Mortsafe

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Her jaw hung slackly open. Jean knew that it was natural for the jaw to drop after death, but still, the gaping mouth seemed to scream, as though the woman had lain here watching light retreat up the staircase and devouring darkness ooze from the depths.

  Or had someone carried the last vestige of light and life away up the steps? Perhaps she’d come here alone, lost in the labyrinth beneath the city, or, despondent, had chosen here to lie down and die.

  Something echoed deep in the profound silence of the grave, and Jean looked sharply around. But she heard only a slow drip of water that, magnified by the stone corridors, had for a moment sounded like footsteps.

  The pressure of Alasdair’s arm counseled, Steady on. In the light his face was calm, lead shielding fully raised. He asked, “Is this Sara Herries? Or perhaps we should be asking, if it’s not Sara Herries, who is it, then?”

  Knox was hanging back by the doorway, her arms folded tightly across the chest of her coat, the huge flashlight tucked beneath her arm. Either she’d gone a bit paler, or her already fair skin was blanched by the harsh light. What? Jean wondered. Was she queasy around death? For a detective, that would be a handicap akin to a sailor being seasick.

  When Knox didn’t answer, Gordon said. “It’s early days yet. We’ll be collecting evidence, estimating her age, looking out a cause of death that’ll show up in the bones …”

  Alasdair said, “Perhaps I should be introducing myself a bit further, Sergeant. Detective Chief Inspector Alasdair Cameron, Northern Constabulary, retired.”

  “Ah. Well then. I’m teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, eh?”

  Alasdair’s “No problem,” didn’t stop Gordon from darting a resentful glance at Knox.

  One corner of Knox’s mouth puckered, perhaps in a smile at Gordon’s discomfiture. This, Jean thought, was not a team made in heaven.

  D.S. Gordon’s dark coat was dusty around the hem, as were his shoes and the trousers of his suit. Knox’s black pumps were almost pristine, as though she’d flown through the wet streets rather than walked. His accent was Aberdonian, sounding like a mouthful of thistles. Edinburgh accents were milder than Aberdeen’s—or Glasgow’s, or even Alasdair’s delicious western Highland brogue—but still Knox sounded more generalized British than Scottish. Was she not a local lass? Had she attended a posh girl’s school in England? Miranda had attended a posh girl’s school in England, and could do Received Pronunciation just fine, but she still spoke Scots when at home …

  Well, if there was some sort of class or locality static between Gordon and Knox, it was none of Jean’s business. The vault was. Now.

  Chapter Four

  Gordon squatted back down in the scuffed mud, grit, and gravel, this time inspecting the contents of several plastic bins. “There’s no handbag or the like, nothing to ID the body, though someone’s dropped a penny dated 1994 in the corridor.”

  “Most obliging, then, of whoever was here since then,” Knox said.

  “Never minding the blocked door,” Alasdair added. “That matches with Amy Herries saying fifteen years. And with Sara going missing just here, although ‘just here’ could mean the university area, or the Old Town.” He looked around at Knox. Your turn.

  “She disappeared in July of 1996, was last seen late at night, at a club just two doors closer to the High Street, with her boyfriend. He went missing as well, and the police supposed she ran away with him.”

  “Is he the other body?” asked Alasdair.

  Oh yeah, Jean thought. The plumbers, or spelunkers, whatever, found two bodies. But where …

  “Not likely.” With a groan, Kazmarek rose to his feet. He was a bulky man, and almost bald—in his coveralls he looked like a high-browed Beluga whale. One latex-covered hand indicated the largest of the blue plastic bins. “That’s a disarticulated skeleton, probably much older than this one, though it’s hard to distinguish age under any condition, let alone these.”

  As one, Jean and Alasdair leaned over to look. No, those brown sticks and clods weren’t more rubble, but were ribs, arm bones, the small joints of fingers, all piled neatly atop foam rubber padding much like the padding that had protected the components of Jean’s new computer. The smooth dome of a cranium sat at one end, face down, inert.

  Funny, how the more the body looked like an anatomical specimen, the less chilling it was to see. And yet that cranium had held thoughts and dreams just as surely as the one beneath the lights. As the living ones beneath the lights.

  Cold seeped upward through Jean’s shoes, and in through her coat everywhere except where she pressed against Alasdair, and even down through the roots of her hair. If the lights were emitting any warmth, it wasn’t enough to drive back two centuries of chill.

  “This one’s a man. There’re no associated artifacts except for a few buttons and those.” Kazmarek’s toe stirred a smaller bin the size of a shoe box.

  Alasdair bent closer, pulling Jean with him. Any other time she’d have abandoned the Siamese twin routine, but not now. The ceiling was not pressing down, she told herself. The stairwell was not closing like a throat swallowing.

  In the box lay a rectangular pile of what looked like sheets of pastry piled one on the other and then merged into one decayed mass. The top layer might be leather—it looked more like decayed skin than the real thing. Strips of something black bracketed one side. “It’s a book,” she said. “With the embossed cover and what might be silver clasps, probably a Bible. There are conservators at the Museum of Scotland who could work magic with that.”

  “A Bible, is it? That’s a crucifix, I reckon.” Gordon indicated two small lengths of wood that might once have been glued together.

  “A cross,” said Jean. “A crucifix would have a figure of Christ. Unless there was one that fell off.”

  “Oh,” Gordon returned. “Well then.”

  Were the tiny striations in the leather binding of the book and the wood of the cross tooth marks? The objects were both so eaten by time and decay Jean couldn’t tell if they’d also been eaten by rats. She didn’t look back at the bones, either set of them. Rats. Worms. Insects. We’re all eaten by worms and insects, but rats, now, no, not rats. She shivered.

  Alasdair, not at all fooled, glanced at her. “Almost time for you to be leaving?” he whispered.

  “Almost. Not quite.” Louder, she asked the air, since Knox was still behind her, “Are there any stories about this—well, I guess not this particular vault, since no one knew it was here. Or knew for sure it was here, anyway. About this building or the ones around it?”

  “Stories?” asked Knox, from what seemed like a long way away.

  Loosening her grip of Alasdair, Jean turned toward her. “The kind of stories you hear all up and down the South Bridge. I mean, the bar upstairs is called The Resurrectionist for a reason. Supposedly body snatchers like Burke and Hare operated down here as well as in the cheap boarding houses and pubs. They didn’t just steal the bodies of people no one would miss, they created bodies of ditto. But why return a body to vaults after it was dissected by Dr… . Oh. Well, his name was Robert Knox.”

  “Knox?” A tremor went over Gordon’s face—apparently he was fighting back a grin.

  Wendy Knox didn’t grin. She didn’t so much as twitch. She was probably used to standing her ground on this issue, too. “Yes, Burke and Hare sold bodies to a Dr. Knox at the university. He should have been hanged as well, I expect, as an enabler, at the least, but he was never even tried.”

  “Justice system wasn’t so different then,” muttered Gordon. “The ordinary folk do what needs doing to get by, the rich folk profit.”

  He and Knox might be having a socio-economic clash, Jean told herself, and went on, “What about other stories, you know, about ghosts and things going bump in the darkness? Human figures seeming to walk through walls, or going into rooms with no exit and not coming out. Things moved around. Odd scratches. The lights going out.”

  She saw Knox staring at her. She sensed Gordon
and Kazmarek staring at her, and at Alasdair as well, who was doing his great-stone-face act.

  The lights went out.

  Jean knew her eyes were open as wide as they’d go, she could feel dust gathering on her irises. She could feel the darkness itself, a palpable presence, choking her …

  The lights flared. They’d probably no more than blinked—certainly there had been no time for Knox or Alasdair to switch on their flashlights. Jean realized she had both arms wrapped around Alasdair’s arm. His hand was probably turning blue. She loosened her grip.

  “Breathe,” he murmured, his warm breath tickling her ear.

  Oh. Yeah. She forced a few molecules of trapped air out of her chest, then sucked another few in. At her feet, on the woman’s body, something caught the light and emitted a furtive sparkle. A bit of jewelry, sunk deep into the rotted flesh.

  “I’ve not asked about ghost stories.” Knox’s voice was as cool and calm as though nothing had happened, but she now held the flashlight like a truncheon in front of her. And Jean could have sworn the woman was now three feet closer to the staircase, calling into the room from the corridor. “Ghost stories aren’t evidence.”

  “They are for Jean.” Alasdair’s voice dropped into a lower register. “Yon dismembered body might be dating back to Burke and Hare—when, Jean?”

  “1820s,” she said, her voice sounding to her own ears as though she’d just gulped helium. But no one seemed to notice. She tried again. “The Anatomy Act of 1832 made it easier for doctors to obtain donated bodies, so the resurrectionist trade pretty much died out.”

  Alasdair nodded. “So why’s this body, donated or not, still lying about? Folk were in and out of these vaults until the late nineteenth century. Or, if the body’s got nothing to do with body snatchers, if it’s been here longer than twenty years but less than a hundred or so, how did it get in here? How did the woman’s body get in here, come to that? Was the door opened up and then re-mortared? Is there any way of testing the mortar, seeing how old it is? Or is there another way in?”

  Knox opened her mouth as if to speak, perhaps to protest that Alasdair was getting all the good lines, but Kazmarek spoke first. “That’s for you lot to decide. Just one more thing before we pack it all up and carry it away. What’s that metal contraption? Not a chicken coop, I’m thinking. I know people were living in these vaults, but chickens?”

  His latex hand, smooth as an alien’s, swept toward the bottomless oblong box of interlaced metal strips. Iron strips—their surfaces were crumbling with rust. Jean waited politely, but no one else offered any answers.

  “Well,” she said, hoping she wasn’t coming across as teacher’s pet, “speaking of Burke and Hare and their ilk, this is a mortsafe. Or most of one, anyway. You know, ‘mort’ as in ‘mortality’ or ‘mortuary’? People would lock a mortsafe over the grave of a loved one, to keep the body snatchers from getting to it until, ah, the body was no longer desirable.”

  Silence, and four faces turned toward her, their expressions ranging from nonplussed to intrigued.

  “You see them in museums every now and then,” Jean went on. “There are a couple just over in Greyfriars Kirkyard. They were more or less for the wealthy. Poorer people would sometimes pile large stones on top of the grave, or arrange pebbles in a certain pattern. Although if you found the pattern disturbed, what could you do? Go down to the nearest medical school and ask for your relative’s bits and pieces back again?”

  Six faces, she decided, counting those of the dead.

  No surprise Alasdair recovered first. “If a mortsafe’s something you’d be finding in a kirkyard …”

  This time Knox interrupted. “Why’s one here? And what, if anything, has it to do with these bodies? What, come to that, have these bodies to do with each other?”

  “You’ve got quite the cold case here,” Alasdair told her.

  Literally, Jean thought with another shiver. “Tell you what. I’m going to leave y’all with it. Miranda’s expecting me at the office. She’s arranged an interview with the owner of the property.”

  “Well then,” said Knox, “best you go asking him about the local ghost stories.”

  Kazmarek peeled off his gloves. So did Gordon. Together they started putting lids on the bins. “Give my lads up the stairs a shout, if you please,” the doctor told Jean. “We’ll be obliged to shift the larger body to the morgue in a larger box.”

  “I’d be glad to,” Jean said as Alasdair escorted her out of the chamber—really, the ceiling was starting to sag, she was sure of it, and her ears rang from silence between voices and breaths and scuffle of feet.

  She did not look back at the woman’s body, the vacant eyes staring toward the stairwell. Jean hoped she’d been dead before she came here. Before she’d been abandoned here. She hoped the woman would be identified, as Sara Herries or as someone else, and her remains returned to relatives. She hoped the entirety of the cold case would be solved, the woman, the man, the mortsafe, and not just because she wanted to know what had happened.

  Hoping she wouldn’t have nightmares, she paused at the foot of the stairs, looking right and left into the shadowed tunnel. In one direction it seemed to end at a wall—at least the darkness took on substantiality there, just beyond the rim of light. In the other direction, the corridor vanished into an infinite void. She imagined people living here, choking on their own smoke, their own waste.

  “I didn’t exactly cover myself with glory, cowering against you the entire time,” she told Alasdair, even as her feet itched for the treads and the upward scramble.

  “Needs must. You redeemed yourself by answering a good many questions.”

  “That’s not redemption. That’s being a know-it-all.”

  “That as well,” he said, and she suspected he wasn’t joking. “It’s best you …” He stopped, darting a glance over his shoulder.

  Knox had stepped back into the doorway and stood, hands on hips, shoulders stiff, watching Kazmarek and Gordon at their work. But the sound of footsteps wasn’t coming from them.

  Jean felt the all-too-familiar blanket of perception settling down onto her already lead-weighted shoulders, and the back of her neck prickling to an ectoplasmic kiss. She felt Alasdair’s shudder, his breath going suddenly ragged.

  From the depth of shadow walked a pale figure. She was no more than colorless mist in human shape, shoes rising and falling two inches above the lumps of the floor, an apron covering a long skirt, a wide collar over a bodice with two hands folded demurely in front, neat little bonnet atop a face that was two dark splotches and a mouth set in calm determination.

  The figure walked past Knox’s back, one elbow actually passing through her jacket. Knox stirred uneasily, but didn’t look around.

  Jean’s and Alasdair’s faces turned to follow the—young woman, not just a figure, the ghost of a human life—down the corridor into the darkness. She vanished into the blank, black face of the wall with only the slightest trace of a shimmer, less substantial than the shapes behind the windows of the coffee bars on the High Street.

  Jean straightened. Alasdair shook himself. They looked at each other. “Right,” he said, well beneath his breath.

  “Seventeenth-century clothing.”

  “No sense her walking an eighteenth-century tunnel, then.”

  “Is she connected to the cold case? Or is it time for something completely different? Is she walking toward the street, toward the South Bridge, or away from it—I’ve usually got a good sense of direction, but down here …”

  “Where’s this corridor go?” Alasdair asked Knox.

  “Nowhere. There are walls in both directions.”

  “Ta.” Alasdair smiled, if thinly. He produced his flashlight, switched it on, and handed it to Jean. “Up you go, and away to work. I’ll phone.”

  “Yeah. You do that.” Jean essayed a smile of her own, squeezed his arm one last time, and turned to the stairwell. The small firefly of light wavered in front of her. No, don’t ru
n, you could slip and fall.

  Step, step, step—there was a glow ahead—cellar door, yeah that was a beautiful sound—she almost did an Amy Herries into one of the technicians, who’d chosen that exact moment to peer inquisitively through the rough doorway and down the stairs.

  Jean apologized and pushed past him into the vast, spacious reaches of the cellar, just as he apologized and dodged. She didn’t stop, just threw, “Dr. Kazmarek wants y’all down there, he’s ready to move the body,” over her shoulder as she sped toward and then up the newer stairwell with its ambrosial odor of fresh paint.

  The upper hallway was now brightly lit, and the door to the pub stood open, emitting more beautiful light and the sounds of nail gun and power saw. That’s why the lights in the vault had blinked, a sudden surge in demand for electricity had addled the building’s antique electric nervous system.

  A hint of sawdust in the air tickled her nose and she sneezed, expelling the odor of decay, then sneezed again.

  A heavy-set man wearing a hard hat surged out of the doorway like a cuckoo out of a clock. “Eh! Are you the female detective? How long’s your lot taking up space in the cellar and holding up progress? To say nothing of questioning me as though I’ve done something wrong.”

  “I’m not Inspector Knox, she’s still down—downstairs. I’m Jean Fairbairn.” She didn’t owe him any explanations of why she was there. “Are you Mr. Bewley, the manager?”

  “Oh aye, muggins here is the manager, having no worse motive than doing a day’s work for a day’s pay.” Beady brown eyes peered out from the shadow of the hat, assessing Jean, dismissing her, and focusing on the door to the stairwell. His full lips tightened in their nest of three-day-old whiskers, an effect he probably meant to be stylish but which Jean’s inner schoolmarm assessed and then dismissed as sloppy. His casual grooming didn’t mean the pub’s glasses would be dirty or the packets of crisps crushed, but the slight aroma of alcohol on his breath didn’t inspire confidence.

  “D.I. Knox is just doing her job, too,” Jean said, heading for the door. So is Alasdair. So am I.