A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Ten: The Other Inspector

The coroner hadn't turned up for work in two days, so Sam had to call in the Bone Inspector to examine the bodies. 

In fact, more and more people were choosing not to venture out of their doors. He saw solemn faces staring out of the windows on every street. They knew that something was going to happen, and they wanted to be locked up safe inside when it did.

Sam wanted to punch through the glass, seize them by the collars and shout, "Now you're afraid? After you watched those gargoyles chasing a young woman over the rooftops as though it was a magic lantern show? After you took the most dangerous man in the city and turned him into an invulnerable monster? It's too late to be afraid – now get out here and take the consequences!"

There had been another murder in the night: a maid-servant from the Chemistry Faculty. Sam knew her vaguely as a girl with a pinched face and long, red nails, but he had no idea how she was connected to Ellini Syal, or the gargoyle, or the old man.

Although he was already starting to think of Jack as the murderer of all four.

Except he couldn't be the murderer of the gargoyle, could he? According to the Book of Woe, only Alice could kill the gargoyles. And yet he had interviewed Alice – after all, she was now staying in the police station – and she had been quite adamant that she hadn't killed the creature.

"What a perfectly barbaric thing to do. Why would you suspect me of it?"

Sam hadn't felt like explaining that a medieval manuscript had decreed that she was the only one who could.

She had been in the University Church, though. According to her account, Jack had been pinned to the wall, Miss Syal had been bleeding copiously from a stab-wound in her chest, and the gargoyle had been trying to molest her.

"Why would it – what?" Sam stammered, feeling too bewildered to even fall back on his limitless reserves of anger.

"I don't know why," said Alice, with a contemptuous shrug. "Insanity would seem to be the only reason that makes sense. There was an old man, however. I didn't think he was dangerous when I came in. My attention was understandably riveted on the gargoyle. But he must have been the one who chloroformed me."

This tied in with what Sam had seen at the River Club. The old man in the mortuary was still missing a head, but, from the clothes and the general shape, he appeared to be the same old man who had stood in the doorway of the River Club, hissing instructions at the gargoyles.

"Could it have been the old man who stabbed Miss Syal?" he asked.

Another contemptuous shrug. "Dr Petrescu thinks Jack did it."

"And what do you think?"

Alice held his gaze for a moment and then looked away. "It was Jack," she said, a trace of weariness breaking through the contempt now. "She was stabbed in a very particular place – far enough from the heart to ensure she remained alive long enough to appreciate the pain. It's easy to forget when you've been watching him drink himself into oblivion for five years, but he is a trained killer."

"But you said he – he remembered his feelings for her."

"I can only assume that that happened afterwards. It would account for his behaviour since that night, wouldn't it? If he regained his feelings not only to discover that the woman he loved was dead, but that he'd killed her?"

There was an edge of bitter resignation to her voice which prompted Sam to say, "I won't let him get you, you know."

Mrs Darwin didn't seem very impressed by this. "You don't know what he is. Or what she meant to him. I knew both, and I still pushed him. I'm not sorry precisely, but it does mean that I've forfeited the right to complain. When he comes for me, I won't be able to say it's unfair. I'll be able to say that it's ridiculous and irrational, and that I've never been more disappointed in him, but 'unfair' is one of the few pejorative words that will not be passing my lips."