Johannes Cabal the Detective (27 page)

“Not nearly as upset as he would be to see me walking arm in arm with a bastard like you.”

Cabal nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a fair point. To return to the matter at hand, however, I cannot eliminate you as a subject, not least because you were in the area, and you did seem to be following me.”

“I just saw you lurking around that street! I followed you a hundred yards at most, and I didn’t take a short break from following you to do in Cacon, the poor swine.”

“So you say.”

The suddenness with which Miss Barrow came to a halt jerked Cabal almost off his feet. “Look, Cabal,” she said, glowering at him. “I didn’t do it. The only criminal act I’ve committed on this trip, to my knowledge, was not handing you over to the authorities and, God knows, I’m regretting that.”

“It’s not as if you’re a prime suspect,” said Cabal, checking his shoulder for possible injury. “But I cannot eliminate you—there simply isn’t the evidence available that would allow me to do that. I do, however, admit that I think you’re a less likely murderer than, say, Miss Ambersleigh, who is also low on my list.”

“Third place?” said Miss Barrow, somewhat mollified but working hard not to show it.

“Joint second, which puts you at fourth. She only makes second because I think she’s as unlikely a candidate as Frau Roborovski. I can’t draw a line between them.”

“Ah,” said Miss Barrow, starting to walk again. “So you’ve plumped for the voyage’s very own femme fatale, Lady Ninuka.”

“And you haven’t?”

“I’m not even convinced that Cacon was killed by a fellow passenger. The way he spoke, it could have been somebody he knew from elsewhere.”

“No,” said Cabal with finality. “Remember, he talked about ‘young love.’ That implies it was somebody known to me. Miss Ambersleigh is not young. Frau Roborovski is married. You—” He considered in silence for a moment. “You, I may have to move up the rankings.” Then, to quickly quench her outrage, he added, “Based purely on your age, but you are still a country mile behind the Lady Ninuka in my mind. Consider: she is demonstrably manipulative, mendacious, and self-centred to the point of sociopathy.” He noticed a faint smile on Miss Barrow’s lips. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m finding this very educational. Please, continue.”

“Furthermore, she is a member of the Mirkarvian gentry, and they seem to be very political creatures. I’m sure they are read Machiavelli in the nursery, and practise by setting their dolls against one another. Nor are they above acting as their own agents. If you want a Senzan spy dead, sometimes you just have to do it yourself.”

“You might have something there,” she said, now sober. “I heard that her father is somebody big in the government or the military.”

“It will be both. It’s very hard to tell the two apart in Mirkarvia.”

“I overheard the purser gossiping with the chief steward, because she’d given one of the stewards a hard time over some stupid little thing she found to complain about. The purser said the steward should just grin and bear it, because if Lady Ninuka went running to her ‘daddy the count’ things could get very sticky for him.”

This time it was Miss Barrow’s turn to be jerked to a halt. “This count,” said Cabal slowly. “Would he have a name?”

“Yes, but I don’t remember it. I didn’t think it was important.”

“Could it have been Marechal?”

“Yes! That was it. I remember thinking it was quite a French-sounding name for a Mirkarvian, but that’s just the name of his fiefdom. Oh, that would be a
county
, wouldn’t it? I’d never really thought about that before. Anyway, the land used to belong to a neighbouring state until some war ages and ages ago, and they kept the name for the title, but the family name is actually Ninuka. Thinking about it, I’m a bit surprised that a country that’s so influenced by the German language doesn’t use
Graf
instead of
Count
. ‘Graf Marechal.’ Hmm.”

She looked closely at Cabal, but he had clearly stopped listening somewhere around “Yes!”

“Ohhhhh,” she said, the smile coming back again. “Friend of yours, is he?”

“Not in any recognised sense of the word, no. This puts a markedly different complexion upon matters.”

Miss Barrow’s smile slipped. “How?”

“My main interest in getting to the bottom of the affair has been partially curiosity but mainly a sense of reactive self-preservation.”

“What? Get them before they get you? Well, that’s lovely. How about to bring a murderer to justice?”

Cabal glanced at her, frowning slightly at such foolishness. “What a quaint idea. No, I can honestly say that was never in my thoughts. The possibility of Marechal’s involvement, however, puts a new emphasis on matters, which is to say, upon my life, and extending it beyond, say, tomorrow.”

Miss Barrow was taken aback. She had come to expect the unexpected with Cabal, but cowardice seemed out of joint with the architecture of his personality as she understood it. “You’re scared of him!”

Cabal raised an eyebrow at this impertinence. “I would not characterise it as fear. Simply a desire not to be cut to bleeding chunks by a maniac with a cavalry sabre. More of a rational concern, really.”

“But the deaths—”

“Unfortunate, but we shall just have to congratulate the killer or—far more likely—killers on some murders well done, and bid him, her, or them a fond farewell.
Bon voyage, ma chère Hortense
, and try not to let your body count get any higher. We’re well rid of the whole sordid affair.”

“Not
we
, Cabal.”

“Eh?”

“I’m rejoining the ship. I’ve decided to go all the way to Katamenia.”

“What? But why? Why rejoin the ship, that is. Any reason for wanting to go to Katamenia is already beyond my understanding, but why put yourself in harm’s way?”

“I can’t just let whoever did this go, Cabal. I can’t. To answer your question, because it’s the right thing to do.”

Cabal’s face tightened with ill-concealed anger. “What your father would do, you mean.”

She smiled, a little wanly. “It’s the same thing. It usually is.”

“Your father’s a busybody.”

“My father,” replied Miss Barrow, gently disengaging her arm from Cabal’s, “is a good man. But he’s at home, back in Penlow on Thurse, so I shall have to do this.” She started to walk away, back towards the aeroport, but paused after a few steps. “I doubt we’ll meet again.”

“I doubt it, too. You’re playing Mirkarvian roulette, Miss Barrow. Much like the Russian version, but with only one empty chamber.”

They stood in the gas-lit street alone, the other evening walkers already at their tables speaking of love and life and happier subjects than a lowering death. Miss Barrow’s face was difficult to make out in the shadow of her hat, but Cabal could see the skin of her cheeks, pale and sickly in the flickering yellow light. She was scared, just as she was brave, just as she was doomed. He could almost see the chain of events that would surely follow: she would ask questions, she would make somebody nervous, and she would die. “Miss Barrow, whatever else you think of me, know this. I abominate death. I deal in it, but I loathe it. Your intentions reek of it and, if you return to the ship, the path of your life will be a short one, I am sure.”

“You want me to stay here in Senza.”

“It would be wisest.”

“Whoever’s behind these crimes would go free, in that case. The captain seems a good man, but he’s out of his depth. If Ninuka is behind all this, he can’t do anything anyway. She could stand in front of him with blood on her hands and he’d trot off to get her a basin to wash them in. It’s more than his career … it’s more than his
life
is worth to do otherwise. I can make a fuss, because I’m a foreigner, and I have my country behind me.”

“If you imagine your country would go to war just because some silly girl gets herself killed, you are a fool.”

“Perhaps I am. But God looks after fools and little children, doesn’t he?
Auf Wiedersehen
, Herr Cabal” He stood and watched as she walked away.

“Goodbye, Miss Barrow,” he said to himself with a heavy finality.

Other known editions:  John Rylands Library, Manchester, Great Britain. Incunabulum, with marginalia. Earliest known, C16, Latin. Subsequent editions have textual fidelity to this edition (cf. McCaffey). Vatican Library.
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
file copy, restricted collection. C. 1860, French.

General:                        The
Principia Necromantica
is a rare surviving artefact of the notorious “Whitely Scandal” of the early nineteenth century. Captain Horace Whitely’s initial attempts to publish the
Principia
—presumably copied from the volume that ultimately came to reside at the John Rylands Library—resulted in the enactment of byelaws to prevent its publication in three boroughs of London. He went on to the continent and brokered a deal with a French print shop known primarily for producing pornography. Only twenty copies had been produced when the master printer was made aware of the book’s contents and ceased work, burning most (accounts suggest seventeen) and attacking Whitely. Whitely escaped with the surviving sheets and returned to Britain, where he had them bound at a bindery where no one spoke Latin.
The cover is of black leather, assumed to be calfskin. It bears no title, author, or maker’s mark. The front cover bears the motto “
Fais ce que tu voudras
” embossed in silver leaf. The content of the book is understood to be a treatise on certain blasphemous studies pertaining to the resurrection of the dead, represented in the form of fables, obscure metaphors, and Socratic dialogue. The text has proved impenetrable to scholars. This copy of the Whitely edition is believed to be the last surviving example. It was confiscated from the effects of an itinerant found wandering the northern forest, whose identity was never confirmed, and who died shortly thereafter in the asylum at Hamkar. The book is
absolutely interdicted
without personal permission, by word and in writing, from the Librarian.

Chapter 14

IN WHICH VILLAINY IS REVEALED AND LIVES ARE RISKED

Weighing the pros and cons of his current situation, Johannes Cabal had to admit that he was definitely ahead in the game. The route had proved circuitous, and the clean lines of his original plan to steal the
Principia Necromantica
had long been trampled under the feet of any number of interested and interfering parties. There had been two very distinct attempts upon his life along the way, although such was the nature of his calling that if nobody had tried to kill him during the project he would have regarded it as, at best, freakish or, at worse, highly suspicious.

Still, here he was with the
Principia
nestling happily in his Gladstone bag, with the murderous mess of bloody circumstance otherwise known as “the maiden voyage of the aeroship
Princess Hortense”
due to fly away from him at dawn, taking the last vestiges of menace with it. He might even go down to the aeroport perimeter and wave from behind the wire as it dwindled into the distance and out of his life.

In the meantime, he would find a small, clean, discreet
locanda
, have a meal that was not subject to Mirkarvian standards of machismo in the kitchen, a long bath, and sleep the untroubled sleep of a man who is tolerably sure that nobody is going to try and cut his throat in the wee small hours—which is to say, he would still lock his door and wedge a chair under the handle.

And so it went. He found a quiet little inn just by the Via Dulcis, whose proprietor was friendly but incurious. He asked Cabal if he was on holiday, Cabal agreed that he was, and that apparently fulfilled the landlord’s entire expectations for gossip. He did not even much care that Cabal had only a single small bag, but blithely showed him up to a small, clean room that had a decent view of a municipal park over the low rooftop of its neighbour. The room shared a bathroom with the three other rooms on the landing, but these were all unoccupied, so Cabal enjoyed his long bath uninterrupted. Clean, shaven, and in his only change of fresh clothing until he would have the opportunity of buying more on the morrow, he sat down to a light meal of pasta and chicken in sauce, accompanied by a glass of dry white wine from, the landlord explained, his family’s own vineyard. Cabal admitted that he was right to be proud of it; while not an extraordinary vintage, Cabal’s spectrograph of a palate found much to admire in it, and so he went to bed tired, very slightly drunk, and—at least briefly—at peace with the world. This last he managed by assiduously avoiding any thought of the past few days and Miss Leonie Barrow’s current circumstances. It was a mental trick that came easily to him, after so many opportunities to practise it in his past.

H
e slept through dawn, and therefore any chance to wave goodbye to the
Princess Hortense
, but this caused him little concern and less dismay. It was hardly his affair if Miss Barrow would insist upon sticking her head in a lion’s mouth. That thought made him consider the coincidence of the leonine Leonie putting her head in any such place, and his thoughts went off in other directions and had to be dragged back into line by the scruff of the neck and spoken harshly to.

He came down to breakfast and enjoyed a light meal in the Continental manner, with strong coffee and tart orange juice in a sparsely occupied dining room in which the other guests kept themselves, much to Cabal’s satisfaction, to themselves. When he had finished, he had another coffee to drink while he skimmed the morning newspaper. This, he was further pleased to note, contained nothing about skies full of murder, or spies turning up cold and dead. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if officials at Senzan Intelligence had already found Cacon, but they would hardly be likely to advertise it. Any suspicions they had would be ranged upon the Mirkarvian aeroship now heading for their border with Katamenia, and there it could remain with his blessings. He, in the meantime, just needed to buy some travelling clothes, and then set off in entirely the other direction. He had suffered his fill of other people for the time being, and he missed his laboratory.

Thinking of his laboratory reminded him of other elements of his life, his real life and real business, away from all the alarums and excursions people seemed hell-bent upon imposing on him. Such nonsense, so distracting. He looked at the empty chair opposite him across the small table and imagined it occupied. He sank into a brown study as he considered the vagaries of fate that had led him to this place and this time and breakfast by himself.

He would probably have been a solicitor. His father had connections with Hinks & Hinks in town, a small firm specialising in the bread-and-butter business of English solicitors—conveyancing, last wills and testaments, and bickering over property lines. His father had so wanted to be English, for his sons to lose their accents and to conform. A whole trajectory for Cabal’s life had been calculated that concluded in his sixty-fifth year, when he was to retire as senior partner at Hinks, Hinks & Cabal to a cottage with roses around the door, Sunday lunch with the grandchildren, and the autumn of his life spent with his wife.

Even at the time, it had been anathema to him. All but that last element. There he had plans himself. Plans that came to an abrupt halt with his brother Horst standing ashen-faced on the doorstep, the mindless run to the river’s edge where a silent crowd stood by, gathered by her where she lay on the grass, her summer dress lank with river water. The doctor had delivered the formula then—that there was nothing that could be done, that all hope had gone, that he was sorry for Johannes Cabal’s loss. He was vague with shock then, hearing without listening, but later, when the priest came and had the damnable temerity to tell him that she was in a better place, Cabal swore and raged and would have struck the man across his stupid sanctimonious face if Horst hadn’t held him back.

That night, he made his decision and, as was in his character, acted upon it immediately. That night, the baleful shade of Hinks, Hinks & Cabal winked out of existence and was replaced by a new arc, that led to here and now, sitting alone at a breakfast table under an assumed name. He noticed the landlord standing close at hand, an expression of concern on his face warring with a professional desire to avoid upsetting the customers. “
Mi scusi, signor
. But you said something?”

“No,” said Cabal. He got up to leave. “I said nothing. Nothing of import.”

T
eeth brushed, bag packed, and bill paid, Cabal walked out into the clear Parilan morning. The sky was a brilliant blue, the buildings shone in the sun’s reflected glory, and the air was fresh, just a hint of chill still lingering from the clear night. It was a good day to be alive and did much to lift his mood. He would have been a mite happier still if his Webley revolver had been snuggling safely in his bag, but the day was otherwise as good as any day without a large-calibre handgun can reasonably be. Cabal stepped into the street busy with people going to work, and set off toward a gentleman’s tailor he had spotted the previous evening that stocked a lot of black suits and white shirts in unenterprising styles. By his calculations, he would be able to buy some fresh clothes and still reach the railway station towards the end of the morning rush. The crowds would offer him cover while he checked that nondescript men with bulges in their armpits were not monitoring departures. His acute sense of danger told him that he was probably in the clear, but, then again, his acute sense of danger had failed to tell him that somebody was about to throw him out of the belly of the
Princess Hortense
, so he was not inclined to trust to it, at least not until it could prove to have recovered its edge.

The tailor was most accommodating, and—once he had got over his disappointment that the gentleman was interested only in items off the peg—bustled around fetching them as Cabal reeled off his measurements from memory. “You are in a hurry, signor?” he asked from the top of a stepladder, from which he fetched down white shirts wrapped in tissue paper.

“I have to meet a boat arriving at Santa Keyna, and my train leaves in two hours,” Cabal explained, missing no opportunity to cover his tracks. Santa Keyna lay eastwards of Parila, while he would be travelling to the west. “I shouldn’t have left everything to the last minute, I know,” and he shrugged.

O
ut on the street again, with his new purchases wrapped in a neat brown-paper bundle under his arm, he checked his watch. The timing was slightly off, he realised; the tailor had been more efficient than planned for, and Cabal found himself slightly ahead of schedule. In an unexpected show of pleasantry, which he didn’t even attempt to rationalise, he bought a red carnation from a woman on a street corner who had a basket full of them. Furthermore, he suffered her to place it upon his jacket’s lapel, and for this he could offer no rationalization either. With the uncharacteristic splash of colour illuminating him, he strolled onwards.

As he entered the square whose northern side was dominated by the railway station’s façade, he heard the happy shrieks of children, and the sound curdled his enjoyment of the day somewhat. He had once been forced by circumstances to be vaguely polite to children for a whole year when he ran the carnival, and the experience had scarred him. When he saw that the source of their amusement was a puppet show, the day darkened still further. A detour was impossible, as the show had been mounted close by the pedestrian approach to the station’s entrance. Most of the commuters passing by smiled and tossed coins into the collection buckets, apparently unconcerned by the bottleneck created by the show’s audience.

Cabal started to edge around the crowd, but paused, distracted by the nature of the show. It was not a simple tall booth with a stage in the upper third, beneath which lurked a glove puppeteer, like the “professors” of the English Punch and Judy show. This was an altogether more massive construction of wood and canvas, the best part of two and a half metres along the front and deep enough to hold a floored stage and sufficient “backstage” and space behind the proscenium to give the puppeteers room to stand and operate the marionettes that pranced upon the stage. The play currently being performed seemed to be an old story, albeit lent a satirical edge for the adults present by passing references to local gossip and national politics. The tale’s root was something like that of “Hansel and Gretel,” but instead of a witch’s cottage the pair had stumbled upon a secret military camp in the woods, run by grotesquely caricatured Mirkarvian soldiers. The Mirkarvians—led by an idiotic captain who reminded Cabal strongly of Lieutenant Karstetz—were at a loss to know how to deal with the children, the captain having inadvisably used his orders as toilet paper in an earlier scene. Now they found themselves “in a pickle,” which led to a running joke about how the captain loved pickles, and what an extraordinarily wide variety of things the Mirkarvians enjoy pickled.

Cabal watched the soldiers whirling and dancing around, their wooden feet clacking across the boards of the little stage. He had to admire the skill of the puppeteers, even if the script played a little too strongly to the Senzan appetite for scatological humour. Still, it was easy enough to ignore the words and just watch the varnished arms wave and the varnished boots stamp.