Jago (82 page)

‘We’ve a pole ready for his head, sirrah,’ he said.

‘Good man,’ Orlando commented.

Up close, he recognised the warder. Benjamin Crude, a cut-purse and battery man from Cheapside. His uniform didn’t fit either. The last Orlando heard, Crude was working for Truro Daine, duffing up club DJs for protection money.

Crude led the way into the Tower, a thousand-year-old fortress keep of Caen limestone, Kentish ragstone and baked Thames mud. Braziers burned in the corridors at regular intervals, but this was an impossible place to warm. Through his shoe-soles, Orlando felt icy flags. The black walls were wet. The fires were yellowish, fog-coloured. Threads of fog hung up to knee-height, like mustard gas.

Orlando’s cheek tickled as spirit gum gave way. He slapped his face, sticking his beard back with little more than sweat. Crude turned and looked at him.

‘Mosquito,’ he said. ‘Bastards.’

The beef-eater accepted it.

‘We’re to be quick about this,’ Orlando said. ‘Whip him out sharpish and into the boat, then off to the chopping block.’

Crude held the sealed packet, which he hadn’t yet examined. Inside were authentic-looking orders, full of the correct codewords and euphemisms. The envelope was even impregnated with gunpowder for instant disposal. A touch of a lucifer, and all the evidence was gone—just the way Crowe and Daine liked it.

‘I’ll have to get confirmation over the phone,’ said Crude. ‘There’s one by the cell.’

Orlando bit a mouthful of beard.

By the door of Little Ease, a cupboard-like hatch, stood two more warders, otherwise Oisin Murphy-Lawless, the three-fingered Kentish Town safecracker, and Con Williams, the Hoxton Bruiser (Undefeated By Fair Means or Foul). Crude unsealed the orders, looked them over by the light of a sconced electric bulb, then went to a stand and began the business of putting a phone call through channels.

Orlando was sure his beard was coming off.

‘Lovely weather, eh, lads?’ he ventured.

Murphy-Lawless looked at him as if he were scum, which was at least comfortingly familiar. The Irishman was famous as the worst karaoke performer in North London: his rendition of ‘I Met Her in the Garden Where the Praties Grow’ could clear out the Assembly Rooms before he got to the chorus. The Bruiser’s gently vacant smile didn’t waver. His brains were so scrambled that little got through to him; you could saw his leg off and he wouldn’t remember to feel pain until after he’d tied you in a hitch-knot and pulled you so tight your eyes popped out.

Lytton heaved his axe from one shoulder to the other.

Orlando wondered when the Captain would move.

‘Daine is coming down,’ said Crude.

‘Better tidy up before he gets here,’ Orlando suggested, nodding at the ‘orders’.

Crude accepted the idea and fished a fag-lighter out of a pouch under his bloomers. Behind his fog-goggles, Orlando shut his eyes.

Flame touched the packet and the whole thing went up in a noxious magnesium flare that burned light even through Orlando’s goggles and eyelids.

The three beef-eaters coughed and stumbled. Opening his eyes, Orlando saw them flailing, the door guards reaching for pikes, and got out of the way.

Lytton held the axe like a golf-club and swung it through a powerful arc. The blade lodged in the door of Little Ease, splitting it in two. He pried it out and chopped again, smashing the thick, solid wood to fragments and splinters.

Crude had a pistol out, but lost it when Orlando noosed cheesewire around his wrist. The envelope was on the floor, still burning brightly enough to leave squiggles in vision. The blinded warders hammered away at each other, yelling. Murphy-Lawless was screaming in pain, which was easier on the ears than his ‘She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas’. Orlando had never lost betting on the Hoxton Bruiser, and would’ve laid money on him right now had he not been busy with other concerns.

People were coming.

No one crawled out of Little Ease. Lytton nodded his hooded head at the open door, shrugging apologetically. He was too broad of shoulder to go in there.

Orlando went on his hands and knees, ripping his tights open on splinters, and looked into the cell. He hoped the prisoner wasn’t chained.

‘Come on out, Your Worship,’ he shouted.

A shape moved inside. The fizzing fire lit up the squalid interior of the cell. A ragged man, recognisable by the bondage hood Orlando had seen on the bus in Clapham, shrank in abject terror.

‘We’re rescuers, sirrah,’ Orlando said, not even convincing himself. ‘Shift your arse.’

The prisoner made no move, pressing himself against the far stone wall.

Orlando tore off his bloody beard, taking strips of his skin with it. He showed his face.

‘Remember me?’

Whittington did and crawled out of the cell. He tried to stand, but his limbs wouldn’t work. Orlando knew how that felt. He took hold of the man and hauled him upright. The hood prevented him from making any sound beyond muffled grunt. He wore the remains of a smart-ish business suit, fouled by captivity. If Strawjack Crowe could see the Lord Mayor Elect, hed have clapped him in jug again as an unsightly vagrant.

Lytton kept Crude down with the blunt end of his axe.

Suddenly, the weather was indoors. The corridor filled with serious fog.

A shape came through the murk, clanking.

Truro Daine wore some kind of armoured diving suit, with an apparatus on its back that produced fog, which fed into his helmet—the face-plate showed yellow features and eyes—and belched out into the atmosphere. It was the foulest fog Orlando had ever known, making his nose and eyes sting and water even through plugs and goggles. He found himself clinging to Whittington for support, which had not been the idea.

‘You will all die,’ croaked Daine, through a voice-box.

With Daine, fog-masked, was a familiar man in a Puritan coat and feathered hat. Rutland Stryng, the murderer. He raised a pistol and drew a bead. Orlando knew this would happen. Before he died, he’d probably be tortured.

Lytton kicked Crude away and swung his axe again.

Stryng shifted swiftly but Daine, bulky and encumbered, couldn’t move as fast. The axe whispered past his head, glancing off an iron shoulder-pad and striking sparks from the wall. Daine staggered under the blow but didn’t seem hurt. Orlando saw Lytton had cut through the tubes of his fog-making device. Coils of foul smoke poured forth from the severed ends. Daine thrashed about in the corridor, drowning in clean air.

Orlando knew it was time to retreat and dragged the freed prisoner away.

A shot was fired, wildly. Stryng.

Lytton tossed his axe back at the Yeomen and ran. The three of them made it to the jetty and the boat. Shouts and confusion were all around.

Orlando and Lytton rowed, bunched up ridiculously side-by-side on the bobbing boat, taking an oar each. Orlando heard vast grating and clanking. The spiked gate was coming down. He saw the sharp points touch disturbed waters.

‘Nothing else for it,’ said Lytton. ‘Hold tight, everyone.’

The Captain threw himself to one side, leaving go of his oar. The boat capsized and Orlando found himself underwater, his head in the bubble of trapped air, clinging to the bench he had been sitting on.

The upturned wooden hull jammed against the descending gate-points. A spear-tip punched through and grazed Orlando’s forehead. Water rose as air escaped and he got a throatful. His noseplugs were uncomfortably jammed into his nostrils, but at least the goggles meant he could vaguely see underwater.

He let go of the bench and kicked his way under the gate-points, swimming through Traitors’ Gate. Lytton was behind him, moving easily and powerfully through the water, dragging the Lord Mayor Elect. From the depths, Orlando saw lights streaking above, and made for them.

After what seemed like hours, he broke the surface of the river. His lungs felt as if they had been torn apart from the insides and his heart hammered like a clockwork blacksmith under a tight deadline. He was probably infected with a combination of awful diseases.

The Tower was under attack from the sky and the river-bank. Incendiaries rained down from the dark. Volleys fired from entrenched positions. Dr Shade and Richard Jeperson were distracting the Yeoman Warders.

Orlando found Lytton and Whittington, thrashing to stay afloat. Lytton had shaken off his headsman’s hood, but Lord Mayor Elect was still strapped into his mask.

‘Let’s get out of the water,’ Lytton suggested.

‘Yes,’ agreed Orlando, ‘let’s.’

* * *

The Fire Brigade had turned up at the Diogenes Club a good ten minutes before the blaze started, and kept the public back while they squirted burning oil through the upstairs windows. Jeperson had been prepared to abandon the Pall Mall site, just as Dr Shade could no longer return to his clockwork cocoon inside Big Ben. Orlando understood three men had been killed tampering with the device, cut apart by the booby traps the Doctor had installed over the years.

They were all fugitives, now. An entire charity school in Muswell Hill had undergone Recovered Memory Therapy and alleged Richard Jeperson had been molesting them, with black candles and Satanic robes, since infancy. The Prime Minister had cheerfully re-opened the enquiry into the Siege of Manchester, with a view to stripping Lytton of his VC and shifting the blame for the unfortunate events away from Rutland Stryng. Jeperson was now of the opinion that the PM was completely the creature of Strawjack Crowe, grinning like a Cheshire Cat as his supposed hatchet man gave him orders. The Parliament of the Marches was still intent on withholding the franchise from anyone but homeowners of proven British parentage.

Orlando nestled uncomfortably between stiff mannequins of Neville Heath and Neall Cream, in a vault under the Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. Here, less memorable murderers - whose infamy never matched that of Crippen or Jack the Ripper - were shunted for a while, before removal to Wookey Hole. The enemy hadn’t tracked them to this cramped lair, which was one of Shade’s fall-backs.

The Lord Mayor Elect sat in a bath-chair salvaged from the home of John Reginald Halliday Christie, while an attractively mousy woman named Miss Rhodes, skirt daringly cut above her ankles, snipped the clasps and catches on his bondage hood with a pair of dressmaker’s scissors. Miss Rhodes was one of the Diogenes Club loyalists who had responded to Jeperson’s general alert, which meant she probably knew seven ways to end a man’s life with one slip of the scissors.

Lytton, Jeperson and Dr Shade stood to one side, heads bowed by the low brickwork ceiling. Orlando noticed they tended to hang together, though Lytton was still wary of the Doctor. Close to the shadow man, Lytton and Jeperson tended to be touched with his darkness, almost pulled in. The Doctor believed in radical surgery, which was always uncomfortable.

‘There now,’ said Miss Rhodes.

The leather mask was loose.

What if Orlando had been wrong? What if the hood came away to disclose not Lord Mayor Elect Whittington but some dire stranger who’d deservedly been clapped into the lowest, darkest dungeon in the kingdom?

It didn’t. The Lord Mayor Elect blinked, blinded even in the gloom. Dr Shade stepped in, and examined Whittington’s face, holding up a finger and asking the man to focus. Orlando found it strange that this dark-shrouded avenger could also act like a proper doctor.

The Lord Mayor Elect looked as if he had passed from the hands of one malevolent conspiracy into another. Orlando understood how he might feel that way, surrounded by wax murderers and real-live creatures of the night.

‘Sirrah, I’m Richard Jeperson, late of the Diogenes Club.’

‘What day is it?’ asked the Lord Mayor Elect. ‘How long was I locked away?’

It was not the first question Orlando would have asked, but he wasn’t a politician.

Jeperson understood. ‘It’s only been three days. The Mayor-Making is not until this evening. We shall get you to the Dome on time.’

Whittington indicated his filthy clothes.

‘I’m not dressed for it.’

‘You have the pick of a store of fine, if sombre suits. I hope it doesn’t discomfit you that they were all previously worn by murderers. You look to be about the same size as the Brides in the Bath fellow, and he was reckoned a spiffy dresser.’

‘Fair enough.’

* * *

At the end of it, Orlando was back where he was supposed to be, in the crowd.

The Dome, that giant cow-pat in Greenwich, was tarted up like Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Trooping the Colour, Derby Day, a Boyzone Ritual Suicide Concert, a Savoy Opera and the Cup Final rolled into one. A thousand miles of flags, ten thousand tons of statuary and a million candles of electric light, and all on a colossal scale. From a distance, the Dome looked like the aftermath of an air disaster featuring a collision between titanic angel chariots; from inside, it was impossible to know where to look, with such a wealth of detail and decor that many of the crowd were struck with the fits characteristic of the Stendhal Syndrome. It was a promised land for pick-pockets, programme sellers, souvenir manufacturers and fly-by-night food and beverage merchants.

Each delegation arrived in choreographed splendour: the Scots in a skirl of bag-pipes and with Sean Connery at their head; the Welsh with a male-voice choir and a dancing troupe of pretty leek-hatted Blodwyns; the Cornish in full tin armour, their Royals in blue body-paint. The Prime Minister was backed up by a cross-party collection of Members of Parliament, in identical shiny, tight, bright suits, with identical shiny, tight, bright smiley-faces. Stark-vestmented Puritans among the MPs acted like sergeants among raw recruits, snapping orders and inflicting instant punishments for infractions.

The business of the evening was the Mayor-Making, with the Queen confirming Whittington or the Nearest Offer in position as duly-elected Lord Mayor of London, Convener of the City Assembly and Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police. Then, it was to be the first official action of the new Mayor to ratify the treaty that would bring the smoke—along with the jocks, taffs and pasties—back into the country-wide administration of the Parliament of the Marches. To get all the parties to the table, the Prime Minister had made so many concessions that the overall power of his government was reduced in essence to an advisory capacity. And a good job too, Orlando thought, looking at the waxy-faced, fire-eyed PM. The man’s constant smile, snide in every sense of the term, reminded him of the murderer’s mugs in Tussaud’s back-up Chamber of Horrors.