Horatio Lyle Read online

  ‘I resent Lord Lincoln thinking he can intrude into my affairs! Assure him that the Plate will be recovered and that the situation is fully under control. You and your . . .’ he seemed to see Tate and Tess for the first time, ‘. . . companions may leave.’

  Lyle took a deep breath as Elwick’s ringing tones died away. ‘No, sir.’

  Elwick started to turn red. Behind him, Thomas cowered, thinking, Not the right thing to say . . .

  ‘Did you speak, sir?’ The words bounced around the room like bullets.

  ‘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

  Tate

  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 po
cket 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.

  And suddenly the crowd slowed and thickened, until he was crushed between Teresa, who ignored him, and a constable trying in vain to push his way through. He could see how many dirty looks the coppers were getting from the locals, especially the costermongers, traditional enemies of the police, and wondered why. Thomas had always been taught to respect the police force as a tool against revolution, a wall of steel against any insurrection that might come from the lower orders. He looked at Lyle, and wondered if he thought the same way.

  Lyle, meanwhile, had elbowed his way to the front of the crowd and was climbing over the parapet of the bridge on to a flight of creaky stairs that led down to the mud, greenish in places, of the river at low tide. The flight was missing some steps, and Thomas held his breath as he watched Lyle cautiously move each foot, sometimes pausing for thought, and then carefully avoiding a tread that looked particularly unsound.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a shape almost impossible to see with the mud that caked and camouflaged it. Around it was a small crowd of filthy boys in rags, shoeless, and several policemen with their trousers pulled up around their hairy knees for fear of having to pay for a new uniform. Lyle stepped into the mud, which rose up around his ankles. He seemed oblivious, picking his way over to the body.

  ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘Miss saw it,’ said a raggedy boy, pointing up at a young, handsome woman standing by the top of the bridge and looking pale.

  ‘Did you touch it?’

  ‘No.’

  Lyle glanced at them suspiciously, but a constable said, ‘We heard a commotion so we came running. They couldn’t have got to it till low tide, sir.’

  ‘So it hasn’t been moved?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long ago was it found?’

  ‘Half an hour, maybe?’

  ‘How long till the tide comes back in?’

  ‘Maybe an hour or two, sir.’

  ‘Right. Help me turn it over.’

  The constables looked at each other uneasily. Lyle saw their expressions and tutted. ‘Come on, don’t fuss.’

  They took an arm each and dragged the body unevenly round. Thomas saw mud settled on a shape in the man’s throat that shouldn’t have been there, and felt bile rising. Next to him, Tess looked on with a disinterested expression. Thomas heard Lyle say distantly, ‘A very clean cut. Entry from the left, right on the artery, dragged straight across to the other side. A lot of force behind this. Good, sharp blade. And a second stab wound to the lower abdomen.’ He saw Lyle scrape green-brown, probably toxic mud away from the man’s wet clothes without any sign of a second thought, and again felt nauseous. He turned his face away. At his side he heard Tess say excitedly, ‘Look! Do you think he’s goin’ to poke it? That ’s horrid!’

  Down in the mud, Lyle bent further forward over the body, oblivious of the brown squelch which crawled at his knees. ‘This abdominal wound would probably have bled heavily, but not enough to kill.’ He looked thoughtfully up at the nearest constable. ‘Did it rain last night?’

  ‘Don’t think so, sir.’

  ‘Right. I want . . .’ He froze. ‘Constable?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  Lyle bent down and carefully picked up the corner of the man’s muddy sleeve, dragging it and the limp arm within it from the mud with a slurping noise. A white hand sagged heavily in the sleeve. It had only four fingers. ‘C.R. Wells,’ sighed Lyle. ‘Egotist.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Carwell. This man’s name is Gordon Carwell. He’s a thief. You’ll find an indecent tattoo dedicated to “Inga” on his back. He lost the middle finger of his left hand during a fight in Limehouse last year. He ’s notor
ious for small-time burglaries in the more expensive suburbs - Hammersmith, Chiswick, Putney and Hampstead mostly. A master of the “humble workman” ruse, along with his brother, Jack Carwell. He knocks on the door saying he’s come to repair a shelf, and doesn’t leave until his pockets are full. His brother plays look-out, or distracts people while he does them and their property over. They always work together.’ He straightened up and looked down sadly at the body. ‘Get it to the mortuary - and make sure only Nurse Marie is allowed to touch it, all right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And . . .’ Lyle hesitated, then shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You might want to think about searching the rest of the river.’

  ‘Why’s that, sir?’

  ‘As I said, Gordon Carwell never worked alone.’

  A little later, Lyle climbed back up from the river looking weary, and at the top stood slowly dripping damp mud from the bottom of his trousers on to his filthy shoes. For the first time he seemed to become aware of this. He gave a deep sigh, then put a hand on Tess’s shoulder and on Thomas’s and said, ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where we goin’ now?’

  ‘The Bank broken into and Carwell dead in the river? Too much of a coincidence.’

  ‘So where are we goin’, Mister Lyle?’

  ‘To find a blood trail.’

  The crowd opened around Lyle, Tess, Thomas and Tate without a care, the living not as interesting as the dead, and closed again behind them, absorbing them without a thought. Tate wove through a forest of shoes and feet, aware that his ears were in peril, his nose twitching nervously, overwhelmed by the smell of the river, the fish in the wharves, salt and tar and soot and coal and, oddly, just a touch of ginger biscuit.

  It took a good five minutes to find a cab, Lyle protesting all the way that there’s never one when you want one, and things weren’t like that when he was a lad. The inside of the cab smelt of old leather, battered wooden seats and too much time in stables, until, finally, the tired cab horse raised its head, turned, and they rattled away from the almost heedless crowd.