Mortsafe

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Each had had his moment with Knox. Each would no doubt be chagrined to know how much his replies had sounded like the other’s: Who me? I know nothing.

  She’d waved Pagano away, and scheduled Davis to make a formal statement avowing that he was the most innocent of bystanders and mild-mannered of ivory-tower inhabitants, and just how, please, should he have known that his colleague Nicola had once answered to her middle name?

  Now Hugh was carrying out his promise to play Burns’s “A Man’s a Man for All That”. Jean mouthed the words: What though on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin grey, an’ a’ that, Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man’s a man, for a’ that. She wondered if anyone dining below knew the words, or would care if they did.

  She knew what she cared about. Or, more properly, who.

  Alasdair sat beside her in the circle of chairs that Knox had arranged at the front of the drawing room, as far from the doors into the downstairs dining room as possible. He wore a neat bandage on his throat, and the open collar of his shirt was splattered now with rust-brown, not red. His expression wavering between elated and nauseated, Vasudev had offered dry-cleaning and medical specialists until Alasdair’s polite smile grew pained. “If you’d have your chef prepare sandwiches …”

  The platter of sandwiches sat empty on the end of the buffet. Funny how the risk of death sharpens the appetite, thought Jean, and tongued a bit of cress from between two back teeth. Today she and Alasdair were two for two.

  For a’ that an’ a’ that, It’s coming yet for a’ that, That man to man, the world o’er, Shall brithers be for a’ that.

  And what about sisters, Jean wondered. Knox had used both persuasion and threats to clear the entrance hall and the drawing room of reporters, allowing only Amy Herries to remain, under strict orders to keep her mouth shut. She sat at the far end of the buffet, just within earshot, her curly head bent over the handbag in her lap that she was apparently dismembering.

  Knox and Gordon sat side by side, gazing across the circle of chairs at Des Bewley. Bewley was bookended by two large constables and handcuffed with garden-variety police-issue handcuffs, not the decorative variety from Pippa’s across the lobby and up the stairs.

  Through the drawing room doors, Jean saw Grizel fall once more from the landing, right before the oblivious faces of Ryan and another constable. Beside her, Alasdair tensed and then loosened again. She set her hand on his sleeve, sensing the subtle prickle of his force field.

  Gordon held up a small plastic bag. Inside lay a blackened lump that could have been just about anything, but which Jean knew was a silver skull charm. “I was only finding it because I was told to be looking out for it. We likely’d never have gone looking for it without being tipped off there was something still at the scene. Even then, we were almost overlooking it in the shadows cast by the mortsafe, had to get the light of the torches shining just so.”

  A toddler could have guarded Bewley. He slumped, defeated. “Nicola wasn’t half blazing I’d opened up the vault. How was I knowing ‘twas the other end of the vault I’d bricked up, all these years ago?”

  “You bricked up the vault?” Knox elbowed Gordon. He tucked the bag into his coat and pulled out notebook and pen. Good, Jean thought. She didn’t have to play steno—not that she had her notebook in her little evening bag anyway.

  “Nicola, well, she was Chrissie then, just someone I was seeing at uni, all right? She liked a bit of the rough, I’m thinking, girl brought up proper in the Outer Isles and me from the banks of the Clyde, well accustomed to working. And to drinking.”

  There was something Nicola and Sara had in common, then. A strict upbringing. Funny, too, how a pendulum that had been pushed too far one way would come scything back too far to the other, given the chance.

  “One night she came to me all in a panic,” Bewley said. “Said she needed a doorway bricked up, there was something inside needed hiding. I’d been doing construction for a bit of the folding stuff, ‘twasn’t too hard getting the building supplies.”

  “Where was the door?” Gordon asked.

  “At the back of the old Deacon’s Neck Theater, behind the framing of an old fireplace. That building wasn’t always a theater, used to be a hotel. Or a whorehouse, most likely. No surprise there’d be a hidey-hole. Chrissie—Nicola was saying she had a good friend doing a show there, she’d been hanging about and helping out, but something had gone terribly wrong and the friend was dead.”

  “That’s all she told you?”

  “Pretty near, aye.”

  “You’ve been blackmailing her all these years, have you?” asked Knox.

  Bewley goggled at her. “Hell no. Why’d I be wanting to do that? Nicola, she looks after me is all. She’s been throwing work my way. She fixed me up with the job at the Resurrectionist. I should’ve spit on Mr. Posh Prasad’s shiny shoes and run like hell, that’s what I should have done.”

  Alasdair fixed him with a stare like an icicle. “Rich, isn’t it, your saying you were tired of all this happening on your doorstep, when you coshed the constable yourself. When you yourself tripped Jean here almost under the bus.”

  Jean very carefully did not let the memory of bus exhaust overcome the present aroma of food. “Because I was looking at the site of the theater? Because I was talking to Davis?”

  Bewley stared at his hands, the metal cuffs holding them close together—but hardly in an attitude of prayer. “Davis. Not a clue, Davis. All that going on at the theater and he’s seeing nowt but his own … Well.”

  “Why did you attack Ross?” Alasdair asked. “Asking questions about the crime scene, was he? Asking about Nicola?”

  “She was telling me about the skull necklaces, way back when. Showing me hers—not that it was hers, she and her friend had traded. Then the friend ended up dead in the vault.”

  Amy stirred, stretched out the strap of her bag, knotted it again.

  Knox asked, “And Nicola was thinking her skull charm was still there?”

  “Aye.”

  “And you were after finding it for her?”

  “She’s always looking after me.” The spittle sprayed from his lips. “Fifteen bloody years she’s been looking after me. Wanted to show her that at the end of day, it’s me could be saving her. But Ross, he was catching me going down there, went asking me why. After I looked after him as well. All that and I couldn’t find the bleeding charm after all.”

  “You don’t like clever people, do you?” Knox wasn’t asking. To the constables she said, “Take him away. We’ll be working up at least three charges of assault, perhaps even attempted murder. See if that will be making him feel himself a man again.”

  Gordon glanced over at her. “Feeling himself a man?”

  She looked evenly back. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s always the problem.”

  “If you’re saying so,” Gordon replied, and flipped to a new page.

  Hmmm, thought Jean. Beside her Alasdair watched the constables drag Bewley away.

  The front door opened and shut. Two more police people, one of them female, took up positions in the lobby. From downstairs wafted a pipe solo, making the dishes on the buffet jingle softly in accompaniment. Another constable—oh, Wallace, back in uniform—sat Ryan in the hot seat. The young man looked yearningly at the remains of the appetizers, then down at his empty hands. “You didn’t put handcuffs on me.”

  “You’re after attacking someone, are you?” Knox asked.

  “Once was enough,” he said. “Back then. Never again.”

  “I was arresting Bewley for assault, not murder. You, now …”

  “I murdered Sara.”

  A quickly muffled moan came from Amy.

  “Did you now?” asked Knox.

  Ryan leaned forward, oozing desperation. “I met Sara at The Body Snatcher. She took me along to the theater. They could always use someone else with the scenery and stuff like that. She came on to me, really she did. All my hormones are in the right
place—I’m not going to turn a pretty girl down.”

  Or even an ugly one, at that age, Jean thought.

  “The janitor at the theater, an old guy who’d worked there forever, he’d disappear for hours at a time and come back drunk. Nobody ever saw him leave, though. Sara got him to show her where he went. Turned out he’d found a sliding panel in the frame of an old fireplace, one covering a doorway in a stone wall that had been thrown across the opening of a cave. It must have been in the steep ground leading down to the Cowgate. The muck in there, you wouldn’t believe.”

  Knox opened her mouth, but Jean got there first. “What sort of muck? How had the place been used?”

  “Petrified crap—cows and sheep, I think, but I’m no expert.” Ryan’s snort was only an imitation of a laugh. “Rotten clothes, rotten barrels, coils of metal tubing and stuff. Someone had a still in there, I bet, avoiding the revenuers.”

  “The excisemen, here,” Jean said. When she had teased Miranda about the bricked-up doorway in Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado”, Miranda had come back with something about whisky distilling. The two of them should set up as stream-of-consciousness fortunetellers.

  “What of the vault beneath the Playfair Building, where Sara’s body was found?” asked Knox.

  “And where Ranald Hamilton’s body was found as well,” Alasdair said.

  “Who? Oh, the human bones. Yeah.” Ryan leaned over, running his hands up over his face and through his hair as though they were a mask that he could pull off. “They were in a niche in the cave, wrapped up in some sort of decayed fabric. With the Bible and the cross. Sara moved them.”

  “Did she?” prompted Gordon.

  “She and I went exploring and saw that the cave was tied into the vaults, but then we got to the dead end. Seriously, we had no clue it was just across the street from The Body Snatcher. From here. You get under the ground, you get disoriented.”

  Tell me about it, Jean thought. Alasdair set his hand on top of hers.

  Ryan leaned over even further, drawing up his knees and resting his feet on the crossbar of the chair. “One night her friend Chrissie showed up. More than a friend, that was obvious. Sara was into experimentation, she’d try just about anything—drinking, mary jane, getting it on with another woman.”

  Knox asked, “Were you jealous, then?”

  Amy dropped her bag to the floor and started knotting her hands instead.

  “Some, maybe, but on the other hand, I was relieved she wanted to keep it all casual. Nicola, you’re calling her now. Geez, does she look different. She’s got real class. Then she was just a bitch, you know? Sticking her nose in here and there, trying to make points and get ahead.”

  “Make points with Davis?”

  “Oh yeah. He gave her and Sara both those little skull charms, meant they were ‘special’.” His forefingers made quotation marks. “I bet he was having them shipped in from China by the boxcar load.”

  “And the two women fought,” Alasdair said softly. “Over Davis?”

  “Oh yeah. Over Davis. The three of us, Sara, Chrissie, me, we had a few drinks, we were having a good time—somewhere in the back of my mind I was hoping I could, you know, both the women at once …” He shrugged. “Anyway, Sara had us all go into the cave and move the bones into the vault and spread them out next to that old mortsafe. Don’t know how that got in there, could have been the whisky guys collecting scrap metal—the poor people living in there had to scavenge anything they could, I guess, just trying to scratch a living.”

  True enough, Jean thought.

  “Sara wanted to substitute the real mortsafe for this stupid one Davis had us make out of aluminum foil. She wanted to use some of the real bones in a scene where the ghost of Mary, Queen of Scots, wanders around looking for her head. A meeting of physical and social anthropology, Sara said. She must have gotten that from Davis. Man, could that guy run off at the mouth. Still can, I guess.”

  Jean offered no opinions. Gordon asked Ryan, “Did Davis know about this?”

  “Not a clue. Not a hint of a clue. He didn’t even know about the cave. Sara thought she’d make points by springing it all on him. He kept talking about pushing the envelope, and boy, that would have done it. The bones were just organic remains, she said, and Chrissie kept urging her on. Me, I kept telling her Davis wouldn’t have the stomach for it. If she turned body snatcher herself she’d get him, all of us, in trouble with the authorities, and that would be the end of her being Miss Favorite.”

  “And would she be feeling that way about her own remains?” Knox asked, but not of anyone in particular.

  Amy’s intake of breath was almost a sob.

  Cringing, Ryan folded in half like an animal protecting its soft underbelly. “I think I realized just about the time Sara did that Chrissie was egging her on because she wanted her to cause Davis trouble, she wanted her to lose status with him. Chrissie thought she’d be number one, then … That’s where I’ve heard her called Nicola before. That’s what she had Davis calling her. Already going for the posher name.”

  “And then?”

  “Sara started calling Chrissie a traitor, saying she thought they were a couple, how could Chrissie stab her in the back like that. She was hurt, she was really hurt.”

  Gordon asked, “You’re saying you were drunk as well, the three of you?”

  “Yeah. That didn’t help. When Sara dropped her flashlight and rushed at Chrissie, I tried to grab her, but I don’t know exactly what happened …”

  The music, the voices, the ring of silver against china seemed to fade. In the lobby, Grizel fell from the landing behind the backs of the waiting constables. Amy had apparently stopped breathing.

  Ryan’s voice trembled. “Somehow I threw her against the mortsafe. I don’t know. It was dark. When I got the flashlights up and going again, there she was, one side of her, her head, all bloody, sort of crushed in—you could see, even in the dim light—she hit the corner of the mortsafe just right. Just wrong, that is. I murdered her.”

  Once again Jean remembered Ryan seizing her arm when she almost fell onto the mortsafe at Greyfriars. He’d gone white as a ghost, pale as one of Vasudev’s tablecloths, ashen as the fires of an old passion.

  The mortsafe in the vault wasn’t rusty only with iron oxide, but with blood.

  Alasdair’s lips twitched. “You killed her, aye. You didn’t murder her. Your account matches the forensics perfectly, the blood and hair on the corner of the mortsafe, the indentation in Sara’s skull.”

  “Oh,” Ryan said, the air rushing out of his chest as he realized he’d just passed the most important exam of his life.

  At the far end of the buffet, Amy bent her face into her hands and wept. Jean extricated her hand from Alasdair’s, went to her, knelt at her side and wrapped her slender waist with her arm. In all the day’s incidents, Alasdair hadn’t told her about the forensics, that Knox already knew the identity of the—death weapon. Nothing would have changed if he had.

  “And?” Knox asked Ryan.

  “I ran away. I went home. I figured I’d have cops on my doorstep any minute, but no. Time passed and I realized Chrissie—Nicola—had covered it all up. I went on with my life. Then Jason said he was going to do a show in Edinburgh. And Vasudev Prasad called, said there was a ghost at his restaurant, and when he gave me the address I realized it was the old Body Snatcher. I wondered if it was Sara. I mean, we used to hang out there. I told Jason we needed to do a scene here as well as all the usual places, Greyfriars, the Castle. I wanted to know if it was her. If she was—happy.”

  Jean opened her mouth, then shut it again. Telling Ryan that the ghost wasn’t Sara wouldn’t help. If anything, it would shine a light into an area that didn’t need illumination.

  “Then Prasad ordered the vault beneath the Playfair Building opened up,” said Gordon.

  Ryan raised his reddened, tear-streaked face. “I saw it in the paper. I couldn’t see how it could be the same vault, how the bodies could be Sa
ra and the, the old one, until I walked around the area and put together the geography. Yes, it was her. Talk about being hoist with your own petard—they only opened the vault because we were in town …” He hiccupped. “I spent so much time walking around I got to Greyfriars late and tried to make lemonade out of lemons, you know, make points with Jason by giving him a bit extra to go on.”

  “Thanks,” Amy said to Jean, and lurched to her feet. “I’ve heard enough. I’m away home. You’re knowing where I am, eh, when it’s coming to a trial? Any trial at all?”

  Jean retrieved Amy’s bag, levered herself to her own feet, and handed it over. Knox said, “We’ll be in touch.”

  “Aye then, well …” Amy stopped beside Knox. “Thanks. And for being a strong woman as well. For setting an example. I hope you do your sergeant here over properly, show him a man’s not a man for all that, not in the way he’s thinking, harassing you and all.”

  The female constable came forward and ushered Amy away.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Knox stared after her. “What the hell?”

  Gordon’s mouth dropped open. “Where’s she getting …”

  Jean returned to her chair thinking, Amy, I’m glad you’re inspired by that harassment complaint but …

  Alasdair said under his breath, “Incoming.”

  Through the double doorway leading into the vaulted dining room walked Nicola, another female constable at her heels, one who shut the doors behind her just as Hugh and the lads struck up “Wild Mountain Thyme”.

  Nicola escorted herself to the hot seat and sat down. One solitary hair drooped from her upswept ‘do. One micro-blot of lipstick marred the ivory of her front teeth. Other than that, she still looked as though she’d stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine.

  She set her feet, in the black straps and spikes that constituted her shoes, side by side. Folding her hands in her lap, she stated, “Inspector Knox, I take full responsibility for the entire situation.”