that hung in the air of the manufactory was beginning to layer itself over everything, making the room with its closed secretive drawers, its miniature limbs and tools and eyes, look like some uncanny half-remembered dream.
Gairden stood in the middle of the floor, avoiding the stain, turning slowly; letting his gaze travel.
Something glittered; something seemed to fall through the air. He glanced up, thinking there was a leak in the roof, but the ceiling was unmarked. He looked down, and there, by the door, was another of those tiny cogwheels – this one of a silvery-blue metal. He moved, and picked it up.
Out in the corridor another faint glittering fall, almost too fine to see; in the glow of the wall lamps it fell like a tiny burning star, landing outside the door of Rheese’s office.
It was locked; he was sure it was locked, but under the touch of his fingers the lock snicked back and the door swung open.
Gairden walked in. He would have some explaining to do if Rheese turned up. He stood with his head cocked, waiting, but it seemed that whatever had led him here had run out of steam.
There were papers on the desk again. One quick glance, and he would be gone.
Designs. Toys. A doll, a metal bird. Drawings in a swift, meticulous hand; another hand, heavier with the pencil. Thick lines scored through notes. Half-legible scrawls in the margins.
A brown, crinkled stain on the edge of the paper. Gairden sniffed. Brandy.
And beneath the desk were a pair of shoes. Waiting for the bootboy to pick them up for cleaning? They looked very clean already. Polished to a gleam.
Gairden glanced behind him, then picked up the shoes and turned them over.
The soles were smooth, grimed with the dust of the factory floor. If they had trodden in blood, it was no longer there. But something glimmered where the sole met the shoe. Something small and bright. With the tip of his pencil, he levered it out from the seam.
A tiny golden arrow, the weapon of a miniature Cupid. Gairden bounced it on his palm, put the shoe back where he had found it, and left.
The patent office was a great, brown, shuffling, rustling wasp’s nest of a place; off the central hallway with its noble domed ceiling and tall imperious counters were dozens of tiny rooms, crammed and choked with paper. Inspector Gairden, after a number of increasingly wearisome enquiries, misdirections, and misunderstandings, found himself in one of these, confronted by a small, tweedy, harassed man with thinning hair and a sore-looking nose. “You wish to examine a patent?” The man rubbed his nose and sneezed. “Excuse me, sir. It’s the dust. Which one would you wish to see?”
“I wouldn’t,” Inspector Gairden said. “I merely wish to be informed about any
“Oh, I see. Well, if you’ve the authority …”
“I have, yes.” He pointed to his authorization papers which were, in fact lying on the man’s desk; Gairden was tempted to snatch them back up before they disappeared in the great forest of paper that lay all about them. He found himself wondering how many trees had died, to provide these birth certificates of yet more machines.
“The thing is, Inspector, we can get more than a hundred a week. You want to know about all of them?”
“As many as that?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Anything from a new type of propelling pencil to a flying machine.”
“Ah.” Gairden tapped his chin. “Mannequins, then. Dolls, automata, things of that nature. And anything with the name Lalika.”
“Lalika?” The patent officer shook his head. “Fanciful.”
“Oh, and while I’m here, I’d like to see any recent applications in the name of Wishart. J. Wishart.”
“That would be with the Ws,” the patent officer said. He sighed, and got up from his chair with the air of a man much put upon, and disappeared among towering stacks of paper, muttering: “Doubleyou, doubleyou . . . How recent, Inspector?”
“The last six months, say.”
“Hmm. No . . . no, there’s nothing. Oh, that’s odd …”
“What’s odd?”
The patent officer reappeared, clutching a brown manila file. “Well, there’s one application, at least five years old. Nothing after that. Looks like old Frobisher’s handwriting – he retired last month. Came into some money, unexpected, and moved abroad.”
“Did he indeed? Then I’d like to see all the applications he worked on before he had such an unusual stroke of good fortune.”
“But …”
Gairden looked around at the tottering piles of paper. “I’m sure you don’t throw anything away, do you? Find them. I’ll wait.”
The sound of the machines thrummed through Rheese’s office, like a heartbeat. The level of brandy in the decanter had fallen; the levels in all the others stayed the same. They gleamed like great flaunting jewels. Gairden stood by the table; Rheese sat, as usual, behind his desk.
“I’m glad to hear you have some information,” he said. “Do feel free . . . and pour me one while you’re about it.”
“Do you have gin, Mr Rheese?”
Rheese paused for a moment. “Wouldn’t have put you down for that type, Inspector.”
“You do keep it, though?”
“Well, yes, for the staff, you know, or traders. Can’t stand the stuff meself. Did you want—”
“No, thank you, sir. I think the decanter may be chipped, in any case.”
There was a silence. “Really?” Rheese said. “Why would you think that?”
“Because I think it may have been used as a murder weapon, Mr Rheese.”
There was a faint clinking noise, then an odd, crystalline buzzing. The tray on which the decanters stood had begun to vibrate, a rhythmic resonance, silvery and strange.
Rheese rubbed his hands together, with a dry rasping sound. “A murder weapon? Really?”
“I don’t like machines, Mr Rheese. I don’t like the world’s obsession with them. But Jamie Wishart did. He loved them. And he put that love into what he made.” Gairden moved to the window, and looked out into the rain. A tiny persistent ringing made him glance down, and he realized that the latch of the window, too, was resonating, beating against the frame like the clapper of a bell. “You applied for a number of patents, did you not, Mr Rheese?”
“I . . . what? Yes. Of course I did. Where is that damned noise coming from?”
“Your father applied for a number, too. A man of great talent, Mr Matthew Rheese. He invented several mechanisms of some significance, I understand.”
“Yes . . . yes, he did. What is this to do with the matter at hand?”
“He was fond of Jamie, wasn’t he?”
“Really, Inspector …”
“He gave him the job, and the workshop. He even gave him a watch, for his twenty-first birthday. That must have jarred on you.”
“Father had a soft spot for lame dogs, Inspector.”
“But Jamie Wishart wasn’t a lame dog, was he? Your father recognized that. I wonder if the boy had a touch of the other, a strain of the fey to him; I suppose we’ll never know. Either way, Jamie Wishart was a genius. You aren’t, Mr Rheese.”
“How dare you?” Rheese exclaimed. “What do you know about it?”
Gairden pinned him with his gaze.
“Until Jamie came along, you hadn’t applied for a single patent. The patents you applied for after that weren’t yours. The inventions weren’t yours. They were all Jamie Wishart’s. He was too busy making what he loved to realize that you were stealing from him.”
“Now look, Inspector, that’s complete—” Rheese pushed himself out of the chair, his cheeks flushed, his teeth bared.
