The Mechanical Messiah (26 page)

eautifully reconstructed, from the ground up, after its complete destruction during Worlds War Two, the Crystal Palace did what it was good at and dazzled in the English summer sun.

Proud atop Sydenham Hill, it gazed down upon the rolling lawns, ornamental fountains, floral clocks and flower gardens that led a leisurely way towards the spaceport.

The Royal London Spaceport.

The spaceport of the British Empire, the only spaceport on Earth. Here craft from Venus and Jupiter rested. Bloated Jupiterian packets with swollen hulls and bulbous parts lolled upon the cobbled landing strip. Whilst fey Venusian aether ships, rising like ghostly galleons, seemed tethered, as though a gentle breeze might waft them all away.

And then there were the flagships of the Empire. Some restored, remodelled Martian craft, put to service for the Crown. Their hulls made colourful with painted Union Jacks. Others new, the pleasure vessels of wealthy folk. Manufactured, under licence and using the technology of Mars, by entrepreneurs who knew where the future lay.

In the colonisation of distant worlds. And in their exploitation, too.

These pleasure craft were marvellous affairs. Part Crystal Palace, part airship, part grand hotel. Sleek and silver, tattooed with the flag of Empire. Her Majesty’s Ships of Space.

The largest of these, and indeed the most luxuriously appointed, was HMSS
Enterprise.
The very first spaceship built upon Earth, the one against which all future spacecraft would be judged.

A triumph of British engineering, it truly was a marvel of the modern age.

It was
not,
however, the craft that Corporal Mingus Larkspur had chartered for the space-treaty-breaking journey to the planet Venus.

This was a slightly more basic affair, lacking the dining halls, ballrooms and Wif-Waf courts of HMSS
Enterprise.
This was one of the original Martian ships of war. Back-engineered by Lord Nikola Tesla and Sir Charles Babbage and then employed in the top-secret transportation of terminally ill victims of disease. Dispatched to Mars, under the authority of Mr Winston Churchill, to infect the population of the Red Planet and ensure that no more attacks would be made upon Earth. A shameful episode (although, it might be argued, a shrewd one) that would never be recorded in any annals of the British Empire.

The ship had subsequently been fumigated and then served for a while as a military vehicle, transporting battalions of the Queen’s Own Electric Fusiliers to Mars. These stalwarts were sent to engage in ‘mopping-up operations’, but as they found the Martians dead to a Martian-man, they spent their time behaving badly and laying waste to indigenous wildlife. And thus the big-game hunt on Mars was born. And thus was the history of this particular craft, from that day to this. A sturdy basic model with no frills for roughty-toughty fellows of a sporting disposition who sought exotic trophies for their study walls.

And so the Crystal Palace glittered in the sun, the trim lawns twinkled, sweet flowers bloomed, fountains tossed rainbows to the sky and spacecraft sprawled upon the landing strips. Another summer’s day in Sydenham.

The horse broke wind and Cameron Bell was forced to cover his nose for the umpteenth time. Alice Lovell tittered behind him; her kiwi birds in their travelling cage made rebellious sounds.

Cameron Bell was not a natural driver of a horse and he knew full well he should never have allowed himself to be talked into hiring the horse and trap to take Alice Lovell on a day trip to Sydenham to become acquainted with the environs and acquire suitable lodgings for herself and her avian charges. It was afternoon now, and although they had enjoyed a charming lunch at the Crystal Palace, at Cameron’s expense, and a later tea in a Sydenham tea room, also, of course, at his expense, and done an awful lot of walking about and looking at flowers, no theatrical diggings of a suitable nature had presented themselves.

Cameron Bell was not
too
saddened by this, as it meant that the lovely Alice Lovell might well end up staying a few more days at his house. On the proviso, naturally, that her outrageous birds would
not.

But for Cameron Bell, the private detective, the day had been utterly wasted. There were numerous lines of inquiry he wished to follow up. And certain theories were forming in his marvellous mind.

Cameron Bell smiled painfully back at Alice Lovell.

‘I do not think you should have fed this horse that chocolate at lunchtime,’ he said.

Alice giggled prettily and Cameron, gazing at her, looked with love.

But just what was he to make of Alice? She had been in his company long enough for him to draw many conclusions, not all of them complimentary, but none that drastically affected his feelings for her. He had looked long and hard upon her shoes and apparel and drawn from these the better part of her life’s history. Where she had been brought up and schooled and with whom she had lived. There were curious depths, too, that the detective could not fathom. Missing areas of time, when it might have appeared that Alice had simply vanished from this world to enter some other. Cameron Bell could divine this from the lace cuffs of her childhood nightdress.

‘What are you dreaming about?’ asked Alice.

‘Only you,’ the smitten man replied. And then, gathering himself, he said, ‘I have an idea. I suggest we return to the village.’

Alice twirled her parasol. ‘Whatever you say, kind sir,’ said she.

The village of Sydenham owned to a single hotel. The Adequate. And upon arrival there, Cameron was hardly surprised to see a number of theatrical artistes checking in. The Travelling Formbys. Peter Pinkerton. Colonel Katterfelto and his monkey. Word had been passed by messenger from Lord Andrew that the artistes must take themselves immediately to Sydenham for tonight’s first night at the Crystal Palace.

The logistics of moving an entire Music Hall troupe, complete with scenery and props, to a new location all in a single day, might to an outsider, one not of the theatrical persuasion, have seemed an impossibility. But the theatre owed much to its predecessor, the travelling show or circus. And up-sticking and moving on at the hurry-up was simply something it did. When needs must and the Devil drove and all that kind of business.

Cameron Bell spied out the colonel and recalled that he meant to have words with this gentleman regarding the mysterious crystal that Mr Bell had recovered from the body of the enigmatic creature he had shot. Before it, in turn, was recovered by the gentlemen in black.

‘You will take a room here,’ the private detective told Alice.

‘But we already came here,’ replied the lovely girl, ‘and they made it more than plain that they would not take my kiwi birds.’

‘Your kiwi birds will take lodgings elsewhere.’

‘At your house?’

‘Not
at my house, but across the street.’ Mr Bell pointed and Alice followed the direction of this pointing.

‘It is a pet shop,’ she said. ‘I have no wish to sell my kiwi birds.’ And this was
mostly
true, although Alice was beginning to find caring for the kiwi birds a trying experience. Not that she did not love them. But …

‘I am not suggesting that you sell them,’ said Cameron Bell. ‘Merely that you offer them to the proprietor to exhibit in his front window during the day.’ And here Cameron Bell was suddenly struck by a thought. ‘Are not kiwi birds nocturnal?’ he asked. ‘Yours seem to keep the most unnatural hours.’

‘Time is twelve hours different in New Zealand,’ said Alice, and that was all the explanation Cameron Bell was getting. And so he continued:

‘You will inform the pet shop proprietor that these birds are the star turn at the Crystal Palace.’ Cameron Bell ground his teeth somewhat at this. He and Alice had arrived in Sydenham to find the posters advertising ALICE AT THE PALACE already up. And whilst Alice herself had engaged in some kind of female convulsive expression of joy at this, Cameron Bell had seen in his mind’s eye a dire headline which read

ANOTHER MUSIC HALL HORROR

ALICE LOVELL

THIRD IN HIDEOUS DEATH TOLL

Cameron Bell continued, ‘You will tell the proprietor that you are willing to
rent
the birds to him during the day on the condition that he looks after them during the night.’

‘How very clever of you,’ said Alice, folding her parasol. ‘What a very clever man you are, dear Cameron.’

Not as clever in matters of love as I truly wish I was,
thought the love-struck Mr Bell. ‘Go now,’ he said to Alice, ‘whilst I arrange a room for you at the Adequate.

‘A room with a view,’ said Colonel Katterfelto to the clerk at the reception of the Adequate. It was a reception not without interest, although not one of
particular
interests. The furnishings were
sufficient.
Things looked as if they would do. For now. ‘Best you have in the building,’ the colonel continued. ‘And only for the one night. Off tomorrow into space. Ship sails at midnight and all that cosmic caper.’

The clerk looked suspiciously down at Darwin. ‘Regrettably,’ he said, ‘as I informed a lady earlier, we do not take pets.’

‘Pets?’
roared the colonel, making motions towards his ray-gun holster. ‘That’s me hairy nephew, Humphrey.

P’haps a tad fuzzy in the facial featurings. But
pet?
How dare you, sir!’

‘Humphrey?’ went the clerk. ‘Humphrey the nephew is it, sir?’

‘It is,’ said the colonel. ‘It is.’

‘And very well dressed, too, is Humphrey.’

‘Somewhat better dressed than you are,’ said the colonel.

The clerk now affected a very smug face indeed. ‘Well, ‘he said, ‘if Humphrey is indeed your nephew, and
not
a pet
monkey—’
he laid great emphasis upon
that
word ‘—he will have no objection to signing his own name on the register.’

And looking now smugger than one might have thought humanly possible, the clerk handed his dip-pen to the colonel.

Colonel Katterfelto
observed
the clerk’s smug smile and raised one of his own.

‘Take the dip-pen, Humphrey,’ he said to Darwin, ‘and sign your name for the mice gentleman.’

Darwin leapt up onto the desk and signed the name

Cameron Bell watched this scene with amusement and wondered just what he was actually seeing. He cast a professional eye over the shoes and suitings of both man and monkey and drew a surprising and accurate conclusion.

‘Excuse me, Colonel,’ said Cameron Bell, when the old soldier, chuckling softly, had concluded his own signing of the register, ‘but might I trouble you for a word or two?’

‘Ah, detective fellow,’ said the colonel.
‘Balls,
isn’t it?’

‘Bell,’
said the detective fellow. ‘Cameron Bell.’

‘Yes, that would be it. What do you want?’

‘I just need a word or two in private, if you will. I wish to draw upon your experiences as a space traveller.’

‘Small world,’ said the colonel. ‘Going up again tomorrow night.’

‘Then I am lucky to have caught you. Over there perhaps?’ Cameron Bell indicated a sofa that was neither grand nor down at heel, but somewhere in between.