The Detective (Johannes Cabal #2)

by Jonathan L. Howard

‘Very nearly. I’m afraid there is one item I cannot let you have. That handgun of yours, for obvious reasons. Tell me, why do you carry such a cannon? Its bullets are more than half an inch in diameter.’ Cabal shrugged. ‘A gun is a tool for killing. It isn’t an enterprise calling for subtlety, only certainty.’ ‘Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.’ ‘But guns make it so much easier. Shall we go?’

CENTRAL MATRICULATION BOARD: LEVEL 5 HISTORY PAPER SECTION 4: THE SECOND GALLACIAN CONFLICT Read the following brief description of the Second Gallician Conflict, its results and ramifications, and then answer the questions that follow it. This section is worth 10% of your overall mark. Show all working. Some four hundred years ago in Eastern Europe, Mirkarvia made significant inroads into the territories of two of its neighbours – Senza and Polorus. These conquests were accompanied and succeeded by a series of atrocities, mostly carried out under the pretext of counterinsurgency actions. Over the following decades, these acts settled into a pattern of ethnic discrimination and violent suppression. Finally, Senza – newly resurgent after the discovery of major gold deposits in the southwest and a generally burgeoning economy – militarised its border with Mirkarvia. The Mirkarvian emperor, Dulcis III, listened to the council of his hawkish generals, armchair strategists all, and declared war. This was exactly what the Senzans had anticipated; several secret treaties were triggered that ultimately resulted in Senza and Polorus, with support from their neighbouring states of Ruritania and Graustark, forming an alliance against Mirkarvia. The antiquated Mirkarvian army was quickly routed, and the captured lands recovered. Polorus argued for the occupation of the Mirkarvian capital of Krenz with the implied erasure of Mirkarvia as a state. Senza, however, had no desire to tr...

Since the conclusion of his year with the Carnival of Discord he’d found himself prey to strange twinges that, after some book research, he had discovered was his conscience.

With no idea of whether Meissner was still alive or not, Cabal had few qualms about wearing a dead man’s shoes but he drew the line at a dead man’s knickers.

He’d allowed his concentration to slip and, in those few moments when he wasn’t being aloof and unapproachable, he’d been approached.

If she denounced him, they’d turn right round and take him back to the waiting arms of the Count Marechal. He couldn’t let that happen. But he couldn’t see a way around it either. He calculated possible schemes. Plan A consisted of punching her in the stomach and heaving her through the window. It was direct and effective but it had certain practical drawbacks that militated against its use. He didn’t have a Plan B.

elders, oh yes. Always the same though, isn’t it? When you’re young, you had to show respect for your elders or you’d get a right lathering. Now I am an elder, you have to treat the youth of today with kid gloves or they’ll give you a right lathering. Doesn’t matter which side of the generation gap I’m on, it’s the wrong side.’

‘Humanity is a despicable mass, Herr Zoruk, and ill-suited to the compassion of romantics. Sometimes it requires culling.’ ‘Oh?’ said Zoruk. He sounded worn out and depressed. ‘And who would choose who lives and who dies?’ I would, ideally, thought Cabal. I’d make a more informed job of it than most. But instead he said, ‘Who indeed, Herr Zoruk?’ and took his leave.

‘Good grief,’ said Leonie Barrow when he answered the door. ‘Where on Earth did you get that dressing gown?’ She herself was wearing a red and blue tartan gown over a white winceyette nightdress. In purely aesthetic terms, her nighttime apparel made Cabal wonder how the English ever managed to find sufficient motivation to breed.

Johannes Cabal disliked many things, despised fewer, loathed fewer still, and reserved true hatred for only a handful. Understanding how intense his personal definition of ‘dislike’ was, however, this gives some impression of how hot ran his hatreds. This is a man who had, after all, shot men dead for making him faintly peeved.

‘Forever’, though, currently seemed to equate to the time it would take him to hit the ground. Fortunately for him, the animal part of his brain that so irritated him with such base desires as eating and sleeping had different priorities. To expedite these, the uppermost of which was ‘Don’t die,’ it had dumped a large quantity of adrenalin into Cabal’s bloodstream, and had – after locating one of the rungs by the hatch edge during a panicked fumble – affixed his right hand with a grip of stone to it. Thus, Cabal did not tumble to a lonely death on an unseen mountainside. At least, not immediately.

Cabal could not have been more horrified if she’d pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life, and he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. ‘What?’ he managed in a dry whisper. ‘Smile when you whisper,’ she said, her expression fixed and bloodcurdlingly coquettish. ‘You’re supposed to be flirting with me, remember?’

‘I’m not talking about some phantom assailant, sir. I am talking about how ill-advised it is to go wandering around the bowels of a great machine of which you know nothing. You could have been incinerated, or electrocuted, or crushed. Worse yet, you might have interfered with the operation of this vessel and brought it crashing down! Did you ever pause to consider that?’ Cabal had not, and inwardly rebuked himself. He wasn’t about to let the reference to a ‘phantom assailant’ go unchallenged though. ‘Such catastrophic scenarios aside, Captain, I repeat: somebody tried to kill me. I did not imagine that.’ ‘So you said, and they just vanished. Hardly the actions of a determined attacker.’ ‘Only after I stabbed them!’ There was sudden silence. Cabal searched the captain’s face. ‘I did mention that I’d stabbed them, didn’t I?’ ‘You did not.’ The captain looked suspiciously at Cabal. ‘How came you to be wandering the corridors in the early hours in your nightwear and carrying a knife, sir?’ ‘I needed something to lift the corner of the carpet square. I had a pocket knife in my luggage, and went back for it. I do not habitually go to bed armed, if that is what you are implying.’ The captain didn’t seem mollified by this explanation, but let it pass. ‘So this individual is injured, yes?’ ‘In the wrist. It was all I could reach.’ The captain seemed satisfied for the first time. He was a practical man and – while talk of hallucinatory tesseracts and shadowy assassins might irk him ...

Cabal had much better things to do with his time than spend it dodging acidic pus, so he had realised early on that the best way to avoid assorted blowhards and rapscallions bursting through the door declaiming ‘We meet again, Mr Cabal!’ or some similar nonsense, was simply to kill them the first time around while they were handy and vulnerable.

He sat at the bar and slapped his open palm on the wooden counter to attract the attention of the barman. The barman came over, polishing an already pristine glass, and smiled at Cabal’s evident good humour. ‘You seem in a very good mood, sir. What can I get for you?’ ‘I am, thank you. I shall have,’ he started, and paused. He belatedly realised that he barely drank. He also realised that the Mirkarvians put a great deal of store by what a man put in his glass. Asking for the wrong thing might well put suspicions in people’s heads. Sparkling water with a slice of lime, for example, would probably see him thrown overboard for crimes against masculinity. What was safe? He plunged for the manliest thing he could think of. ‘I shall have a beer, please.’ The barman looked at him with poorly concealed astonishment. ‘A beer, sir? You’d like a beer?’ Cabal’s heart sank. Why was it so damnably difficult to do anything around Mirkarvians without some ridiculous social more or another causing complications? He could try back-pedalling, but that would seem even more suspicious. He decided to plough ahead and try for ‘mildly eccentric’ in the barman’s eyes, rather than ‘highly dubious’. ‘Yes. Beer. Why, don’t you have any?’ The barman leaned forward confidentially, reaching under the bar as he did so. If that hand comes up holding a gun, thought Cabal, I’m sunk. If he’s holding half a billiard cue, however, I’m in with a chance. ‘I knew you weren’t stuck up, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘Lot...

Paranoia is an occupational hazard common amongst necromancers. When the whole world really is out to get you, one has to set the hurdle of unreasonable fears that much higher.

and smiled, broadly and not without some malevolence. ‘What,’ said Cabal, somewhat testily, ‘is going on? What was all that about?’ ‘Did she ask you about what happened last night?’ ‘Yes, but she’s hardly the first one to do that.’ ‘Ah, but did she ask any questions, or just listen very closely?’ ‘She just listened. What are you getting at?’ ‘Did she congratulate you on how you handled things?’ Cabal nodded, still confused. ‘Did she lean forward a lot? Like this?’ She demonstrated, and Cabal had to admit that it was a good impersonation. ‘Did she touch you lightly on the knee at any point? No? Well, she was certainly working up to it.’ Cabal looked at her, his bafflement lifting. ‘A witch?’ he said, lowering his voice. It wasn’t too surprising, now he stopped to consider it. The upper classes were the embodiment of discretion, and he had certainly heard of members of the nobility who dabbled in practices that would get a commoner drowned in the village pond by her neighbours. ‘She’s a witch? She needed some sort of direct contact to cast a spell? But, why me? What was she after?’ He noticed Miss Barrow’s shoulders were shuddering with the effort of holding in her laughter. This did nothing to improve his mood. When she managed to damp down her hilarity a little, she said, ‘For a clever man, you can be such an idiot. She’s no witch. Not the way you mean it, anyway.’ She leaned forward and gestured him closer. ‘She was seducing you, you blockhead,’ she whispered, then sat ba...

There is possibly no insult so calculated to sting the English as the suggestion that they may at any time be considered foreign, as this flies in the face of the obvious truth that the whole of Creation actually belongs to the English, and they are just allowing everybody else to camp on bits of it out of a national sense of noblesse oblige.

There was nothing for it. Cabal would have to take what mealiermouthed governmental types might call ‘executive action’. Cabal’s term was much shorter and involved sticking his switchblade between Cacon’s ribs. Sighing heavily, for he disliked violence generally and murder in particular, Cabal set off to commit violent murder.

‘There’s a café up there, where there is a police officer busily derelicting his duty . . .’ ‘Hold on. There’s no such verb as to derelict.’ ‘There is now. Would you kindly stop interrupting? There is a police officer, and I do not wish to arouse his suspicions.

Impatient, for the first few minutes of a person’s death are the most vitally important minutes of opportunity for a necromancer, Cabal added, ‘Look, I have to go. Without the necessary chemicals, we’ll lose whatever wits are still floating around his cooling brain. The only more immediate alternative that I can think of is a tantric ritual involving necrophiliac sodomy and, frankly, I don’t think my back is up to it. So, if you will excuse me?’ And he left, inwardly treasuring Miss Barrow’s expression.

‘I would ask you not to lecture me on morality. I don’t take it kindly. Besides, you say “human being” as if it’s something special. There are a lot of them about, you know, and few are worth the price of the calcium in their bones.’

would not characterise it as fear. Simply a desire not to be cut to bleeding chunks by a maniac with a cavalry sabre. More of a rational concern, really.’

In the next few hours I intend to lie and steal for no material gain. Then, I have little doubt, I shall kill some people for no better reason than that they dismay me with their activities and I have decided to prevent them ever doing anything similar again. In my experience, death is an excellent prophylactic measure.’

I regard my life as a vital thread in the ongoing march of humanity from protoplasm to . . . I don’t know, to be honest. Something slightly better than protoplasm would be a start. Therefore, anything that threatens my life now or later has to be dealt with. Paradoxically, that often means risking my life to secure my safety. The difference is that I risk it on my own terms.’

‘I like this,’ confided Cabal to Schten. ‘I like being able to ask questions and getting the answers without being lied to. I like the truth.’

Mirkarvians seem to be great adherents of “if at first you don’t succeed, then repeat your failure until nobody’s left alive to comment.”’ He smiled with the benevolence of somebody watching an unlovable toddler walk under a table and bang their head painfully.

‘What about us?’ said Miss Barrow. ‘Are you going to kill us?’ ‘Oh, Daddy!’ said Lady Ninuka petulantly. It is true that people display different personas dependent on company; the femme fatale had vanished in Marechal’s presence, to be replaced by a schoolgirl. ‘Don’t kill Miss Ambersleigh! I like her. She’s funny and drinks tea.’ Marechal rounded on them both angrily. ‘Will you all just shut up!’ he barked. ‘I have had a very trying few days, and I just want a little “me” time to relax and unwind and kill Cabal. Is that so much to ask? Stop being so bloody self-centred and let somebody else have a bit of fun, will you?’

‘You, sir,’ snapped Konstantin, sticking out his jaw and looking down his nose at Marechal, ‘are not Mirkarvia. You, sir, are a jumped-up jackanapes who plays politics with the lives of our citizenry, tramples our honour beneath boots that have never seen a battlefield, and whores us out to a cesspit of barbarism like Katamenia as if we are nothing but mercenaries! You, sir, are a disgrace to your uniform and your title, both of which, it gives me no pleasure to remind you, were bought for you by your father.’ Konstantin crossed his arms. ‘And he was a self-serving bastard, too.’

He had a further worry, one that he decided not to mention to her, as then she would become all recriminatory and the explanation combined with the inevitable theatrics would eat into the very time that they both knew they didn’t have. As soon as the phrase ‘third bomb’ passed his lips, he knew she’d be impossible, so he kept that little piece of intelligence to himself, and congratulated himself on a wise calculation.

He spoke quietly, and she half made out what he said, and managed to half translate that from what little German she knew. From the quarter-sense she thus derived, she made an educated guess that he was commenting on how blue the sky was and how pretty. When Cabal touched upon the purely aesthetic, it was time for extreme measures. A few stinging slaps later, and he was more or less composed. ‘Did I say anything?’ he muttered, sweeping his hair back in a distracted fashion.

Chiltern, who seemed to spend every morning memorising the newspaper so that he should never be without a topic for conversation, was setting forth his views on the marbles that the Greeks seemed to regard as theirs. These views seemed uncannily similar to those of that morning’s editorial but that was Chiltern; he regarded the newspaper as a useful alternative to having to evolve any opinions of his own.