The Great Ellini (Book One of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Eighteen: Bachelor Clutter

Chapter seventeen was missing. Each page had been carefully sliced out of Jack's copy of Helen of Camden, leaving only a thin sliver by the spine to indicate that they'd ever been there at all.

This was so unexpected that, for a few minutes, he wandered around his bedroom, feeling lost—too lost to even invent games to occupy his attention.

Nowhere, in all the hundreds of scenarios his brain was constantly playing with to keep boredom at bay, had he considered the possibility that anyone at the Faculty—indeed, anyone in Oxford—would be so desperate to keep something from him that they'd resort to mutilating books.

He stopped pacing after a few bewildered minutes and made himself sit still on the bed. Alice could hear the floorboards creaking whenever he paced around and would always watch him with extra vigilance if she thought he was feeling restless.

He knew Ellini. He was sure of that now. He didn't know how they'd met, or what they'd been to each other, or why she was happy to let him treat her like a perfect stranger, but he knew he knew her.

And he supposed he could plausibly have forgotten her. After all, he'd been drinking, smoking, and injecting every narcotic substance he could get his hands on in the past five years.

But the missing pages were... well, they were something physical. He would have remembered doing that. And not only did he not remember doing that, he was forbidden—on pain of Alice's displeasure—to handle sharp objects like scissors.

He tried to keep himself from tapping his toes on the carpet, but it was no good. He had to be doing something. And, in some obscure way, he felt as though remembering Ellini was the key to remembering everything else he'd forgotten—to realizing why he could never keep his mind on one thing at a time, and what he was supposed to do with himself now that the wars were over.

Which was stupid, because how could one girl hold the answer to all those questions? A girl he wasn't even attracted to? A girl who probably wasn't even pretty? True, she was strangely compulsive company, but that was probably just because his only alternatives these days were Alice, Sergei, and—

Jack sat bolt upright on the bed, his eyes shining with unaccustomed concentration. Sam had a copy of Helen of Camden. He'd been carrying it around for weeks now, waving it at people in an admonishing sort of way, as though it was doing service as a truncheon.

And he wouldn't be in bed yet. Policemen kept late hours, especially the ones who were incandescent with rage.

In fact, when Jack got to the modest, respectable boarding house on Speedwell Street where Sam rented his rooms, he found that the Inspector was busy being incandescent with rage somewhere else.

But the landlady—who'd always been very fond of Jack, even though her husband had died fighting his army at Lucknow—led him up to Sam's rooms, pressing a Chelsea bun into his unresisting hands, and asking whether they fed him enough at that demonic Faculty.

Sam's rooms were crowded with bachelor clutter—shirts hanging to dry on chairbacks, books lying sprawled-open, or wedged inside other books to act as bookmarks.

Jack tried not to get crumbs on the carpet, and tiptoed through the debris to the bookshelf, where Helen of Camden stood between two solid, respectable legal tomes, as though Sam had been trying to civilize it by association.

He opened the book and leafed through it eagerly, getting a thin film of sugar and cinnamon on the pages.

There was a lot of noise coming from the neighbouring rooms. It wasn't just snores, and babies crying, and the low drone of domestic conversations. There were creaks and clanks and judders that it genuinely took a lot of imagination to account for.