Chapter One — The Seventh

The body was in the alley behind the rope-makers’ yard, where the Lower City fog comes in worst from the harbour. Tessa Halder reached the scene at the third bell of the night-watch. The constable on the door knew her. He lifted his lantern and let her through without speaking. She did not say thank you.

The dead woman was lying in the mud with her face turned away from the wall, and Tessa knew, before she knelt, that this one was Watch.

——— ◇ ———

Lantern-light caught on the brass clasp at the dead woman’s collar — Watch-issue, second pattern, the kind they had stopped giving out three years ago and that older privates kept polishing because the new clasp was worse. Tessa had her own second pattern in a drawer at home. She had not worn it since they changed.

She knelt in the mud. The cold of it came through her trousers at the knee.

The dead woman’s name was Petra Ashe. Twenty-six years old. Off-duty private out of the Harborside precinct, three years on the post. Tessa had met her twice — once at a Watch funeral the year before, once in passing at the Anchor Stone tavern. Petra had been at a table with three friends and had laughed at something one of them said. The laugh had been loud and pleased. Tessa remembered it because the woman who had been laughing was now lying in the mud at her knees.

She did not touch the body yet. She looked at the position of it.

Face turned to the wall. Hands loose at the sides, palms upward. No defensive marks on the wrists or the forearms — none in the lantern light. The killer had taken her cleanly, the way he had taken the previous six.

She walked anyway. The walking was the procedure. The procedure was what she had.

At the wall she stopped. She did not look at the body again. She looked at the brick of the wall, and the mortar between the brick, and the small black slick of moss in the lowest course where the harbour wet came up through the foundations of the rope-makers’ yard.

The thing she could not stop thinking, which she had not yet said to Errin, was that the killer had brought Petra here on purpose. Not to this alley necessarily. To an alley like this. Off-route. Out of the lamp-pattern of the main streets. The killer knew the Lower City the way Tessa knew the Lower City — from walking it for fourteen years and meaning to know it.

Tessa had been a Lower City Watch officer for fourteen years. The other six victims had been Lower City women. The killer was not finding his victims by chance.

She walked back to the body.

“The body can be moved,” she said to Errin.

——— ◇ ———

They walked back to the Lower City precinct together through the fog. The bell of the night-watch struck the fourth hour as they crossed the small footbridge by the dye-house. Errin kept her pace, which was slower than usual. He did not ask why she was walking slowly.

The Lower City precinct was a low stone building set into the slope behind the rope-makers’ yard, two streets over from where Petra had been found. It had been a Watch-house since before Tessa was born. Inside, the air smelled of wood-smoke and old paper. The desk-clerk on the night-watch nodded them through without asking, the way the constable at the alley had done.

The back office was empty at this hour. The lamps were still burning low. Errin shut the door behind them.

The board was on the back wall. Tessa had pinned it herself, two months ago, the night Anne Telver — the first — had been found. She crossed to it now. The lamps cast warm light across six pinned cards. Each card was a single sheet of cheap rag paper with a name across the top in Tessa’s hand and a column of details beneath.

She took a seventh card from the desk drawer. She wrote at the top: Petra Ashe. She wrote the date of the killing beneath it. She pinned the card to the board, in line with the others, in the order in which the deaths had come.

She stepped back.

“Anne, Ela, Bryn, Ren, Imma, Narri, Petra,” Errin said quietly behind her.

“Petra,” Tessa said.

The seven cards looked, at this hour and in this lamplight, like a small army. Tessa had once had a sergeant who had told her that case-boards were for the dead, not for the killer. She had not understood it at the time. She thought she understood it now.

“I will write the Harborside captain in the morning,” Errin said. “I will tell her we are taking the case to the Watch council.”

“They will not refuse it.”

“No. Not after Petra.”

“They had refused it for six,” Tessa said.

“Tessa.”

“They had refused it for six. I am only saying it.”

Errin came up behind her. He put his hand on her shoulder. He did not speak. Tessa stood with her hand against the edge of the board and looked at the seven cards. Behind her Errin’s hand was warm through her coat.

After a minute Errin took the hand away.

“Go home,” he said.

“I will go home.”

“Go home now. You will not see anything else here tonight.”

“I will go home.”

He left. Tessa heard the back-office door close behind him, and the desk-clerk’s quiet greeting in the front of the precinct, and the outer door close after that. She stood in front of the board another minute. She did not write anything else. After a minute she went out into the fog.

——— ◇ ———

The bakery on the third street north of the precinct was dark at this hour. The baker, Pell Ovrin, left bread on Tessa’s stair when he started the morning ovens. There was no bread on the stair tonight. It was earlier than Pell baked. Tessa climbed past the empty stair to her flat above. She unlocked the door. She lit the lamp at her table.

She took her coat off. She hung it on the hook by the door. She reached into the inside pocket and took out the notebook.

The notebook was a stitched thing she bought four at a time at the stationer’s by the Compact-house. She had been keeping notebooks since her second year on the Watch. The current one was three-quarters full. The pages were filled with her own modified shorthand — the shorthand she had taught herself out of impatience with the standard Watch hand, which was slow and elaborate and did not fit how she thought.

She sat at the table. She opened the notebook to the next blank page. She did not put the pencil to the paper at once. She sat with the open book in front of her and looked at the pencil for some time.

Then she wrote:

Petra. Twenty-six. Liked horse-races.

She closed the notebook.

The lamp guttered. She turned the wick down to keep it from going out. She did not undress for bed. She sat at the table in the small light and listened to the harbour fog moving slowly through the Lower City, and to the dripping of water from the eave of the bakery below. She did not sleep that night. She did not expect to. She had not slept the first three nights after Anne Telver, either. The pattern of not-sleeping after a new body was one she had stopped trying to argue with.

The notebook stayed closed on the table beside the lamp until morning.

——— ◇ ———