Chapter Twelve

Rory

Edinburgh— Wednesday 8th August 1877

T he weather had returned to its usual miserable version of a Scottish summer, with a mizzle of rain drifting down. Every now and then the clouds would thin enough for the sun to make an effort to shine, long enough to make the cobblestones steam, and get your hopes up that it might win through, before the rain closed in again. I drank my coffee and pondered my next steps regarding the issue of Marianne—I'd given up completely trying to call her Mrs Crawford.

Sunday had unsettled me. I'm used to being on my own. I prefer my own company to anyone else's. Not on Sunday though. I hadn't wanted the day to end. And the things I'd told her, ordinary things about myself, but it hadn't only been facts. I'd talked of my feelings, and I'd told her a lot more than I'd meant to. Nothing that mattered, save that it did, because I never talked like that. It was one of the accusations that Moira was forever levelling at me—that I kept my own counsel on everything.

Moira! Now where had that come from? More than likely she still lived here in the city, which was something that ought to have occurred to me before now. I hoped she was married with a family, for it's what she had wanted. I hoped she was happy, to make up for the misery I'd caused her. I hadn't thought about her in years, which proved she was in the right of it when she ended things between us. Talking to Marianne had raked up a whole raft of memories I had no wish to be lumbered with. Maybe it was unfair of me to blame Marianne. Perhaps it was this city.

On Sunday, I'd put the fact that I shouldn't be here to the back of my mind, which was easy enough to do, far too easy, when I was with her. On Monday, I decided to take myself off to Portobello, think things over, untangle what was important for the case, and what mattered only to me. Even though the seaside had not the bustle of the weekend, there were plenty of women and their weans and their nannies or governesses or nurses or whatever the devil they were. The families who decamp out of the city to their big summer houses during the week, for the men must still go about their important business in the town. Would Marianne be part of the entourage if her current employer headed for the seaside? I still knew so little of her present life. Did that matter? To me it did.

Watching the waves creep up over the broad, damp yellow sand on Portobello beach, I'd let myself think about Marianne in exactly the way I'd told myself I wouldn't. I wanted her. Not in that way—or not only in that way! I wanted to get close to her. I wanted something I'd never wished for from a woman before. A friend? No, not that. A companion? That sounded far too staid and platonic. I didn't want platonic, even though that's all I could have. I didn't know what I wanted, that's the truth, and that unsettled me all the more.

It was the waiting that was doing my head in, I decided. I wasn't used to waiting to be told what to do. On Tuesday I took another walk up the Crags, with the city spread out beneath me from the top, New Town, Old Town, all the way to Portobello where I'd been yesterday, and over to the other side of the Forth, and the East Neuk of Fife. Standing on the edge of one of the cliffs, I could trace the location of the many crimes I'd solved, including the ones that had made my name.

The view was like a map of my career as a policeman, the station, my old digs, the narrow, meandering streets of the Old Town where poverty and crime lived cheek by jowl, the wide boundary that was Princes Street and the gardens, the organised grid of the New Town, where I'd been employed privately when I was off duty to solve the crimes that never made it to the police.

It was a clear day, so I could see the sprawl of the docks at Leith where I'd found the body that put an end to my career here. All the old bile came flooding back before I could stop it. I'd been kidding myself, thinking I'd put it behind me. I'd been kidding myself, thinking I'd got over the shame of it, the sheer bloody pain of being exiled from the city I loved, from the work I'd loved and done so well. Too well for some.

It was the injustice of it that really stuck in my craw, when I let myself start thinking about it again. A dead woman whose murder was not even acknowledged, dead because she was somehow embroiled in something that the great and the good wanted kept hidden. No, I wasn't over it. I hadn't put it behind me, even though I knew that I was teetering on the brink of ending up as she had, just for being here.

I'd walked away once. I could walk away again, I told myself. I was here for another case, and I didn't have the time to dally on resolving that old one. Not only was I risking my neck being here in Edinburgh, I was being paid good money to get the Marquess's case done and dusted. My reputation—the one I'd made for myself in the last seven years, with sheer hard graft—depended on my doing what I'd been employed to do.

And there was the rub. I was being employed to wait while Lord Westville tried to sort out the legal tangle, which left me too much time on my hands. Time to think about the old case. Time to think about Marianne. Time I could be using doing what I was most inclined to do, which was get to know her. Which was why I had tried to stay away from her.

Though I couldn't stay away from her entirely. I kept an eye out for her. Wednesday morning found me drinking coffee in a tavern in the Grassmarket. The woman Marianne called Flora came in and ordered her usual breakfast of bread, cheese and ale. She was a pretty lass, though she wouldn't be for much longer. Work such as she did would take its toll, one way or another. What chance had she to make a better life for herself? It had always been a sticking point with me back in the day, the way women like her were treated, but I'd never thought too seriously about what else they could do to survive. I'd never thought myself fortunate, simply because I'd been born a man and not a woman.

‘There are so few so-called respectable jobs open to women.'

Marianne's words stuck with me, calling me out as thoughtless. For women like young Flora over there, falling asleep over her breakfast, there was plenty of work of the menial kind, but very little that would make any sort of decent living. If matters did get resolved, and Marianne had her inheritance, the last thing she'd do with it was set herself up in the lap of luxury. She was the daughter of a marquess, but she wouldn't play the lady, I was willing to bet. She'd go her own road. I'd like to see that.

That brought me up short again. It was none of my business what she did. I had no business in being interested in her. More than interested! I finished up my coffee and was on the brink of leaving, thinking that I'd catch her up as she walked to work, when he walked into the tavern.

I swore under my breath, for I recognised him straight away. He stood there in the doorway, surveying the room as if he owned it, which for all I knew he might well, by now. Judging by his clothes, Billy Sinclair had obviously gone up in the world since I last encountered him at the High Court, where he'd been in the public gallery for the trial of the docker who ran a very successful gang of thieves.

I'd suspected at the time that Billy was the brains behind them, and his appearance on the day confirmed it for me. There hadn't been time to follow up on that one though. Only a week later, I'd been giving my marching orders.

Billy sauntered over, stopping at Flora's table to drop a coin on to it—a coin that looked to me like silver. With a sinking feeling, I realised I'd been caught out. Billy, pulling up a chair to sit down beside me, nodded in confirmation. ‘Katy over there has her head screwed on,' he said. ‘She's planning her retirement from her current profession, if you know what I mean, and I'm her pension.'

The proprietor appeared with a cup of coffee and a bottle of whisky. ‘Just a splash,' Billy said, waiting for the man to return to his counter before addressing me. ‘Mr Sutherland. I can't tell you how sorry I am to see you here.'

‘Billy.' I smiled tightly, my mind racing. ‘You're looking well.'

‘I'm doing well enough,' he said. ‘It's Mr Sinclair these days, but you can call me William.'

‘What is it you want from me, William?'

‘Straight to the point. I always respected you for that, Mr Sutherland.' He took another sip of his coffee laced with whisky. ‘I'm here to give you a friendly warning. I don't know what it was you really did to get yourself in the bad books. I never believed what they put in the papers about you. Taking bribes!' He rolled his eyes. ‘As if.'

‘Thank you for the vote of confidence.'

He grinned. He had come up in the world, but he'd lost a few more teeth in the process. ‘ I know you were set up. I don't know who was behind it, though I could take a good guess. Thing is, Mr Sutherland, seven years isn't long enough to make this city safe for you. You shouldn't be here.'

‘I don't need you to tell me that, William.'

He laughed shortly. ‘That's what I thought to myself when I was told you were back. He's too smart for that, I thought to myself. So he must have a good reason.'

‘Is that what you're here to find out? Or are you here to find out for someone else?'

He bristled. ‘I don't take orders from anyone these days. I came here out of the goodness of my heart, to give you a friendly warning.'

‘It's news to me that you have a heart. Is that something else you've got your hands on while I've been away?'

‘Very funny. I'm being serious. You rattled cages you shouldn't have rattled. They framed you, I know that, they dragged your name through the mud, but they left you with your heart beating. See, I happen to know that unlike me, you do have a heart. I reckon you'd like to keep it beating, too.'

‘I appreciate that, William, and believe me, I share the same goal, but I've business here to conclude.'

He glowered. ‘I hope you're not going to go about lifting up any old stones. Unfinished business, so to speak, especially if it involves me. Things here are ticking along nicely, since you left. We all keep our noses out of other people's business, and we all know when to keep our mouths shut. Something you never did learn, did you?'

‘What was it you just said about keeping your nose out?'

He held his hands up as if in surrender, but his face hardened. ‘Have it your own way, but don't say I didn't warn you. I'll give you this for nothing, because you and I go back a long way, and I owe you a few. As far as I know, I'm the only one who knows you're here. How long that will last I can't say, but no one will hear it from me. I'd be a bit less regular in your habits though, if you get my drift.' Billy scraped his chair back and got to his feet. ‘Good luck to you, Mr Sutherland. I hope you don't need it.'

I paid for my coffee and hurried to the doorway, but there was no sign of him in the bustle of the Grassmarket. No one tells me what to do, I thought to myself, while at the same time thinking, I'd be an eejit to ignore what he'd said.

Back at my digs, there was a telegram from Lord Westville informing me to await further instructions. Fortunately the instructions in the form of an express letter had also arrived. Now that he knew his cousin was alive and unwed, the Marquess was determined to secure her inheritance. The process was complex, but would be complete within the next two weeks. He was, he assured me, as determined as I to bring Eliot to account, and was taking pains to ensure the man was fully occupied with estate matters, and under the impression that he was valued. In the meantime, I was to ensure his cousin came to no harm.