The chanting got louder.
Noel heard it through the stone walls, through the closed door, through his own hands pressed flat over both ears. It came in anyway — rising, swelling, the specific sound of a crowd getting what it came for. Voices overlapping. Something that might have been cheering.
He pressed his hands harder against his ears.
It didn't help.
He could still feel it in his chest — the vibration of it and the crowd outside celebrating the death of a man who wasn't dead and the guilt of a man who wasn't guilty.
'Only if they knew.'
He thought about what would happen when the real killer struck again. When the next ivory flower appeared at the next scene and the papers ran it and the city asked how — how, when the killer was already dead, already hanged, already confirmed. What would they say then?
Nothing.
