Welcome to Mr Majestic’s Marvellous Electric Circus.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome, boys and girls.
Don’t go anywhere too fast. Mingle with the crowds, such great, heaving crowds, pushing on every side. Come dance, come sing, come delight, come hear our stories. Who knows? Once you have feasted on our marvels, you may even want to run away to the circus!
Shoulders jostled on every side, pushing in suffocating density as our companions picked their way down a muddy causeway that might once have been grass.
‘I can see,’ said Lyle, ‘at least two dozen ways of defrauding the public within a fifty-yard radius of where we’re standing right now.’
At his side, Tess sucked loudly on a toffee. The man who’d sold it to her had cunningly taken up a position by the ticket seller at what, for want of a better word, Lyle called the gate to this tented circus city - and a city it certainly was: great, tall tents of striped red and white as far as the eye could see, from which banners and ribbons hung at every opportunity in a fanfare of colour. Some tents were purely for mundane uses, such as the purchasing of food or drink, or a place to deposit the more aged and fatigued of the visitors in reasonable isolation from the bustle and stench of the rest of it. Most offered some sort of entertainment, illustrated in great pictures and banners above the entrance flap with signs like, EGYPTIAN SNAKE CHARMER!!! or REAL JAPANESE PRINCESS SAVED FROM PIRATES AT SEA BY A NAVY FRIGATE or STARS, SPIRITS AND THE SOUL - REVELATION! and so on.
‘Ain’t so many children, is there?’ said Tess casually as they shoved and bumbled their way through the crowd.
‘Plenty with parents, Miss Teresa,’ Thomas replied, and from his pocket, pulled out a stub of pencil and a notebook. This he opened carefully to a clean page - most of them were exactly like this - licking the ends of his fingertips delicately as he turned each thick leaf, and prepared to write.
Two pairs of eyes stared at him in confusion.
‘Whatcha doin’, bigwig?’ asked Tess.
‘Record keeping,’ Thomas intoned, ‘is a vital aspect of a methodologically sound approach to any investigation.’
Silence.
‘Well,’ said Lyle at last, feeling that it was his duty to offer some opinion on the art of investigation, ‘I suppose it is. Especially if the judge is deaf in one ear.’
‘Oh.’ Tess sucked thoughtfully on her toffee, and at great length, in the manner of one reaching a profound conclusion, added, ‘But if we ain’t actually got no methododolologic . . .’
‘Right!’ said Lyle, before the twisted expression of bewilderment on Tess’s toffee-covered face could deepen. ‘Two children have come here and two children have gone missing and we have to find out why.’
‘How?’
‘That is not a helpful or productive attitude. We are going to seek out suspicious things, ask cunning questions and, generally, all things considered . . .’
‘Solve the mystery?’ asked Thomas hopefully.
‘Pinch shiny things?’ added Tess, her face lighting up at the prospect.
‘Knowing you two,’ Lyle said deflated, ‘a bit of both.’
They pushed their way deeper into the circus.
There was a show.
It happened in the biggest, brightest, largest tent of the circus and did, indeed, feature a little marvellous electricity in the form of a pair of smoky light bulbs paraded round the edge of the ring on a horse and trap, to the delight and amazement of the onlookers. Tess, Thomas, Lyle and Tate sat wedged together on benches that creaked and sagged at the back of the arena, skins sweating and stomachs twisting at the smell of so much human life compressed into so little space relative to mass. They tutted.
‘Carbon bulb,’ scowled Lyle. ‘Messy contraption. Nothing more, really, than the induction of light as an incidental effect of heat, and I mean a lot of heat to relatively little light when you consider the amount of power you need for one of the things.’
Thomas nodded sagely.
Tess ate toffee with one hand and rubbed Tate’s tummy with the other.
In the ring, a gang of clowns and acrobats mingled to the farting bursts of brass band and drum, juggling a variety of objects, ranging from knives, flaming sticks and coloured balls to, occasionally, each other, with huge great grins painted onto their faces.
‘Do you believe in that smile?’ Thomas asked Lyle casually, as a clown chuckled his way past the front row of the audience.
‘I know this bloke what had a pair of dentures made out of teeth from a dead person,’ said Tess gleefully. ‘The quack had ’em nicked from the necro . . . necrop . . . from the big train what carries the dead out to the place in the north where the bodies gets dumped, an’ he nicked teeth an’ sold them for three shillin’ fivepence to this fence I known.’
Lyle and Thomas contemplated this for a while.
Finally Thomas said, ‘I’m not sure if that’s very hygienic, Miss Teresa.’
At Thomas’s feet, Tate stirred gently, bored by humanity and all its entertainments. At the edge of the ring, a pair of clowns somersaulted towards a row of . . .
. . . a row of . . .
‘Does that front lot look right?’ asked Tess, pausing to unstick her teeth from the toffee.
Lyle followed her gaze. The object of the clowns’ attention appeared to be a row of ragged children, sitting cross-legged in prime position at the very edge of the ring. Their ages ranged from barely five to almost eleven, and they wore a ragbag of garments unsuited to any child, but which were more like the tattered cast-offs of grown-ups. They were thin and wild-haired, with their teeth grown yellow-brown. But, as the clowns pranced and spun before them, they laughed.
‘Thing is,’ mused Tess, ‘they look to me like the sorta snipes wot’ ain’t clever enough to move from beggin’ to pinchin’. An’ right now they’re not just not pinchin’ anythin’ - they’re spendin’ money, on seein’ this . . .’
No one could make spending such a dirty word as Teresa Hatch. She waved a bewildered hand at the clowns’ antics as they cavorted in time to the brass band.
‘Don’t you enjoy the circus, Miss Teresa?’ ventured Thomas.
‘If I wanna see a bloke in fancy pants fall down drunk, I could’ve gone to Whitechapel an’ saved myself thrupence.’
‘But the crowd! The lights, the colours, the collective - the general - I mean . . .’
‘I seen crowds havin’ a better time at a decent hangin’, an’ no one never said as how it was bad luck to pinch a purse from a bloke what enjoys seein’ that.’
As Thomas struggled to translate this sentiment into something he understood, Lyle nudged him in the ribs and murmured, ‘Trapeze.’
‘What?’
‘I mean, look.’
So Thomas looked. There was indeed a trapeze, and a woman in . . . in . . . Oh my. Well, obviously she was decently attired - obviously. But there were . . . and she had legs that went all the way down from her . . . Well, her . . . Thomas half closed his eyes and thought of gravity. Lots and lots of gravity doing the gravitational thing.
‘Thomas!’ hissed Lyle. ‘You’re not looking!’
‘Uh, no, Mister Lyle.’
‘Why aren’t you looking?’
‘It isn’t - appropriate - sir, for a gentleman and a bastion of society, sir, if I may—’
‘Stop being a nitwit and pay attention!’
So, reluctantly Thomas opened his eyes and looked at the trapeze lady. Objectively speaking, he had to admit that as trapezes went, it was not spectacularly high - in fact, it stood just a short boost up from ground level. A tall man standing on tiptoe might have wrapped himself round it. Added to this, the lady, who seemed to be the focus of the act, didn’t do much more than swing gently backwards and forwards while regaling the audience with some story about her first love in the Wessex countryside and how blue the flowers grow in May, while around her two unconventionally attired ladies cavorted in a not particularly inspiring manner.
‘Do you see?’ asked Lyle briskly.
‘What?’ breathed Thomas. Too much was going through his mind for him to guess what Lyle could possibly mean.
‘Look at the lady on the trapeze! I want you to see what happens when she gets on and off her swing.’
So Thomas watched and waited, doing his best to show appreciation for the act, and then being amazed and in a small part alarmed by the overwhelming mixture of applause and frankly lewd suggestion that the audience emitted at its conclusion.
The woman on the trapeze smiled, and slipped from her perch. Lyle grabbed Thomas by the arm, pointed, gesturing violently, ‘Look! Right there! Look, look, look!’
Thomas looked.
‘Oh, yeah,’ muttered Tess. ‘I see.’
‘You do? See what?’
‘Nah. Just wanna make you feel daft, bigwig.’
‘And to think my mother wanted me to have children,’ growled Lyle. ‘Look! Look at where her feet touch the ground!’
They looked. Tate snuffled impatiently.
‘Look at how she walks, look at the bend of her knee!’
‘Uh . . .’ Thomas’s face was reddening with the effort of observation.
‘Mister Lyle,’ said Tess finally, ‘I’m thinkin’ maybe there’s summat ’ere we can learn!’
‘Are her feet actually . . .?’ tried Thomas.
‘Finally youth catches up with mature wisdom!’ exclaimed Lyle. ‘And no, they’re not. Even when she’s walking on it, the trapeze lady’s feet don’t quite touch the ground.’
They counted over fourteen other . . . Lyle called them ‘disparities’. Tess called them ‘Bloody strange freaky shi . . . cra . . . things what ain’t natural like even for you, Mister Lyle, savin’ your bigwigness an’ all.’
They included the following:
The lion tamer wasn’t merely able to stick his head inside the lion’s mouth; the lion didn’t seem capable of closing its jaws.
The clowns didn’t ever stop smiling, not one, not even counting make-up, and their smiles were too wide, too frozen, never-changing.
The dancing bear danced even when there was no music.
The snake charmer’s thumb seemed fused to the wood of his pipe.
The dancers on the horses’ backs had the same wild round brown eyes as the beasts they rode on.
The acrobats’ knees bent - just for a moment, but Lyle swore it was there - backwards as they made their jumps.
And then there was the ringmaster. Besides the fact that he had a moustache the like of which shouldn’t have been biologically possible, and whose quivering ends tickled the insides of his ears, and ignoring the fact that he had a tremendously over-the-top, maybe-French, could-be-Italian, generic-foreigner-at-a-pinch accent (‘From Bermondsey,’ whispered Tess), and disregarding his outrageous purple jacket and huge black curled shoes, what really caught Lyle’s attention was that at the end of the show, the ringmaster turned to the children in the very front row of the circus, and proclaimed: ‘Once upon a time, there was a child who ran away to the circus . . .’
Somehow, the rest didn’t matter.
‘It had to be . . . unsound, didn’t it?’ groaned Lyle, as the audience heaved, shoved, elbowed and kicked its way out of the show to the last rattle of the brass band. ‘I mean, it couldn’t ever just be a simple case of children disappearing or being poisoned under mysterious and unlikely circumstances, could it? There had to be a dash of scientific fallacy thrown in, a great fat fistful of implausible, unnatural—’
‘Magic?’ asked Tess brightly.
‘That is not a word for the objective and studious to use, Teresa! Not magic - merely things we cannot yet explain. A lady on a trapeze does not touch the ground, a bear dances with no good cause, a child is poisoned and another vanishes and the children say, “Beware the circus”. These are not profound mysteries, Teresa, wrought upon this earth by anything from a . . . a “magical” creature, ’ Lyle spat the words contemptuously, ‘up to and including a theologically fallible god. These are merely’ - he gestured feebly in the air, while Tate snuffled and growled at the trouser legs pressing in around him - ‘mysteries we cannot yet explain.’
‘How,’ asked Thomas thoughtfully, ‘do other people not see it? The things that are not yet explained?’
‘We were looking,’ replied Lyle with a shrug. ‘Remarkable, the things people will go out of their way not to notice when it wouldn’t make them comfortable.’
‘Bunch of marks,’ muttered Tess. ‘ ’Sides, this is one peculiar sorta den.’
‘Thank you, Teresa, for that scintillating summary of our situation. ’
Tess nudged Thomas in the ribs. ‘Did Mister Lyle just say summat good or bad ’bout me?’
‘Erm . . . I’m not entirely sure, Miss Teresa,’ he mumbled, starting to turn pink with the effort of good-mannered obscurity. ‘Mister Lyle? We should - we should investigate further, yes? I mean’ - he waved his notebook hopefully - ‘we should deploy rigorous analysis of the available information and act based on the . . . the information, shouldn’t we, Mister Lyle? I mean, we probably should, shouldn’t we?’
‘Probably a good idea, Thomas.’ Lyle sighed. ‘You can find the children, talk to them, see why they’re here. Let’s see if anyone else has been going missing at the circus.’
‘You makes us do all the work, Mister Lyle,’ muttered Tess.
‘Privilege of being the authoritative fat—pater—patriarch, Teresa!’ barked Lyle happily. ‘In fact, being able to tell you two to get on with something is perhaps the only perk of what is otherwise a largely unrewarding endeavour to impart moral fibre into your youthful selves. So, to quote: go shift your bottoms! ’
‘What are you going to do, Mister Lyle?’ asked Thomas, not very hopefully.
‘Me?’ murmured Lyle. ‘I think I’m going to have a conversation with some dubious characters.’
Horatio Lyle was, in his spare time, a bobby - a copper, a peeler, or, to put it bluntly, a policeman. It wasn’t that Lyle served the law - he just took it so much for granted that if asked why he was bothering to uphold it, he’d look startled and say, ‘I beg your pardon - uphold what?’ He had, however, been too different for the regular service. The highest echelons had found him too common, middle-ranking officers of the investigating ranks had found him too well read, and as for the constables - he bewildered all who saw him. He wasn’t ex-military, nor an old affiliate of the Bow Street Runners, nor an Irish Paddy come fresh from building the railways. Neither was he poor, in debt, in need of a place to sleep, nor fleeing an unhappy marriage. Worst of all, he had ideas. Ideas like, ‘You know, it seems to me that there are better ways to identify known criminals than by the size of their skulls. Maybe the pressure patterns on their lips, or their toes, or even their fingers? Obviously I would need to do a study, with perhaps . . . oh, a magnifying glass, a very large wall, a sizeable bottle of ink, a lot of paper and two thousand volunteers, give or take.’ Naturally, the chief inspector had put a stop to that ridiculous idea fairly smartish.
The police just weren’t ready for a man like Lyle. That said, they could use such a man, and so, with a sly expression and a wink at the accounting department, they’d made him a special constable. Not that Lyle had taken much note of this because, come what may, he knew that the law was right and whether he was a bobby or not he would see that right was done.
The Dream Thief_Horatio Lyle Mystery Page 8