Mortsafe

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “Gary Delaney?”

  “That’s the chap, aye. He was right distracted by the Festival crowds—you’re knowing how it is, the town was heaving. He was right certain Sara’d gone off with Allsort, and that papering every vertical surface with her photo was all that needed doing.”

  “Delaney might have checked at the university to see if Allsort was registered, although sifting through the records for 1996 looking for an American with two-tone hair would be worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. And if he was just a kid backpacking through Europe or whatever, then there’d be no point looking for him at the university at all.” Jean jotted a note on a bit of scrap paper, then went ahead and threw the witness several leads. “Was there anyone there named Chris? How about Nicola MacLaren? Des Bewley?”

  “Knox was giving me the same names, but no joy. Seems to me there was a Chris visiting one afternoon, but no one working with the show.”

  Doggedly, Jean wrote down, “visitor named Chris maybe.”

  “And that’s the long and short of it, Jean. Knox was off in a tearing hurry, to the morgue, she was telling that long tall drink of whisky of a sergeant, and the Museum and somewheres else as well, some woman named Pippa, if I was overhearing properly.”

  Nicola MacLaren. All right. And the Museum? Had Knox followed Jean’s advice and sent the decayed book there? After all, the vault was someone else’s grave, too, and was haunted by a third person—a former person, now an observable memory …

  Jean realized she was still holding the phone to her ear. “Thanks so much for filling me in. I’ll pass all this on to Alasdair, and I’m sure Hugh will want to hear it, too.”

  “Oh, Hugh’s been hearing an earful about it all along. We’ll be seeing you at Lady Niddry’s the night, he’s telling me.”

  “Yes. Looking forward to it.” Jean switched off her phone thinking that she was looking forward to the music, and the food, and to getting dressed up, even, but not so much to the underground venue. But a posh restaurant in a vault wouldn’t take her nearly as far from her comfort zone as the vault that was Sara’s grave.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The door opened and Miranda leaned around its edge far enough to pitch a piece of paper onto Jean’s desk—which wasn’t far, the room was the size of an average American closet. “You’ve got an appointment with Robin Davis at a coffee bar at two … Oh aye, Gavin, just coming.”

  She poofed out as quickly as she’d poofed in, Great Scot’s fairy godmother. Smiling, Jean retrieved the paper and noted the address of the coffee bar, two doors down from Blackwell’s Bookshop. What, didn’t Davis want her in his office? Was he out and about anyway? Did she have a suspicious mind?

  Did she have work to do?

  She swung back around to her computer and opened up the article on an archaeological excavation in Orkney that she’d started yesterday. But instead of adding words to the space beyond the blinking cursor, she stared. Allsort. Striped hair. Black dye, like Amy’s and apparently Sara’s as well, covering a head of hair the color of a carrot, on a scraggy wee guy from the U.S. of A …

  “Holy shit!” Jean grabbed her trusty notebook and skimmed what she’d written about the scene in Greyfriars yesterday afternoon.

  Ryan. Jason Pagano’s sidekick was a scraggy wee American with carrot-colored hair. Pagano had been mad at him for being late—not long after someone had hit poor Constable Rudolph and pushed him down the stairs. Perhaps Ryan was the one who suspected evidence had been left behind.

  Even as Jean opened her browser and typed in “Beyond the Edge”, she remembered Des Bewley saying that no one had been in the Playfair Building that day except people who were supposed to have been there. But if Ryan had donned a hard hat and workman’s jacket … Pagano’s website opened up.

  Jean cursored her way past smudged photos purportedly of ghosts, staged photos of Pagano and his leather jacket and goatee, and illegible red on black letters slashed with exclamation points like knife wounds. No, she wasn’t interested in videos of older programs, thank you, or the scientific basis behind Electro-magnetic Force Field readers or Electronic Voice Phenomena gadgets. It seemed to her as though he was using science subjectively, not objectively, but then, she had taken a bit of a scunner to the man, as Alasdair would say, and wasn’t being exactly objective herself.

  Aha! There, well down the “About Us” page, in what looked like an eight-point font, was a list of Pagano’s crew. Jean’s eye worked its way down half a dozen alphabetically arranged names, including that of Liz Estrada, until it reached the last one.

  Tristan Ryan.

  Ryan was his last name. Okay. While he might be the enigmatic boyfriend, he wasn’t the enigmatic Chris. Unless, she thought, what Amy had overheard was her father deploring her sister’s relationship with a drifter named Tris.

  As for people’s names, was Pagano really Jason’s surname? Using Great Scot’s internet snooping devices, Jean quickly established that he’d been born Jason Figg in Sheffield, some thirty-eight years ago, and had studied in Liverpool, in Los Angeles—and in Edinburgh.

  Oh, good grief. Jean was starting to feel as though the vault beneath the Playfair Building was the dark version of that café in Paris or New Orleans or wherever. If you sat there long enough, everyone you knew would walk by.

  Her phone trilled with “My Love is like a Red, Red, Rose”. Good timing. She started talking as she switched it on. “Alasdair, you won’t believe this …”

  “My capacity for believing is stretching out like an old pair of galluses,” he interrupted. “I’ve just heard from Knox. She’s sent the buttons and the book to the Museum, as you were advising, and she’s got an answer back.”

  “Which is?” Jean prompted.

  “We’ve likely identified the man keeping Sara company in the vault.”

  Jean didn’t quibble over that “we’ve”. Close enough. “So who is he? Probably. Possibly.”

  “The book’s a Bible, as you were thinking, and there’s a name written inside the flyleaf, along with lines from a verse or two about facing down one’s enemies. Ranald Hamilton.”

  “Ranald Hamilton.” A bell clanged in the back of Jean’s mind, slowly, like a church bell tolling the age of the dead. “The Covenanting leader?”

  “Likely one and the same. Kazmarek’s already had a historian in. Seems Hamilton led his congregation away from the state-sanctioned church, into a cave between the King’s Wall and the Flodden Wall, where he went preaching against swearing loyalty to the king. Before long the authorities took notice, and he was hanged in the Grassmarket for treason.”

  “I remember now. Well, I remember reading about him.” Leaning back in her chair, Jean scanned her overstuffed bookshelves. The one mentioning Hamilton had a blue spine, she was sure of it.

  “Hamilton wasn’t only hanged, his body was left hanging ‘til it rotted, setting an example.”

  Jean grimaced. “Or making a martyr, depending on your point of view. How bloody unnecessary, all of it.”

  “Oh aye.” Alasdair’s voice grated. “Any road, Kazmarek’s not only got the name in the Bible, and the neck broken by a judicial hanging, he’s got weathering on the man’s bones. Unlike on Sara’s bones. She decomposed where she was lying.”

  “I suppose Hamilton’s followers eventually gathered up his bones and—did something with them, if surreptitiously. But damn it, Alasdair, they could hardly have left them in that vault!”

  “Kazmarek’s turned up bits of confetti or glitter beneath both bodies.”

  Jean bounced up out of her chair. “Glitter. ‘Ghosts for Fun and Profit’.”

  “Got yourself another by-line, have you now?”

  “No, no—that’s the name of Davis’s revue, the one Sara was working on. I told you I was going to look for the review in The Scotsman.”

  “You did do, aye.”

  “I found a write-up of the show, and what a hysterical muddle it was, too. I also found the name of the theater—The Deaco
n’s Neck, not far from that vault. It’s a bakery now.”

  “Could be Sara or her friends …”

  “… or her enemies—someone murdered her …”

  “… were bringing the bones into the vault themselves. Macabre, but there you are.”

  “Positively gruesome. Part of the same impulse that makes kids vandalize cemeteries, maybe.” Jean went back to scanning her shelves. A blue spine. A blue spine. “Anyway, Billy Skelton called a little while ago, after he talked to Knox, and told me about the show, and guess what?”

  Alasdair made a sound that was consideration and encouragement combined, and only partially directed at her—she heard Ian’s quiet voice in the background. So Alasdair was at his office. No surprise there.

  “It was Ryan, Pagano’s director or whatever, who was Sara’s boyfriend.” Jean went on to explain “Allsort’s” nickname and the reason for it, and how her train of thought had pulled into a station marked not “Chris” but “Tris”, never mind Billy’s vague notion that “Chris” actually existed.

  “That’s leaping to a conclusion,” cautioned Alasdair.

  “My stock in trade.”

  “Oh aye, it is that. No harm my passing Ryan’s name on to Knox, though.”

  “Billy said she said something to him about the morgue, the Museum, and ‘Pippa’. I figure Knox was planning to interview Nicola MacLaren, since she was going to see Kazmarek and the book conservator anyway.”

  “Billy was recognizing Nicola’s name?”

  “No, he wasn’t. It’s just that she’s—there.” By now Jean was at the far end of the room, all of three paces away, scanning the shelves about knee level. Aha! There was the book she wanted, with a red spine, not a blue one—go figure. She pulled it away from its closely-packed neighbors. “The thing is, all today’s thirty-somethings were here in the nineties, all drawn by the university. Nicola and Bewley knew each other as students. Ryan—assuming he’s Allsort—knew Sara. Did Nicola know Sara? Did Nicola and Ryan know each other? Ryan may not have actually been a student, but that doesn’t matter. Where does Bewley come in? Innocent bystander, like he claims? We’ve got one from column A, two from column B, and so on. And what about Davis and his favorites? Was there a love triangle? Who’s the hypotenuse?”

  Alasdair chuckled. “You’re mixing your metaphors. But that’s another of your goods on offer.”

  “Yep.” Jean sat back down. “Oh, and Jason Pagano, né Figg, was a student here in Edinburgh for one semester, but a couple of years earlier than Sara.”

  “Was he, now? Maybe he’s your hypotenuse.”

  “Someone told him the body was Sara’s, and that she was murdered, before the word got out.”

  “He’s by way of being the catalyst, then. His bringing his dog-and-pony show to town had Vasudev and Bewley opening up the closed door and, well …”

  “Here we are. And there Knox is, talking to Nicola. She’s on the ball. Or behind the eight-ball, rather.”

  “Being pressurized into settling the case? Oh aye. She’s saying she had a word with Davis as well, to no particular effect.”

  “I bet she wants to show up Delaney.”

  “I’ll not be putting it past her … Aye, Ian, I’m minding the meeting at the university, thank you.”

  “Gee, you mean you have work to do for P&S?”

  “I’m no employee of Lothian and Borders, or Great Scot, or Amy Herries, come to that.”

  “I’ll be right up the street from you, then, working for all of the above. I’m talking to Robin Davis at two, at a coffee bar next to Blackwell’s. Which is probably no accident. A new book, a bookstore, kind of like, well, love and marriage.”

  “Right,” said Alasdair. “We’ll be having us another blether at home, shall we, whilst dressing in our glad rags for tonight’s do?”

  “Sure thing. See you later.” Switching off the phone, Jean picked up her reference book and turned to the index. Hamilton, Ranald. Check. And Hamilton, Grizel?

  There’s a name you didn’t see any more. Wondering if it were a peculiarly, well, grisly Scottish version of Griselda, Jean turned to the page. Ah. Grizel was Ranald’s motherless daughter and, at sixteen, his helpmeet. When he was taken by the authorities, Grizel brought food and messages to him in prison. After his execution—quite some time after his execution—she gathered up his bones and buried them. Or did she hide them, along with his Bible, in the cave where he ministered to the aged, the poor, and the sick?

  If our ancestors possessed a vindictive streak, Jean thought, they also possessed great intestinal fortitude.

  Taking her father’s place, Grizel had begun to preach. She piled scandal upon scandal by not only espousing illegal ideas, but by being an uppity woman. And in due course she, in turn, fell afoul of the authorities. Rumor even had it that she was turned in by members of her own congregation.

  This time, Lord Provost George Mackenzie and his ilk had an even better—or worse—setting-an-example idea. Grizel was thrown from the King’s Wall into the valley where she and her father had ministered, like the scapegoat of the Old Testament cast into a valley near Jerusalem. But like killing the goat, killing Grizel Hamilton didn’t atone for anyone’s sins.

  At least this time the other Covenanters were allowed to claim the physical remains and give them a decent burial at Greyfriars.

  Jean turned back to the bookshelf, now looking for an archaeological history of Edinburgh. The Covenanters generally met in secluded spots in the countryside, but the Hamiltons, recognizing that the elderly and the sick weren’t able to get out into the countryside, stayed in the city. In a cave between the King’s Wall and the Flodden Wall… .

  She opened the book beneath her desk lamp and found a map of the town walls of Edinburgh. Yes. The fifteenth-century King’s Wall ran south of the High Street, crossing the area now covered by the South Bridge just north of the Cowgate, close to Lady Niddry’s and the Playfair Building. The sixteenth-century Flodden Wall ran on the other side of the Cowgate, beyond where the Museum stood now, and angled back toward the Castle past Greyfriars. In the 1680s, the infamous ‘Killing Times’, the Cowgate had counted as part of the city, but had still been rough in terrain and rough in inhabitants.

  The bottom line, Jean told herself, was that poor Grizel had been thrown into the valley of the Cowgate, near the cave where she and her father had held their services. Where she had perhaps hidden her father’s bones. What had Alasdair said, about his and Gordon’s expedition to the far end of the vault where Ranald Hamilton’s bones had been recovered in company with those of a woman three centuries younger?

  Something about the walls looking like natural rock, tied into the corridor with bricks and masonry. Something about rubbish lying around, bits of wood and metal and pottery. What archaeologists would call a midden.

  Something about the ghost of Grizel Hamilton, head bowed, hands folded.

  Closing the book, Jean restored it to its spot on the shelf and reached for her phone and her bag. The conservator might have helped identify the man’s body, but she’d just identified the ghost, which—who—was nothing so dramatic as Pagano’s Mackenzie Poltergeist, but was a lot more personal. She had to tell Alasdair. She had to run down to the bake shop cum theater …

  No. She took a deep breath and put her phone and her bag down again. Miranda’s pound sterling only went so far, the article on Orkney was due, and Alasdair, too, had a day job. The building and whatever secrets it hid had been there a long time. It could wait another couple of hours.

  By which time, Jean told herself with a glance out the window at the darkening sky, rain would again be falling.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The rain fell. Buses, taxis, and cars swished through streets running with water and pedestrians plodded along, heads down, umbrellas bumping. Jean picked her way from the George IV Bridge down the steep curve of Victoria Street and the West Bow, imagining the pavement echoing hollowly beneath her feet, labyrinths, cellars, vaults, caves, hi
story not only layered vertically but horizontally and diagonally.

  She stopped in the mouth of the narrow road that was the Cowgate. It looked like an asphalt canyon lined by buildings, half-obscured by damp and gloom. Now there, she thought, was an area that could use some Las Vegas-style neon signs, the gaudier the better.

  Passing the oldest building on the street, an almshouse well over a hundred years old when the Hamiltons had known it, she walked under the arch of the George IV Bridge—water droplets like slow tears plunked onto the hood of her coat—and splashed on toward the east and the arch of the South Bridge.

  Even on a sunny day the street lay in shadow. Only near the equinoxes would the sun shine straight down the man-made gorge. But the orientation of the Cowgate was an accident of topography, not a religious impulse like the careful siting of Stonehenge, never mind how many religious impulses had been either welcomed or derided here, “Ghosts for Fun and Profit” not even being the most recent.

  The dull boxes of modern buildings stood cheek by jowl with Victorian turrets packed closely against Georgian-era pediments, all damp and dour together. As Jean grew closer to the South Bridge she could make out the construction site climbing one side of the arch, new structures replacing those lost to the fire. She wondered if the ghosts and poltergeists and creepy-crawlies had been exorcised, if from the eye of the beholder rather than from any objective location.

  There was the Cowgate Bake Shop, just west of the bridge and almost below it. A plate-glass window inserted into a stern stone facade revealed a brightly painted and lit café.

  Jean ducked inside, setting a bell on the door to jangling, and stood on the mat dripping and inhaling. Baking flour, fat, and sugar mitigated the damp and dark as much as a cheerful paint scheme. When an apple-cheeked granny in a tidy smock offered her a table in the window, she took it, and ordered tea and a scone, never mind the cheese and chutney sandwich for lunch at her desk.