7

Long before first light, when Jack was sleeping soundly, Sebastien dressed and slipped from the cabin. This time, the lack of doors that locked and fastened abetted him. He paused in the corridor, listening for activity, and heard only even breathing and faint snores. Slowly, he descended the stairs, which neither creaked nor settled under his weight, and paused at the bottom landing.

Pretend you are a murderer, Sebastien thought, and permitted himself a smile he would never have worn around a mortal, friend or foe. It even felt unpleasant on his face.

If I wanted to murder someone, though–

No. He turned back, and regarded the stairs, lit green by emergency lights. Sebastien was considerably stronger and more agile than a human man, and he could not have maneuvered even a small unconscious woman down those stairs without waking the ship. The forward stairs were no better–and closer to the occupied sleeping chambers. If she had come this way, she had not been dragged.

Which meant that if Mme. Pontchartrain had not gone up, into the airframe–and the search there had revealed no sign–then, barring sorcery, she had come down under her own power.

And, also barring sorcery, Mlle. LeClere had lied again, because if she had left Mme. Pontchartrain drugged insensate, then there was no way Mme. Pontchartrain could have gotten down these stairs.

In the absence of a Crown Investigator or a Zaubererdetektiv, Sebastien found he must reluctantly shelve the idea of sorcery–at least until they made landfall in New Amsterdam. Where, it happened, there was a Detective Crown Investigator, the most notorious of the scant three the British-American colonies boasted.

Under German law, while he was no more welcome in most men’s houses than… than Mrs. Zhang and Mr. Cui, he was not proscribed. In British America, however, the blood were outlawed. Those Crown rules had not been generally enforced since the seventeenth century, but were kept on the books for convenience’s sake in troublesome cases.

And so, it would be entirely best for Sebastien to have this mystery resolved by the time DCI Garrett arrived on the scene–or the scene, as the case might be, arrived in her jurisdiction.

So it had better not be sorcery, hadn’t it?

He paused. Of course, there was one very easy way to tell if it potentially could be sorcery. And that could be addressed in the morning. In the meantime, however–

Sebastien heard crisply military footsteps, and started forward. A few steps took him around the corner, and into the path of the watch officer. Tonight, it was the first mate, who tipped his hat and kept on walking, obviously accustomed to sleepless passengers.

“Guten Morgen,” he said, the first mate echoing his words. As he passed, Sebastien checked his watch. Three oh eight. “Herr Pfrommer?”

The first mate checked his stride and turned back. “Ja, mein Herr?”

Briefly, Sebastien outlined what he proposed, and when it seemed as if the officer would protest, held up his hand. “Please check with the captain,” he said. “I will abide by his decision.”

Herr Pfrommer clicked his heels, a tradition Sebastien had considered happily buried until that moment, and carried on with his rounds. And Sebastien sighed and took himself down to the control cabin before the officer returned, or the sun came up.

The Hans Glücker didn’t have a hanging gondola, as a smaller dirigible might. Most of its passenger and crew facilities were inside the airframe, with only a small control cabin protruding underneath the nose of the ship. Sebastien walked forward past the salon and smoking room, down the white-walled corridor which provided access to the washrooms, crew quarters, and the galley by means of German-labeled doors. The hum of the engines was louder, here. They extended from either side of the ship on sets of pontoons, and one of the main struts ran through behind the forward door that would have brought him into the control cabin.

It was locked, of course.

Fortunately, among all his other skills, Jack could pick a lock. And it was Sebastien who taught him.

Sebastien unpinned his cravat–the jewel was set in gold, but the stick pin itself was steel–and with its offices and those of a bit of wire, he managed the lock by touch in seconds. He opened the door and let himself through, and proceeded down a short flight of stairs.

The pilot didn’t turn. He spoke, though–in German, of course. “You’re back very soon, Herr Pfrommer.”

“I am not Herr Pfrommer,” Sebastien said, and when the pilot started and turned, producing a weapon, Sebastien stood with both hands raised and open, having dropped wire and pin into his pocket. “I am sorry. The door was open, and I–”

“You are investigating?”

“Yes.” Sebastien smiled. “How many pilots are on this ship, sir?”

“Two,” he answered. He checked his controls and locked them in position, and then turned back to Sebastien.

“Heel and toe watches?” Twelve hours on and twelve off, that meant. A grueling schedule.

“Yes, mein Herr.”

“So it was not you to whom my ward spoke this afternoon.”

“I went to my bunk at six–” the pilot began, and then pressed his lips together. “What did your young man tell you about Franz?”

“Just that he was charming,” Sebastien lied, taking the opportunity to survey the control cabin. It was small, and while there was an exit door, it was clearly visible from the pilot’s position. “And that he gave Jack a tour of the control cabin. Tell me, mein Herr, did you leave your post at all last night?”

“Only to visit the washroom,” the pilot said. “And for my coffee and dinner breaks. The officer of the watch takes control during that time.” He checked his watch–a wristwatch, favored by aviators, rather than a pocket watch. “I’ll take my second break as soon as the first mate returns from his rounds, in fact. My relief arrives at six hundred hours.”

“Your dinner break is at three hundred.”

“Three twenty,” the pilot corrected.

“Thank you,” Sebastien said. It was perhaps three twelve. “I can show myself out. Oh–” He paused with his hand on the latch. “Can you tell me where rubbish is disposed of, please?”

“There are receptacles in the washrooms–”

“No, I mean once it is collected. Is it hauled on to New Amsterdam?”

“That would be a waste of the weight allowance,” the pilot said. “It’s cast overboard. It helps to counterbalance any hydrogen leakage that occurs via diffusion through the gas bags.”

“And it’s dumped from where?”

“The side corridor outside the galley,” the pilot said. “There are rolling bins to collect the trash, and a chute.”

“Thank you,” Sebastien said, and took himself outside again.

#

When Jack awoke, Sebastien was waiting. He leaned against the wall beside the porthole light. The cabin’s sole piece of furniture besides the bed was a luggage stool for the cabin bags. That stool stood on Sebastien’s left hand, under the light, and a white tented shape occupied its flat top. “Sebastien?”

“Cover your eyes,” Sebastien said. Jack obeyed, and Sebastien flipped up the shade on the light. Jack lowered his hands, blinking, and pushed himself upright on the bed, tousled and puffy-cheeked as a child.

“What did you find?”

“Laudanum,” Sebastien answered, and uncovered the glinting, pale blue rectangular bottle, still full almost to the bottom of its long neck. “And barely a mouthful gone.”

There were new technologies that might be used to recover latent fingerprints from smooth, imporous objects, such as the surface of a glass bottle. The materials–lamp black, fine brushes, adhesive cellophane tape–which Sebastien would need to carry out such research would be available in New Amsterdam. As would the infamous–and, by reputation, formidable–DCI Abigail Irene Garrett. The Crown Investigator would wield an arsenal of forensic sorcery, and numbered among its functions would be spells capable of linking the murder weapon to the murderer. Assuming the laudanum was the murder weapon, and not a middle-aged widow’s comfort, as Mlle. LeClere had suggested.

“Boss!” Jack exclaimed, bounding out of bed.

***

To Be Continued…

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