The man behind the desk grunted. ‘I am the master of this establishment; my name is Mullett. And who might you be, sir?’
‘I am Thomas Edward Elwick,’ snapped Thomas, all pompous impatience at even having to answer such a query. ‘This is Mister Lyle, my . . . manservant.’
A smile as thin and cold as a knife through a snowstorm passed over Lyle’s face, and his eyes narrowed.
‘And Miss . . . Miss Hatch, who has consented to take time to advise me, with her special knowledge of such matters, on the condition of the workhouses which I am visiting.’
Tess’s expression could have frozen salt water.
‘You are interested in making a charitable donation?’ crooned Mr Mullett, whose priorities in life were firmly fixed.
‘When one has such a surplus of wealth as my family labours under,’ sighed Thomas, ‘one finds it most tedious seeking a suitable cause to endow! It is frustrating, the constant seeking out of lesser creatures worthy of my concern. Half are too illiterate to appreciate what to do with the large amounts of money it is my duty to dispense. This is the fourth workhouse I have visited this morning, and I hope, indeed I do, that you will show me better evidence of order and discipline than I have been forced to endure in other parishes!’
Mullett’s eyes flickered from Thomas, to Lyle, to Tate and finally to Tess. For a second they seemed to hold there, as if trying to dredge up a long-submerged thought. It occurred to Thomas, with a quiver of unease, that his practised impersonation of his father, all overbearing unselfconsciousness, wasn’t impressing Mr Mullett as it should. It wasn’t that the man was immediately rejecting the idea, it was something worse: he was thinking about it.
In that moment, as Thomas’s confidence blinked, he saw a great black pit open beneath his feet, from the bottom of which came nothing but the sound of mocking laughter.
Then Lyle leant forward and murmured, just loud enough for Mr Mullett to hear, ‘My lord, I hate to remind you, but we have an appointment at Mansion House in less than an hour.’
The pit shimmered shut. The laughter faded. He was an Elwick. That was all that mattered. Thomas turned a gaze of pure cold Elwick onto Mr Mullett. ‘Well?’ he snapped. ‘I trust you will show me round now.’
Mr Mullett found that he would.
Halfway through the tour that followed, Mullett did have a moment’s unease when the little girl said that she needed to go to the privy, and don’t you worry none, she knew right where it was. A few minutes later the manservant announced that he would just nip out to check on the horses, sir. But the inestimable well-mannered rudeness of Thomas, that somehow managed to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in such a way as to make both words an insult, kept Mullett from thinking too deeply, until it was much, much too late.
Unobserved and alone in the workhouse, Horatio Lyle was good at sneaking around.
It wasn’t that he was particularly quiet on his feet, or especially sly in his dealings with life; it was just that, physically at least, he was unremarkable. Everything about him was almost striking, from a nose that was almost large to a height that was almost tall, but it seemed that his body had, at the last minute, on the verge of transforming him into something handsome, or ugly, or distinctive, just shrugged and gone, ‘Nah’. And so, when asked to describe that strange man sneaking around, people would frown and venture, ‘Well, he had . . . Well, his hair was almost . . . and he was nearly . . . But I suppose not really . . .’ And so on.
As well as being without obvious character, Horatio Lyle had another advantage when sneaking around. He knew that the best way not to be noticed was to have the manner of a man who didn’t care if he was noticed, and who, if noticed anyway, couldn’t stop and speak to you, being on his way to somewhere more important.
So it was that Lyle retraced his steps through the stone corridors of the workhouse, with the confident stride of a man who’d just forgotten his hat, to Mr Mullett’s office on top of those dull stairs.
The door was locked.
Lyle liked locked doors. He liked thinking about all the incriminating things that someone didn’t want him to see on the other side.
He knelt by the keyhole and fumbled in his coat pockets. He had a lot of pockets, whose contents made them bulge wide in implausible places where coats should not, by all the laws of fashion, have bulged. What he carried was rarely used, but, as he pointed out, there was always going to be that one circumstance when a vial of ammonia nitrate, or a pot of machine oil, or magnesium fragments in a tube, or a charged capacitor with discharge leads, or the contents of the other pockets could save the day, and you never knew when that would be. How embarrassing, Lyle would say, to find yourself facing the apocalypse, only to pat down your pockets and proclaim as the disaster struck, ‘Damn, I forgot to pack any cadmium today!’ Words which would, presumably, be your last.
Today, the object of Lyle’s interest was a regular. Acid, Lyle believed, should never be stored or carried near anything that you valued too greatly. As a result he kept a vial of the stuff sewn into the lining of his coat around knee height, on the assumption that if it did burst, and acid did go all over the place, then his knees were his least interesting part. Thus it was that he moved gingerly as he unpicked the stitches at the bottom of his coat, pulled out a silverish vial, no thicker than his little finger, unscrewed the top, releasing a wisp of pale, vile-smelling vapour, and dribbled a few drops into the keyhole of Mr Mullett’s office.
The keyhole began to smoke. Round its edges the metal started to bubble and pop like boiling water; Lyle flapped his hands ineffectually as a thick brown substance tumbled out, with the consistency of steam. Coughing, he kicked the door. It swung back with a sulky thump, the lock so much dripping metal, and, with a look of self-congratulation, Lyle sauntered in.
Teresa Hatch was very, very good at sneaking around. One reason she’d made such a damn good thief wasn’t that she picked pockets better than any other of the thieving clys and gropuses out on the streets; it was that she always knew which pocket to pick. Let Lyle go wandering round Mr Mullett’s office, Tess had a completely different agenda. She knew this place: where to hide, and where to look, and what to ask when she got there.
So, having detached herself from Thomas and the workhouse master, she slipped through the empty laundry stinking of cheap soap and old pee, skirted the kitchen, where cabbage was the meal of the day, and yesterday, and tomorrow, and hurried through the widows’ wing, where the old women were too bored, too mad, too blind, too weak or just too tired of life to care about a little girl wandering by. All they were now permitted to do was to clean floors and pray for salvation as soon as it could possibly come. Tess sidled past the main working halls, where there were guards on duty, and climbed the high wall between the exercise yard and the children’s wing, slipping her toes into the holes worn by a hundred inmates before her and dropping into a courtyard that overlooked a schoolroom. From inside came children’s voices, bored, monotonous, intoning over and over again, ‘The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my strength, in whom I . . .’
‘Nash! Sit up!’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘. . . my buckler, and the horn of my salvation . . .’
Tess risked peeking through a broken window. In a room full of benches a hundred children sat before their teacher, who stalked the classroom, cane in hand, eyeing up his charges with the look of a man who’d dreamed big dreams and couldn’t cope with how they’d fallen, except to punish the world for failing him.
Sneaking on, Tess found a particular drainpipe, the one that hadn’t drained anything for ten years, clogged with debris and buddleia roots, which she’d used to get down all those years ago. This time, she started to climb up towards the high windows of the children’s dormitories.
Thomas’s confidence was back.
It helped that he didn’t have an audience. The absence of Lyle and Tess enabled him to grow into the part to its very full, so that he could now
chivvy and exclaim and make a nuisance of himself to his heart’s content, letting the arrogance of years of wealth and breeding sweep round him like an ermine cloak. Speed was the key, he concluded. Keep overwhelming Mr Mullett with aristocratic insufferability and he won’t have time to think the obvious thought: I am being lectured by a youngster toff, how dare he?!
So he blurted out, ‘I see you keep orphans and petty children here as well. What are your terms of admittance?’
Mr Mullett mumbled something. He was less than happy about both Thomas’s companions, the shifty-looking man and worse, the even shiftier-looking child, having escaped his clutches to vanish into who knew what part of the workhouse. But if he’d wanted to voice any concerns, he simply didn’t have the time against Thomas’s constant barrage of—
‘Speak up, man, I didn’t hear!’
‘Orphans,’ grumbled the workhouse master, ‘or beggars. Sometimes children will come to us in the winter, thieves and rats for the most part, looking for a warm fire. Naturally, we turn the worst sort directly over to the police, and they are sent mostly to the hulks. But charity, good sir, I’m sure you understand that we extend charity even to the lowest members of our society, so long as they’re willing to work.’
‘You are a noble man to think so kindly towards such wretches!’
‘Our motto, sir, our motto,’ said Mr Mullett, ‘is, “Truth, Labour and the Lord”. We impart Christian values to those within our walls, teach them to find themselves and the good Lord in the work they do, learn a variety of useful skills—’
‘Such as?’
‘Letters, sir, basic letters. The girls we send out to work in the mills, of course, sir, or as domestic labour, which is indeed the greatest advancement to be hoped for by any such creature as comes within our walls, or there’s other suitable trades.’
‘Suitable?’
‘Some class of children, alas, are not born with sufficient good grace, and must be sent to help the night-soil men in the execution of their labours, or to the undertakers, or may be apprenticed to the chimney-sweep. To needful trades, such as better befit creatures of their capacities.’
‘You do not seem greatly fond of these children,’ murmured Thomas.
‘Fond? My dear - my noble sir,’ exclaimed the man, ‘I am as fond of each of these children as if they were my own. For on their actions rests the manner in which men may judge me, and the means by which I live!’
Thomas pursed his lips. ‘What of entertainments?’ he asked. ‘What of rest, of joy, of—’
‘Entertainments?! Sir, I am a soft-hearted, indulgent man, sir. But a few days ago, these creatures of sin - dare I call them so much - these ragamuffins of the slums were given the indulgence of a lifetime! We took them to see Mr Majestic’s Marvellous Electric Circus, no less, and I challenge you, sir, I challenge you to find any master of any house who would have so pampered and spoiled his wards as I did with such a treat!’
‘Are there many occasions of this kind?’ asked Thomas, trying to fix his face in a look of firm disapproval at the thought of that dreaded disease . . . fun.
For a moment, something flickered behind the master’s eye, a suggestion of that same spark that thought, that sat behind the gabbling of his tongue and pinched it now and then with a whisper of, Hold up, friend, think about what needs to be done . . . Then it was gone, and Mr Mullett was all sad smiles. ‘Alas, betterment before entertainment, good sir. I’m sure you understand.’
Lyle rifled.
He rifled Mr Mullett’s desk, Mr Mullett’s wastepaper basket, Mr Mullett’s one drooping bookshelf. He found nothing that would immediately proclaim itself to be a Clue, but that was good, that was comforting. If he’d found something that had immediately announced itself as a Clue, it would have made Lyle suspicious, since, as yet, he wasn’t even sure what the crime was that had been committed. Besides, Lyle generally believed that if something was too good to be true, then it wasn’t just false, it was probably dancing the polka with a bottle of nitro-glycerine shoved down its left boot.
What he did find was a leather-bound ledger of accounts, scrawled in bad handwriting. And while economics and finance bored him, mathematics was Mister Lyle’s best friend, so he palmed the book into one of his many pockets, muttering as he tried to shove vials and packets of wire aside to make space for it.
Two drawers down he found a bundle of certificates. They were formal, square, written on stiff paper with black ink. They had empty spaces for signatures and names, waiting to be filled by a stiff, well-informed hand. Two were freshly signed, bound together and ready for duty.
They read:
Record of Death
That upon the date of . . . from a disease of the
lungs passed away the orphan, ward of the state
Sissy Smith.
Witnessed: Edgar Mullet Esq.
Witnessed by Medical Examiner: Dr Preston.
There was one more certificate, dated from a few days earlier. He read the name. His lips were thin and pale. He folded them both, slipped them into his jacket pocket, and closed the drawer.
The locked wooden box he found two shelves later.
Inside was money.
A lot of money.
Too much money.
Well, thought Lyle, straightening up a little and forcing his sternest expression onto his face, thank God Tess isn’t here.
A moment, to consider Tate.
The dog - for such he was if only because all other species refused to claim him - was possibly the only creature who had a good idea of the illicit activities underway in the St Bartholomew’s workhouse. From the corridors above, he smelt the chlorine of Lyle’s acids; from the laundry below he sensed rats disturbed by passing feet; from the walls outside he detected the distinct odour of Teresa Hatch, on whose clothes, skin and very soul the essence of fried breakfast seemed to have stamped its imprint.
There was also something else.
Something that Tate didn’t even smell in the basement laboratory of Lyle’s house. Something . . . older, drier, like the rustle of falling autumn leaves . . .
. . . and then it was gone.
This is why.
A woman is watching the workhouse.
Or rather, a woman was watching the workhouse.
But then Lyle and his companions went inside.
And now she’s watching them.
Or maybe, perhaps, just watching him.
Her skin smells of soap, but her soul - if souls can have a smell - carries an odour of something much older than the laughter lines round her bright green eyes.
And she’s smiling.
She’ll prove important to Lyle’s story, in a little while, just a little, little while.
She knows it too.
And that makes her happy.
Tess slipped into the empty children’s dorm. She used the same broken window through which she’d climbed out all those years ago. They hadn’t bothered to fix it.
The dormitory was empty.
It contained a hundred little wooden cots, each stuffed with a little hay mattress and covered by a single little woollen blanket. In winter, half the beds were empty and the children piled in together to stop themselves freezing; in the height of summer, when the sewer stench reached up to the chimney tops, the beds were pushed to the furthest, darkest corners to be apart, and even then, you burnt in the long hot nights. Tess made her way past dirty bowls for dirty washing water, beneath rafters caked with cobwebs. Edging up to the door, she pushed it open a crack. In the empty corridor the floorboards were missing every other nail - Tess herself had taken a sizeable number to sell for her first-ever penny on the city streets. She walked along the floor, taking crooked spider-strides to avoid the boards that would creak or sing too loudly underfoot, until she came to a triangular door, barely large enough even for a child to crawl through. It was bolted and locked on the outside. She tapped on it twice; a second later, three taps came back in answer.
She hissed,
‘Oi! Who’s there?’
Silence.
‘Oi! Don’t play daft! Who’s in there?’
‘Edith White,’ came the whispered reply. ‘Who’s that?’
Tess didn’t answer, but pulled the bolt back and fumbled in her pockets. She didn’t have as many as Lyle but then, as she liked to point out, she could get out of almost any trouble without having to resort to acids and explosive compounds, so there. She pulled out a small bundle of tools, wrapped in soft blue fabric, and started working at the lock.
‘Hello?’ came the whispered voice from the other side of the door. ‘Hello?!’
‘What you gone an’ done?’ hissed Tess.
‘Ain’t done nothin’!’
‘ ’Course you ain’t.’
The Dream Thief_Horatio Lyle Mystery Page 5