A male, a white male, tall, blue eyed, leather skinned; well, that could be half of them. In his fifties at least; probably then an old and hardened one. The Gun took them young, as a general rule—in so far as the Gun had rules—and they did not generally live long. An old one was a bad one. Gray hair in a widow’s peak; a smiling man. Sounded like Rutherford; but Rutherford had been sighted far down south, raiding supply lines, poisoning wells. One-Shot Luce? Reported dead.
Lowry sighed and flipped through the Black File, the several volumes of which lay open on the Mayor’s desk; the cold eyes of killers and rogues looked up at him from every page. He waved a hand for the girl to keep going.
John Creedmoor? Creedmoor had an eye for the ladies, they said. Oh, Creedmoor was a bad one; his file practically stank of powder and blood. But he’d been reported dead by the Sub-Conductor of the Second Army of the Harrow Cross Engine, one Mr. Gormley. Lowry made a note to telegraph Gormley for details.
“You still here, girl? Right. Did he have a scar? Like so? No?”
No scar; couldn’t be Slater, then. Dandy Fanshawe? Not if he was making eyes at the girls. Blood-and-Thunder Boch? Cantor? Red-Heeled Jack? Shit, they put one down and another two sprung up! Straight-Arrow Sussex? Thorpe, who’d brought himself to the attention of the Guns after the horrors of the Battle of Vezelay, horrors to which he, Thorpe, had been a great contributor?—but that was decades ago and Thorpe would be near eighty now, hard as walnut if he wasn’t dead. Lowry kept flipping. So many of them. Sometimes he thought the Line’s work would never be done.
“Go on, girl. Fuck off out of here. Send the next one in.”
He drafted a composite description of the killer, for circulation to all patrols and Heavier-Than-Air Vessels. Then he walked outside and leaned against a charred hitching post out front of the Mayor’s house and watched Morningside’s men work.
He had a headache. The Black File often gave him a headache. It was disordered; uncertain; full of suppositions and half truths and scraps of unverifiable almost-fact; facts that could not be put in their proper place; outright myths and stories and the most unpleasant sort of fantasies. The Agents of the Gun poisoned everything they touched, even unto the deepest recesses of the Line’s most TOP SECRET files.
The boardinghouse was a charred ruin. So were several surrounding buildings. Most of the walls were gone, leaving only odd-angled and crumbling beams and struts, and Lowry could see Morningside’s men at work in what had been bedrooms and bathrooms. It was eerie. Some Agents, the Black File speculated, could see through walls, which made them damnably hard to kill. . . .
Morningside’s men carried wheelbarrowfuls of wreckage out of the ruins and laid them out on the street for analysis. Scraps of furniture, brass fittings, antlers, some charred and twisted painting frames. Kloan’s residents stood by glumly at the perimeter of the activity. Professor Harry Ransom crept away down Main Street with a battered suitcase in either hand and a bloody nose, and Lowry couldn’t be bothered to stop him.
Poor old Kloan, Lowry thought; it wasn’t their fault, really. He’d exhausted his contempt on the Mayor, and now he allowed himself a moment of pity.
But what had to happen, had to happen.
He breathed deeply. He got a mouthful of ash and coughed, and it turned quickly into the bent-double coal-dust compulsive hacking of a Linesman born and bred. Some of Morningside’s men looked up, shovels in hand, and glanced with concern at the Sub-Invigilator. Lowry sent them back to work with a bad-tempered wave of his hand.
One of Morningside’s men, deep in the ruins of the boardinghouse, called out, “It’s here! I’ve found the telegraph, sir! It’s badly—”
Morningside entered the ruins, clambering over heaps of ash and fallen timbers. “Right. Let’s see. Let’s see. Any last mess—?”
He stumbled and leaned against a charred beam of wood, which toppled under his weight. Wedged in the join of the beam had been a black briefcase, which had apparently dropped during the fire through a vanished upper floor, and which now fell the remainder of the way to earth. As it fell, it clicked softly open and its contents, which were the dead Signalmen’s last weapons, tumbled out. As it happened, only one of them went off.