Mortsafe Read online

  “No pun intended?” Jean wrote in her book.

  “Pun? Oh, ‘mass’, I see.” His rectangular smile gleamed again.

  “Did I see you at Greyfriars Kirkyard yesterday afternoon, taking photos of Jason Pagano and his film crew?”

  “Why yes, you did. Well observed, Jean. Cynical lad, Pagano, selling out the truth for a fast—buck. You’re American, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Do you know Pagano personally?”

  Davis shuddered. “I have better things to do with my time than cultivate the acquaintance of someone like him. My book will expose him and his sort for the charlatans they are, as a public service.”

  A public service, Jean told herself, that will hopefully make you lots of bucks, pounds, euros, and all. “You don’t see any usefulness in Pagano and his sort, ah, exposing their viewers to history?”

  “Perhaps, if only to demonstrate the foolishness of believers who not only murder but die, all in the name of psychotic belief.”

  “Psychosis is a strong word. Does that mean you believe …” Jean emphasized the word, ever so slightly, “… that all guides to the paranormal are cynical exploiters rather than believers themselves?”

  “Not at all. Some of these folk, that woman running Mystic Scotland, for example, are simply deluding themselves.”

  Knowing “that woman” as she did, Jean did not disagree. To hide her bemusement, she glanced toward the window of the café—and realized someone was staring back at her through the wet glass. But the moment she registered the blurry shape, it was gone, as quickly as though plucked away on a bungee cord.

  Okaaay. Was that the same someone who’d been watching her from the bridge? Someone who was judging her by the company she kept—and she didn’t mean Davis, but Alasdair, and Knox and Gordon. Busybodies are us, she told herself.

  She rotated back to Davis. Time to bring the interview around to Sara. “Was ‘Ghosts for Fun and Profit’ a good use of your time, fifteen years ago?”

  “You’ve heard of that, have you now? What is it they say about good intentions?”

  “That they pave the path to hell?”

  He hadn’t actually wanted an answer—he was still talking. “Throughout history, humor has been a way of educating the common people. I thought an exercise for my students, an amateur production, might open a few minds. But their ideas, enthusiastic as they were, simply weren’t sufficiently well thought-out. Not at all like Commerce and Credibility with its professional reviews, references, and qualifications.”

  “It was their fault,” Jean wrote in her notebook. “Did you know that Sara Herries’s body has been found? She was one of your students, I—well, I don’t believe. I know.”

  Davis acknowledged her play on words with a smile that was more of a triangle, one that settled into a grim line. “I’ve not only read the newspaper today, I’ve had a conversation with Detective Inspector Knox. Now there’s a woman who’s giving feminism a bad reputation.”

  No way would a diversion into gender politics end well. Jean wrote “l”—listen.

  “Dreadful, poor little Sara lying there all these years. And here’s me, thinking she’d run away with that American lad, Allsort, we called him. I didn’t even know his real name, so could hardly make inquiries. I was quite sure it was no more than a dalliance on her part, a pathetic choice for a girl of her talents, but when she never reappeared I convinced myself she was happy in that brave new world across the Atlantic. Alas, poor Sara. She should have died hereafter.”

  Jean mentally checked off his references to Hamlet and Macbeth. “Did she have another boyfriend? A lad named Chris, perhaps?”

  “There’s a common name for you.” With a heavy sigh and a crumple of his lips, Davis patted the book. “For shame, Jean. I trusted you when you said you were interested in this, this ill-favored thing, madam, but which is mine own.”

  A spark in his eye dared her to recognize the source of that quote. She did. This one was from As You Like It, a character speaking of his wife as a thing. Jean had always been attracted to another phrase in the same speech: As marriage binds and blood breaks. But she while she was normally up for a quotation smackdown, this wasn’t the time or the context. “Oh, I’m interested in your book, all right. It’s just that you have more to offer our readers than your theories on the paranormal.”

  “That I do, yes.” His winsome expression faded, overtaken by self-satisfaction. Leaning back in his chair, he pulled out his pocket watch. Something tumbled after it and swung back and forth on the chain—a small silver skull. “I beg your pardon, I’m expecting my public relations consultant any moment. She’s arranging a book launch at Blackwell’s … Ah.” His gaze followed Jean’s to his stomach.

  “Interesting charm you have there.” She concealed her smile at the affectation of the watch. She might still smell of academia, but he was deliberately dousing himself with it.

  “Ah. Yes.” He returned his watch to its pocket and fondled the skull between thumb and forefinger. “It’s a bit of symbolism for myself and my students. I give these out as gifts to the cream of the crop, fittingly engraved with their initials and the date. A memento mori, right?”

  “Remember you will die,” translated Jean.

  “A reminder to us among the living to enjoy ourselves now. We have only the one chance to appreciate the flesh, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. Nothing lingers, no spooks, no spirits.”

  “The flesh isn’t necessarily gone, just the consciousness within it.”

  “My point exactly. Enjoy sensation and consciousness whilst you’ve got it. But squeamishness about the body is a characteristic of the religious, isn’t it? Especially the more virulent of the Protestant Christian denominations. The Catholics seem to accept the body only after death, when they can play with the disjecta membra. As for the Muslims and Jews and all, well, let’s not go there.”

  Did Davis know Sara had found Hamilton’s body? Assuming that’s what had happened—Jean wasn’t at all sure the scenario had played out that way. She was, however, starting to suspect that Davis saw himself as the male version of yet another of Edinburgh’s literary characters, Miss Jean Brodie, who also had her favorite students. Davis’s chocolate brown eyes with their carefully cultivated blend of sexuality and intellect no doubt appealed to young women. They would have appealed to Jean, if she’d been young, and naive, and not committed to the clear ice-blue gaze of someone who was no longer young and naive either.

  Her own hand, displaying engagement and wedding rings, closed her notebook and tucked it away. “Did you give Sara one of those skulls?”

  “Yes, I did. I wonder what happened to it? Perhaps it’s in a box at the family home.”

  Or perhaps that’s what Amy had seen her sister wearing along with their mother’s gold cross, and it still lay in the vault. A tarnished nubbin of silver would look a lot like a pebble—unless you knew what you were looking for.

  Jean blinked. She wasn’t underground, she was in a busy coffee bar. Davis was tucking his tablet into its leather case. She got the message. “Thank you very much, Robin. I’ll be on my way, leave you to your public relations planning. Who is your publicist, by the way? My partner, Miranda Capaldi, is always on the look-out for someone good.”

  “I’m happy to recommend her.” Reaching into an interior pocket, Davis’s long, spatulate fingers produced not a rabbit but a business card. He extended it across the table. “If there’s anything she or I can be telling you about Commerce and Credibility …”

  “Thank you. I’m sure we can mention it in our books column, since you’re a local author and all.” She took the card, glanced at it, and aimed it toward the exterior pocket of her bag.

  Whoa. She jerked it back again. The card read, “Prasad Public Relations, N. C. MacLaren, consultant”, above a phone number and email address. “Nicola MacLaren is your publicist? She is quite versatile, isn’t she? How long have you known her?”

  “Many years. She took a few courses from me
in her university days, all the better to further her business degree. Public relations, social anthropology, they’re not mutually exclusive. She’s a canny one about the Edinburgh market. In fact, she’s introducing me to a few important folk at Lady Niddry’s Drawing Room tonight. In the meantime, though …” Again with the watch. “… we’re meeting the management of Blackwell’s in just a few minutes. It’s been a pleasure, Jean.”

  “Nice to meet you, Robin,” she returned, and, manipulating bag, book, and coat, stepped back out onto the sidewalk and turned toward the High Street and the office.

  Part of her mind was registering the rain. The dark. An early evening. Traffic. Pedestrians. Umbrellas. The Cowgate, a shadowed chasm far below. The rest of her mind spun like a Catherine wheel, sparks shooting out into the gray day.

  N. C. MacLaren. What did that “C” stand for? Catherine? Cecilia? Or perhaps …

  Jean felt a stone wall of preconception collapsing, the clouds of possibility rising to fill her vision. She plunged into the loosely formed line of people waiting for a bus in front of the Playfair Building without seeing them as more than shapes in the murk—juggling Davis’s book, she reached for her bag and her phone—she really, really needed to touch brains with her other half …

  An engine roared behind her. The crowd surged toward the street, carrying her sideways. Water sprayed over her feet and legs. Something hard and fast yanked at her right shin, jerking it out from under her. She started to fall, not onto the sidewalk but over the curb into the street.

  The book flying out of her hands. Voices shrilling. An ear-splitting squeal of brakes and the smothering odor of diesel. The metal mountain of the bus striking her right shoulder. Hands seizing her left arm and shoulder, yanking her back from the brink to crash against an upholstered surface.

  She found herself standing in a clearing, only the hands on her shoulder and arm holding her upright—her legs had turned to Jell-O, her mind echoed in an empty head …

  She focused. Of the open mouths and staring eyes encircling her, she could make out only two complete faces. Tristan Ryan, his red hair, green and yellow baseball cap, and stark white face contrasting with the black leather garb of the man who was clasping her against his own chest.

  Jason Pagano.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jean’s legs and feet were goose-pimply with cold and wet. Her right shin ached. Her left arm ached. Her neck and shoulders ached. Surely she’d have noticed someone beating her up …

  Oh. Yeah.

  Oh my God.

  Pagano half-carried, half-dragged her through the doorway of the Playfair Building, brushing past Des Bewley. Bewley carted a chair from the construction zone into the entrance hall. Pagano plunked Jean down on it. He groped in her mini-backpack—look at that, it was still draped over her shoulder. He found her phone, inspected the screen, asked, “Alasdair. He’s the hubby, eh?” and at her weak affirmative nod alerted her husband that he’d come within a hair’s breadth of widowhood.

  Bewley stared at Ryan. Ryan stared back. At last Bewley muttered beneath his breath, “Allsort?”

  A constable galloped up the stairs from the cellar, phoned emergency services, and administered crowd control.

  Someone handed her a hot mug. Someone else set the now torn and muddy copy of Commerce and Credibility on the floor beside her. Pagano poked at it with the toe of his boot. “Fan of Davis’s, are you? You were at Greyfriars yesterday, taking the mickey.”

  Her thoughts flapped like bats in the echoing cavern of her head. She stared down into the mug and saw that it was filled with milky, sugary, industrial-strength tea. She really didn’t want it—her stomach felt like a small boat on a choppy sea—but at least it was warming her hands.

  Oh. Yeah. Pagano.

  She knew she hadn’t meant to give him a hard time at Greyfriars. But by the time she’d formulated the words, the opportunity to say them had passed. An ambulance pulled up outside. A bus pulled away. More police people arrived. Third time’s the charm, Jean thought. Fourth time. However many times they’d rushed to this building, called out to serve both the quick and the dead.

  “… places to go, things to do, people to see,” Pagano told the constable. No, it was another one, they all looked alike in their key-lime-pie jackets and caps with checkered bands. The officer replied, “Not ‘til we’ve taken your report, sir.”

  A paramedic told Jean what she already knew, that she would be bruised and sore but was otherwise all right. Physically. “We’ll have us a visit to Casualty,” she assured her.

  “No,” Jean replied. “I don’t need to go to the Emergency Room. Thank you anyway. I’m all right.”

  The woman looked dubious, but packed up her kit and departed without arguing.

  Jean sipped at the tea, willing the warmth and the sugar to do its job, and looked across the room at Ryan. Was her face bleached as white as his? “This time I wasn’t clumsy,” she told him. “This time someone tried to kill me.”

  “Say what?”

  “Greyfriars. Yesterday afternoon. You kept me from falling onto the mortsafe.”

  “Oh.” He shrank back into the shadow cast by his boss.

  Alasdair catapulted through the doorway, swept aside the constable, and fell to one knee at Jean’s feet. Now there, she thought, was an unusual pose.

  His eyes blazed, his cheekbones flamed, his breath came in ragged gusts. He’d probably run the three or four blocks from the university. From hair to coat to shoes, he was drenched. Drookit, he’d have said. She felt the chill damp radiating from him as he took her hands in his icy ones. “Jean.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Someone tripped me. I almost went under a bus. He pulled me back.” She indicated the hulking figure inspecting the door into the cellar, raindrops still glinting on his black leather shoulders, and his colorful, slightly built companion. “The guy with Pagano, it’s Ryan,” she whispered. “Allsort, I think.”

  “Who tripped you?” Alasdair also spoke in an undertone.

  “I have no idea. It was dark, it was raining, it was crowded, and I was distracted by something. Nicola’s middle initial. Maybe she tripped me up—I went into her shop earlier—but if Davis could have rushed back from Stirling the night Sara died he could have rushed down the sidewalk from the coffee shop. Or Pagano did it himself, or had Ryan do it, you know, making himself look good for his show. The, ah, black knight saving damsels in distress.”

  Alasdair’s eyes crossed slightly. “Oh aye,” he said soothingly. “We’ll get it sorted.” His gaze turned to Bewley at his usual post, hard hat, truculent expression, wet trousers and shoes. A raincoat lay over a box just inside the door of the pub. “Where was he?”

  “He was at the door when Pagano hauled me inside.”

  “Right.” With a squeeze, Alasdair released her hands and stood up. The red was draining rapidly from his face, leaving it ashen. In two paces, he was across the room and in Bewley’s face, never mind that the man was two or three inches taller. “Who was after killing my wife, eh?”

  Bewley’s expression went from truculent to combative, and his red-rimmed eyes glared. “How the hell am I knowing that? I’d just stepped outside, having a look at the weather. Filthy day, everyone’s head-down. Next thing, the bus is braking, the women are screeching, and that oik’s dragging her in here like a sack of cement.”

  Pagano and Ryan turned to watch. So did the constable at the door. Jean took a deeper drink of her tea and for a moment wished she had some popcorn.

  Alasdair took a step forward, backing Bewley against the wall. His voice softened into a menacing growl. “I’ll thank you to be minding she’s no sack of cement.”

  Bewley’s Adam’s apple jumped. He held up his hands—I surrender. “I didn’t mean anything. I’m full up, just, with all this happening on my doorstep.”

  “That makes two of us. Three.” Alasdair’s right hand gestured toward Jean. His left beckoned towar
d the cellar door. “You. Ryan.”

  Obeying the directive in Alasdair’s glacier-blue eyes, Ryan stepped forward a few reluctant paces. “Yeah?”

  “I’m hearing you had a wee blether with D.I. Knox earlier the day.”

  “Yeah.”

  Looming up behind him, Pagano deployed his resonant voice. “Good timing, that. I’ve got a production schedule to meet, I need my entire crew …”

  “Bad luck,” Alasdair retorted between his teeth, and turned back to Ryan. “I’m hearing you were biding here in Edinburgh in the nineties. You were answering to a nickname. Allsort. I’m hearing you were Sara Herries’ mate. Maybe more. You were seen having a wee bit snog with her.”

  Jean noted that Pagano’s face, while still resentful, registered no surprise at this stroll down memory lane.

  “Yeah, I was here. I was doing odd jobs, like working as a janitor in The Body Snatcher, where Lady Niddry’s Drawing Room is now. Sara got me a gig helping that pompous idiot Robin Davis with his show. But Sara was only—there were lots of girls, and lots of drink—and more,” Ryan said with a sideways glance at the constable, who so far was keeping an admirably neutral expression even as he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, ready for anything.

  “Sara was nothing special to you, was she?” Alasdair took another step forward. “Why’d you leg it when she went missing, then?”

  “I was scared. I didn’t know anything about how the police work in this country. I thought maybe I’d be framed for something, being the outsider.” He shrank back one pace, then two. Behind him Pagano folded his arms and in an elaborate dance step, moved out of the way.

  “Who else were you mates with?” Alasdair demanded.

  Ryan shrugged, and his shoulders remained up around his ears. “Nobody.”

  “A woman named Nicola MacLaren? Des Bewley here?”

  “Never heard of either of them. No offense,” Ryan said to Bewley.

  Bewley scowled, but before he could speak, Jean did. “Mr. Bewley recognized Mr. Ryan as Allsort just a few minutes ago.”