5. The Test
The Test
The summons came at nine in the morning, delivered by a clerk who clearly wished to be anywhere else.
Reid looked at the folded paper, recognizing the Parliamentary seal before he broke it. Five days. Five days of tracing connections and mapping shell companies, of watching Charlotte’s truth-sense cut through lies with precision. Five days of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The shoe had dropped.
Inspector Edmund Reid is hereby requested to present himself before the Parliamentary Committee on Public Safety at two o’clock this afternoon regarding matters of official inquiry.
Williams appeared at his elbow, reading the summons over his shoulder. “Sir.”
“I know.” Reid folded the paper and tucked it into his jacket. “Get a message to Eleanor’s townhouse. Tell them I may be late for dinner.”
“Should I tell them why?”
“They’ll know why.” Reid grabbed his coat. “If I’m not back by nightfall, assume the worst.”
He walked to Parliament through streets that felt different now.
Sharper, more dangerous, full of ordinary people who had no idea their government was building machinery to control a population they’d never known existed.
The mundane world and the magical one, separated by centuries of secrecy, about to collide in committee rooms and legislative chambers.
Reid had spent his career believing in the law.
Believing that justice operated through evidence and procedure, that guilt and innocence could be determined by investigation and trial.
Three weeks ago, he’d learned that some crimes existed beyond the law’s reach.
That magic could commit horrors no statute addressed, that power could corrupt in ways no court understood.
Now Parliament wanted to bring magic under legal control.
And they were starting with him.
The committee room was smaller than Reid expected.
A cramped chamber on the third floor, wood-paneled and gas-lit, with a long table at one end where three men sat in judgment.
Lord Willis Ashworth occupied the center chair, his expression precisely calibrated to convey concern rather than hostility.
Flanking him were two MPs Reid didn’t recognize, their faces carrying the blankness of men who had been briefed but not convinced.
A fourth man stood near the window. Tall, thin, dressed in civilian clothes that somehow conveyed official authority. The Parliamentary investigator Williams had warned him about.
“Inspector Reid.” Ashworth gestured to the chair facing the table. “Thank you for coming.”
“I wasn’t aware I had a choice, my lord.”
“You didn’t.” The investigator’s voice was cold. “Sit down, Inspector. We have questions.”
Reid sat. He kept his hands visible on his thighs, his expression neutral, his heartbeat steady by force of will. Twenty years of interrogating suspects had taught him what innocence looked like. Calm, direct, nothing to hide.
He was innocent. He just wasn’t ordinary anymore.
He used the thirty seconds he had left before Ashworth spoke to read the room properly.
Reid understood now the full shape of what he was doing in this room.
He was not being questioned to determine facts.
He was being processed. Present in this chair, on record, the interview a document that could be cited rather than a conversation that might yield information.
The conclusion had been written. His function was to appear in the chair, answer sufficiently to establish a record, and leave.
Nothing he said would change any of it.
He sat with that and found it did not move him. He had made the choice before he’d crossed the threshold of this building. Made it quietly, in a way that didn’t require revisiting. A man who has already decided does not need to decide again simply because the room is asking him to.
He noticed his hands on his thighs. He was holding them still, and it was deliberate.
He thought of Charlotte under pressure. The controlled stillness she used when her truth-sense was working against her will, when she was managing an involuntary force and keeping it from showing.
He’d watched her do it a dozen times without meaning to learn from it, and he had learned anyway.
Stillness was not a state. It was a practice.
You chose it repeatedly, in small increments, until it held.
He chose it.
Ashworth drew breath to speak.
“Your name appears in several recent case files,” Ashworth began conversationally. “The Whitmore investigation. The Pembroke affair. The matter at Lord Cornelius Ashworth’s townhouse last November.”
“My cousin,” one of the other MPs added, his voice carrying a thread of anger. “The one who died under mysterious circumstances.”
“I investigated his death, yes.” Reid kept his voice level. “The case remains open.”
“Does it?” The investigator moved from his position by the window, circling behind Reid’s chair. “My understanding is that Sebastian Whitmore was identified as a person of interest and subsequently... vanished. Along with any evidence that might have led to his arrest.”
“Sebastian Whitmore is a fugitive. Scotland Yard is pursuing all available leads.”
“Available leads.” The investigator’s voice carried contempt. “And yet you’ve made no progress in three weeks. No arrests. No new evidence. No explanation for how a man can disappear from London in the modern age.”
Reid didn’t answer. The truth was that Sebastian had vanished through magical means.
Shadow-walking, ward-breaking, methods that couldn’t be explained in a committee room without sounding like madness.
The truth was that Charlotte’s truth-sense tracked lies, not locations, and Sebastian had stopped telling lies anyone could hear.
The truth was that Reid had chosen Charlotte’s world over his career, and now his career was choosing to burn him for it.
“Inspector Reid.” Ashworth leaned forward, his expression shifting to what might have been sympathy. “We’re not your enemies. We’re trying to understand a series of events that defies ordinary explanation. Help us understand, and this inquiry can be resolved quickly and quietly.”
“What would you like me to explain, my lord?”
“Your associations.” The investigator’s voice cut through the chamber. “Your relationship with Miss Charlotte Vance. Your frequent visits to the Holloway household. Your presence at locations connected to multiple investigations involving... unusual circumstances.”
The euphemism landed between them. Unusual circumstances. Magical events. Phenomena that Parliament was preparing to regulate and control.
“Miss Vance is a witness in the Whitmore investigation,” Reid said carefully. “Mrs. Holloway is her sister. My visits to their household have been professional in nature.”
“Professional.” The investigator circled back into Reid’s line of sight, his eyes narrowed. “You’ve been seen entering Mrs. Holloway’s townhouse at all hours. You’ve been observed departing the following morning. Is that your definition of professional?”
Reid felt his jaw tighten. They were watching him. They’d been watching him for days, weeks, tracking his movements, documenting his choices, building a case that had nothing to do with law enforcement and everything to do with politics.
The investigator let that land without pressing it. A technique Reid recognized. Give the subject a moment to sit in their own discomfort, let the silence do the work. He’d used it himself, on suspects with everything at stake.
“We’ve had the opportunity to review the incident report from Lord Cornelius Ashworth’s townhouse.
” The investigator’s tone shifted. Still controlled, but with a new precision behind it, focused attention.
A man who had found a thread worth pulling.
“November the fourteenth. You were present when the body was discovered. The report notes several peculiarities. Damage to the interior that your own constables couldn’t account for.
Witness statements that contradicted each other in unusual ways.
” He paused. “What caused the damage to the study, Inspector?”
“The investigation is ongoing.”
“Yes. You said that.” The investigator moved to the window and back, the same circuit, unhurried.
“There’s also a constable’s report. A Constable Henley, night shift, who noted a woman matching Miss Vance’s description in Whitechapel at two in the morning.
You were with her.” He read from a paper Reid hadn’t seen him produce.
“He noted you were known to him and did not approach. He described the woman as, here, behaving in a manner inconsistent with distress, but inconsistent also with ordinary purpose. His words.” The paper went down.
“Would you care to explain what you and Miss Vance were doing in Whitechapel at that hour?”
“Miss Vance is a witness in an active investigation. I was following a lead.”
“At two in the morning.”
“Crime doesn’t keep office hours.”
The investigator studied him patiently. A man who had heard better deflections than this one.
“Inspector Reid.” He walked closer, not aggressively, but close enough that Reid had to choose between holding his gaze and tracking the movement.
Reid held the gaze. “I’m going to ask you a direct question, and I’d like a direct answer.
Do you believe in the existence of powers, abilities, capacities, that science cannot currently explain? ”
The room went noticeably quiet.
Reid understood the mechanism of the trap.
If he said no, they had Cornelius Ashworth’s ruined study, the contradicted witness statements, two years of case files that pointed somewhere no denial could reach.
If he said yes, they had his confession.
If he said I have no opinion on the matter, they had a twenty-year investigator who had never troubled himself to form a view on the central question of every case now before this committee.
Every answer gave them a handhold. The only option was to give them nothing at all.