Cora started. ‘What? Where are they from?’
‘Dunno. Married in, Butterman said.’
‘That’s…’ What? Unlikely? Illegal? She’d have to ask Jenkins. The constable was a fount of knowledge about elections. ‘How did Butterman hear about this?’ Cora said.
‘Couldn’t you ask him that, you being police?’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Hacks don’t reveal their sources. Not willingly. Tell me what you know about it.’
‘One of the sellers told me there was a note slipped under Butterman’s door. No name on it, just the stuff about the new storyteller. But someone else said Butterman had some meeting at the Assembly building last week and that’s when he was told.’
‘Meeting the Wayward Chambers?’ Cora said.
Marcus shrugged. ‘Butterman goes there all the time for his stories. Likes the lunch they give him.’
‘Because it’s free,’ Cora muttered. The story wasn’t in the ’sheets yet. Someone was keeping this tale away.
‘Well,’ she said to Marcus, ‘keep your ears open.’
‘For you, Detective, they’re never closed.’
‘As long as I’m paying you.’
‘Girl’s gotta eat, ain’t she?’ Marcus grinned.
‘And walk the streets.’ Cora fished in her pocket and found a few pennies, which she tossed to Marcus. ‘For your boots. You won’t be much good to me if you can’t keep up.’
In a blink, the coins had disappeared inside Marcus’ frayed and grubby sleeve. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t tell Beulah you’ve got some pennies left to pay your debts at the Dancing Oak.’ She turned to go but collided with Constable Jenkins in the doorway. ‘Partner take you!’ Marcus shouted.
Jenkins raised her palms, as if facing a Seeder bandit wielding a knife.
‘At ease, Constable,’ Cora said. ‘Marcus here was just leaving. Weren’t you, Marcus?’
Marcus looked Jenkins up and down, then gave a loud sniff. ‘No wonder you’re needing help, Detective.’ She headed down the corridor, no doubt ready to shout at Lester on the front desk.
‘I need breakfast,’ Cora said.
Jenkins produced a bag and the stale office was filled with the warm, buttery smell of pastries. ‘Sergeant Hearst sent me out for them.’
‘Hope you filled in the proper ledger for that purchase, Constable Jenkins,’ Cora said lightly, and raised her eyebrows. ‘Commission does insist on accuracy in all transactions, all of the time.’
Jenkins’ face paled. ‘I thought I did, but if you’d like to check, Detective, I can get—’
‘Jenkins, it was a joke. So, Hearst sent you for breakfast, but he isn’t here to eat it.’
‘He said to tell you he’s on his way.’
‘Pigeons eating first again, are they?’ Cora said. ‘Coffee, then, while we wait for the sergeant to finish stuffing those flying rats with seed.’
The briefing room was busy, with the night shift bedding down and the morning constables getting ready to go out. Jenkins started talking to one of them, murmured names that meant nothing to Cora but she did hear ‘Perlanse’. The other constable looked away, his eyes wet. Jenkins clasped his shoulder. This was someone who was close to the officers who’d been poisoned along with Finnuc. And what did Cora have to show for the constables’ deaths?
She stepped away to let the constables talk. Last night’s edition of The Daily Tales was on the table by the coffee pot. The print was heavily marked by mug rings but she could just make out a story that claimed a Casker had robbed a Seeder farm, killing the residents in the process. She picked up the sheet, but the paper fell apart in a wet mess of coffee. It wasn’t worth reading anyway. There was more truth in a Perlish tax form than there was in The Daily Tales’ coverage of life in the south of the Union.
Sergeant Hearst appeared then, and Cora called Jenkins. The three of them went into her office and she closed the door.
‘So,’ Cora said, looking at each of them in turn. ‘We need to find out who Tennworth is. Let’s recap what we know so far.’
Hearst cleared a corner of Cora’s desk to perch on. ‘Point one, Tennworth is the name Finnuc Dawson used for the woman who’d rescued him as a child.’
‘And point two,’ Cora said, ‘Finnuc all but admitted to me that Tennworth was the person who told him to murder the Wayward storyteller.’
Jenkins took a pastry from the bag. ‘Point three, Tennworth is a woman.’
‘How sure are we about that point?’ Hearst said.
‘In all Finnuc’s stories she was a woman,’ Cora said. ‘That was one of the few things that stayed the same: Captain Tennworth was a woman who helped him. When I arrested him in the winery, he stuck to that.’
‘So that’s point four,’ Jenkins said, ‘that Tennworth owns, or is at least associated with, a winery here in Fenest.’
‘Yes, but point five is that Tennworth isn’t her real name,’ Cora said, and took her own pastry from the bag.
‘Well that’s wonderful,’ Hearst said. ‘We don’t even know if it’s her real name?’
‘It might be one of her names, sir,’ Cora said. ‘I don’t know. But we’ve got to start there. And we have to acknowledge point six: the fact Tennworth might be a Chambers.’
Jenkins seemed to shiver at this. Cora couldn’t blame her.
‘Though it pains me to have to say this out loud,’ Hearst said, and glanced at the door to Cora’s office as if to check it was still closed, ‘where does the Chambers angle come in?’
‘Well, Chief Inspector Sillian told me it was only the Chambers who knew the identity of the other realms’ storytellers before the election,’ Cora said. ‘Therefore, logically it had to be a Chambers who ordered Finnuc to kill the Wayward storyteller, Nicholas Ento. I believe the same Chambers then ordered the killing of Finnuc in Perlanse.’ She chewed on her pastry and let her words sink in.
After a while, Hearst cleared his throat. ‘Right. If we go down this road then we need to think about it practically. The current Chambers, three of them are women: those of the Caskers, Rustans, and Seeders.’
‘None of whom are called Tennworth,’ Jenkins said. ‘So it’s almost certainly not her real name.’
‘And there’s no record of her, or her winery, anywhere in the Wheelhouse records,’ Hearst said. ‘That in itself is odd. That the Commission should have no knowledge of her? How much can we trust that what this Casker Dawson told you is true?’
‘I trust him on this,’ Cora said quietly.
‘Maybe the Casker angle is a good place to start,’ Jenkins said, ‘with the Chambers, I mean. Dawson was a Casker. He called Tennworth “Captain”. People in charge of barges are called “Captain”.’
‘Seems as good a lead as any,’ Cora said. ‘What’s the name of the Casker Chambers?’
‘Kranna,’ Jenkins said, without missing a beat.
‘With the Perlish story tomorrow, we’ve got time,’ Cora said, dusting the pastry crumbs from her hands.