Free Death by Silver by Melissa Scott

omnibus –”
    Ned gave him a reproachful look, and Julian couldn’t help a grin.
    “All right. We’ll take a cab.”
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CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    Ned came up the stairs to his chambers with two sizable books from the Commons library balanced in the crook of his arm, having endured the usual lecture from the librarian about not removing them from the Commons grounds. He intended to find some permanent solution to the problem of Mr Clark’s garden gate, and had unearthed both a manual on the care of all manner of doors and a more general treatise with a section on untangling enchantments muddled by too many previous hands.
    Both were out of date, but he felt it was time to consider something other than current best practices, since those were apparently failing. He opened the door about to say as much to Miss Frost, and checked on the threshold.
    Victor Nevett was sitting in the visitor’s chair, leaning back in the chair with his arms crossed in exactly the same attitude of impatience that he’d habitually displayed in classes and chapel. He looked up as Ned came in, and Ned was struck by how little he’d changed; he was a bit heavier than he had been in school, and he sported a neatly trimmed beard, but otherwise he could have stepped out of one of Ned’s more uneasy dreams about school.
    “I told Mr Nevett you’d be back directly, and he said he’d wait,” Miss Frost said, which broke the spell enough for Ned to step in and close the door.
    Victor pushed back his chair and stood, offering his hand. “Mathey,” he said, with the crushing handshake of the sort of man who would consider it womanish not to leave the other party’s fingers numb.
    It was surprisingly difficult not to answer yes, sir . “Mr Nevett,” Ned said pleasantly instead. “Please accept my condolences on your family’s great misfortune.” He set down the books on the corner of his desk, and sat down behind it, trying not to feel that he was putting it between the two of them as a shield.
    Victor nodded brusquely, and then said, “Actually, that’s what I came to see you about. We’ve had the police tramping through the house ever since it happened. They don’t think it was a simple case of burglary.”
    “I’m afraid they may be right,” Ned said. He hoped this wasn’t going where it seemed to be going. If Victor thought Ned could be induced in any way to keep quiet about the results of his tests on the murder weapon, he was in for an unpleasant surprise, and one that had been a long time coming. He wasn’t fourteen anymore.
    “I’m afraid so, too,” Victor said. “I want to retain you to sort it out.”
    “Sort it out?” He was going to make him say it, and he expected to take an unreasonable amount of pleasure in refusing.
    “Find out who really killed my father.”
    Ned hesitated for a moment as he tried to change gears abruptly. “That’s not generally part of a metaphysician’s work,” he said.
    “You sorted out that business about the cursed necklace, though,” Nevett said. “Read about it in the papers. Not bad, figuring out it was one of those heathen curses. Bought from some Thuggee strangler, I suppose.”
    Ned restrained the urge to point out that the necklace in question had been bought from Hunt & Roskell in Bond Street, and enchanted using a perfectly respectable system of metaphysics used by thousands of people in India who weren’t habitual stranglers. “I was glad to be of assistance to the police,” he said.
    “And besides, we were in Beckett’s together, back at Toms’.”
    “Good old Martyr’s.”
    “That’s right. You don’t know what it’s like, having the police in the house and the newspapers speculating about which one of us might have done it. The last thing I need is someone who’s going to dig up whatever dirt there is to dig and then sell the story to the picture papers.”
    “You can’t imagine I’d do that.”
    “Of course not, not a Sts Thomas’s