Crow and I exchanged an eyebrows-raised glance.
“Well, young Charpentier shifted, all right,” said Lestrade. “He chased Drebber out of the house, and the last his mother saw of him, he was trailing Drebber down the street.”
“If he were going to kill Mr. Drebber, he would have done it then,” Crow pointed out.
“If he’d meant to kill him,” Lestrade said. “Which I don’t think he did. Not then, at any rate. He’d come back inside long enough to shift and dress, and his mother and sister both swear he wasn’t in a killing rage.”
“Was Drebber too drunk to have the wits to run?” I said.
“Charpentier’s a tracker,” said Lestrade. “And Drebber was afraid of the wolf, not of the man. He saw the wolf go inside and must have thought that was all he needed to worry about. Now, don’t make that face at me, Mr. Crow. This isn’t one of your hypotheses. This is what all three of the Charpentiers agree happened.”
“Drebber may not have known enough about werewolves to realize,” I said. “In the Colonies, werewolves have their own settlements, or they go over to the native tribes.”
“And any found in Deseret are driven out,” Crow said reluctantly, as if it pained him to have to give support of any kind to Lestrade’s story.
“And anyway,” said Lestrade, “Charpentier admits it. He says that he followed Drebber until Drebber noticed him and hailed a cab to get away from him. Then he says he encountered an old shipmate and took a long walk with him, but couldn’t tell me where the shipmate lived or what ship he’s serving on now, and the name he gave me is almost certainly false. That’s his story. I say that he encountered the shipmate before Drebber noticed him, and the two of them persuaded Drebber into that empty house with them.”
“Where they persuaded him to take poison?” Crow said. “Don’t be absurd, Lestrade.”
“Ah, now, we don’t know it’s poison he died of,” Lestrade said. “A hard enough blow to the stomach can kill a man without leaving a mark. I don’t think young Charpentier and his friend meant to kill Drebber. But when they did, they did their best to throw us off the track by writing on the wall in blood and so on.”
“And one of them just happened to have a dissolution feather on him?” demanded Crow.
“Sailors pick up all sorts of strange trinkets,” Lestrade said.
“Yes, but don’t you see,” Crow started and then clearly realized the effort was pointless.
“You do this every time, Mr. Crow,” Lestrade said, more in sorrow than in anger. “You get so caught up in the little details that you can’t see the big picture.”
Crow’s wings mantled at that, and he snapped, “And how many times have I been wrong?”
“Well, you’ve made some lucky guesses,” Lestrade allowed, “but—”
“Guesses nothing! I’ve made deductions and extrapolations from those ‘little details.’ And I have been right.”
“Well,” said Lestrade in a tone I recognized from years of my brother arguing with my father, and I realized I had to intervene. They could easily be here all night.
I said hastily, “It won’t wash, Inspector. You can kill a man with a hard enough blow to the solar plexus, but you can’t send him into convulsions. And Crow only found footprints for one murderer.”
“Charpentier and his friend could have been wearing the same sort of shoes,” Lestrade said stubbornly.
“And carefully walked only in each other’s footprints even before they killed him?” Crow said scornfully. “I assure you, even if they had, it would have shown in the marks they left. Dr. Doyle is right, Inspector. It won’t wash.”
Lestrade looked both annoyed and rather hurt. “Well, we’ll see,” he said. “We’re still looking for Charpentier’s friend and I’ve a number of other things to do, what with Gregson and them wasting their time in Whitechapel. I just came by to give you the news. Good evening, Mr. Crow, good evening, Dr. Doyle.” And he stalked out.
“Poor Lestrade,” said Crow. “He tries so hard and there’s no one more dogged, but he’s just dreadfully bad at putting the story of a crime together.”
“Do you think Lieutenant Charpentier is in any danger?” I said.
“Of having a very uncomfortable couple of days? Yes. Of being convicted? No. Gregson will laugh this theory of Lestrade’s to scorn as soon as he hears it. They hate each other.”
“Which is such a splendid method for Her Majesty’s justice to be served by,” I said.
“At least they have the wits to come to me,” said Crow.
* * *
I spent a restless night, but no worse than that.
I had not yet finished dressing when there was a tap on my door. It was Jennie, looking scared. “Please, sir, there’s a policeman asking to see either you or Mr. Crow, and Mr. Crow’s gone out.”
“All right, Jennie. Show him up.”
I came out in my dressing gown, expecting Lestrade, but it was someone else.
Detective Inspector Gregson was taller than Lestrade, fair-haired, with gray eyes in a square, bullying face. I disliked him instantly.
And it seemed the feeling was mutual, for he said, “So, Dr. Doyle, I’ve heard a great deal about you from Inspector Lestrade,” in a way that indicated a profound disbelief in everything he’d been told. I half expected him to demand to see my medical diploma.
I said pleasantly, “Lestrade has also said a great deal about you, Inspector.”
Gregson took my meaning easily and flushed brick-red. He said, “I understand you knew the murdered man?”
“I encountered him once,” I said, “on the airship between Paris and London.”
“Not an amiable encounter,” he said.
“No, decidedly not.”
“Have you encountered either Drebber or Stangerson since you arrived in London?”
“No.”
“Do you know the Charpentiers?”
“No.” I fell prey to a horrid suspicion. “You don’t think that I…”
His face was stony. “It seems like a remarkable coincidence.”
“That Drebber should be murdered, or that I should happen, by virtue of being Crow’s flatmate, to encounter his corpse? Because I can assure you there’s nothing remarkable about the former at all, and the latter seems even more implausible if you assume it was somehow planned. Why should I do such a thing?”
“To divert suspicion from yourself,” Gregson nearly snarled.
“But that’s ludicrous. I wasn’t under suspicion to begin with, for the very good reason that I’ve had nothing to do with Drebber since disembarking from the Sophy Anderson. And I didn’t kill him.”
“You’re a doctor,” Gregson countered. “It’d be no great difficulty for you to get your hands on poison.”
“But I didn’t,” I said through my teeth. “I had reason to detest Drebber, but not reason to kill him. And Crow will tell you I neither go out nor have visitors. In fact, since he never sleeps and can hear everything that happens in this house, he can tell you I was here all night the night that Drebber died.” I wondered, with a chill, what else Crow might be able to tell someone who asked the right questions.
Gregson was scowling, and he said, “Lestrade warned me you were clever,” as if “clever” was the worst thing he could say about anyone. “But just because you have an answer for everything…” He shook his head like a man trying to rid himself of a gnat. “You see, it’s ridiculous to think a strong young man like Charpentier would resort to poison—”
“Lestrade doesn’t think Drebber was poisoned,” I said, mostly to goad him.
“Lestrade’s an idiot,” he said. “Drebber was obviously poisoned, and the man who uses poison is the man who doubts his ability to defeat his opponent any other way.” And he looked meaningfully at my cane.
“Tell me how I compelled him to swallow poison,” I said.
Gregson’s smile was not pleasant. “You’re a doctor—as Drebber knew—and Drebber was very drunk. If you’d told h
im it was a hangover cure, I think he would have believed you.”
“That’s really rather good, Gregson,” Crow said from the doorway, and Gregson and I both jumped a foot. “Much better than your usual efforts—but I’m afraid it just won’t do. Dr. Doyle did not make the footprints I found at the scene, and did not leave the flat on the night of Drebber’s murder. I will swear any oath you like.”
Gregson’s scowl swung from me to Crow. It was deliberately nonsensical for Crow to talk about swearing an oath; Gregson knew as well as I did that angels do not lie. “He could have suborned someone into acting as a proxy.”
“Who?” Crow said. “Me? Mrs. Climpson? Jennie MacArthur? Dr. Doyle doesn’t see anyone else—certainly not on the sort of terms you’d have to be on to ask someone to commit murder on your behalf.”
While I was grateful for Crow’s support, I wished he could have found a more tactful way to say I had no friends.
Gregson looked unconvinced—half (I thought) his unwillingness to give up a beautiful theory and half the mutual antipathy that had sprung up like a thicket of swords between us. But he got no chance to argue, because there was a commotion at the front door we all could hear, and Crow swung nimbly out of the way as Lestrade came up the stairs.
Crow said, “Inspector! What can we do for you?”
Lestrade looked from Crow to me with troubled eyes—and winced at the sight of Gregson. “We’ve found Stangerson.”
“And yet somehow this seems not to be splendid news,” Crow said cautiously.
“He’s dead,” said Lestrade. “Stabbed to death in his hotel room.”
“Stabbed to death?” Crow said.
“Viciously,” said Lestrade.
“Well, that’s not surprising,” Crow said. “This murderer hates his victims as much as anyone has ever hated their fellow creatures. But … stabbed. Tell me about the scene.”
“So I had my constables canvass around Euston Station, and one of them struck gold at Halliday’s Private Hotel in Little George Street. He came and fetched me first thing this morning, and I got the boots to take me up—which he wouldn’t do for a constable. He’d got orders to wake Stangerson at six o’clock. I told him I’d take care of it, but as it turned out Mr. Stangerson was beyond waking. The first thing I saw when we turned the corner was a trickle of blood, red as anything, running from under Stangerson’s door to puddle against the opposite baseboard. It was already clotting.”
Crow’s wings rustled, but he said nothing.
Lestrade continued, “The boots turned green, and I thought he was going to faint, but he pulled himself together and ran to get the passkey from the head housekeeper, which spared me a sore shoulder. I unlocked the door, since the boots had used up his courage, and went in.”
Lestrade sighed. “The room was a shambles. Stangerson hadn’t sold his life cheaply: the chair was overturned and everything had been swept off the writing desk, the bedclothes were all in a wad on the floor, and there were bloody handprints everywhere. I asked the boots—him wringing his hands in the doorway like an old maid—and he said the rooms to either side were unoccupied. The gentleman had specifically asked for a quiet room. The body was huddled on the floor under the open window. He’d been stabbed in the side and had slashes on his hands and forearms like he’d been fending off a knife. The word ‘RACHE’ had been written in blood on the wall right beside the window and—oh yes—there were two pills in a chip ointment box on the windowsill.”
“Pills?” Crow said, almost quivering, like a hunting dog who has found a scent. “What sort of pills?”
“They were rather odd,” Lestrade said, although he looked puzzled—as was I—at Crow’s intensity. “I think I’ve still got them.” He dug in his pockets, while Crow watched, looking as if he would rather just turn Lestrade upside down and shake him. “Here we go.”
Crow was immediately there, inspecting the pills minutely. “May I show these to Dr. Doyle?” he asked and did not wait for Lestrade’s nod to snatch the box and bring it across the room to where I was sitting. “What do you make of them, Doyle?”
“They’re very odd,” I said, and they were, translucent gray and almost perfectly spherical. “And I must tell you that I will not volunteer to swallow them.”
“Good heavens, no,” Crow said. “I can’t lose the best flatmate I’ve ever found. And in any event, we don’t need to test them to know they contain poison. Mr. Drebber did that for us.”
“But how on Earth did the murderer persuade him?” I asked. “It’s not like you can just walk up to people on the street, hand them pills, and expect them to swallow them.”
“And why are there two of them?” Crow said, scowling. “Is there some third man in danger of his life?”
“We won’t know until he turns up dead,” said I.
Gregson was frowning. “You think those pills are poison?”
“Strychnine, to be exact,” said Crow. “If Mr. Lestrade will remember, Dr. Doyle said as much over Drebber’s body.”
“Why would the murderer leave them behind?” Lestrade said, also frowning.
“He must not have needed them anymore,” Crow said, although dubiously. “And why are there two of them?”
“And how did the murderer escape?” I said.
Lestrade snorted. “Bold as brass down a ladder. We found a man who saw him and thought nothing of it. Said he was a big man with a long, dull-colored coat, but that’s as much description as I could get.”
“He has the Devil’s own luck,” I said.
“He does, at that,” Lestrade agreed.
Crow was still scowling at those two innocent-looking pills. “I would understand the whole sequence of events if I could just figure out why there are two,” he said. He started pacing the length of the sitting room, an alarming practice, both because the sitting room was not truly large enough to accommodate it and because it was a sign of agitation, and if sufficiently agitated, Crow would forget—no matter how heartfelt his apologies were afterward for the overturned furniture and broken china. I had taken a wing full in the face once and could only count myself lucky it hadn’t broken my nose.
Gregson and Lestrade looked alarmed enough that I surmised they had witnessed the phenomenon—and its consequences—before. Lestrade said, in an obvious attempt at distraction, “We’ve released Lieutenant Charpentier, of course, and I wrote him a letter for his captain. He was quite decent about it, said he was only sorry that Drebber had been so drunk there’d been no chance of a fair fight.”
“A fair fight,” Crow said absently. Then more slowly, “A fair fight.” Then exultantly, “A fair fight! That’s it!” Gregson and I ducked as his wings swept wide, just barely missing the breakfast table. The sensation of being brushed by Crow’s feathers never stopped being unearthly and a little unpleasant.
“What’s it?” I said crossly.
“Oh, sorry. But that’s why there’s two. For a fair fight.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “How can two poison pills be more fair than one?”
“That’s just it!” said Crow. “One of them isn’t poison!”
“One of them isn’t poison?” Lestrade said.
“Yes! He offered them a wager. Two pills, one harmless, one lethal. Each man swallows one. One man dies. Drebber must have taken the wager, while Stangerson preferred to make a wager of his own. Both of them lost. And because this murderer is in some ways a very careless man, he left the pills meant for Stangerson behind. He didn’t need them anymore.”
“But why would anyone proceed in such a lunatic fashion?” I said. “Why would you deliberately give yourself a fifty-fifty chance of death by strychnine?”
“The answer to that question must lie in the history between the murderer and Drebber and Stangerson. I haven’t even a guess. It does seem a terribly inefficient way to go about the matter.”
“Inefficient is one word,” I said dryly.
“This is all well and good,” Lestrade said, in
a tone indicating it was neither, “but it gets me no closer to finding the man.”
Crow’s attention had been attracted by something outside. “If you’ll give me just a minute, I believe I can help you with that, as well. I say, Lestrade, have you ever seen handcuffs like these? They’ve got a spring mechanism and they lock on themselves. It’s quite beautiful.”
Lestrade gave me an eloquently baffled look. I could only shrug in return.
“They do seem rather clever,” he said—a bachelor admiring his neighbor’s infant—“but what do they have to say to anything?”
“You’ll see in a minute,” Crow said, eyes gleaming mischievously as he tucked the handcuffs in his inner coat pocket.
There was a tap at the door.
“Come in!” Crow shouted.
It was a Nameless, who said, in the soft, genderless, idiosyncrasy-free voice that all the Nameless shared, “The cab’s downstairs, sir.”
“Excellent,” said Crow. “Have the cabdriver step up here a moment, and come back yourself. I’ve got something bulky to transport.”
The Nameless slipped silently out, and Crow smiled apologetically. “Sorry about the interruption, but this shouldn’t take long.”
We could hear the cabman thumping up the stairs. He was a big man, very red in the face, wearing a long overcoat the same color as his mouse-brown hair. I realized who he was and how the pieces fit together at the same time I realized that Crow, drat him, was all too capable of lying by omission.
“Thank you for coming up,” Crow said to the cabman. “I’m afraid this may be a little difficult, but I had to get your help. Because, you see, I know what you’ve done.”
The cabman wheeled to bolt, but the Nameless was in the way, whether on purpose or not I could not tell. I saw the snarl on the cabman’s face, more like an animal’s than anything human. Crow caught his wrist and fastened the handcuff on it in one motion, and the cabman went berserk. I use the word precisely, for I had seen the phenomenon before, although never in a Marylebone sitting room.
The Angel of the Crows Page 7