The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle)

by Catherine Webb

  Augustus Havelock sat in silence, hands folded, on a bench, while Lyle wrung out his coat and the rest of his clothes dripped busily on to the gazebo’s polished floor. At length Lyle snapped, ‘All right, get on with it. What do you want?’

  ‘There is no need for bad manners, Horatio.’

  ‘My day is not going well,’ Lyle retorted. ‘And your own presence serves to convince me that it won’t get much better. Now, we could wait here, dancing round the essentials while I catch a chill, or we could have a conversation. So let’s get on with it.’

  ‘You always were crude, Horatio Lyle. It’s a family trait.’

  ‘If you want me, I’ll be on holiday,’ growled Lyle. Throwing his sodden coat over his arm, he made as if to stride out into the rain.

  ‘Horatio.’ Havelock’s voice was a low, warning rumble. ‘What were you doing in those tunnels?’

  ‘What are you doing with Andrew Berwick?’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘You’re lying. You know him perfectly well; you visit his house regularly, you are interested in the same areas of science that he is; probably too closely interested for anyone’s comfort. What do you want with him?’

  ‘And you were in those tunnels because you found a ticket for the Underground line in Berwick’s pocket, and decided to follow your instincts below ground?’

  ‘There was more in question than that; but yes, you’ve got the essentials. Where is he? Where is Berwick?’

  A half-laugh, almost a hiccup, escaped Havelock’s lips. ‘You think I know?’

  ‘Shall we answer every question with a question?’

  ‘No. Sooner or later one of us will have to come up with a statement. I feel you should set the trend here, in view of my shortening patience for this game. What were you doing in those tunnels?’

  ‘I’m sorry, is there something down there I shouldn’t see?’

  ‘From the fact that you triggered the sluice by entering the laboratory, I’d say that you knew perfectly well there is something you shouldn’t have seen. Does that thrill you, Horatio Lyle? Do you taste the spice of adventure?’

  ‘Berwick was a friend. I will find where he is.’

  ‘I hardly see how, and I doubt very much that he would wish to be found by you anyway.’

  ‘I have no interest in talking to you, Augustus Havelock.’ Lyle turned to go.

  ‘If you walk away from me, Horatio Lyle, you will walk into your own destruction - and that of your friends,’ said Havelock quietly. Lyle stopped in the doorway of the gazebo.

  ‘You know that I am not . . . crude in such things. I am not talking about simple, childish devices, the tricks of fools. I will not send thugs to your house, I will not cause you actual physical harm; these things are nothing. Even having you crippled is nothing; it will make you fight all the harder, and the only way I believe I can truly cripple you is to stop your mind, that which makes the essence of you, not the flesh and bones - and that is no pain at all, to stop, to be nothing; that is simple. These things are never so simple.’

  Lyle turned, head on one side, watching Havelock. He wore a look of dull expectation, almost a smile. ‘Go on,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Teresa Hatch,’ said Havelock, voice as low and level as the drumming of the rain. ‘Did you know that she was once mine? That I paid her to break into your home? Yes, of course you do - you would have found out immediately, am I correct?’

  ‘I knew.’

  ‘She told you, I imagine. For ... what ... a shilling? Maybe even a sovereign? She is quick to sell her loyalties.’

  ‘Get to the point, Havelock.’

  ‘I bear her no malice for her failure to fulfil her part of the bargain; the sum offered was small and the task was menial. She is nothing more than a tool, Horatio Lyle.

  ‘And Thomas Edward Elwick, your companion? His disappearance would be only a little harder to effect than hers. There would be some outcry when he vanished in the night; his parents would shout and rail. Perhaps, thanks to the prestige of his family, there would even be something in the newspapers.

  ‘Can you protect them for ever, Lyle? I will only come when you can no longer stay awake, I will let you sit up and sit up and watch and wait, knowing that I know them. I will let you waste away because you don’t dare leave their doors, waiting for them to vanish, for something to change in the night; I can be patient. The torture will be entirely of your own devising - expectation, because you know I am capable of what I threaten. And when you do sleep, when it is too much for you to watch and protect them any longer, I will be there.

  ‘I can destroy everything that makes you you. I can have the police turn you away, never a case passed on to you; I can pay even the postman and the paper boy to steer away so that you have nothing, nothing to solve, no wrongs to right, so you are just another man in another house too big for him, alone, getting old, an old grey man with an old grey life. I will watch your experiments burn away to nothing, I will see the ink of your papers run before they hit the press, I will follow everyone who dares speak to you; in the night, something will change for them too, and you will always know it. You will know that when your friend ’s friend is found in the river, it was you, for you, because of you. I will see to it that you endure while everything else changes, alone and watching. You know I am capable of it. So. I’m going to let you walk away, Lyle. And you are going to stop looking for Berwick. Let this be the one sacrifice in your life, the one letting go of a case. Is this not fair?’

  Lyle waited, to see if there was more. Then he smiled and nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You don’t want me to find him; I understand. But what you’re building down there . . . electricity and bombs, chemicals and wire - that you’re so determined to protect! How do I walk away, knowing what you might do with that? And more; so much more, I have to know. If I walk away from this case now, then who’s to say I won’t walk away for ever, and just keep walking, never looking back and stopping to think that perhaps there is something wrong, and that here is a place to do something right.

  ‘And you probably know this. That ’s what the nice gentlemen with the revolvers are for, yes? I admit, you have every advantage - I’m stuck out on the edge of things, not sure which way to turn. But, I conclude . . . someone has to try. So, Augustus Havelock, here I am, walking away, for just so long as it takes to work out what you’re doing, when I’ll stop you. Good afternoon. ’

  Lyle turned and stepped out into the rain. It ran down his face and under his collar, as if it had a chance of making him even wetter than he was, and pooled at his feet.

  ‘Horatio.’ Havelock’s voice could have announced a funeral. ‘You can’t stop it.’

  ‘What are you going to do? Shoot me in a public place? Hope the rain washes away the blood? You’re smarter than that, Augustus.’

  ‘I can hurt them. I will always come for them before I come for you, Horatio Lyle.’

  Lyle nodded at nothing in particular, and announced in a voice a million miles away, ‘If you so much as touch the children, I will destroy you. Nothing subtle, just you, alone in the dark. You know I can. Good day to you.’

  He touched his forehead politely, and walked off into the rain.

  Night across London, in early spring. There is a smell that comes after rain, that for a moment is clean, as if somehow the drops of water falling from the sky had melted around the dirt drifting in the air, and dragged it all underground, to be washed out to sea along the farther reaches of the Thames. Combined with a cold wind that twists the rising greeny-grey smog and makes it billow like the vapours from a genie’s lamp, the night is as shocking as a cold plunge after a Turkish bath, and no less unpleasant.

  There are people following Horatio Lyle through the city. No point in counting them now; even he knows it’s inevitable. Suffice it to say, more than one interested party has caught his scent. To shake them off, he is going straight to Hammersmith Bridge.

  Thomas Edward Elwick was bored. Bored bored bored
bored bored. Agonizingly bored, excruciatingly bored. Boredom of this calibre became after a while a physical pain, a realization that every bone in his body weighed a ton, that he hadn’t eaten in what felt like an eternity, that his stomach was a churning hollow under his ribs, that his neck was stiff, that his knees creaked, that his arms ached, that even his ears itched. Perhaps this was how it always felt to be a perfectly normal youth, but until now he ’d just been too distracted with other, more interesting things for him to notice the pain of his own existence. It took a sermon from Mr Barker to make him realize how badly painted the ceiling was, how the carpet was scuffed around the edges, how the wooden floors needed polishing, how the candle on the left of the mantelpiece dribbled wax faster than the candle on the right, how the painting of Lord Elwick, one of many portraits of one of many noble lords, was slightly crooked above the fireplace, how loud the gentle clicker-clacker of his sister’s domino set was upstairs, and he was bored !

  He knew that Mr Barker was a well-meaning man. He reminded himself of it as the aspiring parson, so desperate for his father’s patronage, turned each page of the large, leather-bound family Bible, and announced, ‘Ah, now this passage I find particularly poignant . . .’ or, ‘I would trouble you with the reminder that . . .’

  Thomas also knew he should be grateful for a good, religious upbringing, that he should pay strict attention, focus on every word and cherish the opportunity of coming closer to God. But after the first three hours of Mr Barker’s company, the inspiration was fading. When he heard the doorbell ring, despite the proximity of the sound he immediately thought he had imagined it, his mind playing tricks in its desperation. Only when the maid appeared in the doorway with the words, ‘Mister Horatio L—’ ... and Lyle burst into the room, ‘Thomas! Queen and Country are calling you!’ - did Thomas jerk into full, intensified awareness.

  He knew his parents knew of Horatio Lyle. Lyle had, after all, been there following that violent night at St Paul’s Cathedral, clapping politely in the crowd while all praise was heaped on Thomas’s head for an act of heroism that Thomas had mostly chosen to forget. Lyle was known about town anyway, as a man with money who didn’t seem to notice that he had money, and who did not live in the manner to which he could be accustomed but instead skulked around the dirtier streets and spent his day with machines, something of which, it had to be said, Lord and Lady Elwick did not approve. When asked, Thomas had said he was visiting his Latin tutor, or dining at the house of a distant cousin, until his parents had come to accept that once a week Thomas would slip away, and sail down the river to Blackfriars Bridge. They never knew quite what he did there, but just assumed that it was all right. Various servants were complicit in the truth; but never until this moment had Horatio Lyle and Lord and Lady Elwick come face to face.

  Already, Thomas could see that it would go wrong. Mr Barker was on his feet; in the doorway, so was his father, in wide-eyed confusion. ‘Who the deuce—’ Lord Elwick began, and it was going to go wrong, so terribly, wrong ...

  ‘Horatio Lyle,’ said Lyle, hastening forward, one hand outstretched. And now Thomas noticed how Lyle’s clothes were soaked through, and Tess’s too - and there was Tess, an East End thief, standing in his father’s door and, oh God ...

  ‘A pleasure to meet you, my lord. Thomas speaks of you so often.’ Lyle’s voice cut through the nausea that rooted Thomas to the spot. ‘Might I have a word in private with your son?’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Urgent matters of state, my lord.’

  ‘Why should you need to discuss state matters with my son - and who are you anyway?’

  ‘I said, I am Horatio Lyle.’

  ‘Should that name mean anything to me? I am, you should be aware, a man of extensive authority and reputation within the government and House of Lords, and I have never in all my days encountered such -’

  ‘My lord’ - and there it was, an edge to Lyle’s voice, a roughness as the words escaped his gritted teeth; and there it was again, in the tension in Lyle ’s left hand, clenched into a fist; and in the way Tess shrank back in the doorway. Even Tate, usually quite ready to jump on to the furniture, looked cowed. Thomas recognized it immediately: a shimmer of unease in Lyle ’s face, his eyes, his voice, that no amount of babble could disguise.

  ‘My lord,’ Lyle repeated, ‘what exactly do you know of me?’

  ‘You are Horatio Lyle, a man of some wealth, I suppose, albeit based on industry, and an occasional tutor to my son.’

  ‘Ah - good - yes, a tutor! What exactly has Thomas said I tutor him in?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What exactly has Thomas told you?’

  ‘What are you implying?’

  ‘My lord, this will be a very short conversation if neither of us is prepared to answer the other’s questions and, believe me, I’ve already played that game today with a man far, far worse than any peer of the realm, so please answer me.’

  To Thomas’s surprise, and Lord Elwick’s too, the older man replied. ‘Geography.’

  ‘I see.’ Lyle ’s eyes flickered to Thomas, whose skin by now was the colour of cold milk. ‘My lord, might I have a word in private?’

  Thomas and Tess sat alone in a hall full of marble and chandeliers, while Tess continued to drip.

  ‘Hello, Miss Teresa.’

  ‘Hello, bigwig.’

  Because conversation lagged, Thomas added, ‘Hello, Tate.’ Tate raised a thoughtful eye in Thomas’s direction, found himself uninspired, and went on duly smelling of wet dog at Tess’s feet. Thomas knew it would be appropriate to have Tate removed for this sin, but inappropriate to acknowledge the smell if the lady didn’t, and wondered what to do under such straining circumstances.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Whatcha mean?’

  He couldn’t help but notice how Tess’s voice snapped, and how she didn’t even try to meet his eyes. ‘Well, I’ve known you for about six months, Miss Teresa, and Mister Lyle the same, and you’ve never once come here or even asked where I live. And then you just . . . turn up. Without any warning. Or ... anything. Is something the matter?’

  ‘Mister Lyle says as how it ain’t safe to go to his house.’

  ‘Isn’t safe?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘’Cos there’s this bigwig bloke with a gun who knows this other bloke called Berwick what we think was workin’ in this lab thing underground that got all flooded an’ They want to know where he is and Mister Lyle says as how we had to go and lose any followers what we were bein’ followed by in the fog and then come straight here ’cos you’ll be safe ’cos of how you’re a bigwig an’ they won’t dare attack a house like yours with all its people an’ all.’

  ‘Attack?!’

  She shrugged. ‘Like I said, he don’t think as how it ’ll happen.’

  ‘I see. It sounds . . . a little chaotic.’

  Tess met his eyes, and for the first time he saw fear. ‘Bigwig,’ she said, her voice little above a whisper, ‘I seen magic an’ people with glowin’ green eyes and statues move and dragons an’ all that since I met Mister Lyle, an’ it ain’t scared me nothin’. But I also met this Havelock bloke, an’ he scares me.’

  ‘Havelock? Who’s Havelock?’

  ‘He paid me to break into Mister Lyle’s house, he did.’

  ‘Miss Teresa! Are you saying that you would accept such a commission for ...’

  ‘I dunnit, bigwig. That ’s how I went and met Mister Lyle. An’ I ain’t never given another thought to this Havelock bloke since. But I seen his face, Thomas. I heard his voice, I know what he ... how he thinks an’ all, seen bullies like him out in the streets before. But I ain’t never seen Mister Lyle so frightened as he is now. An’ that scares me more than any monster.’

  In Lord Elwick’s study, Horatio Lyle stood. The older man sat down behind a polished leather-topped desk and poured himself a glass of port, without offering one to L
yle.

  ‘Mister Horatio Lyle,’ he said at length. ‘Forgive me if I dispense with polite necessities, now we are out of the lady’s company.’

  ‘Polite necessities?’ echoed Lyle faintly. ‘Those were polite necessities?’

  ‘You may find me a little . . . abrupt.’

  ‘Oh no, not at all!’ Lyle tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice; and Lord Elwick probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway.

  ‘But I am led to enquire,’ went on his lordship in a voice like the brushing of two passing icebergs, ‘what exactly you are doing here?’

  ‘There’s really nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Please explain that remark.’

  ‘It ’s complicated.’

  ‘See if your mental powers of explanation can rise to the occasion, Mister Lyle.’

  Lyle half-smiled a bitter smile, and said, ‘My lord, may I be frank with you?’

  ‘I would demand nothing less.’

  ‘I’m here to see your son, my lord.’

  ‘Why are you here to see my son, Mister Lyle?’

  ‘Because once a week, every week, he sneaks to my house near Blackfriars, and I teach him about machines. Because I know he comes from a home with a hundred staff waiting on your every wish; because I know that Lord Elwick’s son cannot disappear and not be noticed; because I need somewhere safe to stay and, most of all, because I need to warn him. I ... there are those who may try to harm him.’

  ‘Harm him? Why?’ Lord Elwick’s fine features were white, but his voice didn’t waver above a flat calm.

  ‘I would not presume, my lord, to intrude, but that . . .’

  ‘Harm him why?’ The tone didn’t change, but the voice filled the room; it hummed through the panelling and rattled the window panes.