DIRTY CASH (MONEY TALKS)

When In Doubt

The rain has not stopped. It pools in the seams of my coat and runs down the collars of men too frightened to notice. When I arrived at the counting-house of Lord Ephraim Colgrave, the constables were gathered in the street like hounds at a gate they dared not cross. One of them spat into the gutter, as if to expel the name that none of them wanted to speak aloud.

“Inside, Agent Harrow,” said Inspector Dray, a tired man with eyes red from sleeplessness. “He is seated at his desk still, as if waiting for another day’s work. Only, well, you will see it yourself.”

I stepped into the counting-house. The place stank of mud and iron. The ledgers were waterlogged, pages fused together, and the ink had run in great black rivers across the table. Above me the rafters dripped a silt that should not have been there. The Thames was streets away, yet it seemed to have paid a personal visit.

Colgrave himself sat upright, too upright, with spine aligned as though some invisible tutor had corrected his posture. His mouth was packed with filth, his eyes staring into nothing. The watchman muttered a prayer behind me. I told him to wait outside.

I examined the desk. Among the sodden papers lay the key I had heard so much about. Iron, long and heavy, with a sigil etched into the shaft. I took it in my gloved hand and felt an unease climb my arm like frost. Its lines resisted comprehension. I tried to count the angles but lost myself after the third, as if the thing twisted when not watched directly.

“Do you see it too?” asked Inspector Dray. He had followed me inside despite my order.

“I see a key,” I answered.

“No. The other thing. The way the air feels thick. My lungs hate it.”


Later, when I questioned the watchman, he swore the rain had drawn a circle about the door at midnight, leaving the threshold dry while all else drowned. “Like the heavens were holding court,” he said. His hand shook on the lantern handle. I wrote it down though I doubted any magistrate would take such a statement.

I searched Colgrave’s body. No wound, no mark save the filth stuffed down his throat. His pockets were empty of coin though untouched otherwise. It was not robbery. His rings still clung to his fingers. His ledger, ruined though it was, bore evidence of alteration. Columns of debt scratched out, profits inked where none existed. He was a man who had created wealth out of lies, and now he sat dead among them.

Back in the street, Dray lit his pipe with trembling hands. “Do you think it is him?” he asked.

“Who?” I said.

“Grathok. The one they whisper of in taverns. The shadow in the rain.”

“I think it is a man,” I replied, “and men leave patterns. This one will too.”

I wrote my first notes that night in the lamp-lit corner of the Guild offices. Case File Twelve, subject: the death of Lord Ephraim Colgrave, merchant of Bishopsgate. Cause: unknown. Evidence: iron key, sigil of impossible geometry, circumstances aligned with rumor of a figure known as Grathok.

The coin for this commission arrived with no seal. It smelled faintly of river reeds. I asked no questions, as coin is coin, but I begin to feel as though the weight of it is unnatural in my purse.

I cannot shake the thought of the key. Its angles turn in my head when I close my eyes. When I traced the sigil in my notes the ink ran, just slightly, as though the paper recoiled.

I am an agent of logic. I pursue thieves, traitors, counterfeiters. I walk in shadows but I do not fear them. Yet tonight, with the river swollen and the rain gnawing at the windows, I feel as though I have been summoned, not hired. Someone has led me into this case with a steady hand, and already I have stepped too far to walk back.
Still, I will press on. Whoever or whatever Grathok may be, he bleeds or he does not. If he bleeds, I will kill him. If he does not, then God help us all.

Chapter II: Case File 12 — The Magnate

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