The end was already coming in September, though Ben didn’t know it. That was when daring cat burglaries of offices and grand houses in Hertfordshire had reached such a number that the outraged wealthy of the county had begun putting pressure on the chief superintendent to get results. That was when the justiciars came.
Ben hadn’t dealt with justiciars before. He knew of them: the funny ones, the not-quite-police who dealt with peculiar cases. Not uniformed, not disciplined, all of them with an odd air of confidence and a habit of unhelpful remarks and abrupt disappearance. These two were Miss Nodder, a freckled, authoritative, green-eyed woman, and a dark unkempt man named Webster who smoked Turkish cigars with unnerving intensity. They had been all round Hertfordshire, he heard, with access to the files on the burglaries, and now they settled in Berkhamsted, appearing and disappearing, claiming an office in the police station and evicting its previous occupant without consultation. The scuttlebutt was that they were closing in on the cat burglar here.
A couple of weeks after the justiciars arrived, one bright October day, they called in four men, Ben among them, and announced they had been requisitioned for a special job. The cat burglar was known to be setting his sights on the Tring Museum. The justiciars would wait there, take the man in the act, the following night. The constables would act as backup, extra manpower, in case it was needed. They had been chosen, Miss Nodder told them, for their steadiness and discretion. They were men who would not panic or speak loosely. They would be trustworthy, she said with certainty, and her voice carried a very slight note of “or else”.
Ben would have told Jonah all about it. He told Jonah everything, always, glorying in his passionate interest and the glow of happy pride any of Ben’s small successes brought to his eyes. He had told him about the investigation into the robberies, prompted by Jonah’s endless curiosity, and he would not have thought twice about breaking Miss Nodder’s injunction that none of them should speak of this at all. It was Jonah, for heaven’s sake. Ben could trust him.
He didn’t have the chance. Jonah didn’t come home until very late that night, and slipped into bed sometime in the small hours. He didn’t talk, simply held Ben close, fiercely, almost desperately. The next morning he was gone before Ben arose.
So Ben waited in the Tring Museum that night, in the silent dark, with the shadowy forms of long-dead things all around him.
He was in the main hall, on the ground floor, near the great wooden door, a fellow constable on the other side of the room. The first floor was mostly open, just a walkway round the walls lined with cases, so he could see up to the ceiling.
He was expecting something—the justiciars had seemed quite certain of that—but it was still a jolting shock as angry voices shattered the silence. There was a crash from the first floor, and a flare of some bright yellow light, and Ben saw a dark shape run to the railings that ringed the first-floor landing, and vault the iron with effortless grace, leaping over to the thirty-foot drop onto marble below.
He cried out, thinking he had seen a man plunge to his death, and then he cried again because the man didn’t fall. He landed on thin air as though it was solid ground, foot braced on nothing, ran a few steps, and hurled himself sideways as something like a rush of wind hissed through the air, making Ben’s ears pop.
The other copper was swearing devoutly, gaping up. Miss Nodder leaned over the balcony, making another throwing gesture, green eyes narrow and intent and glowing like a cat’s. The burglar was changing direction in midair, leaping like a squirrel bouncing between branches, and Ben heard him laugh aloud.
That laugh.
It couldn’t be.
Ben stared up, mouth open in sickened shock, as the burglar danced through the air above him. The burglar looked down, and their eyes met.
Jonah’s gleeful, wild smile dropped away. He dropped too, suddenly scrabbling at the air, as if whatever held him up had vanished. He lunged out for an invisible handhold, pulling himself up as something sizzled through the room above his head. Jonah glanced round, and at Ben one last time, and then he was moving once more, diving through a window on the ground floor that broke before he was anywhere near it.
He was gone, leaving Miss Nodder shouting orders from the balcony, and Ben with a gaping hole in his chest that he knew nothing would ever fill again.
Now
Ben had given the justiciary a public house as his address for contact, since he had not wanted to admit he was sleeping in a dosshouse, and he had not been sure if he wanted them to find him. It was the Red Lion, just down the road from his grimy lodgings, where gangmasters gathered to look for casual work, and when he went in there the next morning he was greeted by the landlord’s cry.
“Hoi, mate! Constable Marshall, right?”