Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [52]
So Scale followed the stranger and his friends back to their flat and then hung around in the street, uncertain exactly what to do next. This was decided for him when the stranger rushed out of the flat again and hailed a cab. Scale followed him once more, and watched him enter a mansion in the park.
The mansion gave Scale pause. This was money. a grand lot of it. Was the stranger perhaps working for the mansion’s owner? It was worth investigation. He determined to wait and explore the great house. If nothing else, perhaps some silver or jewellery would repay him for his trouble.
He watched the stranger come out of the house again, much more quietly than he had gone in but somehow, Scale could tell, still angry. He was just as glad to have shifted his focus to the fellow’s possible employer. True, Scale had knocked him around, but it hadn’t been as easy as it should have been considering the disparity in their size, and... there was something unsettling about him. Scale couldn’t put his finger on it. It reminded him of the way he felt when, hurrying down a set of stairs, he’d miss one and for a moment tread on air. A sudden disorientation, a catch in his stomach, the beginning of fear.
Scale waited for at least an hour after the last light in the house flickered out before he carefully approached. During his vigil, he had watched the police patrols go by and gained a sense of their schedule: he had the area to himself for at least another quarter of an hour, and it didn’t take him anything like that long to hurry around to the back wall and climb over it. In the silent privacy of the garden, he stood for a minute, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The odour of boxwood made him wrinkle his nose – just like rich people to have in their fancy grounds something that smelled like cat piss.
After a few minutes, he could make out a pale path leading to the house. This proved to be of crushed stone, so he walked beside it on the soundless grass. Glass doors opened into the house, and to Scale’s contemptuous delight one was ajar. Fools deserved to be robbed. If Scale had kept up with scientific theories, he would have thought of himself as fulfilling a necessary Darwinian function as he slipped inside.
The room was much darker than the garden, and again he stood still for a moment, blinking and listening. No sound at all. There was a piece of furniture beside him – he put out his hand and felt papers. A desk. Not likely he’d find anything he wanted in a room with a desk. There might be a safe, but Scale had no skill with safes. Dimly, he made out a blacker rectangle against the room’s blackness – another door. He moved cautiously towards this. It too was open, and he stepped through on to a thick rug. Bit of luck, that. He edged to his right. What was this, then? A sideboard? And this on it? A metal tray and tea service – silver, he had no doubt.
His heart almost stopped when the lamp flared up.
Standing in the door was the biggest man he’d ever seen. Some tiny, cool part of Scale’s mind told him that this wasn’t true, the fellow wasn’t a giant, not like Hugo – but the rest of him stood paralysed in open-mouthed fear. The man’s hair was cropped short against his massive skull and he had the neck and shoulders of a bull. He wasn’t moving, just watching Scale with black, brilliant eyes that glistened in the light of the lamp he held. Scale heard himself make a squeaky, gurgling sound. He jetted out his knife. The next instant, the weapon fell noiselessly to the rug as, calm and quick as a snake, the man simply reached out; closed a fist around Scale’s hand, and squeezed.
Scale yelled and dropped to his knees.