‘You . . . you should go.’
‘Hilarious and not going to happen. Who is Greybags?’
‘You should go now.’ Mr Majestic was shaking from the tip of his moustache to the end of his toes. In a corner of the pen, Mr Lovell had curled up, peeking out between the fingers of his hands like a frightened puppy or like . . . a child. For a moment Lyle thought of Sissy Smith in her bed, wondered if she’d cowered with her hands over her eyes. Without his voice seeming to change tone or eyes wander from Mr Majestic’s face he went on, knuckles white, ‘Children being hurt, sir. A little girl who won’t wake up, children going missing, sir. Who is Greybags?’
‘Leave leave leave leave leave I ORDER YOU TO—’
‘Have you ever wondered how flammable the ointment must be that you use to preen your moustache? It’s these sorts of considerations that largely keep me from promotion within the police - unsound, you see. Don’t mistake me, the police would perfectly happily beat you to a pulp and throw your body into the river if they ever even thought you were protecting someone who hurts children, Mr Majestic, sir. They just don’t approve of any higher reasoning being applied to the process. Do you have any children, sir?’
At which the ringmaster gave a cry. He raised his head to the sky and his hands to his face, and his whole body seemed to wrench and shiver with an uncontrollable rage. Yet Lyle couldn’t help but notice, as Mr Majestic swung the long dark end of his cane with all his strength into the side of Lyle’s head, that even as his body twisted in fury, all that came from his lips was a little child-like giggle.
Even if nothing else was real, the cane felt solid enough where it smacked into Lyle’s skull. And as his mother always said - you know you’re onto something if they’re trying to kill you.
The thought gave him little comfort as the sky turned topsyturvy, clowning with the earth, and then went out entirely.
CHAPTER 7
Pudding
It was a tent of wonders.
Steam was the predominant feature, rising up from a hundred copper pots and pans, from fizzling grills and hissing cauldrons, billowing out above the heat of a wall of charcoal burners. Tess’s jaw was halfway to her ankles, and she tugged at Thomas’s sleeve, making urgent little ‘Uh! Uh!’ sounds as her eyes fell across new and wonderful miracles. Steamed puddings, pastries, pies, pasties hot and cold, great cakes oozing hot bubbling plum jam, grills sagging under the weight of suspicious sausages cooked to blackened perfection, pots boiling with fat greenish potatoes, huge cauldrons of pea soup and great vats of strangely bubbling shaped vegetables. The corner most popular with the men contained a wagon-weight of beer raised up on a sacred plinth, to be poured into chipped old mugs muddier than the churned tent floor. The ladies had found their way into another area, where a matron with incongruously billowing sleeves was explaining her remarkably efficient new method of peeling an egg.
As Thomas and Tess went inside, a pair of hugely grinning clowns were ushering a furious cleric out of the tent flap, whose Bible he raised aloft with a cry of, ‘Vice, bawdry, sin!’ His liturgy to this effect elicited nothing but giggles from the attending children, who all secretly resolved to learn as much about vice, bawdry and sin as they possibly could, since it seemed so well fed. The young teacher, seeing all this, exhorted, ‘Children! Discipline!’ and had to tug several times on his battered piece of string to stop his skinny followers from climbing on the tables to get at the dishes on display.
‘Mr Preston has provided you with threepence each,’ he said, ‘so that you may all enjoy a slice of cake. What do we say?’
‘Thank you, Mr Preston,’ intoned the children with that special droning voice reserved for prayers and tedious, unwelcome obedience.
‘Cake!’ exclaimed Tess, as the two eavesdropped on this ritual.
‘Mr Preston?’ mused Thomas, feeling he ought to contribute something more sensible to the investigative process.
‘Cake!’ Tess squeaked again, unable to comprehend why Thomas could not share her excitement. ‘Wheresa cake?’
This question was promptly answered by another great gout of steam from the far end of the tent, a rattling of wheels and an ‘oooohh’ of delight from the waiting children as, perched on an old wooden trolley, the cake was brought into the tent.
Tess’s face fell. The cake was a dark, sludgy brown, and looked suitable to serve as a brick in any castle wall, so long as the architect didn’t mind a sag in his structure. Raisins seemed its only interesting feature, for it boasted no other source of sweetness except the solid, tough mixture itself. However, it was a big cake, she reflected, and perhaps that made up for some of its other defects. More importantly, it was the only cake the children on the end of their piece of string seemed to have seen in their collective lives, and they all gathered around ooh-ing and aah-ing as the young man pushing the trolley presented it to them.
The young man was . . . Tess put her head on one side, trying to work out what the young man was. He wasn’t particularly tall, but seemed somehow stretched, with a long, thin, almost perfectly white face topped by prematurely grey hair which was straight, thin and dishevelled and with lines round the eyes that spoke of age far more than the softness of the rest of his skin. His hands were long and made almost entirely of bone over which pale skin had been tightly stretched as if by a manufacturer with a devout belief in economy. He wore an apron splattered with flour and more suspicious-looking stuff, and a look on his face of bright, green-eyed . . .
The word Tess wanted to use was hunger. But she couldn’t quite work out why.
‘Mr Preston wants you all to have a slice,’ the young man said. ‘It’s all for you!’
Tess nudged Thomas. ‘Bigwig?’ she began.
‘Yes, Miss Teresa?’
‘Bigwig?’
‘Yes, Miss Teresa?’
‘Does it seem sorta odd to you how—’
‘You! You want?’
The question startled both Thomas and Tess. They looked up into the bright green eyes - was he so young? Not old, not young, but somehow stuck in between, Tess decided - of the man with the trolley on which sat the cake. He was slicing away briskly with a long steel blade, the children barely keeping order in expectation of a slice. ‘You want?’ he repeated. He was nodding and speaking to Tess.
‘Wha’? Me?’
‘Cake’s for all the children.’
‘I thought it was for Mr Preston’s children,’ said Thomas, feeling a sudden need to put himself between this strange man and Tess.
‘Mr Preston pays so the children can come to the circus an’ ’ave summat to eat,’ answered the other man, a slight pout beginning on his lower lip at this line of questioning. ‘But we always make spare cake.’
‘An’ you’d give summat to me?’ asked Tess.
‘It’s for the children.’
‘An’ it’s free?’ she added, her voice rising with incredulity.
‘Course, if you wanna.’
Tess edged towards the trolley, the children parting before her like puppies sensing a superior beast. She leant down, sniffed the cake, looked up, peered into the face of the young man and hesitated, eyes narrowing. She looked into his bright green eyes and smiling face, then down at the steel knife in his hand, down at the cake, and pursed her lips. ‘Free?’ she demanded again. ‘I mean, you’d gimme summat for free?’
‘You want cake or not?’ snapped the man and, to Thomas’s astonishment, this unlikely chef stamped his foot in indignation.
Tess shrugged. She never said no to free cake. She reached out for a thin slice.
‘Wait!’ It was Thomas who’d spoken. No - not spoken. Shouted. Barked in a way that would have pleased his military forebears for its combination of sheer, heart-leaping noise and utter, immoveable clarity. It was the kind of voice that could command a cavalry charge down a Crimean valley and no one, not even the doubters among the brigade, would bother to ask about those nasty cannon at the far end. He leant forward. He sniffed the cake. He
picked a few crumbs off the side with the ends of his fingertips to an indignant, ‘Oi!’ from the young man and several grumblings from assembled onlookers. He rolled them between his fingers. Instinctively, he reached for his pockets, but a well-respected young gentleman was not supposed to carry anything in his coat, so rather than the vast collection of chemicals Lyle always carried, Thomas found himself pulling out his notebook. He opened a page. He inserted a couple of the crumbs, pushed them around on the white paper, sniffed again.
Tess huffed indignantly. ‘You gonna lemme eat cake or not, bigwig?’
Thomas looked up.
One or two of the children on their piece of string stepped back. If Thomas’s voice could have commanded a cavalry charge, the look on Thomas’s face said that here was a general who would show no regret when the bodies were brought in. He looked straight at the young man with the grey hair and said, ‘This cake isn’t right.’
‘Dunno what you mean.’
‘It isn’t right,’ he repeated firmly. ‘Now, I know that the common sort are forced by the unfortunate circumstances of the time to eat debased food, but this is not debased.’ He snatched the cake from Tess’s suddenly unresisting fingers. ‘This is enriched.’
‘Bigwig?’ hissed Tess, starting to turn pale, wiping her hands quickly down the front of her clothes.
‘You said yourself, Miss Teresa, who gives away free food to children in a place like this? There is no indication of an organised philanthropic principal at work, this is not charity. This is something more. Smell it.’
Tess sniffed cautiously at the slice of cake.
‘All right, bigwig,’ she conceded reluctantly, ‘so it smells sorta peculiar.’
‘More than peculiar,’ proclaimed Thomas, feeling his chest start to puff with the pride and effort of detective process. ‘Ethyl alcohol, and something else. When my second cousin Cuthbert—’
‘You have a cousin Cuthbert?’
‘Erm . . . yes.’
‘Cuthbert?’
‘Miss Teresa, if you would be so kind as to permit the deductive process to have its course!’
‘If you gotta go, you gotta go,’ sighed Tess with a shrug.
‘. . . When my second cousin Cuthbert came back from his duties in the cantons in - well, Canton—’
‘You sure you ain’t makin’ this up, bigwig?’
‘I insist! He brought back with him the juice of a certain herb that was sold to China from the Indian plantations in exchange for silver bullion, whose smell, if I recall, most strongly resembled the—’
The cake went flying. Cheap cutlery and small metal bowls flew across the room, thick dough splattered across the floor, children screamed and scampered out of its way as, without a word, without looking back, the grey-haired young man threw the whole thing, trolley and all, at Thomas, turned and ran.
‘After him!’ shrilled Thomas, the level maturity of his voice breaking for a moment into an almost girly shriek.
Tess rolled her eyes. ‘Right, sure, if you’d just said that to begin with.’
They ran.
So, for that matter, did the rest of the people in the tent. Not because they had anywhere to run to or anything to run from, but because it seemed the thing that everyone else was doing so there was probably a good reason for it.
In fact, the only person who didn’t run, was a child, a girl by the name of Effy Hall, who had been pressed at the fall of the trolley into a corner, and who sat bewildered on the floor, licking clean the end of her cake-smeared fingertips.
Horatio Lyle lay on the ground and thought about his life so far.
He thought about his father, old Harry Lyle, nails smeared with chemicals, face with coal dust, as he tried to resist the temptation to play with his son’s brand new toy wooden train on its thin bit of string.
He thought about his mother, Milly Lyle, sitting in the rocking chair by the fire, carefully embroidering a small pillow with the words: Heat and Pressure at Fixed Volume Do Not Make For a Happy Home. That had been after the incident with the coal fire, the fermenting plums, the steel vat and her husband’s enthusiastic discovery of the concept of catalysation. She had only got as far as ‘Heat and Pres’ before running out of space. Needlework had never been Milly Lyle’s strongest suit.
He thought about Miss Chaste, a vicar’s daughter, proclaiming, ‘You know, Horatio, if you just put down those funny little books, I know a smashing place where we could play bridge.’
At the time, he hadn’t understood what she really meant.
He thought he could see Tess out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. He guessed it was rude.
He thought he could see Thomas, who said nothing at all, but just looked down at him and frowned that stern little frown of his as if to say, ‘When I grow up, I will consider your current predicament one which I shall endeavour to avoid. Tut-tut, really.’
He thought he felt Tate pulling at his trouser leg.
He could feel Tate pulling at his trouser leg.
Curious, that.
Even more curious, was what he saw when he opened his eyes.
Greyness.
A lot of greyness.
But not just any ordinary greyness. Oh no. This was a very special, mud-spattered, wrinkled kind of greyness, leathery and sprouting hundreds of thick yellowish hairs at odd intervals up and down its considerable length. And it smelt. It took Lyle some time to work out what it smelt of.
It smelt of elephant.
Reality came flying back like a ringmaster’s cane to the skull. He gave a muted cry somewhere between a gulp of breath and a wheeze of terror that hit each other somewhere around the vocal chords and buzzed. He threw himself back onto his hands, nearly crushing Tate beneath his flailing legs as he did so, and looked up into the thoughtful eyes of an elephant. Very, very much an elephant. Tate growled, plonking himself firmly on his haunches by his master’s side and glaring up into the elephant’s face as if daring it to test the maxim ‘size doesn’t matter’. A pair of huge yellowish-brown eyes considered Lyle for a long moment. A mouth that drooped like the edge of a cathedral gutter opened and closed behind a softly curling trunk, bright pink at the end. It reached out towards him. Lyle squeezed his eyes shut and thought, Oh God, what a stupid stupid stupid way to die. I really hope Tess doesn’t find out.
The trunk reached past him. It fumbled in a heavy trough just behind Lyle’s head and, with possibly the most obscene slurping sound Lyle had ever heard even in his acquaintance with Tess (not renowned for her good manners), it began to drink the water from the trough.
Lyle looked at Tate.
Tate looked at Lyle.
If man and beast could be said to share an understanding that transcended both language and words, the two of them experienced in that single moment a mutual comprehension that more than nine years of prior friendship had not yet produced. Carefully picking Tate up in his arms, legs and ears dangling down either side of his master’s grip, Lyle moved with the slow, careful waddle of the utterly innocuous, towards the edge of the pen.
Someone had locked the gate. Outside, he could see the small patch of manure-filled earth where Mr Lovell plied his trade. There was no one there. He put Tate down on the ground. Tate considered the metal bars of the gate, considered his own width, and promptly tried to force himself between them. He got a little more than halfway before becoming stuck, front paws dangling in the realms of freedom, rear paws paddling uselessly at the world behind. Lyle felt blood running down the side of his head. The trick was to focus on the elephant. Pain, bewilderment, anger and confusion could all happen later. Later, he decided, fumbling a set of picklocks out of the inner reaches of his jacket, was any time after the point where he was not crushed alive by an elephant.
He carefully set to picking the lock.
From somewhere else inside the circus, there came the sound of animals in distress.
Later, Tess would never be entirely sure how it had happened.
The point being that one moment they were chasing him, the next moment, the world had gone mad. It had become peculiar when a matron with flour on her apron and a pair of huge bright red arms had tried to take Thomas’s head off with a saucepan. It had worsened when a dancing monkey had locked itself onto Tess’s head and tried to pull her ear off. This had immediately induced panic in the members of the public who were witness to this event, who had never until that moment conceived of monkeys as anything other than fluffy little creatures about which Mr Charles Darwin had some hideously unorthodox ideas. No sooner had Tess got the monkey off her head by the lucky expedient of head-butting the side of a Punch and Judy stand, than the puppeteer for the Punch character, his face every bit as strange, warped and out of proportion as his puppet, had started shrieking and attempted to bash her over the skull with - not the wooden puppet he held, but with the tiny little cosh that the puppet held in its hand. Which, as she was quick to discover, was no way to stop a good thief in her tracks.
The Dream Thief (Horatio Lyle) Page 10