Chapter Three — The Office

The forty-three names came on the third day.

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Tessa worked the back office of the precinct from the second bell of the morning to the seventh bell of the night, and then again the next day, and then the day after that. She ate at her desk. She drank tea Errin brought her. She did not sleep for the first day, slept five hours the second, and four the third. She did not change her clothes. By the third day Errin had stopped commenting on it.

The work was procedural in the strictest sense. She pulled every Watch interview file from the previous six killings — eighty-seven case-folders, of varying thickness, of varying competence on the part of the officer who had compiled them. The Anne Telver folder was thick because Tessa had compiled it. The Bryn Kelt folder was thin because the constable who had been first on that scene had not believed a fifteen-year-old street-girl warranted the time. Tessa had argued with him about it at the time. The thinness of the folder was, in its way, a record of the argument.

She cross-referenced every person of interest in every folder against every other folder. The work could not be done in one’s head. She did it on rag-paper sheets at her desk, with a column for each name and a row for each victim, and she marked where a name appeared.

Two hundred and forty-one names appeared in at least one folder. One hundred and thirty-eight appeared in two. Sixty-seven appeared in three. By the second day, twelve names appeared in four. By the third day, working from the Petra Ashe folder Errin had compiled overnight, she had a list of names that appeared in five or more.

There were forty-three of them.

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The forty-three were a cross-section of Lower City and Harborside life. Three were dock-workers. Two were fishmongers. Five worked the markets. Four were merchants of various kinds. Two were Compact-licensed surveyors. One was a school-master at the Lower City almshouse. One was a baker — not Pell, a different one. Two were surgeons. One was a midwife. Eight were Watch-adjacent — runners, clerks, a former private who had left the post for cause six years ago and now worked at a tannery. Four were Compact-bureau clerks of various offices.

The remaining ten were difficult to categorize. A retired sailor. A Driftborn ship’s-mate moored in Karath for the season. A widow who walked the same loop of Lower City streets every morning to feed the harbour cats and had been seen in the area of three killings. Three or four men whose work brought them across the city in irregular routes. A handful Tessa could not place at all.

She made a clean copy of the list and pinned it to the back-office board, beneath the seven victim-cards.

She started at the top.

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The first man on the list was a fishmonger named Drev Holst. Drev had crossed the paths of five of the seven. He was sixty-one years old, had run his stall for thirty-two years, and was missing two fingers on his left hand from a winch accident in his twenties. Tessa interviewed him at his stall in the late morning of Day Four. He answered her questions. He had alibis for four of the seven killings — two with his wife, one with his son, one with the night-keeper of the fish-market who had seen him drinking until late. The fifth killing was Petra Ashe’s, and Drev had been alone at home, asleep. He told her so calmly. He did not seem frightened of her.

Tessa wrote in the notebook: Drev Holst. Five of seven. Four alibis. Petra alone at home. Sixty-one. Two missing fingers.

She did not believe Drev had done it. She wrote down what he had told her anyway. She had a rule for herself, which was that the forty-three would all be interviewed before any of them were dismissed. She had broken the rule before, on other cases, and had paid for the breaking each time.

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The second was a school-master at the almshouse, who taught reading and small arithmetic to children whose parents could not afford the Lower City paid school. He was forty-seven. He had crossed five of the seven through the school. Two of his pupils’ mothers had been victims; he had walked the school’s catchment streets at the times of those killings; he had been at the school during three other killings; he had been visiting his sister in Second Port during the sixth and had Driftborn witnesses who had vouched. Tessa wrote it all down. She did not believe he had done it either. She wrote it down anyway.

The third was a Compact-licensed surveyor. Fourth a midwife. Fifth a Watch-runner whose route had crossed five of the seven for innocuous reasons of routine. The sixth was the former private, the one who had left the post for cause. Tessa interviewed him in the back room of the tannery where he worked. He had been angry at the Watch for six years and was not going to stop being angry now that the Watch was at his door. He said three things Tessa wrote down and then asked her to leave. She left. She had not believed he had done it before she came; she did not believe it more strongly afterward; but he had been one of the forty-three and he was now one of the thirty-seven.

The twelve were dismissable, most of them. The fishmonger’s alibis held when she checked them. School-master also. The midwife had been in confinement-attendance during three of the seven killings and the families confirmed it without prompting. The surveyor had been on a Compact field-posting in the southern atoll chain during two of the seven; she had a Compact-stamped travel-record. None of the twelve felt right. Tessa’s rule had been to interview them all anyway, and so she had, and now she had thirty-one names left.

——— ◇ ———

Errin came to find her in the back office at the end of Day Six. He did not speak immediately. He stood in the doorway and watched her at the desk for some seconds. She knew him well enough by now to know when he was going to say a thing he did not want to say.

“Tessa.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t break yourself on this one. The killer does not deserve it.”

“The dead deserve it.”

“Yes. They do. They do not deserve you breaking either.”

She set the pencil down. She looked at him.

“I will eat,” she said.

“You will eat. You will sleep. You will go home tonight at the seventh bell whether you have finished the day’s work or not.”

“All right.”

He waited for a moment, watching her, in case she meant to argue. She did not.

He picked up the pencil and went back to the form.

——— ◇ ———

She walked home late that night. The fog was high. The lamps along the bakery street were lit and the wind, which had been from the harbour for three days, had turned and was coming down out of the north. The smell of harbour was thinner. She climbed the stair. Pell had not yet started the morning ovens; there was no bread on the third stair.

In her flat she lit the lamp and sat at the table and opened the notebook.

She had not written anything for any of the dead in three days. The work of the forty-three had occupied her. Tonight she would not write the small details for Petra Ashe, which was a piece of work she had not yet done and which had begun to weigh on her. She would write something for Anne Telver instead. She had been keeping the small details for the dead in her notebook since the first week of the case. They were the only part of the work that was not procedure.

She wrote slowly, with the pencil sharpened:

Anne Telver. Twenty-three. Engaged to a wheelwright named Toller. They had been saving toward a brass kettle, seven copper pieces a week, and were three weeks from being able to buy it. Toller still has the seven copper pieces in a jar on the mantel.

She closed the notebook.

She lit a second lamp from the first because the first was guttering. She made tea. She sat at the table with the tea and the notebook closed beside her and looked at the wall above the table for a while. She did not think about the forty-three. She thought about the brass kettle. She thought about the seven copper pieces in the jar. She thought about Toller, the wheelwright, who was twenty-five and lived in a small Lower City flat above a wheelwright’s shop and would never marry Anne now.

After a while she put the second lamp out. She drank the rest of the tea cold. She undressed and lay down on the small bed by the window and slept, eventually, the deepest sleep she had slept in three weeks.

She would wake in the morning and start on the next twelve. She did not know — she was not yet looking — that one of the names on the second twelve was a cartographer’s-clerk in the Compact’s Office of Cartography, late thirties, who lived alone in a respectable Middle City flat and had no family in Karath.

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