The Banshee's Walk Read Online Free PDF

written. Your new protégé mentioned Lady Werewilk, and the case, and it just so happens one of our clients has a brand new Coltin—that would be one of Lady Werewilk’s resident artists—hanging above her mantle. It also happens that our client is to have a gown delivered this very morning—so if you could be persuaded to take a parcel to her, you might strike up a conversation about Lady Werewilk from someone who knows her. I have no idea how well they know each other, or if my client will even speak to such a rogue as yourself, but I know you’d prefer tramping around Rannit to sitting comfortably in my chair. Mary will give you the gown and the address. Mind you don’t let the hem touch the ground. Dinner tonight at seven. Love, D.
    And there was Mary, grinning that female-conspiracy grin, address in one hand and gown wrapped in linen on hanger in the other.
    “I’ve never worked at a dressmaker’s shop before,” I said. “Do I curtsey before I hand over the gown, or after?”
    Mary wordlessly handed me her things and darted away. I tramped out the door, the famous finder Markhat abroad, gown in hand against a sea of troubles.
    Mary, at least, had the good grace not to giggle.

Chapter Four
    The name on the card was Mrs. Adorn Hemp. The address was a complicated mess of turn lefts at the butcher’s and go right three blocks down from the Hanged Man and then look for a half-painted house—half red, half white—that stood next to a cab-stop.
    I wondered how many half-red half-white houses I was likely to encounter, next door to cab-stops or not, as I plunged into traffic and headed south and east. I judged the Hemp residence to be about five blocks, total, when I set out. It turned into an easy fifteen by the time I backtracked and wound through the old Spice District and finally gave up and asked a blue-capped Watchman for directions.
    Turns out they’d finished painting the house just that morning. All red, this time. I pondered the danger of relying too much on assumption all the way to the Hemp’s sturdy, tall walk-up.
    The stairs were freshly swept, and the door was ajar, and there were voices inside. Raised voices, a man and two women, the man choosing to employ bellowing and the women opting for a duet of high-pitched shrieks.
    I looked about. There were people nearby a—woman digging in a flowerbed, a man and a boy playing catch on a lawn smaller than my office, another woman staring at the sky while her poodle-dog defiled a rather nice rosebush with fertilizer of its own. I know they had to hear the voices, but none of them so much as glanced in my direction.
    I was about to knock when the man bellowed out “I’ll kill you both,” and then a woman screamed.
    I dropped the gown and charged through the door.
    The door opened into a foyer, and it opened into a great room, and I came stomping through it. There was a man a good four strides from me, his hands clamped around a tiny woman’s throat, while another woman looked on in horror.
    The man was wearing a badly fitted black suit and a monocle. The woman being choked was a busty brunette who managed a healthy squeal despite the large hands wrapped around her pale white throat. The other woman, a tiny blonde, stood by the fireplace and screamed, her hands raised to her chin in a useless expression of horror.
    The man doing the choking and the woman being choked were far too occupied with the business at hand to even notice me. A fireplace poker was leaning against the wall, and I took it and raised it and would have brought it solidly down on the gentleman’s murderous head had not the tiny blonde woman spoken.
    “You’re not Robert,” she said, in a voice far too casual to be used at the scene of a brutal murder. “Don’t tell me he’s claiming sick again.”
    She never lowered her hands from her mouth, or lost her expression of dawning horror.
    “He’d better not be,” added the woman being choked. Her tone indicated the sort of