The Incendiary's Trail (39 page)

‘Will you kill him, Noah?’ asked Mr Williamson.

Noah made no answer.

‘You had the chance at Vauxhall. You had your knife – you could have sprung at him and sliced his throat as he sliced Mary’s. And yet you did not. Why? Surely you were not
dissuaded by the presence of the police.’

Again, Noah made no answer. Instead, he stared out across the chill air to the other balloon.

‘Have you decided, perhaps, that killing him will not solve anything?’

‘I have decided nothing,’ answered Noah.

And Lucius Boyle? He was more Antaeus than Daedalus; he derived his power from contact with the ground, where shadows and solidity hid his presence. Up here he was exposed and
in full view. He was no aeronaut. Though the barometer told him his altitude, the thermometer the temperature and the compass his direction, he was still powerless. He continued to rise and the
policemen continued to follow him according to the immutable laws of science.

Having read of such flights in the newspapers, he knew as much as the rest of the public about guide ropes, gas and ballast. Nevertheless, the chill of altitude and the dizzying effect of ascent
were almost as unnerving as being in full view of the moon’s objective eye.

His ascent was slowing. Had Mr Lyme been there to explain, Lucius would have known that this was due to a partial equalization of pressure within and without the balloon, combined with increased
atmospheric moisture adding to its weight. At the same time, his linear progress also ceased. The effect was that the other balloon – travelling in another stratum of air – began to
move directly underneath.

Lucius Boyle looked down upon the netted globe and understood what he must do. He picked up one of the smaller ballast bags – sand or gravel inside a coarse canvas bag – and
retrieved an ever-present box of lucifers from beneath his robes. He struck a match and held it to a corner of the canvas until flames began to lick at the material, then he leaned over the edge of
the car and dropped it.

The burning bag plummeted towards the other balloon and connected with the outer curve, bouncing off the surface with a shower of sparks.

‘My G—! What was that?’ shouted Inspector Newsome.

‘I believe it was a flaming bag of ballast,’ said Mr Lyme. ‘He is attempting to set us alight.’

‘Can he do that? How secure is the surface of this machine?’

‘It is nothing but silk coated with liquid gum. It will burn quite readily if one of those bags settles on the surface. There may be one there now. We must descend.’

‘We must not.’

‘Mr Newsome, would you rather flutter burning to the ground hundreds of feet below us?’

‘Descend if you must,’ said Noah. ‘He will still be visible to us on this cloudless night. We can follow on the ground if necessary. Descend, Mr Lyme.’

‘Mr Dyson – you have no authority—’

The inspector’s sentence was cut short by Noah’s dagger glinting in the moonlight.

‘Inspector – tell me: what have I to lose? You say I am guilty and will go back to gaol when we land. What is to stop me cutting your throat and tossing your body over the edge? Who
knows you are in this balloon? Who knows that
I
am?’

‘Sergeant Williamson knows. Sergeant – speak to this man. Tell him. Mr Williamson? Detective? That is an order!’

Mr Williamson looked impassively between the two men. A second flaming bag of ballast sailed past the car, trailing a tail of sparks.

‘Take us down immediately, Mr Lyme,’ said Mr Williamson. ‘Or I will have Noah here deal with you as he would deal with Inspector Newsome.’

‘Think carefully what you say,’ warned Mr Newsome.

Mr Williamson made no answer. The aeronaut quickly attended to the valve and the acrid stench of coal gas began to fill the car. At first, there was no discernible change in height, but the
balloon of Lucius Boyle soon emerged above them, moving across the moon in a dark eclipse. It diminished in size as they descended.

‘Throw out the guide rope,’ said Mr Lyme, now all business.

Noah tossed the coil and watched it unravel into the void. They had left the city behind and the earth below was now a blanket of darkness punctuated infrequently by light. As they moved lower,
the hedges and trees of rural Middlesex became distinguishable in the moonlight.

‘Can we not fasten the valve once more and follow from a lower altitude?’ asked Inspector Newsome, half covering his face to avoid breathing the gas.

‘That depends on whether there is an ember currently burning atop the balloon, sir,’ said Mr Lyme. ‘If there is, we may all die shortly. Would you like to test that
hypothesis?’

The question was rhetorical, as the treetops were growing closer and the guide rope was now trailing among them.

‘Be ready with the grappling iron,’ Mr Lyme warned Noah.

Now that the features of the ground were clear and able to give scale to their height, Mr Williamson once again became tense. A collision with a treetop could tip them out into space. They
seemed to be moving much faster than they had in the upper aether.

‘Brace yourselves, gentlemen! Throw out the iron there!’

The hook sailed over the edge and all four gripped the edges of the car. Below them, the land anchor struck soft earth and ploughed a furrow, jumping and skipping along the surface. It leaped at
a stone wall and pulled the first two layers down after it. Then it snagged through a patch of thorns and caught upon an exposed root. The car jerked violently and was pulled to the ground by the
tautened rope, where it connected roughly, rocked over on one edge and finally settled upright.

‘Everybody out!’ shouted Mr Lyme.

The four clambered frantically over the edge and made some distance between themselves and potential explosion. But the balloon just wobbled limply in the moonlit field it had landed in,
apparently undamaged by its unorthodox flight.

The silence – to the two policemen who were used to the unsleeping city – was uncanny. They looked about them warily, as if set down upon the shores of an undiscovered continent. No
streets here to guide their paths; no spires by which locate oneself; no passing omnibus; no advertising posters adorning walls. Even the scent was something otherworldly: a curious aroma of damp
earth and leaves untainted by smoke. Was this how London had once smelled?

‘There is no burning bag! We could have stayed in the air!’ raged Inspector Newsome.

‘The benefit of retrospection, sir,’ said Mr Lyme.

‘Look. He is descending beyond that hill,’ said Noah.

And, indeed, the other balloon was a dark shape against the sky. Noah set off across the field, his Homeric hero’s boots rapidly becoming soaked by the clinging grass. The others followed
less sure-footedly uphill and over unfamiliar terrain until all were panting and sweating freely. As the fittest of them all, Noah raced ahead until his lungs ached and his legs throbbed with the
heat of effort. Lucius Boyle’s balloon had descended out of sight on the other side of the hill.

Then, as Noah approached the crest, a false dawn blossomed before him. A ball of fire and smoke rose into the night sky and cast his martial silhouette against its redness so that he appeared
almost a statue to those following.

Reaching the peak, he looked down to see the ruptured and burning remains of the balloon. Flaming tatters were falling around the car, itself half-consumed in the conflagration.

‘The gas! He must have ignited the gas with all that fire play. Any breach of the skin could have set it off,’ said Mr Lyme, the first to catch up to Noah.

But Noah was not there to hear. He continued on to where the car lay upright and crackling. From a distance, he could make out a form slumped over its edge: a body evidently consumed in its
attempts to escape.

The smoke billowed into his eyes, obscuring his view. Not until he was within embracing distance did he see the body with clarity. Its clothing had been partially burned away, but what scraps
remained bespoke once-white Greek robes. Its skin was a blackened papyrus and the face a charred rictus of death so that no trace of a red jaw remained. A sickly stench of scorched flesh emanated
from it.

The flame-scarred eyeballs of the corpse mocked him even in death and he felt an urge to strike the face. The dagger was clutched furiously in his hand.

‘So, he has met his end,’ said Inspector Newsome from behind. We can all be happy, Noah. Justice has been done.’

Noah did not reply. Nor did he turn away from the face of the incendiary. He threw the dagger into the ground so that the blade buried itself in the soft soil.

TWENTY-SEVEN

‘Good news and bad news,’ said Commissioner Mayne solemnly, putting down the newspapers with their circled articles. ‘I am glad that this lamentable tale has
finally come to an end. You are to be congratulated, Inspector Newsome, though the result has been tardy.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Dr McLeod was unmarried, is that correct?’

‘Indeed. He was a bachelor and lived alone without domestic help.’

‘Do we know why he might have killed himself? What is this about the burned documents?’

‘Frankly, we have little idea. The documents were burned to ash and quite illegible. Evidently he did not want anyone to read them, and he has succeeded in that.’

‘Do you think there is any connection to this case? I would like to be certain that all loose threads are neatly severed. I do not want to be reading about further atrocities in a few
days’ time. Are you absolutely sure that this was not another subtle murder like that of Mr Askern, or that those documents do not have darker implications?’

‘I am as sure as I can be. The doctor certainly had the means to kill himself in a painless way. He lived an impeccable and utterly blameless life. Perhaps, as is sometimes the case, he
simply became fatigued with the death he encountered almost daily. It affects men in different ways.’

‘Well, he was a good man. He will be missed. Now – what is this about Sergeant Williamson?’

‘Yes, he was also at Vauxhall Gardens that night. His own investigations had led him to believe that he would find Lucius Boyle there and we met at Mr Hardy’s show—’

‘Mr Hardy?’