Mortsafe

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Jean laughed. Even before an admirer left him one of the most exclusive flats in town, Hugh’s busking days had passed, not least because, as he often said, it was hard to convince passersby he was in need of their loose change when he manifestly had no trouble obtaining food and drink. “Lady Niddry’s? Vasudev Prasad invited Alasdair and me there tomorrow, too.”

  “Ah, good. You’ll be hearing the first pass at our Saturday program. We’ve not played there since the old Body Snatcher days. Now the place is all tarted up for the carriage trade, I was thinking of starting with ‘A Man’s a Man for All That’.”

  “At the very least.”

  “Hullo, Hugh.” Alasdair heaved into sight in time to help Hugh maneuver his instruments through the doorway and stack them in the entrance hall.

  Behind them, Jean shut the door. And threw it open again when a woman’s scream cut through the night. “What the . . ?”

  The courtyard outside the door was dark, if hardly silent—the high walls still held an echo of the scream, fading and dying. Pigeons fluttered overhead. Lights flared above the rooftops.

  “It’s coming from the Esplanade.” Alasdair took the steps to the upper floor two at a time, Jean and Hugh climbing behind him at a slower if no less enthusiastic pace.

  All three of them packed into the bedroom window overlooking the Castle. There, illuminated by spotlights, a knot of humanity congealed and parted and congealed again, like a giant amoeba. Jean leaned forward, her breath leaving a ghostly shape on the glass—yep, there was a familiar figure, his black leather garb glistening. “Jason Pagano,” she said. And to Hugh, “From the TV reality—if you can call it that—show ‘Beyond the Edge’. I’ve had one encounter with him and his crew already today, in Greyfriars Kirkyard.”

  “Imagine that,” said Hugh at her shoulder. On her other side, Alasdair said nothing. His profile imitated that of the Castle battlements, a serrated edge against the cloudy night sky.

  Another scream, if not blood-curdling, at least blood-hiccuping. A light—and presumably a camera—panned to show Liz in her seventeenth-century cap, collar, and apron, now tied to a stake, brush piled to her knees. Pagano stepped between her and the camera, gesticulating, no doubt saying something more dramatic than accurate about the witch-burnings that had once taken place there.

  A small fire sprang up on the Esplanade. A dim figure—Ryan?—maneuvered a mirror so that the reflection of the flames was directed into the lens of the camera. At least they weren’t actually putting poor Liz in danger, Jean thought. With the camera at the right angle, it would look as though the branches around her feet were on fire. All that was missing was the smoke.

  Alasdair asked, “Who’s given permission for that fire, eh?”

  “Someone whose palm Pagano greased, what do you want to bet? The same someone who’s allowing him to profane the exact spot where women died miserable deaths.” Jean had a time or two felt a frisson there, the chill on the back of her neck that puckered her senses more than her skin and signaled not so much death as despair.

  “I’m thinking I should be rushing out there and playing accompaniment,” said Hugh. “But then, that’s accepting that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

  “There are more songs about battles,” Jean told him, “than there are about poor old women condemned as witches. You know, man stuff glorious, woman stuff boring.”

  Hugh and Alasdair both laughed agreement. For another moment they stood there in a row, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil—sensing no evil, Jean thought, meant they’d never appear on “Beyond the Edge”.

  As one, the trio turned away from the window and walked at a more leisurely pace down the stairs. “You sure you don’t want that drink?” Jean asked when they reached the bottom.

  “Right tempting,” Hugh admitted. “But needs must. What’s all this about the old Body Snatcher and our Billy Skelton being implicated in a cold case?”

  “The story’s getting longer and more complex all the time.” Once again Jean took it from the top, this time with Alasdair interjecting a comment here and a correction there. Finally she asked, “Do you remember Sara Herries?”

  “I’m remembering the case, aye. The vaults, the streets, the uni were papered over with her photo. But I never met the lass. That I knew,” Hugh amended. “But then, chances are Michael Campbell and I passed in the vaults a time or two in those days, and I’ve no memory of meeting up with him. Who’s to know?”

  “I bet there was a lot of beer and whisky sloshing about the premises.”

  “I’m no denying that. But the place was often heaving with people, and the lighting none too good, and, well …”

  “Who’s to know?” repeated Jean.

  Hugh glanced at his watch. “Any road, there were loads of lasses hanging about, more than a few of them playing along, not just at The Body Snatcher itself, but bars, cafés, theaters, the lot.”

  “Theaters,” Alasdair said. “We’re hearing Sara was working with a theater group, aiming to open a revue of sorts in good time for the Fringe, and that one of their musicians was named Skelton. Might not be your lad Billy, but …”

  “… it’s worth asking him,” concluded Jean.

  “That it is. He and I weren’t mates then, though I knew of him. And the other way round. I’ll have a word with him this evening, all right? If he’s remembering anything at all, he’ll be phoning.”

  Alasdair reached into his pocket and handed over the small white square of a business card. “He’ll be phoning the officer in charge first, please, just to be keeping up appearances.”

  “What? Did you pick up a handful of those when you were in her office?” Jean asked.

  “Of course.”

  Hugh held the card to the hall light. “D.I. Wendy Knox. A slip of a lass, is she? One who knows karate or judo, all the better for scoring goals with the criminal elements?”

  “She’s more like a modern-day Boudicca in her chariot,” said Jean.

  “Fine strapping lass, then? Ah, those were the days.” Without specifying whether he meant the days of the ill-fated Celtic revolt against the Romans, or the considerably less—for people who weren’t Sara Herries—ill-fated days of free-wheeling entertainment in the vaults, he stowed the card, gathered up his instruments and set forth into the night. “Later, Jean, Alasdair.”

  They both called after him, wishing him a good evening, and then stood side by side in the doorway craning toward the rooftops and the Esplanade.

  Lights still waved back and forth, and voices rose and fell, but no more screams set the pigeons to flapping. Finally Jean wrapped her arms across her chest, warding off more than one kind of chill, and retreated inside, leaving Alasdair to shut the door on what had been a longer day’s journey into night than either had bargained for.

  Chapter Twelve

  Gavin handed Jean her latte as she swept by, suffused with the cold damp of the morning and the self-righteousness of the early riser. “Thanks,” she said, and veered into Miranda’s office.

  Miranda was just taking off her coat. She greeted Jean with a cheery, “All right then, what were you looking out at The Scotsman first thing in the morning?”

  Jean gulped, then swished the hot coffee around her mouth, trying to keep it from burning tongue or palate. She could hardly complain to Gavin about it being hot, since hot was coffee’s reason for existence, after caffeine, of course. “Robin Davis’s show for the Fringe. Sara Herries was working on it when she disappeared.”

  “I’m recognizing Sara Herries. The rest of it … Wait. Davis. Commerce and Credibility, that Vasudev was going on about.”

  Using her cup to shove a crisp new copy of The Scotsman off the corner of Miranda’s desk—a headline blared, “Body in vault identified as missing student”—Jean set it down and peeled off her coat. “You need to fix me up an interview with him. Not for the book so much, that just makes a great excuse to ask about his relationship with Sara back in 1996.”

  Miranda
sat down and reached for her own cup and saucer—coffee in the morning was an insidious habit she’d picked up as a college student in America twenty years before, her roommate Jean luring her into colonial ways. “So the body’s the missing lass after all.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Jean plunked herself down and gave Miranda a guided tour through Thursday’s post-work adventures.

  Miranda nodded. Her finely plucked brows rose and fell. The coffee disappeared down her throat, hidden behind the high neck of a pink cashmere sweater. “Well now,” she finally said. “Constables coshed, ghost-hunters on the prowl, and the tentacles of suspicion reaching even to Hugh’s band! Whatever next?”

  “Not suspicion,” said Jean, who’d put away most of her own coffee and was feeling all the warmer and perkier for it. “Evidence. Next should be Knox and Gordon finding not only who coshed poor Constable Rudolph—dang, Knox used his real name but I can’t remember what it is—not only who coshed the constable but also who coshed Sara all these years ago.”

  “What of Sara’s play?”

  “Davis’s revue, you mean. Short sketches, satire, sort of Benny Hill does the supernatural history of Edinburgh. The title was, ‘Ghosts for Fun and Profit’, which I like, but according to the review—that would be r-e-v-i-e-w—the satire was much too heavy-handed and mean-spirited, insulting the historical figures who are now supposedly seen as ghosts instead of the people who make a living peddling their stories. Like me, in a way.”

  “Only in a way,” Miranda assured her. “You’ve had your cynical moments, and Alasdair once made his living from them, but still …”

  “But still,” agreed Jean. “The theater was appropriate to the subject matter. Small and old. It was The Deacon’s Neck, named after Deacon Brodie, I bet. Respectable businessman by day, burglar by night, whose neck didn’t survive his unmasking. Same time period the South Bridge was being built.”

  “He was the inspiration for Jekyll and Hyde. And for the pub just down the street from here.”

  “When it came to inspiration, Stevenson was spoilt for choice. Like Pagano is today, although I don’t think he has any literary aspirations.” Jean stood up. “The thing is, The Deacon’s Neck was in the Cowgate, up against the base of the South Bridge.”

  “Near to where Sara went missing?”

  “Near to where she was found, too. In fact, Alasdair thinks that particular vault may link into a natural cave between the High Street and the Cowgate.”

  “Better and better,” said Miranda.

  “Is the theater still there, do you know?”

  “I’m thinking not—likely it was damaged in the 2002 fire—but you’ll be finding out, I reckon.”

  “I reckon so, yes. Time to hit the internet.” Jean headed for the door, then spun around. “Oh, and …”

  “I’ll be setting you up an interview with Davis.” Miranda turned to her own computer. She did not, after all, have every phone number in Edinburgh in her electronic Rolodex of a smartphone—this one she was going to have to look up.

  Jean bustled into her own office and within only a few minutes had determined that no, the theater was no longer there. It was not, in fact, anywhere. It had been struggling financially and the fire had put it out of its misery and its backers out of more than a few pounds.

  If management chose to put on shows like ‘Ghosts for Fun and Profit’, Jean told herself waspishly, no wonder they’d gone under. Speaking of under, as in, the Cowgate running under the South Bridge, what was now occupying the Deacon’s Neck space?

  A bakery with the less-than-evocative name of Cowgate Bake Shop. All right then. This time, Jean promised herself, she really was going to take a stroll along the Cowgate, in what passed for broad daylight. What she was looking for, she didn’t know—well, a sandwich or cookie was always welcome—but she probably wasn’t going to find a large X on the wall, and the message, “Sara Herries was here”. For one thing, she already knew Sara had been there.

  Jean was just turning to her usual day’s work when her cell phone emitted a generic jangle. Ha on Mr. Murphy—she’d already dug it out of her bag and placed it on her desk. “Jean Fairbairn.”

  “Jean, it’s Billy Skelton. I’ve had myself an interesting morning with the polis, thanks to you and yours.”

  “Oh dear—I didn’t mean for Hugh to send you off to the police station so early. Not after a working night.”

  “Ah, ‘twas my own fault ringing Inspector Knox just before last night’s show. I was told to be turning up in her office before dawn had fairly cracked. But wee Sara was by way of being a mate of mine, see, and if someone’s done her over, then I’m for laying the bastard by the heels. Or by the throat, even better.”

  Jean visualized Billy’s wiry hands dancing delicately on the chanter of his bagpipes, then saw those hands squeezing the windpipe of someone who, as yet, was no more than an amorphous humanoid figure. He or she wouldn’t be emitting sweet music under that grasp. “Knox told you they’d identified the body?”

  “Oh aye. She’s saying the lass was murdered, struck down by a blow to the head. Died on the spot, like as not, but there’s no being sure of that.”

  Jean swiveled her chair toward the window to see light. Watery, frail, tentative light, but light nonetheless. She smelled the dank air of the vault with its hint of smoke. She felt the dark closing in. “Died instantly,” she stated. “In a room with an older, dismembered body and a mortsafe.”

  “Funny, that. I’d never heard tell of mortsafes and all ‘til they hired me to play for the show. There was a scene about body snatching, and a mortsafe built of aluminum foil, the sort you’d be wrapping your food in, and Burke and Hare dancing about with it. Not half historical, Sara was telling me, and a load of codswallop, I’m thinking, but they were paying me to play my pipes, and that was rare enough in those days I was saving my breath to inflate my bag.”

  That scene hadn’t been mentioned in the review. A scene involving the ghost of a Covenanter getting it on with the ghost of Mary, Queen of Scots, had been, derisively. “Sara disappeared right before the show was to open?”

  “Aye, that she did. Gave me a turn to hear she’d been lying there perhaps no more than a football pitch away, although how she got herself in there’s a right good question.”

  “One we’re all asking,” Jean told him. “You didn’t know there were vaults beneath the Playfair Building?”

  “Not a bit of it, no. The tour companies hadn’t quite got themselves up and going, then, and the vaults weren’t yet mapped out.”

  “So I guess asking you if the theater had some secret passage running back toward the South Bridge and the vaults is a waste of time.”

  “It is that, sorry.”

  Jean tried a different angle “What part did Sara play?”

  “She was in the chorus, making costumes, painting scenery, and the like.”

  “Did you see much of Robin Davis?”

  “Oh aye, he was directing, seeing himself as Steven Spielberg, I reckon. Sara fancied herself his assistant, always suggesting improvements. What she was seeing as improvements, at the least. More glitter on the sets, more sequins on the costumes—you’d have thought they were aiming for a Christmas pantomime—and more four-letter words and mock violence all at once. Had to be cutting edge, she was saying, and Davis was agreeing with her.”

  “Pushing the envelope,” said Jean.

  “Oh aye.”

  “Was there something more than a teacher/student or director/minion relationship going on between Davis and Sara, do you think?”

  “He had an eye for the lasses, no doubt of that, and they were all hanging on him, but Sara, she had a boyfriend amongst the cast.”

  Jean sat up so abruptly her chair creaked. The name “Chris” burst from her throat but, hearing Alasdair’s voice in her ear—No leading the witness—she kept it fenced behind her teeth.

  “Well,” Billy amended, “there was a lad she was seeing—I surprised them once, snogging behind the card
board Castle—don’t know how official it was. At that age, mind, nothing’s particularly official.”

  Jean had gotten married at that age. She would have done better to have kept it unofficial. “What happened to him?”

  “Left Davis a note saying he was away home, to America. We were thinking the two of them went haring away together, never mind her studies. Mind you, I’m not so sure he was ever a registered student. Backpacker, I’m thinking Allsort was, picking up odd jobs here and there. I saw him cleaning The Body Snatcher a time or two. Never knew his real name.”

  Sara’s boyfriend was at The Body Snatcher? Spreading rumors that the show was pushing the envelope?

  “Pathetic, Davis was saying, Sara deserved much better than Allsort, but no one was minding Davis any more, not just then, and when the show closed after one performance, we scattered like it had been cursed. I’ve never seen another soul of them from that day to this. Nor am I wanting to. Not a happy group, for all the show was billed a comedy. The girls quarreling, the boys bumping heads, each and every one of them competing for Davis’s attention.”

  “Why ‘Allsort’?” Jean asked.

  “His hair was dyed black as soot, like Sara’s, but not so recently you couldn’t see the roots growing out. Red-orange, they were, like a carrot. His hair looked like the sweet.”

  “Ah, I see.” Jean was not a fan of the striped liquorice candy called Allsorts, but she could visualize the image just fine. And there was something about that image …

  Billy was still talking. “Me, I was thinking it odd they’d have chucked it all and gone away together—why a bonny lass like Sara’d fancy a scraggy wee guy like Allsort … Women, though, they’re still a bit of a mystery to me. Then, they were like being an alien species. Not that I’ve been saying that last to Inspector Knox now, mind, let alone that inspector at the time.”