The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  So, in the best tradition of the police force, Special Constable Horatio Lyle knew that if you wanted to get to the truth - which, in Lyle’s mind, was bundled up in the same for-granted package as Law equals Right equals Truth - the best place to go looking was behind the nearest privy.

  That the privy in this case happened to belong to a pair of elephants was, Lyle concluded, nothing to impede an otherwise sound investigative strategy.

  The words, ‘Oi, you ain’t s’posed to be back ’ere,’ let Lyle know that he was on the right track.

  This was confirmed when an old man appeared, whose face resembled a shrunken green grape furred over with grey whiskers. He was carrying what Lyle had to concede was one mighty shovel. Brandishing it at Lyle, he exclaimed, ‘Whatcha doin’ ’ere? Bugger off!’

  ‘Special Constable Horatio Lyle.’ Lyle could feel his voice drift into the business-like, gruff strains of your average copper looking for trouble. ‘I was just admiring, uh, the pen.’

  The man’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. The pen was, to Lyle’s mind, barely large enough to conduct a healthy experiment into the properties of gaseous diffusion, let alone house a pair of extremely skinny elephants. Meanwhile he fumbled in his pocket, digging for something friendly to offer the untrusting man with the shovel, and came out with a test tube of golden-brown liquid. He popped the cork, sniffed carefully, and brightened. ‘Whisky?’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘Just as I said. I was admiring the elephant pen. Not often you see elephants in Hyde Park.’

  ‘You ’avin’ a laugh?’

  ‘You see my humorous smile?’

  The keeper examined Lyle’s face. Tombstones had more wit. The keeper took the proffered tube of whisky, sniffed it, then shook his head. ‘Nah, thanks. I never drink nor eat anythin’ as how I didn’t get myself.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Lyle, re-corking the tube and slipping it into his pocket. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Can’t never trust the other bugger’s grub.’

  ‘I see. And your job is . . .?’

  The pause hung in the air. The keeper looked from Lyle to the cage doors of the pen, from the outside of which came the sound of great elephant snorts and the ‘oooohs’ of an admiring crowd, then to his shovel, then back to Lyle again.

  Lyle smiled stiffly. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Toffs buy it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Toffs like to buy it. To have it put on their gardens. I mean, you’d think they’d stick with chicken or cow like the rest of us, but oh no. Elephant dung’s where the money is. Damn well kills every plant it bloody touches, but it’s the air of mystery, see?’

  ‘Elephant dung has mystery?’

  ‘Cos it come from a bloody elephant, see? It’s foreign!’

  Lyle thought about this, while outside a sudden burst of clapping suggested one of the elephants had done something charmingly un-elephant-like. ‘But,’ he began, ‘the Black Death was in its time an exotically foreign disease. Cholera—’

  ‘Foreign is bloody posh, an’ that’s that. Interesting muck for your interested bigwig.’

  Having reached this absolute conclusion, the keeper nodded his head once, as if to dismiss any other thought, opinion or topic of conversation from the pen and, by implication, Lyle with it.

  Lyle politely cleared his throat. ‘Mr . . .’

  ‘Lovell.’

  ‘Mr Lovell,’ chimed Lyle, ‘I’m sure that you, as a man with a weighty load on the end of your shovel . . .’

  Mr Lovell’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘. . . have a lot to do. But would you answer one or two brief questions?’

  ‘What d’ya wanna know?’

  ‘I want to know if you’ve seen anything . . . odd.’

  ‘Odd? At the circus?’ Contempt dribbled out of every pore.

  ‘Yes, “odd”. I’m sure you can surmise for yourself what “odd” might be. Say, clowns who can’t stop smiling. Or strong men who, I have no doubt, could lift one of your lions whose jaws never seem to close. Or perhaps a trapeze-lady whose feet don’t entirely touch the ground. If that doesn’t excite you, how about “odd” in the sense of two children that I know of so far - a girl called Sissy and a boy called Scuttle - either vanishing off the face of the earth, or being poisoned, Mr Lovell, poisoned at your bloody circus, that kind of odd, yes?’

  The keeper’s face had turned, during this list, first grey, then white, and was now heading into a sickly shade of green. He mumbled, ‘Don’t know nothin’.’

  ‘Of course you don’t, Mr Lovell. Are you sure I can’t tempt you to some whisky? At least, I’m fairly sure it’s whisky, you just never can be sure with these ethyl derivatives.’

  The keeper looked as though he was going to be sick.

  ‘Ain’t sayin’ nothin’.’

  ‘Mr Lovell,’ Lyle asked casually, propping himself on the edge of a foul-smelling, insect-hopping hay bale, ‘just out of interest, what do you think is going to happen to you worse than the full might of the law?’

  At this, the old man grinned, revealing gums possessed of no more than four yellowing teeth and a lot of pink memory. It wasn’t a happy grin. It was, in fact, the grin of a man who, to Lyle’s mind, had planned to die many, many moons ago, and learnt to find the continued and unlikely fact of his existence nothing more than a lewd joke told on a drunken night. ‘I can’t tell you nothin’.’

  ‘Well, that’s an improvement from ain’t. Can’t means you’ve got something to tell me.’ Lyle was fumbling in his pockets. ‘You know, I’m sure I have some more stuff for occasions like this. I don’t suppose you’re open to bribery? It’s much easier for me to bribe you than to threaten to nail various and unusual parts of your anatomy to a brick wall for letting children get hurt, Mr Lovell.’

  His voice was level, jovial, good-mannered, but fury burnt in Lyle’s gaze and as he patted down his pockets, things clanked and jangled beneath his searching fingers.

  Mr Lovell backed away, but found Lyle’s foot suddenly planted very firmly on his own. ‘I can’t,’ he whimpered. ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t! I can’t tell you nothin’!’

  ‘You know,’ Lyle said, ‘I have had, in my career, enough of people being any of the following: cryptic, lyrical, insane, delusional, possessed, ignorant or downright misleading, either through direct fibs or indirect metaphorical flourish. Now, let me make it infinitely clear that I want to know what you know right here, right now, or I swear to God that ten tons of elephant shit is going to seem like summer roses compared to the wrath of the Metropolitan Police. Now,’ Lyle’s face was inches from Mr Lovell’s own, bright and angry, ‘tell me what you know.’

  And Mr Lovell, to everyone’s surprise, including his own, whispered, ‘Greybags is gonna get you.’

  And without further ado, he started to cry.

  Tess and Thomas made their way through the circus.

  Tess’s idea of trailing the gaggle of children they’d seen in the front row of the main tent seemed, now Thomas had a chance to observe it, very simple. The children were all bunched together, held in thrall both by a stern young man who appeared to be some sort of teacher, and by a length of string wrapped round the wrist of every child in a line running to the teacher’s hand. With the young man looking harassed, they drifted past men who’d discovered that an extra shot of rum at the fair was always one too few until it proved one too many, and paused before platforms on which were displayed creatures no longer graced with the description ‘man’ or ‘woman’, so strangely was their flesh deformed. These competed for the crowd’s amazement with a silk-clad dancing princess who, the sign claimed, came from southern India (and who Tess swore was from Birmingham), and a tribesman of the African plains dressed in an undignified costume mostly of feathers, stitched together by a pair of seamstress sisters down in Wapping. The children goggled and gasped at everything, while the young man tried to find something educational to say. The best he could contrive tended to be: ‘And this
is why it is Britain’s duty to enlighten the ignorant’, followed by a hasty tug on the piece of string.

  Thomas, as he and Tess wandered, felt he too should say something, if only because it was uncourteous for a single gentleman to be silent in the company of an unmarried female. So he cleared his throat and asked, ‘What exactly are we watching the children for?’

  ‘To see if any gets nabbed, I s’pose,’ replied Tess.

  ‘I don’t wish to criticise, Miss Teresa, but you seem more interested in that undignified pirate ballad and that rather vulgar dance.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she said, scoffing another toffee from her bag. ‘An’ that shows what rubbish you are at the whole snipin’ business. A real good professional always seems more interested in the song what is about the bucksome girls of Portsmouth an’ the things they do with their stockin’s, instead of her mark, so as how her mark don’t get suspicious, see?’

  And though Tess did indeed seem engrossed in every tent, stage and song they came upon, yet somehow they also seemed to maintain both proximity to and careful distance from the gaggle of children, right up to the moment when, led by their teacher, they vanished into a long white tent. Tess looked up at the tent, and brightened. ‘Grubs,’ she blurted out, her bag of toffees vanishing into her jacket pocket, forgotten in the face of food that just wouldn’t keep and which it was therefore her duty to eat now. ‘Grubs!’

  She dragged Thomas eagerly inside.

  Mr Lovell was crying.

  Horatio Lyle was used to almost any criminal behaviour from general maniacal ranting up to and including trying to throw him off high places during thunderstorms. But one eventuality for which he was not prepared was to find himself sitting beside five sacks of top-quality elephant dung, with a man thirty years his senior bawling his eyes out into Lyle’s vilely blotched handkerchief.

  ‘It was so beautiful!’ sobbed Mr Lovell between great gouts of tears and snot. ‘The circus! I run away when I were just a boy to join it, fifty years of shovelling the, well, you know, an’ now look at it! We were beautiful, an’ now it’s all gone . . . peculiar!’ More sobbing ensued.

  Lyle patted Mr Lovell on the back and wondered what Mrs Bontoft would do under these circumstances.

  ‘I mean, it’s all just gone wrong!’ wailed Mr Lovell.

  ‘Well, I grant you, there’s something definitely iffy.’ Lyle tried to soothe him as best he could, his previous rage somewhat abated in the face of this unusual behaviour. ‘But if you could just clarify a few of the details?’

  ‘I wanna my mama!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I wanna my mama now!’

  ‘No - but I mean, really?’ queried Lyle. ‘I’m just saying, it seems a little unusual for a man of your - your advanced maturity - to wanna your mama.’

  ‘It were . . . it were . . .’ A sound followed like an old rusted tuba being played by a herring, as the keeper blew his nose. ‘He just said that he needed to sleep an’ then the children were . . .’

  Lyle’s fingers stiffened where they had been gently patting Mr Lovell’s shoulder, but the weeping man didn’t seem to notice. ‘What children?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘The children! He said we gotta be nice to the children. Old Greybags said it an’ he gave them puddin’ an’ . . . an’ I ate it too. An’ he said my dreams they ain’t beautiful enough an’ then . . . an’ . . . it ain’t fair!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ stammered Lyle quickly. ‘I’m sure it ain’t - isn’t - but if we can just try and focus on the children. What happened to the children?’

  Mr Lovell sniffed, looked up into Lyle’s eyes through the watery blur of his own. ‘They just go to sleep,’ he said. ‘Happy ever after. That’s how the story ends, don’t it? Happy ever after for all the children. The doctor he said that.’

  ‘What doctor?’

  ‘They’re just sleepin’, see?’ whimpered Mr Lovell. ‘All the children. They’re just dreamin’ pretty stories. That’s all. No harm.’

  ‘No harm? No bloody harm? Sissy Smith was poisoned, she was . . .’ Lyle’s voice trailed away. He leant forward. ‘Wait,’ he breathed, staring deep into Mr Lovell’s tear-filled gaze. ‘Wait.’ He ran his hands a few times back and forth across Mr Lovell’s vision, leant right in close to his face, sniffed his breath, reached out and felt the pulse at his neck, and Mr Lovell, too busy wiping tears away with the corner of his sleeve, didn’t resist. ‘Sluggish pulse, slow dilation of the eyes,’ breathed Lyle, ‘what did you mean, he gave them pudding and you ate it too? What do you mean . . . What do you mean, you want your mother? What did you eat, Mr Lovell? Did you eat something strange? Mr Lovell? How old are you?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Um . . . I think . . . I . . . dunno.’

  ‘When did you run away to the circus? What year?’

  ‘I . . . I . . .’

  ‘Where was the Prince Consort from?’

  ‘Um . . . dunno. Foreignland?’

  ‘How many apples can you get for a shilling?’

  Mr Lovell’s face was a tortured mountain range of ridges and troughs as he struggled to find answers, and, failing, finally gave a little, toothless shrug and a smile. ‘Dunno,’ he snuffled, wiping his nose with his sleeve. ‘Do it matter?’

  Lyle leant away, stood slowly and backed up a step, his face slowly sinking into an expression first of worry, then almost of fear. ‘What did you eat?’ he asked. ‘What . . . what do the children eat? You said - pudding - and there’s a smell on your breath of . . . Mr Lovell? How can you not know how old you are? Who is Greybags?’

  For a moment on Mr Lovell’s face there appeared something . . . hollow. Lyle could find no other way to explain it, no better way to name it, a void of feeling, thought, sense, just a pair of empty eyes waiting to be filled with sense. ‘Greybags is comin’ to get you,’ he said. ‘Can’t stop ’im. Ain’t none as can stop ’im.’

  ‘Why not? Who is Greybags? He’s not a green-eyed gentleman with an aversion to magnetic ferrous material?’ asked Lyle hopefully. Since when, asked a sly little voice at the back of his mind, had green-eyed semi-demonic individuals with usually malign intent become a good thing?

  There was oblivious confusion on Mr Lovell’s face.

  ‘Mr Lovell, it’s really important. You need to answer my questions. You need to tell me about the children.’

  ‘Mr Lovell?’

  It wasn’t Lyle who’d spoken. They both looked up. The ringmaster, all black hat and great curled moustache, stood in the entrance to the pen. He was smiling. In one hand he held an ivory-topped cane, with the other he had swept back his great red cloak and spun it about his arm like a bullfighter. Mr Lovell jumped to his feet, wiping his eyes and nose with a single swipe of his sleeve. ‘Mr Majestic, sir.’

  ‘Something can’t be wrong, can it, Mr Lovell? Surely nothing is wrong?’ asked the ringmaster, and Lyle heard only incredulity, rather than concern, in his voice.

  ‘No, sir, no. Nothing wrong, sir.’

  ‘And this is . . .?’

  ‘Mister Lyle, sir, Mister Horatio Lyle, sir. Nothing wrong, sir.’

  ‘Mister Lyle! How are you enjoying the circus?’

  ‘Very much, Mr . . . I’m sorry, what’s your name?’ asked Lyle smoothly.

  ‘Mr Majestic.’

  ‘Mr Majestic, son of Mr and Mrs Majestic?’

  This question provoked a great roar of guffawing laughter, followed by a sweep of one white-gloved hand across an utterly tearless eye and a cry of, ‘What a wit! What a wit, sir!’

  ‘No, honestly,’ pressed Lyle, ‘I’d be fascinated to know. Mr . . .’

  ‘Mr Majestic, as I said.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, I doubt that Mr Majestic is the name in the church register. I am a policeman, you see, sir, and I have—’

  ‘A policeman! Oh, but where is your charming hat? A man is not complete without his hat. It is a hat that distinguishes a gentleman from a blaggard.’

 
; ‘Mr Majestic,’ Lyle’s voice was rapidly darkening, ‘may I ask you an important question?’

  ‘Of course, of course!’

  ‘How many children do you have who ran away to the circus?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Of course not. Let me try this: who is Greybags?’

  Mr Majestic’s face darkened. His hand trembled around his cane. Mr Lovell began to back away, sticking a fist over his mouth. A whimper crawled out from between his clenched teeth.