The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (32 page)

“You said you had a strong stomach,” she accused. He struggled to bring his eyes to hers. They flashed in irritation. “I remember asking during your interview. You were quite adamant.”

He’d gotten quite upset and violently protested her painting him as a swooning maiden, yes, he remembered. He remembered. He forced his eyes closed, taking long, steady breaths, trying to calm his shattered nerves and his racing thoughts and his heaving stomach.

“Mister
Buckley
,” Olivia pressed. He could hear her tapping her foot.

“Give me a moment,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“You said―”

“I know what I said. I was wrong. Just…just give me a moment.”

She huffed.

He could still see it all in his mind’s eye. Lines of blood like swirls of strawberry in iced cream going all up the walls, covering the floor, spattered across the ceiling, a red rain falling here and then there. Scuff marks through the blood all over the floor where someone had slipped and fallen and scrambled and fought. Gods, so much blood thrown about, drops and splotches and pools everywhere, the rampage of a scarlet undine.

And Ana.

Ana in the midst of it all, mutilated and cut to pieces. He’d seen little more than that,
wanted
to see little more than that. He feared to look closer, to categorize all of her injuries and hurts, and he knew Olivia would make him do just that.

He trembled against the door frame. He’d dropped his notebook, he realized, in his initial shock. Olivia would not be happy. Had there been blood where it had fallen?

Grandmother Eadwyr, give me strength
. It was a more specific prayer than he’d made in many years. Chris took one final steadying breath and opened his eyes.

The room was as sickening and red as it had been before, but his stomach didn’t heave and he kept breathing. He released the frame and took a step in, and another. He bent to pick up the notebook, and a cursory inspection revealed it was unharmed. “What do you need?” he asked to Olivia, and his voice only shook a little.

She took another moment studying a line of blood across the ceiling, then turned back to him. She looked him up and down once. “Better,” she said, and that was the only comment she made on his moment of weakness.

She directed her attention to the heap on the floor, and clucked her tongue. “Shame,” she said, and that was her memorial for the young lady Analaea val Daren had been. She walked in a slow circle around the body. All the blood nearby had been sprawled in and spread about, so it had dried quickly while the thicker droplets remained wet. “She fought,” Olivia said, confirming Chris’s initial impression. “And she fought hard. She didn’t die straight away in shock and disgust like her father did, oh no. The girl gave everything she got.”

Chris fought off a surge in his stomach when Olivia reached down and gripped Ana’s chin in her hand. She pushed it to one side, making the dead girl’s face more visible. “Ugh, so stiff,” Olivia said, making a face and wiping her hands on the rag she had tucked into her belt. Chris’s heart hurt at the expression Ana had died wearing. Tear tracks went down the blood smeared on the girl’s face, and despite the ragged cut in one of her cheeks, it was easy to see that she had died in terror and anguish.

Olivia bent again, this time touching the girl’s hands. They were the worst of it. The cuts there were deep and angry, twisted and uneven. Chris could tell the knife had deliberately sawed into them there, and there. Her ring finger and middle on her left hand were hanging off from the palm side, and her index finger on the right was missing from the second knuckle up. “She gripped the knife in both hands,” Olivia said, pointing to select cuts. “She tried to push it away from her while the killer tried to push it towards her. They went back and forth.” She indicated the ring and middle finger. Then she pointed to the missing index. “Then they changed tack and pulled out while she was reaching to get a better grip. Took the finger off, here. Stabbed again and again, but…” Now Olivia showed him the deep, biting, small cuts peppering the palms of both hands. “But she used her hands to shield her face.” One cut went in one side and out the other, a hole right through her hand. “She did not die easy.”

Olivia shot him a look. “Are you getting this down?” she asked sharply, and then smiled a feline half smile at him when he indicated his open notebook. “Good boy,” she said, pleased. “We’re learning.”

She turned her attention back to Ana’s body. “By now, it’s been some time, too long. There’s blood going everywhere. So now we’re frustrated with her,” she said, her voice losing some of its certainty, becoming considering. “We slash low instead of high.” She brushed the sliced open fabric of Ana’s bodice, in her abdomen. Chris could look there for only a moment before turning his eyes aside. It was too much, too awful, those pale snakes bulging forth from the ruffles of her beautiful, dove-grey gown. “We get her in the stomach, slice. The girl goes into shock at the pain, falls on her bum.” Olivia pointed to where the blood on the floor first turned into a smudgy red mess. “But she
still
doesn’t stop fighting. The knife keeps falling, and she keeps protecting herself. She turns to one side, tries to dodge, pushes herself back.” Chris weaved as quickly as he could, combining the wounds Olivia indicated with the words Olivia said. “Every time the killer pulls back the knife, blood flings to one side, over, up, down.” The splatters along the walls and ceilings, of course. “And the killing blow…” Olivia mused, scanning Ana’s body. “The killing blow, the killing blow…”

Chris finally caught up with her tirade, taking a breath of relief and looking up at her. She stood over the body, her face quizzical as she looked up and down and up and down. And then she smiled smally…
almost
sadly. “There was no killing blow,” she said. She sounded…impressed? “She tried and tried to get her in the heart or the throat or the temple, but the girl never let her. They struggled here until Analaea bled to death.” Olivia looked up and met Chris in the eyes, and her smile widened. There was no doubt this time; she was impressed. “
That
is how I want to die,” Olivia stated proudly.

“I want to die old and happy and surrounded by friends,” Chris replied automatically, feeling dizzy and ill. “In my bed.”

Olivia turned away, skirts swishing behind her and trailing in blood. “That’s what everyone says,” she said dismissively. “Piss poor way to go, I think. Feeble and weak and unremarkable.”

“And happy.”

Olivia cracked a small smile. It lasted only an instant. She paced around the wall of the room, studying all the splatters of blood. “I’ve seen people die scared, people die shocked, people die angry, and people die humiliated.” She flickered her eyes over to him and then away once more. “I’ve never seen anyone die happy. It doesn’t matter you’re ten or one hundred and ten, you always feel you didn’t have enough time.”

Christopher thought of his parents, and he kept his mouth shut.

While Olivia walked thoughtfully around the outskirts of the room, studying blood and saying nothing, Chris weaved. His eyes and his thoughts kept coming back to the room, how pastel and girlish it was, how wrong it looked covered in blood. He’d just sat here with her, yesterday, and they’d eaten scones and laughed together. She’d just begun to heal from her father’s death, not to mention all the other hurts in her life. What had she done, that had made her deserving of death? Could a creditor be so evil? Or…

Chris looked up sharply. He sought out Olivia and found her on her knees by the door, nose mere inches from the floor. “You said ‘she,’ “ he said.

“Did I?” Olivia didn’t look up.

“I wrote it down. ‘She tried and tried to get her in the heart,’ you said.”

“I suppose I must have, then, if you wrote it down.”

Chris looked back down at the carved up corpse and shivered. “You still think the Duchess did this,” he said quietly. The mere thought made him sick.

Olivia did look up, then, finally. She sat back on her heels and met his eyes from across the room. “Yes,” she said with unflinching confidence. “And moreover, I’m more certain today than I was yesterday.”

With his heart sinking, Chris used his eyes to trace the wounds in Ana’s hands, in her cheek, in her shoulders and arms, and, especially, the one in her belly. It couldn’t be, no. Not with this sort of rage.

“Don’t tell me you disagree,” Olivia continued. “You’d have to be stupid not to find this suspicious. Cwenday afternoon, the girl calls her mother a liar to her Deathsniffer and hands over a folder full of secret information, and then bright and early Deorday morning, she’s dead.”

“I refuse to believe that. Ana was her daughter.”

Olivia shrugged one bared shoulder and seemed to lose interest in him. “A disappointing daughter she couldn’t control anymore. And a traitor, too, in her eyes. I’ve seen a hundred times worse and a thousand times less believable. Come on. We’ve seen all there is here.” She motioned to Chris, and the conversation was dismissed.

Eager to put a list of questions as long as her arm to her prime suspect, Olivia sought out Evelyn val Daren. By then, Maris had arrived with a team of lifeknitters and a heartreader, all wearing the queen’s insignias of the Royal Tarlish Police Force. Olivia was happy enough to sign off on Ana’s body, leaving it in the hands of the police, before going in search of Duchess val Daren.

It quickly became apparent she was not at the estate.

Servants with apologetic expressions and low voices informed them regretfully than the Duchess had stepped out for the day. No, they didn’t know where she had gone. No, they didn’t know when she would be returning, either. Was there anything they could do, instead?

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Officer Dawson said with flat irritation. They stood in the foyer, and most of the policewoman’s attention was taken up with supervising as her men carried Analaea val Daren’s litter out to the waiting hearse. “She’s free to come and go as she pleases until you order an arrest.”

“Can I do that, then?” Olivia asked sourly.

“Don’t be difficult, Faraday, you know I wouldn’t approve it. You still don’t have any evidence.”

“She hid evidence from me, she asked people to lie to give her an alibi, she had plenty of reasons to kill him, and her daughter mysteriously shows up dead the day after telling us most of that,” Olivia listed. “Can any of
that
be evidence?”

“Don’t be smart, either.”

Chris couldn’t help but watch the lifeknitters with Ana’s litter. The hearse would take her to the mortuary, and the lifeknitters would cut even deeper and further into her flesh, searching for anything Olivia had missed. The heartreader would spend the night sleeping at her side, trying to pick up on any strong final emotions that might give the investigation some insight. And then, after a lovely funeral attended by people who never truly knew her, Ana would be taken to a cemetery, somewhere very exclusive and beautiful, and put underground. She’d have a headstone that listed dates too close together and an inscription that said nothing about her.
Beloved daughter,
perhaps.

Ana’s body had been covered by a white sheet, and, hidden as it was, it was easy to pretend she had died at peace. Harder, though, to forget the images of her terrified, tear-streaked face and butchered corpse.

Maiden Maerwald,
Chris prayed,
Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I wish we could have figured this before she had to die. Tell her…tell her if I’d had more time, if either of us had had more time, I’d have tried to be a real friend.
He didn’t know if the last was true or not. It had been too soon to tell, and neither of them had had much experience with friendship. But he wished it were true. That had to count for something.

Now he’d prayed twice in a single day, he thought ruefully, and the litter was out the front door and being carried down the walk. Fernand would be so proud.

“Wasn’t there someone else you were going to see about this case, today?” Officer Dawson was asking. “Reams Kolton? Something…”

Olivia made a nonplussed sound. “Rayner Kolston,” she said dismissively. “The val Daren’s creditor. I’d really rather talk to the Duchess. Where could she
be
?”

“Didn’t you tell me yesterday she had a brother who died at the Floating Castle?” Officer Dawson asked. “The six year anniversary is tomorrow. Isn’t it likely she’s preparing for one of the memorials?”

“I’d think she should be a little more concerned with the daughter who died today than the brother who died six years ago, Maris.”

“Maybe she just didn’t want to be called a murderer on the day when the two coincide,” Chris spoke up, against his better judgement.

“Maybe,” Officer Dawson agreed before Olivia could say a word, and then continued to speak, cutting off any chance to change that. “Go and see the creditor today, Faraday. As I recall, you were quite excited about that this morning. You can talk to the Duchess later today, or tomorrow.”

“Once she’d had all day to practice her lies,” Olivia muttered, but in the end she had no choice.

Without the Duchess there to authorize the use of the estate’s vehicles, and with Olivia in no fit mood to wait an hour while they mirrored in a hackney cab from the city, Officer Dawson offered to let them sit in the back of the police car she and her boys had come out in. The rest of the police officers would be attending the hearse, making the police car free but for Officer Dawson and the driver, who were seated in the front. Chris was grateful for the offer—he was nearly as disinclined to sit at the estate for an hour as Olivia was—but the bars on the windows and the clattering manacles attached to the seats made him painfully uncomfortable once they’d started moving.