He put his cup down and proceeded to load a scone with cream. Barrow watched the precision of his hands, still in their black kid gloves, and thought he moved like a surgeon. For want of a conversational gambit, he expanded on this. ‘You don’t strike me as the carnival type, Mr Cabal.’ The cream knife hesitated for a heartbeat and then continued. ‘I’ve met a good few different types of people in my life and I think I’m pretty good at summing them up.’ ‘I understood that you’d retired from the police force, Mr Barrow,’ said Cabal. He made a curious motion with his wrist as he drew the knife along the side of the pot and every last vestige of cream was neatly wiped from the blade as if it had been freshly washed. He drove the tip into the jam, took a blob encasing a strawberry back to the scone and deposited it in the middle. The result was so precise it looked like the work of a machine. Cabal repeated the action with the knife and laid it, spotless, on his side plate. Cabal raised th
– Highlighted by Lachlan Hardy in Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
He put his cup down and proceeded to load a scone with cream. Barrow watched the precision of his hands, still in their black kid gloves, and thought he moved like a surgeon. For want of a conversational gambit, he expanded on this. ‘You don’t strike me as the carnival type, Mr Cabal.’ The cream knife hesitated for a heartbeat and then continued. ‘I’ve met a good few different types of people in my life and I think I’m pretty good at summing them up.’ ‘I understood that you’d retired from the police force, Mr Barrow,’ said Cabal. He made a curious motion with his wrist as he drew the knife along the side of the pot and every last vestige of cream was neatly wiped from the blade as if it had been freshly washed. He drove the tip into the jam, took a blob encasing a strawberry back to the scone and deposited it in the middle. The result was so precise it looked like the work of a machine. Cabal repeated the action with the knife and laid it, spotless, on his side plate. Cabal raised th
– Highlighted by Lachlan Hardy in Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
Posted 4 months ago
