“Looks that way to me. If you cover any part of the design, it makes this pretty much useless. I don’t think this is a case of charm-causing-arson. More like stupidity on someone’s part.” She looked to me for an opinion.
“Indeed, it does. You’ll find most cases are like this—carelessness, stupidity, or negligence causes a great deal of the trouble in this city. Well spotted, my friend. I’ll jot that down and we’ll put it in that bin there, near the door for Gerring to retrieve at his convenience.”
It was only the work of a moment before she had it back in its box with my report attached to the top. Then she turned to me with a curious tilt to the head. “That’s a spell even a first-year student can manage. Are you telling me that of all the candidates, none could do something like this?”
“Oh, they could normally do the diagnostic test. But they couldn’t examine a charm as you just did and see it properly. They couldn’t diagnose something and come up with any observations. That’s what frustrated me. They were incapable of critical thinking.”
Shaking her head, she returned to the table. “Their loss is my gain, I suppose. Alright, what’s next?”
I’d known she would be good at this.
We completed the three things demanding an answer, then one more because it had been sitting on my table for at least a fortnight, which I deemed unacceptable. The rules stated under thirty days, but anything over fourteen, and hives threatened to break out on my skin. I had no wish for a case to grow cold because the evidence came back too slowly to be of any use.
Colette picked up things quickly, and by the last task, I was nothing more than an observer. Almost everything on the table was simple enough that even a third-year student should be able to manage, so I had no doubt she would do swimmingly. Still, I impressed upon her to ask me questions if she had any doubt whatsoever.
I took a taxi toward the palace, as I still had wards to somehow fix. On the way, I belatedly realized my mother had tried to reach me earlier. I picked up the pad and hit the phone spell button, typing her name in the box at the top.
My mother’s voice came through a moment later, and I had to lean away from the pad, her excited soprano filling the cab. “Henri, I heard Colette’s been hired! I wish to throw a celebration dinner party for all of you. Jamie says you’re free this Rest Day. Do ask Colette if she’s able to come or if I need to choose a different day.”
Jamie says, eh? No guesses on the source of her information. Still, it pleased me Jamie would go out of her way to make Colette welcome. “I believe Rest Day will be fine, Mother. You can ask Colette directly. She now has a pad of her own.”
“Excellent! I’ll do so immediately.”
“Thank you.” After we ended the call, I put the pad aside and closed my eyes for a moment. Tired but elated summed up my state of being perfectly. Mayhap if I got proper rest, my mind would start functioning again at optimum levels and I’d finally be able to conceive of a way to either augment or alter the palace wards. Sleep, and not being forced to focus on a dozen other tasks, would surely do the ticket.
One problem down, two to go.
Gibson and I met up at the train station for our meeting with the shift manager, the affable Mrs. Watts—a werewolf with the most pristine white fur I’d ever seen. She’d dyed the patch right over her eye in a blue swatch, which I assumed was some sort of fashion statement. She looked like a goth kid to me, being cool, which tickled my funny bone.
She sat behind her desk, in her rather cramped office that overflowed with portraits of family and knickknacks, and gave us a professional smile. “Kingsman Gibson, Detective Edwards, welcome. Thank you so much for taking this case seriously. I don’t mind telling you it’s alarmed our CEO thoroughly, and of course everyone who works the line. I’m personally quite affronted we had thieves slip through our guard so easily. If you have suggestions on how to tighten security to prevent this from happening again, I will listen with gratitude.”
Well, she just made my life a whole lot easier. “I have a few, in fact, but we’ll review those with you a bit later. We’d like to ask some questions first, get a better handle on matters.”
“Of course. Do be seated.” She waved us to the two leather armchairs bracketing each other.
I sat and immediately wanted a chair just like it in my apartment. It was way comfy. Settling, I flipped open my small notebook and got ready to jot things down. “First question. How often do gold shipments come through here?”
“They’re not on any regular schedule,” she answered steadily, already pulling a report and handing it over to Gibson. “On average, we have perhaps two or three a month. Sometimes they all come on the same day. Sometimes they’re a week apart.”
Made sense, I suppose. Gold shipments would be all about supply and demand.
Gibson flipped through the report with a slight frown. “How are you notified a shipment’s coming in?”
“We’re not, typically. A courier comes in with the shipment and brings it to our clerks’ office, does the necessary paperwork to ship it. Much like any other thing we ship.”
Huh. Now that was interesting. “You aren’t given any head’s up at all? I would think so with a shipment that valuable.”
She shook her head with a long exhale that set her whiskers quivering. “We did so at first, but soon discovered it caused trouble. We were essentially notifying the thieves we had something of value coming. We lost one out of five packages on a routine basis. After two months, we switched to this method. No advance notifications. We also don’t put any sort of special packaging around the gold. Many things are boxed in wooden crates with iron bands—chemicals, for instance. Medicines. Sensitive post.”
My curiosity climbed steadily as she listed this out. Of course, it made sense. If you kept the gold in an incognito package, the thieves wouldn’t be able to tell what was really inside. It was a great deterrent. “So really, the only indication it’s important or pricey is when it gets put into the vaults in the baggage car.”
She nodded, fur bristling along the nape of her neck and top of her head in renewed aggravation. “That is correct.”
“Who’s responsible for that?”
“Our shipping clerks. They’re overseen by the train guard. He has to know what’s on board to properly safeguard it.”
So, we were back to him. Gibson had interviewed the clerks and guard before we came onto the case, and I’d reviewed his interview notes. No one had stepped out of the office until they loaded the baggage car. No way to alert someone with everyone watching each other.
“We absolutely had to offer some safeguard, of course, which was why we devised that system,” Mrs. Watts continued. “We’ve had shipments go through for nearly eight months without issue. I’m quite wroth it failed so spectacularly.”
Gibson made reassuring noises. I was too busy thinking to do any of that.
If there was no advanced notification, and if most of the employees here at the station didn’t even know what was in the boxes until they were put in a safe, then how in the wide green world did the thieves figure it out? How did they know to hit that shipment? Blind luck? Surely not. This heist was far too well planned for such a slapdash approach.
I pulled my mind back into the present to leave the office with Mrs. Watts, and we walked the line of baggage cars behind the station. It was noisy down here, the smog thick and irritating in my throat, and I had to clear it consistently. Really glad I didn’t work in this area. The smoke would kill me eventually.
As we climbed into one of the cars, Mrs. Watts shifted her skirt out of the way so Gibson didn’t accidentally tread on it, then asked me directly, “Is this an inside job, Detective?”
I hoisted myself into the car to face her. “We don’t know. Really, right now I can debate it either way. Certain aspects make me think it is—like knowing there was gold on board that night. Who else would know but an employee? But in other ways, it doesn’t seem so. If it was an inside job, they would hav
e been able to lay hands on all the necessary keys. We know for a fact they had to use other means to open some of the locks.”
An aggravated growl caught in the back of her throat. “That’s vexing. I don’t know whether to trust my employees or not.”
“I understand the frustration, believe me. I’m not sure if I can trust them either. We’ll be looking into them very closely until we get some answers. I need a full list of the employees working the day of the heist.”
“Yes, of course, I’ll prepare that for you and get it to you by end of business day,” Mrs. Watts promised.
“Right now, the best suggestion we can give you is to put at least two guards in the baggage cars every night. Whether or not gold is in here, or anything valuable.” Gibson gave the compartment a wave of the hand. “It’ll throw thieves off the scent some, but also it’s harder to bribe two people. If you can manage three guards on every line, that’s even better.”
Mrs. Watts eyed him sideways. “That sounds, Kingsman, as if you’re quite sure one of my employees was bribed.”
“As Detective Edwards said, you can make an argument either way.” Gibson paused, mouth working, then admitted sourly, “But in truth, I’m leaning that direction. I know they didn’t have all the keys, but we’re assuming they had three. How did they get all those keys if they didn’t have any inside source at all? How did they know what to prepare to get through all the safety measures without some insider knowledge?”
Now those were two excellent questions. I didn’t have an answer for either of them.
Mrs. Watts’ face fell. “Oh dear. That’s a very good point. Alright, I’ll take your suggestions to heart. I’ll aim for two guards, although I’m not sure if I can manage that with my current resources. I might have to hire some more to augment my guards.”
“I’d suggest it, yes. Also, can you verify for me if it’s just your employees handling security on the train? None of the gold companies have security ride with it?”
“That’s correct. Their security is responsible for delivering and receiving the gold at the stations. They’re not part of the security during shipment.” Mrs. Watts grimaced, her nose wrinkling up to show a lot of very sharp canine teeth. “More’s the pity. This might have been prevented otherwise. I’ll definitely have to hire on additional help, just to help prevent a repeat of this occurrence.”
Remembering Henri’s suggestion this morning, I pitched in, “And if you could, put a special magical barrier over the doors. Something that will alert you if there’s something magical breaching the doorway. That way you know if someone’s trying something sneaky.”
She magicked out her own notebook from a voluminous pocket in her dark skirt and wrote things down with a pencil. “Sound suggestions, all of them. Thank you. Who do you recommend to do the barriers?”
“I’ve a short list of people I use for that,” Gibson informed her. “I’ll send their contact information to you later this afternoon.”
“I would appreciate it, Kingsman.”
“We’d also like to do a dry run with one of the cars. The timing of this is so tight I feel we’d gain some insight if we take a run ourselves. Is that possible?”
Mrs. Watts looked off into space for a moment, brow furrowing in thought. “I think it’s doable. Not during the weekend, we’re usually quite busy during that time. Perhaps in the mid-afternoon—there’s a bit of a lull then. I can arrange for an engine and baggage car to take you on the same run to Bristol. It will take me a few days to arrange. Is that alright?”
“Completely. Thanks very much.”
Gibson turned in place, looking the baggage car over with squinted eyes. I had no idea what he was doing, but it made me think. If there was no notification ahead of time, even with an inside source, it didn’t give the thieves much of a head’s up. The gold was put into the vault a few minutes before the train left the station. A few minutes wasn’t much time to get the word out and get the right people on board.
My friend turned and caught my eye, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing. In near unison we both said, “Passenger list.”
Mrs. Watts blinked at us in bemusement. “I beg your pardon?”
Gibson waved me to do the honors so I explained, “The only trains the gold goes out on is the evening express. Less stops that way, more security. We’ll need a passenger list. Not for just that night, but for…hmmm…about two weeks prior. Every train that went out from this station. I think the only way our thieves could reliably know they were on the right train, and get here in time, was by riding the trains consistently until they could verify this was the train with gold on board.”
Her golden eyes narrowed. “Yes. Yes, that would be the only way, wouldn’t it? I’ll get you the list. It might take a day or two to get it all copied over, but I’ll have it delivered to you.” She looked about the train car with open dismay. “And could you both sign off on a report stating we weren’t negligent? The insurance company guaranteeing this shipment is screaming at me that we didn’t take proper precautions.”
“I’d be happy to,” Gibson assured her gently. “You did everything possible, really. We’re just dealing with some very, very clever people.”
Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl. “May their cleverness hang them.”
I grinned at her. “I can get behind that.”
We drove away from the station with Gibson at the wheel because, for some reason, he didn’t trust my driving either. Although unlike Henri, at least he didn’t grab at imaginary handles and try to slam his foot down on nonexistent brakes when I drove ‘recklessly.’ I didn’t really mind today. The traffic getting in and out of the station was horrendous. We were crawling at the moment.
“Those lists are going to be not so fun to compile,” I pointed out to Gibson. “And we need to run a lot of background checks on the employees. I feel the urge to draw in a junior and make him help with grunt work.”
“It’ll be good for his soul,” Gibson agreed blandly. “And not every name we come up with from that list is really a possible suspect. I’m sure more than a few people use the trains to commute to and from work. A few neighboring towns are bedroom communities for Kingston.”
“Yeah, I’m aware, but it’ll give us a starting point. And maybe some of those people won’t have a good reason to board the same train back and forth.” I knew I was reaching a bit, but we had no suspects and not much else to go on. “After this, want to see if we can track down the source of the Raskovnik?”
“Might as well. The person I set on it hasn’t found anything missing. You have a place to check?”
“I do. I also want to see if we can track down the emboss seal they used to redo the wax stamp. I know it was rather generic looking, but….”
“Doesn’t hurt at this point.” Gibson cast me a glance before trying to horn in on the next lane so he could make our turn. “Davenforth going to join us at some point?”
“Maybe not this week. We’ve had good news, though. Queen Regina appointed a new Magical Examiner. Henri’s over the moon Colette’s finally here. He spent this morning catching her up to speed. I don’t think she’ll need much hand-holding, but there’s procedures she doesn’t know, and he’s got to walk her through those before she accidentally contaminates evidence.”
“I’m glad for everyone involved he’s got someone else shouldering the load now. Once this woman—what’s her name?”
“Colette Harper.”
“Once Harper’s caught up to speed, you think he’ll join in?”
“He hopes to. He’s basically darting between lab and palace, but he did say he wants us to keep him abreast of what’s going on. I think he’s actually miffed he’s missing the fun, although of course he didn’t say it that way. For all his protests that he’s not a detective, he actually enjoys the intellectual challenge of it.”
“He certainly agreed to be a Kingsman consultant readily enough.” Gibson gave me that arch look again that spoke
volumes. “Although I think he did so because of you.”
I shrugged in agreement. He wasn’t wrong. “He refuses to let me have all the fun.”
Gibson snorted disbelief and chuckled. “You keep telling yourself that, Jamie.”
“I will, thank you. Alright, Raskovnik?”
“Yes, let’s get that question sorted if we can. I did do some inquiry. That’s a very controlled substance. A contact gave me the name of the main company that deals with it. Shall we go talk to them?”
“With pleasure.” I only knew of my university contact—Master Gardener Pam Pousson—who grew it, but she did so for exhibition and testing purposes more than anything. I doubted anyone would be able to buy anything off her. She was too sharp for that.
Gibson drove us a little further out than I expected, toward the north of the city. We weren’t in the retail part, but more in the distribution side, where warehouses and docks abounded. I guessed us near the channel most of the larger corporations used for shipping purposes, as I could smell the water.
At a large, two-story red brick building, he parked next to a dinged metal door and hopped out. I followed suit, reading the sign as I did so: Magical Items Imports. A straightforward enough name.
No bell chimed as we stepped into the narrow confines of the dingy office. In fact, no one sat at the single desk in the room, and there was only one chair for visitors. Clearly, this place existed for business operations and nothing else.
Another door led further into the warehouse, and Gibson opened it and stuck his head through before calling, “Hello!”
“Be right with you!” a husky voice called back.
It didn’t take more than a minute before a stout woman wearing pants and a leather apron came in. She pushed goggles up to her forehead as she moved, removing a leather glove that went straight up past her elbow. She’d obviously been working on something. She took in Gibson’s red uniform with a blink, then me, and her thin eyebrows nearly got lost in her dark hair. “Can I help you?”
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