Four and Twenty Blackbirds

hand. Tal thought he knew why; he and Brock were both veterans, but Brock was considerably his senior, and would never get any higher than he was now. It would be almost impossible to discharge him, but his hopes of advancement were nil. Hecould have spent his time as a place-holder, and probably Rayburn expected him to do just that, but like Tal, Brock had unfashionable ideas about the duties and responsibilities of a constable.

And if someone tied a bag of rocks to the Captain's ankles and threw him in the river to drown him, we'd both consider it a fine public service, but a waste of good rocks.

Evidently, since Brock was no longer in the position to do any good out on the beat, he had decided to help out Tal, who was. And perhaps he was getting back at Captain Rayburn by offering tacit support of a 'project' the Captain didn't approve of.

Somewhat to Tal's surprise,this murder had taken place at the very edge of the district, upstream, where the grain and hay-barges came in. Unlike this area of the docks, the barges were not towed by steamboats nor sailed in; instead, they were pulled along the bank by teams of mules and horses. The presence of all those animals, plus the kinds of cargoes that came in there, gave the Grain-Wharf an entirely different atmosphere than this end of town, more like that of the inland farm-market. Tal didn't know the day- constable on that beat, but from the tone of the report, he was competent at least.

The Grain-Wharf played host to a completely different cross-section of workers than the down-river docks as well; a peculiar mingling of farmers and barge-drivers, stock-men, grain-merchants, and river-sailors. In some ways, it was a more dangerous place; grifters and sharpsters of all kinds and avocations were thick there, waiting to prey on naive farm-boys just down to see the town. But there were businesses there you wouldn't expect to find on the waterfront, to serve the many interests that converged there.

Blacksmiths, for instance.

For the first time, the murderer was a plain craftsman, a Guild man. Even the secondhand store owner had been operating on the fringes of society, buying and selling things that, if not stolen, were certainly obtained through odd channels. This man had been one of Captain Rayburn's 'honest taxpayers,' though his victim had not. Perhapsthis would get Rayburn's attention.

Tal read the report quickly, grateful that the author had a gift for being succinct—given the paucity of actual detail, there were constables who would have padded the text shamelessly, since a thin report could be construed as lax performance that pure word count might disguise. This time, though, there really hadn't been much to report; there were no witnesses to the murder, though there were plenty who had rushed into the smithy at the first cry, including the smith's two apprentices. By then, of course, it was too late.

This was the first murder, at least to Tal's knowledge, that had taken place in broad daylight, but it might as well have been in the middle of the night. It had occurred in the smith's back-court, where his wood and charcoal were stored; the court was open to the sky, but otherwise completely secluded. The victim was a known whore—a freelance, and not a member of the Guild or a House. Her official profession was 'dancer.'

But there's a tamborine and a set of bones listed among her effects, which means she had at least pretended to be a musician. There's the musical link again.

The smith had actually killed her with a single stab of a long, slender knife with a triangular blade—

There it is again!

—but this time, the victim was beaten unconscious first, and rather cut up before she died. She must have taken a long time to die, at least an hour or so. No one had heard any of this, probably because anyone whomight have noticed the sound of blows would assume that one of the apprentices was chopping wood. Rain had been pouring down all day—

Again.

—and as dusk neared, it was just turning to ice. The smith had finished with the knife the job he had begun with his fists, and then went into the smithy, picked up a pitchfork he'd been asked to mend, took it back out into the court, braced it in a pile of wood, and ran himself up onto it.

He'd screamed as he did so, and that was the sound that had brought the apprentices and neighbors running. But he'd done a good job of killing himself; he hit numerous vital spots with the tines, and by the time they arrived, he was dead, and so was the girl.

There was the expected panic and running about before someone thought to summon the law. The knife was missing by the time the law arrived, a fact that the constable in charge carefully noted. This fellow was competent and thorough, giving the case his full attention. He stayed for several hours questioning those who had been at the scene about the missing blade. He'd even had the apprentices searching the entire smithy for the missing knife, and had ordered them to take the wood and charcoal out piece by piece until they either found it or had determined that itwas gone.

Good for him!

Tal handed the report back to Sergeant Brock, who tipped him a wink. 'I know you're a-mindful of this sort of affair. It's the sort o' thing agood law-man would find odd. Bodies are at the morgue,' he whispered as he slipped the report back inside his desk. 'And I'veheard there's something peculiar about one of them.' He shrugged. 'Night like this, no Priest is likely to sit about minding corpses.'