Chapter Nineteen

Well, look on the bright side,” I said, after the officer had slid shut our cell doors and clicked tight the locks. “At least we’re in jail.”

In the adjacent cell, my employer pushed back a handful of dark hair and raised an eyebrow in my direction. The processing officer had taken our personal effects, and Jackaby looked exceptionally frail in the barren cell without his silly hat and coat to hide in.

“True, we’ve been locked in here,” I continued. “But you could also say the murderer has been locked out there, which is something.”

It wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Jackaby and I had been stuck in separate holding cells, of course, but the enclosures ran along the wall, connected on either side, so I didn’t feel entirely alone. Aside from my employer and me, the lockup contained only one other inhabitant—a peacefully snoring drunk with cheery red suspenders who lay on the far side of Jackaby. Our cells faced not the drab cement slab I had envisioned, but instead a simple, carpeted walkway, bordered by a couple of desks with official-looking documents sorted neatly in trays. An officer sat at the nearest one, stamping papers with a satisfying thup-thup. In the corner was a small table with a few coffee mugs and a half-eaten cake with bright white frosting. Tacked on the wall above it was a handwritten Happy Birthday, Allan. I had heard of offices feeling like prisons, but in this case our prison felt, rather anticlimactically, like an office.

“I would rather be at home on this occasion,” said Jackaby.

“I’m just thankful the constables can’t go calling my parents to bail me out,” I said. “I don’t want to know what they would think if they could see me now.”

“Why should you mind what some old constable thinks of you?”

“Not the constables, my parents. I can’t imagine how all this would look to them.”

“Does it matter, considerably, what your parents think?”

“Well . . . of course it does. They’re my parents. How did your parents react when you started being—you know—you?”

Jackaby ran a finger along the thick bars of the cell, a scowl twisting his brow into a knot. “My home, unlike this jail cell, has been fortified against the sort of dangers presently at large in the city. I would feel far more secure within the premises of my own property on Augur Lane.”

“I saw you setting up ‘fortifications.’ I think bricks and steel might actually be a slightly more effective deterrent than a pinch of salt and powdered garlic. Besides, we don’t exactly make easy targets; we’re surrounded by police.”

“I suppose that’s fair, Miss Rook, and true enough,” answered Jackaby, “unless, as I am beginning to suspect, our villain wears a badge.”

I glanced at the officer on duty behind the desk. His little stamp continued to thup rhythmically. He was a portly, rosy-cheeked man with a walrus mustache, the bristles of which were smattered with white frosting. “Do you think that’s likely?” I asked.

“It is a decided possibility.”

My mind flashed back to the crime scene. “The door,” I said. “Charlie said he’d had to kick it in.”

“Hmm? Yes, that’s right. He also reasoned, logically, that the murderer must have entered and escaped through the window.”

“Then whose claws raked into Henderson’s door?” I asked.

“Ah.” Jackaby leaned his back on the bars and watched the drunkard snoring for a few moments. “You noticed that, did you?”

“The thing was in poor shape, all splintered and cracked. It had clearly been forced open, as he said, but footprints are footprints and paw prints are paw prints. I know you spotted them, too.”

“Indeed. I managed to collect a few small hairs, as well, but until I have my coat back, and can return to my laboratory to test them, they might as well be turnips, for all they’ll tell us.”

“But why would Charlie lie?” I asked, lowering my voice as a door opened on the far side of the office. Inspector Marlowe came in, trailing a pair of uniforms. “It doesn’t make sense—he’s been the most helpful of the lot! What’s he hiding?”

“That is an excellent question,” said Jackaby. “It seems the detective has a few secrets.”

“Funny,” said the chief inspector, from the doorway, “that’s precisely what I was thinking about you. Maybe you really can read minds, or whatever it is you do.” He drew to a stop in front of Jackaby’s cell.

“Ah, Marlowe,” answered Jackaby, “so good of you to join us. I’d offer you refreshments, but I’m afraid we’re all out in here.”

“There’s cake in the corner,” I offered, helpfully.

“Good, yes. There does appear to be cake, as my young associate observes, in the corner.”

“Enough, both of you,” Marlowe snapped. “I have tolerated your lunatic claims and your blatant disregard for authority. I will not tolerate withholding evidence in the middle of a homicide investigation.”

“We’ve done nothing of the sort,” said Jackaby, a bit haughtily. “You’ve done the withholding. You’ve got my tuning fork—which, I remind you, I would like back. We have withheld nothing.”

“Oh, no?” The inspector held out a hand, and one of the uniformed men shuffled forward to hand him a folded paper. Marlowe opened it slowly. “Then I suppose this map, found in your office on Augur Lane, is not drawn on Arthur Bragg’s personal stationery, and written in the victim’s own hand?”

“Oh, that,” said Jackaby. “Yes well, that wasn’t withholding so much as borrowing, or possibly safekeeping.”

Marlowe said nothing, but filled his expression with even more reproach. The officers who had taken position at either side of Marlowe wore matching, humorless scowls that suggested a lifetime of taking themselves too seriously. One of them also had several large, pale gray splatters across his shoulders, which suggested Douglas the duck had excellent aim. They had drawn to a halt, but the swampy, sulfurous smell that accompanied them was gradually creeping its way into the cells.

“Oh, don’t look so put out,” said Jackaby. “You could have asked for it.”

“I’ve got plenty to ask,” Marlowe replied. He shot a glance my way and added, “Both of you. But we’ll be conducting this interrogation one at a time. Jackaby, I think it’s time you and I had a little talk.”

Marlowe nodded a silent command, and the cop with duck-poop epaulettes marched to the cell door and stood at military attention. “Detainees will move away from the door!” he barked. Jackaby, already halfway across the cell, rolled his eyes at the officer and took one more step backward. The man unlocked the door and slid it ajar. Jackaby stepped out, and the guard eyed him with suspicion as he slammed it shut. This fellow managed to make Marlowe seem fun.

Jackaby, Marlowe, and the overzealous guard disappeared down the hallway, leaving the second cheerless policeman to keep an eye on me, presumably because I could get into far too much trouble if left to my own devices in a locked, eight-by-ten cell. It sank in that I had, in fact, been left alone in an eight-by-ten cell, and I began to feel a swelling sensation of helplessness. I fidgeted, worrying the fringe on my new dress.

This was all so preposterous. I don’t know why I felt more secure in the presence of a strange man I had known for less than a day—particularly one whom I had been warned to avoid by nearly everyone I had met—but I hoped that they would be back soon, all the same.

I extended a polite smile to the man guarding me. He returned a blank stare—not simply the expressionless look you might adopt while waiting in line at the bank, but a deeply, aggressively blank stare. He held the sort of posture attainable only by those who have had their sense of humor surgically removed. His uniform looked crisp and free of droppings, but a familiar sulfuric stench still rolled off him.

“Hello,” I ventured.

The officer did not respond.

“So, you had a look around Jackaby’s place? Pretty crazy, isn’t it?”

Still no response.

“Be honest now. You stared at the frog, didn’t you?”

The officer remained silent, but his nostrils twitched involuntarily. He continued to direct his maliciously blank stare toward me.

“I thought so.” I smiled and leaned back on the slab of a bench behind me.