But no one had bound the smith—so where had the bruises come from?
Tal stared at the body for some time, trying to puzzle it out, before dropping the sheet and giving up. There was no saying that the smith had not had those bruises before the girl ever showed up at his forge. And in a man as big and powerful as this one was, no one would have wanted to ask him where they had come from if he himself wasn't forthcoming about it.
Some people have odd tastes. . . .
Andthat could have been what brought the girl to his business today. If she was a girl he'd picked up last night, no one would be aware that he knew her. And if she thought she could get a little extra business—or hush-money—out of him . . .
He grimaced as he walked back towards the door. All this way—and this could very easily be a perfectly ordinary killing, if murder could ever be called "ordinary." The girl ventured out into filthy weather because she needed money and he was the nearest source of it. And perhaps she threatened him in some way, hoping to get that money, or wouldn't go when he ordered her out, and he snapped.
But as he put his hand on the door, he knew, suddenly, that this was just too pat an explanation, and it all depended on the very fragile supposition that the smith was a man with peculiar appetites. Just as he could not be sure that the bruises had not already been present when the girl came to the forge, he could not be sure that theywere.
Furthermore, that did not explain the strange suicide, nor the vanishing murder-weapon. Why would the man kill himself at all? The forge had been vacant at the time, but fully stoked; it would be more logical for the smith to throw the body on the flames and hope it incinerated before anyone looked in the furnace. The temperature required to smelt iron and steel was high enough to deal with one small human body. And why, with the variety of weapons and even poisons available in a forge, had he chosen the particularly excruciating death he had?
No, this was another of his mystery-crimes again; he had the "scent," and he knew it by now.
But for the moment, there was nothing more to be done about it except let it all brew in his mind. He stepped back out onto the icy street, and the sardonic thought crossed his mind that in weather like this, even murder came second to getting across the street without falling.
Weak sun shone out of a high sky full of even higher, wispy clouds, as it hastened across the sky towards the horizon. The only ice now was in the form of icicles hanging and dripping from most eaves; as if relenting a little for the battering the city had taken beneath the ice-storm, winter had worn a smiling face for the last few days.
And it was Tal's day off; with all of his leads gone cold, he was pursuing his private time, for once, in a little ordinary shopping. He needed new shirts, preferably warm—and having no vanity and not a great deal to spend, he was looking through the bins in one of the better secondhand clothing stalls. Although it was late for shopping in the "better" part of town, in the district where Tal lived, full of folk who had to work during most of the daylight hours, street-vendors and shopkeepers accommodated working folk by opening late and staying open past sunset.
"Tal!" A vaguely familiar voice hailed him from across the street, and he looked up. From beneath the overhanging eaves of the building directly opposite, Constable Kaelef Harden beckoned slightly.
The shirts he'd found so far weren't all that good a bargain, and there didn't seem to be anything better hidden in the deeper layers of the bin, so he dropped them back and made his way across the street to his colleague.
"Brock says you're collecting the murder-suicide, vanishing-knife cases," Harden said without any preamble whatsoever, and his voice seemed strained to Tal. "I had one first thing this morning, he said to come tell you about it. Little street-beggar girl got snuffed by a trash-collector, then he threw himself under the wheels of a carriage. Weird. Very weird."
"In broad daylight?" Tal asked, surprised. "Witnesses?"
Harden nodded. "Me, for one. Isaw it, or most of it, anyway, and I couldn't stop it, it all happened so fast."
Now his voice had a tremor in it that Tal didn't like. He took a second look at Harden, who was one of the younger constables, less than a year on the job. Harden was white beneath his weather-tanned skin, and visibly shaken. Tal put a steadying hand on the man's arm, and Harden made no move to shake him off.
Hell. Poor lad's in shock. And he doesn't recognize it, because it doesn't occur to him that a constable could or would have any such weaknesses.
"Are you on duty now?" he asked.
Harden shook his head. "Just got off, and Brock was just coming on; he made a point of saying I should come talk to you, since Rayburn just threw the report in a drawer and didn't even glance at it. I checked at the Gray Rose and they told me where you'd gone."
Huh. Brock probably wants me to talk him through this one, and that's why he sent the lad to me, whether or not this case fits my pattern. It's an excuse to get him to a veteran. Still, Harden was a good man, and it was pretty obvious that Rayburn wasn't going to do his duty by the lad. The Captain was supposed to help a new man through things like this, but Rayburn—
Rayburn is too busy kissing feet to take care of his men, and that's the end of it.
"Come on back to the Rose," he replied. "We'll get something to eat, and you can tell me about it there."
"Not—I'm not really hungry," Harden said, his lips white, but he didn't pull away when Tal took his elbow and steered him back to the inn that was his home. There were never really crowds in this part of town, and a constable's cape always made traffic part as if there were flunkies clearing the way. Two constables together—even if one was out of uniform—prompted people to choose the other side of the street to walk on. It wasn't long before they paused under a wooden sign boasting a rose that might once have been red, but which had long since faded to a pale pinkish-gray.
The Gray Rose—which may once have been known as The Red Rose, when its sign was in better repair—was a modest little inn in a shabby-genteel part of town, and encouraged long-term residents in the dozen two-room "suites" in the third story. These were right above the single rooms normally let out by the night. For a price just a little more than he might expect to pay for private lodgings and food, Tal got the benefits of living in an inn—meals he didn't have to prepare himself, and servants cleaning up after him—and none of the disadvantages of living in a boardinghouse, where he might have had similar benefit. Granted, the menu never varied—a fact which he tried to look upon as "being reliable"—and the rooms were tiny compared to a lodging, but he had privacy that he wouldn't have gotten in a boarding-house, he didn't have to tailor his hours to the preferences of a boarding-house keeper, he could bring home whatever visitors he cared to whenever he wanted, and he never had to come home to unswept floors and an unmade bed. During the day, the inn was quiet—all the really noisy activity associated with carousers and private parties in the rooms below his took place while he was on-shift. The girls cleaned his rooms as soon as he left them in the early evening, just before the evening rush and after cleaning everyone else's rooms. For their part, the proprietors appreciated having a constable in residence; that fact alone ensured that although things might get noisy, they never got past the stage of a generally happy ruckus. And knowing that there was a constable living here kept thieves from eventhinking about trying their luck under the tiled roof.