Garrett Investigates - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,7

You’re holding that parcel like you had a dead rat by the tail, so I imagine chocolates are too much to hope for.”

Cuan chuckled under his breath and held out the brown paper package, which he had indeed been dangling from a fingertip thrust through the twine. “Nothing nice, I’m afraid.”

She lifted the box with both hands, cradling it six inches before her bosom. “It never is. There’s been another killing.”

“Two. In the small hours of the morning.” He was hovering, he realized, giving her a covert stare like a wishful hound. He should explain himself, excuse himself, and go. “Those are scrapings from under the fingernails of one of the victims.”

“Fingernails,” she said.

Cuan nodded. “She fought.”

That turned the DCI’s empty smile real. “Good for her. Good job, Coen. Maybe we’ll make a Crown Investigator of you yet.”

It shocked him to hear her state his secret hope so baldly, as if there were no embarrassment in it. He stood as if poleaxed. She moved away, as if to retreat deeper into the bowels of the Enchancery, and Cuan settled his bag more firmly on his shoulder, grateful to be tacitly dismissed.

Until she stopped in the doorway, turned back over her shoulder, and said, “What are you waiting for?”

***

The stairs down were the same stairs, and the laboratory below them was the same laboratory. Cuan followed as Garrett swept precipitously across the stone floor, the skirts of her dressing gown flaring about ankles that flashed distractingly white in the brilliant lighting. Another of the Crown’s Own was hard at work in one of the bays, bent grumbling over some process involving retorts and alembics. He glanced up as they came parallel to his table, but didn’t return Garrett’s civil nod. Cuan felt the sorcerer’s stare boring between his shoulder blades as they passed.

“You have time to dress, DCI,” he murmured, as she led him into the same end bay as before.

She set the parcel down on the table and flashed him a wink that made his heart skip a beat, in despite—or perhaps because—of her dishabille.

“They don’t bother.” The jerk of her chin indicated the anonymous Crown Investigator sharing the basement, and all the Enchancery beyond. “I had to fight like a cat to be allowed rooms here. It’s most unsuitable, you know.”

Her grin was infectious. Cuan found himself sharing it as she continued: “You can be certain I mean to use them exactly as the men do. Now tell me, Detective Sergeant, is there anything about this fourth murder scene that you noticed in particular, other than the presence of more than one body?”

“The gate,” he said promptly, and blushed. He looked down, but continued, “The yard was gated. With a fourteen-foot fence of wrought iron.”

“And the previous murder was in a tenement yard as well,” she said, and frowned. “Where did you say these murders took place?”

“I didn’t. Sorry, the instinct is to withhold information from potential interview subjects.”

From her sideways glance as she lifted a pair of bandage scissors with which to cut the twine, she understood that instinct very well.

Cuan finished, “But it was Jacob’s Island.”

She rubbed the corners of her red-rimmed eyes with the hand that didn’t hold the scissors. “I suspected you were going to say that. Remember the footprints at the first scene?”

“The ones that ended in a wall. The ones we thought the rain must have washed away.”

“It didn’t.” Having laid the scissors aside, she drew the snipped twine free and coiled it about her fingers. That done, she began folding open crackling paper.

“He didn’t scale that wall,” Cuan protested. “Not without sorcery.”

She folded the paper, too, and set it aside with parsimony that struck him as quite out of character for an aristocrat. “He didn’t scale the wall,” she agreed. “He jumped.”

Of course Cuan knew what she meant. It was London legendry, the stuff of penny dreadfuls and bedtime tales. Murders and assaults in Whitechapel, in Southwark, in Jacob’s Island.

Even an Irish boy heard about the boogeyman. But—“That was forty years ago!”

She opened his box and lifted his little morbid stack of lidded watch-glasses free, dealing them out upon the table in a line. As mildly as if inquiring if her preferred milk or lemon in his tea, she asked, “What’s forty years to Spring-Heeled Jack? More or less, I mean. We never knew why he stopped before, so it’s no mystery if he’s started up again.”

“He didn’t kill!”

Garrett licked her lips. “Forty years is long enough to learn to use a