The Strange Scar

"A scar is a sentence the body writes in a language only the guilty can read."

The sound did not come again.

They stood in the black kitchen for the better part of a minute, the two of them motionless among the hanging copper, listening so hard that Thalessa could hear the blood in her ears. The wind sobbed. The clock ticked. Far overhead, once, something shifted with a soft, wooden, patient groan, and was silent.

"Gears," Roderick said at last. "The bell-tower clock. It is a Lindqvist movement, I should think, and the storm will have set the weights swinging."

"At four in the morning."

"Wind has no regard for the hour."

"No," said Thalessa. "But a wheel that turns in the wind does not stop when the wind drops, and the wind has not dropped." She stared up into the dark where the ceiling should have been. "That was a single revolution, Inspector. One. Slow, and even, and finished. The sound of a thing being wound."

He looked at her for a moment, and she could see him deciding whether to dismiss it. Then he nodded, once.

"The tower door," he said. "We will try it at first light. Not before. I will not climb a stair that I cannot see the top of in a house where someone has just murdered a man by clockwork."

"That is the most sensible thing you have said all night."

"I am a sensible man."

"You have drawn a gun on me twice."

"I was being sensible both times."

She almost smiled. She stopped herself, and saw that he had seen her stop, and looked away.

…

Dawn came late and gray, as if the sky begrudged it.

There was no sun to speak of. The storm had thinned into a hard, fine, driving sleet that rattled against the windows like thrown sand, and the light that leaked through the leaded panes was the color of dishwater. Thalessa had slept two hours in a chair, fully dressed, with the chest across her knees and her scalpel in her sleeve. She woke with a stiff neck and a taste of iron in her mouth and the clear, cold certainty that she had dreamed of a hand sliding down a long pale scar.

Roderick knocked at six.

He had shaved. It struck her as a curious thing for a man to do on the morning after a murder, and she said so.

"I have found that men who look like the grave are treated as if they belonged in it," he said. "Come. The Duke has asked that Sterling be laid in the chapel. I mean to see him there before they can arrange anything else."

"Arrange?"

"They have been arranging him since nine o'clock last night."

…

The chapel was a narrow stone room at the back of the east wing, built when the house was young and men still feared for their souls. A few cracked benches stood in rows. A black iron crucifix hung above a plain altar, and before it, on a trestle draped in gray velvet, lay the body of Ragnar Sterling in his dinner clothes.

Someone had brushed his hair. Someone had folded his hands upon his breast, the right over the left, and covered the nail wound with a clean white glove.

"Who gave leave for this?" Roderick said.

"I did, Inspector."

Duke Alastair Blackwood stood in the shadow of the altar rail with his back to them. He turned slowly. In the light of the two tall candles he looked ten years older than he had at dinner, a gaunt, stooped man with thinning silver hair and the hollow-eyed stare of someone who has not slept in weeks. His hands were clasped before him, and the knuckles were raw.

"He was my friend for thirty years," the Duke said. "I would not have him left in a cellar. It is not Christian."

"It is not evidence either, Your Grace."

"I have given you my statement. I will give it again. But I will not have him left among the herring and the ice."

"Then you will permit Scholar Ashwood a moment with the body. For my report."

The Duke's gaze slid to Thalessa and rested there, wary and bloodshot. "She is a doctor of poisons."

"She is the Crown's medical assessor in this case."

"Indeed." The Duke's mouth worked. "Then I suppose I cannot object." He stepped back from the trestle. As he did he drew a handkerchief from his sleeve and began, in a small, abstracted, terrible motion, to wipe the palms of his hands. He did not seem to know he was doing it.

Thalessa watched him for a moment. Then she went to the body.

She was aware of the room as she worked. The scrape of the Duke's shoes on the flagstones. The distant tick of sleet. The slow drag of Roderick's breathing at her shoulder. She drew off the white glove and examined the hand again, the neat dark hole through the palm, the lips of it bloodless as paper. She lifted the left sleeve and looked at the braided furrow. She was glad of the light now. It was a better light than the lantern's, flat and honest, and it showed her a thing she had not seen in the vault.

"Inspector," she said, very softly. "The Duke's coat."

"What of it?"

"There is no coat. Look at his left cuff."

He looked. The Duke, in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, had pushed back his left cuff to wipe his wrist, and for the space of one breath the sleeve had slid back far enough to show the forearm underneath. It was a lean arm, corded with age. And across the inner face of it, from the wrist nearly to the elbow, ran a long, pale, puckered band.

It was the same wax-colored ridge she had seen on the dead man's thigh.

The Duke caught her looking. He drew his cuff down in a quick, jerky movement and thrust the handkerchief back into his sleeve.

"Old injury," he said. "A boat hook. I took it in the wreck."

"Of course," Thalessa said.

"If you have finished, Scholar Ashwood—"

"Not quite." She drew back the cloth from Ragnar's waist. "With Your Grace's permission."

"What are you doing?"

"Looking for the same sort of wound."

She did not wait for permission. She unbuttoned the dead man's waistcoat, drew back the shirt, and turned the right thigh outward with both hands, as the surgeon had done. The scar lay there as it had in the candle's light, a long broad ridge, waxen, healed. She ran two fingers down it and felt the pucker under her skin.

And a second. On the inner arm, near the elbow, small and neat as a coin. And a third, along the ribs, hidden by the fold of flesh.

"Three," she said. "At least three."

Roderick had come close enough that his shoulder pressed hers. His voice was very low. "From the wreck?"

"No."

"A boat hook?"

"A boat hook tears, Inspector. It leaves a ragged edge and a flap. These are clean." She laid her thumbnail along the edge of the thigh scar. "Look at the margin. Straight as a ruled line, with the stitch marks at even intervals. Someone cut a strip of skin and flesh out of this man, lengthwise, with a sharp blade, and then closed the wound with a surgeon's stitches. I have seen it in the dissecting rooms. It is called an excision."

"For a growth?"

"For a growth you cut deep and narrow, and you take the tumor and a margin. This was cut broad and shallow." She spread her fingers, measuring. "About the width of two fingers, and the length of a hand, and perhaps the depth of a thumb-joint. It is not an operation. It is a harvest."

The word fell into the cold chapel like a stone into a well.

The Duke made a small, strangled sound.

Thalessa did not turn. She had her attention on the dead man's side now, the third scar, the one under the ribs. And she had begun to notice something else, something she could not yet name, a faint regularity in their placement.

Her fingers stilled on the cold skin.

Thorne, she thought.

It came without warning, a small bright shard of memory. A summer evening, a lamp turned low, his shirt half unbuttoned as he bent over a retort. She had laid her hand on his shoulder, and he had flinched, and gently, so gently, taken it away. An old scrape from my sailing days, he had said. Not a pretty thing. Don't look. And she, who had never in her life declined to look at a wound, had said nothing and looked away.

Three years she had known him. She had never once seen his back by daylight.

The room tilted, very slightly. She held on to the edge of the trestle until it righted itself, and was grateful that Roderick, at her shoulder, was looking at the Duke and not at her.

"Scholar Ashwood?" he said, a moment later, without turning his head.

"It is nothing."

"You've gone cold."

"The chapel is cold."

"That," said Roderick quietly, "is not what I meant."

She did not answer. She finished what she was doing.

"Why would anyone do this to him?" Roderick said.

"I do not know yet. But I know what I should think, if I met them on a stranger." She drew the shirt together and began to button the waistcoat. "I should think that this man had been tortured. Carved, in stages, over a long time. I should think that someone had held him down and taken a little of him at a time."

"By whom?"

"By the people who sank the ship. By whoever it was who held them." She said it quietly, still working. "A dead man with three of them, Inspector, and a living Duke with a fourth beneath his cuff. If they were prisoners, perhaps, of pirates, or of something on that boat—"

"No."

The voice came from the doorway, thin and hoarse and shaking.

Thalessa straightened.

Doctor Malthus Malakor stood in the arch of the chapel door with one hand on the stone and the other at his throat. He wore the same shirt as the night before, but he had put on a black coat, and he had drawn the collar up as if against a draft. His long face was gray. Behind his spectacles his eyes had the dull, peeled look of someone who has taken a drug to keep awake.

"No," he said again. "That is a mistake, Scholar Ashwood. Do not make it."

"Which mistake, Doctor?"

"The one you have just stated." He came a pace into the room. He moved like a man walking on a deck. "We were not tortured. We were not prisoners. We were castaways, and we were ill, and there was a surgeon among us who did what a surgeon must. I cut out the diseased tissue. A fever of the blood, a sort of sea-boil. It is common in long exposure. I excised it, as I have excised a hundred in the field."

"On all five of you?"

"On all of us. Yes."

"At the same time?"

The surgeon's eyes flickered. "In succession."

"Over how many days?"

"I do not recall."

"Three on Mr. Sterling," said Thalessa. "Placed on the thigh, the arm and the flank. The best meat, if I may say so, that a man carries. Not a boil among them, Doctor. I should know. A sea-boil leaves a different scar."

For a moment nobody moved.

The Duke had turned to stone. Roderick had not shifted his weight, but she felt the whole of him gather, like a spring.

Malthus drew a slow breath through his nose.

"I am a physician of thirty years' practice," he said evenly. "I will not be lectured by a girl who has read of the sea in a laboratory. If you wish to examine me, you may apply to the Surgeon-General. If you wish to accuse me, you will find that the Corps has already examined me, four years ago, and found nothing." He looked at Roderick. "Inspector, I expect this woman to be removed from the room."

"She stays," said Roderick.

"I will protest."

"You will protest in writing, Doctor. I shall be glad to read it." Roderick's tone was perfectly civil. "But while you are protesting, you may tell us where you were at four o'clock this morning."

The surgeon's face did not change. But Thalessa saw the very faint tightening at the corner of his jaw, and the long hand at his throat curl closed.

"In my bed," he said.

"Alone?"

"I am a bachelor, Inspector."

"Then you will not mind if I send my deputy to inspect the soles of your shoes."

"I have no objection."

He turned, stiffly, and went out. The Duke followed him a moment later without a word, his handkerchief pressed to his mouth.

Roderick waited until the footsteps had died.

"He lied," he said.

"He lied beautifully." Thalessa was staring at the doorway. "And he told the truth in the one place it hurt him. There was a surgeon among us who did what a surgeon must."

"You think he cut the others."

"I think he cut Sterling. And I think something about the cutting was not done to a prisoner." She looked down at the dead man's folded hands. "A torturer does not stitch his work, Inspector. He does not come back to dress the wound. These were done with care. With, God help me, a kind of tenderness."

"A surgeon's tenderness."

"Or a priest's." She drew the white glove over the nail wound again. "Whatever happened on that boat, they agreed to it. Every one of them. They bear the marks of it as if it were a mark of fellowship."

Roderick was silent for a long while.

"I do not like where that thought is walking," he said.

"Nor do I." She stooped and tucked the gray velvet round the dead man's shoulders, a small, almost reverent movement. "But it is walking, and we will have to go with it."

They left the chapel by the back door, into a cloister where the sleet drove sideways between the pillars. At the end of the passage a flight of narrow stone steps rose into the dark, and a small iron-banded door stood at the top of it, its latch glinting.

The tower, Thalessa thought.

She put her foot on the first step.

"Wait," said Roderick. He was looking at the stair. "Look at the dust."

It was thick and gray along the edges. But down the center ran a clean, narrow strip, the width of a small foot, worn smooth as if by daily use. And upon it, at intervals of a pace, lay a faint scatter of grains that glittered in the weak light.

Thalessa crouched. She touched one with her fingertip, tasted nothing, and looked at it under her lens.

"Salt," she said. "Fine and dry. The sort one gets from a fisherman's coat."