Twenty-Two #2
“And a minor matter I’m sure it is,” Marcelle said briskly. “What absurd misunderstanding has my son gotten himself mixed up in?”
“Murder,” said Gendarme Balay with relish.
“Indeed,” said Thoury. His gaze never moved from Marcelle.
Marcelle, after a pause, expressed an icy hope that they weren’t referring to that unfortunate dead girl.
Thoury said, no, but now that you mention it—and smoothly explained that the senior faculty committee, which was accustomed to meeting over the lunch hour on this day, had unlocked the tower room where they usually met and found the Head Healer’s son Estiene standing over the still-warm murdered body of Artificer Decroy, and in possession of both a bloodied knife and a note suggesting a planned rendezvous, for a conversation directly relating to the death of—here he consulted a notebook, which he appeared to have pulled from a pocket simply for effect—Scholar Caudotte.
Whose death, he added, they were clearly going to have to pay close attention to when this inconvenient geas expired.
He didn’t look upset that his desire to write off one scholar’s death as a suicide had been thwarted by the appearance of a second body.
Before Jehan could think this through, Estiene was speaking, his words tumbling over themselves in frustration as he gave his own account: that he’d found the note in his pigeonhole, and run to meet the stated time.
He’d found the man—Decroy—already dead, his throat slit, seated in the chair, with the knife discarded on the floor.
And someone had locked the door when Estiene entered, trapping him inside with no key of his own.
“A key was found in Artificer Decroy’s pocket,” Thoury put in. He was still watching Estiene’s father instead of Estiene himself.
“The artificers have keys for every room in the Academie, don’t they?” said the Chancellor, and got a nod from Doulze.
“Still,” said Thoury. “The scholar might easily have placed it there himself. Just as,” he added, brandishing a piece of paper and making a show of reading it, “he could have been the one to summon Decroy to this meeting. The note is neither addressed nor signed by name.”
Marcelle glared at the Chancellor, who filtered it into a hard look at Doulze, who eventually offered to send for a sample of Decroy’s writing from the workshop.
“Come now,” said Marcelle, once this request had been dispatched. “I’m sure we can—”
“Head Healer Marcelle,” said Thoury. “I know you are accustomed to taking charge of meetings and having everyone fall in line, but we are in my sphere, not yours. I must ask you to remain quiet.”
“Oh,” said Marcelle. “Must you.”
And Jehan had thought that the dislike between his mother and Marcelle was palpable. The air between Marcelle and Thoury was not even excitingly crackling; it was a dull, stifling wall of politeness, politics, and hatred.
There were an excruciatingly silent few minutes of waiting, in which Jehan failed again to catch Estiene’s eye, and Moyna slid down a wall to sit cross-legged.
Jehan might have joined her, but he didn’t want her to consider herself forgiven.
He stood undoing and redoing the purple sash at his waist, then undoing and rebraiding his hair.
His mind was going like nervous rabbits in all directions.
“All right,” said Thoury, once the note had been compared to a produced report and he’d agreed that the hand was very similar, if much more painstakingly written, as if Decroy had wanted to be sure of being understood.
“Then we return to my original question. Why would Decroy consider his knowledge to be of particular interest to Scholar Marcelle, rather than any of the rest of you?”
The you was accompanied by a wave to Moyna and Jehan. Thanks to Alys’s early theorising, Jehan had already reached a potential answer to that question, and didn’t like it. Nor was he about to suggest it, when it was absolutely clear that it was wrong.
“Scholar . . .” Thoury consulted his notebook again. “Was it Savoye?”
“No,” said Moyna. “Apprice.”
“Of course. Didn’t one of you mention that Scholar Caudotte’s death meant that Scholar Marcelle was likely to win some kind of prestigious award . . .” He peered at his own writing. “Something to do with ducks?”
“Dux Scolaris,” said the Chancellor.
“I didn’t kill Ysabel,” said Estiene, raising his voice. “Dux Scolaris doesn’t matter that much.”
“Perhaps not to you,” said Thoury.
So Thoury had landed on the same possible answer, and liked it a lot better than Jehan did. He gazed at Marcelle Senior with calm expectancy.
It took Estiene a few moments, then he blurted, “You think—my father killed Ysabel so I’d be Dux, and the artificer knew it and tried to blackmail me? So I killed him?”
“What a ridiculous, insulting accusation,” said Marcelle. He was still sounding calm, but only just. “My son is a highly superior mage and scholar with a bright future ahead of him. I hardly need stoop to murder to ensure his excellent results.”
Jehan saw Moyna go still, and narrowly escaped choking on his own breath. Not murder, but he’d sure stooped to something. Which they knew, and both Marcelles knew, and the Chancellor certainly knew.
But nobody was going to volunteer information about blatant corruption at the Academie to a gendarmerie captain with a clear grudge against healers.
Jehan managed to think a step past what would happen if he made the accusation himself: Marcelle might deny it, and either way—committing one illegal act on your son’s behalf by no means meant you wouldn’t go a step further and commit another one, did it?
The silence was becoming so heavy it felt dangerous.
Instead Jehan found himself saying, “Come on, obviously Estiene didn’t kill anyone.”
The room’s attention landed on him with a near-audible thunk.
“And why is that obvious, Scholar?” said Thoury.
And to that, Jehan didn’t have the answer.
Or rather, he did, but to say it aloud would be to betray far too much and prove himself hopelessly biased; and far more likely to lie on Estiene’s behalf than Estiene’s own dickhead father, honestly.
He didn’t know if he’d kill to protect Estiene, but Jehan often didn’t know things about himself until they happened. Perhaps he would.
What he should have said to Moyna, when she’d accused him of bad taste, was: Estiene Marcelle, the man who existed now, was a far and distant cry from the nepotistic brat that he’d been at eighteen.
All of them had changed hugely in five years, and in Estiene it had been entirely for the better.
Jehan had thought more people would have recognised that.
But perhaps nobody had been watching with quite his level of obsession.
“He just wouldn’t,” Jehan said finally. “Someone’s trying to make it look like he did, but he wouldn’t.”
There was a snort from Gendarme Quentin. Estiene, finally, glanced back at Jehan.
“A touching vote of confidence,” said Thoury. “Unfortunately, I can’t take your word for it. And I suppose there’s no point asking you if you were in the exam building the night before the exam started, Jourdain.”
“You’re overstepping, Augustin,” snapped Marcelle. “Neither my son nor I have done anything wrong.”
Thoury sent him a long, level look with a smile that didn’t rise above his lips.
Jehan’s heart sank. If the gendarmerie were being forced to pay attention, they were going to be only too delighted to fuck up the day of the most prominent healer in Sieuxerr along the way.
And Estiene had been found with enough evidence against him that they would have no trouble digging in their heels and making trouble.
“I’m sure you can see why I can’t take your words for it either,” Thoury said finally. “And it seems unlikely that someone would cut a man’s throat for the sole purpose of implicating Scholar Marcelle.”
“They did it to stop you looking elsewhere,” put in Moyna. “And to make sure nobody heard what he had to say—if he did have anything to say at all. He might have just been convenient.”
Thoury gave her a glance and for once didn’t have a smooth rejoinder. Jehan leapt in with the first thing he could think of.
“You can’t lock him up,” he blurted. He turned appealing eyes on the Chancellor. “It’ll leave us with only four for our Grand Exam group, when we’re already three cases in. And we’ve already had to . . . you know.” A vague gesture meaning stumble over Ysabel’s corpse.
“Ah. Yes.” The Chancellor coughed. “I’m sure you can appreciate the importance of minimising any interruption to the Grand Exam, Captain Thoury.
The world needs every qualified healer it can get, and to disadvantage this group of scholars, who have worked so hard for five years to reach this very point . . .”
“You want us to let a murderer go free?” said Thoury. “To conveniently disappear out of Sieuxerr’s borders, with his father’s help, as soon as this week is up?”
Another silence. Jehan had the sense of a dropped ball of yarn about to tumble between stair rails and unravel beyond the point of repair.
“I will personally,” said Marcelle, with a hint of a snarl, “guarantee that Estiene and myself will present ourselves to be asked as many tedious, intrusive questions—about both deaths—as you wish, as long as he is allowed to complete his Grand Exam first. You can wait outside the door to the bloody exam room, if you must.”
That was, apparently, acceptable to Thoury.
A few more threats disguised as murmurings of protocol were delivered, Marcelle swept out with Estiene tight-lipped and pale in his wake, and Jehan decided that he and Moyna had better make themselves scarce before the gendarmes started asking them any more questions.
He grabbed her arm again and scurried out behind the Marcelles with a feeling like someone had painted an archery target right over his spinal column.