The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (35 page)

hey spent the rest of the day looking for people who seemed to be purposely avoiding them.

Vanessa Caldwell had left work early and wasn’t at her old tenement house. The Duchess never returned to the estate, and the staff stopped answering the mirror in the afternoon. A quick trip to the station told them Ana’s autopsy was taking longer than expected, but so far, nothing revealing had been discovered. By suppertime, Chris was exhausted and would have done anything for a day just sitting behind the desk in Olivia’s windowless waiting room, bored. As his exhaustion grew, his control over his emotions waned, and he found himself choking back tears in their last cab ride of the day. If Olivia noticed, she pretended not to. For that reason, he felt she didn’t.

The fine weather of the morning had clouded over at noon, and by the time they reached the office of O. Faraday, Deathsniffer, with its strange dark mist, the sky was dark and the air smelled heavily of the metallic twinge that came before a rain. Chris tried to brush unfallen tears from his eyes without Olivia seeing while she climbed out of the cab after him and paid the cabbie, who was only too eager to be on his way.

As their taxi merged into the flow of traffic and disappeared into the ebb and flow of Darrington city, Olivia stood there by the roadside. She didn’t notice the smell of rain to come, nor how Chris simply stood there, waiting for her. Her shoulders were stooped and her eyes seemed to be looking at something very far away.

Chris chased the darkness from his thoughts and reached out to lay a hand on his employer’s forearm. She started, twisting her head about to stare at him with slightly widened eyes, as if surprised to see him there―or, in fact, to see
herself
there. “Oh,” she said, blinking. And then her eyebrows pulled together and she shook his hand off irritably. She turned away from him and started down the walk to the office, clearly expecting him to follow after her.

“I don’t think it was Kolston,” she said with conviction, whatever spell had overtaken her vanishing and business flooding into the empty space left behind. “He’s right. It would be stupid to recreate a murder he got away with if it could be linked to him so easily. He was lucky enough to avoid hanging the first time.”

“Then―”

“It had to have been someone who was trying to use the val Frenton murder as a cover-up, but they didn’t plan it that way. It occurred to them only after the fact.” Olivia stopped to turn the knob and push the door open with her hip. She had the gleam of the hunt in her eye when she turned to meet him and held one finger up. “Do you know how I know that?”

Wearily, Chris shook his head. “I haven’t the foggiest.”

Olivia smiled and bustled away into her office. “The Duke died from his neck wound. Bled out in almost an instant. You wouldn’t believe how much blood comes out of someone’s neck, Mister Buckley. It’s absolutely obscene.” She deposited her satchel by the hat rack and ran the fingers of one hand through her long, straight hair. “And I don’t think the killer knew, either. I think she didn’t intend to kill the Duke at all. She went into the study that night to talk to him, not to kill him. Then something happened, something went wrong. He reacted poorly, or said something to enrage her. She pulled the knife and did him across the throat.” She whirled about again and gave him a shrewd look. “You’re not getting any of this are you?” she asked with a disappointed shake of her head.

He brought his chin up in defiance. “I’m memorizing.”

“Suit yourself, but if there’s details missing from my notes, I’m going to be
very
angry,” she said, and dropped into one of her beautifully upholstered chairs. She continued to look at him, as if waiting for something. Just what, exactly, he couldn’t say. Finally, she shrugged and stretched. “She panics. She didn’t intend to kill him, but now he’s dead, and what’s there to be done? So while she’s standing there, panicking, something occurs to her. She remembers Old Debts, and remembers his creditor almost got himself into trouble for sending a message almost a decade ago. She thinks she can take some heat off herself and shine it onto him if she can recreate that little event.” She turned her attention back to Chris, that same expectant look on her face.

“…that does sound plausible,” Chris admitted after a long time where the ticking clock had been the only sound. “More plausible than Kolston.” As much as he disliked the man.

“That’s all?”

“Is there something else?”

Olivia kept his gaze until she grew bored. She clucked her tongue and set about pulling off her lace gloves, finger by finger. “No one ever notices the really obvious bits,” she complained. “I just spelled it all out for you, and you still don’t put it together. Well, here, think about this, won’t you?” She dropped one glove onto the table between the chairs and started on the other one. “The val Frenton murder happened ages ago. Anything before the Floating Castle is ancient history. What’s more, no one immediately remembered it even when a murder so strangely like it happened. That means it’s gone from the public consciousness―nobody cares anymore.” Her eyes sparkled when she brought them back to his, and he could see her teeth gleam through her dark smile. “So how did the murderer think of it? Think of it in a blink and use it as a defence, hitting the ground running?”

She dropped her second glove onto the table, and his breath caught.

He had to admit, it was impressive. He’d never have put it together himself, but the line that lead from one point to the next to the next was unbroken and undeniable. “It was someone who knew everything about the Duke,” he said quietly.

“
Everything
,” Olivia stressed. “Someone who didn’t just know his creditor’s name, but knew his creditor’s history. From memory, recalled at the drop of a hat. Now,” she said, giving him a sideways smile and stressing the consideration in her voice, “who might know a man so well as that? His wife, maybe?”

“Or his mistress,” Chris supplied.

“Or his mistress, I suppose,” she allowed. “I admit, Vanessa Caldwell is getting a grand list of charges against her, herself. She hated the man. If
she
knew he was going to marry her…” But then she waved the thought away with one hand. “I like the Duchess better, though. It all fits together so well. Everything is circumstantial, but enough of that, and it doesn’t matter. Maris will make the arrest if I order it, soon. She’s done it for less.” Her face darkened.

“…will you?” he couldn’t help but ask. “Order it?”

“Hmm, maybe,” Olivia mused. “But I don’t know if the arrest would hold with what I have. No, not yet. I need to know if she knew. About the divorce, about Vanessa. I need to know what she and Ana fought about, just before she went home and he died. But that’s a lost cause. I can’t trust anything the Duchess says, and the girl, well.” She sighed. “I should have asked before it was too late.”

At least she didn’t say “you” should have asked. Chris didn’t know how he might have responded, if she had. Already, he felt darkness clouding him again at the thought of Analaea. The image of her pastel room drenched in blood flashed through his mind. But even through that, he was thinking about what Olivia had said, and he fixed her with a look as he pinpointed the source of the restless thought. “Ana wasn’t the only one there, though,” he said, hearing a touch of excitement in his own voice. “
Ethan
was, too. Er, Ethan Grey, Ana’s beau.”

Olivia’s eyes lit up. She vaulted from her chair and near-ran across the room to the mirror, spinning once and pinching his cheek like a doting grandmother along the way. She seized the mallet for the little set of chimes resting on the table before the mirror, and then she impatiently struck the lowest note over and over until clouds suffused the mirror and the reflection faded. “Oh, hurry up, you lazy thing,” Olivia muttered impatiently to the gnome whose brown glow suffused the edges of the mirror.

The mists within the mirror spun and danced for considerably longer than usual, but eventually, they burned off, revealing a frazzled-looking young woman with glasses resting at the end of her nose and a mess of freckles covering her homely face. “Hello,” she said, her voice rushed. “This is the Darrington City mirror operator, do you need assistance?”

“Well, obviously,” Olivia laughed, and the girl’s face screwed up like she might cry. “I need the mirror frequency for an
Ethan Grey
, worldcatcher categorization, Darrington City!”

“One moment, please,” the girl said plaintively, and the mirror went back to cloudy fog while she rifled through whatever plethora of records she had set before her. Most mirror operators were, to Chris’s knowledge, very low-power truthsniffers, to help them reach the information they sought more quickly. However, that couldn’t make the task of sorting through so much data under such time restraints very easy.

The clouding in the mirror seemed to stretch far longer than it ever had for Chris. Olivia huffed and drummed her fingers along the table, then tapped one foot, then hummed off-tone under her breath, until just watching her made Chris irritable by association. And still the mirror stayed locked in its swirling, smoky depths, silent and blank, until finally, when Chris thought Olivia might be about to explode, the young woman reappeared, now looking even more frazzled. “I’m sorry, could you repeat your request?”

Olivia slammed one hand down on the table. The chimes rang. “You
have
to be kidding me.”

The girl sniffled. “Miss, I just need you to repeat your request, please.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “Ethan Grey,” she said, enunciating every syllable and sound as if the girl were stupid, and then spelling it, for good measure. “Worldcatcher categorization. Darrington City.”

Chris thought the girl really might burst into tears. She lowered her head and said, very quietly, “There’s no one matching that name and categorization in our records for Darrington City, miss.”

“That’s―” Olivia started sharply, causing the girl to duck between her shoulders and physically cringe away from the opposite mirror…but then Olivia’s voice dropped and her face softened. “Interesting,” she concluded. “That’s very interesting.” She frowned and Chris saw her chewing the inside of her cheek while she thought. “Do you have anything in that name and categorization for another city?”

“I can’t give you that information unless you’re mirroring from that city,” the girl said, and instantly, Olivia was back to her outrage, throwing up her hands in frustration.

“Oh, of course not. Useless as a unicorn’s fart,” she spat, and, before the poor young woman could say anything else, she was dragging the mallet along the chimes and sending off a cascade of sound. The nimbus surrounding the mirror faded, and the girl’s face winked out, fading to first misty darkness, and then to Olivia’s deeply frowning face.

“He must still be registered in the town where he was categorized,” Chris said eventually, more to fill the silence than anything else. “But the Duchess may know where he lives, or someone else at the val Daren estate, or―”

“Just what do we know about Ethan Grey?” Olivia interrupted as if she hadn’t heard him speak at all. Her face was locked deep in thought, and she gripped the table before her as if it were all keeping her in the world.

Chris quickly changed directions, searching through his thoughts for all the information he’d filed away about the handsome young man Ana had loved so dearly. “He’s a painter,” he said, and Olivia nodded encouragingly. “He had his work displayed at a gallery in the city that opened the night the Duke died, and closed yesterday. It was the first time. He seemed very devoted to Ana. The Duchess doesn’t like him―”

“Why?”

Chris stammered. “I-I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think we know.”

“And which gallery were his paintings displayed at?”

“I don’t think we know that, either.”

“How did he and Analaea meet?”

“Or…or that.” Chris shook his head and raised his hands helplessly, hoping to fend off more questions. “We don’t know much of anything about him, Olivia. We didn’t ask.” He studied her thoughtful expression, trying to discern just what she was thinking. “Do you think he might have…?” And he shook his head. “No, it makes no sense. He had no reason to harm the Duke. And he wouldn’t have hurt Ana. Tell me that’s not what you’re trying to say.”

Olivia seemed to come back to herself. She released her hold on the table and turned away from the mirror, leaning back and folding her arms. “I’m not saying anything,” she said, reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ears. “I just suddenly realized that despite being threaded all through this thing, we know next to nothing about him.” She gave him a tight smile. “I don’t like unknowns. They
always
end up being important.”

Before he could say anything, she pushed herself off and started across the room. Her eyes listlessly went here and there: from the chairs to the clock to the desk and back to him. She focused them, then, and stopped in her tracks. “Tomorrow is―” she began.

He cut her off, his heartbeat speeding in his chest. “I know what tomorrow is,” he said, sharper than he intended.

She narrowed her eyes and took her time looking him up and down before shrugging. “I suppose you’ll want it off,” she said with a disdainful wave of her hand. “Take the time to go to a memorial. Well, I’m not cruel. If you―”