The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “When you say you’ve got a tough one…” I said.

  “Murder,” Lestrade said. “Don’t know who the fellow is or how he died, but me and my sergeant—my sergeant and I—we can’t believe that anyone would commit suicide that way. So we agreed it was best to ask Mr. Crow.”

  Crow snorted and resettled his wings.

  “Then you really don’t want me along,” I said regretfully, for I could use a puzzle to get other things out of my head. “I’m sure the last thing you need is more members of the public gawking.”

  “I’d be greatly obliged if you would come, Dr. Doyle,” said Lestrade. “Our divisional surgeon’s tied up in Whitechapel, too, and we could use a doctor to look at this fellow.”

  “Then of course I’ll come,” I said.

  “Oh, splendid!” said Crow. He was clearly sincere, his wings half spreading before he caught himself, and although I knew his enthusiasm was more likely for my expertise than my companionship, I could not help being warmed.

  After a night spent sleeping in a closet, any scrap of comfort would do.

  Lestrade gave us the address, and I once again had the tremendous pleasure of watching Crow fold himself—like a conjuring trick—into a hansom cab.

  I climbed in after Crow—I was learning rapidly not to be squeamish about feathers, and Crow was actually a good deal less fragile than a bird. His wing-feathers behaved like feathers, but they were made of the same stuff as he was himself. When he molted, what he actually shed was not his own material, but the accretion of the world: not the dust and dirt and plaster that he groomed assiduously out of his feathers, but the residue of this plane of existence. He had not been satisfied with that explanation when he gave it, and periodically would interrupt whatever I was doing to try to improve it, but thus far had not succeeded.

  On the way to No. 3, Lauriston Gardens, he chattered so brightly about the investigation in Whitechapel that I finally said, “You don’t seem very exercised about this dead man.”

  “There’s no point in discussing him until we’ve actually seen him,” Crow said. “If I let myself, I’ll come up with all sorts of theories. And they’ll all be wrong. It wastes a shocking amount of time. I will bet you a buttered scone Lestrade has been theorizing away like a mad thing.”

  “He seems sincerely perplexed.”

  “Oh, he is,” Crow said. “He always is, when he comes to me. And it’s because he made up a theory instead of looking at the facts in front of him. I cannot seem to get it through his skull that he’s going about it backward.”

  “Do you work often with Scotland Yard?”

  “Not often enough. They’d save themselves a good deal of time and embarrassment if they’d just let me investigate for them.”

  I did not laugh, although it was a struggle. Crow’s vanity was sometimes endearing and sometimes exasperating, but it seemed deeply ingrained in him. I’d found myself speculating—theory in front of facts, Crow would chide me if I were to tell him—about whether all angels were hiding this o’erweening self-esteem behind their demure faces or if it was perhaps part of the reason he could survive without a habitation where no other angel could.

  It certainly made me more aware of angels, this new curiosity: the silent throngs of the Nameless, the Angel of Victoria’s Needle (a very young angel, as these things went, a delicate female with shining golden hair, like an angel doll for the top of a Christmas tree; but she had the astonishing wings of an albatross), the Angels of St. Pancras and Waterloo, starling-winged both of them, dark and iridescent and grimy. I hadn’t realized how few people looked at angels’ faces until I started doing so myself, how few people bothered to speak to them.

  I always said “thank you” to the Angel of the Baker Street Station when he extended his wings (sparrow wings, brown and barred) to clear me a path; the shock on his face was worth the irritation of his help.

  6

  No. 3, Lauriston Gardens

  No. 3, Lauriston Gardens, off the Brixton Road, was one of a series of small, drab, yellow-gray brick houses—it would have been drearily respectable when new and now, clearly abandoned, was merely wretched.

  A crowd of gawkers had inevitably gathered, errand boys and unemployed men and a few women of questionable virtue. They were thronging the constable who stood in front of the house, pelting him with their curiosity, but they all turned at the sound of the hansom, and I could see the brightness in their faces. Not malice, although it could become that in an eyeblink, but eagerness—eagerness for anything that might disrupt the endless anxious sameness of their lives.

  I exited the cab first and paid the cabbie. Money baffled Crow, although he listened earnestly to my explanations time and again, and I had learned that, since he would either forget to pay or hand over all the money in his pockets, it was better if I took care of payment. Crow had begun simply giving me all the money he made, currency and cheques alike, with a sort of indifferent trust that made my blood run cold. I had not asked him how he earned the money; I wondered now if he had wanted me to.

  I heard the crowd gasp and knew Crow had just stepped down from the hansom.

  In general, people assumed he was Nameless, and in general, he let them; it was so much simpler than embarking on any kind of explanation. It wasn’t unheard of for a prosperous medical man to hire the services of a Nameless, and I had my cane, which suggested a simple reason for Crow to be dogging my footsteps—and he was, in fact, carrying my medical bag. Probably none of the gawkers had ever heard of a Nameless using a hansom cab—indeed, neither had I—but the truth was so much more improbable that I felt sure it would never occur to them.

  Not that we necessarily had anything to fear if it did, but I knew how quickly a crowd’s mood could change. Moreover, the first thing anyone thought when they realized Crow was not Nameless was that he was Fallen, and that was something I most certainly did not want to deal with in this shabby-genteel street with only a young, florid-faced constable to help.

  “Go slow,” Crow hissed at me.

  “Do I have a choice?” I muttered back, but I kept my pace slower even than was necessary. I had not the first idea why Crow wanted to linger in front of the house, but it was almost always easier to give in than to argue with him, and this was not one of the places, such as the W.C., where I had drawn the line.

  “There was a cab here,” he said, just barely audible. “Not Lestrade’s—that’s still there, half a block down. Four-wheeler. Horse had one new shoe, on the off-fore. Nothing else to be made out of the general puddle.”

  The path from the sidewalk to the front door was a mix of gravel and mud and water standing in deep footprints. Crow made an agonized little noise which I recognized as a cri de coeur. I’d heard him discoursing on the astonishing number of things one could learn from footprints; I knew what he’d say the instant he’d closed the front door behind us, and I was not wrong.

  “Why didn’t you just call for a herd of buffalo?” he said to Lestrade, who was waiting in the tiny front hall.

  “Not my doing,” Lestrade said. “They’d had five constables in and out of here before anyone thought to send for the C.I.D. Every constable on the beat wants to prove himself by solving a murder—they all think they’re in the penny bloods.”

  “Well, it’s a simple matter in the bloods,” Crow said more cheerfully. He was as passionate a devotee of the penny dreadfuls as he was of the penny press; I had yet to be brave enough—or foolhardy enough—to ask him how on Earth an angel benefited from that kind of reading material. “You look at the body, you see a clue no one else has seen, it points you straight at the murderer.”

  “And Bob’s your uncle,” Lestrade agreed. “None of them had that kind of luck with this fellow, and frankly we haven’t had any luck, either.” He waved us ahead of him into the room. “About all we’ve found out is his name, which is—”

  It was a dreadful little room, even without the corpse, bare of all furnishings and the wallpaper—a petit bourgeois an
d utterly hideous pattern of cherries and ribbons—peeling in long, ragged strips. It felt desolate, like a place where no one had ever been happy.

  And then there was the corpse, whom I recognized at once. “Enoch J. Drebber,” I said. “Oh dear God.”

  “You know him?” Crow and Lestrade said in unintentional chorus.

  “I encountered him,” I said, “on the airship from Paris to London.”

  “Well, that’s a real piece of luck,” said Lestrade. “Are you sure it’s him?”

  “Vividly,” I said.

  “What do you know about him?” Lestrade said.

  “American,” I said. “A drunken boor. He was traveling with another man, a fellow named Stangerson, who seemed to be the brains of whatever their operation was.”

  “Do you know where they went when you reached London?”

  “Not a clue,” I said. “To be perfectly honest with you, Inspector, I was simply glad to see their backs.”

  “Which ship?”

  “The Sophy Anderson. Barnhart line from Istanbul to London. They only joined the ship in Paris.”

  “And the date?”

  “The eleventh of March.”

  “Huh,” said Lestrade. “Well, I admit, Dr. Doyle, I wasn’t expecting you to be able to tell me anything about this fellow’s life. But do you think you can tell me anything about his death?”

  I looked at the body and wondered how I would make it off the floor again. But there was no help for it. I knelt down, slowly and awkwardly, hiding my wince as best I could.

  His limbs were violently contorted, as was his face. “My guess,” I said, “would be some sort of convulsant poison—strychnine is the most common. But if he didn’t take it by his own choice, and I can’t imagine that he did, the murderer either tricked him or forced him. There are no bruises on his face and”—I looked at his clawed, straining hands—“no bruises or other defensive wounds on his hands, so he must have been tricked.”

  “It must have been someone he knew and trusted,” Lestrade said. “Can you imagine swallowing a pill because a stranger told you to?”

  “People do strange things,” I said. “But I agree, it seems more likely it was a friend or at least a colleague of some sort, whatever Mr. Drebber’s business might have been.”

  “I guess this Stangerson is the one we want to talk to,” said Lestrade.

  Crow had been drifting about the room, apparently paying no attention to us, although I knew that wasn’t true. He’d inspected the fireplace and the stump of red wax on the mantelpiece that had been a candle; he’d inspected the bloodstains on the floor (odd, since there was no sign that Drebber had been wounded), the baseboards, the hideous gas lamps. And he’d been peering at the walls, the peeling wallpaper and the plaster behind it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him startle—the twitch of his wings gave him away every time—and bring his head closer. “Hello,” he said. “What’s this?”

  Lestrade joined him. I stayed where I was, to conserve my limited energy and the number of times I’d have to ask for help in getting up.

  “RACHE,” Lestrade said, “and is that … did the lunatic write it in blood?”

  “I believe so,” said Crow. “And if you look closely, that smudge might be the start of a sixth letter. Or he might just have been startled.”

  “Constable Rance found the body still almost living temperature,” Lestrade said. “Probably he scared the murderer away.”

  “Quite possible,” said Crow. “The question is, what word did the murderer mean to write? RACHE is German for ‘revenge,’ but it looks like a downstroke…”

  “Rachel,” I said.

  They both turned sharply to look at me. “Rachel?” said Crow.

  “A common woman’s name,” I said and shrugged. “Plus, my encounter with Drebber makes it all too plausible to me that he would have been killed for his treatment of someone’s wife or sister or daughter.”

  “It’s certainly a possibility,” Crow said.

  “But what if it’s not another letter,” said Lestrade. “The East End is full of German Jews and Socialists, and heaven knows what kinds of secret societies and cabals those people have.”

  “Oh really, Lestrade,” Crow said crossly. “Don’t talk nonsense. This man came here with one other person, not a cabal.”

  “How … how do you make that out, Mr. Crow?” Lestrade said, doing a poor job of appearing nonchalant.

  “Well, aside from the mud wallow left by your constables, I make out the tracks of two men. One is our friend there with his fashionable patent-leather boots. The other was a man something over six feet in height who wore rough square-toed boots. His tracks are distinctive, for he has quite small feet for a man his size.”

  “Go on,” said Lestrade, a sharp look gleaming in his pouched eyes, and I understood why he had asked Crow to come.

  “They arrived together,” Crow said, “sometime after that largest puddle formed on the walk. Mr. Drebber’s patent-leather boots went carefully around—so that he cannot at that point have been in fear of his life—while square-toes stepped across. They came straight to this room, where patent-leather stood still for some time while square-toes paced up and down. He got steadily more excited, as his stride got longer and harder. The blood must have been his, if the corpse has no wounds?”

  “None,” I said. “And no bloodstains.”

  “And square-toes used his own blood to write RACHE—or most of RACHEL—on the wall at a height which again suggests he is a very tall man. And the fact that he wrote in his own blood, not his victim’s, again suggests the lack of a secret society in this case. At present, I have no idea how he compelled Mr. Drebber to swallow a strong convulsant poison without laying a finger on him, but he clearly did. We will assume for the moment that his powers of persuasion are remarkable. Let us find out about Mr. Drebber’s belongings.”

  He came and knelt across from me and began a catalogue that had Lestrade scribbling frantically to keep up. “A gold watch, fifteen-carat, Barraud’s of London, Number 97163. Not new, but in good condition. Gold Albert chain, probably twenty-carat, very heavy and solid. Gold ring with Masonic device—there’s your secret society, Lestrade.”

  “Very funny, Mr. Crow,” the detective said sourly.

  “Gold pin, fifteen-carat, bulldog’s head with ruby eyes. I can’t say I care for it. Russian leather card case, with cards of Enoch J. Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio, matching Dr. Doyle’s identification, so that’s convenient. No purse, but loose money”—he counted rapidly, long fingers dipping in and out of Drebber’s clothes as easily as a pickpocket—“seven pounds thirteen. Pocket edition of—oh dear—Boccaccio’s Decameron, with the name Jos. Stangerson printed very legibly on the flyleaf. Two letters, one to E. J. Drebber, at the American Exchange, to be left ’til called for, the other to Joseph Stangerson, the same. Both letters are from the Guion Steamship Company about the sailing of the Lone Star from Liverpool. Clearly Mr. Drebber was making his way back to the Colonies. I imagine, Lestrade, that Mr. Stangerson will be endeavoring—possibly with a new sense of urgency—to do the same.”

  “We’ll cable Guion,” Lestrade said. “The Lone Star can watch for him.”

  “Could square-toes have been Mr. Stangerson, Dr. Doyle?” asked Crow.

  “Not if he was a noticeably tall man,” I said. “Stangerson was shorter than Drebber, and I can’t somehow see him wearing square-toed boots.”

  “Pity,” said Crow. “It would make this a tidy murder instead of the messy sprawling thing I fear it is.” He was straightening the dead man’s clothes—as best he could given the corpse’s contorted position—and all three of us heard the distinct metallic clunk of something hitting the floor.

  Crow pounced on it, as swift as a cat, and then sat back on his heels with an expression of blank astonishment. “What in the holy…” He extended his open hand to me—and to Lestrade, who was by now breathing down the back of my neck. The thing on his palm made no sense for a moment and t
hen I was able to resolve it: a feather. It looked like one of Crow’s pin-feathers, or like the husks of them he molted, except that it was made of gold.

  Lestrade and I both flinched back from it. Lestrade said, “Is that…?”

  “Yes,” Crow said. “It’s a dissolution feather. A real one.”

  “But how…” Lestrade said helplessly. I knew a little about dissolution feathers: when an angel’s habitation was destroyed and the angel itself was dissolved, rather than Fallen or made Nameless, there might be left behind one or perhaps two feathers, transmuted by the forces of dissolution into gold. There was a fashion among the wealthy for young women to carry replicas as tokens of virginity. On her marriage, a girl gave her feather to her younger sister or her best friend. I found the tradition unspeakably macabre—but finding a true feather of dissolution on Enoch Drebber’s body was far, far worse.

  Crow was still completely bouleversé. Lestrade looked as baffled as a bulldog trying to understand a doorknob. He said tentatively, “That seems an unlikely thing for this gentleman to have.”

  “I don’t think he did,” Crow said. “I mean, I don’t think it was his. It wasn’t in one of his pockets, just caught in the lining of his coat. I think his murderer dropped it.”

  After another long silence, Lestrade said, “I’m not sure that’s any better.”

  “He leaned over his victim. To gloat? To be sure he was dead? And it must have fallen out of his pocket.” Crow considered a moment and said thoughtfully, “He’ll be horrified.”

  “But what kind of murderer carries a dissolution feather?” protested Lestrade.

  “This one,” said Crow. “Who was it who found the body again?”

  “Constable John Rance 299P,” said Lestrade. “Why?”

  “There’s something I want to ask him.”

  “He’s off duty right now.” Lestrade consulted his notebook. “He’ll be in the Camberwell Division dormitory, but have a heart, Mr. Crow, and let the poor man get some sleep first.”

  “Ah,” said Crow, who obviously hadn’t thought of that. “Yes, of course. I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Anyone he encountered would be long gone.”