carefully peeled it off, wincing as the wound beneath was exposed. Cabal leaned forward in his seat to get a better look, and sat back in disappointment. He had been hoping that the injury would clearly be a knife wound, but this was a shallow, if bloody, affair. It could easily be the result of a blade wielded with desperation rather than technique causing an ugly scoring instead of a clean cut. He couldn’t be sure if his knife had or had not been the cause. It was very frustrating.
“Does that look like a knife wound to you, Herr Meissner?” asked the captain.
Cabal regretfully shook his head. “It may be. I just struck upwards; I don’t even know if the blade cut on its sharp edge or was dragged. It’s not conclusive.”
Schten humphed. He had clearly been hoping for the examination to close the case immediately. He signalled to Zoruk to cover the wound again. “So,
“It was an accident, just a stupid accident. And I have a witness! I was in the corridor this morning and one of the stewards was just ahead of me. He reached the double doors leading into the dining room first and held it open for me. As I was reaching for the handle, so he could move on, he lost his grip or thought I was already holding the door or something. In any event, the door closed on my hand. They’re pretty heavy, you know. Powerful springs on them. It made quite a mess of my hand. The steward was full of apologies and got me off to the doctor’s … what do you call it? The clinic? The sick bay, that’s it. It was cleaned up and bandaged and that was that. Well, I thought that was that, but now everybody’s very interested in it.”
The captain had made a few notes and nodded. “Very well, Herr Zoruk. I shall make some enquiries. In the meantime, you will have to remain in custody.” Zoruk started to protest, but Schten talked over him. “Please remember, you are suspected of a serious crime. I would be failing in my duty if I did not complete my investigation before acting on its findings. If the steward and the ship’s medic confirm your story, you will be released shortly. All I ask is a little patience.”
Schten climbed to his feet and stood by the door, ushering Cabal out ahead of him. A burly engineer was keeping guard outside, and he locked the door once Zoruk was alone. Schten took the keys. “Thank you, Kleine. You may return to your section.” The engineer saluted crisply and left them. Schten looked pensively at the locked door before walking slowly away, Cabal by his side.
“Do you believe him?” asked Cabal.
“It’s irrelevant what I believe,” said Schten. “Facts are all that matter.”
“You have a scientist’s mind,” said Cabal approvingly. “Yes, facts are paramount, clearly. But you must have an opinion? Even scientists use a degree of educated intuition to guide their research.”
“An opinion … I do not wish to prejudge, Herr Meissner. But I will admit to some disbelief that you can injure a man in the hand in the early hours of the morning and, a few hours later, a suspect manages to injure himself in the same place in an innocent accident.”
“Your meaning being …?”
“My meaning being, is it an innocent accident, or is it an apparently innocent accident?”
“My thoughts exactly. It is a long coincidence if the former, but an engineered alibi if the latter.”
Schten stopped at the head of the circular staircase that led down to the first-class deck. “Just promise me that you made no mistake about injuring your attacker,
Cabal drew his switchblade from his jacket pocket and snapped the blade out. Schten raised an eyebrow. “Hardly a penknife, Herr Meissner. You carry that with you?”
“From last night, yes, Captain. You can hardly blame me. Look, I haven’t cleaned the blade since then. You can see blood has worked its way down to the pivot.”
Schten watched with evident disapproval as Cabal closed the knife and put it away. “That knife is material evidence. It should be held in the ship’s safe until official investigators have seen it.”
Cabal looked him in the eye and said, “You may have it with my blessings the very moment you supply me with a replacement of equal or greater lethality. A pistol would be nice.”
“Impossible.”
“Then I shall keep my knife.” The captain frowned, and then shrugged. It was un-Mirkarvian to disarm a law-abiding citizen, Cabal guessed. “Now, Captain, who is next for questioning?”
The ship’s sick bay was surprisingly large, a fact Cabal commented upon when they first entered. It was a long room with four beds out, but room for more. The rows of lockers at head height and the large glass-fronted pharmacy cabinet indicated that the bay was as well equipped as it was spacious. Dr. Huber looked just as capable as his environment, despite being only in his mid-twenties and having a mop of wavy black hair whose exuberance no pomade could hope to quell. He blinked at them over ill-advised half-moon glasses, and seemed so friendly and competent that Cabal’s usual dislike of doctors was hardly provoked at all.
Dr. Huber smiled. “You would be surprised at how quickly an infection can travel through a ship,
“Can’t they be confined to their cabins instead?”
“If the problem is mild, yes, but even something mild is debilitating, and the crew does not have individual cabins. Would you feel safe aboard a ship where some otherwise mild gastrointestinal illness had laid the crew low?”
Cabal had a momentary mental image of the crew fighting to use the heads while the bridge stood abandoned, the ship’s wheel rolling gently this way and that as the
“Besides which,” continued Huber, “serious illnesses and even, God forbid, serious accidents happen, despite our best efforts. The patients would require constant supervision. I cannot organise that if they are in their cabins.” He appeared not to have noticed the captain wince when he spoke of accidents. Some maritime superstitions had clearly made their way from the seas to the skies, and tempting fate was one of them. With hindsight, it also seemed likely this was why the doctor had not attended the meal that first evening; thirteen at table would be considered inauspicious. As things had turned out, twelve was not such a lucky number, either. Cabal watched with quiet amusement from the corner of his eye as Schten surreptitiously looked around for some wood to touch.
“To business, Doctor,” said Schten, after tapping the edge of the doctor’s desk with palpable relief. “Earlier today, Gabriel Zoruk came to you with an injury.”
The doctor thought for a moment and nodded. “The young man who came in this morning with a cut to his hand? Yes, a straightforward case. I just cleaned the wound and bandaged it. Asked him to come back tomorrow to make sure there were no signs of infection. What about him?”
Cabal recalled that there was some directive somewhere, probably a part of the Hippocratic oath, about patient confidentiality. It seemed from Huber’s blithe ignorance of such niceties that Hippocrates was regarded as some sort of dangerous liberal in Mirkarvia.
“In your considered opinion, Doctor, what do you think caused the injury?”
“He caught it in a door.” Huber looked at the other men’s faces and frowned at their silence. Grudgingly, he added, “Well, he said he caught it in a door. I had no reason to think he was lying. What’s this all about, Captain?”
“Was the cut consistent with being caught in a door, would you say?”
Huber bridled. “I’m no criminologist, Captain. The forensic sciences are not my field. I would regard it as a courtesy if I were not forced to make a judgement in a discipline of which I have only a passing knowledge.”
Schten nodded unhappily. He had wanted a nice black-and-white piece of information, but he knew enough of life to realise that such things are a rarity. There was no point in trying to wring a certainty from the doctor; it seemed Zoruk would benefit from the assumption of innocence that even Mirkarvian justice used, provided the defendant wasn’t a necromancer.
Muttering a thanks to Dr. Huber, he and Cabal made to leave. As they reached the door, however, Huber spoke up, his tone grudging. “I will say this much, gentlemen. When I was cleaning the wound, I remember thinking how remarkably sharp the door that cut him must have been.”
Muttering with dissatisfaction, Schten next sought out the other witness to Zoruk’s accident. Cross-
