Ian swallowed uncomfortably at the familiar shadow memory. She noticed.
“Getting squeamish in your new job?” Singh asked as she poured the tea. “That’s not the detective I remember.”
He hadn’t yet shared the second part of his ordeal, of being given another man’s memory, of being the victim of the very things she’d just described. He wasn’t yet certain how the sisters had come by the memory. Was Mary involved in the murders? Was Edwina? Was there an exceptional explanation that exonerated them both? Was such a thing even possible? There was something odd about them, or about Mary, at least. Something about her magic unsettled the heart. The business of taking memories put him in mind of a snake his best friend had kept when they were bairns. Interesting enough to observe the animal’s daily nature, but once a month one had to offer up live prey for the snake to devour. And even though they were naught but mice, Ian couldn’t help seeing them as victims in a brutal cycle, daft as that was. But aside from his misgivings, and despite his denials, he did seem to care about Edwina Blackwood’s good opinion of him. He didn’t wish to upset her by rushing to judgment too soon about the sister.
“Aye, I’ve gone soft working missing persons cases.”
Singh smiled politely, but he knew what she was thinking: Why had he quit a job with the Constabulary only to take up private detective work? He often asked himself the same question when he found himself on surveillance in the middle of the night with the rain pouring down and him out looking for a lost sprite or nixie in some dark fen, freezing his arse off. But he’d never have to work another child’s murder case as long as he was the one who dictated what job he accepted or not. For that alone, he’d made the right choice.
“Privately, the City Police are under the impression robbery was an afterthought,” she said after sipping her tea. “Murder was the real endgame.”
“In more ways than one.” Ian considered the drawings he’d left behind in his hotel room and pushed for an answer. “Any evidence the rumors about the murders being part of an occult ritual are true? Some kind of blood magic or curse at work?”
The chief inspector’s eyebrow twitched again as she reached back in the credenza for a second file. This one was as fat as Lady Everly’s Grimoire. Singh dropped it on the desk so it landed with a resounding thud.
“What’s this?”
“Your file.” She smiled, enjoying the brief moment of discomfort she’d caused him before opening the folder. On top were what appeared to be drawings and a black-and-white photograph of George Elvanfoot. He didn’t recognize them as his, yet he knew what they were.
“How did you—” he began to ask, but he already knew. The Witches’ Constabulary monitored everything both the City and Metropolitan Police did, in case of potential crossover, by infiltrating the ranks of the mortal police with a few of their own. Naturally, they had an interest in controlling access to information about certain incriminating incidents, if they happened to involve the use of magic. “Nice grab. Saves me the effort of sending Hob over to the local nick to steal them,” he said, grinning like an imp himself as he tilted his head to see the sketches better.
On examination, they were as graphic and disturbing as the hotel clerk had avowed. He was no great artist, but he could enchant a stick of graphite as well as the next. The drawings proved to be detailed depictions of the recent murders, but closer scrutiny—once Chief Inspector Singh gave permission—revealed they were based on more than the actual crime scene photos. As Ian shuffled through the drawings, he noted the angles of the bodies and the settings where they were found all matched what he’d read in the newspaper accounts, but there was one big difference.
He pulled free a drawing of a scene at once familiar and sickening. Days before he’d been given the memory of a dead man, he’d sketched the scene of the victim’s murder in the narrow alley. The drawing conformed with his shadow memory, as the illustration in the newspaper had. Yet in his sketch he’d depicted the man without clothes, which gave the drawing an even more lurid tone. He understood better why the clerk had contacted the police over what the maid had found. Poor lass. Looking closer, he began to work out what he’d been up to. He’d drawn a short spiral on the left side of the man’s head above the ear. Beside it he wrote “occultatum.” On the spots above the kidneys, the heart, and the lungs, he’d drawn different symbols with question marks beside them. The sigils, when bonded with the right words, were associated with certain blood-magic rituals of transformation—a star, a crescent moon, a crossroads. He looked up at Singh, hoping for more details.