“The
dead man was named Richard Trevithick,” Shelley said, reading from the City
Watch report.
“What
do we know about him?” Gordon was sitting opposite Shelley and Rose, with
Polidori on one side and Felicia on the other. Felicia, who seemed thrilled at
the prospect of being ‘out in the field’, had grasped Gordon’s hand upon
entering the carriage and showed no sign of letting go. If she received any
sensations or suggestions from holding the Captain’s hand, she did not divulge
it to the other officers in the carriage.
“Born
1771 at Tregajorram, in the Republic of Kernow,” Shelley continued. “Moved to
London in 1799. He was arrested after an explosion in Greenwich in 1803, that
resulted in the deaths of four people; convicted of a number of illegal
experiments going back to 1801 and sentenced to five years in prison.” Shelley
looked up. “The other inmates called him the ‘Puffing Devil’”.
“He
should have been deported,” muttered Polidori darkly. “I don’t like the sound
of this.”
“Neither
do I.” Gordon shook his head adamantly. “But we have to use all the resources
we have, and that means detecting as well as fighting. We have to use our
brains.”
“Maybe
we should have brought Master Keats after all,” Rose said with an admirably
straight face. “He has more than his fair share of those.”
The
coach turned in to a residential section of Bermondsey – a single street lined
on each side with gleaming stucco facades. Shelley looked out of the window at
the City Patrol officers holding back onlookers with long stretches of rope,
several more officers gathered outside a large terraced house that had lost all
the glass in its windows, and was smeared with dark, soot-like stains. Faint wisps
of smoke drifted out into the open. As the carriage came to a halt, dead leaves
scuttled away from the wheels like frightened animals. Gordon’s boots hit the
ground and he marched up to the open front door, the watchmen standing aside
for him.
Once
inside the house, the smell hit them. Everything inside, the furniture, most of
the carpet, had been burnt to a crisp. The smell was overpowering – an
indefinable mix of smoke and blood and fear, like a charnel house. Dark stains
arced across the walls and ceilings.
On
the far side of the room lay the corpse, although Shelley did not recognize it
for long moments. It was as black as charcoal, and as shriveled as a decayed
wooden log. The only things remotely human were the teeth, exposed and
glittering like pearls in the skull now the flesh had burnt away. The hands
were black, skeletal claws held up in front of the chest as the muscles had
contracted.
“Looks
like the Puffing Devil went up in smoke,” muttered Rose.
Polidori
stood still and took in a series of quick, investigative sniffs. “Aha!” he
declared. “Yes, yes, yes. I haven’t smelled that for a long time.”
“Smelled
what, Polly?”
The
Medical Examiner turned and fixed Gordon with eyes glittering with curiosity.
“Greek Fire, that’s what. A mixture of liquid petroleum, sulfur, and quicklime.
It was used by the Byzantine Empire in the Seventh Century as a weapon of war.
They used to pump the substance from a container through narrow brass tubes and
spray it at the enemy.”
Polidori
advanced into the wreckage of the room, picking his way carefully through
blackened piles of ash, gesticulating at the scorch marks on the walls. “The
pattern of the burning here and here indicates that the source of the fire was
a directed, concentrated stream of flammable liquid, just as a hose
concentrates water into a narrow jet. Whoever was holding the weapon would have
some kind of fuse to ignite the fluid as it shoots out, and – whoosh. Goodbye,
poor Mr. Trevithick.”
“Hello,
Satanic Mills,” whispered Gordon. “Thank you, Polly.”
He
swung round to face the psychometrist. “Miss Brown, what can you tell us?”
“Well,
I can see the reason why the perpetrator burned all of the unfortunate man’s
possessions. He wished to give us nothing to work on, you see. Everything this man
touched has been destroyed.”
“Perhaps
there are some of his possessions somewhere else,” suggested Rose.
“Oh
yes?” Gordon rounded upon him. “And in the whole of London, where do we look?
Do you think any of this man’s acquaintances will want to talk to us? They’ll
be as scared as little waifs at midnight.”
“There
is nothing here that any psychometrist can do,” protested Felicia.
Gordon
smiled so lasciviously that Shelley automatically turned away. “But you are not
just any
psychometrist, are you, Felicia?”
“Wait!”
A shout from Polidori made all of them look up. “Captain, I think I’ve got
something.”
The
Medical Examiner was squatting next to the smoldering corpse, his long nose
with glasses perched upon it almost touching the extended, off-white teeth.
“God in heaven,” Shelley muttered, pulling out his muffler and holding it over
and nose and mouth. Polidori was intent upon manipulating a long pair of
tweezers, which he had extended down the dead man’s throat; and as Gordon came
up behind him, he eased something out into plain view, something that gleamed
with the luster of gold.
“Aha!”
Polidori said triumphantly. “The victim swallowed something just before he was
killed. It looks like he pulled off his own wedding ring and put it in his
mouth.”
“He
wanted to leave something for us to find,” Shelley said, moved by the knowledge
of the man’s last, desperate moments.
“Felicia,
quick,” Gordon snapped.
“Of
course, we should really report this to the Watchmen, before we let …” Shelley
tailed off as Gordon turned his haughty, reddening face towards him. “Nothing,
sir.”
“Oh,
you were so scared.”
Shelley
looked at Felicia worriedly as she convulsed, as soon as she held the wedding
ring. Gordon and Shelley helped her to a chair, but she held on to the ring
tightly, the words flowing.
“You
were so scared, and so alone . . . you didn’t want to die alone, but you had
sent your wife and daughter away . . . the giant! The giant at the door. . .
the bronze man with fire in his hands . . . but he will never get into . . .
never get into the room . . . the room . . .”
Felicia’s eyes snapped open, and with a
violent movement, she flung the ring away from her, and it fell with a clink
into the mantelpiece opposite. “The room!” she shouted. “He had a secret room,
where he kept the devices he worked on!”
Gordon
raised his eyebrows and looked at Shelley.
“There!”
the psychometrist exclaimed, pointing out into the hallway. “The drawing room!”
The
group of five hurried to the drawing room. It showed the same level of
destruction as the front room, and once inside, Felica turned to face them.
“Behind the tapestry is a door that leads down to a hidden basement. That is
where Trevithick kept his tools and performed his experiments, out of the sight
of any visiting parole officer.”
“Shelley.”
Gordon pointed his chin at the burnt tapestry. “That’s your department.”
Obediantly,
Shelley crossed the room and gingerly pulled aside the remains of the tapestry.
He spread his fingers wide and put his hands on the plaster of the wall.
He
felt his shoulders tingle, as if he were being watched. The wall rippled, as if
he were looking through distorting waves of heat, and then dissolved. He could
see everything. He could see, just to his left, the brass and copper arrangement
of lock, hinge and handle, and he could feel it, like his own hand was upon it.
He
blinked, and the lock snapped open, and part of the wall swung inwards.
“Good
work, m’boy!”
His
legs and back feeling rather delicate, and a slight headache behind his eyes,
Shelley descended into the gloom behind the others, feeling each step carefully
with his boots as he went down. He heard the voice of Master Keats once more,
the fascinating ideas of the quiet, frail scientist. “I call my theory that of
the Chameleon Warrior, you see. If consciousness is just a ghost in the
machine, then, Master Shelley, you could be present in any machine.”
Gordon,
in the lead, had found and lit a Fulmer lamp hung on the wall, and the five
looked around at the Luddite’s secret workshop. Across a rough stone floor
stood a large table with a vice on one end. Tools of all manners and sizes were
scattered across the table surface and hung on special hooks bolted to the
wall.
The
most striking object in the room was a huge wooden crate, as tall and broad as
a man. It stood on end next to the table.
“Open
that crate, Shelley.”
The
young man blinked, confused. “It doesn’t have a mechanical lock.”
“I
said open that crate, Shelley.”
He
took a crowbar off one of the hooks on the wall and stood in front of the
crate. He thrust it between one of the planks, and after some concerted pushing
and levering, a section of wood snapped off and fell to the floor. Shelley
leant forward and peered inside the crate.
A
pair of dark eyes stared back at him.
“Aaaah!”
he cried, jumping backwards. “There’s someone in there!”
“What?”
They
gathered around, each trying to look inside, until Gordon yelled furiously for
order. Pressing his face to the crate, the Captain peered inside and grunted.
“Shelley, you scream like a girl. It’s a dummy of some kind in there.”
Shelley
and Rose soon had the front of the crate off, and the manikin stood revealed.
It was the life-sized model of a man, dressed in what looked like Turkish
robes, and a turban on its wooden head. The face was also painted to resemble
that of an Oriental sorcerer, with black beard and slanted eyes.
“What
is it?” Felicia asked.
“That,
my dear, is the Turk,” Gordon answered. “Well, not the original, of course.
It’s a very good copy.”
Shelley
nodded, recognition dawning. He remembered the story of the German clock-maker
who, perhaps thirty years ago, had built a clockwork chess-playing automaton.
It was called the Turk and had been paraded as a novelty around half the Royal
courts of Europe.
“What
was Trevithick doing with this?” Felicia asked in awe.
“Looks
like he had built a new model powered by steam,” said Rose, pointing to the
machine parts in the bottom of the crate. “Maybe he had been commissioned to
build this by someone on the Continent and he was just about to send it to the
port.”
“And
he was killed for this?”
“No,”
said Shelley. “Those parts over here are different, they are parts of some kind
of propulsion engine. I think Trevithick had something to do with the theft of the
Remnant.”
“Right,”
ordered Gordon. “We can’t let the City Patrol get hold of this. Put all of the
tools in envelopes, seal them, and write a description on the front.”
Rose
pointed into the crate. “What about the Turk?”
Gordon
looked it up and down coolly. “Dismantle it. Put it in the utility chest in the
coach.”
“What
a colossal waste of money,” Shelley said, partly to himself. Rose heard and
looked at him quizzically.
“I
mean, they know it’s illegal, they know the penalties for dealing with proscribed
technology,” Shelley went on. “Why do they do it?”
Rose
shrugged. “It’s human nature. People are always trying to tinker about with
things they don’t understand.”
Rose
put his hands on both sides of the wooden head and pulled. It came cleanly off the
metal peg that secured it, and Rose stepped back, the disembodied face of the
Turk grinning into his.
“Oh,
my,” said Rose, shivering. “That is one bad case of déjà vu.”
