Chapter 10 – Three Dots and a Crayon

He wasn’t suspicious. The thought settled into Alice’s mind with the slow, disbelieving weight of a coin sinking through water. He genuinely was not suspicious. He had been hit by his sister with the force of a battering ram, launched through a piece of furniture, and was currently standing in the wreckage cataloguing it as enthusiasm. There was no investigation happening behind those grey eyes. No quiet filing of anomalies for later review. Thomas Bannerman, Senior Inspector, had watched his sister break the laws of physics and concluded that she’d been eating well.

He’s an idiot, Alice thought, and then immediately revised the assessment, because it wasn’t accurate. Thomas wasn’t stupid. Stupidity was a general condition. What Thomas had was specific: a localised blind spot, a precise and total failure of pattern recognition that applied exclusively to the five-foot-three girl standing beside him. He could probably reconstruct a crime scene from a bootprint and a cigarette end. He simply could not see his sister clearly, because the image of her in his head had been fixed since she was small enough to lose her shoes in a river, and no amount of contradictory evidence was going to update it.

It was, Alice decided, either the most dangerous or the most useful thing she had ever encountered. She filed it away and moved on.

“Speaking of which,” Alice said, and let her gaze drift, casually, as though it had only just occurred to her, to the silver insignia at Thomas’s throat. “Florence mentioned you were in law enforcement. A policeman, I think she said. She may have used the words beat cop.“

The effect was remarkable.

Thomas’s head turned toward Florence like she’d put a knife in him. His mouth opened. It closed. It opened again.

“A beat cop?“

Florence became very interested in the strap of her satchel. “You said you worked for the law. In your letters. I just assumed—”

“You assumed I was a beat cop.” Thomas repeated the words as though they were a diagnosis. Something behind his sternum had been injured, and it was not the ribs. He drew himself up, spine straightening, shoulders squaring, chin lifting, and the transformation was so immediate and so total that Alice half expected to hear a trumpet fanfare.

“Alice,” Thomas said, and his voice had dropped by a full register, settling into the lower octave reserved for credentials. “I am a Senior Inspector of the Department of Arcane Affairs. I completed the progression from initiate to full Inspector in under three years, which is, and I want to be clear about this, a station record. The previous record was four years and eight months.”

“Thomas, that’s incredible,” Florence breathed, and her admiration was so immediate and so guileless that Alice watched Thomas’s chest expand by a visible inch.

“I lead the primary response unit for the Northern District,” Thomas continued, warming to the subject in the way that only a man who had been called a beat cop by his own sister could. “When significant arcane events occur within the city, my team is the first deployed. I am, statistically speaking, one of the highest-rated field operatives currently serving.”

“Statistically speaking,” Alice echoed. Her voice was perfectly level. “That’s very impressive.”

She meant the flatness to serve as a wall, something Thomas’s enthusiasm would hit and slide off. It didn’t work. The man was armour-plated against subtlety when his professional pride was engaged.

What Alice felt was not fear. It was the quiet, cold recalibration of someone who had just learned that the friendly dog was actually a wolf in a good mood. Senior Inspectors were not beat cops. Senior Inspectors investigated. Senior Inspectors asked questions, cross-referenced answers, and had the institutional authority to make a person’s life very complicated very quickly. And Alice was currently standing within arm’s reach of one, wearing a coat that smelled faintly of woodsmoke and violence, in possession of no identification whatsoever, radiating a pyromantic mana signature that any trained arcanist could taste on the air if they thought to look.

She needed information. Specifically, she needed to know what the Department already knew.

“It must be fascinating work,” Alice said, and adjusted her expression: a slight widening of the eyes, a forward tilt of the posture. Interested, not threatened. “Hunting rogue mages, recovering dark artifacts. Have you had anything exciting recently?”

The question was a fishing line, cast with the lightest possible touch. Thomas took the bait like a trout.

His expression changed. The preening pride drained away. What replaced it was heavier.

“Just yesterday, actually,” Thomas said. “We were called out to the King’s Road. My partner and I.”

Florence went rigid. Alice saw it in her periphery, the sudden lock of the shoulders, the cessation of all movement, and kept her own face perfectly, dangerously still.

“Oh?” Alice said. “What happened?”

“Kidnappings.” Thomas’s voice had settled into its professional register, the warmth banked. “A bandit crew hit a carriage. The Jackal’s outfit. They’ve been working that stretch of road for months, but this wasn’t a standard robbery. They took passengers. People. Then vanished.”

He paused. His jaw tightened.

“One of the missing, we think they were a student. Supposed to start here at the University this term. We found an acceptance letter in the mud near the wreckage.” He shook his head. “The rain had destroyed the ink, couldn’t read the name, couldn’t identify the owner. But the seal was clear. University of Dunwick, Faculty of Medicine.”

The air in Alice’s lungs turned to glass.

Thomas looked at Florence. He placed a hand on her shoulder, heavy, warm, the hand of a man who needed to feel the solidity of someone he loved, and his voice lost the briefing cadence entirely.

“When you told me you’d lost your letter, Flo, I won’t lie, my heart stopped for a second. Just for a second. I thought—” He caught himself. Shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You’re here. You dropped yours in a puddle or left it on a bench or whatever it is you do with important documents. You weren’t on that road.”

He squeezed her shoulder.

“I’m just glad you got here safe.”

Florence’s face was the colour of candle wax. She managed a nod. It was small and tight. Everything she couldn’t say was lodged behind it.

Alice did not nod. Alice did not move. She was performing a series of calculations at a speed that would have impressed a bookmaker.

He found the letter. Her letter. In the wreckage of the carriage she was riding in. The facts arranged themselves in a neat line, each one pointing at the next like dominoes. He knows a student was taken. He knows the letter belonged to a medical student. His sister is a medical student who arrived in Dunwick yesterday without her acceptance letter, claiming it was lost.

And he thinks it’s a coincidence.

Alice looked at Thomas. At the badge. At the silver eye, symbol of the Empire’s foremost investigative body, pinned to the coat of a man who was currently failing to connect three dots a child could have joined with a crayon.

The laugh tried to come. She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste iron and held it there, drowning it behind her teeth.

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His deductive reasoning has a Florence-shaped hole in it, Alice thought. Pray to the Ceaseless Lord that it’s limited to her, because if this is how he handles all his cases, the criminal underworld can sleep soundly.

“That’s terrible,” Alice said. Her voice was steady. “I hope you find them.”

“We will,” Thomas said, and the confidence was absolute. He had never failed to close a case, and the possibility simply hadn’t occurred to him. “The Department doesn’t drop leads.”

Alice believed him. That was the problem.

The back office door groaned open.

The clerk emerged as though the stairs had personally wronged him. His face was the colour of a beetroot, his spectacles had migrated to the tip of his nose, and he was carrying, or rather, being carried by, a book the size of a paving slab. The Ledger was bound in cracked leather, reinforced at the corners with brass, and thick enough to stop a musket ball. He reached the counter and dropped it.

The impact shook the inkwells. A queue of students three rows back flinched.

“Ledger,” the clerk announced, wheezing in a way that suggested the three flights of stairs had taken a personal toll. He braced both hands on the counter, recovered his breath, and began turning pages with the licked-thumb efficiency of a man who wanted this over with.

“Bannerman,” he muttered, scanning columns of dense script. “Bannerman, Bannerman, Banner—”

His finger stopped.

“Bannerman, Florence. Briar’s Crossing. Faculty of Medicine.”

He looked up. The disappointment on his face was sincere. He had climbed three flights of stairs hoping for the satisfaction of turning someone away, and even that had been denied him.

He straightened his spectacles. Cleared his throat. Adopted the flat, mechanical cadence of a speech delivered so many times it had worn grooves in his vocal cords.