The Dire King (Jackaby #4)(12)

I surveyed the dejected lot. More than miserable, several of the detainees had suffered recent injuries—black eyes, bloody lips. A man toward the back was cradling his arm as though it might be broken, and behind him I could see a fellow whose face appeared to have been badly burned.

A portly officer with a walrus mustache was frantically filling out reports and signing paperwork for the latest batch of remandees.

“Mind if I have a little peek at those, Alton?” Jackaby asked as he slid the officer’s clipboard off his desk and began to flip through the most recent arrivals.

“It’s Allan,” the man said. “Hey—I’m gonna need that back.”

“It’s fine,” Marlowe grunted.

“Where is Snorri Schmitz?” Jackaby asked the room.

Manacles clinked as Mr. Schmitz waved a hand forlornly. He was a short, round-faced man. “This doesn’t list any offense,” Jackaby declared. “It just says he was accused of being half gnome!”

“You have to admit, he is rather on the stumpy side,” mumbled the mustachioed officer. Snorri glowered at him. “But if you say he isn’t, Mr. Jackaby—well, then I suppose you’re sort of the expert.” He looked to Marlowe to confirm this. Marlowe looked at Jackaby.

“What? Of course he’s half gnome! That’s not the point! Show me the law that says having human parents is a requirement for citizenship!” He flipped a few pages. “Stupid. Stupid. If that one were a changeling, those irons would be burning his skin. Stupid. And how about this? You’re accusing this woman of witchcraft and devil worship? Well, which is it?”

“Erm, both?” Allan supplied.

“Oh, come on, Allan! You don’t have to be an expert in the occult to work out the problem there. Who’s the one person you need to believe in if you’re going to worship the devil?”

“Er . . .” Allan’s mustache bobbled. He looked to Marlowe for help, but the commissioner only raised an eyebrow.

“Care to take a crack at it, Miss Rook?” Jackaby turned to me.

“The devil?” I said.

“Right you are! If you’re going to worship Old Scratch, you’ve got to believe in him in the first place, haven’t you? Witchcraft is a belief system, Alton—”

“Allan.”

“—and those who practice it believe in various gods, goddesses, and spirits. Care to take a stab at who’s not on the list?”

“The . . . devil?” Allan guessed meekly.

“Now you’re catching up! If you are going to make a lot of idiotic accusations, you might at least try to avoid making mutually exclusive ones!”

A door opened at the end of the hall, and two officers half dragged the sagging body of a thin man in a gray cardigan up to the door of the cell. Jackaby dropped the clipboard back on the desk and watched the procession shuffle up.

“Detainees will move away from the door,” instructed the first officer, pulling the keys from his waist. The men inside did their best to squeeze back a few paces, and the prisoner was deposited within. His cell mates helped him limp over to the bench. His face was badly bruised, and he was bleeding from a cut just above his eye.

“Like I said,” Marlowe grunted. “Thoroughly interrogated.”

“What happened to that man?” demanded Jackaby.

“Man isn’t quite the word for it,” a familiar voice cut in. Mayor Spade himself had emerged from the doorway at the end of the hall.

The mayor wore a canary yellow waistcoat and a coffee brown bow tie. He stumbled as he stepped out, sending his spectacles sliding down his nose, and he nudged them back up. Spade might have been the least intimidating figure in the room, incarcerated grandmothers included. If one were to vandalize the portrait of a slightly stocky twelve-year-old boy by erasing his hair and scribbling in a beard, one would have produced a reasonable likeness of Mayor Philip Spade.

“It took us some time to coax the whole of it out of him,” he continued, puffing out his chest proudly, “but we got the job done. Hello, Detective. Glad you could finally join us. I was beginning to wonder if my telegrams were going astray.”

“I read the first few,” said Jackaby. “I’ve instructed my duck to just file the rest directly under P. I left it to him to decide if that was for politics or paranoia.”

“No need for that,” Spade said, bristling. “Turns out we were right all along, weren’t we? You might have saved us a lot of trouble if you had lent us your assistance sooner.”

“I don’t think you need my assistance to rough up innocent people.”

“Oh, don’t worry. We let the people go,” Spade said.

Jackaby did not reply.

“Oh, come off it. Really. You and I are marching under the same banner, Detective. We’ve made a few mistakes, to be sure, but we’re correcting as we go. I am making New Fiddleham safe again.” He squared his jaw.

Jackaby looked unimpressed. “For whom?”

“For us!” Spade insisted. “For people!”

“There are at least a dozen sentient species represented in this chamber—so what gives you authority to decide which ones get to be considered people?”

“This is nothing,” said Spade, his eyes twinkling. “You should see what we’ve got locked up in the animal control office.”