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I.
My blind friend in the Observatory has theorized that it is the dark that drives us in the Neath to do terrible things. There is a place in the inner ear of a man, he says, that is fundamentally unable to adapt to the nighttime: we are creatures of the day, Mr. Hinks, he has said to me, diurnal, a dark sky frightens us. Even we at the Observatory, to some degree, can feel the dark: it’s something in our inner ear. For all we Londoners claim to adapt, we are permanently unsettled here. It puts men into a state of panic. Panic is the true cruelty of man, you realize.
I don’t agree with him. As of next month I will be thirty-five years old, thirty-three of which I have spent on the surface. I have spent it in England, I have spent it in France, I have spent it in Bombay where there is surely a great deal of sun, and the conclusion I have come to -- not that it took a great detective, precisely -- is that the true cruelty of man is the cruelty of goddamned man himself. It would take a scholar’s naivete to postulate otherwise. I’ve been a spy most my life and a half-bred son of the British East India Company all of it. I have it on good authority that it takes more than a little sunshine to compel Adam’s children to behave themselves.
But my friend at the Observatory is, well, my friend, and my landlord besides, and I’ve found both of those to be in short supply in London these days. So I mustered a smile and said, over my teacup: Perhaps you’re right.
You’re lying to me, Jack, he said, wheezing his old-man laugh. You always are. I doubt that’s the fault of the nighttime.
I swirled my tea, frowning. The cloud of tea-leaves nestled in their white porcelain shell, silent but for the faint slosh of murky-colored water. Around us the Observatory was quiet too. But now that our conversation had stilled for the moment, Watchmaker’s Hill was not quiet at all.
Something in my inner ear, I said. Hodges, do you hear that? There is a riot from Wolfstack and it is catching, I think.
Hodges craned his neck. Yes, he murmured, yes, I do hear some shouting -- a riot, certainly. From Wolfstack, you say? Are you certain?
Ah, Hodges, always fascinated to hear the results of my detecting, or consulting, or some combination of the two, at any rate, or just generally interested at how my mind moves two clicks faster than his, or possibly just playing a joke on my intellectual ego. I’ve always been paranoid about that . Nevertheless I tipped my chair back on two legs, listened further and confirmed: Yes, I’m certain. Though it’s on the Hill at the moment, and let’s pray it stays there, it’s Wolfstack-originated, all right. There’s been a strike of some kind that the organizers have been attempting to keep civil, I believe, but someone got overenthusiastic, and the neddy men were a bit eager to earn their keep, and now fires are burning, Mr Fires only slightly less so, people have locked their doors to the roaming neddy men and the Constables have the headache something awful. It’ll die out before dawn. It always does.
He looked impressed: Oh?
Yes, I said, standing and pushing my chair out. Pardon me, I think I’ve remembered some urgent business. As always I value your company, Hodges.
The astronomer sounded unruffled, but as I turned to shrug on my coat he said: You can tell all that from listening?
I was framed in the doorway for an instant as I reached out to scoop my top hat, and the glowing Neathglass goggles nested on the brim, from the hat-rack where they had taken up lonely and temporary tenancy. I considered.
Some whim struck me, though, and I looked back a little to answer. No. But why else does anyone riot these days?
My name is Jack Hinks, inasmuch as anyone’s name is Jack Hinks, that is, which is to say: it’s not. I am a consulting detective. I help people for money, usually. I live on Watchmaker’s Hill.
This is a story about something in our inner ear.
II.
That wasn’t actually the source of the riot, but the truth is, the art of detecting isn’t much of an art at all. In fact, it’s a lot closer to the art of tradecraft or the art of tidying your house in a hurry while unexpected guests are at the door -- work with what you’ve got, revise when you’ve got more and pray no one remembers what you’d originally got by the time you arrive at the finished product. The word “art” is highly abused, anyhow, as anyone who knows an actual art could tell you. (Not me, mind you, I’m about as artistic as Fast Hetty was, ultimately, fast, ‘artful’ being an entirely different matter.) Even Avery Reading now that she’s taken up painting under that forger of hers has taken to complaining when everything from tallow-making to shroom-hopping is branded an art for the purposes of some instructional pamphlet or other. I have my personal suspicions that had she taken up tallow-making or shroom-hopping instead of painting portraits she’d be doing the same, but nevertheless my point stands: being a detective is not an art, it’s a science. Science is much more fallible than art.
Speaking of Avery, she was lounging around my cottage sitting-room by the time I came home. I was late because I’d gone to find her first. I was especially late because her landlord finds my moral character questionable and will not let me in if she is not physically there to vouch for me, no matter how many times I call. I don’t really like landlords.
“You know, if you’d like I could teach you how to write a calling card,” I observed as I came inside, checking the lock with my fingers as I did -- picked without damage, ah, Avery -- and hanging up my things.
She had her feet kicked up on the arm of the sofa, shoes newly shined. Her collar was popped up and half-covered her face. “I’m familiar with the fine art of the calling card, Hinks,” she said without looking up. “The difference is, you actually answer break-ins.”
She had a point.
Avery Reading is a woman of an unpredictable temper, or, I should probably say, an individual of indistinct and indeterminate gender and also of an unpredictable temper, but I have never found anything particularly indistinct or indeterminate about her gender: the disguise she maintains is capable enough, but no more capable than the downy peach fuzz on her cheekbones nor the way her slim hips fall under the slyly cut trousers she wears to disguise them. It is not always safe to be a woman and poor, in the Neath or otherwise. It is not always safe to be half-Hindi, either. So while we’re here, she’s a boy, I’m English, and we don’t talk about it. And actually, I’m not sure she knows the second bit, and I’m not sure she knows I know the first bit, so it is less a case of not talking about it and more a case of being generally unknowledgeable, but -- in any case, that’s Avery.
“You’re in a foul mood,” I observed, detecting the obvious as I sat down opposite in my tattered armchair. “I haven’t touched honey in over a month, Mr. Reading.”
“I know,” she said brusquely, “your pupils are in-focus. I daresay you’ve more than touched laudanum, though: by the state of your hands I’d argue you ought to propose to it before you ruin its marriage prospects to any honest man.”
I should say before we go any further that the tremble of my hands is hardly obvious in Neathy light. I folded them in my lap.
“But that’s not why I’m here,” she went on, staring at the ceiling. “God forbid I ever be in a bad temper for a reason other than you, Hinks.”
I listened.
Avery realized I wasn’t going to take her sally for bait after a moment, shrugged uncomfortably into her oversized coat and wriggled down a little further into the sofa cushions. When I glanced at her she still looked grim, and that tugged at worry in me -- irritated was normal for her, irritated was apparently a natural consequence of sharing my company or that of anything, apparently, that reminded her of my company, such as my house, Ladybones Road, the sight of laudanum or the symbols of the Correspondence. But grim was only serious. “There’s been an amber trader murdered,” she said after a moment.
Lord above. I sank a little into my chair myself, tipping my head back against the upholstery. I closed my eyes. “Where?”
“The Docks. Just yesterday.”
Well, I thought, cold spreading in my stomach, at least I had gotten something right. “God,” I said. “As if the Rubbery Men needed that much more.”
She was silent on the sofa for a while and I was, correspondingly, silent in my chair. I’d seen the lynching of a Rubbery Man before. In my first month in London, in fact. It was best when they hanged them. When they hanged them they were only cruel enough to tie the noose too wide and let them strangle, gurgling out their dying screams to a laughing crowd who tried to interpret their gibberish as nonsense English and jot it down for the papers. The first one, though, I didn’t see them hang: they burned him.
Have you ever smelled burning flesh? I have -- more than once. No matter what they say, human or Rubbery, it smells the same.
I hadn’t opened my eyes, but Avery was looking at me and I knew why. There was no money in this at all. I didn’t do things for no money.
The first nightmare I ever had here was set in a kitchen, smothered with the smell of burning flesh. That was before the others and North, but I woke up having to clear it out with tobacco before I could sleep again.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” I said.
III.
It was late when I got to Wolfstack, where I found out that I (and Avery) was wrong after all, and the man had died somewhere else: people had just decided to riot at the Docks. It was some sort of tradition around here by now. Even the zailors were used to it and knew which posts to lean on on which solemn jetties where they could smoke their pipes and listen to the fires and the breaking glass, the same old box-step waltz. It was one of them I talked to, striking a match for his surface-whalebone pipe while he cast a superstitious glance over his shoulder to the Unterzee before answering me.
“En’t here the trader was killed, son,” he said, “and don’t you listen to them rabble, his eyes weren’t sucked out by no tentacles. It was poison did him in. Just like the other two.”
The other two? I thought, but didn’t say. “Where’d he die?” I asked.
“Veilgarden,” answered the zailor and gave me a quiet, one-eyed stare. “You one of those nosy-for-hires?”
“Just nosy,” I said, “no hire,” and dropped a potpourri-sized clutchpurse into his hand. “For your time. Thank you.”
Veilgarden, then.
III.
Veilgarden smelled and looked like an overripe fruit tree, with grapes and oranges that had looked all sorts of enticing to me six months previous but for which I’d long since lost my appetite. I avoided the honey-dens, anyway, and looked around for the shapes of any ex-lovers’ backs (particularly the talentless artist who’d calligraphed my name on my back with a paintbrush once, good Lord could that man blather if given an excuse). Clathermont and the Great Game could wait as well. I bought an itinerant, honey-mazed Constable I recognized out of his uniform a drink and talked to him about what people were already beginning to call the Rubbery Murders.
“The Rubbery Murders?” I asked, blinking. “Why, is there anything particularly rubber-like about their consistency?”
“You know how it is,” slurred the Constable, leaning on me. He was a Detective, an officer of sorts in the Constabulary, had been to University and now this was what he was doing with his life -- no wonder he was ten sorts of hallucinating on prisoner’s honey at the moment. “Deep amber traders die, they think it’s Rubbery Men, as if they’d kill their sources of business, ha -- your eyes are the color of deep amber, do you know? The deepest amber. Warm amber. The kind they give birth to, instead of eggs; the color of honeyed laudanum, a Master’s Eyes. Are you a Master, Jack?”
“Mr Hats himself,” I smiled, wincing a little inwardly at his state. “You need to sleep, my friend. Laudanum will still the honey-dreams.”
“Fsh, Mr Hats. You’re hardly a Mr Hats. Mr Laudanum, maybe. I don’t need them stilled, else I wouldn’t be taking the dram in the first place, you bloody laudanum-peddler. I ought to have you --”
“Shh,” I said, and slung his limp arm over my shoulder: “Bartender. Who rents rooms here? My friend needs to stay the night.”
I knew better than to send him home. Home was nowhere for a man on prisoner’s honey, and besides, where was home for a Constable any more? Certainly not in Veilgarden.
In any case, at home they might have wondered at the absence of his badge.
IV.
Thank God for the law and its enforcement. The Constabulary on Ladybones Road was large, large enough that no one on duty expected to recognize any arbitrary constable who strode into the watch-house there; they didn’t equal the ranks of the neddy men, but the difference was that Constable was a job and neddy men were paid. The cobblestones and mist were more uncomfortable here even than the stench of Watchmaker’s Hill, but after a fashion it put me even better at-peace than my home on the hill. I am a finder, after all, and Ladybones Road is where people come to have things found. And I have sewn myself a uniform.
“I got some letters from the prisoner’s solicitor to deliver,” I barked at the officer on duty, a boy about ten years younger than me. “Stamped. I need the ring.”
They were stamped, all right, but the stamps at home had read “BAGLEY MILK AND EGGS” and “WATCHMAKER SUNDRIES” before I’d ground them into unrecognizability and the papers were copies of my old lease on last year’s apartment. The boy squinted, already a little nervous. “What prisoner --”
“Well, Mr bloody Twitch, of course,” I snapped, leaning forward into his face. “What other prisoner does anyone care about right now in temporary holding?”
“Of course,” he said quickly and dropped a set of iron skeleton keys into my expectant hand. I imagined Meredith Raglan’s face at the current state of constabulary training, sighed, and went on to the cells.
They’d had the good sense to hold him in a separate hallway from the other prisoners, an empty one but for his lonely little cell on the end. He drew back, curling in on himself arms and tentacles when my face came to the door and I suddenly thought of the wet thud of boot into rubbery flesh, and the jeering faces of young Constables come to have a little bit of fun. They called him Mr Twitch, said people around the watch house, because that was what he did. If that were so, they would be calling the rest of the cells’ denizens Mr Scream, Mr Curse, Mr Whimper and Mr Prevaricate, but they didn’t, and I think they called him Mr Twitch because they didn’t know his name and because they could. I imagine that was the same reason that they did everything else to him.
I rapped on the bars. He blinked at me. They didn’t normally knock, I knew.
“May I come in?”
He nodded; even if he didn’t comprehend my language, and I was fairly sure he did, the inquisitive face I made was hard to misinterpret. I tried the keys until one of them worked (this earned a head-tilt from him, well, he wasn’t stupid, anyway) and let myself in as he dragged himself and his muddy, torn suit up to sit on one of the benches, staring at me.
I slid the cell door groaningly shut behind me. We were alone, which was good; I took off my bobby’s hat and sat down, folding my arms over it in my lap. “I’m not a Constable,” I felt the need to preface.
He nodded, hesitantly, after a moment.
“I’m not here to spring you, either,” I warned, looking at him and wondering what he saw in my face looking back. “I’m a consulting detective with Mr Stones. He doesn’t normally take a personal interest in the constabulary, but it’s come to our attention that Mr Fires and the neddy men may have had a bit heavy of a hand in the way this has gone in the interests of appeasing the nativist protesters for the time being so that they might hire more Clay Men without garnering further protest for the time being. If this is so, then it’s in his interest to get to the bottom of this matter.”
Mr Twitch blinked more. Rubbery Men were always blinking, but not half so much as Mr Twitch at the moment. He hadn’t twitched yet, though. False claims had been made to me.
“This doesn’t mean I think you’re innocent,” I said, putting a hand up, “or that he does. But I need to take down your statement again. A new one. I don’t trust the one the Constabulary took from you. I feel it may have been weighted.”
Was that a bitter smile at the edges of his squidlike mouth? Who could tell, really?
“I’ve brought paper.” I produced it. “Take your time.”
V.
Mr Twitch’s statement was unsurprisingly banal and I drowned my sorrows in a stack of paperwork from my client Mr Pages before sending my purloined badge back to its rightful, honey-hungover owner by urchin-post. I then considered whether to present myself to the Constables: but, as it turned out, the Constables presented themselves to me. It wasn’t the first time I’d worked with them. I didn’t expect repeat business. But there I was in my dressing-robe, my feet up on a footstool, when a knock came at the door. I frowned. This time of night was always Avery. Avery didn’t knock.
“Mr Hinks,” said the Constable at the door warily, the badge he flashed dubbing him an Inspector. Like my friend, he looked haggard. Unlike my friend, he looked alert. I didn’t recognize him.
“Inspector,” I greeted him without inviting him in, elbow on the doorframe. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
He frowned and gave me a look indicating that I would not be owing him any pleasures if I didn’t ask him in from the marshy night. I complied.
“So you’re the Mr Hinks,” he said, hands folded tensely behind his back as he stood by the fire, “the consulting detective?”
“That’s the one,” I poured brandy into two glasses from my desk, “as opposed to my brother, the candlestick-maker.” I offered him one. He was blinking. “I joke. I don’t have a brother. No, as far as I’m aware I’m the only Hinks in the city with the Christian name of Jack, and yes, I work as a consultant for the Constables and the Masters,” it seemed imprudent to mention the Brass Embassy and my revolutionaries, “part-time. What can I do for you?”
The Inspector had fleshy bags under his eyes like spiders’ sacs. He looked tired. Above all things, tired. And perhaps a little sad.
“I hear you do good work here,” he said.
“I’m glad someone’s saying so.” I sipped my brandy.
“We’re holding a Rubbery Man for a string of poisonings,” the Constable went on, “but it don’t sit exactly right -- three poisonings, all in Veilgarden. Same poison every time. All the victims are involved in the deep amber trade. They’ve all dealt with the same Rubbery Man.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Would that be the scion of the honorable house of Twitch?”
“You would have known that,” he muttered. “Well, if you’re what they say you are I suppose you should have. Yes. The trouble is, we don’t have any evidence against him to speak of.”
I fixed him with a look for a moment or two, and then his untouched brandy, which he cupped with his sleeve as a buffer like it was a brazier full of burning coals. He looked away from me. Constables sometimes did, when they were exhausted of staring accusingly at people.
“And do you want me to get some?” I asked, slowly.
If he’d said yes I would have taken his money anyway. I like money. It pays for hats and laudanum and my rent. But he glanced away again, thinking a moment before he answered; and what he answered, finally, was: “I want you to get us something. Three murders and no one to blame for it is no good for the watch-house. It gets the Shuttered Palace antsy.”
I tapped my fingers on the rim of my own glass, faraway for a moment or two. “And yet I thought you did have someone.”
He just looked at me.
“Very well, I charge the usual rates,” I said, thinning my mouth as sympathy threatened to betray me in my face, for the victims and the Rubbery Man and the weary Constable in his forties still trying to find justice somewhere in London. Sympathy was no good for the circulatory system, or for the reputation. “I’ll be in touch. Was there anything else?”
VI.
One thing was for certain. If you wanted someone permanently out of your way in Fallen London, you didn’t murder them. If the Neath had done one thing for Englishmen, it had removed the sting of permanent death: making New Newgate a tedious and crowded place, and the Tomb-Colonies even worse. Death was no bright prospect, of course -- the intellectual challenge of chess with the boatman its only allure to me any more -- but would not stop a tenacious opponent from coming back to be a nuisance. In fact, it might not even motivate them. At best it served as a warning, a herald for harsher measures should your victim persist in annoying you.
Unless, of course, you wished to trap them in the Neath. No one who’d felt the boatman’s cold hand could see sunlight again. Rumor had it they would turn to dust. That was a possibility for motive.
Of course, the killer could have just been angry. Or mad. Madness was always a possibility. Especially here.
Anyway, theory wasn’t doing me any favors: the next item on my list was to talk to the victims, all three of them. Two of them were nowhere to be found; made themselves scarce, I wondered, or finally passed on? In any case, I located the third, an amber trader who’d shut his iron-wrought doors to the Constables tightly enough that when I made a mistake in flashing another purloined badge at the man who answered the door --
The door closed in my face, so quickly that I barely caught it with my elbow. The man had the grace not to slam it further, but I could see just a flash of sunken eyes and hollow cheekbones before he ducked behind the door again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m ill, I’ve already spoken to you people enough times.”
“I’m not with the Constables,” I said, pushing the door forward a little with my hand. “Mr Jennings?”
Mr Jennings let me open the door. He was a gaunt, ragged man -- his recent death probably not having been much help -- in an oversized dressing-gown. He looked between me and the hand my ‘badge’ had just been in a moment ago, and then back to me, perhaps a bit skeptical of my new assertion.
“I’m a consulting detective,” I said. “I’ve been hired to look into your case.” He was closing the door again, so I rummaged for things to say and came up with, “One of the Inspectors thinks there may have been some misconduct --”
This froze the door. Sometimes drilling blind still hit an oil vein.
“The suspect we’ve apprehended, we’re not sure if he’s --”
What was the right tack to take with this one, in any case? Did he know Mr Twitch? Like him? Dislike him? Want to see a Rubbery Man sent to the gallows? What was the correct approach here? One could net me an interview, another a door in the face, but --
I did catch a glimpse of Jennings’ red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes as he peered at me, blinking, waiting to finish my sentence. No. That wouldn’t be at the top of his mind at all right now. I changed my course.
“This is a private investigation,” I said quietly. “There’s not going to be any more stir made. Please, I’d just like to speak with you; I’d like to resolve this without any more fuss.”
He did.
VII.
These were the facts of the matter, my new recently dead acquaintance told me over a cup of lukewarm tea; he was a trader in deep amber, he’d been locking up his store at the end of a long day and he’d found himself overcome with a sudden attack of being dead. There were depressingly few questions to ask. In the imperfect science of detection, it rarely actually matters whether the window was open or what time the clock was chiming and if the victim could hear any birds outside. What really ends up mattering are a handful of questions, such as these:
Were you robbed?
Yes. Half of my stock was stolen.
Did you see anyone?
No. I was poisoned, there was no one about.
Did you speak to anyone else today?
Yes. The Rubbery Man I do business with, your suspect. Slack Harry the tanner. Mr Fortune.
Was there anything else odd?
Oh. Yes. There was a strange smell --
A strange smell?
Yes, like something burnt, or something rotten, or something that rotted, and then was burned. And all the copper -- all the copper pennies in my shop, they’d turned black. Before I died that was what I was looking at. All the copper had gone black.
Really, anything interesting a detective hoped to learn from a witness tended to fall under the generous penumbra of “anything else odd.” I thanked Mr Jennings for his clearly harried time and left him to his house and the bolts on his door and the knowledge that he, for one, had joined the ranks of those of us who were never going back to the surface again. I could empathize.
VIII.
I did some cursory looking-around to see if I could find any connection between the prior victims, this Slack Harry and whoever had the brazen nerve to call themselves ‘Mr Fortune’ in a city ruled by the Masters, but it was difficult: they’d both gone completely dry, one having split up his small deep amber corporation between several employees (causing quite a market stir) before retiring to the Tomb-Colonies and one apparently knee-debt in debt and debtors and having completely vanished. It was all the preliminary work I could do before talking to my two new contacts -- a tanner and a man who turned out to be an ambitious bookie buying out businesses for the purposes of making himself legitimate. The tanner knew nothing. The bookie, on the other hand, of the rather presumptous moniker ‘Mr Fortune’ -- the Constable could have his badge back this time, I decided I would be better off presenting myself as a friend. The question was rather what constituted a ‘friend’ to this Mr Fortune, and I knew only one gambler well enough to ask;
The man whom I, to this day, will only name as the Affectionate Devil -- for reasons which perhaps I’ll recount someday, but I believe I owe him that much -- was in a honey-den when I found him; not a Brass-dominated honey-den, but one he and I used to frequent together, before circumstance and changing winds drove me to greener pastures and him to claiming chance run-ins with me on streets he knows I frequent. He always liked to vary his tastes in prisoner’s honey, when we spent more of our time together: varied the texture, he claimed, sweetened the taste.
Like lovers? I asked, amused -- maybe I leaned my head on his shoulder, too, once upon a time.
A bit, he acknowledged, smiling a pearly-toothed smile; Is that your experience?
Sometimes. I asked you.
You’re red honey, Jack, was the answer he settled on eventually, and that was a trick question.
But eventually I stopped seeing him and he took up other lovers again -- and his honey-dens dwindled to just the one. Thus went the best-laid plans of devils and men.
I didn’t seek out his company nowadays. I didn’t want to give him the wrong impression. But: desperate times.
The armchair that I sank myself into next to his was red velvet with gold-braid trimmings, which reminded me of him, a little; he didn’t look up, either too engrossed in a honey-dream to care at the moment or, more likely, familiar enough with my voice to catch it at the door bidding a few of the regulars hello and not expecting to see anyone else when he looked up at me, which he eventually did. The smile he favored me with was brilliant off the edges of his sharp teeth, confident and bright, and didn’t quite reach his reptilian eyes.
“Jack,” he said. “And here I’d thought you’d nearly mastered the art of avoiding me. It’s been nearly a fortnight.”
“And here I’d thought you’d nearly mastered the art of finding me,” I sidestepped, leaning my elbow on the armrest and smiling at him; “You’re getting slow, old man. Or is it disinterested? Should I be jealous?”
That was an unfeeling thing to say, I knew, but perhaps I wasn’t feeling today. He glanced away, but only briefly. He was a devil. He had his pride. “No, slow,” he said agreeably. “It must be that. I’m afraid you could never disinterest anything, my dear; you and I both well know that.”
I closed my eyes and thought about what small-talk to steer our conversation towards my point.
“So, tell me,” he said suddenly, eyes flashing with some inscrutable spirit when I blinked and looked back at him, “what favor do you want so badly that you were willing to seek me out about it?”
I blinked again.
“Oh, come off it,” he said a bit goodnaturedly, probably a little too goodnaturedly; “You made things rather clear between us, I don’t expect you’d go seeking me out now unless you needed something or you’d really overestimated your tolerance for laudanum. And here,” he took my hand in his larger, clawed one, “your fingers are steady. So what do you need from me? Tell me, friend, what good is it that needs doing today?”
“It’s about the deep amber traders murdered,” I said, burning a little. “I’m not sure the Constables have the right of the suspect.”
“Well, naturally,” he said cheerfully. Probably he was just being supercilious this time. “Lucifer forbid anyone arrest a Rubbery Man in your presence . What do you need from me, though?”
“Do you know a Mr Fortunes?”
My Affectionate Devil peered at me through black eyelashes. The pads of his fingers were hot against the underside of my wrist: such was always the case with devils, I found, but I fancied it especially true of him, from the bronze-colored skin stretched over his collarbone to the sharp angles of his hips. He let go of my hand for a moment and I let it fall to the armrest again, but then he drew forward and closed the space between us enough to tip my chin up with three of his fingers. The points of his nails dimpled my skin a little. His breath was very warm.
He glanced at me through his lashes. He was handsome, really, for a man who wasn’t really a man at all. I used to be able to ignore everything else about him because of it, sometimes. “I don’t know. Perhaps if something jogged my memory.”
I’d done worse for less before. Just another transaction. The science of detection -- well, it was dull, terrible work.
I closed my eyes and prepared some sort of sincere kiss; before I could, though, the hand was taken away and the breath was gone, he’d drawn back. When I looked at him he looked more unreadable than ever. Maybe a little grim. He had his chin perched in his hand, and the more I looked at him the more I was beginning to suspect that I’d chosen poorly. Devils were always unpredictable creatures. But he, I fancied, more than others.
Nevertheless, though, after a moment he settled on, “Mr Fortune is a friend of the Brass Embassy. He’s bought out businesses that convert rostygold to Nevercold Brass -- it’s the latter he’s interested in seeing as currency here. Mention my name and it might open a door.”
I nodded, awkwardly, and wondered if there was any point in making more pretense at friendly conversation.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” He gestured sweepingly with ringed fingers. “If a cause is worth whoring yourself out to me for it’s worth abruptly ending a conversation for, I daresay. Go free a Rubbery Man.”
IX.
The truth of detection is --
Well, the truth of detection is, sometimes that is all you have to go on.
I could believe that a single Rubbery Man with no criminal record and in full possession of his wits could choose to ruin his entire business and endanger many of his colleagues by choosing to murder and rob three random business partners. Or I could think of why a bookie choosing to make his name in the world by choosing himself a daring name and daring business partners might want to do the same; and so I came calling on the garish gambling parlour of ‘Mr Fortune,’ claiming an association with my friend at the Brass Embassy to get past his secretary. I formulated a cover story in my head while I waited for him to show me into his office, but it turned out not to be necessary, because he chose to come out and talk to me in the hall instead.
“I recognize you,” said short, stout Mr Fortune, tipping his head. “You’re the consulting detective. The busybody.”
“Is there only the one, then?” I deflected, staring at him a bit like an apprehended thief seconds after feeling the manacles clink around his wrists. As a matter of fact, I had brought manacles, but I wasn’t going to be arresting anyone today. Impersonating a Constable unofficially was one thing, but doing it on the record seemed like a poor choice. I had higher aims.
“Only the one the Constables care about.” He blinked at me. “And only the one who introduces himself as Mr Hinks. I’m sorry, I have nothing else to say to the Constables.”
“I just wanted to --”
“Look,” he sounded brusque, “I have nothing else to say to the Constables. My secretary can verify where I was at the time of all three murders, as well as independent business associates.” He didn’t sound nervous; in fact, he sounded entirely confident. That was bringing my hackles up a notch every time he talked. “I have no access to poison of that nature -- and before you ask how I know about it, by the by, the Constables have made the nature of the crime abundantly clear to me. In fact, I wager apothecaries have never heard of it. I am not your suspect. You have the man -- if you could call him that -- apprehended. I believe we’re done here.”
“I believe we should discuss this in your office,” I said.
“I don’t think there’s anything left to discuss,” he countered, unworried.
“I said that I believe we should discuss this in your office,” I said again, placid; “That’s just my opinion. If you’d like we can continue discussing it out here. I just think it would be a better idea if we discussed it in your office.”
He stared at me. I looked back at him with what I thought was evenness and placidity -- because I was serious, and what would go badly for him in public would go just as well for me in either case -- but apparently he must have seen something else, because he looked away and muttered, “Come in.”
We went in. His office was too austerely tasteful to have been that way for long; he hadn’t quite mastered the trick of looking like money or even old business, of having furnishings that were just a little outdated and a few tacky things that indicated that he, like anyone who’d really been a trader for long enough, was trying to keep up with the times by buying decorations that his wife wouldn’t be seen with. The trim was respectable. The upholstery was understated. He was trying a bit too hard.
“Well, then, Mr Hinks,” said Mr Fortune once I’d taken my seat and crossed my legs, facing his decorative fireplace with his back towards me, “what is it that I can do for you?”
X.
The truth of detection is that it requires something in your inner ear.
“I’m not here to ask you questions, Mr Fortune,” I said with a glance at the ceiling. “I understand you’ve already been asked questions. The Constabulary is not interested in gathering more information.”
He was quiet ,which I took as an indication that I should go on, so I did, still maintaining the airy wandering of my eyes around the room, as if I had nothing to worry about: “I’m here to bring you in without a fuss. I understand you might not want a scene in front of your new company. Sending a uniformed man would have been more of a ruckus. If you come with me now back to the station there should not be any trouble.”
Mr Fortune turned his head enough to stare at me. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your hands,” I said coolly, producing the manacles and holding them out expectantly without getting up. “Unless you’d prefer to come willingly.”
“I --” He didn’t even sputter, he was too shocked, and for a moment I was concerned that it was an innocent man I was harassing. But a moment later he marshaled his forces, narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t understand. You’ve already taken down my alibi.”
“They,” I corrected him, lightly, with one raised finger. “They’ve already taken down your alibi. I am not a Constable. I am here to clean up loose ends. It’s no matter -- I gave your your options, a scene with badges, a mild scene with the cuffs or you and I walking here without. Be reasonable, Mr Fortune.”
“I don’t understand,” he repeated, standing his ground; “I told you, I was verified to have been elsewhere.”
I tapped my foot. “And you think the Constables have never heard of an assassin, Mr Fortune?”
He blinked. “I should hope they have. You have no evidence against me.”
“Probably not,” I agreed with a shrug. “They don’t tell me much. I’m here to bring you in -- this is your last chance, I’ve told you. Come quietly or not, but you’re coming.”
This was a gamble, here. Here he’d either go with me or he wouldn’t; he’d go with me and I’d have to take him to the watch station and fail to turn him in, considering there wasn’t actually any sort of warrant out for his arrest, or he wouldn’t and I’d have no back-up to call in for the ‘scene’ I was threatening.
So.
I took a deep breath. “I’m just doing the job I’m given, Mr Fortune,” I said and stood up with the manacles; Mr Fortune took a step back. “If you told them something about the assassin bringing in both of you might do you some good, bu otherwise -- and I don’t even know about that, really, I’m hardly a Constable, or a judge -- please hold your hands out, just like --”
“The assassin?” he blurted out.
Take that inadvertent gold from the sky, run with it all the way to the bank. “Yes, the one you claimed didn’t exist? The one you used to set up your friend Twitch?”
The manacles snapped around his wrists in his moment of shock. His eyes widened, then narrowed. He was paling. “No,” he said. “No, you don’t understand.”
“Nevercold Brass,” I echoed him, smiling grimly; I’d had the grace to cuff him in front of his chest, which was something. “Not a bad currency. Pity it’s overtaken by rostygold at the moment -- but it could dominate the market, if public sentiment were a bit more sympathetic to the Brass Embassy. Or if people who might be willing to take a chance on it economically weren’t placing their bets with the Rubbery Men instead?”
“I --” Mr Fortune’s eyebrows had knotted into a V and his teeth into a narrow box. It was an ugly face.
I slipped my arm through his with a regretful smile, one which he didn't return. "I don't have a personal stake in this," I informed him. "Job. Again, I'm here as a courtesy to you -- and, I suppose, to them, and also to me, but that's a secondary concern. But I have to say, even I'm a little appalled."
He stared at me. I motioned towards the door.
"All the Rubbery Men in London?" I stared at him. "Lynched? Driven into hiding? Just for your stake in Nevercold Brass?"
"No."
"No?" I was already opening the door.
"The assassin," he snapped at me. "You wanted the assassin?"
"That would be good," I conceded; the secretaries were chattering outside. Hopefully he'd be confessing all the way to Ladybones Road. It'd be all the neater to wrap things up with the Inspector as a witness and everything tidy within the day, hopefully, and maybe some quiet on Wolfstack and in Veilgarden for the time being.
"It was one of them," Mr Fortunes hissed, desperately, as I maneouvred him out to face the stares of his co-workers and employees. "You idiot. You damned fool. They're willing to do it to one another. They're not men --"
I stopped, for a moment.
He seized on it. "I just had to offer him money, and he --"
"He?" I turned abruptly and shouldered my way in front of him in the doorway, my back to the outside.
"Your goddamned Rubbery Man," he snapped, "Mr Twitch -- you're not incompetent, you know, he did kill him. But you don't give a damn for that any more, do you? Not since you're on the bankroll, you and the rest of the damned --"
XI.
The Constables took him in, the Inspector giving me a curt nod and a weary smile in return, which he seemed a little startled that I didn't return. We always shared these smiles, inasmuch as they meant anything. They were akin to the smiles two soldiers shared upon having checked a building for explosives and enemies and finding it lacking. All clear. I walked past him.
Everything was quiet for the time being, though it wouldn't be when they came to find him in a few minutes, so these were our last few minutes of privacy together. Not long after, come to think of it, our first few minutes of privacy together.
Things had turned out a bit differently since there.
"Mr Twitch," I greeted the prisoner, walking around his bench to sit opposite like I had before. It was like he hadn't moved.
He looked up with that same expression he'd been making before. But then again, perhaps I couldn't read Rubbery Men after all.
"I spoke to Mr Fortune," I went on. "I didn't know it was so easy to promise a man passage from New Newgate these days."
Mr Twitch had the grace not to look shocked.
"-- but then again," I mused, "I suppose I did. It's not difficult. Much less difficult than framing all of one's countrymen for their own crime, by proxy? I must have been blinkered. Forgive me."
I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and he just looked to one side; nothing stoic or defiant, just yet another boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar. This one had tentacles and I couldn't understand what he was saying. But I was fairly sure I didn't need to.
"So what should I do with you?" I'd already decided.
The Rubbery Man did his best to look pathetic; but maybe it wasn't his best, and besides, he already did. I am sure he thought he already had some idea what was going on, regardless, and was resigned to it. Justice would surely be done.
Justice. Well.
"Get your things," I told him, "well, what things you have. You're a free man, Mr Twitch. Unless there's an alternate name that you'd like me to call you by?"
I stood up while he took that in and turned my back on him. To his credit, or something, anyway, he didn't take long to recover and start scrambling for his possessions.
"When you're exonerated the riots will die down," I said aloud. "The Rubbery Men will be safer in London again, a little by little. People will forget. The exchange rate will go back up. Deep amber will flow back in. Thank the Lord for your innocence, eh, Mr Twitch?"
He gurgled something, which maybe was meant to mean something to me and maybe was not. I had no pen and paper with me at this particular moment. Perhaps I should have brought some.
"I'm unlocking your cell," I said. "Speak to the Inspector at the front, he should take you back home."
XII.
Avery was curled up like a cat in one of my armchairs. I'd turned mine away from the fire, which was how, I suppose, she knew I was unhappy. Some days she might have left it alone, but today she was dead set on bringing it up, I could tell from the half-hearted starts at conversation she was making now and then. Eventually she cut to the chase. That was one of her virtues. She always got around to it sooner or later.
"Hinks --" she began.
"Mr. Reading," I interrupted her, which made her pause long enough for me to go on, "what do you think is the origin of human cruelty?"
"Money," she said easily.
I shook my head. "Mr. Reading."
"The Brass Embassy?"
I thought of my friend a little, winced. "Very theological of you. Any other theories?"
Avery had very striking eyes, I always thought: more striking than anything else about her, physically, which said a great deal for them. I couldn't see them from here. I had to content myself with imagining them peering at me curiously, trying to take me apart joint by joint for the purpose of this conversation. "Is this going somewhere?"
"A physical defect," I said, staring at the wall opposite. "I was thinking some sort of imbalance in the head."
"The Rubbery case," she said, slowly, "did that ever wind up going anywhere?"
"Something innate." I folded my arms against the cold. "Hereditary. Or just some sort of common trouble; maybe too much alcohol before the birth --"
"Hinks --"
"-- or a laudanum addiction, in the father --"
"Hinks," she said. "You should sleep."
But I went to visit my friend in the astronomy tower instead. I owed him a game, after all, and tea, and some sort of concession. And work always went on.