The Carnelian Crow: A Stoker & Holmes Book (Stoker and Holmes 4)

by Colleen Gleason

  Grayling crouched next to me, having enough common sense not to disrupt the area with his feet. He brought with him the scent of cold night air, along with spearmint this time, wood smoke, and starched cotton. “What on earth is wrong with her?”

  I hid a smile. He was referring to Evaline’s caterwauling. “It’s her way of offering assistance.”

  I believe he might have laughed if we hadn’t been positioned next to a dead body. Instead, his demeanor was sober as he withdrew a small measuring device that I had secretly coveted since we’d first knelt next to a dead body together—that of Mayellen Hodgeworth, on the floor of the British Museum.

  “Lady Thistle herself, I presume?” he said.

  “She’s been dead more than a day,” I said, even though I knew his gadget would give a more accurate time of death. Which was why I coveted it. “Rigor has come and gone. She was—she was probably already gone when we were here yesterday.”

  “Yes,” he murmured, and went about with his calculations. “Approximately forty hours,” he said after a moment, tucking the gadget back into one of his large overcoat pockets and pulling out a magnifyer…that had its own illumination. “Is anything wrong, Miss Holmes?”

  I smothered my moan of envy over his seemingly unending array of devices, and gave myself a sharp mental talking-to. Uncle Sherlock didn’t rely on so many cognoggin gadgets and machines. I could, and would, do the same.

  “Not a thing, Inspector Grayling. I was simply—er— Presumably you’ve noted the marks around her neck. Whatever was used to strangle her was—”

  “Rough and patterned. Like this length of lace.” He reached over into the edge of the shadows and procured a string of lace. I had seen it myself, of course, and had already noted the markings on the back of Lady Thistle’s neck, which was the only part clearly visible. As I suspected, the width and scalloped edges of the abrasion matched the size and decor of the lace.

  “Precisely. Naturally, her fingers have traces of skin beneath the nails—”

  “And corresponding marks on her neck, as she attempted to free herself from the—”

  “Naturally. And she was sitting on her stool over there when the killer came up behind her. The heel of her shoe got caught on one of the rungs of the stool, and it became loose during her violent struggles.” I indicated the heel in question, which was crooked where it was tacked into the sole of her shoe. “She couldn’t have walked on it like that, so it had to have happened during the struggle.”

  “Brilliant, Miss Holmes,” he murmured without a trace of irony.

  I smiled modestly.

  “The killer appears to be a female,” he went on, using forceps to draw a long, dark hair from the crease where Lady Thistle’s shoulder met her neck.

  “Likely a customer who came up behind her—perhaps after using the changing room in the back. Lady Thistle was hard of hearing, and it would have been simple to take her by surprise. And just as simple to overpower her.”

  “Did she have a shop assistant? Or anyone else who might have been inside regularly? If so, why wasn’t the attack reported before now?”

  “Magpie.” I considered. “She’s possessed of dark brown hair, and is certainly large and strong enough to be able to do the deed. And Lady Thistle wouldn’t think anything of it if she were in the back room and came up from behind her.” I didn’t like the idea—Magpie had always seemed harmless as well as rather dim. But it was possible, and I knew better than to reject any possibility. “Shall we turn her over now?”

  I allowed Grayling to do so, noting the gentle reverence of his large, freckled hands against the fragile bones of the elderly woman. Something stung the corner of my eye, and I realized this death was affecting me more than any of the others I’d come upon.

  Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that visiting Lady Thistle’s boutique was one of the few memories and connections I had of my mother—and that now I’d never have the opportunity to ask the shopkeeper for any more stories or memories about Mother.

  I privately snapped at myself to buck up. My maudlin thoughts were contributing nothing to the situation, and were, in fact, focused too much on the past tense. There was no reason to deduce my mother was actually dead.

  Though there was no reason to deduce otherwise, either.

  I wrenched my thoughts from that circular path and continued my observation and examination, with Inspector Grayling assisting.

  Unfortunately, there was little else to find on Lady Thistle’s person, although I’d hoped for more personal traces from her attacker besides a single strand of hair. Grayling made notes with a mechanical ink pen in his fancy copper-wired notebook. It had metal pages which could be written on, then erased.

  Grayling lifted the sagging knot of hair to expose the victim’s throat and shoulders. “The abrasions here, on the left side of her neck, are slightly darker and deeper.”

  “Naturally. The killer was left-handed, and thus pulled more strongly with that hand.”

  “Precisely. The markings don’t go all the way around her neck, so she—the murderer—didn’t pull the lace crisscross at the back.”

  “She simply came up behind Lady Thistle, holding each end of the lace, then slipped it down and over the front of her face and pulled back—and slightly upward.”

  “Correct. If Lady Thistle were sitting on her stool, as you have noted, then the height of the killer would be…” His eyes tracked as he did a mental calculation. “Approximately sixty-seven inches. One moment, and I’ll measure it for an exact number.”

  I pulled to my feet, using the wall to leverage against my corset’s restrictions. “The lace, please, Inspector. I’d like to ascertain whether it’s a stock she carries—er, carried—here.”

  Grayling obliged, and I went about the task, enlisting Evaline (who’d stopped wailing shortly after the inspector’s arrival) to assist in combing through all of the drawers and boxes of ribbons and other fripperies, feathers, and furbelows.

  By the time we’d finished—and discovered another length of the same lace—Grayling had covered the dead woman with a cloak he’d presumably taken from one of the displays.

  The front door opened, and this time, the newcomers were two men with a stretcher who’d come to take the body away.

  Soon after, the shop was deserted but for Evaline, Grayling, and myself.

  “Very well, then,” I said. “Thank you very much for your assistance, Inspector. I suppose we’d best be off—”

  “Not so fast, Miss Holmes,” Grayling said firmly.

  Evaline made a squeaky noise that sounded almost mirthful and darted off into the shadows.

  “What do you mean, Inspector?” I replied. I might have attempted to adopt the demeanor I’d seen Evaline do when she wanted to appear innocent, but when I widened my eyes, they began to water and dust motes flew into them, making it quite difficult to maintain that ingénue-ish expression.

  “Och now, Miss Holmes. You’re far too intelligent to think I’d believe your story of just happening to walk by the shop in the middle of the night with the door ajar. It’s quite fortunate for you that I’d anticipated this sort of circumstance and made arrangements to be called to the scene. Otherwise, Officer Dagwood would have certainly been within his rights to arrest you both for trespassing, breaking and entering, and, quite possibly, murder.”

  I sniffed and lifted my chin to look down at him—an impossibility due to his excessive height, but I made the attempt nonetheless. “It wouldn’t be the first time a Holmes had been falsely accused of villainy while in process of investigating a crime.”

  “I don’t even need to ask what you were doing here,” he went on, blithely ignoring my very salient point. “So let’s get on with it, shall we? I’d like a bit of sleep before I have to report in.”

  I pursed my lips. “Very well. The closet with the hidden door is this way. I don’t suppose you have a bigger illumination device in one of your pockets.”

  His only reply was
to beam a clear, long, steady stream of light beyond me and into the depths of the shop’s rear.

  The backroom was no more cluttered or disorganized than it had been previously. And as I was wearing slightly less complicated attire tonight, I managed to navigate my way to the closet with the double-C carving on it without knocking into or dragging anything along with me.

  Without comment, Grayling shined his light at the marking I’d noticed at the base of the closet door, then followed me inside the small space. I moved directly to the box marked “gemstones and feathers, misc.” and reached inside to release the latch to the secret door…

  But there was no latch. The box was not only actually filled with gemstones and feathers and miscellaneous, it was no longer attached to the shelf.

  “What on earth?” I stared at the box, which wore the same innocent look I’d attempted to don only moments before.

  “What is it, Miss Holmes?”

  “The lever to open the door. It’s gone.” I removed the box from its position, explaining, “Only two days ago, this box—or one exactly like it—was affixed to the shelf and was empty of everything other than a small lever that opened the door. As you can see, that is no longer the case.”

  I thrust the box at him and turned to examine the shelf where the box had been positioned. The latch had been on the platform beneath the bottomless box—but the shelf was smooth and unmarred from anything resembling a latch.

  “There’s nothing here. It’s gone.” I began to examine the stack of shelves—which only days earlier had slid away to reveal the secret door. It no longer was anything but what it appeared to be.

  “Someone killed Lady Thistle and removed—or, more precisely, blocked—the secret door,” I said, stepping back away from it.

  Grayling was standing…well, quite close to me in that small space, and as soon as I realized it, I momentarily felt my thoughts shimmer and threaten to evaporate. But it was only the flash of an instant before I recovered myself.

  “May I?” he asked in a voice that sounded more low and rumbly than usual. “Perhaps I can determine whether the door is still there, and only obscured by a recent alteration.”

  I insisted on removing everything from the shelves on the back of the closet, and we did so quickly and efficiently, with me handing him the boxes one by one, and Grayling setting them on the floor.

  He offered me the illuminator, and I beamed it around the area that had moved.

  “There’s no sign of a door,” I said, frustration tight in my voice.

  “May I?” he asked again, and this time I moved out of the way.

  To my surprise, he began to pry the shelves from the wall. When he’d finished, he felt around the edges of the bookshelf, the wall, and even the floor. At last, he made a satisfied sound, and then there was a sound of groaning wood and protesting metal as he pulled away the back wall of the closet. It took several moments of rough activity before everything fell away.

  “Your secret door,” he said, not at all out of breath due to his exertions—although he had paused to remove his overcoat, and then his jacket.

  “It’s not my secret door,” I said, moving to peer around him to see what had been revealed. “A brick wall? How…how extraordinary.”

  “Indeed. Someone,” he said, brushing a hank of thick hair from off his forehead, “did not want anyone to come through here any longer.”

  I pushed past him, brandishing the illuminator. “The mortar is fresh. Barely set. Within a day or so.”

  “As I said, someone did not want anyone—most likely you, Miss Holmes—traversing through this route to The Carnelian Crow.”

  Drat.

  “We could break through the brick wall—”

  “We?” he said with a quirked eyebrow. “I hardly agree with your choice of pronoun, Miss Holmes. Aside from that, I’ve already done enough damage to private property this evening. I’m not inclined to break any more laws—at least at this point in time.”

  For obvious reasons, I declined to point out that he hadn’t actually broken any laws prior to tearing away the false back wall of the closet.

  “Someone does not want The Carnelian Crow to be easily discovered. Which, of course, means,” he said, taking me firmly by the elbow to direct me from the dismantled closet, “you will not rest until you do.”

  “I hardly—”

  “Miss Holmes,” he said, “the sun is not long from rising, and I do believe it’s time for all of us to return to our homes. I would offer to give you a ride on my steamcycle, but I expect you’d prefer any other mode of transport.”

  I closed my mouth. I might have agreed to climb onto the rear seat and cling to him from behind as we tore through the streets, but since he’d taken on that sort of attitude, I certainly wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of commenting.

  Infuriating man.

  And so I made no argument, moving toward the front of the shop, where Evaline had occupied herself by modeling several hats that had fallen from the display when I became entangled in it earlier. I was rather surprised she hadn’t been in the thick of the action when Grayling was tearing walls away and pulling nails from their moorings, but I can’t claim to understand my colleague’s decisions. Most of the time, she leaves me baffled by her impulsiveness.

  She gave me an odd look, rolling her eyes and making them do all sorts of strange calisthenics—she appeared to be having a seizure—then huffed out a breath and shook her head. “For someone so brainy,” she muttered, “you can be oblivious.”

  Grayling assisted us to find a hackney—not a simple prospect at nearly four o’clock in the morning—and bundled us inside. I was mildly surprised Evaline didn’t argue or decline the ride in favor of patrolling the streets for UnDead—or Pix.

  I, for one, was quite tired, and declined to speak during our ride home, preferring to restrict my activity to reviewing everything that had happened tonight.

  It wasn’t until I arrived home after dropping off Evaline (so I could pay the taxi fare, of course) that it occurred to me how almost pleasant my interactions had been with Inspector Grayling.

  We’d examined and studied the crime scene without antagonizing each other, trading theories and observations with more camaraderie than my uncle ever did with someone from Scotland Yard.

  It also occurred to me that not once during the entire evening had Grayling commented about my penchant for attracting dead bodies.

  Fascinating.

  Miss Stoker

  ~ In Which Our Heroine is Carried Wildly Downstream ~

  Friday, the morning after Mina and I found Lady Thistle’s body, I was awakened just before noon when Pepper bustled in. She carried a tray with breakfast—a signal from Florence that it was past time for me to rise and face the day, as she put it.

  I hated it when she said that. “Face the day.” It was too chipper and too sunny, and worse yet, I knew that Florence’s idea of “facing the day” was more like “meet more men who could be your husband.”

  I groaned and rolled over, burying my face in the pillow. Couldn’t I just stay in bed? For about five years?

  Not only was I not at all interested in “facing the day,” but I also realized, as I had every morning for the last two months, that yet another night had gone by without hearing from Pix.

  The deeply buried hope that he might sneak into my bedchamber—as he’d done in the past—was squashed every single morning when I opened my eyes and realized it hadn’t happened.

  “Mrs. Stoker says you ’ave a busy schedule today,” said Pepper, giving me a sympathetic look as I lifted my head. She was aware of my vampire-hunter calling, and had been a great help in outfitting me. She’d also helped hide my true purpose from Florence. My maid’s wild, pale carrot-colored hair poked out in frizzy tendrils from the edges of her cap and her brown eyes were sober as she continued, “She’s going to be up in thirty minutes, and ’as a ’ole stack of inv’tations.”

  I groaned again, louder and more vi
olently into the pillow. Unfortunately, I inhaled a feather afterward, and that had me sneezing loudly for a few minutes.

  “What am I going to do?” I wailed softly. Though I didn’t really expect a response from my maid—after all, what could she do?

  Nor could she fully understand what it was like to have one’s main purpose in life limited to being married. Yes, she worked as a maid, doing considerable manual labor serving the more comfortable upper class, but at least she could decide whether she wanted to find a husband or not. And at least she could look for a new position with a different household if she chose.

  Freedom, I was coming to realize, was more important than wealth and status.

  With all of this on my mind, I was grumpy all through my morning bath. Pepper seemed to realize I wasn’t in the mood for her normal chatter—which often included gossip about her friends who worked “downstairs” for other Society households.

  (Why they called them “downstairs” people was always confusing to me, as most servants I knew had sleeping quarters in the uppermost levels of the households where they lived and worked. I suppose the term came because though they lived in the attic, their main work area was in the lower levels of the large houses—the kitchens and stables and pantries, which were on the ground or cellar floors.)

  Pepper also liked to go on about ideas for how to better hide the tools of my trade (mainly stakes) in my clothing.

  I sat at my dressing table as she did my hair, braiding it in a long plait, then twisting it into a figure-eight-shaped coil. Pepper was an expert at jamming in the hairpins to keep my heavy coiffure in place without them digging too painfully into my scalp.

  At any rate, Florence was due in at any moment, and my mood was growing more and more dour. Maybe that was how it happened—maybe I was rubbing off on Pepper, sharing my glumness with her. It doesn’t matter how or why my normally very efficient maid managed to knock over my entire jewelry case. But she did. It dumped to the floor, spilling necklets, chokers, earbobs, rings, and other items in a tangled, glittering mess.

  We were both on the floor, scrabbling about to pick everything up, when Florence knocked and then came sweeping in.