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by Robin Jeffrey

  “There’s a pattern in that bruise. A pattern that looks,” Cadence dug through the pockets of her pants and produced the crumpled piece of paper I had drawn on earlier, passing it to Brisbois, “like this. It’s a university crest, commonly found on class rings.” She tapped the paper once more. “Chance’s mother wore a ring like this once – and she wasn’t alone.”

  Cadence’s gaze fell to Belinda’s hand. The inspector straightened. “Miss Tanith, may I please see your ring?” He slipped it off her finger without waiting for her consent, comparing the band to the pattern on the paper. The sharp widening of his eyes was all the confirmation any of us needed.

  “But I don’t understand!” Solomon, who had stepped away from Belinda when the EO arrived, now moved back towards her, staring. “What possible reason could she have for wanting to kill Minerva?”

  “I can’t think of one,” said Cadence. “But could someone describe Desdemona for me, please?”

  Victoria sighed, dropping her hands into her lap. “She has long white blonde hair. She’s thin; sickly thin, frankly. A little over one and a half meters tall–”

  “She looks like mum,” Henry cut in, “especially in the dark.”

  Nodding, Cadence spun on her heel and began pacing. “Just before Minerva was strangled, she was with Desdemona in her rooms. It was late, the lights in the hallway were off, and Minerva walked out of Desdemona’s room and went downstairs. Then, she was attacked.” She stopped in front of Belinda, meeting her wild stare. “You made a mistake; you thought it was Desdemona’s throat you were crushing.”

  Belinda collapsed into her chair, groaning. “How was I supposed to know they’d been talking?”

  “And the attempted murder of Felix Hale, Miss Turing?”

  “I don’t think there’s much ‘attempt’ about it, he is dead.” Victoria slid down in her seat, yawning.

  Cadence’s hip jutted to one side as she rested her weight on one leg. “Did everyone really think that Felix just happened to catch flu the night before he was murdered?”

  Happy to see everyone adopting an open-mouthed gape, I allowed myself a derisive snort. Cadence almost smiled, but smothered it, perhaps remembering my words by the gazebo and thinking better of taking pleasure in the proceedings. She stepped into the middle of the room, hands outstretched. “Is anyone familiar with orpiment?”

  “It’s a kind of crystal,” said Henry, scooting to the edge of his seat.

  “Correct. Do you know what one of the main components of orpiment is?” She waited with the patient air of a schoolteacher. No one answered. “Arsenic. Of course, you can’t just grind it up in someone’s glass or anything like that. It takes a lot of skill to extract arsenic from orpiment, not to mention the proper tools. But the shed outside is stocked with all manner of scientific equipment, including all you’d need to extract chemicals from stone. And for a geologist, that wouldn’t be difficult at all, would it?”

  “Even if I am aware of the procedure,” Belinda stood and stepped forward as if already on the witness stand, “you can’t prove that I had any orpiment, let alone that I made arsenic from it. There isn’t a single orpiment crystal near this house; where would I have gotten my hands on some?”

  “You brought it with you. I’ve been looking at it since the night we met.”

  Belinda tried to back away, but there was nowhere to go, the wall butting into her back as Cadence slipped her hand under the strand of yellow stones around her neck. “This is orpiment. And I would be willing to bet that there are some stones missing. Stones you used to cook up a nearly lethal dose of arsenic.”

  Allowing the necklace to fall against Belinda’s skin, Cadence leaned back, jabbing a thumb towards the door. “There’s a pot in the kitchen – quite a big one. Belinda used it the night of the party to make her famous cider.” Cadence dropped her hands to her sides, tapping against her thighs. “She made the cider, she cleaned the pot, but she didn’t do a very good job. There’s residue in the bottom: apple juice, alcohol, and small traces of arsenic.”

  I lifted my hand. “How could she be sure that none of us would drink it?”

  “She couldn’t. But she knew that you all weren’t fond of the brew; it was a fairly safe assumption that only Felix would imbibe.”

  The thought of what might have happened if Solomon, or Desdemona, or Henry had tried a cup made me shudder. I dropped my head into my hands. “But…if Belinda tried to poison Dad once, why not just poison him again with a larger dose? Why bash his head in?”

  “Oh, she didn’t.” Cadence sat back down next to Henry. “Dr. Merton did.”

  Everyone gasped, but no one made as much fuss as Merton, his hands clenched into fists at his side, shaking with righteous indignation as he shouted, “Miss Turing, how dare you! How dare you make such a horrible accusation?”

  Unmoved by his outburst, Cadence brushed a hair off Henry’s shoulder. “Felix Hale was poisoned, and no one suspected a thing.” She turned to him, hands wafting down into her lap. “Except you.”

  Henry, his gaze fixed upon Merton, reached inside his jacket pocket and removed the vial Cadence had discovered earlier, dropping it into her hand. She held it up for all to see. “I found this in Dr. Merton’s effects.”

  Merton strode forward, back arched like a frightened cat. “You had absolutely no right to go through my things!”

  Cadence winced, pulling the vial to her chest. “I know, and I felt slightly guilty about it, but it was in the pursuit of justice. For those of you who can’t read the label–” she met the doctor’s angry stare with cool defiance, “–and I do thank you for labeling it, Doctor– it says, F.H. and the date of the party.”

  Brisbois plucked the vial away from Cadence, tapping his foot as he turned his attention to Merton. “Care to explain this, Doctor?”

  Dr. Merton pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, stuttering. “Dr–drawing blood is a perfectly normal medical procedure–”

  “For the flu? Since when?”

  Merton held up his hands. “Alright! Alright, I’ll admit I was…concerned about Mr. Hale’s symptoms. I took a blood sample and was going to test it later, but then he was killed. It hardly seemed to matter after that.”

  “Naturally you were concerned. It’s not as if you hadn’t seen those symptoms in this house before.”

  Merton’s jaw quivered as he stared at the floor. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Cadence blinked up at him. “Verity Hale, of course.”

  23

  Chapter 23

  “Are you honestly suggesting that I had a hand in murdering not one, but two people? Both of whom were my friends and my patients?”

  “No. I’m suggesting that you covered up the murder of Verity Hale to save your own reputation and killed the man who had been blackmailing you for twenty years.”

  Staggering back, Merton jerked his hand up to his chest. Cadence stood, walking around him as if he wasn’t there. “I read the coroner’s report on Verity’s death. It detailed her illness quite extensively: vomiting, muscle contractions, fever, confusion – all the symptoms of arsenic poisoning.” Slipping her hand into her shirt pocket, she took out the docu-disk I had given her earlier, holding it so close to her face that her eyes crossed. “Then there’s this.”

  Cadence strode out of the room. In a sudden dash that would have been comical under other circumstances, we all rushed to follow her, dogging her steps down the hall and into the library.

  She turned on the computer at the small desk nestled in the far corner of the room, the large screen flickering to life and bathing us in its unnatural glow. Slipping the chip into the drive, she clicked out her thanks. In an instant, a window opened, containing several pages of a document. Even as I collapsed into the nearest armchair, the others gathering around, I couldn’t look away.

  “Felix’s will! My god!” Staring up at it, Solomon’s jaw hung slack. “How did you find it?”

  “I didn’t.” Cadence w
alked over to me and perched on the arm of my chair. “Chance did – again. He’s much sharper than you all give him credit for.” I pulled my gaze away from the screen, but Cadence was on too much of a roll to notice my wide-eyed stare, turning to the inspector instead. “It was stuck inside one of the books. Mr. Davers had the right idea, looking for the will in here; except he was thinking about it as if it had been lost, rather than hidden.”

  “Hidden?” said Henry, stepping back from the desk.

  Cadence shrugged. “How else could it have ended up inside a book?”

  “Why not just destroy it?”

  “Oh, I don’t think the murderer hid it. I think Felix did.”

  Brisbois lifted his brow in a question.

  “Felix was working on an important document late at night and hadn’t told anyone but Solomon, correct? So, it can be assumed that what he was writing was very sensitive. If he was interrupted while working on something he wished to complete in secret, the most natural place to conceal it would be somewhere close by,” Cadence got to her feet, gesturing to the shelves around us, “somewhere inconspicuous and hard to find with the naked eye,” she walked to a shelf and drew her hand down a row of books, stopping at the gap where my tome had been and looking at me before continuing, “and meaningful enough that he wouldn’t forget where he put it.”

  I dropped my head into my hands, the jaunty animal cast of The Wind in the Willows dancing through my mind. To know that the book had meant as much to my father as it had to me; the lump in my throat grew larger and I thought I would choke on it. I couldn’t breathe until Cadence brushed her hand across my shoulders, her fingers warm through my clothes. My throat relaxed, at least a little, and I swallowed, squeezing her hand as she drew away.

  “Felix told Solomon he was working on a new will – one that would enable him to enter into his marriage with Desdemona as a ‘new man’.” Flipping the document up across the screen, pages of legalese flew by. The screen stuttered as the computer jumped from one document to the next and Cadence stopped on a letter, unaddressed but written in my father’s voice. Cadence stepped back and allowed his words to speak for themselves.

  My father had been desperate to save the company. He and Belinda poisoned my mother slowly, although he delivered the final dose to Verity. In his haste, Merton had seen him, forcing my father to use what he knew about the shoddy doctor to blackmail him into silence. He understood now that he had made a mistake for which he could never forgive himself, but he hoped, with all his soul, that one day we could do it for him.

  “This is insane,” Merton turned his back to the screen, dragging his hands down his face. “Felix was delusional! If I’d known anything like that was going on, I would have gone straight to the EO.”

  “I’m sure you meant to. But you were a young doctor, at the beginning of your career; you couldn’t have people finding out about your personal problems.”

  Merton ripped his eyes away from the floor, fixing them on Cadence. She met his gaze and walked towards the young woman collapsed on the sofa. “Desdemona, I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but please: how did you end your drogan addiction?”

  Jumping at the question, Desdemona drew her arms tight against her quavering form. “I…” It was a moment or two before she was composed enough to speak. “I…went to a…rehab clinic. In Cayeux.”

  “Alone?”

  “N–no…” Tears began dribbling down her cheeks and she didn’t bother to wipe them away. She shook her head with all the petulance of a small child, sucking on her bottom lip as she tried not to sob aloud. “I…I went with my boyfriend – Douglas Morton.”

  Victoria piped up beside me. “Morton?”

  Cadence rolled her eyes. “He couldn’t very well keep a name that was tied to a criminal record. A slight change was all it took to leave that life behind him forever. Or so he thought.”

  All eyes turned to the doctor, whose normal twitches had intensified to a near constant quiver as he gripped the insides of his elbows, venom boiling in his eyes. “How–how did you know?”

  “Chance overheard you and Desdemona. You called her Dezzi; hardly a name you’d use for someone you’d just met.” Cadence brushed a lock of hair away from Desdemona’s face. “Besides, I saw the needle marks on your arms when you came to help Minerva. And the vial of drogan in your bag cinched it.”

  Henry removed a second vial from his pocket and handed it to Brisbois while Cadence shook her head at Merton, jaw clenching. “A young doctor with a drug habit. Felix found out, of course. He was sharp. He knew how to read people.”

  “He…he blackmailed me.” Collapsing back into the wall, Merton looked from face to face, finding nothing but distrustful glares. “He was going to ruin me!”

  “So, you’ve kept quiet all these years. Tending to the Hale family, living in fear that at any moment, Felix would change his mind about keeping your little secret. And after that, who would believe anything you said? A filthy addict?”

  Merton jerked back from the words as if they stung, screwing his eyes shut against this barrage of the truth.

  “Then Desdemona reappeared. Not on your arm, but his. She had gotten clean and stayed clean. She made her choice; it wasn’t the drugs, and it wasn’t you.” Sighing, Cadence drew her hand through her tangled hair. “It must have felt like a miracle when you realized what Belinda had tried to do. That’s why you took the blood: to blackmail her into silence while you killed the man she loved.”

  For a moment, Merton looked subhuman, lurching forward with hungry eyes, his back hunched. “That man took everything from me; my whole life, I was a slave: seeing to his every need, caring for his friends and family without making a cent, without receiving so much as a kind word.” He dropped his hands to his sides, shaking his head. “But I didn’t kill him. And you can’t prove that I did.”

  Cadence whirled around to face Brisbois, crossing her arms over her chest. “The first thing that made me doubt Chance’s guilt, Inspector, was the placement of the body. You’ve assumed from the beginning that Felix was killed in his room and because of this, his son must be the killer, because he was the only one with access.”

  Smiling, Brisbois shoved his hands into his pockets, warming to Cadence’s amateur detecting. “Mr. Hale was killed in his room. The murder weapon was found there, and the door was locked from the inside.”

  “Would you agree, though, that it is possible that someone could have entered Felix’s room, locked his door from the inside, unlocked the connecting door to Chance’s room, and then placed the key under the body? And then, after exiting through Chance’s door, use Chance’s own key to lock the door behind them?”

  Waving his hand through the air, Brisbois nodded. Cadence grinned. “Chance had difficulty finding his key that morning. It was on the floor, even though he was sure he left it on the bedside table, as he usually does. So, what was it doing down there?”

  Henry snapped his fingers. “Someone slipped it in under the door after they locked it!”

  Brisbois scowled, shaking his head. “Why go to all that trouble?”

  “To frame Chance. Murder is a life sentence on this planet; that’d be reason enough to give the Enforcement Office a gift-wrapped killer. Keep them from looking too closely.”

  “May I remind you, Miss Turing, that three people saw Mr. Hale entering his room and locking the door? Alone?”

  “One of those three is currently in custody. Belinda, did you really see Felix going into his room that night?”

  Belinda fixed Merton with a cold stare, her lips twitching up into a sneer. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Another witness is now looking more like your prime suspect and would therefore have ample reason to lie. Then of course,” Cadence looked over her shoulder with a soft smile, “there’s Desdemona.”

  Whimpering at the sound of her name, Desdemona wiped the tears from her face. “Um, yes? Yes, I saw Felix.”

  “Desdemona, could you repeat exactly what you said to me
earlier? About what Felix looked like when he went into his room?”

  “I just thought that he looked tired,” she said, shrugging. “I assumed he was still feeling ill, the way he was leaning to one side and dragging his feet.”

  “Dragging his feet?”

  Desdemona dropped her hands to her lap, digging her teeth into her bottom lip. “Well, there was a shuffling sound…when Felix went in.” She turned to me with a mournful smile. “He doesn’t usually shuffle, does he, Chance? Felix is a stomper.”

  Jaw tensing, Brisbois dragged his hand down his face. “Miss Eydis, why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  Desdemona’s eyes welled-up with tears once more. “I di–didn’t think it was important. Everyone knew he’d been ill.”

  “I’m sorry,” Solomon raised his hand, “I don’t quite follow.”

  “Someone was carrying Felix; someone smaller in stature. They had their arm around the body,” Cadence wrested Brisbois to her side and flung her arm around his waist, ignoring his surprised sputtering, “leaned it against them like this,” she tilted so the inspector’s full weight was against her torso and shoulders, “and dragged it in.”

  She released the man without another glance. “The weight must have been enormous, enough to make anyone shuffle.”

  “So,” said Brisbois, fixing his suit with a grimace, “if he wasn’t killed in his room, where did it happen?”

  “Right out there. Or to be more accurate…” Cadence marched out of the library and past the EO officers who had gathered outside, our little group trailing behind her. Stopping in front of the main doors, she pointed to where her feet had come to rest. “…right here.”

  The inspector looked at the floor, saying nothing. Folding her hands in front of her hips, Cadence shrugged. “If you don’t believe me, check the FASCs.”

  Crouching down, Brisbois popped open the FASC service door, pulling back his sleeve and reaching inside. Face contorting, he licked his lips and swallowed. There was a click of a FASC being lifted off its rail and he withdrew it, wincing. The brushes of the FASC were covered with dry blood and torn pieces of flaking skin. Victoria choked down a retch. Henry had the foresight to shield Desdemona’s face in his shoulder, so we avoided another of her fainting spells.