Chapter Eighteen

Rory

Edinburgh— Thursday 9th August 1877

I was kicking myself for giving in to temptation, not even five minutes after I'd decided I wouldn't. I suggested we walk because if we continued sitting down together, I was pretty certain I'd give in and kiss her again. In public! With a crew of fishermen for an audience into the bargain! It wasn't so much the fact that I'd kissed her at all that shocked me to the core, it was how much I'd enjoyed it, and how much further I had wanted to go. It was the way she had kissed me back too, as if she felt the same. And there was no way it was wishful thinking, I was sure of it.

The old case was why we were here, I reminded myself as we made our way past the fishermen at the other end of the harbour, me giving them a look that made sure none of them made any comment on our behaviour. The sun had disappeared again, and there were clouds on the horizon. The breeze had picked up a bit too, as we began the walk along the front towards Granton. Marianne's skirts whipped around her ankles, but when I asked her if she'd changed her mind about the walk, she shook her head vehemently.

‘Go on,' she said, in a way that made me think she was as keen as I was to distract herself. ‘Forget what you've already told me and start from the beginning. Try to imagine you're writing a report or whatever it is policemen do. Did you have a notebook?'

‘I did.' Concentrate, I told myself. Focus! ‘They took it from me, but I wrote down what I could remember afterwards.'

‘So your instinct even then, was that it was important and that you might need it one day?'

‘I just knew the whole thing stank to high heaven. My policeman's instinct, if you like.' I tried to put myself back there. Tried to remember the man I'd been all those years ago. ‘I told you I'd acquired a bit of a reputation for solving tricky cases. I was good at my job, and I did get to the bottom of the cases I was given, but I never liked the way the press reported them, as if I had a special talent or skill, as if I had some kind of magical powers, when all I did was use my head.'

‘To make pictures that others couldn't.'

‘Or didn't take the time to.'

‘I think you are too modest,' Marianne said. ‘Clearly you have a talent for detecting.'

‘I have, I'll take that, but what I'm saying is, to me it's not anything extraordinary, and I didn't like that the press made out that it was.'

‘So when the press made those false accusations, did they also cast aspersions on your previous successes?'

I took my time answering her, since it was clear she was making connections with the accusations that had been levelled against her. It made my heart ache, thinking what might be in store for her if the press got hold of that story. I'd been there, and if there was anything I could do to prevent the same thing happening to her—but what? And what business was it of mine? None, I knew that, but it wouldn't do either of us any good for me to lie to her. ‘They implied that I must have been getting a helping hand, somehow,' I said. ‘That I had been too good to be true.'

She nodded, a deep frown furrowing her brow. ‘And the good you had done, or the harm you had prevented, the fact that you'd brought criminals to justice?'

‘You're right, all that was forgotten, washed away,' I said bitterly.

Her lip curled. ‘And your talent was used against you.' She turned away from me to face out to the Firth, where one of the Burntisland steamers was puffing its way across to this side. ‘I know how that feels, Rory.'

Her voice was tinged with anger. Her gloved hands were curled into fists. I could see the memories chasing each other across her face as she turned to face me again. ‘Years ago. Nine, ten years ago, long before I came to Edinburgh, I was employed as governess to two little girls in one of two large houses in a small town. I was on good terms with the governess from the other house. She was a little older than I and had unexpectedly come into a small inheritance. It was much discussed, as such things are, and everyone assumed that she would stop working but like me, she loved children.

‘What she actually wanted was a child of her own. She met a man, personable, respectable looking, a stranger, though he claimed to have some connection with the town. I knew from the first—sensed from the first—that he was lying, though it took me some time to understand the extent of his deception. In a nutshell, he was after her money, nothing else. She wanted a husband and a child. But he already had a wife.

‘I don't know,' Marianne said, when I opened my mouth to ask the obvious question. ‘I cannot tell you how exactly I came to that conclusion. Things I'd heard him say, things he didn't say, things my friend told me about him. The way he hedged his bets when she spoke of where they would live. The persistent sense I had that he was holding something vital back. As I said, I don't know, but I woke up one morning and the picture was so clear in my head, I felt compelled to tell her.'

She drew a ragged breath. ‘The courage she showed in confronting him—knowing that she was destroying her opportunity to have a family—oh, Rory, I almost wished I had kept silent.'

She turned away to face out towards the water again. I watched her struggle to control herself, desperate to put my arm around her, but knowing that was the last thing she wanted. All I could do was hand her my handkerchief, thankful for the small mercy that I always had a spare, for the other one had been used as a napkin earlier.

‘I'm fine now,' Marianne said, looking far from it. ‘I beg your pardon. I never talk about the past, it is too upsetting, but the parallels are so strong, I felt—because I do understand. As I said, my friend confronted him and he turned on her so viciously that she let fall it was I who had been the architect of his downfall. Needless to say, he then turned on me. He warned me that he would neither forget nor forgive what I had done, and then he disappeared, presumably back to his wife.'

‘Poor woman. At least she was spared a bigamous marriage.'

‘Yes, but at such a cost. It was a big scandal for a small town, and she found herself at the centre of it.'

‘What happened to her?'

‘I don't know. She left the area, her reputation in tatters, poor woman. It was so unfair, but at least she had her legacy.'

‘And you?'

‘Yes, I suffered too. The man found a way to tell the tale that made him the maligned and innocent victim, and I—I was accused of maliciously making it all up.'

I swore, invoking one of my da's most vicious Gaelic curses. ‘It's outrageous. No wonder you have such a poor opinion of my sex.'

‘Not all of you. I have a very high opinion of you .'

That stopped me in my tracks, and despite the sorry tale, it gave me a warm glow, distracting me for a wee bit. ‘It's entirely mutual,' I said. ‘It must have cost you to tell me. I appreciate it, I promise you.'

Her face crumpled, and she cursed under her breath, the first time I'd ever heard her do so. ‘I wanted you to—you see I do understand.'

‘And I can see you do. We've both suffered for having the courage of our convictions. You did someone a good turn, and it was turned against you.' I understood a lot more than she could have dreamed. It sickened me, for this sorry story must have been part of the evidence against her, the facts twisted and distorted to make her out as deluded. There was a gaping hole in the story as she told it, and that was how the tale got to the ears of the man who had her committed.

I wasn't going to ask her, she was in such a fragile state, and it wasn't exactly pertinent. I couldn't help wondering though. Was it from the bigamist? A big scandal in a small town would be easy enough to dig up, but that meant Eliot must have known where to look. From where he paid the stipend to—right enough, that would be it.

Marianne straightened her shoulders and dabbed her eyes. ‘I beg your pardon, you won't believe me, but usually I am not in the least emotional.'

‘No more am I, save when I'm around you.'

‘I'm not sure if that's a compliment or not.'

‘It's a statement of fact,' I said ruefully. ‘Shall we try to direct our emotions back to the murder case?'

‘An excellent idea. Please proceed, Detective Sutherland.'

We had reached the long harbour arm at Wardie Bay, and I steered her towards it, away from the increasing bustle of the Granton seafront. ‘I was on duty when we got a report that some weans had thought they had spotted a body caught under the bridge,' I told her, returning to the past. ‘I took it with a pinch of salt but it turned out they were right. We had no idea who she was when we pulled her out, and she didn't fit with anyone we knew was missing, but that didn't count for much.

‘She was pretty, she was young, and she was very obviously expecting a child. There was a gash on her head that looked suspicious to me. I put all of that in my report that night. The next day, I was called in and told it was an open-and-shut case. She was simply an unfortunate lassie who had found a way to deal with the shame of her condition, and the blow to her head happened when she fell in. Case closed, they said.'

‘But you were determined to find out who she was?'

‘They couldn't stop me doing that. It was my duty to try to put a name to her, let any family know, but they said it was best to let sleeping dogs lie. If anyone came forward to report her missing then fair enough, but until then she was just another tragic statistic. I thought that was unbelievably callous. At the very least some man somewhere must have contributed to her condition. It felt all wrong. Where she was found, it seemed to me that she'd been washed round by the tide from the new docks they were building and was likely put there by someone who intended to make sure she'd be lost for ever.'

We had reached the point on the harbour where the steamboat docked from Burntisland. There was a waiting room where we could have got a cup of tea, but neither of us were inclined to go in, so we started to retrace our steps. The weather had closed in. It had started to spit rain. ‘I was told there were more important matters for me to investigate.'

‘More important than a murder!'

‘A woman, found in the docks, pregnant and with no wedding ring. The implication being that she wasn't respectable, perhaps a prostitute, and so not worthy of investigation. I know, it's wrong—'

‘But it's how it is,' Marianne interrupted bitterly. ‘Go on.'

‘Another thing that makes a detective—or any policeman, for that matter—good at his job, is information. Knowing where to find it, I mean. The better you are at that, the quicker you are at solving crimes. The woman wasn't one of the street walkers in Leith, I knew who to ask to make certain of that. Besides, her clothing was well made, she looked to be in good health, and she wasn't under-nourished—so that was another dead end. Once again, I was told it wasn't worth bothering about. Then I was ordered to leave it, and given another couple of cases.'

‘But you couldn't, because you smelled a rat, and because the more someone tells you not to do something, the more determined you are to do it?'

‘That's about right. To cut a long story short, since we're running out of pier to walk and time's getting on, I went to my superior officer and made my case for murder. By then, she'd already been buried in a pauper's grave—mighty fast too. My superior was a good man, I could trust him, or so I thought. He promised he'd look into it. Two days later, he told me there was nothing to look into. Case dismissed.'

‘But you didn't dismiss it.'

‘I couldn't let it go, even though I was supposed to be—ach, it doesn't matter. Like you said, despite the lack of evidence, I was convinced I was right.' It was tipping it down all of a sudden. All around us, people were running for shelter. ‘If we head up to Trinity we can catch the train back to the city. It's only a few hundred yards.'

We got to the station, standing under cover on the platform to wait for the train, which was fortunately due in a few minutes. ‘You're drookit,' I said to Marianne. ‘Soaked, I mean.'

‘Drookit. I like that. What's wrong, Rory?'

I could have brushed her off, but I didn't want to. ‘Raking it all up like this, it's a double-edged sword. I want to find out what happened, who murdered that poor woman and why, but it's making me think about myself. What if I'd done as they said, kept my mouth shut and stayed here? I was up for promotion again. I was earning enough from my private work to put money aside—that's one good thing about the papers making a fuss over me, it got me a lot of private work, and it paid very well. The plan was to buy one of the smaller houses in the New Town. I was due to get married. The day my superior told me the case was closed, I was supposed to be sorting out the final details of the wedding.'

I took off my cap to shake it out, and pushed my sodden hair back from my forehead. ‘Looking back, it's obvious that I wasn't suited to settling down, but it was expected and I never questioned it. My ma had passed away a few years before, so my da was delighted at the thought of grand-weans. I was doing well. I was of an age to be thinking about taking a wife.

‘And we got on, Moira—my betrothed and I. We were well suited, that's what everyone said. Her family was quite a step up from mine, but they never made me feel as if that mattered. Yet I simply couldn't see past that case. I became obsessed. It became an issue between us. In the end I—we—agreed there would be no wedding.' I winced, not wanting to recall that painful scene.

The train whistled, and a belch of steam preceded it as it screeched into the station. We had bought third-class tickets, right at the back in the last carriage. Marianne took my arm as we walked down the platform. We took our places on the hard wooden seats. The rain was coming in through the open windows. It was cold, my cheap woollen jacket was starting to smell damp.

‘Is it a terrible thing to say, to think it might have been the making of me, rather than the ruining of me?'

Marianne turned towards me, frowning. ‘How long have you been thinking in that way?'

‘It's only just occurred to me.'

‘And would it have occurred to you, if you hadn't come back here?'

‘Probably not. And I still want to find who the woman was, if she was missed. Her family, if she has one, deserve to know her fate, at the very least. '

‘Shall we give her a name, since no one else has? What shall we call her?'

I thought about it for a moment. ‘Lillian,' I said.

‘What about Lillian?' Marianne said at the exact same time.

We looked at each other and smiled. I leaned my head back, closed my eyes, and felt the tension leave me. I knew I shouldn't be here in this city. I knew I shouldn't be with this woman. But at that moment, all that mattered was that I was.