Mortsafe

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  She burst out onto the street to see that it was no longer raining. Behind the thick clouds, the sun had to be shining gloriously. Even with the scent of diesel and old fry-ups, the air seemed free and clear.

  The crowd had dispersed, presumably when the squad car departed, leaving the constable of the “redheaded hellion” comment in command of the field. Jean supposed Amy had gone with the car. Poor thing. Crying was a legitimate response to stress, although she could have timed her tears better. She wouldn’t get any sympathy from the likes of Knox, who in proving she was as good as any man couldn’t allow herself to cut another woman any slack.

  The constable in his shiny jacket the color of key-lime pie stood at parade rest. In the shadow of his cap, his reddened nose turned to track two young women whose backpacks and bulbous coats made their legs clad in colorful tights look even longer and slimmer. The duo headed off toward the university, either not noticing or not caring they were under scrutiny. Jean remembered one of Hugh’s jokes, a woman’s response to a flirtatious male: You die trying, I’ll die laughing.

  Yes, with his reddened nose, the constable seemed less Rudolph Valentino than Rudolph the Reindeer.

  Suppressing her smile, Jean looked past him. A gap on either side of the street revealed that it really was a bridge spanning the medieval lane—the cow path—of the Cowgate. Beyond the opening gleamed the blue-painted front of Blackwell’s Bookshop, its gravitational pull tugging at her as surely as that of a High Street coffee bar. But no. Business now, pleasure later.

  She turned ninety degrees to consider Lady Niddry’s House across the street. Unlike almost every other building on the South Bridge, including the one she stood in front of, it didn’t have a contemporary but a—restored, Jean assumed—classical facade and portico in that mock Greco-Roman style she’d always found cold and distant. Above the portico, damp stains and bits of moss like green hedgehogs hiding in crevices softened its elegant but stern lines.

  Something was different … That was it. The somewhat shorter windows of what she’d have called the second floor, but which here in the UK was designated the first, sported a new sign. No longer did an understated script black on white panel read “Lady Niddry’s Closet”, a posh shop that had been one of Miranda’s haunts. Now a small but vivid crimson signboard read, “Pippa’s Erotic Gear”.

  Whatever “erotic gear” was. Jean suspected items that would be uncomfortable if not downright embarrassing. But then, to some people the voluminous skirts of the eighteenth-century served as erotic inspiration. Personally, she though Alasdair’s kilt was pretty darned erotic.

  What she’d at first thought was a mannequin behind the window glass moved. At that distance, Jean could see the woman’s clothing, an electric blue skin-tight jacket and pants with a sheen that suggested vinyl, more clearly than she could see her face, a ghostly blur beneath what was much more likely a smooth fall of fair hair than a nun-like veil. A blur that was tilted either toward Jean herself or the constable she stood beside.

  Her stance reminded Jean of Wendy Knox’s, straight, firm, arms akimbo with a habit of command. She couldn’t be the owner—Miranda had already said the owner was Vasudev Prasad and her own Duncan Kerr. A sales clerk?

  “Ah, her,” said the constable, and Jean jerked around, startled. But the man had already proved he could speak, not to mention observe. “She’s been watching most all this time, even before the car drew a crowd. Not enough trade to be keeping her interest, I reckon, even with the chap from here stopping by for a blether, the both of them side by side in the window like no one could be seeing in, and she giving him laldy good and proper.”

  “Bewley, the manager of The Resurrectionist?” Jean asked. “She was angry with him?”

  “Chap needing a shave and an attitude adjustment? Aye, that’s him. Came slinking back this way less an organ or two, if you take my meaning.”

  She took his meaning. “Well, both buildings are owned by the same people, so I guess when Bewley called in the police … Who did call in the police? Bewley? Or the plumbers who found the bodies?”

  “Not a clue, madam. They told me off to stand here and keep the gawpers away is all.”

  Amy Herries rated a “Miss”. Jean rated a “Madam”. Go figure.

  She glanced back at Lady Niddry’s. The woman had vanished, leaving the window to a spotlighted wooden library ladder. Various items hung from its steps, something feathery, something leathery, and something consisting of silvery chain links. Not one hint of tartan. But Jean supposed the locals were less likely to fantasize about kilts.

  “Thanks,” she told the constable, and nodded to his mock-salute.

  Sending a moment’s thought toward Alasdair, somewhere in the catacombs beneath her feet, she headed back to the High Street and her familiar paper-and coffee-scented office.

  Chapter Five

  Jean barely had time to hang up her coat, comb her hair, and gratefully accept a café latte from Gavin, child-receptionist and aspiring barista, before Miranda pounced.

  Today she was wearing an intricate Aran sweater over a white blouse, black trousers, and cowboy boots, their leather tooled with Texas bluebonnets and Scottish thistles. “Time to be putting me in the picture, Jean.”

  “Good grief, let me dry out and thaw out,” Jean told her, trying not to gulp and burn her mouth. Ahhh. Caffeine, milkfat, and warmth. No more mildew and death clotting her throat.

  Miranda had the much larger office, but then, as editor-in-chief and publisher she had the much larger responsibility, Jean being less silent partner than stealth collaborator. The sleek Swedish-style furnishings exposed a corner here and a soffit there, but were mostly buried beneath stacks of books, papers, files, and souvenirs from many a jaunt around the globe. The seeming disarray set Jean’s teeth on edge, but then, by the time she could locate a book or document in her meticulously organized office, Miranda would be standing there with two copies, tapping her foot impatiently.

  Moving a stack of competitors’ current issues off a chair, she sat down and between sips put Miranda in the picture.

  “Well, well, well,” was the predictable response. “It’s a cold case, then, within Great Scot’s brief. Better than true crime.”

  “Better than having a body drop at your feet,” Jean said, with feeling. “Better than finding someone you know dead.”

  “Someone knew the dead folk. Amy, it sounds like.”

  “The woman might be Sara, yes, but the man doesn’t seem to be her boyfriend. It looks like someone from an earlier era.” Jean didn’t mention her and Alasdair’s ghost-sighting. Not that Miranda wouldn’t be interested. It was just that until she—they—found some sort of corroborating evidence, a story, forensics, something, then the ghost didn’t count as a clue, only as a memory without an anchor. She cautioned, “In fact, there might not be any sort of crime at all. A puzzle, but not a crime.”

  “In the legal sense.” Miranda leaned back in her chair. The self-effacing blond hairdo she’d worn for Jean and Alasdair’s wedding right after New Year’s was now an even more mild-mannered honey-brown, softening her keenly intelligent face.

  Jean wondered how long it would be before that honey-brown segued into, say, auburn streaks or even red spikes like Knox’s. “Did you know that Lady Niddry’s Closet, across the street, is now Pippa’s Erotic Gear?”

  “Oh aye. Duncan’s saying that’s more appropriate to the area, university lasses less interested in business attire than in having themselves a good time. Than in their boyfriends’ having a good time as well. More’s the pity—about the shopping, that is, not the good times. There are more than enough clothing shops in town.”

  “The restaurant downstairs, Lady Niddry’s Drawing Room, is still open, isn’t it?”

  “That it is. You’ll not be finding another setting like that elsewhere in the city, a drawing room with a dungeon below, a modern kitchen serving up the finest in Scottish cuisine.”

  “No need to sell it to me,” Jean
said with a laugh. “We’ll make it there eventually. Neither of us find eating out quite the sport some people do.”

  Miranda, under no relationship cautions, not after all these years, rolled her eyes. But before she could launch into her spiel about restaurants as vital cogs in the wheels of society as well as purveyors of food, the outer door opened and shut and Gavin’s voice echoed down the hallway. “Good morning to you, sir. Mr. Prasad, is it?”

  “Yes, quite,” man’s voice replied.

  “May I take your coat, sir? Fancy a coffee? Espresso?”

  “An espresso would come a treat, there’s a good lad.”

  “I’m after brewing a fresh lot just now, sir, for Mir—, ah, Ms. Capaldi’s elevenses. Half a tick.”

  “Gavin is wasted at reception.” Miranda rose from her chair and headed for the door. “He’d make a fine maitre d’ at Lady Niddry’s Drawing Room. Vasudev! So glad you could come calling on such short notice!”

  The man she waved into her office had the body of a teddy bear, short, round, and soft, encased in a pinstriped suit that even fashion-impaired Jean recognized as the product of an exclusive tailor. His black hair and black moustache, rich brown complexion, and even richer brown eyes betrayed his roots far from Scotland’s shores, but his accent placed his personal point of origin near the shores of the English Channel. “Good morning to you, Miranda. And this would be Miss Fairbairn, I expect.”

  “It’s Jean. Good to meet you.” Jean stood up, shook hands—for a big man, his grip was surprisingly diffident—and moved to the back corner of the room. By the time Miranda seated Vasudev and resumed her perch behind her desk, Jean had removed a nest of Russian dolls from a second chair and pulled her trusty, low-tech notebook and pencil from her mini-backpack.

  She squelched a giggle when Miranda leaned forward, planted her elbows on the desk and steepled her fingertips—the detective was on the case. “Well then, Vasudev. What’s this I’m hearing? Bodies turning up in the cellar of the Playfair Building?”

  He shrugged. “You know as much as I do, Miranda.”

  Actually, Jean thought, she knew a lot more.

  “I gather a couple of tradesmen were removing a century’s worth of rubbish from the cellar,” Vasudev continued, “all the better to remodel the area, insert toilets, and so on, and they discovered a blocked-up door. The manager, Des Bewley, took it upon himself to have them investigate. Enterprising lad, Bewley. I’d have done the same, had I been on the premises at the time. The vaults beneath the South Bridge are quite the tourist attraction.”

  Miranda sent a subtle smirk toward Jean. Right yet again, a matter of marketing not sewage.

  Jean nodded graciously.

  “When they turned up the bodies, though, it became a police matter. So I dutifully rang the police.”

  “Before or after you rang The Scotsman?” asked Miranda.

  Vasudev’s smile was a crescent of gleaming white teeth. “After, of course. I didn’t want the police telling me to keep it quiet, did I now?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Besides, it’s not so much a police matter as one for an archaeologist. Or perhaps for Miss Fair—Jean, here, with her articles on history and legend.”

  Jean hadn’t intended asking about ghost stories, not quite so quickly, anyway, but neither did she intend passing up an opening. “Are there ghost stories about that building?”

  “Odd that you should ask that.” Vasudev frowned slightly.

  The door opened, and the aroma of coffee preceded Gavin into the room. He unerringly found the one empty spot on Miranda’s desk large enough for the tray and set it down. “Here you are, sir. Miranda. Jean, you’ve already got your latte, but I can be topping it up …”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Jean said, but didn’t refuse the offered plate of cookies. Chocolate covered digestive biscuits helped to keep the dark and the cold at bay. And right now she didn’t mean the weather.

  Gavin, she noted, was either using what she knew to be a modest salary to buy clothing that fit him, or else he was growing into his hand-me-down suit. “That all right for you, then?” he asked.

  “Ta,” Miranda told him, and he disappeared out the door, to the sound of the phone ringing on his desk.

  “Quite an interesting bit of gender reversal you’ve got here,” Vasudev said. “In my office, it’s the girls who bring the coffee.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Miranda told him, tones crisp as her blouse, and moved on. “Jean was asking about ghost stories.”

  “Mind you, I’ve never seen anything at all uncanny in either the Playfair Building or at Lady Niddry’s. Not unless you count the rows amongst the kitchen staff, voices like Macbeth’s witches, some of those women have …” Carefully holding his plate so as to keep crumbs from falling on his paisley-pattern tie and pocket square, Vasudev took a bite of biscuit and chewed. “… but supposedly a waiter took to his heels last year when a ghost fell from the landing at the top of the main staircase bang in front of him.”

  “He could see ghosts,” Jean said.

  Vasudev shrugged. “It’s all rumor. I expect the kitchen staff was simply trying to cover up for his abrupt departure for some personal reason. Young people these days have so little loyalty to their employers.”

  Jean wrote, “Ghost at L Niddry’s? Gender?” in her notebook. “Why is it odd I should ask?”

  “That American telly presenter, Jason Pagano, rang my office—let me see, it was just this Tuesday, day before yesterday. He didn’t say where he heard the story, but he wants to include Lady Niddry’s in his program. Could be he had a word with Bewley as well, leading to the present sequence of events.”

  Oh? Jean wrote “Jason Pagano rears his head!”

  “Program? American chap? There are many ghost-hunting programs these days, codswallop draped in scientific jiggery-pokery, if you’re asking me. Like that Mystic Scotland woman.” Miranda favored Jean with a sideways glance.

  “Very much so,” agreed Vasudev, over the rim of his cup. “Naught but innuendo and sensationalism. Although Mystic Scotland’s obviously filling a marketing niche, and quite successfully.”

  “Mystic Scotland is supernatural lite,” Jean said. “Hippy dippy rainbows and unicorns. Pagano’s something else again. His ‘Beyond the Edge’ is into vampires and violence. Evil spirits, poltergeists, a stake and a cross. Ghost stories aren’t necessarily horror stories, but it’s the horror that’s his subject matter. Suitably embellished, of course.”

  “I’ve often wondered, wouldn’t a spirit have to be Christian in order to be dissuaded by a cross?”

  “Well, yeah.” She remembered the sad wooden bits of what might have been a cross lying near the male body.

  “Do you believe in evil spirits, Miss Fair—Jean?” Vasudev’s eyes, dark as the espresso in his cup, focused unblinking on Jean. Miranda, face downcast, picked grains of sugar off the cookie plate with a manicured fingertip.

  “In evil, yes. In spirits, yes, not that the one implies the other. In most of the stories coming out of the South Bridge vaults and Greyfriars, no.”

  “But you write about such stories, even so.”

  “The tension between the world inside our heads and the world outside our heads defines our humanity.”

  After a moment’s contemplation, Vasudev nodded approval. “You would be interested in Commerce and Credibility, then. It’s a new book by Robin Davis from just here, Edinburgh University. So far as I understand it from the publicity material, he’s attempting to prove that everything we consider supernatural is merely a construct of our own consciousness.”

  “Good luck to him. You can’t prove ghosts and poltergeists and all exist any more than you can prove any sort of divine being exists. And you can’t prove they don’t.” Jean jotted down the title even so. He was right. She was interested.

  Chapter Six

  “So how long have you owned the two buildings, then, Vasudev?” Miranda pulled the conversation out of suppositional quicksand
and back to factual firm ground as smoothly as Alasdair would have done. Jean wrote “l”, for “listen”, and leaned back.

  “Going on for three years now,” answered Vasudev, “soon after I met Duncan over a game at St. Andrews. He told me there was good investment property near the South Bridge, especially since the fire of 2002. He was quite correct, very helpful of him. But there’s been more than a spot of bother obtaining planning permission for the restaurant, the pub, the flats upstairs. We’re still working on the flats in the Playfair Building. The ones at Lady Niddry’s are finished and sold, bringing in a nice income.”

  “What about the shop on Lady Niddry’s first floor?” asked Miranda.

  Up the allegedly haunted staircase, Jean added to herself.

  “Ah. Well now. That was a bit of a mis-judgment on my part. The clientele for an exclusive restaurant on the lower levels doesn’t automatically transfer to an exclusive boutique upstairs. They’re not open the same hours, for one thing. We’ve had to, ah …”

  Miranda didn’t say, lower your sights, but waited.

  “… change the direction of our marketing. We’re well positioned for the city market, but also for the more casual university trade. Hence the pub in the Playfair Building.”

  “And there’s always the tourist trade,” murmured Miranda. “Not only the heritage industry, but the folk who are away from home and open to, ah, unusual shops.”

  “Quite so. We’re hoping to be as versatile as possible.”

  An American would have said, cover all the bases. But Jean wasn’t sure about the equivalent British idiom. Guard both the wickets? She said, “I saw a woman standing in the window of the erotic gear shop, slender, long blond hair.”

  “That would be Nicola MacLaren, manageress.”

  Jean and Miranda caught each other’s eyes in a simultaneous wince. “Manageress” was like Bewley’s “female detective”, implying males were the real thing, whether police inspectors or managers. Although Jean was uncomfortably aware that when it came to gender assumptions, today she was a pot dissing a kettle. “Is there really a Pippa somewhere behind the scenes, or did y’all decide that was simply a good name to class the place up?”