“Well, that’s because it’s illegal to pretend you’re getting messages from people’s dead friends and relatives and then charge them money for them,” Pasco told her.
“I don’t pretend anything. I’m sensitive--I receive messages from a realm beyond this one. The people they’re intended for identify them as being from loved ones no longer on this plane of existence. They insist--quite forcefully, in fact. I can’t argue with them; after all, they know their loved ones. I don’t. And I don’t charge anyone anything. The grateful reward me as they see fit.”
“You’ve got it all figured out,” Pasco said.
The woman dipped her head, shrugging one shoulder. “If you don’t believe me, that’s your right. But that’s hardly grounds for arrest.”
“There’s the problem of two dead people, though.”
“That has nothing to do with me.”
“I think it does.”
The woman turned to Ruby, looking blank. “What is it with your partner? He’s got my record literally in the palm of his hand with that gadget. You read it, you’ll see I’ve never--”
“I think messages from the dead weren’t lucrative enough,” Pasco went on, talking over her. “Especially after someone showed you how to cross from one line to another. You saw a few differences and decided to use them to your own advantage. Did Phil Cannizzarro even know where you were taking him? What did you tell him to get him here?”
The woman looked down at her hands folded in her lap and didn’t answer.
“How hard was it to get his old crew here?” Pasco went on. “Did you try to run the messages-from-the-dead scam on them or did you tell them that Cannizzarro was really still alive?” He sat forward. “How long did it take, even with a connection you could exploit? Was it your connection, or did you have to go through several different lines?”
“Pardon me for saying so but I’m not following you at all.” The woman kept her gaze fixed on her hands.
“What am I thinking?” Pasco said, hitting his forehead lightly with the heel of his hand. “Of course it wouldn’t be your connection. You wouldn’t want to get all mobbed up in your own line. It’s very dangerous, getting into bed with the Mob. Tends to shorten your life expectancy. Like the poor woman in the back. Your co-workers all thought it was you.”
Ruby turned to him sharply, frowning. At the same time, the woman looked up, her face the picture of innocent bafflement. “Obviously it’s not me. But just because they thought it was doesn’t mean that I have any connection--”
Pasco got up and pulled her out of the chair by one arm. “Tell you what,” he said, propelling her through the store toward the treatment rooms, “instead of arguing about it, you can see for yourself and then tell me what you think.”
The woman stumbled along, trying to pull away and protesting that she didn’t want to look at any dead bodies, especially murder victims. Unsure of what to do, Ruby followed, wondering what her partner thought he was going to accomplish. She had been known to shove gory crime scene photos at suspects or their accomplices or even material witnesses who were reluctant to make a statement but this was something entirely different. Even some of the uniformed cops looked shocked as they watched Pasco force the woman through the doorway to the back.
“See, this is what we’ve been discussing,” he said, shoving her into the room.
She twisted out of his grasp and tried to push past him to leave. Pasco spun her around, grabbed the back of her head, and held her in place.
For a long moment, they stayed like that, as still and silent as statues. Just behind them on the threshold, Ruby waited, not daring to breathe, waiting for the woman to scream or try to run. But the moment stretched out and continued to stretch and still no one moved or spoke. Because of the lights, Ruby thought, feeling surreal; too many lights and no proper shadows.
Then she heard the woman say, “Uh-oh,” and everything unfroze.
“Yeah,” Pasco said. “‘Uh-oh.’ Houston, we’ve got a problem for sure.”
The woman turned to him, her face tight with fear and more than a little desperation. “I didn’t set this up. It was someone else. One of the others.”
Pasco glanced at Ruby. “Why should we believe you?”
“Because she said they wouldn’t have faces.”
“Pardon?” Ruby said, although she was pretty sure she knew exactly what the woman meant.
“Because of the way they’d be killed,” the woman said, desperation rising. “She said the way they’d be killed, they wouldn’t have faces. There’d be nothing left, not even enough for dental records.” She looked from Pasco to Ruby. “Hey, I didn’t want to go along with it but she made it pretty clear that if I didn’t, it would be me on the floor instead of--well, you know. A different one.”
Ruby swallowed hard and took a steadying breath. “Does she belong here or do you?”
“I do,” the woman said quickly. “I belong here. She’s from the same place as him.” She made a gesture at the bodies without looking at them and shuddered.
“And which scam were you running--messages from the dead or manifesting spirits?”
The woman’s mouth opened and closed a few times silently.
“Come on, if you want to stay alive, I have to know,” Pasco snapped.
“Manifestation,” she said, her voice small. She looked at Ruby, her eyes pleading. “That wasn’t my idea, I wanted to stay with just the messages. But she said if we could actually show them the dear departed, the money would roll in like--well--”
“Did Phil Cannizzarro know he was coming back from the dead?”
“Sometimes. I--we--didn’t always use the same one.”
The Dread had acquired an almost sharp edge now; Ruby pressed her lips together, trying to keep her face impassive.
“What about this one?” Pasco said. “Was he in on it?”
“I--I’m not sure. I’m not!” she added in response to the look Pasco gave her. “She set it all up. I--we just had to make the appointment, she said she’d take care of everything else, getting all the right people together.”
“And you knew it was going to be a hit,” Ruby said. There was more of an edge in her voice than she had expected.
“She didn’t give me a choice. She said either I went along with it and she’d split the money with me or she’d make an appointment for me, too.”
“The money?”
“Like a finder’s fee. For finding out he was alive and getting him here.”
Pasco turned to Ruby, one eyebrow raised. She shook her head.
“Did you tell them how Cannizzarro faked his death in prison? Or did you just show them photos of him alive?”
“She did all that, handled all the details.”
“And where is she now?” Ruby asked.
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “Not here, obviously, since she left me holding the bag.” She looked nervously from Pasco to Ruby and back several times. “What happens now?”
“We take you into custody, of course,” Pasco said. “What did you think?”
“But what about her?”
Pasco shrugged. “You’re her. Case closed.”
“But I’m not! I wouldn’t do something like this--”
“I wouldn’t know.” Pasco dragged her back to the main part of the store and told a couple of uniforms to take her into custody.
“I don’t suppose you’ve figured out how we can write this up so that it makes sense,” Ruby said, watching as the cops cuffed her and took her out.
“Hey, we just arrest them--we don’t explain them.” Pasco smiled. “As she makes her way through the system, she’ll wind up taking a detour which will take her where she belongs. The appropriate law enforcement agency will take over and you’ll stop feeling the effects of your, ah, allergy.”
“And I assume there’ll be a plausible explanation or cover story for all of it?” Ruby said. “Something that’ll keep Ostertag’s head from exploding?”
“
Ruby, it’s the system. That’s all the explanation anybody’s going to need. Especially Ostertag.”
She didn’t understand until a week later, when Ostertag made a passing mention of a murder victim who had borne an extremely strong resemblance to a dead Mob figure.
“Do not try to talk me out of this,” she said, shaking her retirement papers in Pasco’s face. “It’s all getting too loose and runny.”
“I understand,” he said. “Fortunately, not all of you retired. There’s one--”
“Shut up!” She whacked him over the head; papers flew in every direction and she refused to let him help her pick them up again.
A Murder in Eddsford:--S.M. Stirling
S.M. Stirling is a king of alternate history, with several widely read series to his credit. He is perhaps best know for his Nantucket series, which began with Island in the Sea of Time, in which the island of Nantucket is inexplicably transported from March 1998 to 1250 BC. Recently, he has embarked on The Lords of Creation series, beginning with The Sky People, and detailing a Cold War-era world where the pulp visions of Mars and Menus are surprisingly accurate. The story that follows is set in the world of his best-selling Emberverse series, which began with the trilogy of Dies the Fire, The Proctor's War, and A Meeting at Corvallis and continues in a second trilogy with The Sunrise Lands, The Scourge of God, and The Sword of the Lady. Despite his productivity, readers coming in to Stirling's work cold will be just fine. You're in the hands of a master, and I'm sure you'll want to see his sleuths in action again. Fortunately, you can.
Detective Inspector Ingmar Rutherston of New New Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department looked up from his copy of the preliminary report as the coach began to slow; he’d had the vehicle to himself for the last three stops. The document was signed Corporal Bramble, Ox. & Bucks Light Infantry, but it was as well written, terse and concise as most constables could have managed. The description of the dead man’s condition made Rutherston’s brows rise; the soldier’s dismay showed through the flat official prose, as well.
“Peaceful country to all appearances,” he mused to himself, forcing his mind to stop worrying the scanty data. “But this Jon Wooton is very dead indeed. Beyond that, there’s nothing to be done until I’ve some fresh information.”
He tucked the semaphore-telegraph form into a pocket of his jacket and focused on the view out the window instead. It was a warm afternoon turning into evening, late in August this year of grace AD 2049. A little white dust smoked up from under the hard rubber treads of the wheels, but the vehicle was well sprung on good Shropshire steel. The coach was the weekly from the capital, Winchester, to sleepy little Dover over in Kent, much slower than the British Rail pedal-car but stopping at places not so served, such as his destination, the Hampshire village of Eddsford.
The landscape of the Downs passed by at a good round trot, long shadows falling from the roadside trees as the sun declined toward the west; rolling chalk hills, green close-cropped pasture dotted with off-white sheep, fields of grass and clover and reaped grain on the lower slopes, beech-plantations and coppice-woods and low-trimmed hedges where red admiral and peacock and tortoiseshell butterflies fluttered. An occasional white-walled farmhouse stood in a sheltered spot, thatched in golden straw, surrounded by barn and stable and cart-shed, wool-store, stock-pond and whirling wind-pump and gnarled orchards.
Looking about, you’d never dream that the trackless tangled wildwood of Andredesweald lay only a few miles eastward, home to boar and wolf and the odd tiger down from the Wild Lands, and perhaps an outlaw or highwayman now and then. The New Forest to the west was almost as savage, more than it had ever been in the Conqueror’s time. Here the nearest to nature in the raw were hovering kestrels and a buzzard now and then, and flocks of swallows and house martins crowding the uppermost branches of trees, getting ready for their migration to Africa.
Rutherston smiled at the sight; his father had never seen that without reminiscing about how they’d used the wires strung from pole to pole for roosting when he was a young boy in the Old Days.
The detective rolled the window down the rest of the way and peered out, welcoming the fresh air and the scents of baked earth and growing things with the slightly faded, tattered smell that said summer was past its peak and autumn rains might hit at any moment. A farmer and his workers in the field beyond the roadside hedge were pitching the last of the wheat-sheaves into a wagon drawn by two big chestnut Shires. Men and women and horses alike stopped to look at the high-stepping black geldings that drew the coach, male farmhands with stolid sunburned faces above their smock-frocks, and women in loose pants and blouses and sometimes canvas field-aprons.
A straw-covered jug went from hand to hand as the coach pulled away, and then the pitchforks went back to work. The road dipped down toward the valley of the Rother, showing a glint of sun-struck water in the distance and flatter country southward. Partridges whirred up from the roadside verge...
“No, y’ daft rassgat!” the driver cursed; probably his assistant leveling her crossbow--she was young and enthusiastic. “Just your luck there’d be some kiddie behind a bush!”
The top of the south-facing slope was planted in undulating rows of shaggy goblet-trained grapevines; beyond, the village proper was bowered in trees and followed the riverbank at a cautious distance, separated by water-meadows and a low bank against spring floods.
And that’s the miller’s house where the body was discovered, he thought, looking north. There’s the roof through the trees, and you can just see the water from the millrace.
The assistant tooted again and again on her brass horn, and the driver pulled up to a walk with a woah-woah, there!, to his team; children and dogs and chickens and the odd passer-by afoot or on a bicycle or on horseback made way, and the usual curious crowd started to gather at the inn. The houses were mostly white-walled, roofed in shingle or thatch, slate or tile, along a street still paved with old-style asphalt and lined with big beeches and horse chestnuts.
The lane opened out into a green at the other end, with the tavern on one side and a stretch of grass in the center, and a church further on near the water-meadows. It was unique in the ordinary manner--a handsome battlemented tower of flint and stone obligingly labeled AD 1599 over the west door, and other parts that looked to be anything from Victorian to Norman; a Georgian brick rectory stood a little to one side, nearly hidden in oaks and beeches.
The inn was long and low and rambling, plaster over brick with a higher two-story section in its middle, and an irregular studding of chimneys through its mossy shingles. A brass plaque with the royal arms by the door proclaimed that it was a mail inn, where the coaches stopped for a change of teams and to drop and pick up letters and parcels--usually a profitable sideline for the innkeeper. Three or four shops stood across the green; so did the village post office, flanked by a reading-room and small public library marked by its sign and extravagant stretch of window.
A sign also swung from an iron bracket over the main entrance of the inn, showing a Moor’s severed head on a silver platter, and a branch of dried holly above it. There was a smell of wood smoke and cooking as households prepared their evening meal, mingling with the homely aroma of middens and the odd whiff from pigs kept behind cottages. A toddler tried to climb into a horse-trough by the side of the street, and a harassed-looking woman in an apron ran out of the door and pulled him inside, smacking him smartly on the bottom while she did.
The gate to the inn’s courtyard opened, and an ostler in a leather apron came out, ready to lead out the fresh team. The driver’s assistant unspanned her crossbow with a sharp tunnggg, racked it and jumped down from the seat to open the door as the coach came to a halt. Rutherston sprang down without waiting for the folding step, ignoring a slight twinge where the old wound in his right leg reminded him of that evening in the foothills of the Riff Atlas. She handed down his carpetbags and took a sixpence with a bob of her head before turning to unload the mail-sack and s
everal parcels labeled Eddsford, Hants. The ostler and the driver unharnessed the team and led it over into the courtyard.
And a stout man with a waistcoat straining over a considerable belly and graying muttonchops came out of the front door, smiling and fingering the chain of his watch. The taverner’s experienced eye flicked up and down the detective’s long lanky form and saturnine beak-nosed face; quietly expensive but well-worn traveling tweeds and half-cloak, wide-brimmed panama hat, light cravat of white Irish linen, longsword and belt of good quality but plain and worn, half-boots. Just a touch of gray in at the temples of the yellow hair. And two carpetbags, but no valet...
Rutherston smiled to himself as he saw the quick expert evaluation running through the man’s guileless blue eyes:
Gentleman, but not rich; still, better than a bagsman or commercial traveler. Not a professor, or a doctor, nor a merchant, surely; and not stopping at the Hall with the Squire. Some King’s Man out of Winchester, perhaps, or an officer on leave? Not here for the fishing, though, nei rods...
It was accurate enough, and he spoke with precisely calculated deference:
“Mark Eyvindsson,” he pronounced it Evinson, in the modern manner, “at your service, sir. I’m landlord of the Moor’s Head. Will you be wanting a room for the night then?”
In fact what he said sounded more like: Oi’m the laandlorrd o’ the Moo-er’s ‘Ead. Will ye be tvantin’ a room, fer the noight, then?
If he’d been born in Winchester instead of just living there the last ten years the detective might have suspected the innkeeper of deliberately coming it the heavy rustic. But Rutherston had been born in Short Compton in the Cotswolds himself, about a hundred miles north and a little west of here, where the local dialect was just as heavy and only slightly different.
“Detective Inspector Ingmar Rutherston, of the Yard,” he replied crisply. “I would like a room; for several days, at least.”
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