Jackaby (Jackaby #1)(40)
“I think that can wait until we’ve reached the station,” Marlowe said with a grunt.
The watchmen from either end of the hallway suddenly appeared at the door. Jackaby stepped out as calmly as one might exit a coach, presenting his wrists to be handcuffed.
“What?” My mind reeled at the sudden, extreme turn the day was taking. This was madness! “Mr. Jackaby—can they do this? You haven’t done anything! Inspector, please. He hasn’t done anything!”
Marlowe delicately folded back the corner of the handkerchief in his hands, revealing the metallic sheen of the fork, and a crimson stain, which could only be blood. He made a show of thinking about the object for a few moments while Jackaby was shackled. “Don’t worry, Miss Rook.” He turned to me, flipping the cloth back over the tuning fork. “He won’t be leaving alone. I did warn you not to let him drag you into his craziness, didn’t I?”
Marlowe’s heavy, iron handcuffs were icy cold as he clicked them onto my wrists. As we drew into the lobby, we passed a small crowd of tenants being herded into the office by uniformed officers. A woman in a canary yellow dress made a point of alerting as many of her neighbors as she could nudge that we were passing through. They shuffled and watched our approach, in no hurry to be interviewed, but eager to eavesdrop. A reporter had set up a camera by the doorway, and he flashed a photograph as we arrived. Marlowe barked at him to put it away, and an officer crossed to block his view, but I tucked my head as deeply into my coat’s collar as I could, flushing with embarrassment. Jackaby, for his part, seemed unflappably comfortable, striding with as much confidence as if he were leading the policemen and not the other way around. The reporter didn’t try for any more photographs, but the nosy gossip in yellow had found her way over to him. She was stealing glances at us, and I saw her mouth form the words “that girl” with haughty disdain, before another figure burst from the milling crowd.
Mona O’Connor shoved past her neighbors and planted herself in front of Jackaby before any of the officers could intervene. She jabbed a finger into his chest accusingly. “You! You lied to me!”
“I assure you, Miss O’Connor, I did nothing of the sort. This is all a misunderstanding. If you don’t mind, we do need to be getting along.” His calm was mesmerizing, and if not for the cuffs jingling on his hands, I might have forgotten he was under arrest. Mona was not placated.
“You did! You lied to me!”
The guard on Jackaby’s arm attempted to position himself between the two, mumbling an ineffective, “Step back, please, madam. Out of the way. Step back.” An officer from the lobby came to assist, tugging at her arm. She jerked it away and persisted.
“You told me she would be better by morning!” she cried out as we began to move forward again.
Now Jackaby’s unflappable expression faltered. His eyes went wide and his brow creased. He attempted to stop, and the officer behind him gave him a shove. “Mrs. Morrigan?” he called over his shoulder as we were pressed toward the door. “You mean to say she isn’t?”
“Worse!” Mona’s voice hollered past the uniform now bodily restraining her. “A hundred times worse! The worst she’s ever been!” The officers finally restrained the woman and succeeded in ushering Jackaby and me out the door.
Jackaby’s face was ashen as we reached daylight. He did not speak again until the two of us had been loaded into the back of the police wagon. The policeman slammed the doors, and we were alone on hard wooden seats, which stunk of stale beer and vomit.
“It’s bad?” I asked.
He breathed in slowly before responding. “Each night Mrs. Morrigan has wailed, a life has been brutally ended. If she wails, now—wails a hundred times worse, now—then yes, I imagine it is very bad, indeed.”
Chapter Nineteen
Well, look on the bright side,” I said, after the officer had slid shut our cell doors and clicked tight the locks. “At least we’re in jail.”
In the adjacent cell, my employer pushed back a handful of dark hair and raised an eyebrow in my direction. The processing officer had taken our personal effects, and Jackaby looked exceptionally frail in the barren cell without his silly hat and coat to hide in.
“True, we’ve been locked in here,” I continued. “But you could also say the murderer has been locked out there, which is something.”
It wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Jackaby and I had been stuck in separate holding cells, of course, but the enclosures ran along the wall, connected on either side, so I didn’t feel entirely alone. Aside from my employer and me, the lockup contained only one other inhabitant—a peacefully snoring drunk with cheery red suspenders who lay on the far side of Jackaby. Our cells faced not the drab cement slab I had envisioned, but instead a simple, carpeted walkway, bordered by a couple of desks with official-looking documents sorted neatly in trays. An officer sat at the nearest one, stamping papers with a satisfying thup-thup. In the corner was a small table with a few coffee mugs and a half-eaten cake with bright white frosting. Tacked on the wall above it was a handwritten Happy Birthday, Allan. I had heard of offices feeling like prisons, but in this case our prison felt, rather anticlimactically, like an office.
“I would rather be at home on this occasion,” said Jackaby.
“I’m just thankful the constables can’t go calling my parents to bail me out,” I said. “I don’t want to know what they would think if they could see me now.”