The Raven Spell (Conspiracy of Magic #1)(50)

“Right or left handed?” he asked.

Muttonchops shrugged. “Right.” He nodded at the autopsy photo, which showed a clear, thin tail to the right side of the slash left by the swiping of the blade against the skin from left to right. “Assuming the assailant stood over the victim’s back and lifted the head by the hair.” He mimed a slashing move with his hand to demonstrate.

“After the victim was already incapacitated from the blow to the back of the head.”

“Right,” said the sergeant. “So, if robbery is our motive, why cut the throat too?”

Spilling the victims’ blood afterward would support the theory of ritual murder as motive. The blood or some other part of the body used in conjunction with a forbidden incantation could boost the intent and power of the spell. He’d investigated the serial killing of cats and foxes in the countryside under the same assumption, their bodies drained of blood until they were nothing but desiccated corpses. An earl had turned up dead at the same time, as empty of his blood as the cats. They’d suspected the wife, but he could never link the two incidents together despite his misgivings. And yet Singh had said they held no such suspicion in this case. Why? Because one of their spiders didn’t jump? But then why had he focused on the occult angle in his drawings?

Ian shifted his attention to the autopsy photo. The same victim was positioned on his back, eyes shut, skin ghastly pale. Even in the black-and-white photo, the body had the lifeless hue of a block of ice cut from a pond. The man’s hair had been shaved off, and the body bore the typical stitch marks on the forehead and chest from where he’d been sewn up after the coroner’s inquest had pried back the flesh for an examination of the bone and gore beneath.

The sergeant pointed his tobacco-stained finger at the victim’s head, where a dark smudge was visible above the left ear. “Same mark as the others.”

Singh had described the mark as a mere bruise, but the photo clearly showed a bluish spiral about as big as the queen’s head coins he’d just paid for the view. The same symbol he’d drawn in his sketch of the other victim.

“Drawn on?”

The sergeant shook his head. “Doc insists it’s bruising. Called it a . . .” He stopped to open a notebook he kept in his breast pocket, then read, “A trauma-induced hematoma.”

“What kind of trauma leaves a bruise like that?” But, of course, there were very few real options. A spell was the most likely answer, though if the spiral shape was the result of an incantation, he wasn’t familiar enough with the form of magic to say so definitively. He supposed a stamp with that design struck against the side of the head would do it, but to what end? A maker’s mark for a murderer? Ridiculous.

“All the victims were mortals?” Ian asked.

“Something happen to your head, mate? You keep asking the same questions I already answered last time. Get yourself one of these,” he said, waving his palm-size leather journal before tucking it back in his pocket. “Write it down.”

“Just being thorough,” Ian bluffed.

“Did you figure out how your bloke fits in with any of this?” The sergeant sipped his beer while his rheumy eyes watched Ian’s face closely over the rim of his mug. “Still got him stashed over at that boardinghouse on Cedric Lane? Or maybe you moved him somewheres else?”

Ah, so that’s what this is really about. Ian had to work to keep from telegraphing the epiphany igniting in his brain like a high-voltage arc lamp from one ear to the other. This old copper wasn’t just his bribed informant; he must be Singh’s too. Which only confirmed the Constabulary was more interested in the missing George Elvanfoot than she’d let on. They knew he’d found him once and were hoping he could still lead them to him. So did that make George an official suspect in the murders? The report she’d passed to that constable while he was in her office probably alerted this old geezer to wait for him out in front of the station, tempting him with these photos so he could feel him out for information on George’s whereabouts.

Ian took another gander at the photos. “I’ve lost track of him,” he said with a small shake of the head. “But if this witchwork does turn out to be his,” he continued, pointing to the marks on the side of the head, “he’s a better sorcerer than I gave him credit for.”

“How’s that?”

“You ever seen a mark like that from a spell anywhere else?”

The sergeant mopped foam from his mustache with a swipe from the back of his hand. “I seen it on some old standing stones once. Pagan nonsense. Up north.”

The implied pejorative of “up north” struck home. An insinuation about the way witches cleaved hard to the old magic in the north as practiced by men like his father and even Henry Elvanfoot. The sergeant was a fool if he thought his kin up north were backward cunning folk leaping over bonfires and peddling sleeping potions to ailing mortal tourists for profit. Respect for the deep roots where their magic was born had kept the tender sprig of isle enchantment alive, not only in the people but in the land as well. But he took the man’s point: a northerner was missing, and a northern symbol was the common supernatural link between the murders.

“Aye,” Ian said amiably. “We’re fond of our ancestors in the northern vales.”

The two men clasped their hands around their mugs and sipped in silence for a moment, while the clatter of laughter and the creak of the timbers above suggested the place was filling up. Soon punters would be spilling into the basement as well.