The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (42 page)

he city’s sombre, quiet tone of mourning was gone.

Chris murmured to the unicorn that had pulled their police car to the old tenement. The animal danced and sidled and rolled its beautiful blue eyes, but Chris’s low voice seemed to keep it sane in the face of the chaos boiling around them. No longer reverent, Darrington churned and roiled. The streets were so congested with swarming people, all muttering and babbling to one another, drivers were using whips on the crowds more than their animals.

Two young women jostled him as they jogged past, gesturing wildly between one another. A tattered-looking man pushed a finely dressed lady onto her knees and didn’t stop to apologize. Down at the corner, a newsboy was hawking his papers loudly, his young countertenor shrill enough to pierce through the chaos. “Doctor Livingstone charged for the murder of hundreds!” he cried. “Darrington Arrow’s got the full story, read all about it! Ten coppers! Ten coppers!”

“Come on, now,” Olivia muttered. Chris barely picked out her voice over the excited hum of the city around him, and she stood less than four paces away. She stared at the door of the building and one of her feet tapped anxiously. Water splashed up all over her soaked skirts. “Come on, Maris, I don’t have all bloody day.”

The unicorn sensed his change in focus. It whickered and threw its head about nervously, and Chris grabbed the bridle and hushed the poor thing. Its pearly horn dripped with rain, and it didn’t look so special all muddy and reeking of horse. He patted its nose and whispered encouraging words, but it barely seemed to see him.

Chris sighed and pressed his forehead against the animal’s cheek. When he closed his eyes against the rain sluicing down his face, he saw the Doctor’s eyes. They bored into his, and he tried to name what he’d seen there. Apology? Defiance? Pleading? His memory of the instant kept changing with what he wanted to believe. In one breath, he saw the good Doctor as a victim. Darrington had wanted a believable scapegoat for six years; a set-up would have been easy. But in the next, he saw a man so good at his bloody politics he’d almost convinced Chris to leave his life and take his sister to a reformist laboratory Gods knew where.

The unicorn sidled. Chris half-heartedly tugged on the bridle. “Do you think he did it?” he said, dropping his voice into the whirlpool of sound and motion.

Olivia snorted. “Absolutely not.”

She sounded so sure. “Why? How can you know?”

“I can’t
know
,” she replied. “But it just doesn’t feel right. I don’t care we saw her in his house, with the knife, with the
key
. Gods, we all but saw her slashing his throat and cutting up the daughter, too, didn’t we? But it doesn’t
feel
right. What does that
mean
?”

Chris sighed and shook his head. She was talking about the val Daren case. Well, of course she was. Olivia was single-minded and the val Daren case was her job. Why
should
she care about Francis Livingstone and the Floating Castle?

“Do
you
think she did it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He didn’t even know what he wanted to think. The thought of having someone to blame after all these years, a real villain to hate…

He felt Olivia stiffen and then straighten beside him. “
Finally
,” she said, and in moments, they were surrounded by police officers and their rustling raincoats. Chris envied them those. He was soaked to the skin and freezing cold. “Where is she?”

Officer Dawson growled. “She’s not here.” The stout little woman was nothing but a bristle of dripping orange curls poking out of a hood. “Her landlady says she vanishes for days a lot, but I’ll bet it’s not so simple, this time. She was scheduled to work, like I said.” The officer growled. “You showed your hand too early with that poem in the Herald, Faraday, and she bolted off into her warren.”

When Olivia didn’t reply to the implicit accusation, Officer Dawson snarled and turned to the lower-ranking coppers who surrounded her. “You two,” she barked. “Get on mirrors to our stations in every damn village, town, and city from sea to sea. Clarkson, Cuthberry, the two of you are going to take men and scour
this
city top to bottom. Monkton, you go back and get whatever evidence you can find from her apartment. Pry the key off the landlady with your weapon if you have to.”

A chorus of quite
yes, ma’am
s answered her words, and the officers all scurried off in different directions to accomplish the tasks set before them. Officer Dawson turned back to Chris and Olivia. “She did it,” Officer Dawson said.

“You keep saying so,” Olivia muttered.

Officer Dawson scanned the crowds rushing past them, coursing around in both directions like two rivers colliding. Then she folded her arms and sighed. “You want to go talk to that poor woman.”

“
Yes
,” Olivia said. She whipped out the folder once again, indicating the smudged
HC
at the base of the page. “I just want to lay it all to rest,” she insisted. “If this is what she’s been hiding the entire time, I’ll even admit it was probably Caldwell. I just need to
know
.”

Officer Dawson watched the rain soak through the page. The page was handwritten; the ink ran and made the smudged initials seem right at home.

Olivia didn’t seem to notice.

“If the Duchess funded some sort of high-concept framing of Doctor Livingstone…” the policewoman mused.

“Her Majesty’s police would like to know, wouldn’t they?” Olivia wheedled.

“It wouldn’t be your case,” Officer Dawson warned.

Olivia shrugged. She finally seemed to notice the rain turning the words on the page to sludge and closed the folder with a wince, vanishing it away into her clothes with a small flourish. “Conspiracies bore me, anyway,” she said, and bared her teeth. “Not nearly enough blood.”

Did Chris imagine the way he saw Officer Dawson pale? “If there aren’t enough bodies on this one for you, Olivia,” she murmured, “I don’t know what to tell you.” And then, louder, as she shouldered Chris aside to grab the unicorn’s bridle, “Fine, go talk to her. But this time, you can call a taxi. I have an actual murderer to chase.”

Once they were sheltered inside a dry hackney, Chris asked again. “Do you think the Doctor is guilty, Olivia?”

“Oh, of course,” she said without a thought, crossing her legs and arranging her skirts as though they weren’t sodden and covered in muck up to the knees. “I just haven’t decided if it’s for the crime he just got arrested for or not.”

The handwritten note was nigh unreadable from the rain, but there could be no doubt Evelyn val Daren knew exactly what she was looking at. She blinked down at where Olivia had dropped the file on the table before her. The colour drained from her face, and one hand went up to clutch at the string of pearls surrounding her neck. Her throat worked, but no sound came out.

Olivia smiled with sickening sweetness. She reached down and straightened the papers slightly, brushing a bit of imagined dirt from the top of the page. “Have you heard the news?” she chirped. “Francis Livingstone was arrested this morning for sabotaging the Floating Castle! I’m sure you know absolutely nothing about this!”

The Duchess took a deep breath. It shook. So did the hand she untangled from her pearls to smooth her hair. “We won’t be needing your services, Laurie. You’re dismissed for now.” Her voice, at the least, was very steady. The maid dipped a quick curtsey and slipped out, closing the door behind her.

“I’m very curious,” Olivia said into the stretching silence.

The Duchess spidered her fingers atop the note and pushed it back across the table to Olivia. “These notes,” she said, her voice clear and authoritative, “are private business, and in no way related to the investigation I solicited you to perform.”

“No? Now I’m even
more
curious. If they’re unrelated, why
exactly
did you take them and hide them so I wouldn’t find them?”

Duchess val Daren’s eyes flashed. “Precisely
because
they are unrelated, Miss Faraday!” she said, voice ringing along the walls of the empty parlour. There were finally cracks in her perfect demeanour. One cheek was brighter blushed than the other. Her hands were bare of rings or gloves. He saw crumbs from biscuits or scones in the folds of her right cuff. Finally, she looked like a woman who’d actually lost something. The Duchess folded her hands before her. They looked terribly wrong without their usual adornments, an ageing woman’s hands, not those of a beautiful lady of society. “I knew you would latch onto them. They would taint your investigation. You’d look for answers where there are
none
.”

“And the letters from the offices of Rayner Kolston?” Olivia asked mildly, and the Duchess blanched again. Olivia’s teeth glittered when she smiled. “Those are in the file, too. I find it interesting you didn’t think
those
were unrelated, considering how your husband’s body was laid out. I’m assuming you knew about the val Frenton murder?”

“It was ruled unrelated!” the Duchess protested. Her voice was shrill and her fingers were clawed into her skirts. “I—this family has a reputation to maintain, and our debts are not the affair of, of―” Her face twisted and she growled. Reaching out, she
shoved
the file, and papers flew up into the air like a furious flock of birds. “
Where
did you get these?”

“That’s none of your concern.”

“I
demand
to know where―”

“I want to hear about Hector Combs.” Olivia said.

The fight went out of the Duchess. Her shoulders sagged and her eyes closed and a puff of air came out from between her parted lips. Olivia tapped her long fingers on the table between them.

The Duchess opened her eyes. “I would prefer to sit,” she said quietly. She walked to the box seat at the window, the seat where Chris and Olivia had first spoken to Analaea. When the Duchess sat in it, pulled her legs up to her chest like a very young girl, Chris saw the resemblance between her and her daughter for the first time.

Olivia said nothing and waited for the older woman to speak. She wasn’t disappointed. When the Duchess’s voice came, it was from somewhere very far away. “He was one of my father’s protégés,” she said. “At Lowry. He was my father’s favourite, and so they were very close. Hector was frequently at our home for dinners and other social events, accompanying my father. I think they hoped he and I would fall for one another, but Hector was ten years my senior, and I already had my eye on a particular man. An Old Blood noble. Still, we became close friends. The three of us.”