The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’ll be sulky all day, right?’
    ‘On the contrary, I’ll consider it merely sad that this is information you have chosen to neglect, a new insight into a world of ...’
    ‘All right then!’ Tess bounded to the edge of the roof with reckless abandon, picking her way easily down the sloping tiles while Lyle turned green and even Tate ’s usually dour brown eyes widened at the sight of her. She peered into the street below and said, ‘So why we going out this way?’
    ‘I don’t want to use the front door.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘It might be being watched.’
    ‘Why? What you gone and done?’
    ‘Nothing, nothing.’
    ‘And you ain’t gone and told me why you want to see this Berwick bloke so sudden!’
    ‘I met some people last night who were . . . interested in his well-being. Their interest has piqued my interest. Or rather, I want to know why they’re interested, and suspect that they are going to be interested in my interest and following it with as much interest as I follow theirs, while of course never forgetting our common . . . interest .’
    ‘That were a very odd thing you just gone and said, Mister Lyle.’
    ‘I trust it was sufficiently obscure for you to fail completely to comprehend it.’
    ‘You’re usin’ big words to scare me, ain’t you?’
    ‘Absolutely. Come back from the edge.’
    ‘I ain’t going to fall.’
    ‘Teresa,’ declared Lyle firmly, ‘a Good brush with death and adventure is a Safe brush with death and adventure, yes?’
    ‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’
    ‘A Safe brush with death and adventure involves being Prepared .’
    ‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’
    ‘It involves Caution and Consideration . It is, in short, all about steering clear of steep drops when you see any and never, ever pulling the big lever marked “Bang”. I hope we understand each other.’
    ‘So ... we ’re goin’ on an adventure?’
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘Oh. All right.’ She scampered up the roof again, balanced for a moment on the raised edge of the top, swung round to cling on to a chimney, looked out across the city and beamed. ‘If we ’re playin’ at the how-we-mustn’t-be-followed game again, can I choose the way we go?’
    ‘Very well.’
    The route chosen by Tess took them across the old tavern with its wharfside crane, admittedly now a good fifty yards from the nearest water, down a ladder into a vegetable garden, up over a wall into an alley running down to a watergate, and through the back door of the local bakery - which suddenly found itself short of three scones and a loaf - and out into the black, crammed and overshadowed streets that ducked and struggled under and past the railway lines of Charing Cross, where every other face was a grey shadow, blacked out under the stinking belches of smoke from the trains passing overhead and across the river. From there, a very out-of-breath Lyle hailed a hansom cab.
     
    The residence of Mr Andrew Berwick Esquire, was in one of the wide, shiny streets north of Gray’s Inn, defined by straight lines and relatively clean windows all the way up to that other patch of splotched off-green, Coram’s Fields. The streets in most other directions around this enclosure of gentility largely consisted of tenements compressed together. This, and the fact that just a bit further up Gray’s Inn Road the unwary traveller hit King’s Cross, where the murders were almost as regular as the trains, was something the inhabitants tended to ignore.
    Berwick was no exception. The maid who answered the door wore an immaculately white apron, and requested that Lyle and Tess use the iron scraper at the door to wipe their feet clean of manure and mud from the streets. Valiantly she merely winced when Tate snuffled his way into the house, nose down and eyes suspicious of the clean carpet that smelt of expensive soap scrubbed into it by hand.
    Mr Berwick wasn’t in, the maid politely informed them, but the housekeeper was available if they wanted to speak to her. With that,