Johannes Cabal the Detective (25 page)

“Just bugger off, will you, Cabal? You’re in my light. If you aren’t going to—”

The groan that shuddered out of the darkness made her spin around with a small yelp of surprise. It was a barely human sound, deep and miserable, but Cabal—who had far too much experience in such things—realised that it definitely was human. It seemed that he had been wrong to believe that the donor of the blood on the cobblestones was dead, although by the sound of it that error would be moot in a few minutes. Checking that his knife was easily accessible in his jacket pocket, he followed Miss Barrow as she walked as quickly as she dared into the shadows.

A few paces on, she paused. “It wasn’t far away,” she whispered, ready to be quiet immediately she heard anything else. “There’s a side door here.” Cabal heard a handle being tried. “It’s locked.”

He stood beside her. The shape of the doorframe was just visible in the shadows. Further along the wall beside it was a narrow locked and shuttered window. “Are you sure this is where that groan came from,” he asked, whispering, too.

“Must be.” She squinted into the darkness beyond them. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else it could have come from. It just looks like blank walls after this house.” She tapped experimentally at the ground past the door, and then turned back to him all business. “The cobbles don’t seem tacky past the door. I think the trail stops here. We need to get in somehow. Can you pick locks?”

“No,” said Cabal shortly, and kicked the door open. He stepped through and stood in the dark while checking his pockets. Miss Barrow heard a rattle, and suddenly a match flared in Cabal’s hand. He quickly held the match away from himself to save his eyes from the sudden light, and shielded it further with his free hand. In the reflected glow from the walls, they saw that the door opened into a narrow hallway. At the end, a staircase ascended a few steps onto a landing before turning to the left. In the unsteady light, there seemed to be a widening in the hallway just before the stairs and the hint of another door leading further back into the house. To the right was a small dresser with a tray on which sat a candle in a holder. Finally, a door stood half open in the wall to their left. Cabal glanced down. The blood trail angled beneath his feet and through the door. A single smeared bloody handprint showed on the whitewashed plaster by the base of the frame.

He took a moment to light the candle, and lifted it. He stood before the half-open door and favoured Miss Barrow with a sideways glance in which only a grim necessity was decipherable. Then he turned his attention back to the door. With the fingertips of his gloved left hand, he gently pushed it open.

*
He kept a collection, his favourite being the one with the decent woodcut, the correct punctuation, and—a tiny bit of egotism here—the eye-wateringly large bounty on his head.

Chapter 13

IN WHICH CABAL PRACTISES NECROMANCY AND WAYS ARE PARTED

Cacon had seen better days. To be precise, every day up to this one had been better, for today was the day that some unkind soul had stuck a long, thin-bladed knife into him and twisted it, and so murdered him.

He lay in a dark pool of his own blood in the middle of the barely furnished room. Cabal stood over him and noted the pallor, the slow drip of blood between the floorboards, and the slight quiver of Cacon’s eyelids as he prepared to breathe his last.

“Dear God, Cabal!” Miss Barrow was past him and kneeling by Cacon’s supine body. “Don’t just stand there! He’s still alive!”

Cabal was going to say, “But not for long,” when he thought ahead and just knew that this would result in Miss Barrow’s doing a lot of shouting in his face that he could well do without. So instead, noting that the windows were already closed and shuttered, he set the gas going in the two mantles in the room and lit them cautiously with his candle. Now, at least, Cacon could die in decent visibility.

Miss Barrow had meanwhile, with an admirable disdain for ladylike decorum, undone Cacon’s jacket and torn open his shirt. The knife wound was instantly apparent despite the mass of venous blood around it. A narrow slit forced open by the twist of the blade, it lay in his skin like a single gill cover of a pale cave fish, his life pulsing weakly from it in time to his slowing heart. She tore a strip from his shirt, folded it into a thick wad, and held it over the wound, pressing down hard, trying to hold his soul to his body by the strength of her arms.

“Do something, Cabal! Do something! Get help!” She looked up at him and, suddenly, Cabal understood that she had never seen death at first hand. The realisation sent a cool shiver of remembrance through him, back to when this had been him, kneeling over somebody and willing them back to life. And failing. Now he could only stand, and watch, and see the signs of imminent, inevitable death, and he felt nothing. Miss Barrow looked up at him, and she didn’t even like Cacon, but there were tears in her eyes. “Do something, Cabal.
Please!
”

He knelt on the other side of Cacon, unconsciously avoiding the blood, and leaned in close. “Alexei. Alexei! Can you hear me?”

Cacon’s eyelids flickered, but beneath them his eyes rolled drunkenly in their sockets. Cabal gripped the side of Cacon’s head and drew up one eyelid high using the pad of his thumb. It was rough treatment and Miss Barrow started to speak, but Cabal quenched her with a glance. She fell silent, finally understanding that the man was going to die, and that there was nothing either of them could do about it.

“Alexei Cacon! Listen!” Cabal spoke loudly and clearly into Cacon’s face, demanding a response. “Who did this to you? Who stabbed you? Cacon? Tell me!”

He tried. Cacon truly tried. He drew together what was left of his consciousness and tried to force words out through his mouth, that garrulous mouth that had always seemed so eager to gabble on about nothing in particular. Now it wouldn’t respond properly, and his jaw flapped and his tongue lay stubbornly still. He felt thirsty, terribly thirsty, but he couldn’t ask for water; he couldn’t ask for anything at all. The dark shapes above him that might have been people grew darker still. Cacon felt so thirsty and so tired. He would have a little sleep, and ask for water when he awoke, because we always wake up from sleep. And so Cacon died.

They stayed in tableau for some moments afterwards, Cabal deep in thought and Miss Barrow uncertain what to do. She rose awkwardly and sat on an upright chair near the window.

Cabal didn’t seem to notice. He stayed silent for a little longer, then closed Cacon’s eyes and laid his head down. “Typical, Cacon. Not just of you but of our whole unhappy race. Prattling importunately over nothing, but when you have a chance to say something important, silence. Typical.”

He stood up, brushing off his knees as he rose.

“Well, it won’t do. We need to know who killed him.”

“We?” said Miss Barrow, too tired and sick at heart to speak with passion. “Need?”

“Very well.
I
need. It seems unlikely that this isn’t all associated with events on the aeroship, which means whoever stabbed Herr Cacon may well be whoever tried to kill me. I don’t like leaving unknown enemies in the shadows. They have a habit of jumping out again. This business needs attending to before I can move on.”

“Good. Good.” Miss Barrow seemed terribly weary all of a sudden. Cabal recognised a shock reaction when he saw one. He could have helped her, but it seemed too distracting when he had a murderer to find. “We have to find the murderer. Good. How are we going to do it?”

“Your criminology degree doesn’t suggest anything?” he said.

She didn’t rise to the baiting. Indeed, it seemed unlikely she even noticed it. “I’m still an undergraduate. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know.” She looked lethargically around the room as if noticing it for the first time. “Dust for fingerprints? I don’t know.”

“Fingerprints. Feh. Very useful in most circumstances but not when we know that he was stabbed outside and made his way here. I doubt his attacker even set foot inside the door.” He looked around the room. It was an odd house, sparsely furnished and with little sign of occupation. He frowned.

Miss Barrow was wondering the same thing. “What is this place, anyway? Who lives here? I’m not sure anybody does. The air’s stale, and there’s a thin layer of dust.”

Cabal made no reply. Instead, he took up the candleholder, relit the candle, and left the room. Miss Barrow found herself alone with the corpse. She felt that she should be scared, or at least awed by the presence of death, the last great mystery. But the body was Cacon’s, and he was as unimpressive in death as when he was alive. She sat staring at him and thinking how unlike a person a human body is once the breath of life, with all its pulses and beats and tics and movement, is gone. His corpse was pathetic, in that it inspired pathos, and pitiful, in that it aroused pity. She found herself feeling more sorry for Cacon than she had ever felt for anyone before. All hopes and dreams extinguished, all potential gone. If only she could wave a wand and make him breathe again, it would be the greatest gift that could be bestowed.

Cabal returned, shattering her reverie. “I found this,” he said, and held up a key on a ring. “It fits the lock. The one next to it is of the same pattern as the cabin keys aboard the
Princess Hortense
. It would be no surprise to discover that it unlocks Cacon’s stateroom.”

“So this is Cacon’s place,” said Miss Barrow, with an apparent lack of interest. Cabal pursed his lips and was about to speak, when a spark of animation ran through her as her intellect stopped freewheeling in shock and started to reengage her mind. “But Cacon’s Mirkarvian. Why would he have the keys to a house in Senza?”

Cabal wagged his finger at her tellingly. “Exactly.”

“And the answer is … ?”

Cabal shrugged. “I have no idea. But I know a man who does.”

She looked at him with eager interest. “Who?” Infuriatingly, Cabal just raised his eyebrows and looked meaningfully at her. “What? You? But you just said—” It took a second for her to understand him, but then her gaze fell to Cacon, and her mouth fell open in astonishment. Astonishment and horror. Definitely some horror. “Oh, you have to be joking.”

“I never joke about my work,” he said, and was unable to suppress a malevolent smile at the end as the ramifications settled upon Miss Barrow.

“No! You can’t. You absolutely must not, Cabal! It’s … a monstrous crime. A terrible, terrible thing!”

“Is it? What is our alternative? Do you have a criminological department about your person to aid in the application of your towering forensic skills? You do not?” He simulated amazement, and did not trouble himself to simulate it well. “Then we shall do things my way.” He made for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“For reagents. Not the ideal circumstances under which to gather them, but I think I can throw something together in a hurry that should give the hapless Herr Cacon one last shudder of animation.” Miss Barrow did not seem convinced. Impatient, for the first few minutes of a person’s death are the most vitally important minutes of opportunity for a necromancer, Cabal added, “Look, I have to go. Without the necessary chemicals, we’ll lose whatever wits are still floating around his cooling brain. The only more immediate alternative that I can think of is a Tantric ritual involving necrophiliac sodomy and, frankly, I don’t think my back is up to it. So, if you will excuse me?”

And he left, inwardly treasuring Miss Barrow’s expression.

T
he dispensing chemist and the general grocery stood next door to each other, and both contained homes above the shops in which the chemist and the grocer, respectively, lived with their families, which was very convenient if you wanted to throw small pebbles at both sets of windows at much the same time.

The chemist was the first to respond. He swung open a window and looked down into the street through half-moon glasses. He was jacketless, his white hair slightly awry, and he had a napkin in his collar. “Eh! What is it? Who are you? What do you want?”

Cabal finished writing a list in his notebook, tore out the page, and held it up for the man to see. “I need these supplies urgently.”

“What? What is that? Supplies?” Somebody said something behind him, and he turned away to reply, which involved a lot of arm-waving and extravagant shrugging. He returned his attention to Cabal. “I’m having my dinner!”

“A man’s life is at stake,” said Cabal, not entirely untruthfully.

“Eh?” The chemist looked him up and down. “You’re a doctor?”

Cabal’s expression twisted in a way that seemed to suggest
If my gun hadn’t been confiscated in Mirkarvia, I would currently be in the process of shooting you
. “No,” he said with crystalline iciness, “I am not a doctor, but these supplies are vitally important.”

As he spoke, the door of the general grocery swung open and the grocer, a man of middle years but bearing a surprisingly full, raven-black head of hair, appeared. He stood, straightening a collar that was thoroughly askew, as he looked around and saw Cabal. “Signor? Did you cast stones upon my casement?”

“I did,” said Cabal. “I have an urgent requirement from your shop.”

“Eh?” said the chemist. “What is this? You are on an errand to collect vital medicine and yet you have time to bother Signor Bonacci? Eh? For what? Some nails, perhaps? A mop? I was having my dinner, signor! Not so urgent, eh? Not so urgent!”

Cabal ignored him. To Signor Bonacci the grocer, he said, “Dolly Blue. Do you stock it?”

“Eh?” said the chemist. Cabal continued to ignore him.

“Dolly Blue, you say?” said Signor Bonacci, clearly taken aback. “What, the stuff housewives put in the last white rinse?”

“Specifically, a mixture of indigo blue and starch. I need those chemicals.”

“Pah!” said the chemist. “You’re mad!” He started to close his window.

“I will pay double the price for a little alacrity, gentlemen,” Cabal said, loudly enough to be heard through the rapidly closing shutters. The shutters paused, and then reopened.

“Double?” said the chemist. “Eh?”

M
iss Barrow was sitting on the stairs in the house when Cabal returned. She had found and lit the gaslight in the hall and, judging by the muted glows, those towards the back of the house and upstairs. Cabal said nothing as he placed the paper bag containing his purchases on the dresser, and hung up his jacket and hat. Miss Barrow finally said, “I’ve looked over the whole house. It’s strange. Everything you could want to be comfortable is here—bedding, books, the larder is full of tinned and dried food. A lot of preserves in jars, too. But there isn’t a single personal touch about the place. I can’t see the personality of the owner. I don’t understand why Cacon had a key to it. I would say it was rented, but I’ve never heard of food being supplied like that.”

Cabal kept his counsel. He had a theory about the house, but would wait to hear what Cacon had to say on the subject. Provided, of course, that the ad-hoc resurrection worked. He took up the paper bag and went into the room where Cacon lay, pausing at the doorway to ask Miss Barrow, “Do you want to see this?” She looked at him, her eyes tired and haunted. Cabal tried again. “You might find it … educational.” She didn’t respond, just stared at him through the bannisters.