“No, not that I recall.” She tracked the positions of each spider with a quick glance. There was no twitch, no quirk of her brow, no attempt to evade. “Should I have?”
“Nae, I was only curious, is all.”
He glanced again at the photo, committing as much information to memory as he could. Their conversation ended, and Chief Inspector Singh had Constable Bottomfield escort Ian back to street level. The constable lingered on the pavement with him a moment. “The boys inside said you used to be one of us. That true?” he asked.
“Aye, up north. Seems a very long time ago.”
After a grunt of—what? Disapproval? Grudging respect? Ambivalence?—Bottomfield went back inside and shut the door as a heavy drizzle descended from the clouds, freezing the skin on the back of Ian’s neck.
He didn’t know why he hadn’t just come out and said what Mary Blackwood had done to one of the victims. To him. To who knew how many countless others who’d died in hospitals. Maybe he believed Edwina. Maybe he thought he was wrong to say what he had. He’d been inside the dead man’s head, experienced his memories, watched the outline of the murderer approach, and it was not Mary Blackwood. Nae, she came later, after the deed was done, like her sister said. In the alley, in the morgue, or somewhere in between. What a god-awful thing to have to live with, he thought. To chase the dead, and occasionally the living, to satisfy some unnatural craving or compulsion to possess what’s in their head.
He flipped his collar up with the idea of walking toward the nearest pub to have a proper think when he was stopped at the next corner by a man with gray muttonchops, a tweed suit, and a battered brown bowler leaning one shoulder against the wall. “I trust you didn’t tell the CI about our agreement,” the man said, blowing out a stream of cigarette smoke to mingle with the gray city air.
Chapter Eighteen
Agreement?
As Ian was becoming accustomed to, he had no recollection of the man. Caught on his back foot, he played along, if only to clarify what the man meant. “Not a word.”
“I’m going to need the rest of the money, though.”
“Remind me again how much we agreed on?”
“Ha, cheeky. A pair of queen’s heads’ll do, mate, and I get you that second look at the other autopsy photo like you wanted.”
Ian stared at the man full in the face. Red veins swollen from years of drinking trailed over the man’s nose and cheeks. Rheumy eyes stared back as the stranger offered him his cigarette case with a conspiratorial smile, shaking the tin for good measure. Presumably he meant for Ian to slip the coin inside under the innocent pretense of sharing a smoke in the drizzle. He fished in his pocket discreetly for the money, pulling his pocket watch out at the same time as if to check the hour. He didn’t know the man in the least, but he knew his type. Exactly the sort of dead-end copper he’d approach with the clink of money in exchange for information only someone on the inside could get. A sergeant who’d topped out in his career, if he had to guess. He glanced down at the spectrometer on his watch, verifying the man was witch-born.
He returned the tin of cigarettes, and the sergeant jerked his head, instructing him to follow. They crossed the street in front of the dragon statue, though Ian kept a good distance between them as the man lumbered east. A few paces on the sergeant veered left, disappearing down a narrow opening between buildings. Ian stopped flat. He’d grown leery of narrow passageways after recent events, so he tossed the unsmoked cigarette in the street and watched where the man went first. The arched opening led to a small brick-lined courtyard with a garden enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. On the right hung a sign advertising a pub. Not just any pub, though. A witches’ pub tucked away in a small alcove. Ian walked forward, then craned his neck to look back at the bustling street of venders, omnibuses, and carriages full of people all rushing by oblivious to what remained hidden to them behind the facade of a dead-end passage. Another quirk of an old city, he thought, and entered the pub.
Inside, the main room was half filled with patrons nursing mugs of dark ale and reading newspapers. Ribbons of spiced vanilla swirled from the tonka-bean cured tobacco smoldering inside their pipes. One or two looked over the rims of their glasses when he entered but went back to their reading when he proved harmless enough. The wide plank floors creaked underfoot as Ian nodded at them and searched for the sergeant. He soon discovered there was more to the pub than the main room. The place was a maze of small alcoves that went three levels deep, each arrived at via a narrow set of wonky wooden steps. Portraits of notable witches, draped in cobwebs, hung on the walls of the upper stairway. Lower down, it was the skulls of the infamous that filled the nooks and niches. The three-hundred-year-old cranium of an Alistair Ainsworth had been worn brown and smooth from a thousand hands touching it for luck as they passed. Ian did the same, tapping his fingers against the skull as he spotted the man with the muttonchops. He’d found a table on the bottom level inside a cavern-like space, where low-hanging beams on the ceiling threatened the head of any man of average height. By the time Ian caught up to the sergeant, he’d already procured two pints of brown ale. Fortunately, he slid one of the mugs across the table when Ian sat opposite.