The Devil's Workshop by Alex Grecian

perhaps the tiny flame was there to serve as a beacon for Walter, to bring him back safely. Claire was curled under an old off-white coverlet that was pulled up under her chin. Her blond hair glowed vivid orange in the candlelight, and the pillowy folds of the coverlet were grooved with deep purple bruises.
    “Constable Winthrop is settled in now,” Fiona said. “He ate all the biscuits we had in the place. And he drank three cups of tea with milk. It’ll be a wonder if he can stand up from the chair.”
    “He ate them all? All the biscuits?”
    “I think so.”
    “I was saving those.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “No, it’s fine,” Claire said. She laughed. “I wasn’t really saving the biscuits. I suppose I’m just put out that we have a policeman underfoot and it’s the wrong one.”
    “Yes,” Fiona said. “Why couldn’t they have sent Mr Hammersmith? We know him already. We would have felt completely safe with him right away.”
    “I was talking about my husband. He’s a policeman, too.”
    “Of course he is!” Fiona covered her mouth and turned to leave. “I’m so sorry.”
    “Don’t go,” Claire said.
    “I have things. I should do them.”
    “Would you bring me a glass of water before you leave?”
    “Of course.”
    Fiona kept her eyes down and let her long hair fall across her face. She was a slender, pale girl with a calm demeanor and an inexpressive face. The youngest Kingsley girl had grown up without a mother. She had spent much of her childhood helping her father at his work in order to be close to him. She had walked around countless crime scenes with him, observing the bodies of murder victims, sketching the placement of their limbs, and making note of their wounds, a junior coroner’s assistant. Until the day Dr Kingsley decided that the morgue might not, after all, be the best environment for his daughter. He had sent her away, asked her to assist Claire until a permanent housekeeper could be found. But it was not the sort of work Fiona enjoyed.
    She went to the washstand, where a ceramic cup sat next to a pitcher of water that had gone room temperature over the course of the night. Fiona noticed that the pail of dirty water from the morning’s stand-up wash was still sitting on the floor under the table. She wondered if she was supposed to empty it. Her duties in the Day household were still unclear, and it sometimes frustrated her that she didn’t know exactly what Claire wanted from her aside from simple companionship. She filled the cup and carried it to the bed, put it in Claire’s waiting hand.
    “We ought to interview housekeepers again,” Fiona said. “And cooks. Cooks especially.”
    “Oh, I know,” Claire said. “It’s just, I have no energy for it. We already know how hopeless it all is.” She took a long drink of water. Some of it dribbled down her chin and soaked into the coverlet.
    They had had miserable luck in trying to find someone appropriate to help around the house. For some reason, the only women to apply for any position were horrible. On two separate occasions, they had hired a woman despite their misgivings, and both women had failed to return after their first days’ work. It really did seem like they were doomed to make do without help.
    “So,” Claire said, “tell me about Sergeant Hammersmith. You seem terribly attached to the idea of him.”
    Fiona felt herself blush. Her gaze fell on the coverlet, and she noticed a long squiggly seam of red thread. She bent and focused on it. In the shivering light of the candle, the red threads looked like letters and words, like a long sentence that progressed down the side of the coverlet from top to bottom and around its corner.
    “What’s this?”
    Claire set the water cup on the bedside table and pulled the coverlet down, bunched the side of it in her hands, and pulled it closer to her face. She smiled.
    “Those,” she said, “are the names of everybody—of every woman, at least—in my family,