by Jordan Reece
“If he had a very odd taste, then he couldn’t satisfy it there,” Jesco said. “But he would wait until he had a day off, to my reckoning. He had had a full day at work, and another scheduled for the next day. Wattling is a long trip to make there and back. I wouldn’t do it.”
“In the throes of lust, a man will do just about anything,” Scoth said. “Here we are.”
The autohorse was pulling over in front of a shabby home. It was narrow and had two stories capped by a round roof. Identical houses stretched right and left on both sides of the street. They looked like long lines of thumbs in beige and brown, and there was barely a foot of space between them. However, when compared to Wattling, this was the height of luxury. Most of the homes were tended if humble, although the one where Hasten Jibb once lived had been treated with a slapdash hand. It needed to be repainted, and the garden was weedy.
“She’s been informed, hasn’t she?” Jesco asked, loathing to be the bringer of bad tidings, and pitying the poor old woman who would sob to receive them.
“She’s been informed,” Scoth said. “Her name is Guiline Jibb.”
A white-haired woman opened the door to them. She was dressed all in black. Looking far more annoyed than grieved, she listened to Scoth’s introduction and jerked her head to welcome them in. She clipped down the hallway to the kitchen, Scoth and Jesco going after her. There was a framed photograph on the wall of the woman in her younger years, seated upon a chair and with two boys posed behind her. Each had a hand on her shoulder. The younger was Hasten Jibb.
Pans clattered in the kitchen. As they entered, the woman hung a pan upon a hook and said, “Sit at the table then, I can’t stop my day for you.”
“We are very sorry for your loss,” Scoth said. “I assure you that I’m going to do all I can to bring your son’s murderer to justice.”
They sat down. Mrs. Jibb banged a teapot on the counter and filled it with water from a pitcher. “That’s life, isn’t it? It gives and takes away. It took my husband when he ran off; it took Dochi when his heart gave out. Twenty-two years old, a strapping lad, and dead on the sidewalk. He worked for Lord Calvert, the only one that the lord trusted with his show dogs. Huge brutes, Kavenyork breed, but just big loves, Dochi said. Stand tall and let them see you won’t be knocked about, and they won’t knock you about. He went with Lord Calvert to the show over in Oppentown, and the lord had Dochi guide the best dog through his tricks for ten thousand people. Second place. Second place!”
Having banged the full teapot onto the stove and thumped a mug onto the counter, now she was lifting a cloth from a bowl to check the rising dough inside. Even that she somehow did loudly. From there, she checked a pot on another burner upon the stove. Letting the lid fall with a resounding crash, she said, “The lord was giddy with that red ribbon, upped Dochi’s salary and said he would up it again once he was holding the blue. Dochi was going to be known as the finest dog trainer in all of Ainscote had he lived. All of those lords and ladies would have been fighting tooth and nail to have him out to their manors to train up their dogs in agility. And he said, Mother, when I’ve gotten rich off those fools, I’m going to buy an autodog so I don’t have to clean up so much hair anymore. Kavenyorks have a coat so thick that you could sleep on it in winter, and they shed in great sloughs the rest of the year. Hair on his clothes, hair up his nose, hair all over this house from him trailing it in.” She laughed.
This was not what Jesco had expected from a woman who just lost a son days ago. Even Scoth seemed taken aback as Mrs. Jibb went on. “Just hair. I’d tell him that we would have been those lords and ladies going silly over dogs, but my great-great-grandmother was a lord’s bastard on a prostie. She made good, that prostie, but she didn’t get a title out of it, nor did the baby. But that’s how close we were to manors and champagne and Kavenyorks. Dochi was going to get us there.” Three bowls landed on the counter, the lid was jerked from the pot, and a ladle crashed inside. Liquid splashed everywhere.
“We’re here to talk about Hasten,” Scoth said.
“Got himself killed. I told him that he would get himself killed, riding around on that stupid bicycle. Who do you think is going to win in a crash between you and a carriage in the road? Who do you think is going to win if you get sued for mowing down a pedestrian on the sidewalk? Bicycles don’t belong in roads and they don’t belong on sidewalks and I don’t think they belong anywhere. I just hate them. But no, he never listened to me.”
Alarmed to hear this, Jesco looked at the detective. His voice gentle, Scoth said, “Hasten wasn’t killed in a bicycle accident. Someone stabbed him. Were you told that?”
“Oh, yes, the officer made mention of it.” Filling the bowls with soup, she slammed them down on the table and went to a drawer for spoons.
“Did Hasten have any enemies? Was anyone bothering him?”
She clattered about the utensil drawer. “How would I know? He came in at the end of the day and had his dinner, went upstairs to his room and closed the door. He always left early to have breakfast over at Shining Water, so I hadn’t seen him in the morning. He wasted his money dining there. You get a red jacket for an owner in your company, and then you eat there. Anyone can have a green jacket. You have to be someone first. Dochi only ate there when Lord Calvert’s son invited him, to talk dogs and training with friends of his who were interested. That’s what put Shining Water in Hasten’s head. He thought he was making some connection just by being there with his waffle and eggs and that’s not how it’s done. Connections are for lunch and dinner, and you have to know someone to make a connection. A waste! But he took after his father, spitting image, went about things the wrong way and wouldn’t change course for anything.”
“You don’t know what he did on the day he passed?” Scoth asked as she laid out the spoons and took a chair.
“I got up and he was gone with his bicycle like regular. Went about my day, visited with the ladies, did the shopping, and I came back in the afternoon to make dinner. He came home and was acting queer.”
“Can you tell me more about that?”
“He took his satchel up to his room rather than putting it on his hook by the door, and I had to call three times before he came down for dinner. He gobbled up his food and went back upstairs.” She had not been interested then in what was bothering her son, and it didn’t appear that she was interested now. Sipping her soup, she said, “I did the dishes and took to the parlor to do some mending and listen to music. He came downstairs and left without a goodbye, fit to be tied about something.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw his face. Mad or upset about something as he went by. He had his satchel on again, his work clothes still, and I heard him get on his bicycle. Then he rode off and never came back. Exactly like Dochi, just left and didn’t return. Is there something wrong with your soup?”
“A querulous stomach,” Jesco lied. Because some people still found a demonic cause to his power, Scoth had introduced him as a police consultant until they had a better guess of the woman’s most likely reaction to the truth.
The soup before Jesco was of uncertain color, scent, and description, its surface pimpled by mysterious chunks of meat or vegetable underneath. He had not brought his own utensils from the asylum and could not risk the spoon touching his lips or tongue. Nor could he wipe off with a napkin.
Displeased with him, the woman turned to Scoth. He ate a spoonful to placate her and said, “Thank you. This is good.” There was something quite subtle in his eyes that made Jesco think it was not good.
“I like to see a man with a healthy appetite,” she said to Scoth. “I could put a whole roast chicken in front of Dochi and come back ten minutes later to a heap of bones and him in the cupboard looking for something else to eat. Never picky.”
After taking a second and third sip of the soup, Scoth brought out a photograph of the timepiece. “Mrs. Jibb, this was found near your son. Did it belong to him?”
She looked at
the photograph and shook her head. “He didn’t own a timepiece, that one or any other.”
Scoth put it away. “Was he ever in trouble?”
“What do you mean?”
“Trouble with women or men, trouble with opium, trouble of any kind. Did he run with friends who had some trouble?”
“That boy never ran with anyone. I told my sons from the time they were small: you don’t have anything to do with these common folk. You’ve got the blood of lords and ladies in your veins! All of this is beneath you. So you talk proper and use your manners, act like lords until the world gives you your due. Lord Calvert saw the grandness in Dochi. He didn’t scuffle about on break with the grooms in the stables but read a proper book in the corner, said please and thank you to the maid who brought him food and drink, always rushed to get the door for the lord’s wife and to wish her a fine day. He made sure his clothes were spit-spot and a cut above anything you’d find in any closet on this block. He could mingle with the rich at that show and not stand out with nasty street dialect or behavior.”
Jesco could only feel sorry for Hasten Jibb, who was neither the favorite son while he lived, nor very much mourned in his death. His mother could only keep bringing the conversation back around to her beloved Dochi. She cast Jesco another peeved look for not touching the soup and turned her full attention to Scoth. But then she grew peeved with him as well, because he was just as stubbornly bringing the conversation back around to Hasten. “Is it possible that Hasten stole this piece?” he asked.
“Stole?” she exclaimed in outrage. “Hasten was not a thief! I taught my boys to be respectable.”
“I’m just trying to figure out how this arrived at the crime scene.”
“It came some other way than in Hasten’s pocket! I didn’t raise a criminal in this home!”
“He doesn’t mean to offend,” Jesco said as the old woman swelled up. She looked like she wanted to yank the bowl of soup away from Scoth. “We only want a clear picture of your son to help with finding the person who deprived you of him. Hasten sounds like he was an honest fellow.”
“Yes, he was! Honest!” Mrs. Jibb cried. “He wasn’t half the man that Dochi was, but he was honest. If he had ever found a wallet in the street, he would have returned it with every cent intact. I’ve got money squirreled away and he knew where, and never did a dollar of it go missing even when he was so keen to buy that big, stupid blue bicycle.” Now she preferred Jesco and turned in her chair to face him. Given a scornful shoulder, Scoth had another sip of his soup and winced.
“Was he interested in anyone?” Jesco asked. He had accompanied detectives on enough investigations to know what the most common questions were. “Did he ever mention a person special to him?”
“He didn’t have those interests.” She nodded fiercely when Jesco’s brow furrowed at the thought of a man in his twenties having no interest in romance and sex. “It’s true! Because of the illness he had, the Gelerm fever. He was in the hospital to have his tonsils out and somehow contracted it in his recovery. He was eight then, and it neutered him in head and body. A boy forever, unable to father a child, unable to even know what it was to desire a woman. So no, there was no one special. The doctors said that he would look like a regular man when he grew up, but he wouldn’t ever understand what the fuss was all about. Then he did grow up and they were right. He looked every bit a man, but he wasn’t. The prettiest woman in all of Ainscote could stroll past him and he wouldn’t notice. I asked the doctors all those years ago: what good is a son like that? Generations raise generations, but all that work and I’ll just be raising a dead end. That’s what the fever left him, a dead end. The doctors pointed out that some of the greatest inventors and healers and poets were people without children, but Hasten wasn’t going to be the greatest of anything, so what was the use of him?”
“I’ve never heard of the Gelerm fever,” Jesco said, pitying Hasten all the more.
“It’s rare as hen’s teeth, more rare than that, and nobody could establish precisely how he got it. Someone had to have gone through the hospital in the early stages of infection, perhaps a visitor, left the germs around and a doctor or nurse transferred them to Hasten. It almost killed him and Dochi was just distraught to see his baby brother in isolation.”
Before she could get started on Dochi, Jesco asked, “How did he get the job at the courier company?”
“I wanted him to go into dogs, pick up the torch, if you will, but he didn’t like them much. He didn’t follow up on Dochi’s connections and I told him that he was being a fool to let those slip through his fingers. But he wanted to do it his own way. A lot of the boys and girls around here do a stint as a courier. He was bound and determined to work Golden Circle and make his own connections. But what are those? Here’s your package; thank you, here’s a dollar. Being a dog trainer gets you right into someone’s home. A courier only ever sees the front doorstep.”
From what the supervisor had said, Hasten saw a lot more than the front doorstep with Lord Ennings, but Guiline Jibb had not been a confidante of her son’s. Since he had not done things her way, she could only disparage him. Quietly, Jesco said, “Do you have any idea, any idea at all, who would want to hurt your son?” He hoped that Scoth was going to step in soon, but the detective appeared content to let Jesco ask.
The woman stared down to her soup and trailed her spoon through the surface. Her clashing and clattering and excitement had passed. Now her shoulders slumped and she looked old and drawn. “No. He kept himself to himself and had ever since he was a small boy. He got up early, worked hard, and slept the night away. He wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t a thief. He wasn’t a fighter. He was missing a little . . .” she paused to tap on her forehead, “upstairs since the fever. Just a smidgen, not so much he stood out. A bit of him was still a boy in that man’s body. He didn’t stir up trouble; he didn’t want any part in trouble. He just wanted to ride his bicycle all around and read those penny tales about pirates and battles in the high seas, save up for nice clothes. That’s all I can say about Hasten.”
With the same quiet, Scoth said, “Does your family know anyone in the Wattling area?”
Her pepper rose once more. “Wattling? That cesspool? We’re descended from lords, Detective, not risen from rabble. We don’t have any people in Wattling.”
“Can you think of any reason he would have been there? Or in the surrounding communities?”
“No! We don’t know anyone who lives over in that area. It had to be a courier job that took him there.”
They already knew that it wasn’t. “Would it be all right if we took a look at his room?” Scoth asked.
She escorted them upstairs and left them to it. Great clashes and clangs and whistles rang out from the kitchen below as they looked around a very small bedroom. The bed was made, and Scoth opened the closet door to a neat rack of clothes. Drawing his finger down the sleeve of a shirt, he said, “Hasten had good taste.”
There were stacks of penny tales upon the table under the window, each one weighed down with a decorative rock. Jesco wanted to touch something that Hasten Jibb had used on the day of his death, but he had left with his bicycle and satchel, and dressed in the same clothes that he had worked in all day. What had he done for the short time he was in here? He had not rested upon his bed, unless his mother made it up. It didn’t seem likely that Mrs. Jibb would remember which plates and utensils he used in his last dinner either. Jesco could always try the knob to the front door, but the problem with that was he would not only get a flood of memories from Hasten, but also his mother and brother and everyone who had ever lived within this house or even just visited it. Another problem was that one only touched a doorknob for a second or two at a time. All of the memories within doorknobs were fragments.
Scoth went through the closet, looked under the bed, and examined the table. “He lived lightly upon this world.”
“He might have sat in that chair,” Jesco said.
“And he might
not have, and if he did, he was wearing his trousers. That’s an old chair. You’ll be flooded.” Turning around in place, Scoth skimmed the sparse features of the room. “Something to upset him happened in the afternoon. He came back from the job with the lord and the bank just fine, or Wassel would have mentioned it. Jibb was happy enough to spot the Silver job, ride that package over and maybe collect a personal for his trouble. But then he came home in distress. What happened between Melekei and here?”
Deciding that there was nothing clearly related to the case for Jesco to touch, they said their goodbyes to Mrs. Jibb and returned to the carriage. The wind had picked up speed but still the carriage didn’t rock as all the others did on the drive to the asylum. Scoth took notes of what they had learned from Hasten’s mother and rubbed his face tiredly. “Guess I brought you out for nothing.”
His tone was gruff and unpleasant. Jesco gave him the benefit of the doubt and said, “It was better for me to come and have there be nothing to touch than the other way around.”
“Still, just a waste of a day for you.”
Curious at what the detective was truly getting at, Jesco said, “I take pleasure in my work, and I do not consider it a waste just because we did not learn as much as we had hoped.”
It was quiet within the carriage, and all that could be heard outside of it was the roar of the wind. Jesco looked out the window as the detective dozed in his seat. He kept forcing himself back to wakefulness and losing the battle, and his spurts of sleep were restless. But he had denied himself too long the rest that he needed, and it persisted in overcoming him again and again.
By the time the autohorse turned down the flowered lane of the asylum, the wind was approaching violence. They were winds from the Shorgum Sea, and they were the advance guard of a storm. Branches scraped all along the sides of the carriage on the way to the building, and Scoth woke just as the autohorse stopped. He looked even more tired for his rest than he had without it.