Free The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) by Catherine Webb Page A

she followed, clinging on to his wrist with both hands, half-paddling, half-walking along the bottom of the flooded tunnel. She felt her shoulder bang against something hard and metallic, and suddenly up seemed the place to go, blissful up. Lyle was already pushing her, and there was light somewhere up there, criss-crossed by a grate, and distorted by the faintest shimmering of the water’s surface. She climbed the ladder with her arms and kicked with her feet, not knowing what she was doing but drawn by that light, letting her own natural buoyancy propel her forward.
    The grate opened without resistance and there was air above it, and a large puddle. Tess climbed out into the puddle and fell on to solid ground. She had time for two very deep breaths before the laughter took her, hysterical and giddy, shaking every soaked limb as she lay and looked up at the dim light of Baker Street Station and laughed. She wondered where Tate was, and then Lyle appeared, a hand at a time, heaving himself over the edge of the shaft, crawling into the puddle of water spread around its opening and sprawling on his front. With his head turned to one side, he heaved in lungfuls of air, not even bothering to pull his feet out of the shaft until he had oxygen back in his blood.
    Only when he felt that the world wasn’t trying to dance the polka in his vicinity did he bother to roll over and wheeze, ‘Tess?’
    ‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’
    ‘Are you all right?’
    ‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’
    ‘Sure?’
    ‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’
    ‘Have you seen Tate anywhere?’
    ‘No. He’s bugge . . . he ain’t here, Mister Lyle.’
    Lyle groaned. ‘Tate!’
    From the end of the platform there came a growl. Lyle heaved himself up, and saw Tate, sitting sulkily by a pair of shoes. With a frown, Lyle looked at the shoes, black and highly polished; thence at a pair of black pinstriped trousers below a black waistcoat with a silver fob watch, above which a pale face and a head of thin dark hair were crowned by a silk top hat.
    The face gave a benign smile.
    ‘Horatio Lyle,’ it said. ‘Are you busy?’
    Lyle stared past the top hat to the two other men standing a few respectful paces behind. They wore plain working clothes, and in each right-hand jacket pocket there was a suspicious-looking bulge over which their hands hovered, ready to move at any moment.
    ‘Augustus Havelock,’ Lyle said wearily. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’

CHAPTER 5
    Acquaintances
    Near the duck-thronged ponds of Regent’s Park there stood a small gazebo, where on a Sunday when the weather was good the ladies and gentlemen of the neighbourhood sometimes met for tea. More often it was used as a meeting place for illicit lovers fearful of being seen by their families and friends, sometimes in the name of true love, sometimes for quick money.
    Today, on a cold spring afternoon with the rain belting down outside, it housed a dripping Lyle and a surprisingly dry Augustus Havelock. At the nearby roadside Tess and Tate cowered in the company of the two men with the bulging pockets, who had explained in a few short grunts that they did not share Tess’s sense of humour. Somewhere the sun was probably getting on with setting, but the pervasive greyness of the afternoon gave no sign that it had even bothered to rise, and only a deepening darkness on one edge of the horizon suggested that there was anything the city might wish goodnight.
    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