Chapter 16
I kept my chin high as I stepped out of the police wagon in front of the station. My cheeks still felt cool with shock, but the short ride had given me time to compose myself.
People in the street stared—curious, fascinated, accusatory—as I raised my bound hands to adjust my hat, tilting my head at a dignified angle to hide my features.
More stares beset me as I entered the station proper, passing through a waiting room full of petitioners. A clerk handed the constable, Blakely, a sheaf of papers which he began to fill out, conversing with her quietly as Detective Supford and I passed into a hallway.
I expected further interrogation. I had prepared for it. But instead I was divested of my possessions, including my hat (which I found rather unnecessary). Then I was deposited in an isolated cell, hidden in the back of the station, and left to stew for an unmarked stretch of time.
At last I was fetched by a new constable, his hands noticeably covered with leather gloves to prevent our skin from touching as he took my arm.
“Very pleased to meet you,” I said when he failed to introduce himself. I looked pointedly at the pin on his chest, which read J. Hopgood. “You may call me Ottilie. May I call you Jack? Jacapo? Jebediah? Jethro.”
I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. “Constable Hopgood will do.”
“I feel we are quite past that, given how friendly you are being with my upper arm. Did you know that in Ummi, a lady’s arms are considered as salacious as her thighs?”
His grip spasmed but remained in place. “Please, do not talk.”
“I talk when I am frightened. Jacapo?”
“This way,” he ordered, and set off at a brisk walk.
We passed through a gate and into a hallway, then through an area with a long counter and several offices, all of which seemed abnormally quiet compared to the waiting room and the streets outside.
All the walls were wood-panelled, sparsely decorated, and the entire place smelled of cigars, hair wax, and cologne.
These were overpowered by a whiff of something stark and corrosive as we mounted a set of stairs. At the top another hallway stretched, and my guard rapped knuckles on a closed door.
“Come in.”
The door opened and the scent I had picked up tripled. Formaldehyde. Decomposition.
Death.
Detective Supford stood on one side of a table.
The room was a crude thing, barely an improvement upon my cell with its single window—open, for the smell—creaking floorboards and limewashed walls.
But my gaze did not linger on the room, or even on the detective.
Instead, they fell on the sheet-draped cadaver on the table.
Dread, thick and sickly and poisonous, coiled through my belly.
“Who is that?” My voice emerged surprisingly steady, girded by a flash of hot, nervous anger. If Supford thought he could play with me, unbalance me by putting me in a room with a corpse, he was wrong.
In answer, Supford pulled back the top of the sheet.
The world went mute. No clatter and chatter from the street. No heartbeat in my chest. No breath through my lips. Trapped in that soundless realm, I stood in the doorway with my hands shackled, fingers limp, face slack.
A man’s discolored, sunken face gaped up at the ceiling. Tweed jacket. Dark hair, just starting to grey. A mutilated, shattered jaw.
The silent world collapsed inwards and sound rushed back, assaulting my ears like a nest of disgruntled wasps. Before any true comprehension could reach my brain, my knees gave out.
Constable Hopgood caught me. I staggered and tried to find my feet, but I could barely breathe, let alone stand.
Supford watched me, his impassive expression softening just a fraction. When he spoke again, it was more of a statement than a question. “You did not know.”
“No,” I managed. “No, I did not.”
Supford stood there for another thoughtful moment, before he came to a decision and began to re-cover Mr. Stoke’s face.
“No!” I snapped, stepping out of Hopgood’s supportive grip. He did not stop me. “Let me see him. It cannot be him. It cannot. I must see.”
Supford nodded and I, with limbs that were not my own, crossed the floor.
My employer was nearly unrecognizable. His face was blackened and battered, one cheek caved in and his jaw broken. Bruising rose about his throat and across his shoulders, signs of a struggle that he had failed to win.
Nausea assailed me, but I managed to say, “It looks as though he was cudgelled to death. How can we be sure this is him?”
“You do not believe it is?” Supford asked. He nodded to Hopgood. “Constable Hopgood and I both knew Stoke, back in the day. We are certain it is him.”
I glanced at Hopgood. “You may be right, but…” Clearing my throat, I studied the corpse with an attempt at clinical detachment, but it was no easy thing. “When was he found?”
“This morning, around seven o’clock. He had not been dead long.”
“I see…” I took a deep breath to gather myself, but only took in more of the stench. “The clothes are his. His height, weight… What did you find in his pockets?”
“He had these on him.” Supford picked up a box from a side table and held it out. “Do you notice anything unusual?”
It did not occur to me until later that, with that question, I had begun to fade from the realm of suspect to victim—at least regarding Mr. Stoke’s probable demise.
My spark of hope died as I saw the contents.
In the box lay Mr. Stoke’s pocket watch, a billfold, cigarette tin, a book of matches, scrap receipts from his usual shops, and a familiar pen.
The sight of them filled me with immeasurable sadness, and all at once, I could not bear to look at the body anymore.
With gentle hands, I pulled the sheet over Mr. Stoke’s face, careful to hold the chain of my manacles out of the way. Then I clasped my hands before my skirts and turned to Supford. “Where did you find him?”
“At the Mithos,” the detective replied, citing one of Old Harrow’s middle-class hotels, some three blocks away. “In a room booked under an assumed name.”
“Was there anything else with him? In the room?”
“No. Should there have been?”
I made an uncertain expression. “He disappeared with an artifact, a box marked with circular symbols, the one I spoke of before. We were hired to retrieve it for Lord Stillwell. It is likely the reason he was—It is valuable enough to kill for, in any case.”
Supford shook his head. “There was nothing of the kind.”
“Perhaps his killer took it,” I observed. “Will you speak to Stillwell on the matter?”
“In due course,” Supford said. “But I must warn you, Miss Rushforth. You are not yet above all suspicion.”
A moment of quiet settled over the room.
“Pardon me, sir, but can she not… look?” Hopgood asked the other man. “As an Eventide Adept. To see the killer.”
The notion nauseated me. “No.”
Hopgood looked perplexed.
“I mean…” I gathered myself, setting one hand on the table beside Mr. Stoke.
My gloved fingertip brushed the sheet. Somehow that small touch finally broke through the desert of my shock, and my eyes began to moisten.
“I may not be able to see anything important. Deceased humans and Entwined become inanimate objects upon their death, all memories prior to that are erased. Sentient, self-aware life is a magic all its own, and when it departs it takes more than animation. Death corrodes the memory of life. Once a corpse is cold, I can see nothing before its death.”
Supford nodded. “I understand. Would you be willing to look, regardless?”
The urge to flee the room over whelmed me. It was becoming increasingly hard to breathe, let alone think. But I nodded.
Supford closed the window, and dimmed the lights, leaving us in an approximation of twilight.
I mustered my strength and brushed one finger across the body’s one intact, swollen eye.
I saw Supford and the constable. I saw a medical examiner with a narrow face and sad eyes. An alleyway, and a cudgel.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
I jerked my hand away and described, as quickly and passionlessly as I could, what I had seen.
“Could you see more at twilight?” Supford inquired.
“Perhaps, but unlikely. The body is recent enough that I have already seen its entire history,” I deflected, increasingly desperate to leave the room.
“Are you willing to try again, regardless?”
I could not bring myself to speak, so I gave a listless nod instead.
“Very well.” Supford accepted this. He glanced at his watch, and seemed frustrated by what he saw there. “Early tomorrow morning, then. I’ve an appointment tonight.”
I nodded again.
“Miss Rushforth,” Supford began, and for the first time in two years, I turned to my true name. “I beg several more questions of you before I leave. Can you tell me what you think of this? I must reveal the body again, I apologize. Prepare yourself.”
I retreated a step and the detective pulled back a section of the cloth to reveal Mr. Stoke’s unmoving chest. There, just beneath his heart, was a bruise so dark it looked like a piece of night carved from the sky.
A bruise in the shape of a handprint, fingers slightly crooked to leave tight, scar-like lines of nails.
“This, as near as we can determine, is what killed him,” the detective said.
“The damage to his head was done postmortem, as you confirmed, and all his other injuries are unlikely to have caused his death. As to this… bruise, we assume it is sorcerous. The work of a Silver, perhaps, though I have never seen, nor heard, of their Leeching being used to the point of death.”
“Neither have I,” I admitted. My mind leapt to Harden, but despite his criminal affiliations, I could not imagine him doing something like this. That did not mean he was above suspicion, though, or that he might share some insight into the higher abilities of his kin.
With a jolt, I remembered my intended outing with the Silver that very night, and felt a dash of disappointment. At least languishing in prison was a valid reason for standing him up.