Chapter Thirty-Six

We rush in then. With such a tiny space, there's no chance that someone is lying in wait to attack. Selim is on the blankets, with empty bottles beside him and something else. Something that I see Gray notice at the same moment.

I yank newspaper from the tiny window, and light floods in. When I glance over, I can see what that pale object is. A length of rope, lying right beside Selim.

Gray is already bent next to the young man.

"He's alive," Gray says as he checks for a pulse. He grips Selim's shoulder. "Mr. Awad? Selim?"

A low groan. Gray shakes him and says his name again. Selim falls over, head lolling. The stench of alcohol overwhelms the stink of Selim's unwashed body. There's another smell, too. Sickly sweet.

"Vomit," Gray says.

He shoves aside a filthy blanket covered in that vomit. Then he returns to trying to rouse Selim. When he slaps his face, I wince, but it does the trick. Selim jerks awake, blinking and looking around.

"Dr. Gray?" He blinks harder. "Miss Mitchell and Detective McCreadie. Where—? Oh!"

He tries leaping to his feet, but staggers and needs to be held up by both men.

"Where am I?" Selim says, looking around. His gaze falls on the empty bottles. "What are—?" He looks about again. "How did I get here?"

"Well, according to a note I received," McCreadie says, "you were spotted entering here with a woman last night."

"What? No." Selim gazes about himself in horror. "That's not—I did not—" He points at the bottles. "Those are not mine." He sees the length of rope and goes still. "And that definitely is not mine."

"We have questions for you, obviously," McCreadie says. "But for now, we need to get you home to your sister, where Dr. Gray can take a better look at you."

While McCreadie goes outside to hail a hansom cab, I talk to the neighbor. Gray has given me coins to draw answers out of her. The saddest part is that they aren't even big coins. Pennies and ha'pennies are all it takes, and so I don't begrudge her demanding payment incentive. The real concern will be that she'll start making things up to earn more money. So I'm careful with my questions, and I pay her even when she can't answer.

Last night, two men brought Selim to the apartment. Definitely men, meaning whoever wrote the note was lying about seeing a woman take him in, which suggests the whole thing was a setup.

The neighbor can't describe the men beyond saying they were big and rough, like dockworkers. They didn't see her with her door cracked open, and she had the good sense not to throw it open and confront them with all the noise they were making. Also it was two in the morning instead of the afternoon.

Selim had been unconscious. Drunk, she said, the smell cutting through even the stink of the building. They put him inside the room, and then they left. Before they went, one said something very specific to the other.

"Did you leave the rope?"

I don't even need to question Selim Awad to know he was set up. We would have strongly suspected it from the note and from finding him unconscious and surrounded by empty liquor bottles. His boots are also missing, suggesting they were used to make the prints that seemed to tie him to the attack on me.

By the time I finish my questioning, the guys are helping Selim downstairs. I slip in after them to search the room. Gray has taken the rope. I scoop up the bottles in the least filthy blanket. I also realize Gray took the one with the vomit. Gross, but a good call.

The setup here was that Selim was dead drunk. That blanket may tell us what was actually in his system, be it alcohol or something else.

Once those items are removed, the room is empty save for two other blankets, which I shake out. Empty.

The men had dumped Selim in that room overnight. They'd staged it with booze bottles and rope, and then someone sent that note to Gray. McCreadie might grumble that everyone is passing the clues our way, but I suspect if there's any insult in there, it's not directed at McCreadie.

The serialized stories depict Gray as a brilliant detective, but also something of an adrenaline junkie, rushing headlong into danger. While the writer gets a lot of things wrong, they're dead-on with that part. Brilliant but also an adventure hound, much like his new assistant.

The clue might have been sent to the guy most likely to hare off after Selim without bothering to notify the police. Such a person would burst in, see the rope and the booze bottles, and go "Ah-ha! I deduce this is our killer and, in his guilt, he drank himself into a stupor." Because, obviously, if you've strangled someone, you're still carrying around the rope days later.

Whoever set this up fancies themselves a criminal mastermind when, like most self-declared criminal masterminds, they just make our job a whole lot easier with their clumsy attempts to stage a crime scene.

Selim is resting at his sister's and joking—sheepishly—about setting a record for number of times rendered unconscious in a week. Yep, there's a serious dose of déjà vu here. The guy was knocked out in the tunnels below and now, well, now it seems he was knocked out there twice.

Selim had been in the tunnel the night he disappeared. Speaking of amateur sleuths, he'd gone down hoping that being there might jog a memory. Had he seen or heard something the day before and then forgotten it after he lost consciousness? Could some clue to his brother-in-law's murder be locked deep in his brain?

Selim might not have set a record for number of times being knocked out, but he has probably set one for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. First, he'd encountered a fleeing killer while he was trying to sneak in to surprise the children. This time, while he poked around the tunnels for clues, someone was making off with the artifacts.

"I heard someone coming," he says. "I did not know what to make of that. Would the killer return? If so, for what reason? My indecision cost me precious moments, and when I did spot the thief, it was too late. I saw him with a bag and I grabbed it from him. It fell, and a roll of papyrus tumbled out. Then someone clubbed me from behind. The blow did not knock me unconscious, but it befuddled my mind, and the brute overpowered me."

"You saw the thief?" McCreadie asks. "Is it someone you know?"

Selim shakes his head. "I strongly suspect he is only working for whoever was stealing the artifacts, and I believe I know who that was."

He seems poised to tell us, because surely that will be our next question. Instead, I ask him to describe the man he saw. The guy was in his thirties, large and rough looking, and while I didn't get much from the neighbor, what little I did get matches this guy to one of the men who hauled Selim into that tiny apartment. It is not, however, the person who ambushed him in the tunnel after Sir Alastair's murder—Selim confirms that person was notably smaller.

"What happened next?" McCreadie asks.

Selim hesitates, probably confused that we're not asking him to name his suspect for the antiquities thief. But he answers, telling us how he was sedated, and briefly woke a few times in the darkness, bound hand and foot, before being sedated again.

Gray confirms that rope burns on Selim's wrists and ankles support this story.

After that, Selim remembers waking once, sick to his stomach, barely managing to vomit safely before falling back into a heavy sleep.

McCreadie grills Selim on everything he can remember about the person who grabbed him, the papyrus roll that fell from the bag, and the places he woke in. He has nothing on the last, and only what he's already provided on the first.

It seems the attack on Selim was, once again, just bad luck. But after he'd been knocked out, whoever was in charge of the theft decided he could be useful. Selim's attacker stashed the artifacts in the tunnel for safekeeping while he hauled Selim out. Then, the next night, Muir went back for the artifacts… and found that the so-called secret tunnel wasn't so secret, with people traveling to and fro like it's Toronto's underground PATH system after a Leafs game.

Me being down there with Mrs. Wallace had launched another scheme. Knock out Mrs. Wallace and strangle me the same way Sir Alastair had been strangled, so Selim could be blamed for both deaths, since they already had Selim in their keeping and could use his boots to make tracks. Hell, killing me might also affect the investigation, if the loss of his assistant—and his presumed lover—threw the illustrious Dr. Gray off his game.

Now comes the moment Selim has been very politely awaiting. He has told us that he knows who took him captive, and we haven't even asked for a name. That's because we have a feeling this will be the least surprising part of the story.

"Lord Muir," he says when McCreadie finally asks. "Now, before you say anything, I know it is a very serious charge to make. Worse, I have no solid evidence that he took me. I did not see him or hear him speak or even overhear my captors say his name. What I have instead are the results of my own detective work, which point to him as the person stealing Alastair's antiquities. It is entirely possible that this latest theft—and my capture—was undertaken by a different person. Yet even if it was, I must step forward with my suspicions regarding Lord Muir as I realize it might affect the investigation into Alastair's death."

Selim takes a deep breath. "Alastair believed Lord Muir was behind recent thefts of antiquities destined for museum collections and research. It put Alastair in a very difficult position, with Lord Muir being his patron. He had asked me to investigate, using my contacts in the antiquities community. I have been doing that, coming to visit the city whenever I can, under the guise of having a mistress here."

I think back to the letter Muir found. "Did Sir Alastair write to you about the artifacts?"

He frowns.

"We have heard something about a letter between you and Sir Alastair, urgently wishing to speak to you about the artifacts."

"Ah, yes. I was in London, and he had the note sent there. I returned here to discuss it. If that is important, I can likely produce the note."

"If you could, please."

"So you were in Edinburgh investigating," McCreadie says. "There is no mistress?"

"I will not pretend I am a monk." He notices me, and color rises in his cheeks. "Er, that is to say, well…" He clears his throat. "I have no mistress. I am too busy with my work for entanglements of that nature. When the time comes, I have aunts who will find me a wife, if I do not wish to find my own. The ruse of a mistress allowed me to slip about the city at night without my sister asking questions."

"You were helping your brother-in-law find the thief."

"Discreetly. Very discreetly. To even say they were stolen is… complicated, if the person taking them is the one funding the expeditions. I had the sense there were other points of contention between the two men, and it was all very…" He shrugs. "Complicated."

"So what did you discover?"

"Enough evidence that Alastair was mulling over the best way to handle it. I tracked down three of the missing antiquities. There were two dealers involved. One is well known for trading in high-value items, and I can provide his name. The other has proven more difficult to track. He operates deeply in the criminal world of antiquities trade. I had a lead on him, but it was something to do with an underground market, and I had not finished those inquiries. The dealer I did contact seemed to think the goods came from, well, from me. The man who delivered the antiquities was brown-skinned and claimed to be the Egyptian brother-in-law of an Egyptologist. I tracked down that person, and in a conversation with him, I became convinced his employer—and supplier—was Lord Muir, who also told him to pass along the story that suggested the young man was me. I told Alastair, and we planned to pay the fellow a visit once Alastair got past that blasted mummy unwrapping."

"So you would be able to tell me where to find this young Egyptian."

Selim rolls his eyes. "He is not Egyptian. He is not even African. His mother is from India."

He looks at Gray. "I am certain you know how that is, Doctor. One brown-skinned person can easily be substituted for another. But yes, I can tell you where to find him. I even have his real name." He nods our way with a slight smile. "I am no great detective, but an inquisitive turn of mind and a bit of charm go a long way in finding people and convincing them to talk. That is why Alastair set me to the task, in addition to my contacts in the community. Charm was not part of my brother-in-law's repertoire." He sobers. "He was a good man. A bit stolid and often frustratingly obstinate, but he cared for Egyptian history and for my sister, even if it was in that order. Work was everything to him, but he did not neglect his family. He cared about them more than he knew how to demonstrate."

An epitaph that could, I'm sure, be appended to the lives of many men in this world, and even in my own. Raised to embrace their careers, but not given the skills to do the same with their families, however deeply they might care.

Of course, McCreadie asks why Selim didn't come forward with this right away, as it gave Muir a motive for, if not plotting to kill Sir Alastair, at least getting into an argument that might have led to murder.

The question is not entirely fair, given the timeline. When Sir Alastair was found, Selim was unconscious in the tunnel. He spent a half day recovering… and then was kidnapped before the latest antiquities disappeared.

Still, McCreadie must ask, because if Muir is charged—even with just the thefts—his defense lawyer could use this delay as "proof" that Selim was the real thief and just needed time to formulate his defense, which resulted in sending Gray that letter to make it seem he'd been kidnapped.

The answer is simple. Selim didn't mention it because he saw no reason to suspect Muir of his brother-in-law's murder, which was the active investigation. We know Muir had an alibi for that. The theft was only discovered after Selim was gone.

Once Selim knew more artifacts had been stolen, he would have come forward. He just didn't get that chance.

"Oh, and there's one more thing," Selim says. "I had suspected Lord Muir might be using the tunnel to remove the artifacts. Of course, that seemed ridiculous—how would an earl know about an underground tunnel only used by children? I found the answer by talking to his daughter, on the pretense of ferrying messages between Alastair and Lord Muir. She's a lovely woman, if somewhat lonely in their country home, and she was happy to provide tea and conversation when I visited."

Yes, I'm sure she was. Selim isn't only charming; he's intelligent, educated, and attractive. His background adds the appeal of exoticism for a woman who may have never left the British Isles. And the fact that he is a baronet's brother-in-law makes him socially acceptable company, at least within the safety of Miss Muir's own home, surrounded by staff.

"I mentioned the tunnels once," he continues. "She particularly enjoyed little touches of adventure like that. When I spoke of them, she became very animated and wanted to share a bit of family gossip with me. Do you know how Alastair came to be sponsored by Lord Muir?"

"A family connection, wasn't it?" McCreadie says. "The families have known each other for generations?"

"Yes, dating back to the French revolutionary wars. Alastair's great-grandfather served under Lord Muir's grandfather, and saved his life. The family's fortunes became intertwined after that. Alastair's house was originally owned by Lord Muir's grandfather, who constructed the tunnel to sneak ‘unsavory people' into his parties. While that does not prove Lord Muir knew of the tunnels, it is a fair bet, as he lived in that house when he was a child."

"And if there are tunnels," I say, "children will find them."

Selim smiles. "They will indeed."