And I was wholly out of opium.
Finally, my patience—or at least my stubborn hope—was rewarded. I heard Ishmael Communion’s distinctively heavy tread long before he loomed from the dark.
I stepped out of my vantage point. “Ishmael.”
“There you are, girl.” Like everyone else, he had no name to call me by, but it didn’t bother him. He’d always called me girl. One day, I assumed I would have to give him some kind of nomme de plume, but I hadn’t found a good reason.
I answered to girl easily.
“Thank God,” I sighed. “The kinchin cove found you.” That was Ishmael-speak for, I had always assumed, grubby yet useful young criminal. I’d picked up some of his vulgar street language along the way.
His broad, flat face split into a smile. “Easy.” It faded quickly. “You’ve never called by day.”
“I know it.” Quickly, I outlined the circumstances. His features registered no recognition as I said Woolsey’s name, nor any flicker of familiarity when I described the exhibit warehouse.
But they darkened as I got to the bit about my plan. “You want us to crack a case in that Square?” he asked, frowning. “By day?”
“It’s not as if you haven’t worked by day before,” I pointed out, dry as a desert in summer. I waved my hand in the gray air. “Day’s not exactly bright below the drift, right?”
He grunted. After a moment’s silence, I realized Ishmael was studying me oddly, and I barely kept from wincing. It was statements like that, which sounded as if I had the knowledge to contrast this world with the one above. Ishmael may have been part of a brutal gang, blessed with a face only a kind soul could love, but he wasn’t stupid.
I hastened to add, “I’ll pay you for it.”
He still looked unconvinced. “I’d have to get my cracking tools,” he rumbled. “Bess and glim, just in case.”
I looked up into his dark face, made all the more so by the soot that invariably clung to everything. I widened my eyes, as innocuous as I could manage behind my goggles. “Zylphia hired me to take in this murderer. And I think he’s the same what murdered Rufus and Woolsey. This rotter’s killing sweets, Ish. I want to pin him.”
If possible, his expression of unease knitted even tighter. “That’s something else, girl.” His huge hands, larger than the whole of my face, fisted against each other. “This hang-in-chains, he’s long past the point of any old miller. There’s no call to be messing in his way.”
I blinked. “Er . . .” Hang-in-chains. I got that one. After a murderer was hung from the gallows, he’d be hung on display from chains for a while. Gruesome business, but hang-in-chains was vulgar dialect for “murderer.” Miller? I wasn’t sure. I frowned. “Wait, so you knew about the dying sweets?”
He nodded once. “One of mine, he found the first dove. Zylphia, she told me the rest.”
And yet I was kept in the dark? I didn’t like that thought. But I’d have to address it with Zylla later. “And he’s not known to yours?”
“Bakers?” His teeth bared, but it wasn’t a smile. Not even close. “Bad as we are, girl, this cove’s worse. That’s a whole other monster, much bigger than us.”
Monster. Ishmael was the second man to use that word to me today. I didn’t like the frisson of apprehension it caused.
If this murderer could keep the Bakers in line, he’d have to be a frightening monster, indeed. I rubbed at my cheeks beneath the line of my goggles, hoping it would suffice to ease the brewing headache from behind my eyes. “Zylphia and her girls, they’re scared, Ish. I need your help. They need your help.”
“Everyone needs help,” he rumbled. But then he sighed like a gust of wind. A heavy hand came down on my shoulder. “I’ll get my tools.”
“Thank y—”
His thick fingers tightened. “Just stay the bleeding hell away from the ripper by yourself, are you hearing me?”
I didn’t need reminding. “Oh, yes.” I blew out a hard breath. “I hear you.”
The immediate difficulty presented itself upon arriving at the Square.
“What the hell is this,” Ishmael muttered, not a question. We were wedged between two of the warehouses, half-hidden behind a pile of discarded crates and up to our ankles in alley muck. Ishmael towered over me, which meant he could see much more than I could.
I frowned at fragments of rotting wood, and the blurry patches of fog-smeared Square beyond. “What?” I demanded. “What do you see?”
“Traps.”
“Traps?”
He didn’t look down at me, but he didn’t have to. I could sense his patient effort from where I knelt. “A constable,” he clarified. “And bobbies.”
I wanted to smack my forehead in frustration. I didn’t. I was acutely aware of the lampblack I was determined not to smear today. “Of course,” I sighed. “And why not? It’s a crime scene, isn’t it?”
Ishmael wasn’t the type of man to speculate. “We’ll have to go in a back way.”
“Is there a back way?”
He grinned down at me, but said nothing. Wordlessly, he inched his barrel-chested frame back along the alley we’d come, completely unbothered by the green and black splotches of grime rubbing off against his overalls.
Grimacing, I followed, though I checked over my shoulder often.
Only the faint murmur of masculine voices ghosted through the fog behind us, but it was enough. I didn’t know what they were saying—what sort of clues would they find, I wondered?—but I worried an officer would walk by and spy us creeping along like common criminals.
Which, really, we were.
For all his size, Ishmael moved like a bloody ghost. I almost lost him twice as he bent low and darted from shadow to shadow. Much to my relief, we made it to the back end of the exhibit warehouse without any hue or cry, and Ishmael squatted by the scarred door inset a meter up from the muddy cobbles.
I let him do his magic. Ishmael was one of the best crackers I’d ever known, which largely explained the foundation of our relationship.
Within moments, he’d selected a small pry bar from a worn leather satchel he wore over his shoulder and fit it into the seam between door and stained wall. With his other hand, he wadded a thick cloth against the joint.
A sharp tug, a careful twist and the lock split.
The cloth muffled the worst of the sound and the door swung open.
I leapt lightly to the stoop and patted Ishmael on his bare head. “Brilliance.”
Again, he grinned, though he was quick to carefully replace his tools. He was, after all, a craftsman. Of sorts.
The door led directly into the warehouse proper. I recognized the mazelike array of shelves, though it was terribly surreal without the electrical hum I remembered. The lanterns were dark, suggesting the power Professor Woolsey had been using had been turned off. Perhaps by the bobbies?
Ishmael tugged the door closed, cutting out what hazy light filtered through. “Where?”
“What, rather,” I replied, my voice a low whisper. “I’d like to find a study, or some sort of storage provision where he’d keep all records.”
“Split?”
“Up ahead,” I agreed, and led the way in.
Ishmael eyed the tanks as we passed by them, but the interiors were dark. If he picked out any details, he made no noise to tell me, and we didn’t have the time to speculate on the matter. I wiggled my fingers at him as we approached a crossroads.
The very place where an earl had kissed me.
Clearing my throat, I tipped my mouth to his ear as Ishmael lowered his head to hear me. “I’ll take the left wall. Have you a timepiece?”
The look he gave me suggested I was daft to ask.
Of course he did. His mother had been the slave of a watchmaker. I’d forgotten.
“Ten minutes, here,” I said quickly, wincing at my lapse. My mind was worthless of late.
“Be careful, girl.”
“You, too. Mind the bobbies, they’ll be in and out i
f they’re still investigating.”
“I know what bobbies do, girl.”
I grinned. He probably did, better than most.
We split without another word, and Ishmael became nothing more than a soundless shadow in the dark. It amazed me that someone so large, so vital, could vanish so easily.
He could take care of himself.
I had to do the same. I traversed the dim interior as swiftly as I dared, passing row after row, tank after tank. I paused by one, cupping my gloved hand against the glass and straining to see through it. I saw no hint of its contents, and a quick scrutiny revealed no sign or label.
Had the police taken it all?
The warehouse was large, and even small sounds could echo with disturbing ease. I caught myself straining to hear every tiny sound. I felt isolated. Alone. Perhaps I was just remembering how full it had sounded with the electricity running through it.
Perhaps I was just recalling the professor’s earnest eyes, owlishly large behind his spectacles.
Ten o’clock. And I’d failed him.
Somehow, I’d come to think of the man as a victim, not a suspect. But it was hard to consider a corpse anything else. I set my jaw, hurrying across the floor. The air was cool inside. Darker than I liked for easy vision, but just dark enough—I hoped, anyway—that I had a measure of freedom from prying eyes. If the police came through, I’d hear them long before they saw me.
Sooner than I expected, I came upon one wall, its bare woodgrain dingy from lack of regular cleaning. Silhouetted crates provided a haphazard obstacle to the right, so I turned left.
Pipes thrust from the wall at various increments, some attached to flexible tubes and others left raw and unfinished. None were warm to my touch; whatever they were used for, it hadn’t been recent. Eager to find my hoped-for records, I stepped over a twisted nest of tubes.
I didn’t see the step inset just behind it. My mind expected to find floor, but my foot encountered thin air and I staggered. The pipes groaned as I caught one in each hand, swinging my body in a graceless tangle of flailing limbs. “Oof!”
My backside hit the step. Pain slammed through my tailbone, zipped up my spine and I saw stars as I stared at the ceiling, my feet splayed out in front of me.
Utterly inelegant.
For a long moment, I didn’t move. I barely even dared to breathe.
The air pulsed with anticipation. I held my breath, but there was no sound of alarm in the distance. No sign that my clumsy misstep had alerted anything but my own exasperation. Carefully, my teeth gritted and every nerve jangling in alarm, I eased up from the nest of tubes. They creaked and rustled.
Who the devil would leave something so unsafe as a stair behind a bundle of tubes?
Well, that was easy enough an answer: a preoccupied professor, clearly.
I stepped away from the clutter, dusting myself off with as much dignity as I could muster. Not that there was anyone to see me.
As if in answer, I heard a clang behind me. I froze, searching the shadows. For a long moment, even my breath stilled as I imagined all manner of things in the darkness beyond the shelves: men with weapons, monsters with fangs, even the bobbies carrying their truncheons.
I turned slowly, eyes wide behind my goggle lenses as I strained to see.
It came again, somewhere out of reach. Almost out of hearing.
“Ish?” I hissed. And immediately felt foolish. It probably was Ishmael, all the way on the other side of the warehouse. He’d likely put his cracking tools to work again.
Regardless, the sound didn’t come again. Rubbing my aching backside, I very cautiously tested the floor ahead of me with a foot. No gaps met my searching toes. No more ledges.
Grumbling under my breath, I reached for the wall and froze.
My hand passed through open air.
I’d found another room.
And I should have brought a lantern.
The room was darker than the warehouse proper, and I got a sense that it was nowhere near as large. My footsteps didn’t echo, and even the very air felt more contained.
My goggles were useless in this darkness. I set them carefully atop my head, blinking rapidly in the gloom.
Nothing moved; or at least, I didn’t hear anything. I waited for my eyes to adjust, all too mindful of the treacherous ground I’d already found by accident. Without knowing what waited for me, I didn’t dare risk falling into a hole. Or over metal piping. Or into a strange but incongruously placed collection of chimes.
One never knew, with scientists.
Over time, my eyesight began to adjust, clearing enough detail that I could walk forward in relative confidence. My initial assumptions proved to be correct; the room wasn’t terribly large, lacking entirely in windows or—near as I could tell without traversing every centimeter—other doors.
Strange shapes loomed from the murky interior as I stepped deeper in. I recognized the bulky, rectangular shape of a gurney as I came closer to it. There were no sheets atop it, no sign it had ever been used. The bare metal facing had been stripped of anything that would tell me what the professor had ever used it for.
I crouched, running my fingers along each leg. I found the wheels locked in place.
Curious, indeed. Perhaps a repurposed work table of some kind? Or a method by which his crated organs and limbs had been transferred. The tanks looked heavy. Surely Woolsey would have needed help. Barring an extra pair of hands, a gurney with wheels would do.
I was back to my theory of a second person. Perhaps, then, Woolsey wasn’t the killer at all but a victim in more ways than the obvious? Did the second person, if there was such a thing, collect the organs and pass them to the unsuspecting scientist?
I rose again, my clothing rustling faintly—the only noise daring to break the weighty silence. To my left, a wide table seemed home to a carefully cultivated morass of . . . rubbish, I thought. A tangle of twisted wires and sharpened cutters sat beside a pair of metal goblets smelted together.
I could see no viable purpose for fused goblets.
Dirty cloths and stained rags were piled on the floor beside the table, and I kicked them aside curiously. There was nothing hidden beneath. Copper coils had been left scattered across the table’s surface, some bent and others joined together by brass fittings.
It was as if the professor had only absently worked on this or that, picking it up and leaving it as the mood struck. No organization. No purpose.
A tinkerer?
The worst kind. I saw nothing of value amid the debris, nothing useful or even particularly clever. It was as if the truly useful items had been . . .
I covered my eyes with one hand. Of course! Whomever had killed Woolsey must have taken anything of value. Granted, most items a tinkerer made probably wouldn’t look like much—I still remember my first few attempts at fog protectives.
Maybe it meant, I thought slowly, that the person who’d killed Woolsey was also a tinkerer? Or familiar enough with such things to know what was useful and what wasn’t?
Or had Woolsey’s mysterious partner killed him?
It was a thought, anyway. I left the table, passing the gurney once more. As I did, a faint glint caught my eye.
I paused. Had I imagined it?
No. Something had winked, I was sure of it. A tiny, glittering gem? A sheen of paint? I crouched, surveying the gurney surface with a critical eye.
There. Again. I bent until my cheek was almost flush to the surface, my eye aligned just so. As I blinked, the light flared off tiny, almost invisible motes of . . .
Dust? Pink dust?
I touched the spot with the tip of my gloved finger. The gurney shifted, just a twitch. At the same time, I heard something that put me in mind of a footstep crunching on fine grit. I jerked upright, whirling to stare at the empty room.
Had the constable come in? Found me?
Certainly not, I thought almost immediately. I’d be arrested on the spot.
Nothing moved behind me
. Or at all. I heard no other voices. I was alone. Still, my skin was prickling most uncomfortably, and time had to be ticking closer to the designated minute of reunion.
I left the gurney again, approaching a wide shape arrayed along the far end of the room. It turned out to be a large and rather awkwardly designed switchboard. Nothing quite so ominous as it seemed in the shadows. The whole was made of metal and entirely without labels of any kind. I scrutinized the array of switches, levers and pulleys with some wariness.
If I had learned nothing else from my forays into scientific theory, I knew this: never assume a scientist’s gadgets were harmless. Many was the article about laboratory accidents, explosions or injuries caused by the unwary fumbling of the ignorant bystander.
I walked the length of the switchboard, found the pipes and tubes crawling out of either side, and thought it looked awfully similar to the smaller tank Woolsey had attempted to show me before.
But this was so much larger than the individual switch he’d pulled. What was so complex that it required this much . . .
I hesitated to use the word finesse, but the concept remained sound. This had been designed to levy as much control as possible over the electricity I was sure had been funneled through the whole structure.
As I studied the silent and still dials, my gaze fell on a small oblong shape tucked amid a series of five levers. It was crooked. Not as uniformly set as the gauges just above it.
Not a dial at all, I realized as I plucked it from its unusual nest. A brooch of some sort. I couldn’t make out any details in the gloom, but my fingers found raised edges and a beveled surface.
Squinting, I backed up toward the door, seeking even a shade more light to see by. The piece seemed . . . familiar? No, not as such. It put me in mind of something my memory was struggling to grasp; I could sense the idea just beyond reach.
As I passed the gurney, squinting at the object, the ambient light brightened just enough that I realized what I held.
Quickly, I stripped my gloves off, tossing them to the gurney to better explore the palm-sized cameo. I was wrong; there was no pin at the back of the odd piece of jewelry. It wouldn’t fasten to any bodice or ribbon. There were no hooks by which to string a chain. It was too large for a necklace, anyhow, and there were strange raised marks along the edge. Hinges? Or knobs.
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