33. 32
Behind the faded yellow door was a house that I might have suspected to be entirely disused from the cobwebs clinging to the ceiling, and the dust settled on two of the doorknobs.
But the floorboards beneath the boy’s boots were so polished from the constant thoroughfare of passage in and out that the house was very clearly not deserted.
But this house, and its door, were not our end locations.
The boy who had spoken to me from inside knew me by name, and now he led with the speed of someone unaccustomed to guiding guests, let alone offering any hint of a tour.
He walked through to a dustless door, pushed it open, and disappeared, all without looking back to check I was there.
In this next room, I caught up with him only for him to vanish through yet another door. Only this wasn’t quite a door. It was a hinged fireplace. The boy pulled the frame back, the height of a grown man’s chest, and ducked through, over the ashes.
I only suffered a small hesitation before following him through. I was already here, and the boy had locked the front door behind us. If I let this fireplace slide back into its place, I could end up trapped in here.
I stepped through, and I realised that the other side of the false fireplace was not another room in the same house, but the next house along the street altogether. I had walked past this one, and had sworn it was entirely boarded up. It was a neat facade.
This house was not derelict on the inside, however. The boy had scuttled across the royal blue rug and stood with his head ducked next to an oak-panelled door. He rapped his knuckles against it as I stepped through onto the rug, careful not to track ash and dust on it.
I straightened. I adjusted my skirts into their proper place, scanning the room for any interesting details. The fire was out, of course. A desk sat empty of paper, but full of dust. The bookshelves were full but equally untouched. A desire to be seen as well-read, perhaps.
There was also a giant painting of Granville.
He held a golden chalice in one hand, and a ferret on his shoulders, signalling wealth.
His expression looked foreign to me, severe and smug.
A character used to winning, and expecting to win.
His eyes had also been painted wrong. They were far too dark.
I hadn’t seen that expression on Granville’s face. He was superior, but not usually so austere. As I thought it, the man himself stepped inside. The boy hastened to exit, ducking back through the fireplace.
He regarded me with no surprise, and a warmer smile than I expected. “Fopdoodle. How can I help you?”
He was dressed differently today. More like the first time I had seen him, with fitted clothing which showed his narrow build, and less finery. He gestured towards two soft chairs in the corner of the room.
I did not sit. Instead, I said the words I’d been lingering on for far too long. “Robar was in debt to you, wasn’t he?”
Granville smirked. “Not quite true.”
“But you helped him?”
Granville raised a hand, and I could not decide if it was cautioning, or patronising. Likely both. “Slow it down. You are in my lair, after all. Decide what you’re really accusing me of.”
I forced myself to breathe in, and exhale.
If I wanted answers from this money lender, I would need to be forthcoming, and I would need to be smart.
But this city, and the slow evil rotting it, was driving me mad.
I struggled to keep my voice flat. “Robar had debts. He was there, in the Fancy. That was the investment you were watching. He owed the barman a huge tab, and probably others in the city. You lent him money.” Here, I paused. “In return, he gave you Jusia.”
Granville let this accusation sit in the air. He swept around the outside of the chairs, and sat down in one of them, facing me from lower down. His gaze was as steady as rock, as hard as steel. “Do you believe I killed Jusia?”
In truth, I didn’t know. My usual lie-detecting abilities didn’t seem to be working with Granville. For some reason, he was different. Whatever he wanted, whatever he had or hadn’t played a hand in, nothing in his face gave me the answer.
His eyes twinkled. “You were the first, weren’t you?”
I opened my mouth and closed it.
“He loved you, for what it’s worth,” he said. My chest tightened. “He had to get an Ekrissian out of the House. He didn’t know what it was for.”
My mouth pressed into a tight line.
Granville smirked. “Don’t mistake me, he suspected what might happen.
Selling the woman off somewhere, even killing her.
But he had spent all of his daddy’s money and all of his friends’ good will, and that of half the drinking establishments in Dytho.
If he delivered an Ekrissian, all of that would disappear.
” He clicked his fingers, and I managed not to flinch.
“He was willing to overlook the specifics.”
“So, it was you.”
He shook his head. “I said he had to deliver an Ekrissian. I didn’t say he had to do it for me, did I, doodle?”
The nickname soured in my stomach. I wasn’t his childish stupid doodle. Not now, not anymore. Not ever. I might have been that naive thing once, in the Fancy. I had changed. “You know who, though.”
“But he did love you,” he continued, ignoring my statement.
“He needed to pay up, or his neck was on the chopping block. I knew someone who would pay handsomely for an Ekrissian, and I put them in touch. But weeks later, after I had been told he had found someone, he came to me to explain that he couldn’t go through with it.
He intended to elope with you.” Granville drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “And then he forgot all about you.”
It didn’t make me feel better, to be right and yet so wrong.
I had known Robar had meant it when he declared his love for me.
There was some sick reassurance that he didn’t then intend to deliver me to a fate worse than death.
But he had done it, the second time. He had forgotten his love for me, and then walked right back into the House and bought my friend’s flesh just to betray her to this man.
He wasn’t a good person just because I was the exception.
He was a coward, and he always had been.
And I was desperate enough to be loved that I didn’t look close enough to see the ugliness below the surface.
“One lamb was replaced with another,” I said weakly.
Granville hummed, but the play in his eyes had died.
It was an admission, and it wasn’t. Robar had delivered Jusia, then, to someone. This man hadn’t held the knife, hadn’t drowned her in the canal, but he had sold an Ekrissian’s life down the river just the same. “Who was it? Who killed Jusia? Who bought her?”
He said nothing, only waiting with that catlike calculating look.
So I kept on. “The House of the Sea, too. They were accepting gold for information. They sold Saskia out, too, didn’t they? Was that you? Or this other person?”
He raised his eyebrow. He wasn’t even that old, but blathering out my theories, and the look on his face, he might as well have been my grandfather. I hated how small he made me feel.
“Any more accusations?”
Whatever spirit and power had brought me here, and kept my tongue spilling my every thought, left me. In the face of such indomitable apathy, everything felt pointless. And there was nothing else I could conceivably connect to him.
I thought of apologising. Instead, I just conceded. “I—No.”
He hummed, steepling his fingers on the chair’s arms. “What evidence do you have?”
He had all but admitted to Jusia, but he was right.
It was my word against his. It was a loose trail.
Neither myself nor Davian had the relationships with the sunners to get them to take this seriously.
I knew nothing of Seera’s finances, and as for anyone else who might have died or gone missing, I had nothing to tie them to him. “Well—”
He chuckled. “And what of the rest? If you’re accusing me of killing them, then surely you would have some connection between me and the other missing people.”
He didn’t dispute my assumption that the murders were linked.
“You know who is behind it all.” I stepped forwards. Even if asking for Jusia was the only part he had played in the whole mess, he knew the person behind it. “Please. Davian and Fella are… I don’t know if they’re missing yet. But if they are… You have to tell me what you know.”
He smiled, slowly, and his canines were pointed. “Do I?”
I put my hand on the back of the other chair. “If you tell me where they are… Please. I’ll do anything.”
His expression did not change.
“Please, Vasile,” I said.
There. The smallest of flinches, more of a tiny spasm across his features than a true sign of displeasure or shock. But I could get through to him.
We both breathed into the heavy silence, and then he patted the pad of the chair. I swallowed, sitting opposite him. The chairs were close enough that our knees were nearly touching, and I had a queer memory of sitting the same distance from Davian in the row boat.
This man was one of the most powerful lenders and merchants in the city, and I had just promised him anything he could ask for.
And yet, as desperate as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to regret it.
If he knew anything that could help solve the murders and prevent someone else from dying, I would pay the price for that knowledge.
Granville, or Vasile, watched me with those piercing blue eyes. I waited for the cost, the bartering, the deals. Then he placed his hand on a book on the low table beside him, and tapped it with his fingernail. “Can I read you a section from my diary?”
I barely smothered my shock. “I suppose.”