Madame Vastra and the others made their return to Paternoster Row by a circumspect route. Strax in particular was keen to intercept any individual he suspected might be following and forcibly remove a variety of their limbs and appendages. But Jenny prevailed upon him that most of the people he singled out were merely walking past. Given the lateness of the hour there were, thankfully, not many.
‘What about him?’ Strax said, pointing to a figure shambling slowly along on the opposite pavement.
‘That old lady is selling lucky heather, and she’s heading in a different direction so she’s unlikely to be following us.’
‘She could be bluffing. And who is this Lucky Heather anyway?’
‘It’s heather – it’s a plant not a person. It’s supposed to be lucky.’
‘Not if I catch her, it won’t be.’
‘Strax,’ Vastra said simply. ‘No.’
Harry was in a daze for much of the journey. He felt he was living through a dream – a nightmare. It was an effort to put one foot in front of another. Wherever he looked, the gathering gloom of the London smog reminded him of the smoke in the cauldron below him as he was lowered down in his cage.
It was well into the night by the time they arrived back at Paternoster Row. Jenny sat Harry down before the fire in the drawing room, then withdrew to make a pot of tea. It took a while, and a lot of tea, but finally Harry felt recovered enough to recount his adventures.
He told them how Jim had found him in the carriage, and lured him to Able Hecklington.
‘He wanted both possible witnesses taken care of,’ Vastra said. ‘I’m afraid your friend Jim will suffer a similar fate. He was merely postponing the inevitable.’
‘He ain’t my friend,’ Harry said. ‘Not no more, he ain’t.’
Strax leaned across to Jenny. ‘At what age do these cubs become grammatical?’ he demanded.
‘Depends,’ she told him. ‘At what age do Sontarans become pacifists?’
‘Did he tell you anything of his plans?’ Vastra was asking Harry.
The boy shook his head. ‘Not really. But I did overhear him talking to Jim and to some of the other men. Like sort of boasting he was, about how everything was going according to plan.’
‘What plan?’ Strax asked. ‘He has a strategy? Or is this merely tactical thinking at a preliminary stage of military operations?’
‘Eh?’
‘Ignore him,’ Jenny whispered. Louder she said: ‘Just tell us what you know. Anything might help, anything at all.’
Harry struggled to recall what he had overheard. He had been scared – more scared than he could ever remember, and Harry had already been through a lot in his short life.
‘He talked a lot about “the Smoke”.’
‘The smoke? The smoke in that cauldron?’ Jenny wondered.
‘He said it like it was a living thing. He talked about meeting it, said he had come to an understanding with it.’
‘Did he explain this Smoke’s stratagem?’ Strax asked.
‘No. But he did say…’ Harry’s eyes widened as he remembered what he had heard. ‘He said the Smoke would consume the world.’
Strax gave a snort of impatience. ‘This tells us nothing. It makes no sense.’
‘On the contrary,’ Madame Vastra told him, ‘it fits entirely with what I already know.’
They all turned towards the Lizard Woman.
‘And what is that, Ma’am?’ Jenny asked.
Madame Vastra’s face was lit by the flickering red of the firelight as she told them her story. ‘Several days ago, Miss Felicity Gregson contacted me in my capacity as the Great Detective. She was concerned about something that she had seen. A light, falling from the sky trailing smoke and fire. It came down behind her house, in the grounds of what we now know to be Mister Able Hecklington’s foundry.’
‘An invasion spearhead,’ Strax said. ‘Perhaps the first craft of many. The primitives of this planet should arm themselves ready for the assault.’
‘Perhaps,’ Vastra said. ‘But moving on… Miss Gregson said that whatever had come down split open when it hit the ground. Smoke spilled out of it. She had something she wished me to see, though she was a little vague about what. I got the impression that she felt I would dismiss her story until I saw what she had. And perhaps I would have done. She referred to it as “evidence”.’
‘We had no other reports of anything falling to Earth in that area,’ Jenny said.
‘The other thing Miss Gregson told me, was that when she went back out into her garden the next morning, there was no sign of whatever had fallen. As if it had all been cleared away in the night.’
‘By Hecklington,’ Strax said.
‘It seems likely. More than likely.’
‘But what did she find?’ Harry asked. ‘What was she bringing to show you? She didn’t have nothing with her when she fell dead out of our snowman.’
Strax leaned forward, about to speak.
But Jenny intervened. ‘When he says “she didn’t have nothing” he means that she did have nothing.’
‘Ah!’ Strax slapped his fist into his open palm. ‘I understand – it is a code. Good, boy – very good. I shall give the impression that I don’t not know what you ain’t talking about.’
Vastra sighed. ‘Thank you, Strax. But the question remains – what was the “evidence” that Miss Felicity Gregson was bringing to show me, and where is it now?’
‘The police found nothing of interest,’ Jenny said. ‘That constable would have told me, I’m sure.’
‘Then the murderer, Hecklington, took it,’ Strax decided. ‘The murder may have been in the nature of a recovery operation.’
‘Tell us again what happened when you found the body,’ Vastra said to Harry. ‘We now know how she came to be inside your snowman.’ She held up a gloved hand to stay Harry’s immediate and vocal curiosity. ‘I will explain in a moment, but first – tell us again what you saw.’
Harry’s brow was creased with concentration as he tried to bring back an image of the moment. ‘I’m trying to remember her hands,’ he explained. ‘When she fell, she had them in front of her. I thought it was like she was praying – making her peace with God.’ He swallowed at the thought.
‘Her hands were together, thus?’ Vastra asked. She held her flattened palms together in front of her in demonstration.
‘More like this, I think.’ Harry clasped his own hands together more loosely by way of demonstration.
‘She was holding something,’ Jenny realised. ‘Holding it tight between her hands.’
‘But the police found nothing,’ Vastra reminded her.
‘The muscles would have relaxed when she fell, as the life ebbed from them,’ Strax said. ‘Her grip on the object would not be maintained.’
‘She fell into the remains of the snowman.’ Vastra’s eyes were glittering in the firelight as she leaped to her feet. ‘It would have been under her body, whatever it was. Pushed into the snow on the ground, just as she was propelled into the snowman itself.’
Jenny nodded, excited. ‘We don’t know what it is – but it might still be there!’