Andwho was the killer?
Chapter Three
The next murder got the attention of the entire city; it was a nine-day wonder that kept the taverns a-buzz for long enough that even Tal got tired of it.
But this time, like some strange disease that strikes three homes in a row, then suddenly occurs halfway across the city, this crime happened so far outside of Tal's district he would never have heard of it, if the circumstances hadn't been so bizarre. Whoever, whatever was behind all this, "he" had moved his area of operation from the waterfront side of the city to the tenement district farthest inland.
Once again, the poverty of the murderer and victim should have relegated the incident to a mere item in a few records. Tal heard about it over his morning meal in the common-room of the Gray Rose, and his first, cynical thought was that if the deaths themselves had not been so outrageous, the entire package of murder and suicide would have been put down as a sordid little sex-crime.
Even so, the details were so unbelievable that he was certain they were exaggerated. It was only when he reached the station that he learned that if anything, the public rumors were less horrific than the truth.
And that was enough to send cold chills over him.
When he heard the official report for himself, he had one of the oddest feelings he had ever experienced in his long career as a constable. Part of him was horrified, part sickened—and part of him knew a certain sense of self-righteous pleasure. He knew what it was, of course. Hadn't he beensaying something like this was going to happen? Well, now it had, and he had told them so. It was a base emotion, but—maybe it was justified.
As Tal read the report, though, he found it very difficult to keep his detachment. A jewel-crafter (too unskilled to be called a full Jeweler) named Pym, who made inexpensive copper, brass, and silver-plated trinkets, was the perpetrator. A Gypsy-wench called Gannet was the victim. And what had happened to the poor whore at the hands of the smith palled by comparison with what happened to the Gypsy.
Gannet showed up at Pym's workshop just before he closed, with a handful of trinkets she wanted him to purchase. That much was clear enough from a neighbor, who had probably been the last one to see either of them alive. The neighbor had been loitering about the area in front of Pym's shop and her own; other neighbors said she had "an interest" in Pym, and what they probably meant was that she had her mind set on inveigling him into marrying her. The neighbor was not pleased to see a younger woman show up at the shop, and drew close enough to hear the ensuing conversation. The Gypsy insisted that someone had sent her to Pym specifically to sell her goods, and although the jeweler seldom made such purchases, tonight he waved the wench into his shop and shut and locked the door behind her. That had been so unlike Pym that the neighbor suspected something illegal (or so she told the constables) and set herself to watch Pym's door.
Right, Tal snorted to himself, as he read that particular bit of nonsense. More like, she suspected Pym of a bit of funny-business with a skirt, and was nosy and jealous enough to wait around for details.
But the Gypsy didn't come out, although there were lights and shadows moving about in the back of Pym's workshop all night long. And in the morning, the neighbor, whose imagination had been running at high speed ever since the girl showed up, knocked insistently on the door on the excuse that she had smelled something burning. Then she called the constables when Pym didn't appear to open his shop or answer the door.
The constables, unable to rouse anyone, broke the door down. There was no one in the front of the shop, nor in the rooms above, but what met them when they opened the door to the workshop sent one of them running to empty his stomach in the gutter, and the other to rouse the entire station to come and cope with the scene.
What was left of Pym lay on the floor in a posture of agony at the foot of his workbench. The girl lay spread-eagled on the top of his biggest workbench, also dead. Pym had used the entire contents of his workshop to make a strange display-piece out of the girl, beginning by clamping wrists and ankles down to the table, filling her mouth with wax, then setting to work with copper wire, semiprecious stones, and most of his tools. She was quite chastely covered in a garment of wire and gems, all of it laced through her muscles and skin, and riveted to her bones to anchor it in place. Her eyes were wired open, her head covered with a wig of fine wire riveted to her head. The pain must have been excruciating, and because the wounds were so small, she wouldn't even have lost consciousness because of blood-loss. The knife he had plunged into her breast must have come as a relief.
Now the detachment Tal had been looking for finally came, and with it, that odd ability to analyze even the worst information. If she'd lived, she would have been crippled for life. The amount of nerve-damage he must have done would have been impossible to repair, let alone whatever he did to her brain by spiking that wig into her skull.
But she was not to be alone in her suffering, for Pym finished his night by drinking every drop of acid and poisonous chemicals in his shop. It was the horrified judgment of the Healer-Priest brought in to decide on the cause of death that Pym probably lived about as long as his victim before he died.
Once again, the girl had been murdered with a knife with a triangular blade, and once again, the knife was missing. Theofficial version was that Pym had stabbed her with one of his files, but none of the files had even a trace of blood on them—in fact, the files were the only tools Pymhadn't used to make his "display."
Tal would have given five years of his life to see Pym's body, but unfortunately, the acid he had drunk had rendered it unfit even to be placed in the morgue. Or, as one of the constables with a mordant sense of humor said, "The only way to put him in the ground was to scoop him up in buckets and pour him in."
But I wish I knew if he had the same bruises as the others I've seen. . . .
The Gypsy-wench was buried the next day with all the pomp due a Guildmaster, a funeral that was paid for by donations. If she had any relatives, they were lost in the throng of spectators who came to gawk rather than mourn, searching for some sign of what had been done to her under the burial-gown of stiff snow-white silk that covered her from chin to toes. Tal didn't go, but Captain Rayburn made a prominent appearance.
The last murder took place right under Tal's nose.
He was making another attempt to find a decent set of shirts, because by now he needed more than one, and this time had gone much farther afield than his usual haunts. Lately, bargeloads of clothing came in at the southern end of the city on a semiregular basis, brought up out of places where a species of establishment called amanufactory was becoming common. There were manufactories in the High King's capital of Lyonarie, but only lately had anyone set them up along the Kanar River. Such establishments produced large quantities of simply-made garments in a limited range of sizes and colors, and shipped them off by water, since shipping them overland would have made them too expensive to compete with locally made garments. Tal was not certain that he would fit any of the sizes available, and he was more than a little dubious about the quality of such garments, but by now he was desperate enough to go look at them when word came that another shipment had arrived.