“Worse!” Mona’s voice hollered past the uniform now bodily restraining her. “A hundred times worse! The worst she’s ever been!” The officers finally restrained the woman and succeeded in ushering Jackaby and me out the door.

Jackaby’s face was ashen as we reached daylight. He did not speak again until the two of us had been loaded into the back of the police wagon. The policeman slammed the doors, and we were alone on hard wooden seats, which stunk of stale beer and vomit.

“It’s bad?” I asked.

He breathed in slowly before responding. “Each night Mrs. Morrigan has wailed, a life has been brutally ended. If she wails, now—wails a hundred times worse, now—then yes, I imagine it is very bad, indeed.”

Chapter Nineteen

Well, look on the bright side,” I said, after the officer had slid shut our cell doors and clicked tight the locks. “At least we’re in jail.”

In the adjacent cell, my employer pushed back a handful of dark hair and raised an eyebrow in my direction. The processing officer had taken our personal effects, and Jackaby looked exceptionally frail in the barren cell without his silly hat and coat to hide in.

“True, we’ve been locked in here,” I continued. “But you could also say the murderer has been locked out there, which is something.”

It wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Jackaby and I had been stuck in separate holding cells, of course, but the enclosures ran along the wall, connected on either side, so I didn’t feel entirely alone. Aside from my employer and me, the lockup contained only one other inhabitant—a peacefully snoring drunk with cheery red suspenders who lay on the far side of Jackaby. Our cells faced not the drab cement slab I had envisioned, but instead a simple, carpeted walkway, bordered by a couple of desks with official-looking documents sorted neatly in trays. An officer sat at the nearest one, stamping papers with a satisfying thup-thup. In the corner was a small table with a few coffee mugs and a half-eaten cake with bright white frosting. Tacked on the wall above it was a handwritten Happy Birthday, Allan. I had heard of offices feeling like prisons, but in this case our prison felt, rather anticlimactically, like an office.

“I would rather be at home on this occasion,” said Jackaby.

“I’m just thankful the constables can’t go calling my parents to bail me out,” I said. “I don’t want to know what they would think if they could see me now.”

“Why should you mind what some old constable thinks of you?”

“Not the constables, my parents. I can’t imagine how all this would look to them.”

“Does it matter, considerably, what your parents think?”

“Well . . . of course it does. They’re my parents. How did your parents react when you started being—you know—you?”