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  Chuckling, Jean once again fell into step beside him.

  “Opposite Lady Niddry’s House, Ian was saying. Not so far along the street as the arch over the Cowgate, where there were buildings lost during the 2002 fire, but near. And wasn’t that a headache for the firefighters, tracking the fire into the catacombs.”

  Jean could imagine, but didn’t. “You know that Lady Niddry’s House is just another marketing scheme, don’t you? There never was a Lady Niddry, just an alley, Niddry’s Wynd, running down from the High Street to the Cowgate and covered over by the bridge.”

  “Nothing like a hint of the aristocracy, I’m thinking, for posh shops and a restaurant.”

  “As posh as you’re going to get in this neighborhood, anyway.”

  Jean skirted a puddle, and a thin stream of water pouring off an overhang, and checked out the funky outliers of the university: shops selling casual clothing, comic books, music and videos, computer and electronic gear, food and drink. Flags hung dispiritedly from the front of a hotel. Backpack-wearing students clambered off buses, slammed in and out of various doorways, stopped at ATMs. And, a block down the street, a police car with all its lights flashing came to a sudden halt.

  “That’s across from Lady Niddry’s House.” Jean quickened her pace.

  But her journalist instincts didn’t perk up any faster than Alasdair’s police whiskers. He was already moving, half a pace ahead of her.

  A constable leaped out of the car and ran into a classical Age-of-Reason structure whose ground floor had been carried by time and taste into the Age of Commerce. Passersby began to coagulate around the door.

  Alasdair reached around, and without even looking grabbed Jean’s forearm—the magnetic attraction of wedding ring to wedding ring, she supposed—and pulled her behind him through the bodies and their miasma of wet wool sweaters. Electronic voices crackled from the squad car, overridden by the sub-vocal buzz of the kibitzers.

  Of the building, Jean noticed only a plate glass window blocked with brown paper and a wooden door covered in peeling paint, ajar behind a sheet of water falling from somewhere overhead. Then Alasdair thrust the door open and they were through the icy waterfall and inside.

  Blinking through her water-flecked glasses, she saw that they were in a dark, chilly hallway piled with construction material. With one hand she groped in her pocket for a tissue and with the other she swept the hood off her head. A woman’s shrill voice echoed in the gloom. “It’s my sister. I know it’s my sister. Let me in. Let me see her.”

  A man’s voice murmured, “Now miss—nothing definite—no need to worry yourself …”

  Jean mopped at her glasses and jammed them back onto her face just as a constable surged forward, made a warding gesture, and inhaled to speak. Alasdair spoke first. “Alasdair Cameron from Protect and Survive. Jean Fairbairn. D.I. Knox is expecting us.”

  “Down you go, then,” the constable returned, with a quick sidestep and a gesture behind him. “Have a care for the redheaded hellion.”

  “Ta.” Alasdair headed on down the hall, past the doors leading into a large room filled with a long counter, mirrors, lamps, tables, now all dark and disarranged but soon to be, no doubt, The Resurrectionist Bar. A flight of stairs ran upward into shadow. The light coming from below them no doubt emanated from the cellar door.

  Was it Tolkien, Jean wondered, who’d once said “cellar door” were the prettiest words in the language, if you considered only their sound and not their meaning? But Jean was considering their meaning.

  Behind her back, the constable blocked the street door and murmured some variation on, “Move along, nothing to see here.”

  From the open doorway, the first voice shrilled, “You dinna understand, ‘twas just here she went missing, fifteen years since, I know it’s her …”

  Another female voice, this one an acidic contralto, said, “Either calm yourself or I’ll have you removed from the premises.”

  Alasdair made a hard left into the throat of the stairwell, redolent with the chemical scent of paint, then looked back over his shoulder. His hair caught the glow of a bare bulb, the silver threads and the gold alike emitting a subtle gleam. “Jean?”

  “I’m okay. I’m coming.” She pushed away any deliberations on cellars in general and the South Bridge vaults in particular.

  “Well done.” He creaked on down the narrow steps to a landing, Jean so close behind him the hem of his coat flew back into her legs … An upwards rush and a woman catapulted into Alasdair’s chest. He didn’t so much leap as fall backwards, smashing Jean in turn against the wall.

  “Here!” shouted a male voice from below, and, in chorus, a light female voice called, “Stop just there!”

  Swiftly regaining his balance, Alasdair seized the woman with both hands and held her in front of him like a veterinarian holding a clawing kitten. “You’re all right then,” he said, not to her but from the corner of his mouth to Jean.

  “Yeah. No problem.” Jean pulled herself away from the cold wall and thought, she doesn’t have red hair at all.

  She had dark ringlets around a face so pale her puffy, brightly patterned coat looked like a tea cozy nestling an egg. Her eyes were also dark, and seemed to be spilling down her rounded cheeks… . No, she’d been crying, and her copious if carefully applied make-up had smeared and run. She peered frantically from Alasdair to Jean and back but slumped rather than struggled.

  Up the steps galloped two constables, one man, one woman. “Here,” said the former, this time in reproof.

  The latter said, “We’re only trying to help, Miss Herries. Amy.”

  “Herries?” Alasdair repeated under his breath. “Sara Herries?”

  “Yeh,” Amy said. “My sister was Sara Herries. Yesterday’s news, eh? Out of sight, out of mind.”

  Not necessarily, Jean thought. Edinburgh had never been Alasdair’s patch, but an unsolved missing person case would have crossed his desk in Inverness.

  The two constables removed Amy from Alasdair’s grasp and, everyone jockeying carefully around the landing, aimed her up the stairs. “Thank you kindly, sir,” said the man to Alasdair.

  Alasdair didn’t have to say anything about force of habit. His “Carry on, Constable,” proclaimed his former profession as clearly as if he wore a name tag.

  From the nether regions came the same astringent voice, its low register reverberating in the stairwell. “Take her to the station, give her tea, I’ll be along presently.”

  “Tea and no sympathy,” muttered Amy, but she allowed herself to be steered up the steps and away. A murmur of interest greeted her at the outside door.

  “Cameron?” inquired the disembodied voice, less a spirit of the ancient world, Jean thought, than D.I. Knox in female person. She’d never have assumed an academic was male, and heaven knew she’d met enough distaff police people she should have left her options open—but then, Alasdair, too, had assumed the Detective Inspector was a man.

  “Oh aye,” Alasdair called, apparently unmoved by his mistake. “Just coming.”

  Jean had thought it was cold and stuffy upstairs. Every step downwards, however, carried her deeper into an ominous chilly stillness.

  Chapter Three

  The cellar might be every bit as dank as Jean had—not feared, she reassured herself, anticipated—but it wasn’t as dark. Several bulbs glared down from the rough-hewn beams of the ceiling, illuminating the spiky red hair of D.I. Knox.

  Oh. The constable had been referring not to Amy Herries, but to this, this Valkyrie. She had to be close to six feet tall, four inches taller than Alasdair. She stepped forward, hand extended, eyes hooded in a face as beautifully carved as a Renaissance sculpture. “Wendy Knox.”

  Wendy? Jean thought. No telling what teasing about Peter Pan and Tinkerbelle this poor woman had suffered from her male colleagues, all the more because of her stature.

  With practiced expressionlessness, Alasdair shook her hand. “Hullo. This is Jean Fairbairn, from Great S
cot magazine. My wife.”

  Jean let Knox’s cold hand engulf and release hers, tilting her head back to look the woman in her cosmetic-free hazel eyes. She not only towered over Jean’s five-foot-three, she outweighed her by several stone. Not that she was fat. As far as Jean could tell, Knox’s body was all lean muscle and taut tendon beneath a stylish dark pants suit, its severity lightened by a necklace of multicolored agates and gold hoop earrings.

  Jean tried a smile. “Don’t worry, I write travel and history articles, I’m not a reporter, not exactly.”

  “American, are you? A bit cheeky, then, to be writing about Scotland.”

  So the Inspector believed the best defense was offense. No need to get offended, though. Jean stood as straight as she could without rising onto her tiptoes, smoothed the naturally surly tendrils of her own hair, and said with an even wider smile, “I’ve been doing a fish out of water number. Or a fish leaping out of one water into another.”

  “I know what you do,” Knox replied. “The both of you. You’ve been involved in a few homicide cases this last year, haven’t you now?”

  “Oh aye,” said Alasdair. “What’s this about the Herries case? Any chance your body is the missing woman’s?”

  “The cow,” Knox said, an upward flick of her eyes dismissing Amy. “She was making a wild guess is all. That newspaper article’s attracted too much interest.” This time her gaze flicked toward Jean.

  Jean didn’t bother with another smile. She might be her brother’s keeper, but she couldn’t keep her brethren at The Scotsman from a scoop.

  “What’s the medical examiner saying?” Alasdair asked.

  “He’s downstairs now. Have a look for yourselves.”

  Oh good, Jean thought. I was so hoping you’d say that.

  Knox strode briskly away across the stone pavement. Alasdair looked around at Jean. “You can be waiting for me at Blackwell’s. Or get yourself back to the office, and I’ll phone.”

  “No way. I’m coming, too.”

  “Aye?” he asked.

  “Yeah, well, since when has my claustrophobia outweighed my curiosity?”

  “Never, not so’s I’ve noticed. Come along then.”

  Jean went along, looking around the cellar like a condemned man taking in his last sight of freedom. But the subterranean room looked reassuringly mundane. All four corners had been cleared. Old furniture, more junk than antique—though you never knew—was stacked near the staircase along with collapsing cardboard boxes and lumps that could just as well be trolls as trash bags. What part of the central floor wasn’t piled with the remains of lives long gone displayed a collection of tools, lumber, a couple of sawhorses—all contributions to the new pub upstairs. And, Jean thought as she spotted a wooden platform taking shape against the far wall, contributions to a stage down here.

  Pipes. Plumbers. Between the beams of the ceiling, the flooring of the building above, snaked a maze of pipes large and small. Most were scabrous metal, their joints arthritic with age, but several were modern PVC. An army might march on its stomach, thought Jean, but a pub surely ran on its plumbing. No wonder the hapless plumbers had been down here poking into the walls.

  Now it was Knox who stood beside a rough, rectangular hole. Stones and scraps of mortar were piled around the base of a nearby police-issue light stanchion. Two coveralled crime scene technicians squatted on their haunches near its halo of light, either searching for clues such as footprints or cigarette butts or taking their ease. One of them grinned. “No rush, Inspector. Those puir bodies’ll no be away for a dauner afore you get there.”

  The other fingered the shining screen of his smartphone and muttered, “You’d best be unrolling a ball of string, you’ll no be getting a signal in those catacombs.”

  “Thank you kindly,” said Knox over her shoulder and, no doubt, through her teeth.

  Alasdair had pulled a small flashlight from his coat pocket and was inspecting the impromptu doorway. Except, Jean saw in the traveling blotch of light, it wasn’t impromptu at all. The pattern of the stones changed from the squared blocks of the wall to irregularly shaped rocks mortared into a stone-framed rectangle. “There was a door here already,” she said.

  “There was that,” Alasdair replied, and to Knox, “The plumbers punched through just here, I reckon, because the rubble fill would be easier to shift than knocking a hole in the wall itself. But why? Where they meaning to connect with the mains beneath the street? Seems to me there’s many a pipe already here—the building’s had access to the mains all this time.”

  “I’ve been asking that as well,” Knox replied. “The plumbers and the manager of the pub, a chap named Bewley, will be giving me an answer. In any event, they knocked out enough of the rubble to step through. We opened it up further, when they got a bit more than they bargained for.”

  Did they? Jean asked herself, remembering Miranda’s, The owner of the new pub likely ordered the tradesmen to ca’ down the wall, the better to increase his trade.

  Alasdair shone his light into the pitch blackness beyond the opening. Knox picked up a nearby industrial-strength flashlight and did the same. Jean peered past them both, to see nothing but a small stone chamber and steps plunging even further downward.

  She took a step backward, then forced her feet to carry her forward again, to where her sleeve touched Alasdair’s. So far she wasn’t sensing anything emanating from the hole other than stale air and mildew, its wet-dog stench making the last trace of the stairwell’s fresh paint seem like perfume. Not that she was taking deep breaths. Her ribs seemed to be closing around her lungs like an iron maiden.

  “That’s why you’re consulting with P&S, because we’ve got detailed plans of all these buildings and the vaults beneath,” Alasdair said to Knox. “Though I’ve not yet had time to see if this entrance, this area, is in the records.”

  “You’ll be letting me know, then.” Her flashlight before her like a lance, Knox stepped through the doorway. “I’d also like your opinion on the bodies. Shall we?”

  Let’s not, said a little voice in the back of Jean’s mind. She hooked her elbow around Alasdair’s free arm, and told his inquiring glance, “If the lights go out I want to make sure it’s you I’m hanging onto.”

  He must have read the same article on relationships. Rather than rolling his eyes, he nodded gravely and pressed her arm against his side. Together they stepped into the catacomb.

  Following the unwavering beam of Knox’s flashlight, they picked their way down a stairwell so constricted the two of them had to press even more tightly together. The narrow stone steps were gritty beneath Jean’s shoes. She touched the scabrous plaster of the wall with her free hand to steady herself, and her skin crawled at the cold, damp, slime-over-sandpaper surface. The reek of mold and mildew had an elusive aftertaste of smoke, trapped here beneath the city since the fire of 2002 or even since the occupancy of over a century ago.

  Down, down, one flight of steps, a landing, an angle, another flight of steps—surely they were approaching the center of the Earth and a dinosaur was about the burst through the walls, walls which were not closing in … No, Jean told herself firmly, they were only approaching the level of the Cowgate, the street that crossed under the South Bridge, and the walls had not moved.

  Suddenly the steps ended, the walls seemed to fall away, and Knox’s light illuminated a corridor. The rooms opening to either side were no more than ink-black voids, except for one, its arched opening outlined by glare. Lights, camera, action.

  Jean caught a cautious gleam from Alasdair’s blue eyes, and knew that he, too, was—well, the word wasn’t quite listening. Letting his extra and not entirely welcome sense take in whatever paranormal resonances vibrated gently and invisibly between air and shadow.

  She raised her eyebrows in a query. Getting anything?

  He shook his head.

  No, the place was oppressive, sad, tired. But not haunted. Not just now, anyway.

  Knox strolled on into the
doorway of the illuminated chamber and beckoned the two laggards. Still hanging onto Alasdair—a literal pratfall on Ramsay Lane was nothing compared to a perceptual pratfall here—Jean squinted into the light.

  The chamber’s barrel-vaulted roof, black with soot, dipped close to the gravelly floor on right and left. Rough brick-and-mortar shelving ranged up the far, flat end. A dark blotch of moisture stained one wall. The room was empty except for a coffin-shaped network of metal strips in one corner and a human-shaped lumpy mass in the center, illuminated much too well by the operating-room glare from a couple of light stanchions. Two men crouched beside it, one in coveralls, one in a trench coat.

  The latter stood up, and up, and up. He was even taller than Knox, but less wide, a flesh-and-blood version of Star Wars’ C3P-O. Simultaneously cringing and dodging as his swept-back hair brushed the ceiling, he turned the axe-blade of his nose toward Knox. “You’ve come back then, have you?”

  “You’re needing supervising?” Knox retorted, and, without looking around at Jean and Alasdair, “D.S. Gordon. Mr. Cameron of Protect and Survive. His wife, Miss Fairbairn of Great Scot.”

  Gordon held out his hand, realized he was wearing latex gloves, and settled for a brisk nod. “Great Scot?”

  “I’m only here observing,” Jean told him.

  “There’s many a muckle to be observing. This here’s a woman, Dr. Kazmarek’s saying.”

  The other man made a vague gesture of acknowledgment and kept on plying his collection bags and tweezers. Jean managed to inch forward without releasing Alasdair, so that the lights weren’t reflecting off the smudges on her glasses, and observed.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—this body was clay to clay. It was hard to believe that all those dun-colored clumps and furrows had once been flesh and blood. Now its—her—garments were no more than threads melded to leathery bits of skin and protruding angles of bone. Her face was turned toward the door, eye sockets filled with fibrous matter that might be spider webs, or might be memories.