A/N: Yeah, I have no idea how long this is going to end up. So far there are two sentences in my planning synopsis that have ended up as entire chapters! Oops!
Louise: Thanks for the review. I'm glad you like it. I would love to say I have free reign with the characters in this one, but as it is set directly between two canon episodes, I'm a bit limited. How limited is another matter. I do love loopholes...
Chapter 4
The hotel was easily within walking distance of the Old-New Synagogue, and the tomb of the rabbi that had first created the golem. Baird insisted their first stop was at the local police station, though, so there they went, Jake playing translator once again.
As always seemed to happen, their usual cover story was accepted completely by local law enforcement, and the officer on duty at the desk was only too happy to give them the details of the case that they already knew from the newspapers. He was not so easily forthcoming on anything else though. The four made their way back to the street and headed in the direction of the synagogue.
"Well, so much for that!" Stone grumbled. "Nothing."
"Oh ye of little faith!" Jones sighed, handing Baird his phone. "Some of us were up early enough to hear all of the plan, not just the clip notes version!"
"Feel up to doing a bit more translating?" Baird asked, passing the phone to Stone. On the screen were the entire case files for the three murders.
"You stole the files?" Stone looked over at Jones incredulously. "When? How? We didn't get beyond the front desk!"
"The power of wi-fi, mate," Jones breezed. "Everything's stealable, especially data!"
"How much data?" Stone queried, flicking through the pages. Not all seemed to be from the murders.
"Well, you were never going to keep that guy talking long enough for me to find the files we needed," shrugged Jones. "So I just swiped the lot."
"You can fit their entire case histories onto a smart phone?" Cassandra frowned.
"Nah, they're in a secure cloud area I set up," replied the thief. "I can probably set up a translation algorithm too if you two would rather go back to catching up on your beauty sleep."
Behind the young man's back, two pairs of eyes glared at Baird. She held up her hands and shook her head.
"They don't tell us much more that we didn't know," growled Stone. "Some background on the victims and the medical reports. There's a few technical terms here I don't know, but the murders all do seem to have the same cause of death. The victims were all throttled. There are some close up photos of the injuries too. Looks like one hand went round the throat and just squeezed. Seems the hand print was easy to recover because the killer's hand appears to have been covered in fine mud or clay, but the police think they must have been wearing gloves because they couldn't get any fingerprints."
"Sure sounds like a golem to me!" Jones smirked.
"I ain't saying it is and I ain't saying it's not," said Stone. "I'm just saying we need to be sure that's what we're dealing with first."
"If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck..."
"Yeah, but Occam's razor ain't always the key to the right answer."
"Is anything ever simple with you?"
"Hey!"
"We should find the clay the golem is supposed to have been made from," suggested Cassandra. "If it's the same clay, then maybe we're on to something."
"Yeah, so long as it is the same clay," said Jones. "If it's not, then what? It doesn't rule out the possibility someone out there has magicked up another one. Even if it is, there's nothing to rule out someone repeating all of the rabbi's processes. If I wanted to make my own golem, that's exactly what I'd do! I mean, with all this free magic and those broken ley lines floating about, who knows what the good people of Prague are capable of!"
"Okay, fine," said Baird. "Cassandra, you and Jones go find this clay and answer that question. Stone, you're with me: we need to talk to people."
The three watched as Baird walked off in the direction of the synagogue without waiting for a reply. Jake's gaze flicked back and forth between Baird and Cassandra.
"I'm fine," Cassandra told him. "Go."
She felt Ezekiel step up to her side as the others disappeared into the growing crowd.
"What the heck was that all about?"
"Apparently I hallucinate in my sleep now," she sighed. "He could hear me through the wall. He's just worried."
"You okay?"
"As much as ever," she smiled. "Come on. Let's go find this river."
XXXX
"Baird about this morning..."
"I really do not want to hear this story!" Eve cut him off with a wave of her hand.
"No, seriously, it's not what you think!" Stone insisted, catching up with the Colonel at last.
"Really, because I am struggling to come up with any innocent explanation for the conversation I overheard this morning!"
"Which is exactly why it's not what you think! I swear! I wouldn't... We wouldn't... We're not..."
"You're both adults. What you do in your own time is none of my..."
"She had a seizure! If someone hadn't been there she could have been in serious trouble. She was choking on her own blood, Eve!"
"What?" Baird stopped in her tracks and turned to face him. "Why didn't you tell me this earlier?"
"I was trying to!" Stone threw up his hands. "You kept assuming... Anyway, you know she probably wouldn't want you to know, but you have got to go easy on her! She's doing too much! Pushing herself too hard! If she has to keep using her synaesthesia, she's going to keep getting nosebleeds. At least that's how it seems. She said this happens, but she took a knock to the head this morning thanks to yours truly here and I don't think she'd tell me if it was because of that."
"Why not? Surely it's more worrying if it's the tumour?"
"Not if it's normal for the tumour," Jake looked sheepish. "And I think she's... Well, I don't think... Look, we've had our differences, Cassandra and I, and I might have said some... stuff..."
"You told her you didn't trust her."
"Yeah, and I never quite got round to mentioning..."
"That you trust her now? And you think she's still trying to make up for it."
"Something like that."
"I'll talk to her about the nosebleeds, when I get a chance and you're not around," sighed Eve. "She'll be honest with me. She's probably being honest with you too, Stone. If you weren't too busy being an egotistical idiot you'd see that lying to someone isn't a sensible way to make that person trust you."
Baird turned and walked on. After a moment he followed her. A street later, something appeared to cross his mind.
"Wait a minute, how'd you know I'd told her I didn't trust her?" Stone asked, frowning over at the Guardian.
"Because she told me," she replied.
"What else did she tell you?"
"Just that," Eve looked round. "Why?"
"No reason," shrugged Stone, looking away. "Oh, look: there's the synagogue."
"Stop deflecting, Stone," Baird sighed. "If you don't want to tell me something, just say so."
"I'm not... It's a... How can you use a building to deflect a question? It doesn't do anything: it just sits there!"
"And yet, you still try!"
XXXX
Cassandra and Ezekiel looked down at the river mud below them. It wasn't clear where exactly along the river Vltava the rabbi had made the golem, but from what they could see, it certainly wasn't here.
"Are you sure?" Ezekiel looked sideways at Cassandra.
"I have a brain tumour and synaesthesia, Ezekiel, not a full chemical analysis lab complete with mass spectrometer, soil analysis kits and everything else a forensics laboratory would have."
"Do you need one?" Jones asked. "Because I'm reasonably certain I can get you one of those."
"Not even you can steal an entire laboratory, Ezekiel," Cassandra smiled over at him.
"Maybe not permanently, but for an hour or four..."
"That's sweet, but I think we can be pretty sure the results wouldn't match up no matter what tests we do," she grinned. "There's no way the river mud would show the exact same chemical analysis as the original mud used, way back in the sixteenth century. The stable isotopes alone would be completely different, never mind the pollution caused by the industrial revolution..."
"That's only the top layer though, isn't it?" Ezekiel cut in. "If we dug down, we'd get to the sixteenth century stuff."
"You seriously want to dig in that?" Cassandra pointed down at the dark mud. "It's river mud, Ezekiel. Rivers move. Mud gets added, mud gets washed away."
"It's just sitting there. No security, nobody wants it, nobody'll notice if it goes missing..."
"It's mud. You're talking about stealing mud."
"Sixteenth century mud."
"Do you even know how far down you'd have to dig? If there's any point in digging at all of course!"
Ezekiel shrugged and grinned. "Not a clue," he pulled out his phone. "But I know a man who does!"
XXXX
Eve Baird looked around her, admiring the ancient cemetery and its grounds. It was peaceful. There was a service in progress at the synagogue, and she wasn't sure they would have been allowed entry anyway, but the young man who had met them at the door had been more than willing to show them around its exterior, then accompany them over to the old cemetery just a short distance away. He was now happily telling Stone about the famed Maharal and his golem, all while standing just a few feet away from the iconic figure's tomb.
The birds were twittering in the trees, the sun shining through the branches. The sound of traffic was muted by the surrounding buildings. Everything felt enclosed and protected. Sacred, even. There were a few other people in the cemetery. She wondered if they were simply tourists, visiting one of the city's more sombre landmarks, or if they had a connection to someone buried here. There was a young couple, strolling between the gravestones, pointing out a name here and there. An elderly man stood by a grave, taking notes. Half-seen figures moved between the trees and the tombs, each with their individual or collective unknown reasons for being there. None of them, thought Eve, quite as strange as her own.
"Anything useful?" Baird asked, as Stone joined her and the young man disappeared back in the direction of the synagogue.
"Not really," he shook his head. "Everyone round here knows the story, especially in the Jewish community. The Maharal, as he's known, was a local hero, even without the legend being true, apparently. Our friend there confirmed the reports that the synagogue has been searched numerous times and turned up nothing. He even remembers hanging around the film crew that was there in the eighties."
"I can imagine that would be the sort of thing little boys would find fascinating," nodded Eve with a smirk. "Even the adult ones."
"Either way, we got nothing," said Stone. "I say we make a start on talking to some of the witnesses involved, maybe some of the family of the victims, see if we can't get some leads there."
"You still have the addresses?"
"Turns out I have our entire cloud of data on my phone," he replied with forced cheerfulness. "Which is interesting because I don't recall uploading the particular app that accesses it! Nor do I recall giving my password, or my permission, to anyone else to do the same! Which is even more interesting because the password to get into the app is the same as the password to get into my phone!"
"Well, I guess that's what you get if you work with a thief and don't keep your passwords updated," laughed Eve.
"It's fifteen digits and I change it every week!"
"Okay, that's kind of impressive," she admitted. "And slightly scary and paranoid. Who memorises a new fifteen digit number every week for a phone?"
"Someone who works with Ezekiel Jones," shot back Stone. "And it's only paranoia if you're imagining it! He cracked the thing when it was five digits, then when I increased it to ten. Took him a little while, though. I thought I had him with fifteen and now this!"
"I'll talk to him," said Baird with a shrug. "Although, admittedly, having that information on hand is actually helpful."
"Are you seriously telling me you would be happy with the thief messing with your phone?"
"You don't know..."
"He took a selfie!"