The Great Game (8 page)

  And now Smith was angry.

  "If you won't butt out," he said, rudely, "then maybe you can help."

  "Can I?" Irene Adler said. "I'm overwhelmed."

  He ignored her. "There was a boy," he said. At that she paid attention. "I saw him, for a brief moment. He was watching. It is possible he saw the… the murder."

  Was the destruction of a machine, however human-like, murder? Could it really be called that? He didn't know. It didn't used to be but the mechanicals had gained in power since the quiet coup of eighty-eight.

  "What sort of a boy?" Irene Adler said. Tense. Attentive. Smith liked that in her. She would follow every scrap of information, never let go of an investigation until she solved it. She was smart and capable and she ran Scotland Yard well… but this was a shadow investigation, and not her domain. And where the hell
was
Fogg? The Bureau should have been all over the investigation by now, and wasn't. And the news would be all over the papers by morning.

  Smith closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Tried to picture the scene as it was, the brief glimpse of the boy. "Around twelve years old," he said. "Worn clothes, too large for him. Pale face. Black hair. Thin." He opened his eyes again. The details added up. "A street boy," he said.

  Irene Adler sighed. "Do you know how many there
are
, in this city?"

  Smith did know. And an avenue of questioning had already suggested itself…

  And
now
there was a commotion outside, and he leaned back and smiled at the Scotland Yard chief.

  The door to the interrogation room banged open and Fogg came in, trailed by a bemused police constable.

  "Adler!" Fogg barked.

  "Smog," Adler said, not turning to acknowledge him.

  "
Fogg
," he said, irritably. He looked tired and out of his depth, Smith noted with some satisfaction. "Your part in this investigation is
over
," Fogg said. "We do not need you stomping about all over the place making noise." He turned to Smith. "And
you
!" he barked. "This is a mess, isn't it, Mr
Smith
?" Fogg pinched the bridge of his nose. "And you right in the middle of it, as usual. This is a disaster!"

  Smith said, "You are upset over Byron's death?"

  "Death?" Fogg glared at him. "Do I look like I give a whiff about that damn machine finally
expiring
? Don't be absurd, Smith. This has your mark all over it, doesn't it? What a mess. What a public, public mess."

  Neither Smith nor Adler replied. They exchanged glances. "Yes, Mr Fogg," they both said, in unity. Fogg glared at them. "You," he said, pointing a long, thin finger at Irene Adler, "stay out of it. And
you
," he said, turning the finger, like an offensive weapon, on Smith, "outside. Now."

  Smith gave the chief of Scotland Yard an innocent look and got up. He followed Fogg outside, through the station corridors and out into the street, where a black baruch-landau stood, belching steam.

  "Get in," Fogg said.

  Smith got in. The interior smelled of new leather and polish. He wondered if Fogg did his own buffing, and smiled.

  "And wipe that smirk off your face!" Fogg said.

  "Yes, headmaster."

  Fogg let that one pass. He signalled the driver, and the horseless carriage began to move.

  Mycroft, Smith remembered, had preferred the comforts of his own black airship: watching the city from high above, drinking scotch, smoking a cigar. It was easier to see things from a distance, he liked to say.
And in comfort
, Smith always added silently.

  Fogg was street-bound. "A disgrace," he said.

  "A mess, I think you said," Smith said.

  Fogg shook his head. "Were there witnesses?" he said.

  So he wasn't dumb. But then, Smith had learned long ago not to underestimate the man.

  "Scotland Yard–" he began.

  "Adler is out of this!" Fogg snapped. Whisper at the Bureau had been that Adler and the fat man's brother had been linked, in the past. Smith had a fleeting image of the bee keeper, standing in the rain, not speaking. What did the bee keeper make of all of this? Rumour had it he, too, was a part of the events in eighty-eight, but shortly after that he'd been retired–

  "They interviewed the crowd outside the
Bucket of Blood
," Smith said, patiently.

  "And?" Fogg snapped.

  "And they found nothing."

  Fogg snorted. "If you
were
a witness to such a crime, you wouldn't stick around to be interviewed."

  "My thoughts exactly," Smith said. Fogg looked at him. "So," he said again, "
was
there a witness?"

  Smith told him about the boy. Fogg looked thoughtful. "You know that part of town," he said. Smith nodded. "The…
undesirables
," Fogg said. Again, Smith merely nodded.

  "Good," Fogg said. "Then follow that trail."

  Smith was angry with himself. He had been so close… Could he have prevented the attack? Could
he
himself have seen the killer?

  Was he following the wrong path? This chain of events did not begin in London. He was looking at it wrong. He needed to step back, to start at the beginning. He said, half to himself, "But the killer is here."

  He raised his head, saw Fogg smirk.

  "Do you know where I've been in the past few hours, as you two were having your little heart-to-heart in there?" Fogg said.

  Smith said, "No."

  "I was called to Dover," Fogg said.

  "They found another body," Smith said. Thinking furiously – How could the killer get from London to Dover in that time?

  "Yes," Fogg said. "They found a body."

  "Who is it?"

  "Somebody. Nobody. A pastor, by name of Brown. It seems he was in the habit of crossing the Channel regularly."

  Smith: "A courier?"

  Fogg, with pursed lips: "Possibly."

  "What was he carrying?"

  "Nothing was found on the body."

  "But the injury matches?"

  "It matches."

  "So our killer is on his way to France?"

  "He was not on the ferry – that my people could find."

  But the killer had his own ways of getting around, and not be seen, Smith thought. He felt suddenly helpless. Chasing shadows, they called it in the trade: following an impossible trail, and never catching up.

  Fogg signalled the driver. The baruch-landau stopped and the door opened, as though by itself.

  "Get out," Fogg said. And, as Smith climbed out into the street, a parting shot: "You used to be good."

 
 

 
 
 

  
The observer was in no hurry. He stood and watched the water and the small island he had – partly – left behind. He found the world fascinating. Steam and sail and man-power, all sharing the water. That mixture of old and new, and they kept striving for the new, the newer still. Such a curious place. The voices argued and shouted and finally quietened, leaving him momentarily alone. He wondered what it was that had stopped him from taking the small boy, in that city where the whales sang in the river. He had been much taken with the whales. He had gone to see them, standing on the Embankment, and, as though sensing what he was, they came close, one by one, and showed themselves to him, and sang. He loved their song.

  
He should have taken one of the whales, he thought. He would have liked their song, to accompany the voices.

  
But there was time, there was plenty of time. He had been rushing about, to start with, with newfound eyes, excited by everything, eager for new experience, but that had been…

  
He did not have a term for it. It was one of the voices who finally offered a suggestion, and the observer contemplated it now.

  Unprofessional.

  
Perhaps, he admitted, he had been a tad unprofessional. Certainly he should have taken the boy.

  
Why hadn't he?

  
A strange, unfamiliar word, whispered by the woman.
Compassion
. What a strange notion, he thought. Yet something in the boy's frozen stare, the wide eyes, the under-nourished face, had halted him. It would have just complicated things, the observer thought. His quarry had not been the boy but the strange man-machine, and by letting the boy go he had freed himself for his primary task.

  
The observer shook himself, raising naked arms against the rising sun. It felt wonderful, he thought, to be here. Clouds fascinated him, and migrating birds. And people were intensely fascinating, to the observer.

  
Before the observer had got into the water he had stood, the way he stood now, naked on the shore before the Channel, with moonlight instead of sunlight illuminating his artificial flesh.

  
He had shuddered, his body shifting and changing, drawing power and material from the humidity in the air, the salt water and the fine chalk. The voices had risen into a frightened crescendo before he silenced them. His body shuddered and shivered,
splitting
, the extra material of him lying down at last on the sand like an egg.

  
The observer had waited for his body to seal itself again, then crouched by this egg and put his hand on the warm, thin membrane. After a few moments the surface broke and the egg hatched.

  
The thing inside was not yet human, nor did it have shape. Blindly, it burrowed into the sand, feeding, converting solids and gas into–

  
At last the child rose out of the sand, and the observer helped him up. They stood, facing each other, identical in height, identical in shape. The moonlight reflected on their flesh. Then, not needing to speak, the observer turned to the sea, and the other put on his clothes, heading back into the city.

  
For there was one element left, of course, besides the trivial task of harvesting a whale. The observer had been aware of that for some time. Sooner or later he would have to collect one of the others, he thought. The masters. One of them. That made him a little uneasy. But what had to be done had to be done. There was that still left, to chart and understand.

 

It was night and Smith was tired, but he'd been used to worse and at least no one was shooting at him any more.

  Which was not to say they weren't watching–

  Though he tried to shake any possible shadows, following a circuitous route through the city, keeping an eye out for enemy agents.

  Which meant, at the moment, just about anyone.

  But he needed to get to where he was going unobserved. Keep a low profile, from now on. Fogg was understandably angry. Another public murder and he, Smith, like a fool, smack in the middle of it.

  
Shadow executives had to keep to the shadows.

  He was getting old.

  There was no getting away from it. The realisation dawned on him gradually, in stages: he was past it. Mycroft had been right to retire him.

  And Alice, he thought. What was
she
doing still playing the game? She had told him once, lying beside him in a hotel room in – it must have been Prague, or was it Warsaw? Somewhere in that region, in a spring with long bright evenings and the smell of flowering trees – "My one wish is not to die in bed."

  Now she was dead and he was still around.

  Ahead of him was the church. He was at St Giles, and it was dark there, and the people who moved about looked furtive. Which suited him fine. He went into St Giles in the Fields, the church quiet and welcoming. He stood there for a long moment, as he always did, wondering what it meant, a church, a place of worship; wondering, too, where the dead went, if they went anywhere at all, and if they did, what they found there.

  He went and lit a candle. For the Byron automaton. Could you do that? Could you light a candle for a machine that no longer ran? Yet people were machines, too, running on vulnerable fleshy parts that decayed and were easy to harm. People shut down every day. Some – many – had been shut down by him.

  What happened then?

  Everything. Nothing. He lit the candle and placed it gently in place, in the damp sand, with the others. Goodbye, Byron, he thought. Another name on the long list of Smith's life had been crossed out.

  He sighed, then went forward, towards the dais, and sat on a bench but at the end, in the shadows, close to the wall, and waited.

 

"Mr Smith."

  The voice woke him up and for a moment he felt confused, thought he was back in his small house, back in the village, and it was time to tend to the cabbages. Then he remembered the house had burned down, people had tried to kill him, what had been left of the cabbages had been dumped in the rubbish tip, and he was in a church and must have fallen asleep. He shook his head ruefully. Another sign of getting old. Getting careless.

  "Mr Smith?"

  He turned his head and stared at an old, lined face. It was like staring into a mirror. "Fagin," he said.

  "Thought you were dead, like, Mr Smith," Fagin said.

  "Retired," Smith said.