The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “I have a little trouble thinking of Drebber as a gazelle,” said I.

  Crow laughed. “No, I suppose not. But you see my point. I don’t know if this person followed Drebber from Paris or was waiting here in London. But either way, their encounter wasn’t by chance. And I think that does imply strongly that the murderer can read.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “And even if he can’t, he probably has friends who can and who will read the papers for him.”

  “That’s true,” said Crow, much struck. “I hadn’t considered that he might have confederates. Oh dear.” He muttered to himself for a moment—of which I only caught the words “bait and switch”—and then burst to his feet. “I’ll be right back!” he said and flung himself out the door.

  Jennie, bringing in my toast, stared after him in amazement, but said only, “Please, sir, Cook said if you’d be liking a poached egg or such like, she’d be glad to—”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Toast and marmalade is truly all I want.” The exchange with Crow had lightened my mood, and I refrained from snapping at the child. That in turn meant that Mrs. Climpson, who ran her household with an iron fist, wouldn’t be up later to scold me for making Jennie cry.

  I appropriated Crow’s newspapers and found myself drawn to the articles about the death in George Yard. The woman, unknown, was middle-aged, plump, shabbily dressed. There could be no doubt she was what polite London termed an “unfortunate”—a fallen woman instead of a fallen angel, and I lost myself for a moment in considering the hopeless plight of the woman and the equally hopeless plight of the angel, and yet how differently that hopelessness played out. In the case of the woman in George Yard, since none of the residents recognized her, it seemed obvious enough that she had chosen that landing to conduct a transaction, equally obvious that her client had had other ideas.

  Thirty-nine stab wounds, up from the earlier estimate of twenty-four. It was hard even to imagine an attack that frenzied. She couldn’t have put up much of a fight in the face of so much rage; she would have bled to death in a matter of minutes at the outside.

  There was speculation, naturally, about paranormal activity—what polite London (those who called the woman an “unfortunate”) termed the “unusual.” But the wounds had distinctly been made with a bladed weapon, which ruled out hell-hounds, rogue werewolves, and any other creature incapable of holding a knife, and none of the body was missing, which ruled out necrophages and ghouls, while neither vampires nor any desperate hemophage would have been so wasteful. All the signs pointed toward human agency, and although it was only a matter of time before the howls of “witchcraft!” started up, none of the witches I had met was any more likely to do this sort of thing than their respectable neighbors.

  All of which led to the inevitable question: what sort of person was likely to do this sort of thing, and would you recognize him if you saw him on the street?

  I had seen men in Afghanistan who had been driven mad by the Fallen, or by the experience of being buried alive in a mass grave, or by having their best friend’s brains painted across their face. All of them had indeed looked like madmen, wild-eyed shivering wretches who wept uncontrollably or held conversations with people who were not there. But they were mostly not violent, and those that were would not have been able to act normally long enough to persuade a Whitechapel prostitute to go anywhere with them. On the other hand, I had known a number of exceedingly sane men who had reveled in the butchery of war, and my most uncomfortable image was of one of them, returned to London but still on the battlefield in his heart, realizing that there was an infinite supply of targets in the East End, women who would be so little missed that no one could even identify their ravaged corpses. It was a terrible image, and I strove to rid myself of it. But a man like that, a soldier, would be able to persuade a canny woman—and the women who made their livings on the streets of the East End were as canny and cunning as wild creatures—to find a dark and quiet spot to be alone with him. And she wouldn’t realize her mistake until it was too late to scream.

  Enough, I said to myself and deliberately turned to contemplation of Enoch J. Drebber—of either Salt Lake City or Cleveland, depending on which source you believed—and the peculiar circumstances of his death.

  I agreed with Crow that the dissolution feather had not belonged to the murdered man, not because I believed him incapable of carrying such a macabre relic, but because if he had had it, I felt certain he would have tried to impress the young lady on the Sophy Anderson with it. That led me only to the question of why his murderer would have been carrying such a thing on his person when he set out to commit a murder—and I could not but assume he had set forth with that goal in mind, for otherwise he would not have also been carrying the poison necessary to do the job.

  But how on Earth could anyone have premeditated the murder of a transient? Drebber had arrived in London five months ago, and he had been planning to leave soon, on the Lone Star. Was it mere happenstance that he had crossed paths with his murderer? Or had his murderer stalked him from Paris to London, like Crow’s simile with the lion and the gazelle? Why was Drebber in London? Why had a man like that been in Paris, for that matter? Drebber had seemed to me, in our admittedly brief encounter, to be the worst kind of Colonial, the sort of man who asserted that because America was new, everything old was bad. What would bring such a man to Europe?

  I lurched up out of my chair and over to my desk, where I found a sheet of foolscap and my pen and began making fierce scribbled notes.

  1.  STANGERSON

  Clearly the first order of business had to be to find Stangerson, both for the information he had and to warn him. Anyone who hated Drebber that much must surely also loathe Stangerson.

  2.  dissolution feather

  I had a terrific number of questions about the feather and how it came to be on Drebber’s body, starting with the angel to whom it had once belonged and ending with, if the murderer treasured it so greatly that he carried it with him on his errand of murder, how could he possibly have been so careless as to leave it on Drebber’s body?

  3.  Drebber

  What had Drebber been doing in France? What was he doing in London? Where was he lodging? What had he done the last day of his life? I was sure Lestrade was pursuing all of these questions, but it hurt nothing and no one if I wrote them down as well.

  4.  How had the murderer found Drebber?

  Possibly unanswerable.

  5.  How had the murderer persuaded Drebber to enter No. 3, Lauriston Gardens with him?

  Also possibly unanswerable.

  6.  How had the murderer persuaded Drebber to take poison without putting a mark on him?

  What alternative was so dreadful? What threat could the murderer possibly be holding over Drebber? Or, alternatively, did Drebber not know it was poison? Was the murderer someone he trusted?

  7.  RACHE

  Why write that on the wall? Was the murderer a German socialist? Was the word really RACHEL? If so, who was Rachel and how was she tied to that damned dissolution feather? No one could have two such fearsome causes, even against a thug like Drebber. Could an angel be named Rachel?

  I stopped and thought about that. There was, so far as I knew, no reason an angel couldn’t be named Rachel. They generally got their names from their habitations, but Crow was proof that they could have names even without one.

  Had Crow picked his own name? Could an angel choose to be named Rachel?

  I wrote those questions down and continued:

  8.  The murderer

  Speculating about his motive was an alluring but ultimately pointless exercise. I simply didn’t have enough information. But there were things worth writing down: The murderer was (a) someone Drebber knew and trusted or (b) someone Drebber DID NOT KNOW. A chance-met acquaintance was much more likely to arouse suspicion than a complete stranger—which perhaps said something odd about the human psyche. The murderer knew London well enough t
o know that No. 3, Lauriston Gardens was abandoned—possibly even that people were worried about ghosts. If a constable admitted to unease, the anxiety had to be pretty widespread. But the murderer—apparently not afraid of ghosts, but I supposed a man who carried a dissolution feather with him probably wouldn’t be—knew that No. 3 was a safe place to go to conduct a quiet bit of murder.

  PERSUASIVE, I wrote and then went back and underlined it. The murderer had either persuaded Drebber to kill himself, which seemed ridiculously improbable, or had persuaded him to swallow something under the pretense that it would … And there I was stumped. In an abandoned house in the middle of the night, what in God’s name would you agree to swallow? What could you possibly have that needed to be cured that badly?

  Another avenue of useless speculation.

  Before I could regroup and try again, Crow burst back into the room as precipitously as he had left. “I found one!” he said triumphantly.

  “One what?”

  “A wedding band with an inscription,” he said and held out a gold band, chased with a delicate pattern of ivy leaves and with a line of engraving running around the inside.

  “What on Earth…?” I couldn’t even articulate the question.

  But Crow understood. “If someone comes, and it’s not the right person. We can’t just say, ‘Oh yes, we found a dissolution feather.’ Now we’ve got something to show them.”

  “You went…”

  “To Oliphant’s pawnshop. They know me there; they’ll send a bill.”

  “And bought someone’s wedding ring?”

  “Well, they’d pawned it.”

  “Some poor woman had to pawn her wedding ring, and you’re going to use it as a ploy?”

  “… As a ploy to catch a murderer,” Crow said, frowning.

  “What does the inscription say?”

  “Just a date and some initials. Doyle, the whole case was covered in dust. She’s not going to come back for it.”

  “I don’t know that that makes it any better,” I said. I would have liked to slam out of the room, the way I had done in my parents’ house, but I could neither spring to my feet nor stride to the door. My dramatic exit would be a farce.

  “I don’t understand your objection,” Crow said stiffly.

  “No, I’m well aware that you don’t,” said I.

  “Do you have a better suggestion?”

  “No, of course not.” I felt myself deflate, my anger vanishing like a soap bubble. “And who knows, perhaps she pawned her wedding ring for money to escape her husband. Perhaps she never intended to come back for it.”

  Crow’s head was tilted in his most birdlike fashion. “Your objection is based on the feelings of the woman who once owned the ring?”

  “No … yes … maybe, I don’t know.”

  “Well, that was comprehensive,” he said dryly.

  “I’m trying to prevent the words ‘common decency’ from coming out of my mouth,” I said.

  Crow looked, if anything, more baffled. “Is there something indecent about the operation of pawnshops? I thought they were perfectly legal.”

  I started laughing, which only worsened his perplexity. Finally, I said, “No, there is nothing illegal about pawnshops. I meant only that it seems callous to purchase a wedding ring, which has a great deal of symbolism and emotional freight, for use in a distinctly Machiavellian ploy.”

  “Oh,” Crow said. He had read The Prince; I knew because we had discussed it before, particularly the infamous passage about ends and means. He pondered for a long moment and said, “I think I understand your objection, but I don’t agree with you.”

  “You believe that your means are justified by your end?”

  “I think my means do not need any particular justification. It’s not as if I walked up to the woman on the street and demanded her wedding ring. She pawned it, Doyle, not I.”

  “No, I know,” I said. “You are correct. You have done nothing wrong.”

  He frowned at me—Crow was unfamiliar with human beings’ more private emotions, but not insensitive to them.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Do you truly think we are likely to get false claimants?”

  Crow said, “I have every faith in the average Londoner’s curiosity and acquisitiveness. I only hope we may not be mobbed.”

  In the event, we had four callers that evening, three of whom were bowled out by their own lack of imagination, one of whom correctly/incorrectly guessed a wedding ring—and had a particularly affecting story to go with the guess—but could not supply the inscription. After she had left, I said to Crow, “I’ve been thinking about some things,” and read him the notes I had made earlier.

  “That’s quite good, Doyle,” Crow said, with such enthusiasm that it was not at all patronizing. “I didn’t think you’d take such an interest.”

  My face heated. “I’ve little enough to do,” I said, “and I have never been able to resist a puzzle.”

  “Well, it’s good news for me. I was afraid you’d leave once you realized I was entertaining police officers.”

  I snorted. “I was a battlefield surgeon. My sensibilities aren’t so delicate.”

  “People can be surprisingly finicky,” Crow said, but before I could decide whether there was perhaps a hint of sadness in his voice, he said briskly, “Well. What next?”

  “I trust that question is rhetorical,” I said.

  “No, I’m quite serious. You’re an intelligent person, and I value your opinion. What do you think should be our next step?”

  “We still don’t have any idea why Drebber stood still to be murdered.”

  “No, you’re right,” said Crow. “And that honestly makes no sense at all. Unless he didn’t know it was poison.”

  “But why would he take it? What could the murderer possibly have claimed it was and been believed in the middle of the night in an abandoned house? You’re quite sure the murderer couldn’t have been Stangerson?”

  “From your description, yes, I am perfectly sure. But that reminds me, I must send word to Lestrade that the mouse has eluded our mousetrap tonight. I shall be back directly.”

  “I won’t have gone anywhere,” I said.

  But before Crow reached the door, we heard the bell.

  He stopped as abruptly as a child playing Statues, neck craned just slightly, listening. He said, “I think that’s Lestrade now. Yes, I’m sure of it.” He finished his rush across the room and flung the door open before Lestrade could have been halfway up the stairs. “Good evening, Inspector!” Crow said cheerfully. “Won’t you come in?”

  “Good evening, Mr. Crow,” Lestrade said, pausing on the threshold as he had before, as if checking for lurking assailants. “Dr. Doyle.”

  “Good evening, Inspector,” I said, my mother’s voice in my memory snapping at me to be civil to guests.

  “You look like a man with much to impart,” said Crow.

  The Inspector did indeed look as if he was about to explode with the force of the words pent inside him. “It’s one in the eye for Gregson!” he cried.

  “Whatever do you mean?” said Crow.

  “We’ve got him!”

  “The murderer?”

  “Yes, indeed. Lieutenant Arthur Charpentier of Her Majesty’s Navy.”

  “Charpentier,” Crow said sharply. “That’s a lupine name, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Lestrade.

  “You think a werewolf murdered Mr. Drebber?”

  I was as taken aback as Crow. Werewolves, tending as they did to live in their enclaves apart from human society, rarely had any reason to murder human beings. And when they did, it was almost always a matter of lupine justice, and the murderer torn to bits by the rending teeth of the pack.

  “I think a werewolf with a beautiful sister murdered Mr. Drebber,” Lestrade corrected.

  “… Oh dear,” said Crow.

  “Mrs. Charpentier is a widow, and to support herself and her children, she runs a boardinghouse. Most of her cli
entele are cabmen and factory workers, but she accepts transients from time to time, and she told me that Drebber and Stangerson were paying a pound a day each. That was why she put up with Drebber accosting the servants and being over-familiar with her daughter Alice. But finally Drebber got stinking drunk and actually grabbed Alice and kissed her.”

  “He was lucky he wasn’t dead then and there,” I said.

  “Alice was apparently too stunned to react,” Lestrade said. “She seems to have been quite sheltered despite her mother’s rough customers.”

  “You don’t have to be bourgeois to know better than to insult a werewolf like that,” I said. “Arthur must not have been home at the time.”

  “No,” Lestrade agreed. “His ship is in dry dock, so although he’s sleeping at home, he is exceedingly busy.”

  “And Mrs. Charpentier herself?” said Crow.

  “Mrs. Charpentier did not come upon the scene until after Stangerson and one of the other boarders had got Drebber off Miss Charpentier, and she is a woman who has lived among humans for a long time. She told me she almost never shifts anymore except with the moon.”

  “A hard way to live,” Crow said somberly.

  “The Charpentiers are a poor family, even by werewolf standards,” Lestrade said. “She had two small children, and her son has apparently been Navy-mad since he was quite young.”

  “Some werewolves feel a call to the sea,” I said. “No one understands why, but it is apparently unassuageable.”

  “She’s just paid for Arthur’s commission,” said Lestrade, “so that fourteen pounds a week got her to overlook a great deal—but she couldn’t overlook this. Even Stangerson was disgusted. She asked them to leave, and they did. But Drebber came back.” Lestrade seemed to enjoy our horrified silence. “Drebber came back, even more drunk, and proposed to Alice.”

  “Proposed?” I said.

  “Proposed. He said”—Lestrade consulted his notebook—“‘You are of age, and there is no law to stop you. I have money enough and to spare. Never mind the old girl here, but come along with me now straightaway. You shall live like a princess.’ That was when Lieutenant Charpentier entered the room.”