Outside the station they found themselves in the Strand and now Jherek saw something leaning against a wall on the corner of Villiers Street.
"Look!, Mrs. Underwood — we are saved. A time machine!"
"That, Mr. Carnelian, is a tandem bicycle."
He already had his hands on it and was trying to straddle it as he had seen the others do.
"We would do better to hail a cab," she said.
"Get aboard quickly. Can you see any controls?"
With a sigh, she took the remaining saddle, in the front. "We had best head for Regent Street. It is not far, happily. The other side of Piccadilly. At least this will prove to you, once and for all, that…"
Her voice was lost as they hurtled into the press of the traffic, weaving between trams and omnibuses, between horses and motor cars and causing both to come to sudden stops and stand stock still in the middle of the road, panting and shuddering.
Jherek, expecting to see the scene vanish at any moment, paid little attention to the confusion happening around them. He was having a great deal of trouble keeping his balance upon the time machine.
"It will be soon!" he cried into her ear, "it must be soon!" And he pedalled harder. All that happened was that the machine lurched onto the pavement, shot across Trafalgar Square at considerable speed, up the Haymarket, and was in Leicester Square almost before they had realized it. Here Jherek fell off the tandem, to the vast entertainment of a crowd of street urchins hanging about outside the doors of the Empire Theatre of Varieties.
"It doesn't seem to work," he said.
Mrs. Underwood informed him that she had told him so. She now had a large tear in the hem of her dress where it had caught in the chain. However, for the moment, they did not appear to have the police on their trail.
"Quickly," she said, "and let us pray to heaven that someone who knows you is in the Cafe Royale!"
Heads turned as they ran across Piccadilly Circus and arrived at last at the doors of the Cafe Royale which Jherek had last visited less than twenty-four hours before. Mrs. Underwood pushed at the doors, but they would not budge. "Oh goodness!" she said in despair. "It's closed!"
"Closed?" said Jherek. He pressed his face to the glass. He could see people inside. He signed to them, but they shook their hands from side to side and pointed at the clock.
"Closed," sighed Mrs. Underwood. She uttered a funny, toneless laugh. "Well, that's it! We're finished!"
"Hey!" called someone. They turned, ready to run, but it was not the police. From the great tide of traffic converging upon Piccadilly Circus they distinguished a hansom cab, its driver seated high in the rear of the vehicle, his face expressionless. "Hi!" said a voice from within the cab.
"Mr. Harris!" called Jherek, recognizing the face. "We were hoping you would be in the Cafe Royale."
"Get in!" hissed Harris. "Hurry. Both of you."
Mrs. Underwood lost no time in accepting his offer and soon the three of them were crammed in the cab and it was jogging around the Circus and back towards Leicester Square.
"You are the young man I saw yesterday," said Harris in triumph. "I thought so. This is a bit of luck."
"Luck for us, Mr. Harris," said Mrs. Underwood, "but not for you if your part in this is discovered."
"Oh, I've bluffed my way out of worse situations," he said. He laughed easily. "Besides, I'm a journalist first and foremost — and we newshounds are permitted a certain amount of leeway when obtaining a really tip-top story. I'm not just helping you out of altruism, you know. I read the papers today. They're saying that you're the Mayfair Killer come back from the dead to be reunited with your — um — paramour!" Mr. Harris's eyes gleamed. "What's your version? You certainly bear a striking resemblance to the Killer. I saw a drawing in one of the papers when the trial was taking place. And you, young lady, were a witness for the defence at the trial, were you not?"
She looked at Mr. Harris a little suspiciously. It seemed to Jherek that she did not altogether like the bluff, rapid-speaking editor of the Saturday Review .
He saw that she hesitated and raised his hand. "Say no more at this stage! What reason, after all, have you to trust me." With his stick he opened a hatch at the top of the cab. "I have changed my mind, cabby. Take us, instead to Bloomsbury Square." He let the flap fall back and turning to them said, "I have rooms there where you will be safe for the moment."
"Why are you helping us, Mr. Harris?"
"I want an exclusive of your story, ma'am, for one thing. Also, there were facts about the Mayfair case which never seemed to fit right. I am curious to know what you can tell me."
"You could help us with the Law?" Hope now overcame her caution.
"I have many friends," said Mr. Harris, stroking his chin with the head of his cane, "in the Law. I am on intimate terms with several High Court Judges, Queen's Counsels — eminent lawyers of all descriptions. I think you could call me a man of influence, ma'am."
"Then we may yet be saved," said Mrs. Underwood.
16. The Mysterious Mr. Jackson
After installing Mrs. Underwood and Jherek Carnelian in his Bloomsbury rooms, Mr. Harris left, telling them that he would return as soon as possible and that they were to make themselves comfortable. The rooms, it seemed, did not really meet with Mrs. Underwood's approval, though Jherek found them extremely pleasant. There were numerous pictures of attractive young people upon the walls, there were thick velvet curtains at the windows, and deep-piled Turkish carpets upon the floors. There were porcelain figurines and a profusion of jade and amber ornaments. Looking through the books, Jherek found a great many elegant drawings of a kind he had not previously seen and he showed them to Mrs. Underwood, hoping that they might cheer her up, but instead she closed the books with a bang, refusing to explain why she would not look at the pictures. He was disappointed, for he had hoped that she would help the time pass by reading to him from the books. He found some other books, with yellow paper covers, which did not have pictures, and handed one of these to her.
"Perhaps you could read this?"
She glanced at it and sniffed. "It is French ," she said.
"You do not like it, either?"
"It is French." She looked through into the bedroom, at the wide bed with its lavish coverings. "This whole place reeks of the fin de siecle . Although Mr. Harris has helped us, I do not have to approve of his morals. I am in no doubt as to his purposes in keeping these rooms."
"Purposes? Does he not live in them?"
"Live? Oh, yes. To the full, it seems. But I suspect this is not the address at which he entertains his respectable friends." She crossed to a window and flung it up. "If he has any," she added. "I wonder how long we shall have to stay here."
"Until Mr. Harris has time to talk to a few people he knows and to take down our story," said Jherek, repeating what Mr. Harris had told them. "There is a great sense of safety about this apartment, Mrs. Underwood. Don't you feel it?"
"It has been designed to avoid ordinary public scrutiny," she said, and she sniffed again. Then she stared into one of the long gilt mirrors and tried, as she had tried before, to tidy her hair.
"Aren't you tired?" Jherek walked into the bedroom. "We could lie down. We could sleep."
"So we could," she said sharply. "I suspect that there is more lying down than standing up goes on here, as a rule. Art nouveau everywhere! Purple plumes and incense. This is where Mr. Harris entertains his actresses."
"Oh," said Jherek, having given up trying to understand her. He accepted, however, that there was something wrong with the rooms. He wished that Mrs. Underwood had been able to complete his moral education; if she had, he felt, he, too, might be able to enjoy sniffing and pursing his lips, for there was not much doubt that she was taking a certain pleasure in her activities: her cheeks were quite flushed, there was a light in her eyes. "Actresses?"