“He was pretty strong,” Quicklime responded. “But if he’d started in drinking again this morning, he might not have been able to defend himself well.”
I relayed our conjectures to Larry, who nodded.
“And the place is so messy you can’t really tell whether there was a struggle,” he said. “Though, for that matter, the killer could have straightened some furniture afterwards. I’ll have to go to the constable. I’ll tell him I dropped by, found the door open and walked in. At least, I’d visited here before. It’s not as if we’d never met. He won’t know we weren’t that well acquainted.”
“I guess that’s best,” I told him. Returning my gaze to the corpse, I said, “Can’t tell from his clothes either. Looks as if he’d slept in them, more than once.”
We moved back to the front room.
“What are you going to do now, Quicklime?” I asked. “You want to move in with Jack and me? That might be simplest, us closers sticking together.”
“I think not,” he hissed. “I think I’m done with the Game. He was a good man. He took good care of me. He cared about people, about the whole world.
What’s that human notion, compassion. He had a lot of that. It’s one of the reasons he drank a lot, I think. He felt everybody else’s pain too much. No. I’m done with the Game. I’ll slip back to the woods now. I still know a few burrows, a few places where the mice make their runs. Leave me alone here for a while now. I’ll see you around, Snuff.”
“Whatever you think is best, Quicklime,” I said. “And if the winter gets too rough, you know where we live.”
“I do. Good-bye.”
“Good luck.”
Larry let me out and we walked back to the road.
“I’ll be going this way, then,” he said, turning right.
“And I’ll be going this way.”
I turned left.
“See you soon for the follow-up on this,” he said.
“Yes.”
I headed home. “And you will lose a friend”, the old cat had said that, too. It had slipped my mind till now.
Jack was not in, and I did the rounds quickly, leaving everything in good order. Stepping outside then, I located his spoor and tracked him to Crazy Jill’s.
Graymalk watched me from atop the wall.
“Hello, Snuff,” she said.
“Hello, Gray. Jack is here?”
“Yes, he is in having a meal with the mistress. He ran low on supplies and she decided to feed him before their trip.”
“Trip?” I asked. “What trip?”
“A shopping trip, into town.”
“He did say something about being low on necessaries, and needing to visit the market soon. . . .”
“Yes. So he’s sent for a coach. It should be here in an hour or so. It will be exciting to see the town again.”
“You’re going, too?”
“We’re all going. The mistress also needs some things.”
“Shouldn’t _we_ stay behind to guard the places?”
“The mistress has a very good daylong warding spell, which she will share. It will also capture likenesses of attempted trespassers. I understand that a part of the reason we are going this way is to see whether anyone tries such a thing. Everyone will see our coach go by. On our return, we may learn who are our most important enemies.”
“This was decided recently, I take it?”
“Just this morning, while you were out.”
“This may be a good time for it,” I acknowledged, “with the big event only a week from tomorrow, and in light of the way things have been going.”
“Oh?” She rose, stretched, and jumped down from the wall. “There are new developments?”
“Walk with me,” I said.
“Where?”
“To the vicarage. You said we have an hour.”
“All right.”
We left the yard, headed south.
“Yes,” I told her as we went, “we’ve lost the mad monk,” and I recounted the morning’s events.
“And you think the vicar did it?” she asked.
“Probably. He seems our most militant player. But that’s not why I wanted to visit his focus. I just wanted to learn the location of the room where he keeps Lynette a prisoner.”