An Apprentice Without Magic, page 19
part #2 of Magic Missing Series
He spotted Mark wearing his constable uniform, eating by himself. He sat down across from him.
“What’s new?” Sam asked.
“Blisters!” Mark said. “I’ve started going out on patrol with my trainer for full days. What about you?”
“I’m working on a crime. Parts of it anyway.”
“Not all of it?”
“There is a task that he’s given me to perform, so I’m doing that.”
“By yourself?” Mark said. He looked like he didn’t believe Sam.
“It is something I can handle, or thought I could handle. Some people I interviewed lied to me just to lie. I suppose it was fun for them.”
Mark made a painful face. “And you believed them?”
“You have to believe people some of the time, right? If you don’t, you can’t get anywhere,” Sam said. “Ask your trainer about it. He might have some perspective that eludes me.”
Sam stopped talking. It sounded like he was failing and maybe he was. That wasn’t very smart, he thought.
“So you do make mistakes,” Mark said.
Sam laughed. “I make mistakes every day. Dickey tolerates them, I suppose. Sometimes I get compliments, and sometimes I get the opposite.”
“Life as an apprentice,” Mark said. A constable called to him from the commissary entrance. He looked down at his plate. “I guess it is time to make more blisters. See you around.”
Sam watched him leave. The constable clapped Mark on the shoulders and then tugged on his ear. He didn’t know if the constable was playful or cruel. Dickey could be the same way, but he had to admit the compliments were more common lately. Perhaps he had been learning a few things.
He finished his lunch and pulled out the list of questions he could ask the remaining four ice merchants. He would take information down and then check it out before he came to any conclusions.
~
Sam looked across the street at the third ice merchant. This one was bigger than most, but the warehouse looked like it could fall down any moment. It reminded Sam of Wicket’s place of business. He took a deep breath. Two more, and they were closer to the western gate and the guardhouse.
The sun was descending and a chill wind whipped around Sam. He was glad he had worn his coat this time. The large door to the place was wide open, and a cart and horse were inside. Perhaps the ice merchant was late in delivering his ice for the day.
Sam walked in, and the door closed behind him.
“What do you want?” a grizzled man said. Sam stood about at his shoulder if that.
“Hello, I am Sam Smith.” He pulled out his constabulary token and showed it to the man. “I’m an apprentice on assignment.”
The man glared at Sam. “And just what does that have to do with the likes of me?”
“I’m checking on a delivery of ice. Over one hundred blocks about a week or week and a half ago. It probably went to a stable.”
“Why a stable?”
“Because the ice needed to be cold for an extended period of time. Packing ice in straw does that.” Sam pointed to the piles of straw in the man’s warehouse.
“Don’t look to me for any information. I deliver blocks of ice all day long,” the merchant said. “What is an order of one hundred or more?”
“A large order,” Sam said. “It was likely a one-time delivery, so you can cross off your regulars.”
The man snorted. “What is a tiny lad barely out of diapers asking questions for?”
“Can I look around?” Sam said, reacting to the man’s insult.
“Look all you want. I have nothing to hide, sonny.” The man grinned, but his comment wasn’t made in any kind of jest Sam could detect.
Sam nodded. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he had to do something, now that he had blurted out his request. He started in the front and worked his way back on one side. The place looked the same as the other warehouses, with heaps of straw covering lumps of ice. The floors were damp from ice melt.
Sam removed his glasses from time to time as he went, occasionally using his wand to poke at the ice underneath its shaggy coat of straw. He spotted a trap door made out of pollen because it disappeared when he viewed it with his naked eye. The ice merchant had scattered a bit of straw over the thing, so it looked like part of the floor.
“See anything interesting yet?” the man said as he followed Sam closely behind. “It looks like you’ve got trouble with them fancy specs of yours.”
“Nothing, but then you told me you have nothing to hide,” Sam said.
The other side of the warehouse mirrored the first. There wasn’t anything on the main floor to see unless Sam wanted to remove all the straw. Even if the man were hiding things, he probably counted on no one bothering. The pollen trapdoor, on the other hand, looked suspicious.
He considered confronting the man about the trapdoor, but the man was very big and had to be very strong from lugging all those blocks of ice.
“I guess I’ll have to report what I see.”
“And what you see is nothing,” the man said.
Sam shrugged and pointed to the stacks of straw. “Straw, straw, all over the place and underneath, ice.” He shrugged again. “I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time.”
“Quite all right, lad. You run along to your nursemaids and tell them you’ve seen nothing.”
Sam nodded and exited the warehouse. He turned back and shivered at the cold glare the ice merchant threw back at him. Something was indeed strange about that place.
The fourth merchant only took a slight detour from the way back to the constabulary. Sam hired a carriage to take him, but the warehouse was already locked up for the day, and his carriage had taken off before he could secure it for the ride back to the constabulary.
He trudged halfway there before he could hail another and disembarked, exhausted from an afternoon of snooping. Sam ran into the constabulary. Dickey was standing with two other snoops joking about something.
Sam stood there and endured listening to a bad joke before Dickey turned to talk to him. He knew he was being ignored.
“Something for me?”
Sam nodded. “An ice warehouse with a secret trap door leading to the basement. The merchant was taller and probably stronger than any of you, so I didn’t press him to show me his hiding place. Can we go back and take a look?”
The two other snoops laughed at Sam.
“Fancy yourself one of us?” one of them said derisively.
“You two aren’t busy. Let’s grab a few constables and investigate,” Dickey said.
The other scoffed. “He sees things.”
Dickey balled his fists. “He doesn’t see things. That is why we are heading out now. Do I have to make this an order, boys?”
“Naw,” one of them said. “Let’s go on the boy’s wild goose chase.”
~
Dickey clutched a search authorization as he alighted from one of two constabulary wagons. Sam followed him as they pounded on the establishment’s door. A few windows were lit.
The door was flung open, and the ice merchant stood with a napkin still tucked into the top of his shirt. “What do you mean disturbing my dinner?” He spotted Sam and leered at him. “Did you see a little mousey or a big hairy spider? Is that why you brought your mates?”
Bolstered by more than enough men to subdue the big ice merchant, Sam said with confidence. “I wanted to see what was under the trapdoor in your warehouse.”
The man’s face turned white. “What trapdoor?” he said trying to keep his composure, but the edge of bravado was rapidly disappearing.
“Step aside,” Dickey said.
“No!” the man said. He tried to shut the door, but Sam had jammed his wand next to the doorframe.
Two constables grabbed the door and pushed it open. The ice merchant took off towards the back of the building. One of the snoops and all the constables ran after him.
“I guess that leaves us,” Dickey said to Sam and the other snoop. “Lead on, apprentice.”
Sam removed his spectacles and accepted the lantern that the other snoop had given him. The ice merchant had suspected something because more straw had been tossed over the trapdoor. However, the man wouldn’t have thought that Sam could literally see through his attempts at camouflage.
“It is here,” Sam said. He knelt down and uncovered the straw. He had to put his spectacles back on to find the hidden latch, and soon the door led down to a lower level.
The ice merchant had been caught and trussed up by pollen ropes instantly created by the constables as soon as the man had been apprehended. The man looked down at Sam below.
“You said you didn’t see anything,” the man said, still struggling with his bonds.
Sam looked up. “And you said you had nothing to hide,” Sam said as the constables took the man away.
Dickey tilted his head and looked at Sam. “Weren’t you the one who didn’t like people lying to you?”
“I didn’t lie to the ice merchant, but I didn’t tell him I found the trapdoor either.” Sam looked around. “What will we find? Could this be your stable?”
“Could be,” Dickey said. “Continue to look, but don’t disturb any evidence.”
Sam had no idea what evidence there would be, but he found a large metal drum cut in half, lined with straw. “Here!” he said. “This could be where the body was kept.”
Dickey and the other two snoops leaned forward and looked at the half-chamber.
“It fits the bill, and the ice merchant didn’t like our finding this,” one of the snoops said. He made a sour face. “A lot of good this does for your case, Dickey.”
“Didn’t we solve it?” Sam said.
“Who committed the murder?” Dickey asked Sam.
“Oh. Could there be an entry in the ice merchant’s books?”
“If he keeps any,” one of the other snoops said.
Sam continued to look closely at the chamber. He found a few large sheets of uncolored pollen. “This isn’t pink,” he told Dickey, holding the edge of the evidence with tweezers. “No pink pollen at all. This was what the victim was wrapped with.”
“Memorize this and make a sketch.”
A constable who had been rummaging around the lower level called out. “I found the other half of that big barrel!”
They all converged and began uncovering the straw to reveal chunks of ice, not blocks, and then after removing the top layer of ice, a body wrapped in pollen appeared.
“It won’t be another guard’s death,” Dickey said. “I’ve accounted for all the missing guards on the West side.”
The men lifted the body out of the ice bath and laid it on the floor. Dickey ordered Sam to remove the pollen shroud.
“Me?”
“You’re the apprentice. Tell us about the body before you remove it. Anyway, handling dead bodies is part of the calling, lad.”
Sam pressed his lips together and removed his spectacles, bringing the lamp closer to the victim. “It is a woman,” he said. He put the gold tip on his wand and used it to part the pollen. The thin pollen shrouds parted as if cut by a knife.
“Don’t know her,” one of the snoops said.
“Big lady,” a constable said.
Dickey grunted. “We will identify her tonight. It may be storing the bodies was a lucrative sideline for the ice merchant.”
“A grisly one,” a snoop said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
~
T he woman was identified as the ice merchant’s wife. She had disappeared four days previous.
“The man is not talking,” Dickey said. “Someone would have to be in on the murder to take the body to some alley and dump it just like the guards. That could be anyone.”
“Not I,” Sam said.
Dickey shook his head. “Funny,” he said, but his face didn’t show it. “There are a lot of people you can hire to do unsavory things. Dumping a body isn’t legal, but if a person hasn’t done the murder and can’t be traced, plenty will do it for you.”
“One of the gangs?”
Dickey nodded. “They are included as sources.”
“So we aren’t any further in solving the murders than we were before.”
“I didn’t say that. We know how it was done. There is too much of a coincidence. There were two of those storage things. Both were in use at the same time, I imagine.”
Sam shivered at the thought of working above the cold storage. “So, you’ve found out something?”
Dickey nodded. “You can preserve a body, but you can’t make the body appear after it is dead. I would guess both of the guards went missing at the same time.”
“Killed simultaneously?”
“Drugged or drunk, I would guess, but they didn’t need to be. I have one more person to interview, and we should have the full story.”
“Banna Plunk?”
“Not her,” Dickey said. “The pink pollen found on the second guard is not deer pollen. Antina Mulch confirmed your suspicion. You haven’t been back to her for your lessons. She has been disappointed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be apologizing to me. I thought you wanted to continue to learn court language?”
“I only missed one session,” Sam said.
Dickey shook his head.
That was enough to make Sam vow not to miss again. He took a deep breath.
“A sigh?” Dickey said.
“No, I am inhaling perspective and determination,” Sam said.
Dickey’s lips turned up on one side. Evidently, Sam had amused his partner, finally.
“So, now that we are through with that, I will tell you what I have been doing. I talked to most of the guards.”
“Remember the first murder? The man’s name was Perl Basket, a sergeant who was under the command of Lieutenant Happy.” Dickey smirked. “Happy.”
“And the other man?”
“A recently demoted sergeant of Happy’s. Both men were enemies of the Lieutenant, and they aren’t the only ones,” Dickey said.
“So Happy might be the killer?”
Dickey nodded his head. “Captain Fork had told the West guards not to tell us anything, but ordering a person to do something and getting them to carry out the orders are two different things. The West guards had it in for the lieutenant, so a few drinks purchased at local establishments brought out the true picture.”
“So Happy killed the guards?”
Dickey shook his head. “No, but Happy had his close underling, the sergeant that took the demoted guard’s place, was the one. The three of them entered a drinking establishment the day of the disappearances. The sergeant emerged to enjoy another day of life, and the other two didn’t.”
Sam sat back. “So you didn’t need me to find the stable where the killer stored the body?”
“Oh, I did. You solved a murder we didn’t even know about and answered one of the key questions of our investigation. Not bad for an apprentice. What was very good was not trying to find out about the trapdoor on your own. Snooping is dangerous enough without trying to do it all by yourself, especially for a fifteen-year-old boy. Your ice merchant required three constables and one of your fellow snoops to capture him.”
“So when do we arrest the Lieutenant?”
Dickey took a deep breath. “Well, there is a problem with that. The Ministry of Justice has reassigned Happy to the palace guard, and we have no jurisdiction over them.”
“The only guards we can’t touch?”
Dickey nodded. “They report to the king, and once appointed, not even Issak Bolt can do anything to them. The king can do whatever he wants to the man.”
“Why?” Sam asked.
Dickey shrugged. “I don’t know, but I am going to make the case and submit it to the king. Don’t get your hopes up. Happy is unlikely to pay for his crimes.”
“What about the sergeant who did the killings?”
Dickey smiled. “My last interview. I will take you and another snoop along as witnesses. Then it is up to the king, who won’t do a thing. He loves to exercise his prerogative.”
~
Sergeant Polite fidgeted in his seat. The constabulary had picked him up as he left his shift at Baskin’s southern gate. With Lieutenant Happy’s promotion to the Royal Guard, the sergeant had been transferred simultaneously to a different guardhouse. Sam suspected Captain Fork or Minister Bolt sponsored the move.
“You were the last person seen with the two deceased sergeants?”
Polite looked trapped to Sam. The man looked at the interrogators and bit his lip before speaking. “So what? I didn’t kill them,” he said. “How could I? Redbird was found days after.”
“After you pulled him out of an ice merchant’s ice bath.”
The man’s eyes blinked, but he remained otherwise impassive. “Not me.”
“What if we had a witness?” Dickey said.
Polite grasped the arms of his chair. “What witness?”
“As if we would tell you,” another snoop said. “You would go off to tell Lieutenant Happy, recently promoted to the Royal Guard, wouldn’t you? He gets off with no punishment from the king, and you get hanging.”
“That won’t happen!” Polite said.
The interview went on and on. Dickey and the other snoop repeated the same things over and over until Polite hung his head.
“You have your witness. What if we make a deal?” Dickey said.
Sam wasn’t listening closely until that comment. A deal? Did snoops deal with criminals?
Polite swiveled his eyes from the snoop to Dickey. “What kind of arrangement would you be talking about?”
“No hanging. Reduced sentence to be served outside of Baskin,” Sam’s partner said.
“How reduced?” the guard asked.
“Fifteen or twenty years. We have to give those in the judiciary their discretion,” the other snoop said.
Sam looked on in shock as Sergeant Polite looked at the wall, not seeing a thing but obviously weighing advantages and disadvantages. His eyes narrowed and looked one way and another. Sam didn’t know what the man saw, but he hoped it was a thread of salvation from the rope.
