The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (15 page)

Why else was she unhappy? She was unhappy because no one had commented on how pretty her hair looked; because Mister Lyle appeared tired and was talking in that low, flat voice he used when what he was saying was bad and he couldn’t care any more; and because sitting opposite her and licking jam out of the pot from one long, dainty finger, was a Tseiqin.

Then Mister Lyle said the one thing that could make it worse. ‘The Tseiqin really do want us to break into Pentonville Prison.’

Tess managed not to choke on a fingerful of jam. Thomas made a noise as if he’d just swallowed a spider. Curled up by the fireplace, Tate sneezed.

‘What?’ squeaked Tess. ‘I don’t know what part of what you just gone and said scares me more, Mister Lyle.’

‘You’re confident that you’re not even a little bewitched, sir?’ hazarded Thomas.

‘Look, bring me a magnet and I’ll bloody prove it!’ snapped Lyle. He looked and sounded like what he was: a man who hadn’t been getting enough sleep. ‘I’m not even sure I’m going to do this damn thing for the Tseiqin!’

‘Horatio,’ sighed Lin, ‘do we need to go into morality again?’

‘Morality?’ Thomas’s voice was so high, Tess almost worried that he’d sat on something sharp. ‘Since when did the Tseiqin care about
morality
? You kidnapped Mister Lyle; you want to hurt us; he came here because of you!’

‘Well, actually . . .’ began Lyle, a little sheepishly.

‘
What?
’ Thomas was surprised at his own voice. So was Lyle, who leant back as if trying to get a better look at his friend.

Lyle said, ‘It’s not the Tseiqin who’ve caused this latest trouble. Not unless you’re going to take it right back to first principles, which is dubious and, I feel, futile.’ He took in Thomas’s expression, then Tess, back to gobbling her way through the fruit bowl, and Tate, who wagged his tail in the manner of a creature also aware of the food at the table. Lyle sighed. ‘It’s Havelock -
Havelock
is the one threatening you, Thomas. Havelock is the one who was involved with Berwick, Havelock is the one who knew about that damn laboratory underneath Baker Street. It’s
Havelock
.’

‘Who?’ Thomas was amazed at himself, at how much he sounded like his father, the rich, indignant tones of aristocratic good breeding rolling off his tongue like magma down the side of a volcano. ‘Who is this Havelock, and why are you afraid of him?’

‘Oh, he
bad
,’ offered Tess through a mouthful of fruit.

‘He is a gentleman who has dedicated his life to the cause of technology,’ said Lin. ‘He seeks to build a new world out of iron and cogs; he attempts to spread the power of machinery.’

‘And why’s that bad?’ asked Thomas.

She met his eyes. Instinctively Thomas recoiled, then found he couldn’t look away. But it wasn’t the same compulsion as when he had looked before into a Tseiqin’s eyes. There was none of that sinking loss, the sense of drowning, or of suffocating with a mouth full of dry dirt. It was something more honest than that. In a voice like wind chimes, she said, ‘Because he does not consider others when he builds. He creates only for himself, and sees in machines only power, not wonder.’

Thomas hesitated, the sharp reply dying on his lips, and a little ‘Oh’ escaping him instead.

‘The Tseiqin do
claim
,’ Lyle’s quiet voice oozed scepticism, ‘that Havelock is building a machine designed to kill all Tseiqin in the city, all at once.’

Tess raised a hand. ‘Not to be too blunt about this, present company excepted, Mister Lyle, but ain’t the Tseiqin sort of . . .
evil
? As in how they’ve got evil schemes and do evil things an’ all?’

‘It’s true,’ admitted Lyle, glancing at the now impassive Lin, ‘that their record to date hasn’t been . . . comforting. But there is something in what they say: Berwick’s work seems to have been in the areas of magnetism and explosives - I don’t know how in the world he intends to combine these two ideas. I don’t even know if it’s possible to create any machine -’

‘Not
a
machine, Mister Lyle,
the
Machine.’

‘It’s just the way she speaks what makes it seem scary, right, Mister Lyle?’

Lyle drew the long breath of a man attempting a valid scientific point and finding himself thwarted at every turn, ‘. . .
if it’s even possible
, as I was saying, to construct any machine capable of carrying out the purpose which the Tseiqin have described. But . . .’

‘But?’ Tess scowled and waited for the bad news.

‘
But
. . . Berwick is still somewhere out there, and he’s involved somehow. He’s still my friend, I still wish to know what’s happened to him, and there is . . .
something
. Something wrong happening.’

‘How can you be sure, sir?’ asked Thomas.

‘Wherever Havelock goes, there’s always something wrong,’ groaned Lyle. ‘It’s one of the few certainties I have in this life.’

They all considered this. Eventually Lin said brightly, ‘All right, humans!’ Three pairs of disbelieving eyes turned to her. Thomas was openly gaping. She waved her hands, with the gesture of someone who is having trouble communicating. ‘People! Companions! Darwinian equals in the evolutionary processes! Citizens of Her Majesty’s Empire! You lot! Now that you’ve done your reasoning, worked things out and so on, all very commendable, et cetera, how exactly are you going to get into the Model Prison, and out again with one of England’s most wanted criminals?’

‘Who said anything about
leaving
with him,’ exclaimed Lyle, ‘when all we need is a conversation?’

Lin hesitated. ‘You know, Mister Lyle, I personally find you a charming specimen, but I doubt whether this gentleman will be so inclined to talk to you.’

‘I am
not
breaking anyone out of prison! I am not creating a riot, I am not . . . going to break the law; excuse me, miss, but I have scruples. All I want is a decent conversation.’

CHAPTER 8

Pentonville Prison. Situated at the top of the Caledonian Road, near the railway lines sprawling out from King’s Cross Station, it was, to Victoria’s London, unique. Here, Her Majesty’s Government had tried to build something that had a
function
; that was self-sustaining and viable. Something that wasn’t, in short, converted from the cells of the Old Bailey or the ramshackle remnants of some medieval palace with thick walls; something embodying an intention, a design, meant for just one purpose and that purpose to be fulfilled to the hilt. Situated behind high brick walls, everything about the prison - cells, courtyards, narrow corridors, iron doors, and halls where the condemned could spend their days picking oakum along silent rows of benches while, naturally, considering the reformation of their souls - was intended as the perfect fusion of function, form, efficiency and economy. For no more than fifteen shillings a week, the prisoner in his solitary cell could contemplate his misdeeds and consider how he might best return something to society, while such hearty, healthy activities as the crank and the treadmill, forever clocking up a futile total towards a pointless goal, would give him something to do when these good thoughts failed. The first prisoner ever to enter Pentonville Prison, twenty years before, would have been dazzled by the whiteness of the walls, the relative security of the cells, more than just iron bars set into a rotten wall, but solid in their construction, the open structure in its heart so that the warders could watch the prisoners at all times, without the prisoner necessarily being aware of it, and the smell of nothing more than whitewash and boiling cabbage.

Without a doubt, the prison was cleaner, brighter and better laid out than the half-converted old palaces and courtrooms that had housed more rats than inmates and where light had hardly ever entered. Moreover, the Model Prison was not just a holding point before transportation: it was a place of reform, where the condemned would learn new skills and trades so that they might re-enter society as useful citizens. And if indeed there was any one thing that characterized Pentonville Prison, it was the silence. From quarter to six every morning with the ringing of the morning bell to wake them, to the evening lockdown, the silence buzzed like a bee trapped in the ear, a constant, conscious awareness, the total straining of the senses every hour of every day to hear the tiniest noise, the scratching of a rat’s claws on the floor, the dripping of the pump in the courtyard, broken only by the call of, ‘Three D! Step quick, Three D! Two A, the Chaplain wants a word about those tracts he lent you . . . One C, scrub those floors!’ Those shouts, echoing through the wings of the prison splayed like a strange five-pointed cross in the creeping suburb of north-east London, came as relief, a blissful reminder in the loneliness of the high-ceilinged, empty cells, that life somehow went on, that the prisoner alone hadn’t fallen deaf from lack of hearing, or dumb from the inability to speak.

At night, the quiet was broken only by the wagon come from the courts with a new load of prisoners, or going to the docks with the next batch to be sent overseas or put on the hulks just offshore, or the distant rattle of a late goods train from the north, the whistle as it went somewhere
else
, somewhere far, far away from these thick walls and lifeless corridors. And sometimes, for those who were near the bottom floors and swore that the door at the back of the warder’s office couldn’t lead outside, the way the maps claimed they did, there was said to be the sound of someone whispering very quietly to himself, in the darkness:

‘Let me out let me out let me out let me out
let me out let me out let me out Let Me Out Let Me Out Let Me Out I’ll See You Burn For All You Have Done!
’

Then the clang of a staff on iron, and no more from the darkness far beneath.

 

In a police lodging house in the heart of Soho, a man had just fallen out of his hammock where he had been happily reading a book of cheap poetry purchased from one of the tattlers on Drury Lane. He fell with a bang and a shriek.

‘You want me to do
what
?’

‘Charles, don’t be difficult,’ said Horatio Lyle, brushing the policeman’s uniform down and helping him to his feet.

‘You know this is . . .’

‘. . . more than your job’s worth, yes, yes, I know. But think of all the times I’ve helped you!’

‘Such as when?’ Constable Charles - poor, unfortunate Constable Charles had been lured to join the Metropolitan Police from the Welsh hills and coal mines south of Abergavenny as much by the uniform’s shiny buttons as by the promise of justice for all. He was not equipped to deal with Horatio Lyle in full placatory mode, and certainly not when at the same time Tate was quietly chewing on the leg of his regulation blue trousers.

‘The Old Bailey,’ said Lyle reasonably. ‘I helped you then.’

‘It was
your
fault they attacked it in the first place!’

‘All right - St Paul’s Cathedral.’

‘
You
were dangling off the bloody roof while
I
was getting shot at.’

‘Charles, I want you to consider the process of being struck by lightning for the greater good as more of a moral reflection on my character than the unfortunate consequence of being in a high place during a storm.’

‘What?’

‘Wha’?’ added Tess helpfully.

Thomas, feeling that Lyle needed support, said quickly, ‘I think Mister Lyle is referring to his presence on the highest point in London during a thunderstorm as an act of heroism rather than a rash venture into the realms of experimental meteorology . . .’

‘Thank you, Thomas,’ said Lyle and, in the same breath, ‘Come on, you know it’s got to be for a good reason.’

‘Horatio,’ Charles replied, ‘there’s only one reason for a man - even one such as yourself, who’s supposed to be committed to the fighting of crime . . .’

‘I’m not sure how I feel about “supposed”, but go on.’

‘. . . to want to get into Pentonville Prison!’

‘And what would that be?’

‘To get someone else
out
of Pentonville Prison!’

‘I said nothing about
out
. I just want to have a conversation.’

‘Are you going to lose me my job, Horatio Lyle?’

Lyle patted Charles gently on the shoulder. ‘I know someone who can put in a very, very good word for you with the Commissioner.’

‘Really? Who?’ snapped Charles suspiciously.

‘A young woman with a . . . a
knack
for persuasive argument.’

From the corner, a woman waved cheerfully. She had bright green eyes and outlandish clothes, and was probably grounds enough for dismissal, just by being there. Charles sagged. ‘Just for once, Horatio, couldn’t you be like an ordinary bobby?’

 

A moment, as the sun sets behind a billowing cloud of grey-brown smog, its bottom edge not so much disappearing behind the horizon as dissolving behind the vapours that ripple away to a burning bronze haze. Thomas Edward Elwick stands alone at the bottom of Caledonian Road, and looks north, and thinks.