by Morgan Rice
“A man is still dead, Sergeant,” Pinsley said, feeling a moment of disappointment at this, and not just at the thought of a life being snuffed out here, like this. “A madman, and there’s every chance that he would have been locked away rather than hanged.”
“He’s still a killer,” the sergeant said. Pinsley heard him sigh. “The superintendent will have to be told.”
He made it sound like that was the worst part of all of this, rather than a man being dead.
“I’ll do it,” Pinsley said, although he wasn’t really concentrating as he said it. He was too busy thinking about how wrong this all felt. It felt as if he had been taken away just as he might have helped to finish things neatly, leaving Pinsley with the uncomfortable wrongness that had plagued him before.
Kaia had been right, something about this wasn’t right, and now the one man who could explain it all was dead.
Pinsley turned and walked from the cells, heading up into the station, among the desks and the wood paneled walls. His first thought was to find Kaia and talk to her about what had happened. She would want to know, and probably deserved to know, as well. Pinsley realized that he would have to ask her about her conversation with the prisoner too, because the superintendent would want to know if there had been any sign that Xander was about to take his own life.
Pinsley collected himself as he stepped out into the foyer of the police station. He had to be the police inspector in this moment, not the man who had just seen a prisoner dead in front of him.
“Two constables get down to the cells to help the sergeant,” Pinsley called out, and he’d clearly managed enough of a tone of authority, because a couple of blue coated constables ran to obey the instruction. “Another run to Dr Florian and tell him that there will need to be an autopsy.”
He looked around, hoping that Kaia might not have left yet, but it seemed like a forlorn hope.
“Is Kaia still here, or has a constable found a carriage to bring her home yet?” he asked.
“No carriage, sir,” a constable replied from one side of the room. “The young lady just walked out.”
“Just walked…” A sense of horror dawned over Pinsley, in a single cold certainty. He hoped that he was wrong, but he knew then that he wasn’t.
“And no one escorted her back to the vicarage?” Pinsley demanded.
“She just walked off, sir.”
It took Pinsley a moment to realize what that might mean. If Kaia were heading back to the vicarage, logically, she would have taken the carriage. Therefore, she wasn’t heading back to the vicarage. There was only one other place he could think of she might be trying to go, as preposterous as it seemed:
She was going to try to get to Paris alone.
In that instant, a part of Pinsley made him want to run straight out of Scotland Yard and head after her, but the worst part was that he couldn’t, not now, not with a man dead when Pinsley had just gone to visit him. His duty and the law both demanded that he at least tell Superintendent Hutton what was happening.
He could at least hurry, though, and give himself the best chance possible to catch up to Kaia. Pinsley all but ran up the stairs, barely managing to stop before he simply barged into the superintendent’s office. He forced himself to knock instead.
“Enter.”
Pinsley stepped inside, and found himself facing Superintendent Hutton, who sat at his desk wearing full uniform. He was rail thin and sharp featured, with thinning, dark hair. His expression turned into something sour as Pinsley rushed in.
“What now, Inspector?” he demanded.
“Sir, there has been a death,” Pinsley said. “A prisoner, the man I brought in earlier, has hanged himself.”
Hutton’s expression only became more sour. “Is there no end to this night? There will need to be questions asked now, and reports. I will need a full report from you, Pinsley.”
“Sir,” Pinsley said. Every moment he was here was a moment when he wasn’t going after Kaia. He knew her well enough by now to understand where she would be going. She had a level of determination that would have made most of the soldiers he’d known look indecisive. “I believe I need to leave. There is an urgent matter I need to attend to.”
“An urgent matter?” Hutton said, raising his voice. “What could be more urgent than a death in our custody?”
Pinsley wondered how he was going to manage to explain all of it to his superior. He realized, of course, that he couldn’t, not really. He couldn’t put Kaia’s feelings and instincts into terms Hutton would comprehend. Pinsley barely comprehended it all himself. Still, he did his best.
“I believe that there is another matter related to tonight’s case that must be addressed,” he said. “A matter that I have been told is most serious.”
The enormity of what it might mean if Xander and Kaia were right started to sink in for him. It would be a matter that could shake the world. At the very least, it would put Kaia in tremendous danger.
“Told?” Hutton said. “Told by whom? By the prisoner? By your famous skills of investigation? No, this simply will not do, Pinsley.”
“Then I must request leave, effective immediately,” Pinsley said, in his best talking to officers voice. He pulled aside his coat to reveal the bloodstain in a reminder of the wounds he had suffered fighting Xander. “I have been injured in the line of duty, and request time to recover from those injuries. Also, I believe it may be necessary to go to France.”
“To France?” Hutton said, sounding utterly incredulous. As stiff necked as the superintendent was, he seemed taken aback by this, at least. “What could there possibly be in France?”
“If I don’t hurry, a young woman who very much needs my aid,” Pinsley said. He was wasting too much time. He needed to catch up with Kaia before she did something foolhardy. He turned for the door. “I’m sorry, sir, I’m needed.”
“Do not walk away, Inspector!” Hutton said. “Not until you have adequately explained yourself!”
“That would take too long, sir,” Pinsley said. “And I only half understand it myself.”
“Pinsley, if you walk out of that door, do not expect there to be a job waiting for you when you deign to return!”
Pinsley was sure that Hutton meant every word of the threat. After all, the superintendent hated him. He would probably see all this as a glorious chance to be rid of Pinsley.
Pinsley walked out of the door, leaving Superintendent Hutton’s angry shouts echoing behind him as he headed downstairs. He grabbed his things from his office and started to run.
With Kaia, there was no telling how much danger she might get into if he didn’t catch up to her soon.
CHAPTER FOUR
How far would a shilling get her, Kaia wondered as she walked through the streets of London. She’d never really had money in the orphanage, which made it hard to judge how much it was worth now. Presumably it wasn’t enough for a trip all the way to France, but just how much of the way could she cover with it before she had to think of something else?
Walking this first part saved Kaia some of it. She walked back in the general direction of the vicarage, but only because it also happened to be in the same direction as Euston Station for this part of the walk. The first rays of morning light were starting to hit the streets around Kaia, although a February fog off the Thames meant that she could see almost as little as if it had still been full darkness. The gas of the street lamps still glowed with an eerie blue edge to their flames ahead, but they were slowly being extinguished, the snuffers going by their watches rather than the light.
It didn’t matter; Kaia would still find her way.
She suspected that a shilling would be more than enough for a train journey to Dover, but not nearly enough for the passage across to France. Probably, she would have to hide away on a boat, and that was a prospect that filled Kaia with worry, but she couldn’t see another way. She had to get to France.
It had to be her; no one else would understand the threat that
was still out there. The inspector had already proved that. Xander’s talk about the Shadowseers didn’t make her feel better, either, Kaia couldn’t just leave this to them, because she had no idea if they knew about the shadows’ plans or not.
That left her. She had to get to France. That it also meant that Kaia could try to find a sister she’d just learned of only made it more urgent.
She walked past small theatres and gin houses, and realized that she was probably in Soho. Even at this hour of the morning, there were places that noise seemed to spill out of as doors opened, suggesting that those within hadn’t bothered with anything as mundane as sleep. Kaia hadn’t slept either, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her. She had to do this now, before the inspector could talk her out of it, and because Kaia suspected that the shadows in Paris already had a good head start on her.
Around her, the signs on the shops didn’t make a lot of sense. Boulangerie? Pattiserie? It took Kaia a minute to remember her history: Soho was the part of London where French refugees had settled a hundred and fifty years ago. That worried her. If she couldn’t read that much French, what hope did she have in Paris, alone?
Kaia was still worrying about it when she almost stumbled into a group of young men, probably her age, in the fog. There were four or five of them, expensively dressed although their clothes were in some disarray.
“Careful, Hugo!” one said, even as he staggered into another of them.
“You be careful. We’re going the wrong way, you know. Matron will be furious.”
“Oh, who cares,” another of them said. “We got out of Eton for a reason.”
“The gin!” a couple of them chorused.
They were drunk, Kaia realized, and even as she realized it their eyes fell on her.
“Oh, hello,” one of the young men said, his eyes roving over Kaia in a way that made her start to take a step back. His hand caught her wrist, though, stopping her from stepping away into the fog. “No, don’t go. Not when we’ve got business for you.”
It took Kaia a moment to realize what they meant, and a mixture of disgust and terror rose up in her. She pulled back sharply from the young man’s grip.
“I’m not who you think I am,” she said. “I’m just on my way to the station.”
Another of the young men laughed at her. “A woman out alone at this hour? In Soho? There’s only one reason you’d be out here. So how much?”
“No, get away from me,” Kaia said, trying to pull away from them. She broke free, and turned to run, wanting to get away. She turned down a side street, hoping that it would be enough.
Instead, the young men behind her whooped like hunters taking off after a fox and set off in Kaia’s wake. Kaia ran, having to hitch up her skirts to do it, setting off through the filth of the London streets, hoping that if she got far enough away it would allow her to lose herself in the fog.
“Help!” she called out. “Someone help!”
Kaia wasn’t sure why she called out. Perhaps in one of the nicer areas of London, there might have been someone willing to help her, but here, no one cared. It was probably even better to be quieter, simply so that she would have a greater chance of slipping away silently in the fog.
She took turnings without thinking about it. It almost didn’t matter which way she went, just so long as she didn’t stay on one straight path. In spite of it all, though, Kaia could hear the sound of feet striking against the cobbles as the young men hunting her followed.
Even the hope that they might give up seemed forlorn now, because they’d turned the whole thing into a sick kind of game. Kaia’s only chance was to outrun them.
Then she ran up against the limits of a dead end, closed in on three sides by a tangle of old buildings that looked ready to fall down. Kaia looked around for any way out of there and saw a doorway that must lead into one of the buildings. It was locked. In terror, she hammered on it, but there was no reply. Even if there was someone in there, they didn’t want any part of this.
“Nowhere left to go,” one of the young men said, as Kaia turned at bay.
They spread out in a half circle around her, and Kaia knew that there was nothing she could do now, nothing she could say, that would stop them from attacking her.
*
“Help!”
Pinsley had almost given up hopes of finding Kaia when he heard her call out. It had been obvious which general way she would go, but the specifics of it were always going to be difficult, even for him. That she would head for a train station seemed obvious: it was what she’d done when she’d run before, and it was her best chance of getting to the coast. That she would head north, to Euston, seemed just as obvious to his way of thinking. Kaia knew where the station was, even lived in the shadow of some of its lines.
That part had been easy enough to deduce, but finding one girl in the midst of the largest city in the world was much more difficult. He’d already proven the near impossibility of it when it came to his daughter.
Pinsley stopped short at that thought. Kaia was not the same as Olivia. He would not accept that the two situations were the same at all.
Yet, in a lot of ways, they were far closer than was comfortable. In both cases, he’d driven them away, dismissed their feelings and what they wanted. In both cases, he’d been sure that there would be another chance to talk, and to make things right. Olivia had walked away, disappeared without a trace. Now, there was too much of a risk that Kaia might do the same.
“Help me!” Kaia called out, and Pinsley started to run through the London streets.
It was always hard to pin down the direction of sounds in fog, but he did his best, running through the streets of Soho, ignoring the revelers only just pouring into the streets after their nights of entertainment. His attention was only on catching up to Kaia before whatever danger she was in caught up with her.
Pinsley strained his senses. There were no more cries for help, but somewhere ahead, he could hear the sounds of young men shouting to one another.
“This way, chaps! Our fox has gone to ground!”
There could have been a hundred reasons why someone might shout that, but here, now, with Kaia calling for help, Pinsley felt certain that the two were connected. He felt just as certain that he was running out of time, and fear for Kaia propelled him forward.
He came out into an enclosed yard, where a group of five young men were surrounding Kaia. She looked terrified, and Pinsley swore to himself that if they’d laid a finger on her, they would feel the full force of the law. He took a step forward, reaching into his coat for his truncheon and warrant card.
“Now then,” he said, in his most officious tone. “What’s all this?”
A couple of the young men looked round.
“This has nothing to do with you,” one of them said.
Instantly, Pinsley started to reason out more about them from their manner and their style of dress. That they were drunk was no great feat of deduction. Since one of them had school colors protruding from a pocket made the next part barely more impressive.
“What is it lads?” Pinsley said. He wanted to wade into them and crack them round the head for what they were trying to do, but with five of them, that probably wouldn’t go well. “Up from Slough because the entertainment at Eton’s not up to your standards? Well, from the way some of you are staggering, I’d say you’ve had enough, and if you don’t hurry, you’ll never catch the train back in time for roll call.”
“This is none of your business,” the largest of the young men said, turning and puffing his chest out.
“This warrant card makes it my business, boy,” Pinsley said, letting his tone harden. “Now run along, before I arrest the lot of you.”
“Arrest us?” another of them slurred. “D’you know who my father is? Go away, or I’ll have your job.”
The big one seemed to take that as his cue to throw a punch, swinging one at Pinsley with more skill than some drunken youth should have had. But then, if they did
n’t teach boxing at the finest schools, how would the young men aiming to go on to run the Empire know how best to strike their subordinates.
Pinsley slipped aside from the punch just in time and countered with a truncheon blow to the gut. There was no time for niceness now, or for second chances. His only hope was to strike hard and fast, and pray that the sight of it cowed the rest of them. Bullies like this were usually cowards.
The young man he’d hit doubled up and fell back, but didn’t fall. He came back with another couple of punches, neither of which connected, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that his friends saw him continuing to attack, and they took that as their cue to pile in alongside him.
Suddenly, instead of fighting a single opponent, Pinsley was trying to take on five at once. It was like being back in the midst of battle again, where in a melee everything could turn into chaos, and even the best fighter could be brought low by an attack they simply didn’t see.
Still, Pinsley did his best to fight back. Unlike these young men, he’d been in life or death fights, and he knew what it took to survive them. He’d been in one only earlier tonight, against an opponent far more dangerous than any of these boys could be.
Pinsley struck out with his truncheon at another young man, aiming for the jaw now. He heard the crack of wood hitting bone, and the young man staggered back. Pinsley struck out again, with a fist this time, slamming it into a gut that was already too soft with easy living.
If it had just been two of them, that would have been that, but in that moment, a fist caught Pinsley above the eye, making him stagger. Another caught him with a rugger tackle, and Pinsley went down, with the five young men rearing up above him.
Pinsley had a moment of absolute fear then, because he knew with cold certainty how the next few moments would go: one of the boys would throw a kick, and then the others would join in because they wouldn’t want to be left out of it. Soon, Pinsley would be at the heart of a kicking, baying mob, and it would only take one of those blows to land to his head for the inspector to die.
