Eleven #2
“What? The two of them were very close. Maybe you and Ysabel were lovers—maybe you resented her for always getting all the attention—where’s your imagination gone, Alys? If people can accuse me of murder to get Dux Scolaris—”
“Nobody was actually accusing you, you self-centred shit,” said Jehan.
“If you think—” began Clement, white-lipped.
“Everyone please be quiet,” said Alys. It had a burst of desperation behind it, startling enough that everyone obeyed. In the silence Estiene gave a long, rough exhale and stared at the table.
“Fine. Clement, I don’t think you killed her,” said Jehan. “But if you’re keeping secrets for Ysabel—if she was cheating, or up to something that you don’t want the faculty to know about because you think it would tarnish her name—”
“I’m not. She didn’t tell me anything about these letters or the exam,” Clement said. “Mathé’s sacred name, she didn’t. I’m as much in the dark as any of you, and I fucking hate it.”
They made sharp music out of the word. Estiene gave a little jolt and looked up.
“All right,” he said stiffly. “Sorry, Clement.”
“We still don’t know how Ysabel knew what the cases would be,” said Jehan.
Estiene said, “The case topics for the Grand Exam are agreed in advance, so they can find patients in the Hospital and the clinic. Dean Brodier and the faculty exam committee would know. Probably Secretary Lefer, too. That’s a lot of people who could have let it slip.”
“If Ysabel knew in advance,” said Alys slowly, “then her whole exam group would be cheating. Even if the rest of them didn’t know it. Right? And cheating means an automatic fail. So cleverness is all very well, but why would she flaunt something like that to other people? To us?”
That was the question. One note to Jehan, he could understand. Or one to Clement. But a whole series of them, to a handful of people Ysabel didn’t have any reason to trust?
“Because she didn’t expect to be here to sit the exam herself,” said Moyna.
Clement graduated from a flash to a glare.
“No, you can’t have it both ways, Clement,” Moyna said. “Either Ysabel was a cheat who stole the exam questions with the full intent to use her solutions during the exam itself—and I can’t say I ever liked her much, but I don’t think that sounds like her—or she never intended to sit it at all.”
“She also knew who would be in our group,” said Estiene. “And that’s done by random draw, and I thought it happened the night before the exam?”
“I think—”
Jehan realised two words into the sentence that he didn’t actually know what he thought. It was too late. Everyone was watching him hopefully, as if he’d wave a hand and transmute all the fights and accusations into a nice, neat solution.
He took a breath while he decided what to say. This is not getting us any closer to explaining Ysabel’s death in a believable way that will make the gendarmes go quietly away and not ask me any questions at the end of exam week? Probably not.
And he wasn’t exactly an inspiring group leader.
He liked people, and they liked him, because he was careful to never try to make them do anything that they didn’t want to do already.
And he didn’t know what anyone in this exam group really wanted.
Four pairs of eyes looked at him expectantly and he took stock of them.
Alys, who still seemed more enraptured by the idea of a murder mystery than the reality of one.
Clement, who Jehan had never thought twice about before yesterday and was now finding an increasingly baffling ball of contradictions.
Moyna, who—all right, Jehan knew what she didn’t want, even if she’d never said it aloud and he’d never had the guts to prod her about it.
He suspected Moyna was playing along with this investigation because she would have seized on anything, anything at all, that distracted her from the clock ticking down to the end of her life in Sieuxerr.
And Estiene. Jehan knew what Estiene didn’t want, too. And Jehan loved him infuriatingly and wildly despite it, because bodies were simple and hearts were impossible and Jehan remained very good at making bad decisions.
Jehan said finally, “This is all getting fucking—tangled. Which mystery are we trying to solve here? The mystery of what’s going on with these letters, or the mystery of how Ysabel died?”
“They must be all part of the same mystery,” said Alys. “Surely.”
“Life isn’t as neat as stage-plays, Alys,” said Moyna.
“Jehan’s right,” said Clement. “It’s tangled. Maybe it’s two different threads in a knot, and maybe it’s all one big ball, but all we can do for now is pull on the ends we can see.”
“All right,” said Alys. “What ends do we have?”
Jehan gave them the only end he’d pulled on so far, which was the conversation he’d had with his mother yesterday, in between observing the in-utero healing and coming back to the Academie grounds to break his knuckles open in the gym.
As far as his mother knew, nobody amongst the nurses and medics of the Hospital Sieuxerr had a burning reason to kill Ysabel Caudotte.
“Which isn’t to say it’s impossible. She wasn’t popular.
Some of them definitely wanted to slap her,” Jehan added, “because she kept doing techniques she wasn’t supposed to do unsupervised, and tended to go around telling people she could think of a better way to do whatever they were doing.
” And she was usually right, Medic Fortier had said irritably, but I’d hope nobody would kill a scholar for being insufferably good at her job.
“I want to find out who else might have been in the Rondelle the night before last,” said Clement.
“I spoke to one of the Academie artificers yesterday. I could get more details out of him about what time they were setting everything up for the Grand Exam, and if anyone might have seen Ysabel there.”
“If we agree that both Dean Saige and Dean Brodier are worth looking into, because of their connections to Ysabel’s research,” said Alys, “then maybe we should find out their movements? Or more about their possible motives? Without asking them directly, of course. We can’t make the murderer suspicious that we might be suspicious.
That’s a good way to get murdered yourself, in the plays. ”
Estiene looked pained. Jehan bit back a laugh.
“Secretary Lefer would know,” Jehan said.
“She knows all the faculty schedules. And she’d know how the exam cases are kept secret, and how and when the draw of exam groups happens.
But if we start asking questions about the Grand Exam in the middle of it, it’ll look dodgy. Like we’re trying to cheat.”
“I’ll talk to Lefer,” said Estiene. “We might as well use my father’s status for something.”
“And here I thought you used it for everything,” said Moyna.
Estiene wasn’t of a complexion to colour easily, but the shape of his jaw changed. He’d sounded faintly bitter when he spoke. Perhaps Papa Marcelle yanking that healing away from him yesterday had hit hard enough to actually make a dent in Estiene’s need for approval from the smug arsehole.
“You can—”
“I’ll come too,” said Alys hastily, raising her voice over Estiene telling Moyna in precise anatomical detail exactly what she could do and Moyna giving him a thin-lipped smile of triumph in return. “Estiene? I’ll come with you to talk to the Secretary.”
“Why?” Estiene demanded, swinging his annoyance from Moyna to Alys. “Are we gendarmes now, to be investigating in pairs? Or do we need witnesses, because one of us might have killed her after all?”
The silence settled onto them like dust. Glances were exchanged, newly etched with wariness.
This was so incredibly stupid.
“I thought we agreed,” said Jehan, “that none of us had any reason to want her dead.”
“Well,” said Moyna, looking right at Estiene, “none that anyone’s going to be stupid enough to admit to.”