by Morgan Rice
Right then, Kaia didn’t care about those looks; she just needed to find Pinsley and tell him everything that had just happened.
“Where is the inspector?” Kaia asked the sergeant on duty at the desk.
“He’s gone up to his office, miss.”
Kaia knew the way, and didn’t wait for the sergeant’s permission before she headed up the stairs off to one side and went looking for Pinsley. There was no time to waste, with any of this. She went to his office and knocked on the door out of habit, but didn’t wait for an answer before she rushed inside.
The office within was largely blank, white painted, with a desk, a cabinet and a few shelves. Inspector Sebastian Pinsley was currently sitting at the desk, writing with a fountain pen.
He was in his forties, tall and slender, clean shaven aside from mutton chop sideburns, with features that seemed to settle naturally into a stern expression and movements that echoed the military precision of his time as a soldier, so that it was all too easy to forget that a good, kind man lay beneath them. Unlike the other police there, he wore dark street clothes, with a waistcoat, long overcoat, and somewhat blood-stained shirt. His eyes took Kaia in as she entered, and she knew that he would see everything about her in that moment. She’d seen the way he observed things, so her distress at what had just happened should be obvious.
“Kaia?” he said, standing. “What is it? Did something happen when you talked to the killer? I knew I should never have allowed it. Are you all right?”
“I think…” Kaia tried to work out what to say, and how to say it. “I think we need to go to France.”
She saw Pinsley’s eyes widen at that, saw his mouth open slightly in shock. “Kaia, what are you talking about?”
“We need to go to France, to Paris,” Kaia insisted. “Xander explained it.”
“Xander, the madman who murdered Tabitha Greene?” Pinsley walked around his desk, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Kaia, the man is quite deranged. Whatever he told you-”
“He said that the shadows are gathering in Paris,” Kaia said. She had to make him understand the importance of this. “They’re plotting something big there.”
“The shadows,” Pinsley said, in a tone that was obviously designed to be careful and non-judgmental. Combined with the hand on Kaia’s shoulder, it simply felt patronizing.
“The shadows that I can see,” Kaia said. “Following one is how I led you to the chapel. One possessed Xander, making him kill Tabitha, and then making him attack you. He said that I was something called a Shadowseer. He said he knew my family.”
“Kaia, he is a madman,” the inspector said, “you cannot trust what this man says. He probably doesn’t know half of what he’s saying.”
“It’s real,” Kaia insisted. “It’s true. I know it.”
“You want to believe it,” Pinsley said. “That isn’t the same thing. But a world full of shadows that can somehow control people makes no sense.”
“Then how do you explain the things I’ve done?” Kaia asked. She knew that she had to find some logic that he couldn’t escape, or he would never believe her. Kaia found that she needed him to believe her. He’d done so much for her already, but he had to see her as she was, as a Shadowseer.
“Finding the chapel was remarkable,” Pinsley said, “but there will be a rational explanation for it if we look hard enough.”
“It’s not just that and you know it,” Kaia said. “I threw off Xander and forced the shadow out of him.”
“I don’t know what happened while I was unconscious,” Pinsley said.
“You saw me throw aside two police officers,” Kaia pointed out, thinking of the moment when they’d tried to arrest her.
“Just because I have seen things I can’t explain, that doesn’t mean that I must latch onto a madman’s explanation for it,” Pinsley said. He went back to his desk. “Kaia, the matter is done. The murderer has been apprehended, thanks to you. I’m writing up my notes on the case now, and I assure you that there will be no mention of shadows possessing people or magical powers.”
“Then you’re not seeing what’s really there,” Kaia said. She knew that she shouldn’t be speaking to the inspector like this. By the standards of polite society, this was far too forward. But then, Kaia wasn’t a member of polite society. It wasn’t like she was ever going to go to the palace to meet Queen Victoria, or be invited to tea at the Reform Club.
Besides, she needed to do this.
“If we don’t go to France, something bad will happen,” Kaia said.
“Plenty of bad things have already happened in France, and Paris in particular,” the inspector countered. “It has only been a few weeks since a would-be assassin of the Emperor there killed more than a hundred and fifty people with his bombs. Before that… well, over the last sixty years it has seen an endless cycle of violence, from its Revolution onwards. I suspect that your man Xander plans to point to some random story in the broadsheets and say ‘there, I told you so, let me go.’ It’s what these people do, Kaia.”
“These people?” Kaia said.
“Madmen and charlatans,” Pinsley replied.
“And do you think I’m a charlatan?” Kaia said. “Do you think I’m lying when I tell you that I see shadows?”
She wasn’t sure that she could stand it if he said yes. Pinsley was one of the few people who had been kind to her in her whole life. Even the others, Reverend Faulkner and his sister Lottie, had only come into her life because of the inspector. If he thought that she was a fraud… no, she wouldn’t be able to stand it, she was sure.
“I think that you are certain of what you see,” Pinsley said, and it sounded to Kaia as if he was choosing his words very carefully indeed. “And it is undeniable that you have been right about certain things, but I think that I have not seen the same shadows as you, at times when you have said that you can see them.”
That didn’t hurt quite as much as if he’d called her a liar, but it still hurt.
“Well,” Kaia asked, “what do you think is happening?”
“I don’t know,” Pinsley said. “Perhaps you simply have good intuition, or perhaps you are observing things well and your mind is presenting you with answers without being able to explain the process by which it has done so.”
“Then my ‘intuition’ is telling me that we need to go to Paris,” Kaia shot back, hoping to trap Pinsley in his own logic.
“Kaia, do you even understand what would be involved in going there as things stand now?” Pinsley asked her. He gestured for her to sit, and Kaia did so reluctantly. The chairs in his office were so uncomfortable that standing might have been better.
She watched as Pinsley took a book from one of the shelves there, opening it up to reveal a series of maps stamped with the symbol of the Ordnance Survey. Kaia recognized Britain from the map of the Empire that had been used to teach geography in the orphanage, learning the principal exports and key features of Britain’s main colonies.
“Just to get to France, we would need to travel to Dover, here,” Pinsley said, jabbing a finger at the map, “a journey of some seventy miles. From Dover, we would need to take a boat over to the French port of Calais, another thirty miles as the crow flies across the English Channel. That is before the journey to Paris, which would be a journey of another…” he paused, measuring. “Nearly two hundred miles.”
“That’s just distance!” Kaia said, even though the distances involved seemed huge. Two hundred miles was as far away as York or Harrogate, the kind of near mythical, far off places that had only existed in Mrs. Garrow’s stories of her cousin going off to take the waters for her health. “We could… we could take trains, or ride in carriages!”
“You hadn’t done either until a day or two ago,” Pinsley pointed out. “Besides, there would be other problems that have nothing to do with distance.”
“Such as?” Kaia asked.
“J'imagine que vous ne parles pas français?” Pinsley said.
Kaia
could only stare at him blankly.
“I imagine that you do not speak French,” Pinsley translated. “Then there is the rather serious matter that the English are not currently welcome in Napoleon III’s France. Some of the plotters who assisted Signore Orsini in his attempt on the Emperor’s life were English, and there is much ill feeling as a result. The government itself is on the verge of collapsing over the whole affair, and I am sure that no one on either side would allow a police inspector to simply start wandering around Paris.”
Kaia wasn’t sure what to say in response to all that. She wasn’t stupid; she’d heard what the broadsheet criers had been shouting about the government being on the verge of falling over the whole assassination business. She hadn’t imagined that any of this would be easy. It was simply that it was worth doing anyway.
She had a sister.
It wasn’t the only reason that Kaia desperately wanted to go to France. She’d wanted to even when Xander had been talking about the danger that the shadows posed, but when he’d said that she had a sister… that had clinched it. Kaia needed to go now. She had to find the one fragment of family that she might have remaining.
She still needed to persuade the inspector, though. “I thought that police inspectors didn’t leave cases unfinished?”
Pinsley looked at her sharply. “This is finished, Kaia. The killer is caught. The business is concluded.”
“Xander was being driven by a force more dangerous than any human killer,” Kaia said. “And I’ve felt how much it hates people, especially people like me, and like my sister, if she is anything like me. If we don’t stop it, it will kill more people. It won’t stop killing until it gets everything that it wants. Xander is locked up, but the thing truly responsible for Tabitha Greene’s death is still out there.”
“Enough,” Pinsley said, shutting the book of maps firmly. “I shouldn’t have indulged this even this far. This matter is finished, Kaia. We have caught the murderer, and that is an end to it. No, I’m sorry, but I will not hear another word on it.”
“But-”
“I’m serious, Kaia,” he said. “Talking about this not being done risks undermining all the work we did just to catch this madman. And all this talk of France… it is simply impossible.”
Kaia stared at him, hurt by that. She’d thought that Pinsley would understand, that he would listen, and he had in his way. He hadn’t been able to go far enough, though. His precious reason was like a wall keeping him away from all of this.
“Look,” he said. “I know you feel strongly about this right now, but why don’t you return to the vicarage and get some rest? You’ve earned it. You caught a killer tonight, and that is more than enough, without bringing all this business of France into it. I’ll have one of the constables hail a cab around. Here’s a shilling for the fare. We will speak again later today.”
“I…” Kaia considered continuing to argue, but snatched up the shilling instead.
She went outside, waiting for a carriage to come around to the front of Scotland Yard. As she did so, though, Kaia couldn’t escape the certainty that she had to go to Paris, whatever the inspector said.
That meant that she would either have to change the inspector’s mind, which didn’t seem likely now, or…
Or do this herself.
CHAPTER THREE
Inspector Pinsley sat there in his office for several minutes after Kaia left, trying to make himself get back to the business of writing a report on the case that the two of them had just solved.
He found that he couldn’t, though, and his pen hung poised above the paper, perfectly still while his thoughts refused to settle. He sat there so long that a single drop of ink fell down onto the paper, forcing Pinsley to reach for his blotter to stop it spreading.
Kaia’s words felt a little like that spreading patch of ink, flowing out within him, unsettling him and making Pinsley doubt, in spite of himself. She’d spoken as if it were obvious that there was more to this, and that they should simply go to Paris to chase after ghosts, or shadows, or whatever unlikely thing she thought of next.
Pinsley had been a little harsher in sending her home than he’d intended. It was just that he couldn’t live in a world where the careful underpinnings of logic were undone by… what? Whim? The impossible things a girl of seventeen claimed to see when no one else did?
That was what it amounted to: picking apart an entire murder investigation on no more than Kaia’s word. Potentially travelling to France, now of all times, simply because she said that they should. Put like that, it had been obvious that they shouldn’t do it, and that Pinsley should act to shut down this nonsense. A world where reason did not hold sway was a world that threatened to fall into madness.
Even so, the doubt continued to spread, like the patch of ink that was even now escaping the best efforts of his blotter. There shouldn’t have been such doubts, because they had a suspect in custody who was only too willing to confess to his crimes, but still, they ate at the inspector.
There couldn’t be aspects of this that were beyond what anyone could hope to explain, because that wasn’t how the world worked. They were in the most advanced city in the world, at a moment when further advances were starting to take place in medicine, science, engineering and more. Mr Brunel’s great iron works, from bridges to boats, were a testament to the kind of world this was, solid and real, constructed on sound principles. This was not a world for shadows, and feelings, and the rest.
Unfortunately, a feeling of his own was starting to batter against the edifice of Pinsley’s reason, insisting that there were still things about all of this that made no sense. It seemed indisputable that the man in the cells, Xander, had committed the murder, yet his reasons for doing so still seemed unclear to Pinsley. More than that, even if he didn’t share Kaia’s credence when it came to shadows and the like, he’d seen her send policemen flying in a way he couldn’t explain. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to all of this than met the eye.
“The world is not about feelings,” Pinsley said. “And sometimes, men’s reasons for killing make no sense.”
He knew that as well as anyone. The madman who had murdered his wife had needed no reason that made sense to other men. That had torn a hole through his life, driven away his daughter Olivia, and for what? Madmen caused chaos, and yet Kaia seemed determined that this one had something of value to say.
Pinsley set down his pen and took out the metronome that he used when trying to think through the details of a case without emotions becomin too distracting. He set it in motion now, the soft, repetitive ticking of it dividing the world into orderly slices.
In spite of it, though, Pinsley couldn’t shake the feeling that things were still disordered. He tried to resolve the conflicts of this case, from the way Kaia had found the killer in the end to the contrast between the skill it must have taken to break into Bedlam and the savagery of the attack there. None of it quite fit, and this latest business, this talk of trouble in France, fit even less well.
Pinsley didn’t want Kaia being taken in by the words of some manipulative killer. After all she’d been through…
“She is not your daughter,” Pinsley reminded himself aloud. “She is not Olivia.”
Even so, Pinsley felt the strong, almost unshakeable, urge to protect Kaia. Maybe it was just knowing what she’d been through, or maybe it was all the ways she’d helped him so far, but maybe a part of it was the similarity to his daughter, out there somewhere alone without her father to aid her.
Pinsley made a decision then to at least talk to the killer. Perhaps he would be able to convince him to admit that all of this was nonsense, or perhaps he would reveal something to make all the strangeness of the situation fit together properly. Either way, Pinsley rose and headed downstairs.
The duty sergeant opened the way for him as he walked to the cells.
“I wish to speak to the prisoner I brought in, Sergeant,” Pinsley said. “It shouldn’t take long
.”
“Very good, sir,” the sergeant replied. “Just the cell along the way.”
Pinsley nodded and made his way down towards the cell the sergeant had indicated, moving past cells that held prisoners brought in for a wide variety of crimes. Most of them were asleep, although a few looked as if they couldn’t, probably dreading what would happen when they were brought before the magistrates.
Pinsley got halfway to the cell before he realized that something was wrong.
As soon as he saw that things weren’t as they should be, he ran for the cell, and stood in front of it, staring at the scene within in horror. Through the bars, he could see the body hanging there in the cell, swinging back and forth as if from a gallows at Tyburn.
Xander hung there, and his corpse seemed to stare out with accusing eyes at Pinsley.
“Sergeant!” Pinsley yelled, and the urgency of that shout must have cut through, because the sergeant came running on booted feet.
Pinsley had seen death before, in far too many forms. He’d seen men killed on the battlefield in Crimea and dying of cold or disease in the military encampments without ever firing a shot. He’d seen people murdered in the worst ways, including his own wife. He’d even seen people hanged before, for the crimes they had committed.
None of it made the moment any better.
Pinsley saw the sergeant fumbling with his keys, struggling to open the door, but Pinsley could only stand there, staring. He could tell from here that Xander was dead, but even so he went in with the sergeant and helped to cut him down.
The killer had hanged himself with his own belt, using the bars of the window to do it.
“I suppose it saves the hangman a job,” the sergeant said.
