The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “Yes,” I said, truthfully enough—although clairvoyance was not a science and its results were not admissible as evidence, I had every respect for those who achieved their certification—and changed the subject. “Mrs. Bernstone, how many of the servants knew what Bartholomew Sholto was doing in the attic?”

  She looked at me as if I’d asked her to eat her planchette. “All of us.” She sighed at my expression. “Even the stupidest person would notice the two of them digging up all the gardens like a pair of rabbits, and then Mr. Bartholomew going up and down the house measuring everything and muttering to himself, and then he shuts himself in the attic, and you could hear the noise of him tearing a hole in the ceiling in every corner of the house. And then he sends for Mr. Thaddeus and they’re up there yelling at each other and Mr. Thaddeus comes down all dusty—which is not like Mr. Thaddeus at all—and muttering about fairness and equal shares … how could we not know?”

  “I see your point,” I said. “Is there anyone, do you think, who might have mentioned the treasure to someone else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s the timing,” I said. “How did the … the people who stole the treasure know it was here?”

  Mrs. Bernstone’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “You really think—”

  “Not on purpose,” I said hastily. “But if the thief had cultivated a relationship with someone, they might not think anything of passing along the latest gossip.”

  I thought for a moment I had mortally offended this gentle elderly lady, but she considered my proposition, then said, “No. The menservants are all Indians, and they would never discuss Mr. Bartholomew’s business with an outsider. And the maids sleep out. They weren’t here when Mr. Thaddeus came and they weren’t here when he left. Isn’t it more likely that this person did exactly what you’re trying to do to find him?” And she nodded at Miss Morstan, who was leaning intently over the bowl of water.

  “It’s too dark,” she said. “Wherever he is, it’s too dark to see anything.”

  “Do you receive anything at all?”

  “Only the reek of the Thames, and that hardly narrows it down.” She stepped back from the table. “I’m sorry, Dr. Doyle. That’s all I have.”

  “Thank you for trying,” I said and smiled at her more warmly than I should have. “I’ll let you and Mrs. Bernstone get back to your planchette work.”

  She gave me a dryly unamused, very governess-ish look, but said only, “Good luck.”

  First we had to clear the hurdle of the police. They arrived in the person of a Detective Inspector Athelney Jones, who seemed inclined to treat Crow as a sort of dancing bear, and a dour Sergeant Forbes, who seemed to feel that Bartholomew Sholto had died with the intent of affronting him. They brought Thaddeus Sholto with them; he was, if possible, even more affronted than Sergeant Forbes, radiating wounded dignity like a wet cat. Mrs. Bernstone sprang into action when she saw him, making a hot toddy and fussing over him until he drank it—and did he look pleased by the attention!—and then bundling him willy-nilly off to bed.

  I spent an interminable length of time talking to Sergeant Forbes, who was determined to make everything I said a lie—or at best simply wrong. If I thought he did it on purpose, I would call it a very clever technique, since there is nothing more infuriating than being called a liar when you’re telling the truth and nothing more likely to make you say more than you meant to.

  When finally I escaped from him, I found Crow and Miss Morstan waiting for me in the hall. She said, without preamble, “Dr. Doyle, I have to find my father.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Do you need my help with something?”

  She was blushing. “I tried to explain it to Mr. Crow, but I don’t think he understands.”

  “And you think I will?”

  “You have a family,” she said, and I didn’t wince. “I’m sure you know what it’s like to lose a loved one, although”—and she managed a wan smile—“not quite as literally as I have.”

  “What can we do to help?”

  I got a much better smile, and she said, “I think if I am to reach Father or get any information about his death, I need to use Major Sholto’s study, but I’ve no idea where it is.”

  “Well, that, at least, is simple. We ask.”

  There were four of Major Sholto’s Indian servants remaining, one having died and one having gone with Thaddeus Sholto to that awful row house. I was not sure what all of them did, but the butler was a man named Narhari Rao. We found him easily enough, in the kitchen, drinking a strong cup of tea, which I was sure he needed after being interviewed by Athelney Jones.

  “Of course, sir,” he said, his English as beautiful as the khitmutgar’s, when I asked about Major Sholto’s study. He led us easily through a warren of dark-paneled hallways, all luxuriously decorated with Indian treasures and carpeted with Indian carpets. And what must it be like for him, spending his life in a foreign country, surrounded by stolen reminders of his home?

  “I’m surprised Major Sholto returned to England at all,” I said to Miss Morstan.

  “He does seem to have been obsessed,” she agreed and then was visibly struck by an idea. “Mr. Rao, did you know my father? Captain Arthur Morstan?”

  Rao glanced back at her, sympathy in his eyes. “Of course, miss. He visited Major Sholto many times in Port Blair. He was a good man.”

  “Thank you,” said Miss Morstan. “But you never saw him in England?”

  “No, miss. Here is the Major’s study. Mr. Sholto does—did not use it, preferring a room upstairs for his chemical experiments.” He opened the door and gravely ushered us in, as if we were invited guests instead of nosy intruders.

  “Thank you, Rao,” I said.

  He bowed to us both, and slightly more deeply to Crow, and departed, hopefully back to the kitchen and the cup of tea we had interrupted.

  The study, like the rest of the main floor, was dark-paneled and littered with Indian art and artifacts at the value of which I could not even guess. It was like a much larger version of Thaddeus Sholto’s room—or rather, I supposed, his room was a much smaller version of this.

  “Oh dear,” said Miss Morstan. “My father would have been very angry about this. He was a man of principle, and he believed very strongly that looting was criminally wrong.”

  Crow was frowning. “How could he have been friends with Major Sholto, who clearly believed the opposite?”

  “I don’t know,” Miss Morstan said helplessly. “Unless the Major did not display his treasures openly in Port Blair.”

  “But felt perfectly safe doing so in England,” I said. “And he could hardly clear the house of them before your father’s visit.”

  “Not if Father arrived unannounced,” she agreed.

  “But it isn’t as if your father could have done anything. Major Sholto is hardly the only—or the worst—offender.”

  “That’s what angered Father the most, that almost no one even considered it a crime—certainly not a serious one. He used to say, ‘Imagine if they were looting Buckingham Palace.’ Oh, it infuriated him.”

  “This reunion of two old friends must have been anything but cordial,” I said.

  “If Father did have a weak heart, I would be inclined to believe that part of Major Sholto’s story. But I know he would have told me.” She looked around the room with mingled awe and distaste. “This collection must be worth thousands of pounds.”

  “What do you need for what you want to do? Not, I hope, a planchette.”

  “No,” she said and turned a laugh into a cough. “Oh dear, it is just the most dreadful nonsense, but of course I couldn’t say so. For this, I just need something…” She looked around the room. “Ideally, something they both touched, but something Major Sholto handled frequently will do.”

  “Here,” I said. “I imagine this knife is on his desk because he used it as a letter opener.” It was a lovely little thing, a paring knife with a jeweled handle.

&nbs
p; “Perfect,” she said and took it from me, our fingers brushing for an instant.

  “And you don’t need water?”

  “That’s for distance,” she said. “Did your sisters not learn clairvoyancy?”

  “I have no sisters,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, divining from my voice that the topic was a sensitive one. Instead of prying, as most people would, she said, “Water doesn’t help when you’re trying to see spirits, and I’ve never had much luck with it in scrying the past. Mirrors are best for all kinds of clairvoyancy, but one can hardly carry around a scrying mirror all the time. They need to be at least a foot in diameter. But, although I don’t like to brag, I am certified, and I think I can manage with just a focus.”

  She sat down in one of the wing chairs, the knife cupped carefully in her hands. I sat in the other chair and Crow paced thoughtfully back and forth in front of the desk. I was worried for a few moments that Miss Morstan would find him distracting; then I saw that she had her eyes closed, and he, of course, made no sound.

  After a span of time that was more than five minutes but less than fifteen, Miss Morstan said softly, not opening her eyes, “I can feel Major Sholto’s greed. It’s all through this room like a suffocating fog. And I can see him at his desk, looking at his treasures and thinking about the hidden treasure, the Agra treasure. He almost panics when he thinks of it, because he stole it and he’s afraid of the people he stole it from.”

  Crow had stopped pacing and was watching Miss Morstan with an intensity that suggested he was trying to dissect her with his gaze alone.

  “And there’s guilt,” she said. “Guilt about my father. There! I’ve found it. I can see my father coming in. He is angry. They talk. He reproaches Major Sholto. He says they had an agreement. They argue. Major Sholto is defensive, desperate. He offers to share the Agra treasure, half and half, and my father leaps to his feet. He’s going to go to the I.A.F. Major Sholto comes around the desk to plead with him, but my father is adamant, and he’s deeply offended that Major Sholto would think he would accept a bribe. He says, ‘This conversation is over,’ and turns to leave, and Major Sholto picks up the paperweight from the desk and hits him over the head with it.”

  Crow and I stared at the paperweight, an elaborately etched brass globe that certainly looked heavy enough to kill a man.

  “My father falls to the floor and Major Sholto looks down at him for a moment and then gets down on his knees and … oh God, no! No!” Her eyes snapped open; she flung the knife across the room, narrowly missing Crow, and burst into bitter tears.

  Crow came and knelt down beside my chair and whispered, “What should we do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “She’s just learned that her father was brutally murdered by his best friend. Let her cry. I have no knack for comforting, and I beg you not to attempt it.”

  “All right,” Crow said, although he looked worried.

  As I expected, Miss Morstan did not cry for long. She regained her composure within a few minutes and said, “He deliberately beat my father’s skull in until he was sure he was dead. Oh, that monster!” She shuddered. “I do not wish to stay in this dreadful house another minute.”

  Crow said, “But your father’s body—”

  “No,” said Miss Morstan. “He is not in the house, and I cannot bear to imagine what that fiend might have done with his body.”

  “I do not blame you,” said I. “Come. Let us find Williams the coachman and get you home.”

  “I will call on you and Mr. Crow this afternoon at six to find out what you learn.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Williams, too, we found, had gravitated to the kitchen, where he was playing cards with Lal Singh, one of the Indian servants whose duties I did not know. Williams was astute enough to see that Miss Morstan had been crying, and he agreed at once to take her to Mrs. Cecil Forrester’s house. “And you gentlemen?” he said.

  “Thank you, no,” Crow said. “We have a prior engagement.”

  14

  Tracking by Cerberus

  We found McMurdo in the garden, waiting by the wall where the two murderers had gotten into the grounds. The wall, with its glass shards, was as forbidding as ever, but there was, almost like an optical illusion, a pattern of missing half bricks, which, if you looked at them the right way, made an obvious ladder leading up to the exact corner, where there was no glass.

  We walked down to the main gate, open for the police officers coming and going, and then back along the other side of the wall to the same corner, where, as Crow had confidently predicted, we found a hex-ward lying in the gravel. “It must have gotten too hot to be bearable,” said Crow, kneeling to take a closer look. “It’s a good one, though. Custom built.”

  “He learns from experience,” I said. “A better hex-ward and a better escape method. That must be why Bartholomew Sholto bought McMurdo to watch that gate.”

  “Yes,” said Crow. “And yes.”

  “Can we find out who made the hex-ward? That might be an easier way of finding the murderer’s identity.”

  “Possibly,” said Crow. He pulled out a handkerchief and gingerly picked the ward up. “It’s still warm.”

  “Wait!” I said, assailed by a qualm. “Should we not show this to the police?”

  Crow snorted. “Jones thinks Thaddeus Sholto killed his brother. I’m not going to give him more ammunition.”

  “But…”

  “Later, Doyle! When we’ve gotten as much information from it as we can. For now, let us follow McMurdo, who has caught the murderers’ trail.”

  Cerberus automata do not track by scent. They track the psychic residue that human beings leave on everything they touch. This makes them particularly formidable, for while you may disguise your scent or cross your trail, you cannot disguise your psyche. It is possible to “shake” a cerberus, but it is not easy, and we were wagering that the persons we were after, not expecting to be tracked by a prohibitively expensive cerberus, would not even try.

  McMurdo proceeded steadily, but not fast—its short legs and broad body were not built with speed in mind—and Crow and I followed, away from Pondicherry Lodge and into a maze of alleys and side streets. We were headed toward the Thames, and after a while we left behind the residential neighborhoods, finding ourselves walking among warehouses and odd, secretive shops, and the air grew heavier and heavier with the indescribable stench of the river.

  As we walked, Crow described his encounter with Athelney Jones. “It’s not that he’s a stupid man—he’s brighter than Gregson, for one—but he comes up with a theory and then moves the facts around to match it. The problem is that he’s so frequently correct, he’s gotten out of the habit of imagining that he could be wrong.” He sighed, then brightened. “At least I annoy him nearly as much as he annoys me, so that’s something. Due north. He’s heading for Whitechapel.”

  “Cheap doss-houses and no questions asked,” I said.

  “And right in the shadow of Victoria’s Needle,” said Crow. “Endless throngs of strangers to lose yourself in.”

  The damaged muscles in my leg were beginning to burn with fatigue. To distract myself, I said, “If Inspector Jones has a theory, then you must have one as well.”

  “I do!” he said, laughing.

  “Tell me your theory,” said I.

  “It is not very complicated,” he said, but I could tell he was pleased to be asked. “An officer of a convict guard comes into possession of a treasure map. The most likely way for this to happen is that a convict draws it for him. Draws it and signs it in English with the rather dramatic ‘the Sign of the Four,’ which may suggest something about his reading habits. Now, of those four names, only one of them is obviously that of a native English speaker.”

  “Jonathan Small,” I said.

  “Exactly. Therefore, I think it’s safe to proceed on the theory that Jonathan Small drew the map. And furthermore that Jonathan Small is the wooden-legged man of whom Majo
r Sholto was so terrified.”

  “Economy of persons,” I said approvingly.

  “Just so. And we see that the Major was right to be worried, since Small caused the death of the Major’s heir. Why this unrelenting anger? Either Sholto stole the map or he received the map in exchange for a promise that he did not keep.”

  “Release,” I said. “The one thing every convict wants.”

  “I would guess that Major Sholto recklessly promised something he knew he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—deliver, secure in the knowledge that by far the most likely outcome was that all four men would die in prison.”

  “But Small did not.”

  “No. And in the meantime, somehow Captain Morstan learned what was going on—learned and was infuriated. I would guess that he was angry at Sholto for taking the treasure—but also for the entire transaction with Small, as Sholto effectively took a bribe and then reneged. That’s why Sholto had to silence Morstan. The Armed Forces might turn a blind eye to despoliation, but they feel very strongly about bribery. And most officers are gallant men, who pride themselves on upholding their oaths. But you know that better than I do.”

  I waved his apologetic grimace away. “Then Sholto, what? Gave Morstan the map to keep him quiet?”

  “As token of an agreement of some sort. Remember what Miss Morstan said.”

  “But Sholto reneged again. He murdered Morstan and was scared to death by Small.”

  “Yes, for a treasure he hoarded up in that unspeakably grim attic, unseen and unknown. It hardly seems worth it, especially when one factors in Jonathan Small. I think the letter Sholto received in 1882 was either from a friend still in India, warning him that Small had escaped, or from Small himself, since clearly he knew where Sholto lived.”

  “Sholto must have thought he had nothing to worry about, with Morstan dead.”

  “The Major doesn’t seem to have been much gifted with foresight,” said Crow.

  “Small escapes, makes it back to England, scares Major Sholto to death, and waits for the Sholto sons to find his treasure for him.” I told him Mrs. Bernstone’s theory about Small hiring a scryer.