Garrett Investigates (2 page)

Her eyebrows rose, her thumb slipped under the flap of the case but hesitated before she lifted it. Though she said nothing, he read her regard as skeptical.

“I wanted to speak to you away from the DI,” he finished, limping. Groping after anything else to say, he added, “Did you have any luck with the knife?”

She’d been freezing over, a chill spidering through her manner like frost elongating toward the center of a pool. Whether despite or because of its awkwardness, his question broke that ice. She smiled faintly, the appling of her cheeks making more evident the bruised shadows under her eyes. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’ve had some exceptional success. Come along.”

She turned, black boots that vanished under the hem of her skirts clicking on marble until she mounted the heavy figured runner in the hall. She moved like a whippet, so Cuan hurried to match her, almost breaking into a trot before he drew up alongside. His heart thumped hollowly, but it wasn’t the woman or the exertion. It was the place.

He was here, in the Enchancery itself, on official business. He kept his eyes front and his expression professional, but there was a twelve-year-old inside him who hung on every sound, every image, every scent.

The long hall smelled of tobacco smoke, nitre, and saffron. The walls on both sides were hung with portraits of men in plain frames, each dark beveled rectangle chased with a narrow thread of silver. The oldest were in oils or tempera; the newer ones silver-process on tin. Each one bore a plaque beneath with the name of one of the Crown’s Own, and the circumstances of his death in the line of duty.

By the time Garrett and Cuan came to the far end of the hall, there were no more portraits. But the smell of saffron lay musty and heavy on the air, leading Cuan to speculate that dinner was likely to be curry.

The stair Garrett led him to was wide and plain—not a grand stair, but not a servant’s runway either. He thought they would climb, but she turned downwards, still wordlessly, and so they descended together. Cuan’s palms sweated badly enough that he wished he could ball his fists in his pockets.

The emotion filling him up was a peculiar one, a ribbon snarl of melancholy and longing he was more accustomed to associate with unattainable women than with government offices. He was here, finally, inside these gray walls and walking these worn floors—but he was not here as a Crown Investigator, or even as a hopeful supplicant.

At the bottom of the stair, Garrett unlocked a second door and swung it wide. Cuan expected the dankness of a London basement, but they entered into a bright cool space floored in granite, the low beams overhead knobby with glass spheres aglow with incandescent light.

The perimeter of the basement was divided into bays, each one open toward the center and containing a table, metal shelves covered in equipment, and paraphernalia half of which Cuan could not identify. “We don’t research or experiment here,” she said. “That’s carried out at London Bridge, just in case anything blows up. But there are facilities for forensic work. Last bay on the left, please.”

He went on ahead while she was locking the door behind, and paused by the opening she had indicated. A light still burned over the long slab table, a length of white toweling spread beneath it. Something black and slender lay diagonally across the cloth, dull enough even under intense light that Cuan could not make out its detail.

Garrett cleared her throat at his shoulder, and he jumped. While he was still gathering himself, she said, “Coen is really Cuan, isn’t it, Detective Sergeant? Sean Cuan? Do I miss my guess?”

The slow banging of his heart accelerated with panic. “DCI?”

She shook her head. “You’re Irish. Aren’t you?”

He could lie, of course. But changing your name wasn’t a crime. Lying about the reasons to a Crown Investigator, however…

“I’m Irish,” he said. “But I’m good at my job.”

She smiled. “Never fear, Coen. I’d be the last to throw you to the wolves. I know your partner dismisses it, but do
you
think your killer is a bobby?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t ruled it out, but—that’s a lot of ground for a policeman to cover, unless he’s off duty nights. And why would you slip on a cape to cover your uniform, but leave your helmet on?”

“You could plan to come back and mingle with the crowd of police at the scene,” Garrett offered. “Here’s your knife—or the shape of it, anyway.” She reached out and lifted the object, turning to offer it across her hand.

Cuan accepted the model, finding it lighter and warmer than he expected. He’d thought it would feel like glass, heavy and chill, but it barely weighed his hand. When he held it close enough, angled to the light, he could pick out the features of the blade.

“Dip it in whitewash,” she said. “It’ll give it a little more texture. But for now, you should be able to see—”

“It’s a Frontiersman,” Cuan said. A hunting knife, jagged along the back, sharply pointed and sporting a heavily beveled edge. “We don’t see a lot of these in London.”

She nodded. “I thought it was significant. There’s more; look at the hilt.”

He brought his eye down to the same level as the hilt and looked along it, consciously adjusting his focus to sweep the length. “There are scratches on the hilt. That’s pretty damned weird, DCI.”

“They look like fingernail scratches,” she said. “But those would have to be peculiarly long fingernails.”

Whatever passed between them when their eyes met, it was Cuan who looked aside. It was easier to talk with his shoulder to her. Spit it out, Cuan
.
“How did you get to be a sorcerer?”

She lifted her chin, framing a savage response. And then something in his face must have softened her fury, because the corner of her eyes twitched and she said, “I attended university.”

Cuan bit his lip, knowing she noticed. “And the admission requirements?”

“A basic liberal education,” she said. “There’s an examination, of course. And a practical. The examinations are more stringent at Oxford than on the continent, with three or four exceptions.”

“The Sorbonne,” he said.

The flat line of her mouth curved upward. It must have been the note of pure longing in his voice. She said, “But if you want to join the Crown’s Own”—she touched her dress over her breastbone—“you need the red sigils.”

Sorcerers received the mark of their profession upon graduation. Mostly tattooed over the breastbone in black ink. The red sigils were from Oxford, Paris, Wittenberg, Rome, or Kyiv—the great universities of the profession. “No point in studying anywhere else, then.”

“You’ve a spark?”

He nodded.

She lifted the model knife from his grip and turned back toward the work table. With her free hand, she swept up the length of toweling. “Show me.”

He spread his fingers as if they ached. “I haven’t anything to work with.”

Garrett laid the objects in her hands on a steel shelf. When she turned back, she held a shallow brown-and-cream glazed bowl in her palm. She laid it on the table before Cuan and cupped her hands around it. She leaned over it, looked down, and breathed, “Where do you think you are?”

Between her hands, the fine white grit that filled the bottom of the bowl shifted slightly. “That’s sand and glass. Can you sift them?”

Cuan swallowed. “A little. I’m not strong.”

“Talent isn’t half of it. As long as you’ve enough to go on with, brains and determination mean more.” She hesitated. “You know neither Oxford nor the Crown’s Own would take you under an assumed name. There are oaths. And they have means by which to tell. Can you face that?”

He swallowed. “I don’t know.”

She stepped back and Cuan stepped forward. He cupped his hand around the bowl. “Do you have a glass rod? Or a piece of quartz?”

Smiling, she let a lens of rock crystal slide to the table from where she’d palmed it. Cuan touched it with his fingertips, slid it around until it centered between his body and the bowl.

He closed his eyes.

The blood in the lids filtered the bright light pink, but he could still see it. Against that glow, he pictured the bowl of white grit, the tabletop, the crystal, his hands. He imagined the grit sifting itself, sand and powdered glass, indistinguishable to the eye. He tried to feel the flush of energy moving through him, the tingle of his fingertips, but all he felt was an ache at his temples, the throbbing in his throat.

“Enough,” Garrett said.

Cuan opened his eyes in time to see her draw a finger across the dust-dulled surface of the lens, leaving a shiny swath behind.

“Not strong,” he said again, apologetically. Embarrassed, feeling the heat in his cheeks.

She touched one of them with that selfsame finger, so he imagined he felt the sand grit against his flesh. “Irish,” she said, and shook her head. “Huh.” And then she winked. “Well, if a girl can do it…”

***

Bitner thought the American knife meant the killer was a colonial. Cuan couldn’t argue the possibility, but he thought Bitner’s conviction betrayed a certain unsettling air of relief.
Not one of ours. Something other, something else.
It’s comforting to alienate the monsters.

So Bitner built his fairy tales and sent the Bobbies about asking after rough-hewn colonials, while Cuan imagined him picturing the killer in fringed buckskin and a wolverine cap, and had to cover his mouth with his hand. It was wasted time, but Cuan knew better than to argue. So he nodded and agreed, and conducted his own investigation in the interstices of Bitner’s. It meant he ate out of cookshops still draped in black bunting to mark the period of formal mourning for the Prince-Consort, and it meant he slept in snatches, propped against walls, but neither thing mattered. There was no one waiting at home.

He asked Bitner’s questions—insubordination wasn’t useful—but Cuan also made sure to asked his own, less-leading ones first. Not that it garnered him much; the murderer might as well have vanished into the yellow fog. Might as well have
been
the yellow fog, for all the traces he left.

They waited only three days for the next victim.

Cuan was catching a nap when the bell rang, doglegged on the burgundy divan which jammed one corner of his office. He started awake in darkness slatted with what dim light fell through the blinds from the hall and pushed himself to his feet before he really knew what was transpiring. Shoving a hand through well-greased hair to rake it into some semblance of order, he opened the office door and leaned through it, one hand on the knob, the other braced heavily against the frame. “What’s all this?”

Bitner was shrugging into his coat. He might be too attached to pet theories, but Cuan couldn’t fault his work ethic. And when he looked up and caught Cuan’s eyes, Cuan didn’t ask any more stupid questions. He fumbled his coat off the back of his chair and threw it around his shoulders. The boots were under his desk. He jammed his feet into them one at a time, hopping as he caught up to Bitner. “What have we got?”

“A double,” Bitner grunted, as Cuan stomped his heel into his second boot. He could button them in the carriage. “Come on. It’s Jacob’s Island; we’re going where the whores and Irish reside.”

“Bloody hell,” Cuan said tiredly. “Bloody hell.”

***

Jacob’s Island was an island no longer, the man-made Folly Ditch that delineated it having been filled in decades before. But it remained one of the worst rookeries in Bermondsey, the reek of tanneries doing nothing to cover a charnel stench. Shaggy tenements leaned shoulder to shoulder, hunched over ineradicably filthy alleyways littered with crusted oyster-shells and bloated animal corpses.

It was down one of these, off Jacob’s Street, that a uniformed officer led Cuan and Bitner. Bitner held a handkerchief pressed to his face. It was impossible to tell by the sickly light of dawn if his color was as queer as Cuan’s stomach, but Cuan wouldn’t doubt it. Gray morning caught a clotted sheen off the cobblestones and the muck between them.

Cuan stepped carefully.

They had to pass through a warped and rotten gate to reach the bodies, which lay in an enclosed courtyard within—or between—tenements. There, the squalid stones lay concealed under a fading red wash, and two women tumbled in each other’s arms.

Or rather, Cuan realized as he drew up at the edge of the puddled blood, one had pulled the other into her arms before she died. The younger lay spread-eagled, the cavity of her abdomen gaping through a rent bodice, gray and yellow organs losing luster before his eyes. Under her crouched an older woman, one leg bent, her slashed throat soaking her dress and her arms hacked about the forearms.

“Sweet Christ,” Bitner said, and turned from the drone of flies. He made a show of examining the gate, the rotting iron fence—some twelve feet high—that separated the yard from the alley, and the stones of the tenement to either side. “There’s no sign this was climbed,” he said. “You couldn’t climb something this rusty without making noise and leaving signs.”

“Was it locked?”

“The gate and the door from the tenement, too. And the hallways are full of Irishmen.” Bitner’s jaw worked. “The girl was no better than she had to be. I think we’ll find she got money from most of them. None of them saw anything, of course. Unless somebody got inside all over blood, stepping over sleeping men without waking one of them, he didn’t leave that way.”

“Maybe the blackguard sprouted wings and flew.” Cuan turned back to the dead. He swallowed bile and leaned over the blood, careful not to trespass its margins.

“She fought,” Cuan said, and realized only when he heard his own voice that he’d spoken aloud. “DI, come look at this.”

Bitner gagged, but didn’t retch. He squared himself beside Cuan and squinted through the gloaming, arms folded over his chest. “He attacked the young one first.”

“She’s just a girl,” Cuan said. Agony and death didn’t help the process of determining her age, but by her sloped nose and the plumpness of her cheeks and jaw he made her out to be no more than sixteen. The older might be thirty, though she looked half a crone. Women aged fast in poverty. “Her mother or sister or friend came to her defense—”