Page 53 of A Case of Possession
“And?”
Crane cautiously flexed a shoulder. His throat was horribly dry. “Willetts. You speculated he was killed by someone needing the chant or the amulet. But clearly the shaman, that thing,didn’tneed them. So why kill him? I concluded he was stabbed to shut him up. Not about the story, everyone already knew that, but for the thing he knew and nobody else did. The real ending.”
His voice cracked. Merrick threw him a hip flask, and he took a gulp of raw brandy. “Christ! Steal the good stuff next time, you know where it is.” He handed it on to Stephen. “When we first heard the story, it all ended when the vessel of the Red Tide was strangled. No blood. I thought perhaps that was what they wanted to hide. The ghost needed blood to move into me. And if its host body was killed without bloodshed—well, Town said Xan couldn’t live in a corpse.”
“I see.” Esther took the flask from Stephen and swigged. “That’s a devil of a deductive leap. How were you sure your version of the ending was the true one?”
“I wasn’t. That was a calculated risk.”
She threw back her head with a sudden crack of laughter. “Magnificent. It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Lord Crane.”
Crane forced himself to control his voice. “The man I just had killed was named Paul Humphris. Monk, we called him. He had no part in this. Town trapped him for that damned creature’s use. He tried to warn me to run, before that thing took him over. He was afriend.”
Stephen paused in his work to put a hand on his arm, warning. Esther said soberly, “I’m sorry. But you should know, you didn’t kill him. The possession destroyed his mind, and his body wouldn’t have survived long after it. Your friend was already gone.”
“I saw him earlier today,” Crane said obstinately. “He was himself. He spoke to me.”
Stephen gave his arm a gentle stroke. “Things like that can squat in the mind, almost unnoticed, almost harmless, for a very long time. Like a toad, or a cancer. I’d imagine that it simply roosted in Mr. Humphris when it wasn’t controlling the rats. It’s only when they take over the body that they destroy the original inhabitant, root out the brain and the soul and the nerves and replace them. There’s no coming back from that.”
Crane recalled Monk’s body, the ugly jerking. “It was moving him like a puppet. A meat puppet. It was going to do that to me, wasn’t it?”
“Not on my time.” Stephen cut through the last few strands of the rope, dropped the knife, and brushed his hands over Crane’s abused ankles with a gesture that looked professional and felt anything but. “You are, I think, fine. No damage done. Mr. Merrick, were you hurt?”
“No, sir.”
“Joss?”
“Flesh wound.”
“Bleeding wound,” Stephen said. “You’d have been next up for possession, because you let yourself get stabbed. You have to pay more attention.”
“Sir.”
“And while I’m on the subject of attention, when I say three over eight Imeanthree over eight, and not somewhere between three and a half and four,” Stephen added. “I’ve never heard such a racket. Do we need to go over resonance again, Saint?”
“We was a bit busy,” Saint muttered.
“You’ll always be busy. And then you’ll be dead because you can’t get a simple resonance right. Both of you go to Mr. Maupert tomorrow, and don’t come back till you can give me three over eight for five minutes, understood?”
“Sir,” mumbled the two juniors in chorus. Saint went on, “But Mrs. Gold doesn’t—”
“When you can do what Mrs. Gold does, you can decide for yourself what’s important,” Stephen said. “In the meantime, resonance.”
“Enliven your lessons by meditating on the wordshold the line,” Esther added. “That was shambolic, Saint. Otherwise, though, not bad work, you two. We would still have had our backsides kicked without Lord Crane, of course.”
“The reverse is significantly more the case,” Crane said. “I’m indebted to you all.”
“So am I,” said Leonora quietly. “This was my fault, Tom’s fault. I’m sorry.”
That was greeted with silence, because there wasn’t much to say to it. Crane looked round. “Town?”
“Dead,” Esther said.
“What? How?”
“Poison. He seems to have taken something very unpleasant and very fast acting. No blood. I don’t think he wanted to be Xan’s next host.”
“Jesus. What are we going to do about him?” Crane asked. “About all this mess?”
