Mortsafe

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

“He was carried away by the paramedics, she’d have seen from her window. Or Bewley was telling her, or …” He let his sentence evaporate into the darkness.

  Jean got the message. Rational suspicion. “If Nicola MacLaren had mannequins in the window, she’d probably have one dressed like Jason Pagano. Rebecca called him a metrosexual Rasputin.”

  Alasdair’s dry laugh was a good as a guffaw.

  “So what does Pagano know, if anything? When did he know it and how and why? And what about Nicola, anyway? Was she fussing at Bewley for lowering the tone of the neighborhood by attracting the police? Or does she know he’s been sampling the wares …”

  “… oh aye, the man’s reeking …”

  “… and is regretting having recommended to Vasudev that the fox guard the henhouse?”

  “Well then. We should be asking what MacLaren knows as well.”

  “We?” Jean repeated.

  This time it was Alasdair who waved his hand holding the folder in a never mind gesture. “Old habits die hard. I’m leaving Knox and Gordon to it. This is us away home. We’ve got the plans to be going on with.”

  Side by side, they walked on toward the High Street, Jean filling Alasdair in on her adventures in Greyfriars Kirkyard. “Speaking of proof and its permutations, there’s someone else you—we—Knox—could talk to,” she concluded. “Robin Davis, a professor of social anthropology at the university. Sara was working with him about the time she disappeared …”

  The bleat of his phone interrupted her. Jean had never decided whether it was affectation or practicality to set it to the usual British telecom sound rather than a ring tone. With a hold-that-thought gesture at Jean, he plucked the phone from his pocket. “Cameron.”

  A faint buzz emanated from the tiny speaker. Alasdair’s brows quirked, one up, one down. He stepped into the shelter of a doorway, Jean close beside him, and tilted the phone so she could hear. “Aye, that was me.”

  The female voice said, “You’ve got a nicer face than that cow Knox. Former policeman, I’m hearing from the duty officer. Protect and Survive. I went ringing them, your chap Ian’s gone and given me your number. I’m hoping you don’t mind, but I … I don’t know where else to be going.”

  “Who …” Jean mouthed, then realized who. Amy Herries.

  Alasdair’s brows tightened, forming that oh-so-familiar crease between them. Whether or not he minded that “nicer face” remark, he applied honey rather than vinegar to Amy’s wounds. “Is there something I can be doing for you, Miss Herries?”

  “Aye, that there is.”

  Chapter Ten

  Stepping from the chill night into the warmth of the restaurant made Jean’s glasses steam up, giving her a moment to focus on the delectable odors of Indian food. She and Alasdair’s first—well, it hadn’t exactly been a date—had been at an Indian restaurant.

  Her vision cleared and she looked around. It wasn’t much past six o’clock, early for dinner in this part of the world, and only three tables were occupied. Two students sat in one corner, their backpacks spilling so many books and papers across the table there was little room for samosas and coffee. The couple eating curry in the window were probably Americans, judging by the way they held their utensils.

  Amy sat near the back, at a table with only two places. Alasdair hadn’t mentioned that his sidekick was coming along to the rendezvous. Making no apologies, he seized another chair and spun it around, seating himself elbow-to-elbow with Jean across from Amy and her glass of beer. “Jean Fairbairn, my wife,” he told her, and cut to the chase. “Much better your taking advice from D.I. Knox than from me and mine.”

  “The cow.” Amy meant Knox, not Alasdair’s “mine”. Jean pulled out her notebook and pen, all the better to play the loyal retainer, and took advantage of the opportunity to jot down a few key words from her Kirkyard visit. Not that she often referred to her notes. The act of writing them helped to embed them in her mind.

  “I’m thinking a cop should be having the same slogan as a doctor, first, do no harm. But no, she’s up my nose, first telling me it’s none of my affair, then telling me it’s all my affair and I’d best be airing Sara’s dirty linen good and proper.”

  “Sara had dirty linen to be airing?” asked Alasdair.

  A waiter appeared in Jean’s peripheral vision. “A menu, Madam?”

  “No thanks, just chai and vegetable pakora. For both of us,” she added, when Alasdair’s gaze didn’t waver from the young woman across the table. Frost gathered on his expression. You didn’t rattle Alasdair’s cage and walk away unscathed.

  Amy’s face was no longer as pale as it had been this morning. Her cheeks were polished as much by resentment as by cold, probably, and her dark ringlets—of a shade of charcoal black that couldn’t possibly be natural, not with her complexion—bounced with indignation. “Everyone’s got dirty linen, eh?”

  Alasdair’s palms-up gesture acknowledged her point. “And what sort of dirty linen was Sara wearing, eh? What were you not wanting to share with the police? What of that are you thinking contributed to her death?”

  Amy leaned back as Alasdair leaned forward, like a twin pendulum. “We were brought up proper, Sara and me. Dundee, a fine place if you’re the right sort. And we were, sent away to school in Stirling, then Sara on to uni here in Edinburgh. Me as well, when my time came, but I’m by way of being ten years younger, and Sara was, was gone by then.”

  “She was twenty when she went missing,” Alasdair stated rather than asked.

  “Oh aye, that she was. I kept hoping all these years she was away with her boyfriend, still alive in London or even America, but I knew she wasn’t. She’d not have abandoned me.”

  “You were close?” Alasdair asked.

  “We weren’t of an age to be in school together, so she couldn’t help me there. She watched out for me at home, mostly, kept Dad from being as bad a tyrant as he intended. He’d failed with her, he was saying. He’d be damned sure I turned out all right.” Amy took a swig from her glass, the quick thrust of her chin indicating obstinacy. A gold chain sparked at her throat, but if anything dangled from it, it was concealed beneath her sweater and blouse.

  The gold chain on Sara’s body had survived the years much better than her flesh.

  “You father said he’d failed with Sara?” prompted Alasdair.

  “Oh aye. Last time I saw Sara, alive or dead, she was rowing with Dad about her friends at uni, the wrong sort, he was saying, and her boyfriend the worst of the lot. Immoral, he was saying. Shameful.”

  “Did you meet this boyfriend?”

  “No. Didn’t know anything about him. At one time she was seeing an American—and that did him no favors, not with Dad …” Sara glanced at Jean. “You’re American, are you?”

  “Yes, but don’t hold anything back on my account.”

  Amy turned back to Alasdair. “I was away at school, I was ten years younger, Sara didn’t confide in me, not any more. Said I wasn’t old enough to understand about relationships and all.”

  “And this man’s name?” asked Alasdair.

  “They were rowing over someone named Chris is all. I’m not sure ‘twas even the same bloke.”

  Alasdair nodded, no doubt remembering that Knox had said the elusive boyfriend was American, perhaps wondering if Knox had known the name “Chris” at all.

  “She wasn’t happy ‘til she came here to Edinburgh,” Amy went on. “Me neither, though it’s hard to tell.”

  Jean wrote everything down. Yeah, it would be hard to tell whether you were happy, if you’d spent your life living up to the expectations of parents who felt your personality was theirs to mold, not yours to develop. “And your mother?”

  “Died, years since. It was just Dad, Sara, and me. But she vanished and he died of a heart attack—broken heart, like as not, thinking how he would have done, should have done differently—and now it’s just me.”

  The waiter delivered two cups steaming with cinnamon and cloves, and two small pl
ates piled with savory fritters. Her own flesh suddenly hungry, Jean sipped and munched, balancing the sweet of the drink with the spice of the snack. An elbow in Alasdair’s ribs deflected his attention from Amy long enough for him to do likewise.

  The young woman’s blue eyes were impacted in so much make-up, lined in black with lashes like hedgerows, that they looked inhumanly small. Jean remembered the eye sockets of Sara’s skull, inhumanly large, and wondered whether she’d overcompensated the same way. Had her hair, too, been dyed a defiant black? Jean tried dropping a hint. “Was Sara a Goth?”

  “She was a bit of everything,” answered Amy, “Goth one month, posh the next. Dad said she’d spent a packet on clothes, if she wanted more she could make them herself. So she did. Soon she was making costumes for theater groups and musicians. Me, I can’t hardly sew a patch on the knee of my jeans without taking the legs off.”

  “Was she making historical costumes?” asked Alasdair.

  Jean thought first of Pagano’s Liz and the cheesy re-enactment in Greyfriars Kirkyard, then of the ghost in the vault. She and Alasdair had never before seen a ghost lingering over its own physical remains, but why not …

  “Oh aye, she was reading history before she changed to social anthropology.”

  “Theater groups and musicians,” Jean repeated. “I know there were student musicians practicing in the vaults about that time. Were theater groups using the free space then, too?”

  “Oh aye. Before the landlords like my Dad moved in with their nightclubs and all,” said Amy. “She and her mates were presenting a show at the Fringe Festival, and found themselves a wee theater, but she went missing just at the beginning of August, a week before the opening. Worst possible time.”

  Alasdair nodded. “In more ways than one, I reckon. The police were distracted by crowd-management during the Festival.”

  “I’m supposing so, aye. There’s no real excuse, is there, leaving her there in the vault, alone.” Amy took a pakora from Jean’s plate and bit into it, making a satisfying crunch. Jean pushed the plate a little closer to her.

  “What play were Sara and her mates presenting?” Alasdair asked.

  “‘Twasn’t properly a play at all, ‘twas a satire on the tourists and the ghost tours, though there was a fair bit of history in it as well. Queen Mary and Riccio’s murder. Witches burned, Covenanters executed, folk walled up to die of the plague, two-faced Deacon Brodie, Burke and Hare murdering for money.”

  “Edinburgh through time and space?” asked Jean. “Ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night, may the Scottish Tourist Board deliver them to us?”

  Closing his eyes, Alasdair emitted the sigh of the long-suffering. Jean nudged his knee beneath the table. Sorry.

  Amy stared. One beat, two—then, with a crack not unlike that of her teeth on the pakora, her face broke into a grin. “Oh aye, that’s it exactly. You weren’t there, were you now? One of Robin Davis’s chums?”

  “Who?” Alasdair asked, his knee nudging Jean: No leading the witness.

  But Jean was bemoaning her owlish appearance, which displayed her academic credentials as clearly as the Greyfriars’ guide’s name tag.

  “Robin Davis, Sara’s social anthropology tutor,” Amy answered. “He wrote the play. Revue. Whatever it was. She was by way of researching for him. That’s what she was telling Dad, at the least, when I’m thinking she was no more than dogsbody or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “I’m wondering if he’s the boyfriend Dad was going on about. Had himself a bit of a harem, I’m hearing, adoring lasses all gathered round.”

  “A harem?” Jean asked. Michael had said something about Davis being a bit of a goat with the undergraduate lasses. “You mean …”

  Amy shook her head. “I’m not sure what I’m meaning. Could be Davis was only the mentor, not the boyfriend at all. If I’d known what would be happening, I’d have paid closer attention. I didn’t know.”

  If only I had known. The motto of the human race, right after, It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  “Was the play ever performed?” Alasdair asked.

  “Once. ‘Twas laughed off the stage, and not the way Davis was intending. Music was good, though.”

  “You saw it for yourself, then?”

  “No. I was by way of reading a review in The Scotsman.”

  “Who was Sara working with? Who were her mates over and beyond the play?”

  “I’m telling you, she didn’t confide in me.”

  “Des Bewley?” hinted Jean. “Nicola MacLaren?”

  Amy shook her head again, her face registering no recognition.

  “Are you minding the names of any musicians?” Alasdair asked.

  “Just one, a chap named Skelton. Seemed like the right sort of name, Skelton, skeleton.”

  “Ah,” he said with a nod.

  Jean swallowed her own aha. Hugh’s piper was named Billy Skelton. She wrote the name between two greasy fingerprints and added an exclamation point. “Did she know a man named Jason Pagano?”

  “Name sounds familiar,” Amy said. “Wait, he’s a presenter on the telly, isn’t he? Why ever should Sara have known him?”

  Alasdair didn’t answer that question. His profile, sheened with ice, informed Jean, There’s no evidence Pagano was anywhere near Edinburgh during the nineties. Best be looking for whoever rang him about Sara’s body in the vault.

  She almost said, “Yes, dear” aloud, but didn’t. Mentioning Pagano was a shot in the dark. A blow in the vault. She was starting to sweat—rooms that she’d call stuffy the Brits called cozy. She should have taken off her coat.

  “Chris,” said Amy. “That’s the only name I’m remembering, and that’s because Dad was shouting it so loud.”

  “You’re remembering Robin Davis,” said Alasdair.

  Amy reached for another pakora. “I don’t know what he was to her. More than a tutor, maybe. Maybe not.”

  Alasdair sent a quick glance toward Jean. She caught it. Oh yeah. Gotta talk to Davis. But surely the investigating officer at the time already had.

  There was many a slip betwixt an interview and closing the case, Jean reminded herself. No need to remind Alasdair. His lips thinned, the corners tucking themselves in, hiding any vulnerability.

  “Did Sara have any special jewelry?” Jean asked Amy.

  Amy drained the rest of her beer down her throat and wiped her lips. “She’s still wearing the necklace, isn’t she? That’s why you and the—D.I. Knox are both asking about it.”

  Jean nodded encouragingly but committed herself to nothing. Alasdair waited.

  Reaching into her blouse, Amy drew out a small gold Celtic cross, no more than an inch and a half long but finely incised with interlace even so. “Like this, eh?”

  “It’s very pretty.” Delicately, Jean lifted it, warm from its nest against Amy’s living flesh, and turned it toward Alasdair. One of his brows twitched in acknowledgment.

  “It’s St. Martin’s cross from Iona. Mum went there on a sort of pilgrimage when she was first ill, got us each one of these. Seems to me the last time I saw Sara she was wearing something else as well, not gold … Ah, I don’t know.” Amy pulled away, and the cross fell from Jean’s fingers.

  “Not that I’m at all religious, mind you,” Amy said quickly. “Not like Mum and Dad. If there was a heaven they’d be doing John Knox proud. But there’s not.”

  Being certain heaven didn’t exist, Jean commented to herself, was no more than the flip side of being certain it did.

  “And Sara?” asked Alasdair.

  Amy’s laugh held no humor. “She was already thinking the church and all was no more than rubbish, even before Davis began telling her there’s no such thing as the supernatural, full stop. The world’s dark enough, she was saying, without making up stories of evil spirits.”

  “What about stories of angels?” Jean asked. “The stories we make up …”

  Alasdair’s knee beneath the table stoppe
d her in mid-phrase. He asked Amy, “What is it we can be doing for you, Miss Herries?”

  “Find out who killed her. There’s someone walking free today who’s got away with murder. I don’t need religion telling me that’s wrong, dead wrong.”

  “Murder? Who’s saying anything about murder?”

  “She’d hardly have crawled into that vault and died, would she now?’ Amy’s eyes flashed in their thickets of lashes. “Don’t go asking about drugs and the like. She did her share of mind-altering substances, I reckon, but never so much as to cause her trouble.”

  A blow to the head, Jean thought, was trouble. A blow leaving a sharp-edged wound.

  “Were you telling D.I. Knox any of this? About the theater group? Robin Davis?” Alasdair circled back around to his opening statement. “I’m no detective, not any more. It’s Knox who’s after finding—finding out what happened to Sara.”

  Alasdair was still a detective, if of the generic … No. Nothing about Alasdair was generic.

  Amy shook her head so emphatically her curls bounced and her whole body shuddered. Pulling a couple of pound coins from her pocket, she threw them onto the table. She rose halfway to her feet. “Never you mind, then. I’m seeing how it is. I’m on my own, the way Sara was on her own, left on her own, when she died.”

  Alasdair murmured, velvet over steel, “Don’t be daft.”

  Amy froze, crouching.

  “You’ve got D.I. Knox’s business card, aye? Then you’d best be ringing her, telling her all that you’ve told us. If you’re genuinely wanting to see Sara’s death explained, that is.”

  Slowly Amy stood straight. She looked at Jean. Perhaps tears sparkled on her thick lashes, perhaps the bright lights of the restaurant reflected oddly from her eyes.

  Jean tried what she hoped was a stern if reassuring smile. “We’ll do what we can to help. But we’re civilians. We don’t have the resources of the police.”

  Amy looked at Alasdair, a resource of the police.

  “Much better having Knox with you than against you,” he said, scooting back his chair.

  Reluctantly, she nodded, and, brightening by a match’s worth of light, added, “Maybe Knox isn’t so bad. I was overhearing two women at her office talking about her, something about that sergeant, Gordon, and a possible sexual harassment complaint. She’s overbearing, aye, but there’s principles needing defending.” Amy looked at Jean.