Death's Executioner

by Charlotte E. English

  Today though it was not to be, for a mere, soul-destroying two hundred feet from warmth, safety and repose, Konrad stumbled — literally — over the prone and splayed remains of… somebody.

  Motionless. Grey eyes staring at a grey sky. No visible wounds, Konrad’s professional instincts informed him. The fallen one was female, neither old nor young, neither rich nor poor; bordering upon nondescript, with her brown hair tied up in an unremarkable arrangement and a featureless brown coat hiding whatever else she wore.

  Konrad bent, and went through the requisite motions, as he must.

  No pulse. No reaction.

  Dead.

  ‘Well,’ he said aloud, and finding himself with no other remark to make, fell silent.

  A swift look around followed. The street was still quiet at so relatively early an hour, and in this part of town. Not many passers-by. Still, if she had been here for long, someone else ought to have noticed her by now. Recently deceased, then. A woman passed at that moment, expensively hatted, chin high. Upon beholding the sad, still form and Konrad’s tall figure looming over her, she averted her gaze and scurried on, as though afraid that the slaying hand (his, apparently) might fall upon her next.

  Konrad permitted himself a small sigh. He was not so intimidating a presence, surely? Tall, yes, and broad enough in the shoulder. Dressed, by habit, in a certain darkness of hue. But he was hatted himself, like a gentleman, and with nothing else about him that ought to alarm a female. At least, not when he wasn’t trying, like now. He could muster a sinister enough air when it was of use.

  Serpents? he called, setting the matter aside. I do not suppose you might mend my fractured hopes for this morning, and find that this good woman has died of some natural cause?

  He felt a flurry of cold air, separate from the drifting breezes that wafted along the street. A twin gust followed, prompting a shiver. Theirs was a special level of chill, something supernatural about it that cut to his bones.

  Then, Eetapi answered. I do not see how she could have. The words had a resentful air, as though Konrad offended merely by asking the question.

  Her brother Ootapi added, There is sickness in her. But there is also taint.

  Unclean, added Eetapi, gleeful now, all her happy hopes answered in the prospect of a fresh murder. She has died by the hand of another, Master!

  Terrific. He wondered sometimes how they could tell, these abominable assistants of his. Could they smell it on the corpse, some odour of corruption? Was it a sense? Did wilful murder leave so clear a trace, if one had the means to detect it? He had never chosen to put these questions to the serpents themselves, and again avoided the opportunity. Some things, he might be better not knowing.

  Anyway. To swallow his dismay, and go to work. Is there a shade? Quickly, please, before someone else should happen along.

  The twin presences of his serpents faded from his perception, and shortly afterwards the corpse shuddered convulsively, and — this was unusual — coughed. His hopes leapt. Perhaps, somehow, they had all been wrong, and she was not dead—

  No. Those were the glassy eyes of someone who no longer had the power to see. Her lips moved, though, thanks to his serpents, but only to utter a low groan of agony. And she gasped.

  ‘What is your name?’ Konrad said quickly, keeping a weather eye upon the as-yet silent street. The portico of Zima’s beckoned up a ways to his left, tantalising. Before him rose some handsome structure of grey stone and pilasters, a merchant’s establishment perhaps. Behind him, some other building much the same. He was not familiar with who else occupied this street, his attention being all for his club.

  ‘I am Verinka,’ she choked.

  ‘Verinka…? The rest is?’

  ‘Tarasovna.’

  ‘Who killed you?’ Konrad spoke rapidly, moved as much by the knowledge that her ghost would soon flee this macabre scene as by the probability of an intruder happening upon them. They never did last long, the murdered ones, though some of them tried.

  Verinka Tarasovna spoke, though, with growing composure, and ceased to choke. ‘I am dead,’ she said, oddly dispassionate, but with a note of enquiry. The head turned. He did not imagine she profited much by the movement. Could her dead eyes see?

  ‘You are in—’ he paused to remember ‘—Polik Street. Do you know how you came to be here? Do you remember how you died?’

  Ignoring these questions, Verinka flashed back to the preceding one. ‘My brother,’ she said, flatly. ‘He did not like Kristov, but I did not know that he disliked him so much as to— as to— I know it was Tsevar—’

  She was fading. ‘Who is Kristov?’ Konrad said rapidly.

  But the question was not answered. Verinka Tarasovna began, again, to choke, and the borrowed ghost-light vanished from her glassy eyes.

  The corpse collapsed back into its former inanimate state.

  Talkative, commented Eetapi, returning to Konrad’s side.

  Very, for a deadwoman, but had she said anything of much use? Having her name helped, yes; it may take a little time, but Konrad could (with the inspector’s help, most likely) trace her to her place of abode. Her brother might then be discovered, and the mysterious Kristov perhaps?

  But flimsy it all was, and vague. While the opportunity of interviewing a corpse was often of use, Konrad had to handle anything they said with caution. Especially when they named their supposed killers. Especially if they were surprised to find themselves dead, and could not remember how it had come about.

  In this case, the question of how Verinka had died was an important one. She had no wounds, no injuries, which suggested someone had taken a more subtle approach. And that usually meant poison, secreted in something she had unknowingly imbibed.

  A murderer who took pains to conceal not only their identity but the crime itself? Those were the slippery ones. No doubt Verinka’s killer was hoping her death might be conveniently ascribed to causes natural — frozen to death in the street, perhaps, or succumbed to a sudden illness — and thus allow him to escape the notice of police and Malykant both. It might be Verinka’s brother. It might be someone else entirely, someone she had no notion to suspect.

  Konrad would have to take care.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Konrad brightly a few minutes later, striding into the reading room at Zima’s. A familiar figure sat enjoying his day off (or so he thought) in a deep, leather-upholstered armchair by the fire, his face almost entirely obscured by the pages of his newspaper.

  Inspector Nuritov looked up — and, upon seeing Konrad, brightened. ‘Ah! I was hoping you would show. Look.’ He sat up, and brandished his paper in Konrad’s general direction. ‘Interesting case in Vand. Do you know it? Small town, not far from here. Someone—’

  ‘I would love to hear all about it,’ Konrad said with total sincerity. ‘Only, we have a spot of work to do.’

  ‘Work.’ Alexander blinked. ‘Oh. Work. You mean—?’

  Konrad pointed. ‘About two hundred feet that way.’

  Dismay flickered across the inspector’s pleasant, slightly weathered face, followed by resignation. He set aside his paper with only a faint sigh, ran a neatening hand through his slightly overlong sandy hair, and hauled himself out of his chair. ‘You have no respect for my leisure time,’ he said to Konrad, his lips curving in the faintest of smiles.

  ‘I do,’ Konrad assured him. ‘Killers don’t.’

  ‘I imagine you know all about that.’

  ‘Don’t I though.’ Konrad thought briefly back over the many times his obliging serpents had dragged him out of bed at obnoxious hours of the morning. ‘Still, there is always the hope that this will be a simple case, and soon resolved.’

  Alexander gave a noncommittal grunt, and ventured to peer tentatively out of the nearest window. ‘Two hundred feet…?’

  ‘Approximately.’

  ‘Still there?’

  ‘Was five minutes ago.’

  ‘Right, well, down we’d better go.’

  Konra
d produced a mirthless smile of his own. ‘Quickly, quickly, before someone… makes off with the corpse?’

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ said Alexander. As he walked to the door, the mild-mannered, easy fellow Konrad had befriended became the coolly competent, unflappable Inspector Nuritov.

  ‘That… I also know,’ Konrad conceded.

  ‘Truly,’ said Alexander shortly afterwards. ‘I could almost believe someone had left this poor lady here on purpose. Right under our very noses, Konrad.’

  ‘A shocking insult,’ Konrad agreed. ‘What do you make of it?’

  Alexander studied the woman in silence for some time. Konrad said nothing, and did not move. The inspector sometimes made shrewd observations which had eluded Konrad himself, if given time to consider.

  ‘Her posture,’ Alexander said at length. ‘Look at the way she has fallen.’

  Konrad took a fresh look. She lay on her side, her face averted from the street. ‘What of it?’

  ‘I am trying to decide. Did she fall here, or was she dropped? With no wounds, there is no blood flow, no spatter. I cannot tell whether she died where she fell, or whether she was killed somewhere else, and brought here.’

  ‘I see.’ And if his own surmise proved correct, and the woman had been poisoned, the inspector’s question would prove pertinent. If she had fallen in the process of walking down the street, then whichever poison she had ingested must have been a relatively slow-acting one, and probably administered somewhere nearby. If someone had dumped her body here, then it could have been anything at all.

  ‘Why would somebody leave her corpse just here, though?’ he said, unable to decide from her pose which of the two was more likely.

  ‘Good question. Could prove very relevant.’

  A swift study of the snow availed him little. Much of it was old, fallen some time ago, and packed down by the passage of many feet. No obvious marks hinted at what had happened here.

  ‘What do we know about her so far?’ said Alexander, a delicate allusion to Konrad’s odd ghostspeaker abilities if ever he’d heard one.

  ‘Verinka Tarasovna. Possible connection with a brother, and someone of the name of Kristov.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Well. A name isn’t bad. I’ll have someone on it shortly.’ The inspector crouched in the snow, and gently prised apart the fingers of Verinka’s right hand. She was clutching something, an object which proved to be a pipe.

  Alexander held it up to show Konrad. ‘Finer than mine,’ he said with some truth, for the piece was crafted from mahogany, polished to a shine, and engraved with a scrolling symbol Konrad could not make out. A band of metal around the bowl — brass, probably — bore an intricate filigree pattern.

  ‘Not cheap,’ Konrad agreed. ‘I wonder if it was hers. Was she a smoker?’

  I was not, came a distant voice.

  ‘What?’ Konrad looked first, stupidly, at Alexander, as though such words — and in a female voice — might have come from him.

  But he was the only other person present.

  Eetapi? Was that you?

  It was her, came the serpent’s reply.

  Her who?

  The dead person.

  It cannot have been. Did not her spirit depart?

  It broke, said Eetapi thoughtfully. But it is not all gone.

  Not all gone? What do you mean?

  I mean that bits of her are still here.

  Bits? Bits of a murdered woman’s spirit? Konrad, speechless, attempted to work out the implications of that, and failed. He had never heard of it before.

  She is tenacious, he finally said.

  A strong one, Eetapi agreed. Then added, whimsically, I wonder which bits of her they are?

  Konrad pictured a drifting, incorporeal hand, and perhaps an eyeball, and shuddered. Unhelpful imagery.

  Well, but. If bits of Verinka Tarasovna remained, however fractured, perhaps that would be a good thing. Perhaps she could help.

  ‘Verinka?’ said Konrad aloud.

  Alexander was staring at him. ‘Who are you talking to?’

  ‘She’s, um… possibly not quite gone.’

  ‘Oh.’ This unnerved the inspector, judging from the daunted look he cast about himself. Perhaps he expected to see a severed head floating upon the air, ghostly and ghastly in equal measure.

  Perhaps he would, at that. How was Konrad to know?

  No ghostly body-parts emerged to discompose either Alexander or Konrad, however. Nor did Verinka speak again. ‘She said she was not a smoker,’ Konrad said. ‘At least, she seemed to be saying it in answer to my question. If that’s the truth, this was not her own pipe.’

  ‘That is something we will be able to verify, once we find out where she lived,’ said the inspector. ‘Someone who was close to her will know. She did not happen to mention whose pipe it was, if not hers?’

  ‘That’s all she’s said. So far.’

  ‘If she speaks again…’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’ Meanwhile…

  Keep an eye on her, please, he said to his serpents. If she lingers, there must be a reason. And she may provide us with a clue.

  Yes, Master, said the serpents in chorus.

  Ootapi added, Perhaps we shall keep her.

  Keep her? Konrad spoke sharply. No.

  But my collection—

  No.

  Ootapi gave a shivery sigh, and drifted off.

  Chapter Two

  A scant few hours later, the body of Verinka Tarasovna lay in the morgue beneath The Malykt’s temple. The police had studied her as much as they pleased, though without uncovering any very startling information. She was estimated to be in her mid-forties, with signs of no particular vices. She’d had a little money with her, and a moderately handsome timepiece, but no jewellery, nor any sign that she’d ever been wearing any. Probably not a robbery, Nuritov had decided. Nothing had come up that might hint at what she’d been doing in a street far from either shops or any house such a woman might have lived in.

  The Order had moved fast. The moment the police released Verinka’s remains, they had whisked her to the morgue and proceeded with their own examination. The kind that involved a certain amount of cutting and internal study. Konrad hesitated to acknowledge how much he hated that part. He ought not to be squeamish about such things; nor was he, strictly speaking. But there was something so coldly clinical about cutting into a dead body, as though she were naught but a slab of meat. He liked to encourage his warmer, more human side, these days, and gladly left this task to others of the Order.

  The verdict came back speedily enough. She had died of a slow poison. They could not identify which, but that scarcely mattered. A wasting poison acted very slowly. It had to be administered repeatedly, in small enough doses to escape the victim’s notice. Its effects were cumulative, killing the victim over a matter of weeks — perhaps even months. In all likelihood, then, the poor woman had been growing steadily sicker for some time, and had at last keeled over in the street. That did make more sense than that someone had disposed of her body there; if they were going to go to such lengths as that, why take such a long time to kill her?

  Still, there remained the question of why Verinka Tarasovna had been on that street in the first place.

  These things, too, he hoped the inspector’s men might soon be able to shed some light upon.

  ‘The brother, then, is looking more likely,’ said Alexander somewhat later, upon his return to his own, cluttered office at the police headquarters. ‘It has to be someone known to the poor woman.’

  ‘Someone who had regular opportunity to administer poison,’ Konrad agreed. ‘Unless it was an accident.’ Such things happened. Something became contaminated — water, a food the victim ate regularly, that kind of thing. She might have been felled by misfortune.

  ‘But was it?’ said the inspector.

  Konrad remembered what his serpents had said. Taint. Unclean. ‘No,’ he sa
id regretfully. ‘My snakes do not think it.’

  ‘They tend to know their business, there.’ Alexander had Verinka’s pipe laid on the table before him, and his own in his hand. The latter was lit, expelling a vaguely sweet-smelling smoke into the air. Taking a puff, Alexander added, ‘This pipe is an unusual piece. I may be able to find out where it came from.’

  ‘You think it of recent craftsmanship?’

  ‘That or immaculately well-kept. But it is not so expensive a piece as to deserve such care, one would think.’

  Konrad gladly ceded that task to the inspector, he being the pipe enthusiast among them. And the contrast between Verinka’s pipe and his own was illustrative by itself. The one, plain and well-loved to the point of being rather battered. The other gleaming, elaborate and pristine.

  ‘If she was a smoker,’ said Alexander. ‘I don’t suppose…?’

  ‘Was that how she was poisoned?’ Konrad thought. ‘My knowledge of poisons is not as extensive as Nanda’s — we’ll ask her, presently — but I think it could be done. Not easily. The poison must be odourless, or else combined with a tobacco strong-smelling enough to mask its scent. And also ingestible via inhalation, but without causing any immediate reaction — coughing, etc — that might alert the victim to trouble. My main problem with the idea, though, is that we have testimony to the contrary, of sorts, and this pipe clearly has not been subjected to weeks or months of use.’

  Alexander had liked the idea, for he seemed disappointed at having to relinquish it. ‘Something mundane, then. Poisoned tea. Something in the butter.’

  ‘Dull,’ Konrad agreed, which provoked a sheepish grin from the inspector.

  ‘I should have more respect,’ he said.

  ‘Occupational hazard.’

  ‘It is, rather. Ah.’ He looked up as a knock came at his door. ‘Enter.’

  A youngish police constable came in, stocky and fresh-faced, pale-haired and wreathed in an almost palpable air of deference. Surprised, Konrad soon concluded that the young man’s manner was derived more from admiration than intimidation, for he looked upon Inspector Nuritov with a shade of awe. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve found the house.’