Blood & Baltazar Read online

  Josiah Hartt

  Blood and Baltazar

  Liam Inscoe - Jones

  Preface

  I wrote this book when I was thirteen, and you can tell. When I was spending all my after-school evenings in my study working on it, I was convinced that I was writing something of great artistic significance; a Great American Novel perhaps, or at least the next world-beating saga to give Phillip Pullman the nervous sweats. Then I realised it wasn’t any of those things - not even that long after to be honest - and it became a point of embarrassment, a failed shot at greatness to be filed away and forgotten.

  I never really did forget Josiah Hartt, but I was forced to remember it distinctly when I fired up my Kindle account for the first time in nearly a decade earlier this year and found a copy of it lying dormant in my library since 2010. I almost didn’t open it (god knows what literary horrors lay inside!) As I started reading I began to feel rather proud. Yes some of it is sloppy, most of it is implausible and more of it than I should admit betrays the fact that I wrote it as Steven Moffat’s Sherlock adaption was first airing on TV. But now I can also see what it is: a fun, ridiculous, steam-punk, overwrought and exciting romp written by a teenager for teenagers. I was writing a book the twelve year old me wouldn’t want to put down, filled with characters which are broad but legitimately compelling and ideas that aren’t bothered by reality or plot holes or all that other boring stuff.

  Now that I’m older, kept writing and so am much more capable of writing what my teenage-self aspired to, I realise that that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Maybe a few other teenagers will crack open the first of the Josiah Hartt Saga (yes, I planned to write five of these things… I was an annoying and ambitious kid) and feel the same way. If even a couple of them do, it’ll be worth existing in the world again, and so here it is: a finished book for people to read.

  It’s also a testament to the power of writing, and one I hope today’s thirteen year olds are finding out too. When I was that age I was a Doctor Who-obsessed nerd with about three friends to speak of with puberty hardly working the wonders I’d hoped - a happy boy turned deeply unhappy teenager when suddenly my own company stopped feeling like enough. Josiah Hartt was a world I made to escape to, one of around five full-length novels I wrote in the space of those three tough years between thirteen and fifteen, and they cured my loneliness almost entirely while I wrote of them. Now that I’m a happy adult, having realised as I left adolescence that every thirteen year old felt that way - yes, even the cool ones - I hope books like Josiah Hartt are still helping kids through those scary years. After all, the only thing which helped me more than writing books, was reading them.

  Enjoy Josiah Hartt, it’s a gift from my younger self. And I never told anybody at the time, but I did get round to writing a second…

  Liam Inscoe - Jones

  24 years old.

  “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

  -Benjamin Franklin

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  A Murder in the Valley

  The Second Victim

  Meet Josiah Hartt

  A Matter of De Ja Vu

  A Notable Omission

  An Eight-Legged Dilemma

  A Visit from a Prince

  A Plan is Formed

  A Brilliant Disguise

  A Return to Normality

  An Initiation

  The Final Movements

  A Case to Solve

  Calling a Superhero

  The Killers Play Their Card

  A Murder in the Valley

  Lylith White backed against a row of logs. Her hands slid across the bark and fragments of splinters snapped against her shivering palm. She tried to steady herself but found that the moment she stood still, leant against the brittle poles, her eyes began to blur and her stomach lifted like it was being hoisted by a dozen balloons. A deep sweat crossed the skin of her face and she jolted further forward, her morning meal passing once again over her lips.

  As she wiped her mouth she questioned how she’d found herself there, how her normal morning had become horrific so suddenly. What had been a routine stroll through the village was shattered as she arrived at the collection bay and saw that woman, laid out before her.

  Lylith dropped to the dirt, the same light-headedness rushing back at the thought. She grasped at the dirt, raising her head into the cool breeze as the mountains churned above her, clouds shaking, eyes brimmed with tears. Once she’d set down her sack, Lylith had approached the body with caution, her heart throbbing in her chest. She had knelt beside the woman, laid a hand on her cold skin, two fingers on her wrist. And there had been stillness. No faded pulse, no flowing blood at all, just the nothing she’d feared since the moment she’d approached.

  Lylith placed her cheek to the ground, too giddy to realise that she’d placed herself facing the woman, exactly where she didn’t want to be. She was staring at her pretty hair, now split by cold sweat across her forehead. Her lips were cracked, her eyes lifeless eyes and dead as the moment she’d found her.

  Marcus Fraun shuffled where he stood. He looked upon the body blankly, his hands sticky inside thick leather gloves. A large crowd had gathered around the collection bay. Crowds made the Chief Detector uneasy. They seemed to leer in on him; chattering lips, anxious frowns, hot sweat…

  He pulled his coat around himself, covering his long body from head to toe. He wrapped his hands around each other and hoped now more than ever that this murder meant that the excitement he once expected would accompany his title was finally here. Fraun enjoyed nothing more than the thrill of the chase, but since he’d joined the Stonemoore Detector Force he’d spent every Sunday afternoon wedged between a broken seat and his desk.

  The woman who discovered the body stood shivering in the corner. Her name was Lylith Swan White, 24 years old. She was just a delivery girl, working long shifts in the Windmill Plain across the moor. Marcus Fraun didn’t suspect her in the slightest, but in the hour since she’d called in her find she’d been treated as was customary. His colleagues wiped up her sick, handed her a tissue and pressed her into a corner until she was calm enough to speak. She’d said nothing of interest of course, but Marcus Fraun had stood there fascinated by every second. It was his first murder in years, and to him even irrelevances had him gripped to every word.

  Fraun was the head of the team and his immediate subordinate, Deputy Detector Rosin Ash, was as excited to hear of the body as he was. Ash had treated the whole affair with rather more tact and, unlike the Detector, genuinely seemed to care about the life of the woman lying lifeless before them, not just her death. This was one of the reasons Fraun roundly mocked his Deputy at every opportunity, alongside the fact that amongst all the petty calls about lost cats and noisy neighbours, it was Rosin who had to deal with the worst of it.

  The third member of the team held quite a place in the Chief’s heart, not least because Field Specialist Elisa Smith seemed as removed and diligent as himself. This affection however didn’t necessarily mean he understood the necessity of her position. The role of Field Specialist was not one commonly called upon in a village where new grit for the path had garnered a front page headline in the valley’s newspaper. Her job was to inspect the cause of the body’s condition while the crime scene remained untouched, an advantage hard to replicate once the corpse had been shipped to the morgue. It was Elisa’s first body, and she enacted her inspection with relish. The loud clearing of her throat signalled that at last her assessment was complete.

  “The woman is clearly a tourist.” Elisa concluded, her open arms performing to an impatient crowd as much delivering to her colleagues, “She has a map in her pocket of this region alone; she’s eit
her recently moved to Stonemoore or she came to this village holidaying. As everyone here seems to know everybody else, a new arrival would be a hot source of local gossip, and I haven’t heard a word of a pretty young newcomer, so I find the latter most probable. As for her cause of death…” She turned around, picking up a bag of tools and jangling them purposefully. “I’ve examined her entire body, every inch, and as far as I can see there is no sign of blood or bruising. I’d suggest there was nothing sinister about this woman death Detectors; in fact it was completely natural. I’m sure I will be proven right upon examination in the morgue. I’d suggest that her heart was weak and just gave out, which would certainly explain this…”

  The Field Specialist walked across to the furthest reaches of the crescent, running her fingers along the logs as she went. Where she stopped there was a mark on the wall, a large yellow symbol slapped across the wood in thick, sticky paint. The drawing itself was quite meaningless; a large circle spiralling inwards, with a pair of parallel lines running from the inside out. “It was indeed drawn a few moments before this woman died.” She confirmed. “I would suggest the emblem has its origins in the war: I can’t be sure exactly, but most cryptic signs and words in this country do. Perhaps it’s a political group or allegiance of hers; she must have passed out when she was painting it. The excitement of the action triggered a dormant heart condition maybe?”

  “Correct!”

  A voice cut the Field Specialists conclusions short. At first Marcus thought it was Deputy Ash who had spoken, yet Rosin’s face was as confused as his own.

  Lylith White’s ears were pricked too, and she leant to catch sight of the voice’s owner emerging through the crowd. The man who stepped forward was strikingly tall, a long swathe of dark hair ran across his forehead and he too wore a long coat, a mottled brown fabric brushing against the dust on the ground. Beneath the thick material he wore a garish blue and red winter jumper, loosely hanging from his broad shoulders. His eyes were wild with excitement, pin-prick pupils flittering over the scene before him. He beamed at the huddle of bemused Detectors. “Nah, only joking: it was all completely wrong.”

  Marcus Faun sighed as his bubble was burst and he found himself dealing once again with the stupid, tedious public. “And who are you?”

  “My name’s Josiah Hartt. And I’m merely implying that this woman, this… ‘Specialist’ has, in her brief analysis, somewhat embarrassed herself.” He smiled and pointed towards the corpse. “May I?”

  “No, this is a crime scene!” Elisa exclaimed. “We can’t just let anybody-”

  Josiah ignored her. He crouched beside the body with a brow creased in concentration. He ran his hands over the woman’s clothes, rummaging through every pocket, sticking his fingertips behind her buttons and her collar. His hand fell upon her breast-pocket where he found a slip of paper folded up and tucked away. He glanced at it for a moment before pushing it down his sleeve.

  Josiah stood and smiled at the Chief Detector: “This woman wasn’t a tourist; with problems like hers the last thing on her mind would be a holiday - she came here because she had nowhere else to go. I suggest you find and interrogate her ex-husband and children who currently reside in Mugollen. That’s a town down the valley ten miles from here. I presume you already know that but you’ve been so clumsy in your investigations so far I couldn’t be sure….” He turned back to the symbol on the wall. “Oh and that is defiantly not a war emblem, I know them all and that looks child-like in comparison, although yes; you might be correct about it being the signet of a club or group. Or maybe it’s an underground society…” He swizzled around to a bemused Marcus, his eyes alight. “…I do hope it’s an underground society: I love them! Again, I’d check her ex to see if he knows anything, I presume you found her name and address in her purse? The break up was recent so I assume her children are still living with him.”

  “I’m sorry…” Rosin Ash stammered. “Did you know this woman?”

  “No.” Josiah said. “Never met her before in my life. How would I know her? I haven’t spoken to anyone in seven years.”

  “But you know about her family, you know where she came from…”

  “I knew the same as you when I arrived here, but now… now I know everything. Plenty enough to fuel a murder investigation anyway.”

  “How can you possibly tell where she came from, who she is? We looked all over her body, there’s nothing to see…” Chief Detector Fraun quizzed.

  “You found nothing because you’re rubbish, and I found so much more because I have eyes.” He took the folded scrap of paper out of his sleeve and handed it to Marcus Fraun. It showed two children, arms wrapped around each other with big wide smiles upon their lips. The paper itself was battered and torn, cracks around the page yellowed by time.

  “You don’t know these girls are her children…” The Chief Detector said.

  “Not from the page alone no, but it was tucked away tightly in her pocket, she tore a gap in the lining and placed it inside. It’s clearly dear to her as she didn’t want anything to happen to it. And she hid it in her breast pocket. Next to her heart. Now I’m no expert on petty symbols of emotion, but that usually means she wanted them close to her, yes? They aren’t just nieces or cousins; they’re her own…”

  “And this husband?” Rosin asked, keen to prove Josiah wrong.

  “Ex-husband.” Josiah Hartt corrected, snatching the picture from Marcus’ hands and passing it to the Deputy Detector. “Look at the shoulder of the girl on the right. A hand: big and hairy and manly. She wanted to remember the children, not him. And the edge beside it isn’t neatly cut like the rest, it’s been torn away. The paper beneath is fresh, not like the rest of the picture which has been weathered by time, suggesting of course that the tear is new and they are recently separated. If they are not yet divorced, we must presume the papers are in the post. You can hear the despicable wails of sweet little kiddies miles off and yet here: silence. They’re not with the mother; they must still be with Dad.”

  “Good…” Elisa Smith murmured, still clutching the woman’s possessions tightly in her hand. “But what about her home? You guessed right; there was a street name in her purse but there’s no mention of any town, let alone Mugollen.”

  “Look around you.” Josiah stated, tuning to the sky. He pointed far into the distance, towards some black looming clouds. “See those clouds? Underneath them, that’s Pollock; small town just a couple of miles closer than Mugollen. There is barely a breeze in the air, the clouds have been there nearly the entire day; let’s say they’ve moved two miles closer since dawn. The distance between Mugollen and here is easily travelled in the time it took the clouds to move. Now, her body is mostly dry, there’s been plenty of time for the rain to drain away, but her collar and sleeves were tucked back and so the damp was preserved. There is no such weather anywhere else in the valley, and so we must deduce she came from Mugollen…”

  “Excuse me.” Lylith White raises her voice from afar, raising a tentative hand.

  Josiah turned to face her, and waited politely for her to speak.

  “It’s only... Did you say that this was a murder?”

  “Yes, yes I did.” Josiah Hartt grinned. “Quite the most important question I think, although obviously these so called Detectors don’t think so.”

  Elisa shook her head. “That’s because she wasn’t murdered. I’ve checked every inch of her body – there are no fractures, wounds-”

  Josiah dropped his foot. “Darn it!” He exclaimed. “I just wish there were some other way for someone to die other than being whacked with a family heirloom or stabbed…” He tutted and shook his head, turning to Marcus Fraun. “She was poisoned”. Elisa went to speak but Josiah barely paused. “How do I know this? For a start her lips are dry and cracked and frankly; they stink. She might have taken the poison on via her mouth, or it got inside her some other way; the smell being an acid reflux perhaps? I’d say the second was most likely, especially considering
we know from the floor she was not here alone.”

  “Really?’ Fraun asked.

  Josiah Hartt sighed. “It’s a pleasure working with you Chief. There are other footprints beside hers. They’re not obvious, but I’d say they were a man’s judging by the stride and the size. There are marks, speckled with the lines of toeprints, so I can even tell he was barefooted. I’d say he forced the poison upon her. The bark has been scraped off several of those logs so there has clearly been quite a struggle. You’d better start looking for him; he knew what he was doing. The search won’t be easy, all I know about this man is his how tall he is – about six foot by the look of his gate and the height of the marks on the bark. Obviously I’d look for anybody with access to paint or poisons…”

  “There’s something you’ve missed.” Elisa said, unable to hide a smile. “That symbol on the wall... you said it wasn’t her work yet she has the same yellow paint all over the fingertips of her left hand. Poor work, whoever you are.”

  “Of course I saw the paint!” Josiah remarked. “I’ve got no time to waste missing stuff like that; I’ll leave that kind of thing to you. Perhaps she did paint it herself but the age of the paint...? Already almost dry, and the fact we know there was a man here too suggests he placed it there on the logs before she even arrived. The presence of bark in the scrapings of yellow under her nails tells us she didn’t get it fresh from the tin: the paint rubbed off the logs and onto her clothes and hands, most likely in the scramble. I’d guess my theory was more probable as I myself would find it hard to paint such an intricate symbol having been poisoned. But then - I never guess, I only know”.

  Josiah fell silent. Marcus Fraun turned to his Deputy and the message in Rosin Ash’s eyes was annoyingly conclusive. Hartt waited in silence, bobbing on his heels with a wide grin on his face.