“Be quick, Mr. Jackaby.” Charlie glanced up and down the hallway as the detective slid into the room behind him. “And you, Miss—?”
“Rook,” I answered in my most professional tone, hoping I did not sound as flustered as I felt. “Abigail Rook.”
“Well, Miss Rook, will you be examining the room, also?”
“I—of course. Yes, I am Mr. Jackaby’s assistant. I will be, you know, assisting.”
Jackaby shot me a momentary glance from within the room, but he did not correct me. I slipped inside and was immediately overwhelmed by the coppery stench. The apartment had only two rooms. The first was a living area, populated by a small sofa, a writing desk, a bare oak table, and a simple wooden cupboard. Not many decorations adorned the area, but there was a dull oil painting of a sailboat on one wall, and a small framed portrait of a blond woman propped up on the desk.
The door to the next room hung open, revealing the grisly source of the smell. A small halo of dark crimson stained the ground beneath the body. The dead man wore a simple vest and starched shirt, both of which were dyed vivid red at the chest and tattered so thoroughly, it became impossible to discern where clothing ended and flesh began. I felt light-headed in earnest this time, but drew on all my practiced stubbornness not to succumb to a genuine faint. I forced my eyes away from the bloody scene, following the detective instead as he hastened around the first chamber.
Jackaby gave the spartan living room a cursory examination. Wrapping a finger in the end of his scarf, he opened and shut the cupboard, then peeked beneath the table. He lingered briefly by the writing desk, pulling out the chair and returning it. Beside the desk sat another chair, which Jackaby examined more closely, leaning in and delicately brushing a finger along the grain of the wood. Rummaging in his crowded pockets, he removed a blue-tinted vial and held it up, staring at the chair through the glass.
“Hmm.” He straightened and quickstepped to the macabre scene in the bedroom. The vial disappeared back into the coat. I followed, breathing through the fabric of my sleeve—which helped only a little. Jackaby took a rapid tour of this room as well, checking in the closet and under the pillow before bringing his attention to the corpse. I tried to survey the room—to take a careful and deliberate mental inventory of the dead man’s belongings—but my memory of that space remains a faded blur. Almost against my will, my eyes fixed themselves on the horrific sight of that poor body, instead, the picture burning itself into my mind.
“Tell me, Miss Rook,” Jackaby said as he knelt to examine the victim, “what did you notice in that last room?”
I dragged my gaze from the slain body and back to the doorway as I tried to remember anything unusual. “He lives simply . . . lived simply,” I corrected myself awkwardly. My mind peeled very slowly away from the corpse and began to find focus as I considered my surroundings. “I would guess he lived alone. It looks like he had a girl, though—there’s a picture of one in a nice frame over there. Not much food in the cupboards, but a lot of papers on the desk, along with a very modern typewriter, several pens, and at least one spare inkwell. By the letterhead on his stationery, I take it his name was Arthur Bragg. The wastebasket is full of crumpled papers. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a writer.”
“Huh.” Jackaby glanced back at the door. “Wastebasket?”
I tried to read his expression without looking back at the body. What sort of detective didn’t look in the bin? The men in my adventure magazines were always finding important clues in the bin. “Yes. Back there, just beside the desk.”
Jackaby went back to looking at the body. He lifted a corner of the rug and peered beneath it. “What about the chairs?”
I thought a moment. “The chairs? Oh, of course—there are two at the writing desk. One where you would expect, but the other—he must have had company!” I looked out again. “Yes, I can see where it’s been taken from its place at the table. Someone was sitting opposite him at his writing desk. That’s why you were so interested in it. Is it strange they didn’t sit around the table, instead? What do you think it means?”
“Haven’t a clue,” answered Jackaby.
“Well, have I got all the important bits? Did you notice something I missed?”
“Of course I did,” said Jackaby, with such a matter-of-fact tone as to almost obscure the arrogance of the statement. “You entirely ignored the clear fact that his guest was not human. I suppose that could, in other circumstances, be inconsequential—but given the state of the man now, it seems rather pertinent.”
I blinked. “Not human?”
“Not at all. Remnants of a distinctly magical aura are all over the chair, and even stronger on the body. Hard to tell what sort of being was here, but old, I can tell. Downright ancient. Don’t feel bad, no way you could have seen that. Now then, what do you notice about the body?”
I paused. “Well, he’s dead,” I said, not wanting to look again.
“Good, and . . . ?”
“He’s clearly lost a lot of blood, having been”—I swallowed hard, keeping my eyes on Jackaby—“torn open, like that.”
“Precisely!” Jackaby grinned at me over the body. “An astute observation.”
“Astute?” I asked. “With all due respect, sir, it’s impossible to ignore. The poor man’s a mess!”
“Ah, but it’s not the wound that’s strange, now is it?”
“It isn’t strange? I suppose you see people with their chests ripped open every day?”
“What the . . . detective is saying,” came a new voice from the doorway, hesitating on the word “detective,” as if bestowing the title with great reluctance, “is that the blood that isn’t here is more of a mystery than the blood that is.”
I turned. A uniformed policeman with two silver bars on his sleeve stepped into the room, looking down sternly at Jackaby. Heavy iron handcuffs hung from his belt and clinked against his leg in a measured rhythm until he drew to a halt just a few paces from the body. He was clean-shaven, with a hard jawline.
Jackaby did not look up. He fished about in his pockets and continued examining the body through various vials and tinted lenses as he spoke. “Right you are, Chief Inspector,” Jackaby said. “This carpet alone should be entirely saturated, and yet it’s hardly stained except immediately about the torso. It looks as though the wound’s been daubed. Just here, and all the way across, like someone’s taken a towel to mop it up.” He packed an oblong jade disk back into a pocket and got to his feet. Speaking more to himself, he added, “Only, why bother cleaning up the body at all if you plan on leaving the scene like this?”
“Thank you ever so much,” said Chief Inspector Marlowe, “for providing me with deductions I had reached an hour before you trespassed onto my crime scene. And now, Mr. Jackaby, any reason I shouldn’t have you in a cell for the remainder of this investigation?”