“There was one thing,” she said abruptly as I was turning away.

I turned back.

“It may be nothing, but if you want someone who was angry at her…”

“Yes?”

“Before all that, she was the one who insisted that Osmin Temin resign from the board, and Osmin Temin was furious.”

“Why did she make Osmin Temin resign?”

“She said it was either that or she went to the newspapers, and Osmin Temin’s reputation would be ruined. Osmin Temin was making the girls pay her to find them positions, and then turning around and making the employers pay her for finding them girls.”

“That sounds very lucrative,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” said Osmerrem Ganatharan. “And it was not illegal! But the marquise said it was grievously unethical, and the rest of us agreed.”

“Osmin Temin—what is her given name?”

“Pavalo.”

“Thank you. Osmin Temin must have been angry at all of you.”

“Yes. But she blamed the marquise.”

“We understand. Thank you, Osmerrem Ganatharan. You have been very helpful.”

“We don’t know if we were right to tell you,” she said anxiously.

“You were,” I said. “If Osmin Temin did not murder the Marquise Ulzhavel, no harm will come to her. If she did murder the marquise, you will have helped to catch a particularly calculating murderer.”

“All right,” she said uncertainly.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

She watched me leave, still frowning, her ears low, and I wondered if, when I found Osmin Pavalo Temin, she would prove to be expecting me.

The next thing to do was to talk to Osmer Bazhevar, but here I hit the problem I had been expecting: Osmer Bazhevar did not want to talk to me. The message was delivered, in those words, by his doorkeeper. There was nothing I could do about it; my office only allowed me to compel cooperation from the dead, not from the living.

I went home, where five cats were waiting for sardines. I worried about them as it got colder, but thus far they showed no signs of distress. The half-blind queen allowed me to pet her when she was done eating, and the great rumble of her purr was soothing. This was the sort of night when I was most tempted to allow the cats inside my room, but I knew better. They were not mine and never would be.

I washed the sardine dishes in my tiny cold-water sink and then, from duty rather than desire, went to the Hanevo Tree and ate dinner. The servers here knew me the same way the servers at the Chrysanthemum knew Anora. They gave me a table against the back wall and brought me a two-cup pot of isevren without my having to ask. I ordered the bean soup, which I knew from past experience was almost as thick as a stew, with onions and carrots and generous chunks of sausage. It would be warming and possibly would induce some sense of comfort.