Mona O’Connor shoved past her neighbors and planted herself in front of Jackaby before any of the officers could intervene. She jabbed a finger into his chest accusingly. “You! You lied to me!”
“I assure you, Miss O’Connor, I did nothing of the sort. This is all a misunderstanding. If you don’t mind, we do need to be getting along.” His calm was mesmerizing, and if not for the cuffs jingling on his hands, I might have forgotten he was under arrest. Mona was not placated.
“You did! You lied to me!”
The guard on Jackaby’s arm attempted to position himself between the two, mumbling an ineffective, “Step back, please, madam. Out of the way. Step back.” An officer from the lobby came to assist, tugging at her arm. She jerked it away and persisted.
“You told me she would be better by morning!” she cried out as we began to move forward again.
Now Jackaby’s unflappable expression faltered. His eyes went wide and his brow creased. He attempted to stop, and the officer behind him gave him a shove. “Mrs. Morrigan?” he called over his shoulder as we were pressed toward the door. “You mean to say she isn’t?”
“Worse!” Mona’s voice hollered past the uniform now bodily restraining her. “A hundred times worse! The worst she’s ever been!” The officers finally restrained the woman and succeeded in ushering Jackaby and me out the door.
Jackaby’s face was ashen as we reached daylight. He did not speak again until the two of us had been loaded into the back of the police wagon. The policeman slammed the doors, and we were alone on hard wooden seats, which stunk of stale beer and vomit.
“It’s bad?” I asked.
He breathed in slowly before responding. “Each night Mrs. Morrigan has wailed, a life has been brutally ended. If she wails, now—wails a hundred times worse, now—then yes, I imagine it is very bad, indeed.”
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.”