The Fallen by Pavel Kornev

Author:Pavel Kornev [Kornev, Pavel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Magic Dome Books
Published: 2017-08-06T22:00:00+00:00

I walked across Leonardo-da-Vinci-Platz, catching interested glances in my direction and experiencing a certain degree of pleasure at that. But it would have looked awkward for such a refined young gentleman as myself to walk down the streets loaded down with a suitcase and massive bags, so I caught a cab and made my way to the hotel as comfortably as possible.

By evening, the weather had gone foul. The sky was stretched over with black clouds that crawled in from the ocean. It grew dark abruptly, but the air remained steamy. Frequent, sharp gusts of wind brought waves of dust down the sidewalk. It started to thunder

The cabby left me right at the Benjamin Franklin. I paid up with him and hurried to get out of the dust devil and into the hotel foyer. I walked up to the receptionist, and he had to exert a certain effort in order to recognize me as a guest from earlier.

"Mr. Shatunov!" he faded into a smile. "Will you also be checking out?"

I lowered my gaze to a traveling bag in his hand, but immediately shuddered.

"What do you mean, 'also?'"

"Miss Montague asked to check out and ordered a taxi to the train station. Didn't you know?"

"It's all so unexpected," I muttered in vexation. "Is she still here?"

The receptionist turned to a cabinet divided into little square compartments and confirmed:

"The lady is still in possession of her key."

I nodded and clarified without particular hope:

"You wouldn't happen to know what might have caused her change of plans, would you?"

"I cannot say," the receptionist answered, but still threw out: "Perhaps it’s to do with some correspondence."

"Correspondence?"

"Yes, correspondence."

"My thanks!" I nodded and hurried to the elevator. I went up to the fourth floor and saw that there were several newspapers before my door, but none in front of Lily’s.

Correspondence? Hm...

After unlocking my room, I went inside and started studying the papers.

I immediately set the Stock-Exchange Bulletin aside, Liliana was most likely not following the quote prices for valuable shares. I just took the Capital Times and immediately noted the lead article. "Raid on the Kali Stranglers!" read the article's headline. In the text, it said that, this morning, the metropolitan police had killed six cultists, all of whom were wanted criminals. Between them, there were no less than a dozen unsolved murders. A grainy photograph depicted a body covered with a sheet. I had no trouble recognizing it. And the police man next to the body was also familiar; Senior Inspector Moran had fallen into the photographer's frame.

I loosened my neckerchief and collapsed heavily in a chair.

"Round casings!" it dawned on me. "You dolt, you left round casings in the alley!"

And the round casings have fingerprints on them. As soon as the criminal investigators took the fingerprints and checked them against the database, they would declare a search for me, a fact that surely would not go unnoticed by the Imperial Secret Service. And although the people surrounding the heiress to the throne must have thought that

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