The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “You are very harsh.”

  “I have reason to be.” He shook himself, wings half spreading and settling back. “Have you ever heard of the Ratcliffe Highway murders?”

  “Er,” I said, dredging up a vague memory. “De Quincey, right?”

  “Yes, although abysmally inaccurate,” Crow said. Jennie brought in my breakfast, and we were silent for a long time. I was dealing with the last toast crust when I looked up and found him watching me speculatively. He said, “Are you up for a walk?”

  “It depends how far we’re going.” I could not deny my desire to get out of the house.

  “We’ll walk as far as you’re able and take a hansom the rest of the way,” Crow said.

  I had watched the amazing spectacle of Crow folding himself into a hansom cab once, and I felt a private, ridiculous thrill at the thought of getting a second chance to observe. “Lay on, MacDuff,” I said and levered myself slowly out of my chair.

  4

  The Skull of John Williams

  No one gave us a second look as we came into the public taproom, from which I deduced that Crow came here fairly often. I did wonder why, since he neither consumed alcohol nor could even taste it, but I had learned that Crow did things for utterly unfathomable reasons—even when he could be coaxed to explain himself, which was not often.

  The landlord said, “Mornin’, Mr. Crow. The gentleman with you?”

  “Yes,” Crow said. “I’ve brought my friend Dr. Doyle to see Williams’s skull.”

  The landlord made a pursed-lips, eyebrows-raised face, and said, “Ah, well then.” He turned and reached up for what I had taken to be an odd porcelain decanter; as he brought it down and set it on the bar, I could see that, yes, it truly was a human skull, mandible-less, toothless, and brown with age. I picked it up. There was a strange feeling to the skull, a feeling of incompleteness that had been associated with no skull I had ever handled before.

  I looked at Crow. He said, “John Williams was a seaman. Granted, he does not seem to have been of particularly sterling character, if the men who were his companions are anything to go by. But it still doesn’t seem reasonable to assert that because that is so, he was able to split himself into two persons.”

  “That does seem most unlikely,” I said cautiously.

  He gave me a sidelong flicker of a smile. “And yet, at the scene of the Williams murders, two men were seen running away. Two sets of footprints were found. He cannot have been both men. It does lead one to wonder if he was either of them. In the aftermath, there were certainly persons who seemed overeager to see that the crimes were fastened irrevocably on the late John Williams.”

  “But what were the crimes? You say de Quincey is inaccurate, and to be truthful, I hardly remember him.”

  “So,” Crow said, cocking his head to the side like his namesake bird. “On the seventh of December, 1811, Timothy Marr, his apprentice, his wife, and his infant son were found viciously hacked and beaten to death inside his home. It was later determined that the assailants—and again, there were plainly more than one—had escaped across the barren land behind Marr’s house. No one knew of any person with a compelling reason to wish Mr. Marr dead—still less his wife and apprentice—and least of all his son, a child too young to speak and entirely incapable of bearing witness against his parents’ murderers. Someone must have hated Timothy Marr with a most passionate hatred.”

  “Are they certain it was a person?”

  “Footprints,” Crow reminded me. “And at the second murder site, they were seen fleeing, a tall stout man and a shorter lame man, having murdered a public house owner, his wife, and his servant just as viciously as they murdered the Marrs.”

  “Are they quite sure they were the same men?” I said and saw the delight on Crow’s face.

  “An excellent question, Dr. Doyle. On the evidence of the sheer brutality of both attacks, it does seem likely—more likely than that two such beasts—I beg your pardon, four—four such beasts were roaming the Ratcliffe Highway at the same time.”

  I hoped devoutly that he had not noticed my twitch at the word “beast.” “Then are they sure it was a man?” I pursued.

  “A demon would not have stopped,” Crow said. “The Williamses—no relation to John Williams—had both a granddaughter and a lodger above-stairs who escaped unscathed. A demon would have gone after the girl first. They are drawn to innocence.”

  “There are other … creatures,” I said, for somehow I could not bring myself to say the word “beast.”

  “True again,” Crow said. “But there was no stink of the unnatural about the scenes, and I think you know as well as I do, Dr. Doyle, that such creatures—even demons—leave a distinct odor behind them when they kill.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking of the terrible stenches I had encountered in Afghanistan. And I noticed that Crow spoke as if he had examined the scene of the crime himself. “Is it the killing itself that does it?”

  “Generally,” Crow said. “It’s why angels have no such scent. Now, a very ancient and powerful Fallen—who has killed many hundreds, if not thousands of people—will carry that stench wherever they may go. But no such creature has ever alighted in London, I assure you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not specifying what I was thankful for. “Thus, you believe that the murders were the work of human hands, which doesn’t surprise me. Humans are more than capable of evil. But from what you said, these seem to be quite in-human murders.”

  “… Yes,” Crow said, having considered my choice of words. “Whether committed by a human being or not, they were definitely inhuman murders. Eight people, including an infant, brutally murdered, and for what seemed to be no reason. Naturally everyone was terrified. Naturally the magistrates jumped at the first halfway plausible suspect they encountered. Naturally when he committed suicide before he could be brought to trial, everyone was only too glad to take it as proof-positive of his guilt.”

  “Suicide.”

  “Maybe,” Crow said. “He was found hanged in his cell.”

  “Ah,” I said. “He must have been rather ingenious to contrive that.”

  “Quite. A determined man can be shockingly ingenious. But there is also the fact that at his arraignment, Williams said very clearly and loudly that he was innocent.”

  “Bravado.”

  “Oh, very likely. But if he meant it—or if he thought he could brazen it out—then it was much too soon for that kind of despair. But if he knew something—and he very well might have—then it was not at all too soon for someone else to silence him.”

  “Permanently.”

  “Oh yes. No clairvoyant would have touched him regardless.” Crow regarded me thoughtfully. “A gentleman named William Ablass keeps showing up around the edges of the case. He was a tall, stout man, very much like one of the men seen running from the scene of the Williams murder. He seems to have been an unpleasant sort of fellow. And it’s possible he knew Timothy Marr.”

  “But even if he had a grudge against Marr,” I said, “why did he murder the Williamses? Or I suppose, conversely, if he had a reason to murder the Williamses, why did he murder the Marrs?”

  “Would that the magistrates had asked that,” Crow said. “I don’t have an answer. It’s one of the reasons the case has never satisfactorily been resolved—even if John Williams were the sole perpetrator, which I don’t believe. So far as anyone knows, the Marrs and the Williamses did not know each other and had nothing in common—except that they were both within the orbit of a man with a great lust for murder.”

  “But it only happened the twice?” I said. “If he did it for the love of killing—and he wasn’t John Williams—then why did he stop?”

  Crow made one of his shoulder/wing shrugs and said, “If the true—or second—perpetrator was William Ablass, then presumably he was too canny to strike a third time, especially after John Williams’s ‘suicide.’ Also, he was a sailor. We don’t know that he stopped.”

  I shuddered
. And then I thought of something else. “Did the public house have an angel?” Some public houses did and some didn’t, on a basis that I had never fully understood, but that seemed both arbitrary and self-contradictory.

  “No,” Crow said. “The murderer or murderers were seemingly very careful, for they did not allow their path to intersect an angel’s dominion on either night. The Pear Tree, where Williams lived and where a variety of peculiar evidence was found both before and after his death, did have an angel. But I regret to say that the Angel of the Pear Tree was a sodden drunk.”

  “I didn’t know angels could get drunk.”

  “We can’t via literal alcohol,” Crow said. “But there is a metaphysical equivalent, a kind of corruption. It often leads to the Fall.”

  “Could the angel have…”

  But Crow was shaking his head hard enough to disarrange his hair. “It isn’t the sort of thing one can conceal, Dr. Doyle. If the Angel of the Pear Tree had Fallen, everyone in London would have known. No, that angel embraced the Consensus in 1835.” His wings mantled defensively and he twitched them back before they started to spread to their full span, which would be a debacle of no small proportion—or expense—in this public house, which was not overlarge and which was becoming steadily more crowded around us.

  I knew, of course—every schoolchild knows—that an angel can only be left in an abandoned building for so long before they will inevitably return to the ranks of the Nameless; some angels can maintain their integrity for centuries, but those are the angels of great castles and churches, not the angels of seedy rooming houses. A very few angels choose to Fall and a very few angels choose dissolution—to be destroyed without hope of any kind of resurrection.

  “The Angel of the Pear Tree provided no useful evidence,” Crow said briskly, and I deduced that we were not going to mention that he felt about the word “Consensus” the way I felt about the word “beast,” nor that he had clearly known the Angel of the Pear Tree personally. “If anyone knew the truth, they never confessed it. John Williams’s corpse was paraded through the streets in a barbaric spectacle. They buried him”—he jerked his head toward the door—“out there. The body was accidentally dug up again during some road repairs. And,” raising his voice, “the skull somehow ended up here.”

  The landlord smirked and said nothing.

  “So,” Crow said, picking up the skull and turning it pensively in his hands, “this is the skull of a murderer and/or a murder victim and/or a suicide. He might have been a completely innocent man.”

  “Makes a better story if he wasn’t,” said the landlord.

  “That depends on what kind of stories you like,” said Crow.

  “What happened to the rest of the skeleton?” I said.

  The landlord shrugged. “Potter’s field, probably.”

  “Or the nearest storm drain,” Crow said.

  “You’re a braver man than I am,” I said to the landlord. “What if John Williams wants his skull back?”

  The landlord shrugged, with another of his grins, as Crow handed him the skull. “Hasn’t happened yet.”

  PART TWO

  THE DISSOLUTION FEATHER

  5

  An Appeal for Help

  Just before midnight on the eighth of August, my new problem reasserted itself.

  This time, instead of merely waking in the morning with a head full of nightmares and a body full of cramps, I woke to cloudy consciousness in the middle of the night. It is hard to describe, for I was not human and my thoughts were not a human being’s thoughts, but I was still myself. I still knew that I would be human in the morning.

  And I knew I had to be quiet. I didn’t understand my human fear of discovery, so that I had a confused belief that there were predators in the sitting room. In the morning, I would recognize the predators as Fallen, but in the night, all I knew were shadows and red eyes that glowed like hot coals and a sharp musty smell that meant only terror. I wanted to be outside, running, hunting, using the great muscles of my jaws to bite and rend and break. The door I had carefully locked was irrelevant; in the morning, I would understand that I could simply have pushed through it like a lion at the circus through a paper hoop. But there were predators in the sitting room, predators thronging the stairs.

  I whined, but softly, and pulled the blankets off the bed to make a nest in the closet.

  And that was where I woke in the morning, aching and unbelievably cramped and almost sick with gratitude for the locked door that had meant so little in the night. It took me twice as long as usual to complete my morning routine, and when I finally hobbled out to the sitting room and the breakfast table, Crow said, “You look horrible. Are you ill?”

  “No,” I said, pouring a cup of tea—blessed, miraculous tea that helped the whole thing seem like a nightmare instead of bitter reality. “I spent a bad night. And it isn’t, by the way, considered polite to tell someone how bad they look.”

  “I don’t know very much about diseases,” Crow said, and I had lived with him long enough by then to recognize it as an explanation, if not exactly an apology.

  It had never occurred to me before beginning this living arrangement what a skewed and partial view angels—whose dominions are public buildings, not private residences—must gain of human nature and behavior. Crow, who had the curiosity of nine particularly persistent cats, was fascinated by sleeping, by eating, by a thousand details of daily life about which I, for the most part, never even thought, and he was dreadfully offended that I would not let him follow me into my bedroom or the bathroom or, God forbid, the W.C.

  Also, although his public, formal manners were perfect, as angels’ manners always were, I had discovered that he had no real understanding of how to treat someone with whom he did not have a strictly defined, formal relationship. I often caught him staring at me as if he had simply no idea what to do with the fact of my existence. It was not that he disliked me or that he did not wish us to be friends. He simply had no idea how and in some ways only the vaguest conception that the thing was possible at all. Everyone knew that angels could speak to each other mind to mind, but Crow’s behavior made me wonder just what kind of communication that was.

  Thus, I did not take offense and said merely, “Trust me, if I’m ill, you will know about it.”

  “All right,” said Crow, rather in the manner of one accepting a promise, and left me alone with my tea and toast and boiled egg. But I had barely reached for The Times, bracing myself as always for the complaints about the I.A.F.’s ineffectualness, when there was a sharp staccato knocking on the front door.

  Crow’s head came up sharply and eagerly. I watched him tracking the activity downstairs as Jennie emerged from the back of the house and answered the door. I could only distinguish the heavy thump of the bolt being drawn, but I had already learned that Crow’s hearing was exceptionally acute and that the concept of “eavesdropping” meant about as much to him as it did to a fish. By the time I could hear someone’s feet mounting the stairs, Crow was already regarding the door with pleased anticipation. He barely gave the visitor a chance to knock before he called, “Come in!”

  The man who opened the door was short and stocky. In face as much as in body he resembled a bulldog, having a heavy jaw, a rather square forehead, and a prizefighter’s much broken nose. His dark hair was slicked straight back and flat to his skull. He wore a blue serge suit that was only just beginning to be shabby and square-toed black leather shoes without the slightest pretense of fashion about them. His hat, already in his hand, was the bowler it had surely been destined from birth to be.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Crow. “Do you have something for me?”

  “I think I might,” said the visitor.

  “Do you want me to leave?” I said, reaching for my cane with a certain amount of dread. Crow certainly had every right to use our sitting room for a private conversation, but short of shutting myself in my bedroom like a naughty child, there was nowhere I could go, and I was
in no condition for a long, bracing walk.

  “No,” said Crow. He had turned his unnerving, searching stare on me, a thing I had by no means gotten used to. “You were an Armed Forces doctor. You must know a great deal about unnatural death.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Splendid!” His smile was like a crack of lightning, and he turned back to the little man with the bowler. “What can I do for you?”

  “We’ve got a tough one,” the little man said. He had a painstakingly corrected Cockney accent—a man who would never misplace an H, but who would never sound like he belonged anywhere but the East End. “And Gregson and all them are in Whitechapel.”

  “Of course,” Crow muttered. “What can you tell me, then, Inspector?”

  “Inspector?” I asked.

  “This is Inspector Lestrade,” Crow said. “Inspector, this is Dr. Doyle.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait. Am I correct in understanding that there is an officer of the Metropolitan Police standing in our sitting room and apparently asking for your help?”

  “Of course,” Crow said. “It’s what I do.”

  “It’s what?”

  His wings flared and mantled. “I’m a consulting detective, the only one in the world. I told you London is my dominion.”

  “You work for the police?”

  “No!” he said, clearly insulted by the mere idea. “I work for anyone who has an interesting problem. My clients merely happen to include police officers.”

  It was not the most complimentary way to phrase the matter; I could not help glancing at the police officer still standing in our doorway, and he understood, for he said, “Not to worry, Dr. Doyle. I know what he’s like.”