“I see,” said Crane slowly, mind racing. “I see.”
“I don’t suppose it was you.” Esther spoke reasonably. “You brought Willetts and the dead practitioners to our attention, after all. But I think you will have to tell us everything you know about who Rackham was blackmailing.”
“No.”
Esther took a step forward. Crane took two rapid steps back. “If you’re thinking about putting fluence on me, don’t.” He heard the note of something like panic in his voice. He loathed the very idea of fluence, hated the idea of having someone magically tamper with his mind ever again, but even more, he knew he couldn’t risk the loss of control, for Stephen’s sake or his own.
Esther’s brows were raised. “How do you know about fluence?”
“I fluenced him.” Stephen stood behind her, voice unhappy. “And I shouldn’t have, and I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Or let anyone else do it.”
“Well, that was silly of you,” she observed.
“Possibly. Don’t, Es. I can’t let you. I made a promise.”
Esther looked round at him. Stephen shrugged. “Sorry. It wouldn’t help anyway—” He stumbled over the words, stopping himself abruptly.
“Why not?” said Esther curiously.
“Because… Rackham had his fingers in too many pies. Well, you know, we had to stop using him to translate, he was getting more and more unreliable. I’m not saying the blackmail isn’t what got him killed but for someone making a mess of things on the scale he was, I am actually prepared to look at coincidence for once. Anyway, look, Es, we’re wasting time, and there’s at least two more pressing issues, one of which is to do with some of the people I met at the Traders last night, and the other is how the rats got in.”
He had said most of that slightly too fast, to Crane’s ear, and had signally failed to answer the original question, but the last phrase snagged Esther’s attention. “Yes. That.”
“If the door was locked, then either we missed a really quite large hole in the wall or there was an impressive piece of practice going on,” Stephen said. “You look at that, and I’ll chase up the loose ends among the China hands?”
Esther tipped her head to one side with what Crane was coming to recognise as her considering look. “Fine. Back at the surgery in a couple of hours?”
“Good. Lord Crane, will you walk with me?”
“Certainly.” Crane glanced at Esther. “I’ve no objection to snouting out anyone else with a grudge against Rackham for you. I just don’t propose to drag in someone that I know not to be involved.”
“Protecting the lady’s name?”
“I didn’t say it was a lady.”
“No. In fact, you didn’t use any pronouns at all,” said Esther. “Which does suggest you were avoiding them because they’d be revealing. See you later, Steph.”
Chapter Ten
They headed out, down Cable Street, in silence for a few hundred yards, until Stephen let out a very long, shuddering breath. “Hell, hell, hellfire.”
“Don’t panic. It’s fine.”
“No, it isn’t!”
“Yes, it is,” Crane insisted. “Mrs. Gold knows everything she needs to know about Rackham. You’re not hiding anything relevant. I will gladly serve up anyone else Rackham was blackmailing on a plate. Just keep your head.”
“Keep my— Do you realise what I said in there?”
“What?”
Stephen clutched at his hair. “I began to tell Esther you’re resistant to fluence and had to invent a load of rubbish to cover that up.”
“Why should she not know that?”
“Because,” said Stephen, with tenuous patience, “the Pied Piper is likely to be someone with latent or undetected talent. Someone with innate resistance to fluence would be exactly the sort of person we’re after. Given the way you’re tangled up in the middle of this web, she’d be mad not to look at you. And the closer Esther looks at you, the more likely she is to find out about you, and the more likely she is to find out about me. Damn it!”
“No harm done.” Crane wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
“Esther is not a stupid woman. She knows you’re hiding something.”
“That’s my problem, Stephen.”
“No, it really isn’t.” Stephen had led them down to the river with rapid strides. They paused now, looking across the broad sweep of the churning brown Thames. “Lucien, do you know what I have? In life?”
“What?”
“My profession. That’s it. I’ve no family, except my aunt, and she’ll never speak to me again. I live on the pittance they pay justiciars. My friends are all justiciars, or married to them. Everyone else hates us. If I couldn’t be a justiciar, I… God, I don’t know what I’d do. If I lost that, I’d have lost everything.”
“I’m here,” Crane observed, without inflection.
Stephen propped his elbows on a bit of wooden fencing. Crane joined him, and they both stared out at the turbid waters.
“You’re going back to Shanghai,” Stephen said at last.