The cook returned from her break then. Cora questioned her and found nothing in the old woman’s answers that countered what her workers had said. There were no signs she’d chosen to poison the people in the barn, but Cora was certain her soup had been used to do it. That was a kind of guilt.
Tr’stanton was waiting for her in the bar, another glass of Greynal in his fretting hands. ‘Well? Are you finished?’
‘I need to talk to the serving boy, Elis.’
‘He’s in the kitchen,’ Tr’stanton said, already turning away.
‘No, he isn’t,’ Cora said firmly. ‘I need you to find him for me, now.’
Tr’stanton pushed past her into the kitchen but was out again soon enough, calling for a search.
Cora stepped into the courtyard. The inn flanked one side, the barn the other. Next to that were the stables – plenty of them, and no surprise, given this was a coaching inn. There weren’t many places for the boy to hide, if he was still close by. The road stretched into the distance on either side of the inn, open scrub land surrounding it as far as the eye could see. As the calls for Elis to show himself continued around her, Cora lit another smoke and allowed herself to imagine what Finnuc must have felt when the coach had arrived here the previous night. Had he any idea his life was in danger? When she’d last seen Finnuc, in the cell back at the station in Fenest, he’d seemed resigned to his fate. Maybe he knew what was waiting for him on the road to the Steppes, and yet he’d still chosen to tell Cora about Tennworth and confess to the murder of the Wayward storyteller anyway, risking his life. Perhaps he wasn’t all bad.
Constable Jenkins was still at her post in the barn’s doorway. Cora joined her there but kept her back to the bodies still lying in the straw.
‘I thought it was over when we caught the Casker,’ Jenkins said, sounding gloomy.
‘The Audience knew better, Constable.’
‘Who do you think we’re looking for now, then?’
Cora rolled her shoulders: the ache of the ride from Fenest was still with her. ‘I think you know the answer to that question.’
Jenkins looked away. ‘Tennworth.’
‘Exactly. Who is very likely a Chambers. The most powerful people in the Union. If we can find the person who did this—’ Cora pointed at the barn ‘—we’re a step closer to finding Tennworth.’
‘This is hardly the kind of thing a Chambers would do themselves though,’ Jenkins said, keeping her voice low.
‘Of course not. We’re looking for a lackey,’ Cora muttered. ‘Someone to do the dirty work and disappear. No loose ends.’
‘The kitchen staff?’
Cora grunted. ‘They weren’t much help.’
She was halfway through telling Jenkins what she’d learned when a cry went up from the stables. A few seconds later the lad with the limp came out, clutching the collar of a weeping boy.
*
The boy Elis didn’t look much like a cold-blooded killer. He was no more than ten and seemed to be crying more than he was breathing. It was a day for people running out of air. Cora feared he might join the Audience before she’d had a chance to question him, so she ordered everyone apart from Jenkins back inside the inn. That didn’t mean people didn’t watch from the windows though.
‘Let’s go over here, Elis,’ Cora said, and pushed him, gently, into one of the stables, away from the view of the inn, and of the barn’s doorway too. ‘You, me and Constable Jenkins will have a little chat about your work last night.’
‘I… I… didn’t mean to. I didn’t know…’
‘All right, now,’ Cora said gently. ‘No need to fret. Sit yourself on that pail there.’
Jenkins guided Elis to sit, and then squatted in the straw next to him. Cora stayed standing, her back to the stable door. Just in case he tried to make a run for it.
‘Now,’ Cora said, ‘I want you to tell me what happened last night, when you took the soup to the barn, and do it nice and slow.’
The boy fumbled in the pocket of his trousers and brought out a mark. He thrust it at Jenkins. ‘You can have it! I don’t even want it!’
Jenkins took the offered coin and glanced at Cora. ‘Is that from Mr Tr’stanton?’ the constable asked the boy.
He sobbed again, wiped his hand across his nose, and shook his head. ‘I heard Mr Tr’stanton say them people in the barn are dead.’ He looked up at Cora, his whole body shaking. ‘Is it true?’
‘Let’s start from the beginning, Elis, like you were telling the Affable Old Hand a story. Maybe we’ll try to tell it together. Can you help me with that?’
Elis nodded.
‘Good,’ Cora said. ‘Were you in the kitchen last night when Cook made the soup?’
Another nod.
‘And did she make it like she usually does? Nothing special about it last night?’
‘It was the same soup as always.’
‘And then she asked you to take it to the barn?’ Cora said.
‘There was people staying in there. Going to the Steppes, Cook said.’
‘And she was right. Did you take the soup by yourself, Elis?’
‘I did, but… I couldn’t carry everything in one trip so I took the bowls and spoons first, and the bread, and I gave them to the lady in the blue clothes. Clothes like yours.’ He looked at Jenkins.
‘What were they doing, the people in the barn?’ Cora said.
‘Just sitting. They had some cards. The man in the blue clothes, he was sitting with the other man, the Casker. They were far away from the door. I wanted to look at the Casker’s tattoos but the driver said I had to hurry up. She was hungry. So I went back to the kitchen to get the soup. I was nearly back at the barn when he grabbed me.’
‘Who was this, Elis? Who grabbed you?’
‘I didn’t know him, and I would have remembered him if I seen him before. He’s funny-looking.’
‘Funny-looking how?’
‘His nose was bent.’ Elis did his best to squash the end of his own nose onto his cheek and his voice shifted into nasal. ‘Like this.’
‘Like it had been broken?’ Jenkins said. The constable had taken out her notebook and was scribbling away.
‘Yes, and he weren’t tall. No higher than my mum and she’s only little.’
‘And how old was he?’ Jenkins said.
‘Ummm. Old?’
‘Old as the detective here?’
The boy shook his head vehemently. Cora supposed that, to a boy like Elis, forty-something was ancient.
‘Your age,’ he said to Jenkins, which meant close to twenty.
‘And where was this man when he spoke to you?’ Cora said.
Elis turned and pointed to the corner of the barn, to the right of the door. ‘There. He come round the side.’
From where he’d have had a good view of the inn’s main doors on the other side of the courtyard. He could have watched Elis make the first trip with the bowls, then waited until the boy came back with the soup pan.
‘The woman with the flowers in her hair saw him too,’ Elis said. ‘She’ll tell you about him. About his bent nose.’