Текст книги "The curious case of the Clockwork Man"

Автор книги: Mark Hodder

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“I had life but I didn't live it!” he wept. “I want it back! Please, don't let me die like this!”

Something registered in his consciousness. There was a figure ahead, moving in the thickening fog. He could sense its warmth, its vitality. There were others beyond it, but this one was close.

A beating heart! Pulsating blood! Life!

He must have it! He must have it!

His corpse lurched forward, the arms reached out, the fingers curled into claws.

There came a distant shout: “Constable Tamworth! Come back! Don't wander from the group, man!”

Detective Inspector Honesty looked at his pocket watch. It was ten to three in the morning.

He felt weary.

He loved police work, mainly because he was very good at it, but at times like this his mind tended to drift to what he considered his true vocation: gardening. In his youth, he'd dreamed of becoming a landscape gardener, but his father, one of the original Peelers, had insisted that his boy follow him into the force and wouldn't hear otherwise. Honesty didn't begrudge the old man's stubbornness; policing had, after all, gained him respect, a secure job with prospects, and a loving young wife whom he'd met while on a murder case. He'd been able to buy a house with a large garden, too, and it was the envy of the neighbourhood, with its bright displays of flowers and finely trimmed lawn.

What, though, would his life have been like had he defied his father?

He remembered something Sir Richard Francis Burton had told him: that when Edward Oxford, the man they called Spring Heeled Jack, had altered time, original future history had become disconnected. It still existed-in the same way that, if you find yourself at a junction, taking road A won't cause road B to vanish-but it was inaccessible; there was no way back to the junction without a time-travelling device.

Did that mean that somewhere, some when, there was a Thomas Manfred Honesty, Landscape Gardener?

He hoped so. It was a strangely comforting thought.

It was ten to three.

His watch had stopped.

He shook it and tut-tutted.

Only a couple of minutes had passed, he was sure. The signal wouldn't come for at least another hour.

His men were restless and he was feeling the same way.

In front of the police cordon, Kingsway had faded from sight, obscured by the fog, which was obviously returning to London with a vengeance. The shambling figures, visible earlier, were now hidden, which made them seem even more uncanny and threatening.

“Dead Rakes,” he muttered, for the umpteenth time. “Damned peculiar.”

A constable approached and pointed wordlessly back at the men. Honesty looked and saw three wraiths swirling among them. The policemen were swiping at the ghosts with their truncheons, to no effect.

“Stop that!” he ordered. “Waste of time! Save your strength!”

They desisted, but one of the men looked at him, his face suddenly contorting with fury, and screamed: “Don't bloody well tell me what to do!”

“Constable Tamworth! At ease!”

“At ease yourself, you little jumped-up poseur! Who are you to give me orders?”

“Your commanding officer!”

“No, mate. I'll follow no one but Tichborne!”

Honesty sighed and turned to another man. “Sergeant Piper,” he ordered. “Your truncheon. Back of Tamworth's head. Now!”

Piper nodded and unhooked his truncheon from his belt.

“Not bloody likely!” Tamworth said. He took to his heels and vanished into the fog.

The detective inspector yelled after him: “Constable Tamworth! Don't wander from the group, man!”

A bubbling wail of terror answered him.

Three policemen broke away from the cordon and ran toward the sound.

“No! Menders! Carlyle! Patterson! Come back!”

“He's in trouble, sir!” Carlyle protested before plunging into the pall.

Honesty turned to the main group and bellowed: “Stay here! Move and I'll have your guts for garters! Come with me, Piper.”

He gritted his teeth and, with the sergeant, hurried after his men.

As they came into view, he saw Menders raise his arm, point his pistol at something, pull the trigger, and curse: “Jammed, damn the thing!”

He looked to where the constable had aimed and saw Tamworth sprawled on the ground. The man's jacket and shirt had been ripped aside and his stomach torn open. Squatting over him, hands buried in the policeman's intestines, was a thin, bearded, bespectacled dead man. The corpse looked up, moaned, and stood. Entrails oozed from his hands and fell to the cobbles. “My apologies,” he said. “I need life.”

“Mary, mother of God!” exclaimed Menders. He threw his pistol and it bounced off the bearded man's forehead.

Sergeant Piper whispered, “Useless. You can't kill a bloody stiff!”

“Piper, stay with me,” Honesty commanded. “The rest of you, behind the cordon, now. That's an order.”

Menders swallowed, gave a hesitant nod, and started to back away from the bearded man, who stood swaying, as if uncertain whether or not to collapse to the ground and admit his demise.

“A bloody stiff,” Piper repeated. “But still bleedin’ well movin’.”

A top-hatted, well-dressed cadaver suddenly emerged from the cloud beside them, grabbed Menders by the shoulders, and sank his teeth into the constable's throat before dragging him out of sight.

Constable Carlyle saw his colleague die, let loose a high-pitched scream, panicked, fumbled for his police whistle, raised it to his lips, and started blowing long, loud, repetitive blasts.

“That's the signal!” a constable named Lampwick announced.

“Impossible!” Trounce snapped. “It's too early.”

He and his men were close to the smoldering skeleton of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which had burned to the ground the day before. The rioters enjoyed setting fire to taverns as much as they enjoyed drinking in them. Judging by the stench, on this occasion they'd made the fatal misjudgement of combining the two activities.

“But listen to that whistle, sir! That can't be a mistake!”

“Constable Lampwick, we're expecting Mr. Swinburne to arrive via Waterloo Bridge, so the signal should more or less come from straight ahead. It sounds to me like the whistle-blower is with Detective Inspector Honesty's team on Kingsway.”

Trounce shifted from one foot to the other uneasily. He took off his bowler and gave it a hard slap.

Something wasn't right.

He shoved his hat back onto his head.

A decision had to be made.

What if he got it wrong?

The distant whistling stopped.

“Hell's bells,” he hissed under his breath.

What to do? What to do?

Trounce became very still for a moment.

He blinked.

The Scotland Yard man suddenly wheeled to face his men and bellowed: “Arm yourselves, lads. We're moving forward. Proceed with utmost caution. Do not, under any circumstances, mistake this for the Charge of the blessed Light Brigade, is that understood?”

There came a great many, “Yes, sirs.”

A hundred and fifty uniformed men took out their police-issue Adams revolvers, unhooked their truncheons, and, following Trounce, advanced slowly into the fog.

“Did you hear that, Commander?” Sergeant Slaughter asked.

“Yes, but it was ahead of time, farther away than it should be, and from the wrong direction, to boot!” Krishnamurthy replied, puzzled.

“It's the fog, sir. You know how it distorts things.”

“Humph!”

The commander of the Flying Squad couldn't stop thinking about Milligan. The man was a personal friend and had a wife and child. Witnessing his life terminated so abruptly and so senselessly had been shocking.

He sighed and forced the flier's death to the back of his mind. Duty first!

“Something must have happened,” he muttered. “So do we proceed into the Strand now or do we wait until the planned-for moment?”

“Maybe this is the planned-for moment, sir,” Slaughter suggested. “It's just come earlier than originally intended.”

Krishnamurthy clicked his tongue and considered a moment. He addressed his men: “We're going to wait. Ready yourselves. I want absolute silence. Keep your ears to the ground. Be prepared to move at a moment's notice!”

“Stop blowing that bloody whistle!”

Constable Carlyle stopped.

“You blithering idiot!” Detective Inspector Honesty growled. He stamped over to his subordinate. “You just ruined the whole-” He was brought up short by the sight of a sword blade projecting from the constable's chest. It slid back into the man's uniform and disappeared.

Blood spurted.

The whistle fell from Carlyle's mouth and tinked onto the road. The policeman followed it down.

From behind the body, a man shuffled out of the mist. He was a Rake, plainly, but he was also at least three days dead. His lower limbs were saturated with fluids and bulged horribly against his clothing. The swollen hands holding the sword, and the cane from which it had been unsheathed, possessed the sickening appearance of old uncooked sausages. His skin was the colour of earthworms, his sagging bottom lip dangled against his chin, and his eyes were turned up and sunken into their sockets.

“Awfully thorry,” he lisped. “That mutht be a terrible inconvenienth!”

There and then, Thomas Manfred Honesty decided he wanted to spend a great deal more of his time tending to his garden.

“More pink dahlias,” he muttered to himself, thinking about the state of his little plot's bottom border.

He drew his revolver.

“Yellow marigolds, perhaps.”

He aimed at the dead man's head.

“Blue geraniums.”

He squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed. He sighed, pocketed it, and hefted his truncheon.

“Perhaps marigolds.”

He stepped forward, knocked the sword blade aside, and bludgeoned the corpse's head once, twice, thrice, four times, until it flew apart in a spray of white bone, black clotted blood, and grey brain tissue. The cadaver crumpled and lay twitching.

“Good mulch!” Honesty muttered. “That's the secret.”

“Sir!” cried a voice behind him. He turned and saw Piper and Patterson backing away as more bodies loomed out of the miasma.

“Everyone advance!” he shouted to his team behind the cordon. “Guns don't work. Use your truncheons! On their heads. As hard as you can. Crush their skulls!”

Detective Inspector Honesty and Detective Inspector Trounce cautiously led their men toward the centre of the Strand, one team proceeding from the north, the other from the east.

As they penetrated the thickening fog, the walking dead, with sword-sticks drawn, came staggering out of it to meet them. They were well dressed, debonair, and faultlessly polite.

“I'm mortified,” one of them confessed as he jammed his fingers into a constable's eye sockets. “This really is despicable behaviour and I offer my sincerest apologies.”

“I say!” another exclaimed, plunging his blade into a man's abdomen. “What a terrible to-do!”

“It's all rather unseemly,” noted a third, urbanely, after spitting a chunk of flesh from his mouth. He looked at the throatless uniformed man he held slumped in his arms. “I do hope you won't consider me boorish.”

The constables swiped their truncheons, crunched skulls, and splattered lifeless brains, but they were badly outnumbered and, furthermore, were distracted by swooping wraiths.

The seeming ghosts wafted in and out of sight, sometimes almost solid, other times a mere suggestion, and every time one appeared, policemen nearby slumped and clutched their heads. More than a few suddenly turned, with the word “Tichborne” blurting out of their lips, and attacked their colleagues.

Police truncheons smacked down onto police heads. The Rakes weren't the only ones apologising.

The battle intensified.

“Don't hold back, lads!” Trounce shouted. “Have at ’em!”

He stepped aside as a svelte and fashionable but sagging and bluish corpse minced out of the pall and said: “What ho! Would you mind awfully if I took your life, old thing? I seem to have mislaid my own. Jolly careless of me, what!”

“Oh, bugger off, you ridiculous ass,” the detective snarled. He dodged the Rake's blade and swung his truncheon into the side of the man's head.

The dandy staggered and protested: “Rotten show, old man!”

The detective hit him again, sending him to his knees.

“Really! This isn't at all cricket!”

“Shut the hell up,” Trounce hissed, and bashed his attacker's skull in. The Rake folded onto the cobbles and twitched weakly.

Detective Inspector Honesty emerged from the fog and nodded a greeting. Trounce returned it and warned: “Watch behind you!”

Honesty twisted and ducked under a blade. The Rake holding it was a badly moldering cadaver, perhaps one of the first to die. It stank, and when the Scotland Yard man punched it hard on the chin, its head simply fell off and split on the cobbles like an overripe melon. The body toppled after it.

Honesty turned away, his nose wrinkled in disgust.

“Where's Swinburne?” Trounce asked.

“I don't know.”

“Was the signal given early?”

“Yes. One of my men panicked.”

“Blast!”

“My fault.”

“I doubt it. Don't blame yourself. Can we hold them off until he arrives?”

“No choice. Burton's depending on it.”

Trounce grunted his agreement, stepped away from his fellow officer, gripped the handle of his truncheon with both hands, and swiped it into the ear of an attacking Rake. The corpse stumbled and fell. The detective stepped onto its chest, heaved himself over, and swung his weapon upward into the chin of another dead man. The head snapped back, came forward, and was met by a crushing blow to the forehead. The Rake grabbed at the detective's arm but missed, and the truncheon came arcing back and impacted against the carcass again. Bone shattered.

“Lie-” Trounce grunted, putting his full strength into a fourth blow “-down!”

The Rake tottered, swayed, and fell.

There was a loud smack and fragments of flesh, bone, and hair showered over the Scotland Yard man. He looked back in time to see a headless body fall. Constable Lampwick stood beyond it, bloodied truncheon in his hand.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “It was about to jump on you.”

“Much obliged. I'll send you the laundry bill in the morning.”

The constable smiled, grimaced, clutched his head, raised his weapon, and yelled: “Not guilty! Tichborne has been cheated, you bastard!”

He swung his club at Trounce's head. The detective yelled, dodged backward, fell over the corpse he'd just downed, rolled, jumped to his feet, and threw his truncheon. It hit Lampwick square between the eyes and the man collapsed, unconscious.

“I'm sorry, son.”

Honesty, meanwhile, had scooped up a second weapon, and, with a truncheon in each hand, was ducking under clutching hands, swiping at kneecaps, and crippling his opponents. Five of his men, staying close to him, were then finishing the job by flattening heads.

It became a routine, almost rhythmic: dodge-duck– Smack! Smack! -pulverise. Dodge-duck– Smack! Smack! -pulverise.

“Winter jasmine,” Honesty declared. “Very cheerful.”

Dodge-duck– Smack! Smack! -pulverise.

“And maybe wisteria. A good climber for the back fence.”

Charles Altamont Doyle's astral body drifted through the fog and mingled with Commander Krishnamurthy's men. Some took a swing at him, which didn't affect him at all, while others seemed to hear the voice that reverberated through what little essence he possessed. “Rebel!” it urged them. “Turn against your oppressors!” They put their hands to their heads, winced, and assaulted their fellows. Fights broke out.

The other part of Doyle was at the junction of the Strand, Aldwych, and Lancaster Place, at the end of Waterloo Bridge. Despite having a dent in his cheek where a truncheon had caught him, he still moved and he still hungered. He could not resist his appetite; others had life, and he wanted it!

A policeman charged at him and slashed at his forehead. Doyle shifted and the weapon thudded down onto his shoulder. He felt nothing, though he heard his collarbone crack. He clutched his attacker's wrist and slammed his other hand into the man's elbow, which snapped with a nasty crunch. The policeman let loose a scream. Doyle released the arm and wrapped his fingers around the man's neck. He started to squeeze. The scream gurgled into silence.

“Give me your life!” Doyle moaned. “Please!”

At the edge of Trafalgar Square, Commander Krishnamurthy listened to the growing sounds of battle and made a decision. He ordered his men to advance.

From the north and south sides of the Strand, smaller police teams also responded to the intensifying conflict and moved into the fog.

Tock!

Krishnamurthy's truncheon bounced from the back of a constable's skull. It was the fifth of his men he'd had to personally render unconscious.

There were wraiths everywhere, and the Flying Squad man could feel them digging into his mind, trying to wheedle their way inside to take control. His headache was almost overpowering.

“Do your duty, old son!” he advised himself. “Don't give in to these bloody spooks.”

Despite the steady loss of men, he still had a reasonably sized force at his command, and he was leading them at a steady pace toward the end of Lancaster Place.

Now Rakes, as well as wraiths, began to appear out of the miasma, and combat became rather more deadly. Five men went down before the Flying Squad commander realized that not a single pistol was functioning. The only way to beat the walking corpses was to obliterate their heads. He yelled the order, and a few moments later gore was spraying everywhere.

Krishnamurthy forgot his headache as he started to exact vengeance for Milligan's death.

Amid the carnage, as his team penetrated deeper into the battle zone, he caught sight of Trounce, who was laying about himself like a wild man, and Honesty, who was industriously crippling the shambling monstrosities.

Krishnamurthy realised that the three main groups of policemen had made it to the rendezvous point as planned. However, unlike Honesty and Trounce, he didn't know that the signal whistle had been sounded by mistake or that the advance had been made some considerable time ahead of schedule. Now, as the police teams merged, it dawned on him that something had gone badly wrong.

Swinburne was supposed to be here. The opposition should be on its back foot by now. The police were meant to be in control of the situation.

They weren't.

“Hold fast,” he breathed. “Just hope the poet shows up.” He lashed out at a Rake and muttered: “A poet, by crikey! A blessed poet!”

Detective Inspector Honesty strode past, brandishing his weapons.

Krishnamurthy clearly heard his superior bark: “Petunias.”

“Did you say Tichborne, sir?” he asked.

“No, Commander. Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give them hell.”

Krishnamurthy nodded and winced. His head was filled with pain.

“Excuse me,” said a refined voice. He turned. A Rake stood beside him. “How does it work, old bean?”

The commander stepped back. “What?”

The Rake, not long deceased by the look of him, said: “The thing of it is, you have life. Unfortunately, I don't. Regrettably, that means I have to take yours. What I can't bally well work out is where to look for it after I've run you through.” He showed Krishnamurthy his rapier. “Can you advise?”

The Flying Squad man eyed the sword point, which was poised about three inches from his face.

“Um-”

The Rake's head flew apart, the rapier dropped, and the body folded.

“This isn't a bloody debating society, Commander!” Trounce growled, standing over the prone corpse. He wheeled and stalked off into the mist, shouting orders and encouragement to his men.

Krishnamurthy watched him go. “Snooty bastard,” he muttered.

Dodge-duck– Smack! Smack! -nothing.

Honesty straightened and looked around. His five-strong team of head-pulverisers had been set upon by a large group of Rakes. The constables were fighting for their lives.

“Not very sporting!” exclaimed the corpse at his feet. “Hitting me in the knees like that. How am I supposed to toddle about?”

Honesty ignored the question and took a step toward his men. The fallen Rake grabbed his ankle and unbalanced him. He hit the ground face-first.

“I demand an apology!” said the Rake.

The detective sat up, twisted around, and thumped a truncheon onto the cadaver's head.

“Ouch! Good grief, man! What sort of an apology is that?”

The weapon descended again, harder.

“You should go,” said the Rake, in a slurred voice. “I'll just lie here for a bit.”

His head caved in under the third blow and he lay still.

“Purple flowering laburnum,” said Honesty. “Very hardy. Grows anywhere.”

He got to his feet.

An arm wrapped around his neck and yanked him backward. One of his truncheons was wrenched from his hand and thrown into the fog. He felt teeth sink into his left shoulder and tried to yell in pain but his throat was too constricted. He struggled, his vision blurring. Bells began to chime insistently in his ears.

He pitched sideways and hit the ground. His assailant's grip broke and Honesty rolled free, lay on his back, and gulped at the dirty air.

A foot slammed down onto his hand. He cried out as his fingers broke around the grip of his remaining truncheon. A body thumped onto his chest, its knees on his shoulders. Hands seized his neck and tightened around it like a band of metal.

The ringing in his ears increased, yet, somewhere behind the cacophony, he heard an approaching rhythmic thunder, too.

The ground started to tremble beneath his back.

Through a red haze of pain, Honesty looked up and saw that his assailant was the bearded man with the dent in his cheek.

Detective Inspector Trounce was covered from head to foot in gore. His truncheon dripped brain tissue. His mouth had frozen into a ferocious snarl and his eyes were blazing. He stood on a pile of motionless Rakes and waited for the next one to come. It was not a long wait. A man lurched into view and ran toward him. He was dressed in evening attire and there was a monocle jammed into his right eye socket. He'd obviously already been in battle, for his jaw was broken and hung loosely with the tongue flapping over it. It didn't matter to him; he was already dead.

The Rake scrambled over his fallen fellows. Trounce sprang to meet him and swept his weapon down, double-handed, onto the bare head. The skull broke with a horrible noise. Trounce hit it again and again and again.

The Rake went limp and still.

There was a moment of respite.

The Scotland Yard man wiped his sleeve over his eyes and peered around. Through the dense murk, he could see shadowy figures locked in combat. A great many constables lay dead or wounded in the road. Rakes milled about.

“How many heads have I smashed in tonight?” he rasped. “And still the bloody stiffs keep coming!”

He turned his head and saw Detective Inspector Honesty sprawled in the road, his face turning blue as a Rake, kneeling on his chest, throttled the life out of him.

Trounce took a step, lost his footing, slipped, and slid across corpses to the cobbles. He scrambled to his feet and made to run to his friend, but he'd taken no more than a single stride before two wraiths suddenly wafted into view and grabbed him by the arms.

“No!” he croaked, as, struggling furiously, he was dragged into the fog, borne away from his dying friend.

The wraiths came to a halt as Krishnamurthy emerged from the haze. The ghostly figure of a top-hatted man loomed behind the commander.

“Watch out!” Trounce cried. “And save Honesty! He's back there being strangled to death!”

“I'm sorry!” the Flying Squad man gasped. “I-I can't-can't-” Lifting his truncheon high, he approached his superior. “Tichborne is-is innocent!”

“Krishnamurthy!” Trounce yelled. “Pull yourself together, man!”

“The op-oppressors must-must die!”

He swung his weapon back, ready to sweep it down onto Trounce's head.

Thunder sounded: Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom!

The ground vibrated.

A police whistle shrieked repeatedly.

A powerful gust of wind suddenly swept over Trounce, and the two wraiths lost hold of him. They were ripped apart and blown away. Behind Krishnamurthy, the top-hatted apparition disintegrated.

The commander looked over Trounce's shoulder, his eyes wide with astonishment, his mouth gaping.

The detective turned.

“Bloody hell!” he gasped. “I'm seeing things!”

It came pounding across Waterloo Bridge, and when it entered the Strand, the cobbles cracked and powdered beneath its hammering hooves.

Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom!

It was a colossal horse, a mega-dray, and on its back, looking as tiny as a child's doll, sat Algernon Swinburne, a Pre-Raphaelite knight, his fiery red hair streaming behind his head, a tremendously long, thin lance gripped in his right hand.

He was blowing enthusiastic blasts on a police whistle, and, perched on his shoulder, a little blue and yellow parakeet was gaily screeching insults at the top of its voice.

As the enormous steed came charging out of the fog, the base of a pantechnicon, to which it was harnessed, followed. The wagon presented the incredulous spectators with an even more fantastic vision, for mounted vertically upon it was a huge spinning wheel. It was similar to a waterwheel in construction, though built from lightweight materials, and it was revolving at a tremendous speed on well-oiled bearings, driven by the twenty greyhounds that raced flat out on its inner surface. Miss Isabella Mayson stood beside the contraption and encouraged the runners with claps and whoops and morsels of food.

From the wheel, a series of simple but extremely well-designed gears and crankshafts drove a mammoth pair of bellows up and down, and snaking away from the nozzle, a tube ran up to the top of a tower at the rear of the wagon and into the back of a cannon-shaped barrel. This was mounted on a swivel and was being aimed at wraiths by Constable Bhatti.

The whole contrivance was a masterpiece of engineering, for it depended upon neither springs nor complex machinery, and was so simple in design that Isambard Kingdom Brunel had been able to build it in a matter of hours.

As the mega-dray pulled the wagon onto the wide thoroughfare, Bhatti directed the jets of air hither and thither, and, though his range was extremely limited, the wraiths caught by the strong blasts were ripped out of existence.

A great cheer went up from constables as they scattered out of the horse's path.

Detective Inspector Trounce and Commander Krishnamurthy looked on in amazement as Algernon Swinburne lowered his lance and aimed its tip at the back of a Rake's head.

Charles Altamont Doyle pressed his dead fingers into Detective Inspector Honesty's neck.

“Squeeze!” he said. “Squeeze the life out of you and into me!”

A fairy pranced at the periphery of his consciousness.

“Recurrence comes!” it sang.

“No! Life comes!” Doyle whispered. “Start again. Get it right. Mend my mistakes.”

He felt something touch the back of his neck. From the perspective of his astral body, which drifted through the fog nearby, he could see that it was a long lance held by a small man on a big horse.

His head burst into flames.

“Now!” said the fairy.

The fire ate into his face and scalp, clawed hungrily into the bone and tissue beneath.

He rolled off the police officer and collapsed onto the ground, thrashing wildly as the flames gouged deeper and deeper into his dead flesh.

The lance touched him again, on the chest, and his entire body ignited.

He felt himself being consumed, found that he could struggle no more, lay still, and allowed the conflagration to suck him into oblivion.

Nearby, swirling through the fog, he watched and felt himself burn.

“No!” he thought. “What about all the things I still have to do?”

A powerful gust of air tore into him and ripped him apart.

Charles Altamont Doyle dispersed into the atmosphere and ceased to exist.

Trounce and Krishnamurthy saw the Rake erupt into flames and roll off Honesty. Their friend crawled weakly away from the blazing corpse.

They hurried forward and dragged him to safety.

Trounce looked up and noticed that four cylinders were slung over the mega-dray's haunches. From them, tubes ran up into the hilt of the lance.

“Inflammable gas,” he suggested.

“I would venture so,” Krishnamurthy replied. “Some sort of flame-throwing weapon. Detective Inspector, I don't know how to apologise. They got into my head. I couldn't control myself.”

“Accepted, lad. Say no more about it. Detective Inspector Honesty is injured-let's get him onto the back of that wagon.”

They helped their colleague to his feet and guided him toward the pantechnicon.

“Lily of the valley,” Honesty wheezed. “The flower of the poets.”

A Rake approached them, waving his rapier. His eyes had retreated far into their sockets and his skin was horribly loose, as if the flesh were sloughing off the bones beneath.

He attempted to address them, but his tongue and lips were too slack and only a horrible moan emerged.

“I'll get this,” Trounce said.

“Allow me,” came Swinburne's voice from above.

The lance touched the decaying, sword-wielding corpse, which combusted, fell to its knees, and toppled onto its face, burning fiercely.

“What ho, fellows!” Burton's assistant shouted enthusiastically.

“Hallo, Swinburne!” said Trounce. “Honesty is injured!”

“Oafish knuckle-dragger!” Pox squawked.

“Hoist the old fellow onto the wagon. Miss Mayson will keep him comfortable until we can get him to safety.”

Trounce and Krishnamurthy lifted their comrade and carried him to the pantechnicon.

“His throat,” said Trounce to Isabella Mayson, as they laid him on the flatbed.

“I think his fingers are broken, too,” Krishnamurthy noted.

The young woman nodded. “Don't worry, I'll make sure he's comfortable.”

Up on the horse, Swinburne whispered something to Pox and watched as the brightly plumaged bird launched itself from his shoulder and disappeared into the fog. He looked down at his friends and called: “In the absence of litter-crabs, what say you we clean up this street ourselves, hey, chaps?”

The two police officers brandished their truncheons.

“Ready when you are,” Trounce grunted.

H igh above the fog, glinting silver in the moonlight, an ornithopter flapped, circling the Strand at a distance of two miles. A long, irregular ribbon of white steam curved away behind it, marking its course through the sky.

It was controlled by the clockwork man of Trafalgar Square, and, in the saddle at his back, sat Sir Richard Francis Burton.