Horatio Lyle (8 page)

‘Yes, sir. I’m not going. I wish to know the significance of the Plate. Why is it that Lincoln thinks only of the Plate? And why is it the first, as well as least valuable, object you mention on coming in here?’

Elwick hesitated, starting to feel confusion seep in. ‘I do not need to answer your questions!’

‘You don’t, sir, but please do, because I’ve got a rack of test tubes that are probably spoilt by now, but the sooner I solve this the sooner I can clear up and prevent the nitrates from
. . .
’

‘Are you deaf, man? I gave you permission to leave! Tell Lincoln that the situation is being dealt with.’

‘Is it? Who’s C.R. Wells?’

‘What? I’ve never heard anything more absurd in—’

‘You don’t know Mr Wells?’

‘Absolutely not!’

There was a faint shift in the room, a change in the air. Tess realized she was staring at Lyle, who took a deep breath and leant back on the table, rubbing the bridge of his nose. No one spoke, not even Vellum.

‘Sir,’ said Lyle finally, in a weary voice, ‘Mr C.R. Wells was the individual who deposited a sarcophagus in your family vault, using a letter with your signature on it as proof of his origins. That sarcophagus contained the thief who stole the Plate, opened the vault door from inside by triggering the bolt mechanism within the door, and then disappeared with your property.’

‘A pleasant idea,’ said Vellum smoothly, stepping forward, ‘but quite implausible. How would he get past the other vault doors? They are locked on
both
sides.’

‘Have you found Bray yet? The missing guard?’

Silence. Elwick’s eyes were burning. ‘Mister Lyle, did you say?’

‘That ’s right.’

‘Son of Harry Lyle and a lady of
. . .
’ his smile was tight, ‘dubious parentage?’

‘Dubious? Clearly not dubious enough to stop them fulfilling their necessary biological function.’

‘A police constable, are you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

And then, to Tess’s horror, Lord Elwick laughed. It was a cruel laugh that denoted some joke only he could see. ‘A
policeman
?’ he sneered. Tess looked, appalled, from Elwick’s twisted face to Lyle’s utterly impassive one, then on to the boy standing behind him. His eyes were fixed on Lord Elwick’s face, and his mouth hung slightly open, as if unable to comprehend what he was seeing and hearing, utterly unaware of his own physicality in the horror of the moment. Elwick blurted between malicious peals of merriment, ‘I see now that the Bible was correct - the mighty
are
fallen.’ He took off his top hat in a sweep. Spinning on his heel he called, not even looking back as he did so, ‘Good day,
Mister
Lyle.’

Young Thomas Elwick turned to follow his father, and saw the girl looking at him with her head on one side. He hesitated. He heard his father’s laughter. He glanced back at Lyle. The man was standing with his hands in the pockets of his long coat, chewing one side of his lip. Thomas stopped. His father kept walking, bellowing at anyone who’d listen, Vellum sweeping along in his shadow, ‘I demand to speak with a Superintendent
. . .
’

And Thomas turned, and faced Tess and Lyle. ‘Excuse me?’

CHAPTER 4

Lyle was never sure whether he chose Tate, or Tate chose him. He hadn’t meant to have a pet, reasoning that an animal was a hazard in any occupation where chemicals were involved. He didn’t hunt, and regarded most members of Tate ’s species as an accessory to shotguns, tweed and inbreeding of the most genetically ill-advised kind. When he had opened the door, therefore, one cold winter’s night, and found a puppy with a huge nose and a bored expression slumbering on his doorstep, his instinctive reaction had been to find it some warm fireplace where people who believed in hunting and string quartets and dog food could look after it.

The first dog expert he’d questioned had informed him flatly that he couldn’t begin to guess what Tate ’s parentage had been, but didn’t think it could have been healthy. And as soon as Tate had woken up and looked at him, Lyle had had the overwhelming feeling of being regarded by an intelligence that could solve eleven-figure natural logarithms in its head and still have room for a biscuit afterwards. So he’d taken Tate in. There didn’t seem any real choice.

Now Tate sat to complete inattention by Lyle on the steps of the Bank while, below the huge white walls blackened with dirt, the carriages rattled by, and Lyle said, ‘Your name is Thomas?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me about your family, Thomas.’

‘We
. . .
own things, sir.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘Houses, parks, horses, dogs and counties mostly, sir.’

‘What about the Fuyun Plate?’

‘I’m unfamiliar with the object, sir.’

‘It’s in the Elwick household’s possession in the name of the royal family. It was put into the vault under the Elwick name, and then stolen.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘How about a sarcophagus? Does your family own a sarcophagus? ’

‘No, sir.’

‘You seem very sure of that.’

‘My mother refuses to have truck with anything that might once have been organic, sir.’

‘No sarcophagus?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘That’s interesting. And you’ve never heard of C.R. Wells?’

‘No, sir. But I’ve heard of Harry Lyle, sir, I mean of Mr Lyle, and I read all the papers and I think that
. . .
’

‘Tell me about your family, Thomas. I want to know
everything
.’

As they talked, Tate looked at other things. The smells that dominated this part of town were grease from the axles of the carriages, manure and sweat from the horses, and the river. Only a few years ago, Lyle wouldn’t have been able to take Tate anywhere near the river because of the overwhelming stench that rose from the stagnant, scummy waters, but now, somewhere behind the waste and oil and dirt and slime, there was just a hint of salt. Tate could smell the coal burning in Liverpool Street just to the north; and at Blackfriars to the south the leather drying in the tanners’ shops, the steam in the weavers’ factory, the tar on the rigging of the ships, and through it all, something else. Tate sat up, and instantly Lyle ’s eyes flickered to him. Tate sniffed the air, trying to place that strange, alien smell. Then he started to bark. He stood up and trotted away. Lyle stood up too, cutting Thomas off in mid-flow about his sister’s arranged marriage to the second Count of Ihnaticz and how good the trumpet players were in that part of the world, and muttered, ‘Hello.’

The three of them watched as Tate trotted over to a segment of wall below the towering edifice of the Bank, stood next to it and irrefutably claimed a small part of London as Kingdom Tate. Thomas’s face involuntarily twisted into an expression of disgust. Tess looked bored. Lyle just stared. ‘That is
interesting
.’

‘Ain’t you never seen it before?’ asked Tess in an incredulous voice.

‘Yes, but you wouldn’t expect to see it here.’ He started to walk along the pavement towards the wall, while the traffic rattled by and overhead the grey sky threatened rain. Thomas realized that Tess was looking at him with exasperation, and he straightened up and tried to force a polite smile on to his face, as he had been taught to do with all ladies, no matter what their social origin.

As the first drops of drizzle started to fall, Lyle walked straight past Tate and knelt down carefully on the edge of the pavement. He dug into a pocket and pulled out a long pair of tweezers and a rough paper bag. Reaching down, he completely ignored the stares of passers-by, and picked up the stone lying alone and discarded. It was wrinkled, old and dirtied, with scraps of some kind of fruit, all strands of damp brownness, still clinging to it. He turned it over and over thoughtfully. ‘
Hello
.’

‘Mister Lyle, are you feelin’ well?’ asked Tess, starting to feel exposed as people stared.

‘Teresa, doesn’t it occur to you that in this part of town it’s extremely uncommon to discover a fruit of this variety?’

She thought about the question, put on a sage expression and nodded fervently. ‘
Yes
.’

There was a long silence. ‘Teresa
. . .
’ began Lyle.

‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’

‘Teresa, remind me why I employ you.’

‘I got
charm
, Mister Lyle.’

Silence. ‘Good grief,’ muttered Lyle finally. ‘I’m examining fruit remnants in central London with a thief and - no offence, lad - a bigwig, having just been to the Bank of England and the Palace in short succession, if not that order, on the one day of the week when I really felt ready to tackle copper anodes and a nitrate solution.’ He thought about this. ‘How did that happen?’

The arrival of an answer was forestalled by the arrival of a policeman, running up from Blackfriars Bridge.

 

In a white-marbled mansion on the edge of town, surrounded by red-leaved trees in green-grassed grounds, a man with white gloves over long hands and a voice like black leather says, ‘The situation is being dealt with.’

‘Where, then, is the Fuyun Plate?’ The speaker is a woman, and when she breathes, the air shimmers with delight at its motion in her vicinity.

‘We have nearly located the associate - Bray. Mr Dew has been very effective.’

‘I am informed that Lord Lincoln,’ a name spat in the same voice that might describe a particularly long, slimy, orange-grey slug, ‘has engaged the services of a detective to locate the Fuyun Plate.’

‘A
human
detective?’ The voice like black leather has an inherent sneer, ugly and cruel.

‘Horatio Lyle.’

Silence. Then, ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Son of Harry Lyle. The son is very like the father, they say, but more so. He breathes the iron, it’s in his
blood
, his heart. He was born out of hot coals and dirty smoke. Do you believe Mr Dew can be so effective against such an
. . . abomination
?’

‘My lady, the matter
is
in hand.’

‘My lord, please see that it is.’

Thomas Edward Elwick was confused. He had been confused enough when informed that the strange man with the stranger girl as his assistant was the son of Harry Lyle, the man who had welded more strange and wondrous tricks out of a bit of iron than anyone on the planet. He’d become more confused when he ’d found himself trying to explain to Lyle why his family was trusted with artefacts by Her Majesty and how it was more about prestige than
money
, really. Now he was most confused of all by the sudden and unexpected arrival of a breathless constable who was shouting, ‘Where’s the Inspector? There ’s a body down at the bridge! In mysterious circumstances!’

Lyle had been inexplicably annoyed by the statement ‘in mysterious circumstances’. He’d spent a good five minutes trying in vain to explain to the unfortunate constable how precision was important, especially if you got such words as ‘kill’ and ‘mill’ confused in a society of capital punishment and sent the wrong people to the wrong places, but had given up when it became apparent that no one cared.

Now Thomas was finding himself being carried along by a crowd, whose inexorable passage was taking him down the tight winding streets of Blackfriars, towards the river through a maze of slippery docks, warehouses and factories belching soot across every rooftop. He wondered whether it hadn’t been a mistake after all to try and help.

But if I don’t follow now,
he thought,
I’ll never know what happens.

He saw faces black with grit staring at his fine clothes as the crowd of policemen, and general onlookers eager for a spectacle, swept on down towards the bridge. He could hear the rattling of trains, hear steam being let off in huge billows, spewing down from the local yards in a thick, hot, damp fog that burnt his eyes. With the figure of Lyle for guidance, he kept going along the uneven, muddy, salty ways.