The Seer (16 page)

The detective got down as Jesco opened the door of the carriage. Raised voices were ringing out from the shanty, a man and woman yelling at one another in anger. Something crashed and their shouts only increased in volume and temper. Alarmed, Scoth said, “It might be better if you stayed put.”

Jesco closed the door and retook his seat as Scoth knocked and went inside. Uncomfortable minutes passed in the carriage with dirty faces pressing up against the windows to look in. A boy of fifteen or sixteen shouted, “Are you a lord? Are you a lord, sir?” His jaws were crenellated parapets, each merlon of a tooth separated by a gap so large that the tip of his tongue could protrude through. Jesco shook his head repeatedly to the question, but there was a dull look to the boy’s eyes and he continued to ask. Finally, other people knocked him away so that they could look in. Some were obviously scanning around for anything to steal, and the humble insides of the carriage disappointed them.

Scoth came out of the residence, his trench coat dripping. The people about the carriage faded away at a fast clip. Hoisting himself up to the seat, Scoth pushed the autohorse forward. He was trying to find a place to turn around, but the alleys were so tiny that that was not possible. At last he shouted to another child, producing a coin for a route out of Shackton, and they were duly led back to the main road. Scoth stopped there to fiddle with the autohorse, and let himself into the carriage. The horse drew them on alone.

“Offered you a drink, did they?” Jesco asked. The splash on the trench coat was one of alcohol.

“Roaring drunk, Michum Quay, and his lady friend who is not his wife,” Scoth said in aggravation. “Drunk and screaming their heads off about nonsense as they threw glasses at each other. I couldn’t understand half of what they said. But I got it out of him that he hasn’t seen his son Tallo in years.”

“How many years?”

“He was incapable of specifics. Tallo went to work for a brothel, he said with disgust. That had to be the escort agency. His father wanted nothing to do with him after that. But he knew that his son was living in town with a woman some time later.”

“Can we speak to the woman? Where is she?”

“We’re headed her way now and we’ve already seen the establishment. She works as a maid at The Donkey Inn and the father says that she still does. The employees keep rooms there and that was where Tallo lived with her.”

It did not take long to reach the inn. The autohorse swished its tail as they disembarked and entered. Raucous but good-humored voices were bellowing within the barroom, the noise coming and going with the swinging of the door. The entryway was otherwise demure, a stout woman at the counter checking in a guest and two men reading papers in armchairs.

“Help you?” she asked tersely when Scoth and Jesco came to the counter.

“We are seeking the whereabouts of a man named Tallo Quay,” Scoth said, showing his identification.

“Put that away!” the woman exclaimed in a horrified hiss. “Chase off good business with that, you will. Tallo hasn’t set foot in this inn in years, so whatever business he’s mucking about in, it’s not here. Get out with you!”

Unperturbed, Scoth leaned on the counter. “Who is the maid that he lived with when he was here? We must speak with her.”

The woman lifted the counter and beckoned them in frantically, her eyes on the men in armchairs. They were looking up from their papers. She escorted Jesco and Scoth to an office space behind the counter to have the conversation there. “That’s Merlie Jonkins and she’s not mixed up in anything! The girl barely has a brain in her head to call her own.”

From the inner pocket of his coat, Scoth withdrew the hand drawn picture of the nervous blonde. “Would this be a fair rendering of Merlie Jonkins?”

The woman paled. “See here, I don’t want any trouble-”

“My partner and I are not here to cause trouble,” Scoth said smoothly. He had slipped in referring to Jesco as his partner, but Jesco didn’t mind. “We simply want to ask Ms. Jonkins some questions. Where can we find her?”

“Upstairs in her room, chances are,” said the woman with an anxious look around them to the entryway. “It’s her day off but she took a wrench to the shoulder last night spotting for Ellna in the bar. I haven’t seen her come downstairs so she must be resting. Just go up and knock on the fourth right-side door nice and quiet-like, don’t scream what you are and barrel your way in!”

“She speaks as if from long experience,” Scoth said flatly once he and Jesco were going up the stairs, and Jesco snickered under his breath.

Merlie Jonkins answered the knock. Her left arm was wrapped up in a crude sling made of towels and pins. Except for that, she looked better than she had in Jesco’s visions of her. Although still a slender woman, she had been eating better.

The room she was within was the same as in the thrall. The wallpaper was peeling, and there was the spindly wooden table. Upon it were stacks of coins. Following his gaze, Merlie said, “’S my tips.” She took a chair by the window. “Police, you said? Here about Beddam?”

“No, we’re not here about Beddam,” Scoth said.

She didn’t hear him. “You can’t hold those bunnies against him! He didn’t know he was in anyone’s backyard. He thought he was trapping in a field, not someone’s pets.” She nodded, convinced of Beddam’s innocent mistake. “Who keeps bunnies for pets no-how? Fur and meat, that’s what they’re good for. But these were wearing little blue coats.”

“I’m not interested in the bunnies,” Scoth said. Jesco could not help but wonder why a man would then think that they were wild bunnies in a field.

But Merlie Jonkins did not possess a discriminating mind. “If you’re not here for Beddam, is it Sprout? He didn’t mean to-”

“We’re here about Tallo Quay, Ms. Jonkins,” Scoth interrupted.

She both blanched and wheezed in laughter. “
Ms.
Jonkins. Like I’m a proper prat, huh? Nobody calls me that. I’m Merlie. What do you want about Tallo then?”

“We’re attempting to locate him.”

“He didn’t come back. He went out that day, two years ago, maybe three now, and didn’t come back.”

“Where did he go?”

She began to look extremely nervous. “I told him not to get messed up in rich folks’ business. But he was dead set on getting his pound of flesh from her.”

“Who do you mean?”

“I don’t remember her name. That rich woman who had a different man in her bed every night of her life. Even women she had in her bed on some nights. That’s what Tallo told me. Sometimes she had two men at the same time, or a man and a woman, like her bed was a party and everyone was invited. Indecent.” She adjusted her sling.

“Can you tell me how you met Tallo?” Scoth asked.

“Here. He came in for a drink one night all downhearted. He was on fire. A man on fire! Not real fire,” she clarified for them. “Fire in his heart. Passion. But she doused his fire with cold water and sent him away. After she took what she wanted of him, she gave him that little clock and told him to go. Go back and sell yourself to someone else. But he didn’t want to do that. He cried at me. All the world wanted from him was his body.”

“Did he stay with you after that?”

She flushed. “Yes. He had nowhere else to go.”

“He sounds like he was very angry at that woman,” Jesco said when the stain in her cheeks grew brighter in anticipation of their judgment. The two of them must have started a sexual relationship almost immediately for her to be so ashamed about it.

“He was!” Merlie agreed. “He was furious. He wanted to make her sorry for not giving him a little something after he’d given her everything.”

“And how was he going to do that?”

“Poor people, see, they got dirt on the outside. I’d rather that, dirt you can’t hide. Rich people, they have dirt on the inside. They look clean but they’re not. He knew some of her dirt from living there in her big house. He’d spied on her when she had visitors. And he’d gone through her papers when she was playing with her other men and women. They aren’t supposed to do that, go into her little home office that she keeps. She locks it, but he lifted her keys. He was real careful, put everything back the way it was so she would never know anyone had been in there. And that’s how he got the dirt on her.”

“Did he tell you what it was?” Scoth asked.

“It wasn’t so dirty to me. Some of the royal blood, generations past the throne, the ones who have hu . . . humanitarian interests . . .”

She enunciated slowly and went on. “Those ones, they pulled strings to get her the ground in Lizziner over the competing mines. That’s rich ground, Lizziner, he said. They made sure that she was the one buying it. Some are in Parliament and they aren’t supposed to fund interests like that. It’s against the rules. But everyone does it, and there are Parliament people slipping favors to the other mines in exchange for things. I didn’t really understand all that Tallo was saying.”

“That’s all right,” Scoth said. “Did he say anything else you remember?”

“He knew some names. The names of the people giving her favors. He was going to tell someone who worked in another mine so they could make a scandal. But everyone in politics and business is rolling in a mud puddle so what was his little bit of dirt? The game of it is that everyone is filthy dirty and everyone knows it, Tallo said, but everyone pretends to be squeaky clean. You got to show the world how dirty someone else is but still look like roses yourself, or else you’re called a hypocrite. But I told him these are rich people’s games and he should keep his nose out of them. He didn’t, though. He was going to get himself hurt or something, I told him, the only one that gets hurt in the games of the rich are the poor. He was hunting that man.”

“What man?”

“The one with the strange name. I can’t recall it. Colomo? Co . . . Cadelmo? It was something like that. Tallo thought the man would be very interested in his information. And then this man could give Tallo a little something in return. The problem was that it was hard to get to the man to tell him. It was hard to find out where he was, and then he never stayed there long. It was like hopscotch. Tallo would find out the place where he was and take a carriage there to find him, and the man would have just left for somewhere else. Then Tallo would find out the next place and go
there
, but the man was gone again and Tallo didn’t have the money to keep chasing him around the country. Tallo couldn’t work when he was chasing, so I gave him my money. And often the man wasn’t even
in
the country. He would travel for months at a time around the world. Tallo sent him letters but never got a reply. It was rude. If I get a letter, I take the time to write back. But this was a very busy businessman, so he didn’t.”

She stretched her good arm to the table and turned over a coin in her fingers. “Then he found out where the man was going to be again. It had been two years of waiting and chasing and waiting some more. It was in the papers that the man was going to be attending a play in Cantercaster. Tallo got a lot of papers. He knew that this was his moment. He took the little clock and his booklet where he’d copied down the dirt from the papers in her office, his coat and gloves since it was getting cold, and left. He never came back here. I figure the man put him in a theater company somewhere as gratitude.”

And he never contacted the woman who had supported him for two years?
Jesco didn’t ask the question on his mind. It seemed cruel.

Scoth showed her the timepiece and she touched it longingly. “That’s it. She was rich, rich, rich, and this was all she gave him. She should have been ashamed.”

“Did he leave anything behind when he left?” Scoth asked.

“Just a pile of clothes. I gave them away a year ago. He didn’t have much when he came to me. Why are you looking for him?”

“His name has come up in an investigation of a murder. Tell me: do you know a man by the name of Hasten Jibb?”

“No.”

“Did Tallo ever say that name to you?”

“No.”

“Did he say the name of the play?” Jesco asked.

She shook her head. “He might have at the time, but it was years ago. He was always talking about plays and the parts he wanted to have. That was his passion. I couldn’t tell them all apart. I’ve never been to a play. It’s a waste of money to me. The man was going to be at one that wasn’t performed much.” She brightened as her memories came back. “A tragedy. It was a tragedy. People want to laugh these days, or they want romances that end all happily, but this was a sad one.”

As Scoth spoke with her more, Jesco looked around for something to touch that would put him in the mind of Tallo Quay. The clothes would have been best. Then there was the table, but it was too small to dine at or work upon. It was just decorative to hold some knick-knacks, or coins. Would he have touched that table for any length of time? Jesco didn’t think so. The wallpaper wouldn’t contain much either.

Then there was the bed. “Did Tallo sleep here?” Jesco asked in a pause of their conversation. “In this same bed?”

“In that bed? No,” Merlie said, finding nothing odd about his inquiry. “It’s new. The last one got the rot in it last winter and was only fit for fire, sheets and all.” The new bed was someone else’s old bed, and was fairly battered.

He would have touched the doorknob with his bare hand, but when he looked at it, Scoth caught his eye and shook his head. The detective removed a bag from his pocket and said, “I’m going to need to take your doorknob.”