leaned over it, looked down, and breathed, “Where do you think you are?”
Between her hands, the fine white grit that filled the bottom of the bowl shifted slightly. “That’s sand and glass. Can you sift them?”
Cuan swallowed. “A little. I’m not strong.”
“Talent isn’t half of it. As long as you’ve enough to go on with, brains and determination mean more.” She hesitated. “You know neither Oxford nor the Crown’s Own would take you under an assumed name. There are oaths. And they have means by which to tell. Can you face that?”
He swallowed. “I don’t know.”
She stepped back and Cuan stepped forward. He cupped his hand around the bowl. “Do you have a glass rod? Or a piece of quartz?”
Smiling, she let a lens of rock crystal slide to the table from where she’d palmed it. Cuan touched it with his fingertips, slid it around until it centered between his body and the bowl.
He closed his eyes.
The blood in the lids filtered the bright light pink, but he could still see it. Against that glow, he pictured the bowl of white grit, the tabletop, the crystal, his hands. He imagined the grit sifting itself, sand and powdered glass, indistinguishable to the eye. He tried to feel the flush of energy moving through him, the tingle of his fingertips, but all he felt was an ache at his temples, the throbbing in his throat.
“Enough,” Garrett said.
Cuan opened his eyes in time to see her draw a finger across the dust-dulled surface of the lens, leaving a shiny swath behind.
“Not strong,” he said again, apologetically. Embarrassed, feeling the heat in his cheeks.
She touched one of them with that selfsame finger, so he imagined he felt the sand grit against his flesh. “Irish,” she said, and shook her head. “Huh.” And then she winked. “Well, if a girl can do it…”
***
Bitner thought the American knife meant the killer was a colonial. Cuan couldn’t argue the possibility, but he thought Bitner’s conviction betrayed a certain unsettling air of relief. Not one of ours. Something other, something else. It’s comforting to alienate the monsters.
So Bitner built his fairy tales and sent the Bobbies about asking after rough-hewn colonials, while Cuan imagined him picturing the killer in fringed buckskin and a wolverine cap, and had to cover his mouth with his hand. It was wasted time, but Cuan knew better than to argue. So he nodded and agreed, and conducted his own investigation in the interstices of Bitner’s. It meant he ate out of cookshops still draped in black bunting to mark the period of formal mourning for the Prince-Consort, and it meant he slept in snatches, propped against walls, but neither thing mattered. There was no one waiting at home.
He asked Bitner’s questions—insubordination wasn’t useful—but Cuan also made sure to asked his own, less-leading ones first. Not that it garnered him much; the murderer might as well have vanished into the yellow fog. Might as well have been the yellow fog, for all the traces he left.
They waited only three days for the next victim.
Cuan was catching a nap when the bell rang, doglegged on the burgundy divan which jammed one corner of his office. He started awake in darkness slatted with what dim light fell through the blinds from the hall and pushed himself to his feet before he really knew what was transpiring. Shoving a hand through well-greased hair to rake it into some semblance of order, he opened the office door and leaned through it, one hand on the knob, the other braced heavily against the frame. “What’s all this?”
Bitner was shrugging into his coat. He might be too attached to pet theories, but Cuan couldn’t fault his work ethic. And when he looked up and caught Cuan’s eyes, Cuan didn’t ask any more stupid questions. He fumbled his coat off the back of his chair and threw it around his shoulders. The boots were under his desk. He jammed his feet into them one at a time, hopping as he caught up to Bitner. “What have we got?”
“A double,” Bitner grunted, as Cuan stomped his heel into his second boot. He could button them in the carriage. “Come on. It’s Jacob’s Island; we’re going where the whores and Irish reside.”
“Bloody hell,” Cuan said tiredly. “Bloody hell.”
***
Jacob’s Island was an island no longer, the man-made Folly Ditch that delineated it having been filled in decades before. But it remained one of the worst rookeries in Bermondsey, the reek of tanneries doing nothing