Garrett Investigates (3 page)

He glanced from side to side, brow itching as it furrowed. There was less blood behind the body—a slope had pulled it chiefly in one direction—and so he circled to approach from that direction. He crouched there and lifted one of the older woman’s arms. Her garments were worn, stained. There was too much blood and muck on them to tell if they had been clean before she fell.

“These are wounds from defense,” he said. “There’s blood under her nails.”

Bitner handed him a penknife and an envelope. “Maybe some of it is his. And he might have cuts—she must have fought like a tigress.”

Having scraped her fingernails into the envelope, Cuan laid her hand gently down from where he had lifted it. He patted the dead woman’s matted hair. “I hope you got your claws in him, love,” he said. “Good for you.”

***

When Cuan arrived at the Enchancery, it was half eight, hammered light making the old city glint like copper and pewter under a ragged sky. He didn’t expect DCI Garrett to see him at all. He certainly didn’t expect her to meet him in her dressing gown and slippers, eyes red-rimmed and strands of bobbed hair twisting out like twigs around a pallid face. The doorman sniffed with patent disdain as he left them alone together, but Cuan was honestly more concerned with the grayness of her cheeks and the smell of bourbon on her breath.

“Late night?”

She rolled her eyes at him exactly the way Bitner might have, so he choked back a bark of laughter. She caught it, too, to judge from her hollow-backed smile. “Do you have a sweetheart, Coen?”

He shook his head.

“You’re better off without one. What have you brought me? You’re holding that parcel like you had a dead rat by the tail, so I imagine chocolates are too much to hope for.”

Cuan chuckled under his breath and held out the brown paper package, which he had indeed been dangling from a fingertip thrust through the twine. “Nothing nice, I’m afraid.”

She lifted the box with both hands, cradling it six inches before her bosom. “It never is. There’s been another killing.”

“Two. In the small hours of the morning.” He was hovering, he realized, giving her a covert stare like a wishful hound. He should explain himself, excuse himself, and go. “Those are scrapings from under the fingernails of one of the victims.”

“Fingernails,” she said.

Cuan nodded. “She fought.”

That turned the DCI’s empty smile real. “Good for her. Good job, Coen. Maybe we’ll make a Crown Investigator of you yet.”

It shocked him to hear her state his secret hope so baldly, as if there were no embarrassment in it. He stood as if poleaxed. She moved away, as if to retreat deeper into the bowels of the Enchancery, and Cuan settled his bag more firmly on his shoulder, grateful to be tacitly dismissed.

Until she stopped in the doorway, turned back over her shoulder, and said, “What are you waiting for?”

***

The stairs down were the same stairs, and the laboratory below them was the same laboratory. Cuan followed as Garrett swept precipitously across the stone floor, the skirts of her dressing gown flaring about ankles that flashed distractingly white in the brilliant lighting. Another of the Crown’s Own was hard at work in one of the bays, bent grumbling over some process involving retorts and alembics. He glanced up as they came parallel to his table, but didn’t return Garrett’s civil nod. Cuan felt the sorcerer’s stare boring between his shoulder blades as they passed.

“You have time to dress, DCI,” he murmured, as she led him into the same end bay as before.

She set the parcel down on the table and flashed him a wink that made his heart skip a beat, in despite—or perhaps because—of her dishabille.

“
They
don’t bother.” The jerk of her chin indicated the anonymous Crown Investigator sharing the basement, and all the Enchancery beyond. “I had to fight like a cat to be allowed rooms here. It’s most unsuitable, you know.”

Her grin was infectious. Cuan found himself sharing it as she continued: “You can be certain I mean to use them exactly as the men do. Now tell me, Detective Sergeant, is there anything about this fourth murder scene that you noticed in particular, other than the presence of more than one body?”

“The gate,” he said promptly, and blushed. He looked down, but continued, “The yard was gated. With a fourteen-foot fence of wrought iron.”

“And the previous murder was in a tenement yard as well,” she said, and frowned. “Where did you say these murders took place?”

“I didn’t. Sorry, the instinct is to withhold information from potential interview subjects.”

From her sideways glance as she lifted a pair of bandage scissors with which to cut the twine, she understood that instinct very well.

Cuan finished, “But it was Jacob’s Island.”

She rubbed the corners of her red-rimmed eyes with the hand that didn’t hold the scissors. “I suspected you were going to say that. Remember the footprints at the first scene?”

“The ones that ended in a wall. The ones we thought the rain must have washed away.”

“It didn’t.” Having laid the scissors aside, she drew the snipped twine free and coiled it about her fingers. That done, she began folding open crackling paper.

“He didn’t scale that wall,” Cuan protested. “Not without sorcery.”

She folded the paper, too, and set it aside with parsimony that struck him as quite out of character for an aristocrat. “He didn’t scale the wall,” she agreed. “He jumped.”

Of course Cuan knew what she meant. It was London legendry, the stuff of penny dreadfuls and bedtime tales. Murders and assaults in Whitechapel, in Southwark, in Jacob’s Island.

Even an Irish boy heard about the boogeyman. But—“That was forty years ago!”

She opened his box and lifted his little morbid stack of lidded watch-glasses free, dealing them out upon the table in a line. As mildly as if inquiring if her preferred milk or lemon in his tea, she asked, “What’s forty years to Spring-Heeled Jack? More or less, I mean. We never knew why he stopped before, so it’s no mystery if he’s started up again.”

“He didn’t kill!”

Garrett licked her lips. “Forty years is long enough to learn to use a knife.”

***

Whatever other errands she ran after retiring up the stairs, Garrett was still the first Crown Investigator to appear again in the hall, though the Enchancery’s housekeeper assured Cuan that soon there would be more. Cuan’s experience had prepared him for many things, but the sight of DCI Garrett in navy trousers and a coat like a man was not one of them. She had swept her bobbed hair up under a bowler and buttoned all four buttons on the jacket rather than leaving the bottom three open to flash her waistcoat, and still he found he couldn’t look at her directly. His discomfort seemed to amuse her, however, especially when he blushed and turned his head when she bent to lift her carpet bag.

“Can’t fight devils in a dress,” she said, facing him.

Cuan extended a hand, ready to take her bag, but she shook her head and shouldered it. He stepped back, still tasting the bitter coffee the housekeeper had poured him. In the street before the Enchancery, he heard the rattle of many hooves and the whir of steel-shod carriage wheels on the stones.

He said, “So how
do
you catch a devil?”

“We didn’t catch him last time. We only ran him off. If we had anything to do with it.”

“And now he’s back.”

Stairs creaked, Garrett’s and Cuan’s heads pivoting as one. Two more sorcerers paused their descent at the first landing, one a tall man with grizzled hair and a moustache that draped his upper lip in luxuriance, the other shorter, stouter, and sprightly of step despite curls shot through with silver and a powder-blue coat gone shiny at the elbows.

“DCI Rice,” Garrett said, nodding to the taller before turning her attention to the man in the worn suit. “Commander.”

Cuan caught himself correcting his posture. So this was Sir Nigel Lain, Commander of the Crown’s Own. As he descended, Cuan could see that he was not a big man, neither tall nor broad across the shoulder. But he wore the unmistakable cloak of authority, which neither his genteel manner nor the careless manner of his dress could diminish. He extended his hand, and Cuan hurried to accept it, stammering as he tried to remember if the proper form of address was
Commander Lain
or
Sir Nigel
.

“Commander,” the Commander offered, with a disarming smile. “The Crown’s Own reserve titles for social occasions; it confuses the issue otherwise. Don’t you agree, Lady Abigail Irene?”

“Of course, Commander,” she said with an amused smile. “DCI Rice, Commander Lain, this is Detective Sergeant Coen. He’s been cooperating on the prostitute murders.”

Rice winced when Garrett said
prostitute
, and Cuan would have had to be a blind man to miss his disapproval of her mode of dress and the casual banter Commander Lain offered her. Cuan squelched—
hard
—any unworthy speculation on how exactly it was that DCI Garrett had come to be the only female among the Crown’s Own. Perhaps Sir Nigel had been a friend of her family; there was only so much peerage, after all.

“Excellent work, Detective Sergeant,” Lain said. He had a cool, dry handshake, papery but still strong. “I’ll be sure to put in a good word with your superiors.”

Ouch
, Cuan thought. But out loud, he said, “Thank you. May I ask what our next course of action is?”

Three more sorcerers had appeared at the landing while he was shaking the Commander’s hand. The men filed down, arranging themselves against the hallway wall. By the tilt of his head, Commander Lain appeared to note their presence, but he didn’t turn. “To start? DCI Garrett has turned the tissues you recovered over to a team of technical sorcerers, who will be providing us with locator amulets. Once that’s done…”

“We put a lot of men on the street,” Garrett supplied. “Station the Crown’s Own near every neighborhood affected—then or now—and then we wait for him to emerge.”

***

A mustard-colored blend of coal smoke and London fog, thick as gravy, licked the windows of the carriage and trailed across the street in tendrils that seemed firm enough to touch. Cuan balanced awkwardly on the bench seat beside Garrett, trying not to stare as the drape of her trousers resealed the outline of her knee. He hunched over the amulet cupped in his palms, watching a needle of light flicker in the jewel at its center. A real cat’s-eye would have maintained its orientation, but this one spun lazily as the needle of a demagnetized compass. When Cuan sighed, his breath blew across it, and—impossible as that was—seemed to set it spinning the harder.

“He won’t appear until sunset,” Garrett said.

She had bent her head and was picking something from her coat sleeve; the wiry russet hairs of a dog, if he didn’t miss his guess. “Terrier?”

She smiled obliquely and flicked the fur out the window. “You have a good eye.”

“I like dogs. You keep it in your rooms?”

“You may as well take some rest.” She looked away and drew her legs up onto the cushion, wedging herself into the corner opposite. When Cuan looked up in surprise, she reached for the lap robe that hung beside the door.

She must have read his face accurately, or perhaps it was merely the wisdom of long experience with slightly raw recruits that led her to continue, “We have to be out amidst the city, it’s true. But nothing will happen until nightfall, and one of the most vital skills of a Crown Investigator is sleeping in carriages, Detective Sergeant. By all means, take the bench opposite.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I think.” He held onto the amulet while he swung across the cabin of the carriage. There was another robe; he reached for it and snuggled himself into the corner opposite. Garrett seemed to drop off as soon as she shut her eyes, her breath leveling out and her head rolling softly on the long neck. Cuan did not find sleep so easy, with broad daylight outside the windows and the close, unchaperoned proximity of a woman, but he let his head slide to the side anyway, cupping the amulet where he could watch it without turning. If it flickered with anything resembling purpose, he would see.

He didn’t expect to doze, but the late night and his gritty-eyed lack of sleep quickly won the day. When he awoke, it was to Garrett’s touch on the back of his wrist.

“Sunset,” she said. He could see the slanted orange light—still fog-muffled—for himself.

He sat up, rubbing his eyes as much to obscure the sleep-mussed visage across the dim carriage as to clear the sleep away. “You told me so.” He’d been dreaming, pentagrams and frankincense, and it almost seemed the cloying scent of resin still hung all around them. The amulet must have slipped from his hand in his sleep, because Garrett held it now, balanced lightly on her palm. “Any movement yet?”

She bent over it briefly and shook her head. “It’s still slow spins.”

As if her frown had conjured it, a whipsnake tendril of dream-memory skimmed his awareness.
Conjured
. Cuan shuddered. “Do devils just summon themselves?”

A slow blink, as Garrett raised her gaze from the amulet cupped in her palms. “A conjured spirit,” she said. “Possible, though why you’d go to all that trouble just to murder a soiled dove or three—” She shook her head.

“Well, fiddlesticks,” he said. “I was hoping against hope that I might have developed a facility for clairvoyant dreams.”

“Maybe we should bring in a Spiritualist,” she offered. When he winced, she patted his knee and continued, “Whether or not your dreams are prophetic, it doesn’t mean you’re incorrect. Or…”

She paused, and for a moment he imagined he saw her counting on her fingers. “What does now have in common with forty years ago?”

“Well, I wasn’t here then,” Cuan said, to see her smile. “Same Iron Queen,” he said, opening his hands helplessly. “Though only just barely a Queen on that end. Long may she reign.”

He must not have scrubbed his voice sufficiently, because Garrett gave him a soft, ironical smile. “I’m sure Alexandria Victoria will be comforted by your approval.”