L
enoir was still stewing when they arrived in Berryvine. He could not afford to let his anger get in the way of the investigation, however, so when Kody cleared his throat uncertainly, Lenoir said, “Speak, Sergeant.”
“Will we be checking in with the constabulary, sir?”
“Naturally. Crears might have information we need. Why—is there a problem?”
“No, sir, of course not. I only ask because we don’t usually involve the constables.”
“And why should we? Most of them are incompetent fools. Crears is different.”
“I have nothing but respect for Constable Crears, sir,” Kody said stiffly.
“As well you should. He is the best officer I have ever worked with, present company included.”
Kody held his tongue.
They found Crears just outside his office, apparently organizing a search party. There were about twenty people gathered, most of them wearing uniforms. The constable was handing out maps and giving instructions. When he spotted Lenoir, he paused as though slightly taken aback. Then he cocked his head toward the hitching post in a gesture that said,
I’ll be with you in a minute
.
Crears was a small man with flaming red hair and keen blue eyes. He had aged since Lenoir had seen him last; gray had started to overtake his beard, and his face was lined and worn. But he remained fit as ever, striding toward them with the lively gait of a man half his age.
“Inspector,” he said, shaking Lenoir’s hand. He and Kody exchanged handshakes as well, Crears seeming almost as a child next to the burly sergeant.
“Surprised to see you two. Wouldn’t have thought a case like this would earn a visit from the Metropolitan Police. Not yet, anyway.”
Not until the child turned up dead, was what he meant.
“Normally not, perhaps,” admitted Lenoir, “but there are two boys missing in this village, it would seem.” When Crears raised his eyebrows, Lenoir said, “Another boy was taken from the poor district of Kennian last night, an orphan called Zach.”
The astonishment on Kody’s face brought Lenoir’s anger to a boil again, but he put a lid on it. “According to the coachman I questioned this morning, Zach was brought here last night, in a green and gold carriage. Has anyone mentioned it?”
Crears shook his head. “But I haven’t been asking. Maybe someone saw a carriage like that. I can have some watchmen ask around if you like.”
“If you can spare the men.” Lenoir glanced around at the small crowd. “And it seems as though you can. How many watchmen do you have working for you?”
“A little less than fifty.”
Kody whistled softly, impressed. “How do you afford it?”
“They’re volunteers, mostly, although they get a small stipend. Trained them myself. Semiprofessional, I guess you’d call it.”
Innovative,
Lenoir thought approvingly. But he would not have expected any less from Crears; it was that sort of creativity and good sense that had landed him the plum constabulary in the Five Villages. Crears would have made inspector if he had stayed in Kennian, but he preferred Berryvine. Lenoir did not blame him. Berryvine was the second largest of the Five Villages, and like Kennian, it was a “village” by tradition only, having long since outgrown the name. Berryvine was a proper town, and out here, Crears was lord of his own fief. If he acquitted himself well, he could be chief of the Metropolitan Police one day—if he wanted it. Lenoir was not sure he would.
“In any case,” said Lenoir, “it is worth looking into the carriage. We can assume that both boys were taken by the same person, so whatever helps me to find Zach should also turn up your boy.”
Crears looked over his shoulder and waved, summoning a wiry youth, who came trotting over. The constable said something quiet to him, and the young man nodded and loped off again. Then Crears said, “I questioned the boy’s parents yesterday, but since you’re here, Inspector, maybe you’d like to have a go as well. Good chance of turning up something I missed.”
Lenoir and Kody followed Crears across town to a row of handsome stone town houses just off the main street. The buildings were neat and orderly, each one built right up against the next such that there was no space between them. Stone steps led up from street level to wrought-iron fringed landings in front of elaborately carved doors.
“Granne is a merchant,” Crears told them. “Dyes, mainly, from the berry farms. He trades them for all kinds of things—cloth, cattle, coin. He does well, as you can see. I assume his boy is being held for ransom.”
“A reasonable assumption,” said Lenoir, “but in this case I am doubtful.”
“Oh?” The constable’s clear blue eyes searched Lenoir as he gestured toward a set of stone steps.
“Whoever took Zach obviously was not interested in money, since the boy has no family.”
“And you’re sure it’s the same person who took the Granne boy?”
“It would seem a strange coincidence, particularly since the boys are the same age.”
“Zach is nine?” Kody cut in excitedly. “I
knew
it!” When Crears looked at him quizzically, Kody added, “Someone has been stealing the corpses of nine-year-old boys. I haven’t—that is,
we
haven’t—been able to figure out why. And now this.”
They had reached the doorstep of the town house, for which Lenoir was eminently grateful. He could not decide what was worse—that the sergeant had every reason to gloat, or that he was not doing so.
A girl of about fifteen answered the door. At the sight of Crears, her expression lit up with hope. “Did you find him, sir? Did you find our Mik?”
Her face fell as Crears shook his head. “Not yet. But we will.”
The girl ushered them inside and bade them sit, then went to fetch her father. The three officers sat in silence, each lost in his own thoughts, until Granne returned with his daughter and his wife.
“This is Inspector
Lenoir and Sergeant Kody of the Metropolitan Police,” said Crears. “I wanted them to talk to you, see if they could turn up anything I didn’t.” Lenoir noticed that Crears did not mention what brought them to Berryvine. He supposed the constable did not want word to spread that they might have a serial offender on their hands. Besides, these people would not want to hear that their son was not Lenoir’s only concern.
“Constable Crears tells me your son disappeared two days ago,” said Lenoir, “sometime in the afternoon.” Granne only nodded mutely, so Lenoir continued. “When was the last time you saw him?”
It was the mother who answered. “At the midday meal. He went out to play after. Said he was going to find his friend Bean.” She smiled wanly, her hands twisting unconsciously in her lap. “That’s not his real name—Bean—but Mika has always called him that. I don’t suppose I know what his real name is, actually. . . .” She trailed off, her gaze dropping to the floor.
“The friend didn’t see him,” Crears put in quietly. “Says Mika never showed up.”
“No one saw him come out of the house?” Lenoir asked. Crears shook his head.
Kody cleared his throat discreetly. Lenoir gave him leave with a wave of his hand, and Kody asked, “Did Mika ever mention feeling like he was being watched? Or maybe you noticed someone hanging around the house?” Again, heads shook.
This was not going anywhere. Lenoir rose, his fellow officers following suit. “Thank you for your time, and I am very sorry for your troubles. We will do our best to find your son.”
Outside, Crears asked, “What next, Inspector?”
Lenoir gazed down the length of the street. They were in the merchant district near the heart of the town, yet still very close to where the farmlands began. This unusual layout owed to the particular history of Berryvine, which, as its name suggested, revolved entirely around berry farming. No one wanted his business too far away from his customers, and thus, in spite of its size and prosperity, the town of Berryvine was built more or less in a long, straight line, several miles north to south, but less than two miles east to west.
“Where does the friend live?” Lenoir asked Crears.
“Bean? That way.” The constable pointed west down the length of the street. It ended only a few hundred paces away, emptying into a nearby field.
“So the boy would presumably have been taken somewhere en route.”
“If he was taken at all,” Crears said. “It’s possible he just ran away.”
“No,” said Lenoir firmly, starting up the street. “He was taken.”
They made their way toward the field in silence. Lenoir scanned the rows of town houses as they went, searching for an alleyway or some other hidden route by which a kidnapped boy might be secreted away without being seen by passersby. It was a quiet street; only the muted trill of pigeons accompanied their footsteps. From behind them the fading babble of the main avenue sounded like a distant creek. Ahead, a wagon trail ran perpendicular to the street, and beyond it the field opened out before them, revealing the long, ordered rows of a raspberry farm.
“Does this wagon road run the length of town?” Lenoir asked.
“More or less,” said Crears. They had reached the edge of the field now, and they turned their backs to the rows of raspberry bushes. The breeze sweeping across the field was cold on the back of Lenoir’s neck; winter was coming.
“And the gardens of this last row of houses overlook the length of it?”
“They do.”
Lenoir knelt, scrutinizing the wagon road. The grass grew long between the wheel ruts, and the earth was packed hard where the weight of the fruit-laden wagons came to bear. Lenoir despaired of finding any trace of what he was looking for, but then he got lucky. As he moved a little southward along the road, he spied a scar on the edge of one of the wagon ruts, as though a horse crossing over the road had tripped when its hoof failed to clear the hump of grass between the deep ruts. Lenoir tried to suppress the flutter in his stomach. It was too early to get excited. Far too early . . .
Crears had seen it now too. He turned ninety degrees to his right, following the line of the hoof marks toward the field. Sure enough, there was evidence here too, even more plain than the track on the road. The spaces between the raspberry rows were only just wide enough to permit a man to comfortably pick the fruit. A horse could pass through, but not without damaging the bushes. The trail could not have been more obvious: the dark soil was littered with sprigs of heart-shaped raspberry leaves, some trodden beneath the crescent moon of a horseshoe.
“But wait,” Kody said as Crears and Lenoir started into the field. “How do we know this is our kidnapper? That could be anyone’s trail!”
Lenoir bit back a harsh reply. He did not have time to explain every little thing to Kody, and anyway, was it not obvious? But he could not afford to alienate the sergeant any more today. He needed Kody to be sharp, not brooding after yet another row. So instead he answered, as patiently as possible, “It could be someone else’s trail, yes. But probably not. Think about it, Sergeant. You are a kidnapper. You have just seized a child in broad daylight, in his own neighborhood where everyone knows him. Now you must make your escape. Where do you go? The street has no alleyways, no hidden routes to take between the town houses. You can either go east, back to the main avenue full of people, or west, out to the fields. Of course you go west, and now you are on the wagon road. Do you take it, in full view of every back garden on the west side of town? Or do you take the boy into the fields where no one can see you?”
“Folks around here don’t take kindly to people riding through the berry fields,” Crears added. “More than likely this is our man. But even if it isn’t, we’ll still be headed in the right direction.”
They moved single file through the canyon of foliage, their footsteps muted by the closeness of their surroundings. It was the ideal getaway route, Lenoir realized. The bushes were thriving here, growing so densely that very little light filtered between the leaves. And they were high, almost to the top of Lenoir’s head. They would not completely conceal a man on horseback, but if he hunched over, no one would be able to tell who he was or what he was carrying. He would not even have to stain his clothing, for the fruit had long since been picked.
Lenoir called ahead to Crears, “Do you know whose farm this is?”
“Can’t remember his name, but yeah, I know him. He’s got kids of his own. Can’t imagine he’d have anything to do with it.”
“How much land has he got?”
“Not that much. A couple of hides, maybe.”
“And then someone else’s land.”
“Right, and then it gets to—”
Crears stopped so suddenly that Lenoir walked into him. “What is it?” Kody called from behind.
Crears turned around, his expression set. “Let’s go back for the horses, Inspector
.
I know where we’re going.”
“T
he place has been abandoned for years,” Crears explained, twisting in his saddle to speak over his shoulder. “The crop came up blighted one season, and the owner just left it. The fields have lain fallow ever since. It’s a sore point with the local farmers.”
Understandably so,
Lenoir thought as they approached along the wagon road that separated one property from another. It was as though the road were a boundary between two worlds, one bright and young and alive, the other dull and overcome with decay. To their left, emerald green fields were lined with bushes as neatly ordered as military ranks. Yet only a few feet away, the neighboring property was overgrown with thistles and clover. A wide, ugly trench had been dug between the road and the abandoned farm, a crude attempt by the neighbors to keep the weeds from invading their land.
It only grew worse the closer they got to the farm buildings. A pair of old fruit wagons sat at the head of the drive, one of them pitched forward like a wounded animal on its knees. It had been stripped of its front wheels, some opportunistic neighbor having salvaged them.
Crears was right to bring them here. It was the perfect place to keep someone against his will. No one would happen upon the site, and there was nothing within earshot. Even if the boy managed to escape, he would probably be too disoriented to get far. Lenoir only hoped that the three of them would be able to manage whomever they found here. Crears had sent one of his watchmen to round up as many others as he could, but that would take time, and they dared not wait. Every minute that passed was another risk taken, for there was no telling what the kidnapper intended.
They dismounted about halfway up the drive, tying their horses to a fence post that did not look up to the task. Lenoir had brought a sword, plus a brace of flintlocks that Crears had loaned him. The sergeant and the constable were similarly armed, though Kody preferred a crossbow to a pistol. He insisted that he could load it faster and that it aimed truer, and Lenoir did not argue, for he had never seen Kody miss a shot.
There was no evidence of the place being occupied. They could not see any horses, and there was no sign of life from the barn. The farmhouse itself was in ruins. The western half of it had collapsed, leaving a wreckage of rotting wood overgrown with ivy, and what was left standing had a precipitous lean, as though it could go at any moment. It appeared to consist of two rooms, probably the main room and a single remaining bedroom. Someone had boarded up one side of the larger room where the wall had caved in, but it was shoddily done and probably offered only the barest protection from the elements.
Lenoir, Kody, and Crears circled around the house. A path led from the back down to the river. It looked to have been recently trod. Lenoir made a mental note of it, but first they needed to investigate the house. Crears stationed himself at the back door and drew his pistols, while Kody and Lenoir made their way around to the front. They paused before the door. It had been painted once, but that was clearly long ago; only a few chips of white still speckled the shaggy gray wood, and shadows were visible between the shrunken slats. Lenoir could probably have shouldered his way past the door, but there was no telling what awaited them on the other side. They readied their weapons. Kody towered behind Lenoir, leveling his crossbow just above the inspector’s shoulder. Lenoir raised his pistol. Then he gave a short nod, and Kody pivoted and kicked the door off its hinges.
There was a flurry of movement in front of Lenoir’s face. He leapt back and bumped into Kody, but the burly sergeant held his ground as he fired the crossbow. The spring snapped to and a loud thud sounded against the far wall, and then all was silent. As their eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior, Lenoir spied a small shape pinned against the wall at eye height. A quail twitched in its death throes, its breast blasted through by Kody’s bolt.
“Nice shot,” said Lenoir.
They stepped over the threshold, the shadows of the interior parting to reveal their contents. Dust swarmed angrily in the beam of light streaming through the open doorway. It lit upon a rotting wooden floor and naked walls, and for a moment Lenoir thought the room was empty. Then he saw the boy—gagged and blindfolded, bound to a chair. He knew immediately it was the wrong boy, for his hair was yellow like his mother’s. His head sagged, and for a moment Lenoir feared he was dead. But as Lenoir moved toward him, the boy’s head rose. There was something strange about the way he moved, an eerie calm that drew Lenoir up short.
Kody elbowed past and knelt before the child. He removed the blindfold first. He reached for the boy’s bonds next, then changed his mind and pulled the gag from his mouth. The boy said nothing. He made no move, not even to wet his cracking lips. He simply watched Kody, his face impassive, as though he were not interested in what the sergeant was doing.
Crears was just coming around the front when Lenoir found the bedroom door. It was off to the right, closed. His heart surging with hope, Lenoir burst through.
The room was barren. At least, it appeared to be. “Get out of the doorway, Crears! You’re blocking the light!”
The constable complied, but Lenoir already knew it was useless. Zach was not there. Lenoir got down on his hands and knees, searching for anything that might be a clue. There was a dark stain on the floor next to the door, and Lenoir sniffed at it, fearing the scent of blood. What he smelled was not blood, however, but urine.
“He was here,” Lenoir said as Crears entered the room. “I think he—”
Lenoir was drowned out by a scream. There was a crashing sound from the room next door, and Kody swore loudly. Lenoir and Crears rushed back into the main room to find a bizarre sight: Kody was tussling with the boy, who was shouting and tearing at the sergeant with all his strength.
“What are you doing, Kody?” Crears cried. “You’re hurting him!”
“What do you want me to do, let him claw my eyes out?” Kody was trying to restrain the boy’s wrists. “Calm down! It’s all right, you’re safe now!
Stop it!
”
Despite his size, he was having trouble keeping the boy in check. The attack was so vicious, so frenzied, that for a brief moment Lenoir even thought the sergeant might be overcome. Then Kody seized the boy by the shoulders and spun him around, clasping him in a bear hug that pinned his arms at his sides. The boy continued to struggle, spitting and shrieking like a fiend, but the sergeant held him fast.
“What’s the matter with him?” Kody growled. He had a gash on his right cheek, shallow but bleeding.
Crears knelt before the boy, just out of range of his flailing legs. “Mika! Mika, it’s me, Constable Crears! You remember me, don’t you?”
But Mika did not seem to remember the constable. His eyes rolled back and he screamed again, as though something before him were too horrible to look at.
“They must have done something to scare the wits out of him,” Crears said.
“I think it is worse than that, Constable,” said Lenoir grimly. “Look at him—the boy is mad.” Mika had begun to tear at the bottom of his shirt, as though he would rip it from his body.
“Take him outside, Sergeant,” Lenoir ordered. “Try to keep him calm until the watchmen arrive. We can’t bring him with us like this.”
Crears looked disturbed as he watched Kody drag the boy out of the farmhouse, and when he spoke again, his voice was distracted. “There’s a path out back. Looks to have been used recently.”
“I saw it.”
“I’ll stay here and help with Mika.” Lenoir started to protest, but changed his mind and merely nodded. As constable of Berryvine, Crears would consider the boy his responsibility. Lenoir did not envy him that, nor did he envy him the task of delivering the news of Mika’s condition to the family.
The path behind the house led between a jumble of rosebushes that might once have been beautiful, but were now little more than a thicket of thorns. They had obviously been pruned at one time, and still retained some hint of their former shapes. The riot of growth that had since burst forth gave them the look of cages that could barely contain the wild creatures within, stray limbs reaching out between bars to claw at Lenoir’s cloak as he passed.
The sound of the river wandered up the path to meet him. He could already smell the clay that lined its banks, and the damp air grew chilly as he made his way toward the water. A tentative chorus of frogs had just begun, only to fall silent as Lenoir drew near. Here the path descended steeply before disappearing behind the trunk of an enormous willow tree. Beyond it, the river was slowly disgorging a ribbon of mist that retained its shape, as though a great snake were sloughing its silvery skin. The opposite bank was all but obscured. Lenoir could sense the trees looming behind the veil, but the only evidence of their presence was the occasional disembodied branch materializing and then dissolving in the roiling fog. Their unseen closeness made him feel as though he were being watched.
At the foot of the path, the tracks Lenoir was following turned over themselves, creating a muddy mess. They drew right up to the river’s edge: dimpled bootheels filled with water pointing in different directions. He had to squat to examine them, for the willow tree at the river’s edge cast a thick cloak of shadow over the ground. Now that he was closer, he saw that the prints had not been made as recently as he thought, for the peaks of the tracks were rounded, not sharp-edged as they would have been if the footprints were fresh. It looked as though someone had come down to the river to draw water, or perhaps to wash something. Lenoir spied a mark that might have been someone setting a jug down in the mud.
Beside him, the willow tree leaned far out over the water, the shaggy tips of its bottommost branches grazing the surface. It looked as though the tree might eventually topple over; so acute was its angle that the roots farthest from the river had begun to tear up through the ground. They were thick, as big around as a man’s thigh, and knotted over one another like a nest of vipers.
That was why it took Lenoir so long to notice the body.
He started back up the path and might have walked right by had he not spied a flash of metal out of the corner of his eye. Peering through the gloom, he saw what had caught his eye: a buckle, attached to a boot. What he had taken for one of the roots was actually a man’s leg, crooked at the knee so that the rest of the body lay concealed behind the mound.
Drawing a flintlock, Lenoir approached cautiously. The leg made no movement, and from the angle of it Lenoir was quite sure that its owner was not merely resting in the lee of the willow tree. His suspicions were confirmed when he walked around the mound of roots and found the wide, vacant eyes of a corpse staring back at him.
The particulars of the scene rushed into his brain, registering themselves one at a time: male; Adal; twenty-five to thirty years old; dead less than twenty-four hours. Lenoir holstered his pistol and approached, cocking his head to reconcile his view with the crumpled form before him. The man was on his back, his body draped across the tangle of roots so that his feet were higher than his head. One leg dangled over the top of the roots—the leg Lenoir had spotted from the path—and the other was splayed at an unnatural angle. The corpse’s head lolled back, openmouthed, hanging over the edge of a root. Neck broken, Lenoir gauged, almost as though the victim had fallen from the tree.
He gazed up at the branches above and immediately spied a green scar where the bark had been worn away. It looked as though someone had tried to hang the man. A lynching, perhaps?
Lenoir knelt over the body and moved the man’s collar to take a look at his neck. He had expected to find rope burns, but what he saw there instead caused him to cry out and stumble backward onto his rump.
Impossible!
He scrambled to his feet, but then his body failed him, refusing to obey his command to flee. Instead he stood rooted to the spot, staring. His mind buzzed uselessly. He could not be sure how long he stood there. A minute? An hour? Whatever the case, he was thoroughly lost in his own world when he heard the voice.
“What’s this?”
Lenoir jolted so badly that his knees nearly gave way. Even so, he had never been so glad to see Kody. The sergeant, for his part, appeared not to notice Lenoir’s state of shock, his gaze fixed instead on the corpse lying broken among the roots. He knelt before the body for a closer look. “Neck snapped, looks like, as though he fell out of the tree. . . .”
Lenoir scarcely heard him. There was a strange roaring in his ears, a sound distantly and unpleasantly familiar, like a bad dream. A dream about a night spent huddled in the shadows, listening to the blood rushing through his veins, praying for daylight. Nowhere to hide, no one to come to his aid . . . and then the burning on his arm, the burning and the chill, the horrible sense that the warmth of his life was being sucked out through his flesh. . . .
“That’s odd,” Kody said. He pulled back the man’s collar just as Lenoir had done. “Have you ever seen marks like this, Inspector?”
Lenoir could not answer him. Kody waited for a response; when none was forthcoming, he frowned and turned back to the corpse. “It looks like his neck has been . . . I don’t know. The skin is gray, as if he’s been dead for weeks, but the rest of him looks . . . Well, I’d say he’s only been dead a few hours.”
Lenoir understood the sergeant’s confusion. He understood that it should not be possible for some of the body’s flesh to be necrotic while the rest was not. Not unless the man had had some sort of terrible infection. . . . Lenoir experienced a brief twinge of hope at this thought, but it disappeared immediately. There was no infection, he knew. There was only one possibility.
Like judgment, like death, the green-eyed man had caught up with him at last.