Chapter 12

12

Caroline

Present day, Tuesday

Just after six o’clock, with a coffee in hand and enough early sunlight to see by, I left the hotel and made my way toward Bear Alley. I sucked in deep, cleansing breaths and considered how best to handle James’s impending arrival. I could ask him to book a room at a different hotel, preferably in another city, or print out our vows and tell me what, exactly, he didn’t understand about the words I will remain faithful. Whatever I asked him to do, one thing remained very clear: when I finally saw him, he wouldn’t much like what I had to say.

Distracted by my thoughts, I missed the crosswalk light and a taxi nearly ran me over as I crossed Farringdon Street. I waved my hand to the driver in a futile apology and silently cursed James for almost getting me killed.

On either side of Farringdon Street, imposing concrete-and-glass buildings rose high into the sky; as I’d feared, most of the area around Bear Alley looked to be taken up by mega corporations, and it seemed unlikely that anything existing two hundred years ago would remain today. With my destination only half a block ahead, I resigned myself to the fact that Bear Alley might be little more than a driveway.

At last, I came upon a small white-and-black placard marking an alleyway hidden between high-rise buildings: Bear Alley, EC4.The alley did indeed appear to be a service route for delivery trucks. Overfilled garbage cans cluttered one side of the alley while a mess of cigarette butts and fast-food containers littered the blackened pavement. Disappointment settled heavy on my chest; though I didn’t expect a sign reading Apothecary Killer Was Here, I’d hoped there would be a bit more intrigue than this.

As I walked deeper into the alley, the street noise fading quickly behind me, I realized that behind the street-front concrete-and-steel buildings were older brick structures. Ahead of me, the alley stretched on for a couple hundred meters. I scanned the area to see a man leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette and checking his phone—but other than him, the lane was empty. Despite this, I felt no fear; my adrenaline was high in anticipation of James’s arrival.

I walked slowly between the brick buildings, searching for anything interesting as I made my way to the end of the alley, but I only found more trash. I asked myself what I was searching for. It wasn’t as though I needed proof that the vial, or the unnamed apothecary, had a connection to this alley. After all, I wasn’t even convinced she existed; the hospital note could have been written by a deranged, hallucinating woman in the hours before her death.

But the possibility of the apothecary’s existence, the mystery of it, drew me deeper. The youthful, adventurous Caroline had begun to come alive again. I thought of my unused history degree, my diploma shoved away in a desk drawer. As a student, I’d been fascinated by the lives of ordinary people, those whose names weren’t acknowledged and recorded in textbooks. And now, I’d stumbled on the mystery of one of those nameless, forgotten people—and a woman, no less.

If I was honest with myself, this adventure drew me in for another reason: I sought distraction from the message sitting in my inbox. Like the final day of a vacation, I longed for something, anything, to delay the inevitable confrontation to come. Placing my hand over my belly, I sighed. I also sought a distraction from the fact that my period still hadn’t shown.

Disheartened, I approached the end of the alleyway. But then to my right, I spotted a steel gate, about six feet high and four feet wide, cracked and warped with age. Beyond the gate was a small square clearing, roughly half the length of a basketball court, unpaved and overgrown with shrubs. Discarded equipment littered the clearing: rusted pipes, metal sheeting and other trash that looked well suited for a colony of stray cats. The clearing was surrounded by the timeworn walls of the brick buildings around it, and I found it strange that a lot in obvious disuse was situated in such a popular commercial area. I was no real estate developer, but it seemed like a waste of perfectly good space.

I leaned into the gate, held in place by two stone pillars, and pushed my face up against the bars to better see the clearing. Though two hundred years had passed since the apothecary might have lived, my imagination grasped at the possibility that the tucked-away, abandoned clearing in front of me had remained unchanged. Perhaps she had walked this very ground. I wished badly the area wasn’t so crowded with shrubs and weeds, because the walls surrounding it looked ancient, too. How long had these buildings even existed?

“Looking for a lost cat?” came a husky voice from behind me. I jerked my head away from the gate and turned around. About fifteen feet away, a man in blue canvas pants and a matching shirt stood watching me, an amused look on his face. A construction worker, possibly. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he offered.

“Th-that’s all right,” I stammered, feeling ridiculous. What good reason could I possibly give for peeking through a locked gate in an inconspicuous alley? “My husband is just around the corner,” I lied. “He was going to take a picture of me in front of this old gate.” Inside, I cringed at my own words.

He glanced behind him as though checking for my invisible husband. “Well, don’t let me stop you, then. Creepy place for a picture, though, if you ask me.” He snickered, taking a pull from his cigarette.

I appreciated that he kept a safe distance away, and I glanced up at some of the windows around me. Surely I was safe; as secluded as the alley felt, it was within sight of plenty of people in the buildings.

Feeling slightly more at ease, I decided to use this stranger’s arrival to my advantage. Perhaps I could glean some information from him. “Yeah, I guess it is creepy,” I said. “Any idea why this clearing even exists?”

He stamped out his cigarette with his foot and crossed his arms. “No idea. A few years back, a biergarten tried to set up shop. Would’ve been perfect, but heard they couldn’t get permits. It’s hard to see from here, but there’s actually a service door over there—” He pointed at the left end of the clearing, where a few bushes stood taller than me. “Probably just leads to a subcellar or something. Guess the folks who own the building want to keep this area clear in case they ever need to get in there.” A buzzing noise suddenly came from his pocket, and he withdrew a small walkie-talkie. “That’s me,” he said. “Always a pipe to install or fix.”

So he was a plumber. “Well, thanks for the info,” I said.

“No worries.” He waved while walking away, and I listened closely to the steady sound of his footsteps as they faded out of earshot.

I turned back to the gate. Using a dislodged stone on one of the pillars, I pulled myself up a few inches to get a better look over it. I directed my gaze to the left side of the clearing, where the plumber had pointed. From this higher vantage point, I squinted, trying to see past the branches.

Behind one shrub, I could make out what appeared to be a large piece of wood set into the aged brick building; the base of the wood piece was partially hidden amid tall, thick weeds. A rustle of breeze moved the branches ever so slightly, and then I caught the crumbling, reddish protrusion of something halfway down the wood. A rusty door handle.

I gasped, nearly losing my footing on the stone pillar. It was most definitely a door. And by the looks of it, it had not been opened in a very, very long time.