Chapter 8 — The Crow of Londrivar

  Crowe's flat was on the third floor of a townhouse at 14 Copper Street.

  It was not an address that appeared on any calling card — he had no calling cards. It was an address people discovered by referral, or by persistence, or because Maren had relented after being asked a third time. The building was dark brick with steam pipes on the facade like every other on the street, with an internal staircase that creaked on the fourth step and the seventh, and a landlady on the ground floor called Mrs. Hadwell who knocked on the wall when there was noise after ten o'clock and who had never, in the four years Crowe had lived there, come upstairs to complain in person.

  He respected that about her.

  The flat itself was three rooms: a sitting room that was also an office and informal laboratory, a bedroom that was primarily a surface for depositing things when the sitting room became too full, and a kitchen that Mrs. Hadwell had described on the first viewing as well-appointed, which Crowe had discovered meant there was a working stove and a window that closed.

  The sitting room was the real world.

  A large table at the centre, covered in papers organised on a system that appeared to be chaos but had a rigorous internal logic — active cases to the left, closed cases to the right, reference material stacked by frequency of use, not by subject. A bookshelf with volumes on chemistry, anatomy, criminal law, the history of Londrivar, three volumes of applied mathematics, and a detective novel he had been given by someone and never opened. A corkboard on the wall with maps, notes, and now the fragments of Case 001 — the sketch of Voss's diagram, the note in red ink, the hand-copied list of disappearances, the names of Drest and Mourne with annotations.

  On one wall, burn marks at a specific height that Mrs. Hadwell had twice asked him to explain and that he had twice promised to explain later.

  The armchair sat by the window overlooking Copper Street. It was old, darkened leather, with the right armrest worn from use. It was the only object in the flat that was there for comfort and not for function — which meant, in Crowe's logic, that it was probably the most important object in the room.

  It was where he sat when there was no case.

  There had been no case for three days.

  The first day without a case after an intense one was always the worst — the mind kept to the previous rhythm, looking for connections where there were none, building patterns in random things. Crowe had spent that day rereading Voss's correspondence that Drest had provided, not because he expected to find anything new, but because he needed something to process.

  The second day was better. The mind slowed. He had run experiments — some with chemical compounds on an improvised workbench near the kitchen, attempting to reproduce the kind of substance that could erase short-term memory without detection, information that might be useful later without his yet knowing for what. He had also played the violin for approximately one hour, which Mrs. Hadwell had endured with a patience he recognised as generosity.

  The third day — today — had begun with light rain and the morning paper sliding under the door at seven on the dot, as always.

  Crowe was in the armchair with his coffee when he opened it.

  The piece was on page three. Not large — five paragraphs, a moderate headline, no photograph. Watchmaker's disappearance under unclear circumstances — investigation conducted by private detective yields significant findings. The text described the Voss case with the particular imprecision of someone who had received information filtered through Maren and filtered it again through the need to fill five paragraphs. The essential facts were present. The important details were not.

  The last paragraph was the problem.

  The investigator, who works in informal collaboration with the Londrivar Guard, was not identified by name at his own request. Sources close to the case refer to him only by the nickname that circulates among inspectors in Lower Londrivar: The Crow of Londrivar.

  Crowe read the paragraph twice.

  Then he folded the newspaper carefully, placed it on the table, and looked at the window for a moment. The rain ran down the glass in irregular lines. In the street below, a rail carriage passed with its customary whistle, and the steam from the pavement grates mingled with the rain into a low white mist.

  Stolen story; please report.

  The Crow of Londrivar.

  There was an irritating logic to it. Crowe was a surname that meant crow, and crows were associated with ill omen, with inconvenient intelligence, with presence in places where there was death. It was the kind of nickname that was born without an identifiable author and died without anyone officially killing it.

  Or didn't die.

  He stood. Went to the kitchen, put more water on to boil, returned to the sitting room. He stood before the corkboard looking at the fragments of Case 001 with his hands behind his back.

  The Crow of Londrivar.

  The worst of it was that it suited the city. Londrivar was the kind of place that named things with an accidental precision that seemed intentional — streets that described what they concealed, buildings whose old names revealed functions no one any longer admitted. The nickname had that same quality: precise without having been chosen.

  He decided, at that moment, that he would not think about it again.

  At ten o'clock someone knocked on the door.

  Three knocks — Maren. He had a specific rhythm, heavier on the first knock, that Crowe had learned to recognise.

  — It's open — he said, without moving from the table where he was working.

  Maren entered with his coat still damp from the rain and the expression of someone who had climbed seven steps of staircase and concluded, around the fourth, that the visit could have been avoided if Crowe had a bell on the door like any normal person.

  He looked around the flat with his usual expression — not judgement, cataloguing. The corkboard, the workbench with chemical compounds, the violin leaning against the bookshelf beside the anatomy volumes.

  — You saw the paper — said Maren.

  — I did.

  — It wasn't me.

  — I know. — Crowe indicated the second chair by the window, which had a stack of papers that Maren moved to the floor with the ease of someone who had done it before. — It was someone on your floor who talks too much. The young guard who delivered the envelope, most likely.

  Maren sat. Didn't contest it.

  — The Crow of Londrivar — he said, in the neutral tone of someone testing the weight of a phrase.

  — No — said Crowe.

  — No what?

  — I'm not having that conversation.

  Maren made that sound through his nose that was his way of finding something amusing without admitting it. He took an envelope from inside his coat and placed it on the table between them.

  — New case — he said. — Industrial District. Mechanical components factory, East Sector. Workers reporting shifts they have no memory of completing. One operative found inside the locked factory at three in the morning with no idea how he got in. The manager came to the Guard yesterday.

  Crowe didn't pick up the envelope immediately. He looked at it for a moment.

  — Workers with no memory of their shifts — he said.

  — Six of them, so far. All with time-sheet records confirming their presence during the shifts they don't remember.

  — Time clocks.

  — All marking the same hour.

  Crowe picked up the envelope. Opened it. Three sheets — Maren's report, handwritten in the large and deliberate script he used for documents he considered important, plus two depositions copied out by a clerk.

  He read in silence. Maren waited, looking at the rain through the window, with the patience of someone who had learned that interrupting this process was counterproductive.

  — Time clocks all marking the same hour — said Crowe, without lifting his eyes from the paper. — Workers with no memory of specific shifts. Factory locked with an operative inside and no explanation for access.

  He set the sheets down. He looked at the corkboard — at the fragments of Case 001. At the note in red ink. At the sketch of Voss's diagram.

  Discontinuity. Intervals. Gaps between contiguous states.

  — You're doing that thing — said Maren.

  — What thing.

  — You're connecting this to the previous case.

  Crowe didn't answer. Which was, in itself, an answer.

  Maren leaned slightly forward, elbows on knees, his voice in the tone he used when he wanted something to be heard rather than merely registered.

  — Crowe. A factory with workers forgetting shifts has ten practical explanations before it has an explanation of the kind you're thinking of.

  — I know — said Crowe.

  — Then —

  — I know — he repeated. With a pause before it that made clear the matter was closed for now and open for revision later.

  Maren was quiet. He recognised that tone.

  Crowe folded the sheets and put them in his coat pocket. He stood. Went to the bookshelf, picked up the violin by the neck — not to play, just held it for a moment the way someone holds a familiar object when thinking — and returned it.

  — When can I see the factory — he said.

  — Tomorrow morning. The manager will be there.

  — Tonight — said Crowe.

  Maren opened his mouth.

  — I want to see it without the manager first — said Crowe. — Without anyone. The space speaks differently when there are no people explaining what I should be seeing.

  A pause.

  — I can get a key — said Maren, in the tone of someone agreeing without using the word agree.

  — Eleven o'clock.

  Maren stood. He picked up his damp coat from the back of the chair. Stopped at the door.

  — The Crow of Londrivar — he said, one last time. This time with something different in his tone — not irony, not amusement. Something closer to a quiet warning.

  — No — said Crowe.

  Maren left. The door closed.

  Crowe was alone in the flat with the rain on the window and the new case in his pocket and the corkboard before him.

  He looked at Voss's note for a moment.

  He saw the interval.

  Then he looked at Maren's report in his pocket — at the time clocks, at the forgotten shifts, at the operative found inside a locked factory with no explanation for how he got in.

  There was a voice in the most disciplined part of his mind saying that Maren was right. That there were ten practical explanations before anything else. That he needed to enter that building without anticipated conclusions and let the space speak.

  There was another voice — more recent, less trained — saying that coincidences of this magnitude did not exist.

  The problem was that both voices were right.

  And he still didn't know which one to listen to.