Chapter Two — The Method

She slept three hours after the morning bell and woke with the notebook still on the table. Pell Ovrin had left bread on the third stair. She ate half of it standing at the window and went back to work.

——— ◇ ———

The first alley — Anne Telver’s — was off the cordage-yard run, two streets back from the harbour wall. Tessa had been to it nine times since Anne had been found. She walked it in daylight now, slowly, with the notebook open on her left palm and the pencil in her right.

Anne had been twenty-three. A dressmaker’s apprentice, engaged to a wheelwright. Found at the second bell of the night-watch, two months ago, by a baker’s boy who had taken the alley as a shortcut to the Lower City flour-house. The body had been positioned the way Petra had been positioned. Face turned to the wall. Hands loose at the sides.

Tessa stood at the place Anne had been found. She looked back along the alley toward the open street. She looked the other way, toward where the alley narrowed and ran out into the small irregular passages that fed back toward the rope-makers’ quarter.

The killer had come from one direction or the other. Either he had brought Anne in from the open street, which was the route the baker’s boy had taken — the route a stranger to the Lower City would take. Or he had brought Anne in from the back passages, which were not on any chart Tessa had ever seen and which only opened to someone who already knew the Lower City the way a Lower City woman knew it.

Tessa wrote one word in the notebook: back.

——— ◇ ———

Ela Mosse’s alley was harder to walk. Ela had been fifty-two, a fishmonger, widowed nine years. She had been found in a half-passage off the Harborside fish-market, behind the stall she had worked at for twenty-three years. The market was open by the time Tessa got there. The morning catch was being laid out on the stalls and the smell of it was strong in the cold air.

Tessa stood at the back of Ela’s old stall. The stall was being worked now by Ela’s daughter, who was twenty-eight and had taken on the business out of practical necessity rather than vocation. The daughter saw Tessa and nodded once and went on with her morning. Tessa had spoken to her four times. The daughter did not have anything more to say.

The alley behind the stall ran north, past the salt-house and the small open yard where the gulls fought over the fish-heads, and turned twice before it opened onto a back passage that led, eventually, to the rope-makers’ quarter.

Twice it turned. Tessa had walked it before but had not, until now, asked herself how a man would have come to know that it turned twice.

She wrote in the notebook: twice.

——— ◇ ———

Bryn Kelt’s alley was the one Tessa had been most reluctant to walk again. Bryn had been fifteen years old. No surname known to the Watch, until Tessa had found, eventually, a Driftborn woman in Second Port who had known Bryn’s mother and had given the name. Bryn had been a street-girl. Bryn had been carrying, when she was found, a Veyra-token of provenance Tessa had never quite traced — a small carved disk on a leather thong, of the kind Driftborn crews held one per crew-member rather than the kind Anchored ships held mounted at the bow.

The alley was off the lower-Harborside, between two warehouses owned by the same merchant house. It was a closed alley — no through-route, three walls, the fourth opening. A man could not pass through it. A man could only come in and come out the same way.

The killer had brought Bryn into the alley. The killer had killed Bryn against the back wall. The killer had walked out of the alley by the same route. The route opened into a narrow back passage that connected, by a turn Tessa had not registered before, to a side-street the Harbor Master’s runners used at certain hours of the day.

She stood at the mouth of the alley. She looked at the side-street. She looked back at the alley. She looked at the side-street again.

The killer had not been a Watch officer. She had been certain of that since the third killing. A Watch officer would have known that the side-street was patrolled at the second bell, and Bryn had been killed at the second bell. The killer had known the side-street was there — that was the point. He had known it was there, and he had not known the patrol would be there, because the patrol-route was a Watch matter and the side-street’s existence was a Lower City matter.

She wrote in the notebook: He learned us.

She underlined the words once.

She closed the notebook and stood at the mouth of the alley for some time, looking at the brick.

——— ◇ ———

She walked the remaining four scenes between midmorning and late afternoon. Ren Holm at the dock-yards. Imma Treld at the back of the Lower City bread-house. Narri Calling in the alley behind the Anchor Stone. Petra Ashe at the rope-makers’ yard, where she had been kneeling sixteen hours ago.

By the time she came back to Petra’s alley the late-autumn light had gone thin and grey and the harbour fog was beginning to roll up the streets again. She stood at the place she had knelt the night before. The mud had been turned by the constable’s traffic and by the body-cart wheels. Petra had been gone for ten hours.

The pattern, in Tessa’s head, was now a map. Each killing was at the back of an alley or a passage that did not appear on the official Watch survey of the Lower City. Each was reached, from the killer’s side, through small connecting routes that a Lower City woman would know — a midwife, a back-alley merchant, a girl who delivered laundry between the dye-house and the Compact-house. The killer had walked those routes. The killer had done his learning over time.

Tessa stood in the rope-makers’ yard for a long minute. She did not write. The light went thinner. The fog came up from the harbour. She turned and walked back to the precinct.

——— ◇ ———

Errin was at his desk when she came in. He was finishing the day’s sergeant-paperwork — a stack of small forms required by the Watch council, which Errin did at the end of every shift and which he had told Tessa, more than once, was the only part of the work he genuinely hated.

She sat down across from him. She put the notebook on the desk between them, open to the page where she had written He learned us and underlined it.

Errin read the words. He looked at Tessa. He read the words again.

“Show me,” he said.

She showed him. She drew, on the back of one of his hated forms, the rough shape of the Lower City as the killer used it. Six alleys. Seven, with Petra. The connecting routes between them. The places the killer must have walked to know what he knew. The route from each killing-alley back to a back-passage that fed into a street the killer could leave by without being seen.

Errin looked at the drawing for some time. He had not been a Lower City officer for fourteen years. He had been a Harborside officer in his early career and a sergeant of the Lower City precinct only for the last six. He did not know the Lower City the way Tessa knew it. He knew it the way a sergeant knew it — well enough for the work, not well enough for the map Tessa had just drawn.

“Who studies the Lower City who isn’t from it,” he said.

“Nobody.”

“Somebody.”

They looked at each other. The lamp on Errin’s desk had been burning since before midmorning and the wick was guttering. Errin reached across and turned the wick down without taking his eyes off the drawing.

“A man who needed to know,” he said. “A man whose work brought him here. A man who walked it on purpose.”

“Or a man who was paid to.”

“Or that.”

“Or a man who lived here once and left.”

“Or that.”

She took the drawing back from him. She folded it once and tucked it inside the notebook. She closed the notebook. The closing of it was a small sound in the back office.

“Forty-three names,” Errin said.

“Forty-three for now.”

“You will go through them.”

“I will go through them.”

“How long.”

“Three days. Four. I do not know.”

“Tessa.”

“Yes.”

“He learned us. You said it. You know what it means.”

She did know what it meant.

She had wanted to remember whether any earlier case in her career had been like this. She did not believe any had. The pattern of the current killings was, to her knowledge, unprecedented in the Lower City of her career.

She read the index until the lamp guttered the second time. She did not find anything she had not expected to find. She closed the third notebook and put it back on the shelf.

She did not yet know to look further back. That would come.

——— ◇ ———