Chapter Seven — The Eighth

She had not yet walked the eighth.

On the morning of Day Eleven, at the second bell, she set the fact at the top of the notebook page. She had been at Second Port on Day Eight when Liss Ardren’s body had been found. Anne Ela’s cart had taken the body before Tessa had returned. The name had come back from the seamstresses’ guild on Day Nine.

Liss Ardren. Forty-one. Widowed. One son in the Compact’s Office of Public Works. Twenty years at the guild. Lived in the room above the cloth-store. Took the lane behind the guild as her shortcut home from the late shift, the way she had taken it for twenty years.

Tessa had read the scene-report on Day Nine. She had read it again on Day Ten. She had not been to the lane.

She closed the notebook. She picked up her coat from the hook by the door of the back office. She went to find Errin.

——— ◇ ———

Errin was at his desk, finishing the night-watch’s intake forms.

“I am going to walk the eighth,” she said.

He looked up at her. He set the pencil down.

“You have not walked the eighth.”

“No.”

“Why not.”

“I was at Second Port on Day Eight. I had the report on Day Nine. The apprentice had been over the lane, the privates had been over the lane, Anne Ela had been over the lane. There was nothing for me to do at the lane that had not already been done.”

“And today.”

“Today there is.”

He looked at her for a moment. He did not ask the question. He did not need to.

“Take the runner,” he said. “If it rains again before noon I want the runner with the oiled paper.”

“I will take him.”

“Tessa.”

“Yes.”

“You are looking at it the way the Brightwake told you to look at it.”

“I am looking at it the way the eighth has not been looked at.”

“All right,” Errin said.

——— ◇ ———

The lane behind the seamstresses’ guild was in the lower-Harborside, three streets back from the wharves, between the guild house and the small cloth-store the guild kept on the lower side. It was a stepped lane — three short flights of stone steps from the upper street to the lower. The killing had been on the second flight from the top. Tessa had this from the report. She had not walked it.

She walked it now.

The wind was still from the north. It had been from the north for four days. The lane was dry. The mud at the edges of the steps had set. The rain that had run the lane in the night between the seventh day and the eighth had been the last rain before the wind shifted, and the lane had been drying steadily since. Whatever the rain had thinned, the dry days had now hardened.

She stood at the head of the second flight where Liss Ardren had been found. She did not look at the place the body had been. She looked at the stone — at the risers and the treads and the lower gutter and the wall of the guild house where the rainwater would have run.

The wall of the guild house was old brick. The brick course at the foot of the wall was lower than the modern paving by perhaps a thumb’s-breadth. The rainwater coming off the wall would have pooled briefly against the foot of the brick before draining out through the gutter at the foot of the second flight. The pool would have taken silt from the lane. The silt would have been thinned by the running rain and would have set as the rain stopped and the wind came out of the north.

She walked along the wall slowly, with the lamp the runner had brought even in the daylight, because the wall was in the lee of the guild house and the late-autumn light at the foot of it was thin.

The print was at the lower end of the second flight, where the gutter took the drainage out into the small open court at the bottom of the lane. It was at the foot of the wall, in the band of silt the pool had left. It was a half-print — the inside half of a man’s left boot, from instep to ball, set hard now in the dried silt. She knelt. The runner brought the lamp closer.

The sole-pattern was a band-and-cross.

She stayed kneeling for a long moment.

Watch officers in Karath learned the regulation soles of every Compact bureau in their first year. The band-and-cross was made by the Compact’s leather contract-house in the western quarter, fitted to every clerk of the Office of Cartography on appointment. The pattern was not, as far as Tessa knew, available for purchase by any other person.

“Officer,” the runner said.

“Yes.”

“You want the oiled paper.”

“I want the oiled paper. Take the lamp closer to the foot of the wall and hold it steady while I press.”

He did. She pressed the print. The silt was hard enough that the press took only a partial — the inner half of the half — but the band-and-cross came through clean. The cross-bar of the pattern showed at the ball of the foot. The band showed at the instep. At the heel-side of the cross-bar was the small distinguishing mark of the cartographer’s-clerk regulation sole, which Tessa had learned in her second year and had not until this morning had occasion to remember.

She folded the oiled paper carefully. She put it inside the flap of the notebook. She did not write anything.

She stood. She looked at the lane again — the second flight, the wall of the guild, the upper street, the lower court. She looked at the place the body had been. She looked at it for some time.

Liss Ardren had taken this lane for twenty years. The killer had known she took it. The killer had waited at the foot of the second flight, against the wall of the guild, where the rainwater would later pool. He had stepped out of the wall’s lee to take her. He had stepped back into it, and the rainwater had pooled around his boot, and the silt had set the print, and the wind had come out of the north and the print had dried.

She turned and walked back up to the upper street.

——— ◇ ———

The Office of Cartography sat in the lower wing of the Compact-house, three streets up from the rope-makers’ quarter. Tessa did not go to the Office. She went to the precinct. She had what she needed. She did not need to ask the Office a question whose answer she already had in the back-office board.

In the back office she set the oiled paper down on the long desk. She opened the notebook to the page where she had written, on Day Six, the narrowing of the second twelve, and she found the four cartographer’s-clerks she had identified on the cross-reference of the forty-three names against the Compact roster.

She crossed out three names.

Halren Vyse was sixty-four. He had retired from the Office of Cartography eight years ago and walked with two canes. He was not a man who waited for a guild-seamstress at the foot of a wall.

Marek Senn had been at his sister’s wedding in the Middle City for the night Petra Ashe had been killed. He had been at the same wedding for the night Bryn Kelt had been killed. Eight Compact-clerks would attest to both. He was not the man.

Jorn Heffel lived with his elderly mother in a small Middle City flat. He had not been out of the flat after the second bell of the night for six years. The mother could not be left. He was not the man.

The fourth name on the list she did not cross out.

She had recorded him on Day Six as a man to interview in the second twelve. She had gone to the Office of Cartography on Day Seven to interview him. He had refused to come to the door. She had recorded the refusal in the notebook on Day Seven and had written, in the margin, return. She had gone to the Anchor Stone that evening because she had not wanted to go home and write the rest of the day. At the Anchor Stone Carrik Solenna had come to her table. The next morning she had walked to Second Port. The man at the Office of Cartography had not been returned to.

She wrote, beneath the crossed-out three, in her own hand:

Roe Carrick. Cartographer’s-clerk. Office of Cartography. Vellan Lane, Middle City. Thirty-eight. Unmarried. No family in Karath. Refused at the door, Day Seven. Not yet interviewed.

She underlined the name once.

She did not close the notebook.

She sat at the long desk for some time, with the notebook open in front of her and the oiled paper beside it. She looked at the words on the page. She thought about the man at the door of the Office of Cartography on Day Seven, whose face she had not closely looked at because he had not given her the kind of conversation that called for the looking. He had been refusing not the Watch but the woman in front of him.

He had known on the morning of Day Seven what she had not known until the morning of Day Eleven.

She had walked past him. She had recorded the refusal. She had gone to the Anchor Stone.

Liss Ardren had been killed that night.

Tessa sat at the desk. She did not move for some minutes. Then she closed the notebook.

——— ◇ ———

End of Chapter Seven.