Chapter Two

Rory

Edinburgh— Thursday 2nd August 1877

S tanding in the doorway of the coffee shop, I wrapped my hands around the steaming tin mug of coffee. It was looking set to be another typical August day, with leaden skies and twenty different varieties of rain to look forward to. A pure minger, in other words. I'd forgotten what it could be like, the so-called Scottish summer. Seven years down south in England had clearly softened me up.

To be fair, those seven years had also kept me out of harm's way, and made me—comparatively, mind—a wealthy man. Being back here was the last thing I wanted or needed. The last thing anyone in this city wanted, I was willing to bet.

You can't say you weren't warned, Sutherland. I told you not to poke your nose in, but you didn't listen.

That old familiar voice resonating in my head made my hackles rise, for try as I might—and I'd tried, trust me, over the years—I still couldn't bring myself to believe I'd been wrong. The case stank to high heaven. It wasn't the first time I'd been warned off, nor the first time I'd been told that I was ruffling the wrong feathers. The thing was, I saw that as an essential part of my doing my job properly—without fear or favour. That's what sealed my fate in the end. The powerful person who felt threatened by investigation, whoever they were, knew I couldn't be bought, and they knew I wouldn't rest until I'd got to the bottom of whatever it was reeked.

I was warned, but I didn't see it coming all the same. Insubordination, I was accused of, as well as placing my fellow officers in danger, blackening the good name of the Edinburgh police and taking bribes—that was a belter! Trumped-up charges, all of them, full of innuendo and singularly lacking any evidence, but they were plastered over every newspaper in the city, the very same papers that had been happy to sing my praises over the years. I paid the price for my former success and the unwanted fame that accompanied it.

There's nothing like a dramatic fall from grace story to sell a newspaper. There was no need for the wheels to turn in any formal manner. I was found well and truly guilty by the press for crimes that didn't even exist, while the real crime I'd been trying to solve was swept firmly under the carpet. What's more, it was made very clear to me by my superior that there would be no road back.

You've made some very powerful enemies, Sutherland. So powerful that I can't guarantee your safety. My advice to you is to get out of this city, and if you value your life, you'll never show your face here again.

He reckoned he saved my skin, and he was probably right. He didn't need to either. He was a good man, but unlike me, he knew his place in the Edinburgh hierarchy. It pained him to stick the knife in, and it was bloody agony for me, but that wasn't even the worst of it. The worst part was the look on my da's face when I told him what had happened. He took my side without question, which was a small consolation, until he'd had time to think it over.

‘You have to find a way to clear your name, Ruaraidh,' he'd said, in that soft Highland accent of his that decades in Glasgow hadn't rid him of. ‘You can't let those vile things they said about you stand.'

‘I can't, Da,' I'd told him, though I didn't tell him why.

‘M'aither,' he'd corrected me, as he always did when I called him Da. Aside from the curses and the way he pronounced my name, it's the only Gaelic I have. No one pronounces my name the way he did. Ruaraidh. Rory. It's a subtle distinction, too subtle to bother with now that he's gone.

I stuck to my guns and I never promised to do as my da bid me, not even at the end, when he was dying. It's a salve to my conscience, though not much of one, that I never lied to him. I did what I had to do to save my skin, and I kept well away from Edinburgh. Until now.

Not that I was back, risking life and limb, to stir all that up again. No, I'd have to put up and shut up on that one, as I'd been doing for the last seven years. I was here to get the job I'd been employed to do done, and that was all. I planned to keep a very low profile and get the hell out of the city for the second time and for good as soon as I could, with my hide intact. Edinburgh was a big city. I, of all people, should know how to keep myself hidden in its shadows.

It stuck in my craw, I'll admit that, but what choice did I have, save to let sleeping dogs lie? I wasn't going to rake over old ground, and I definitely wasn't going to set about rattling the skeletons in the closet that likely still lurked here. I'd moved on, made a new life for myself, and it was one that I enjoyed, where I was my own man. The fact that it had brought me to Edinburgh, where my old life had begun and ended in disgrace was just a very unfortunate coincidence. That's what I told myself, and it was the truth, though not all of it.

It was the mystery of my current case that piqued my interest at first. Solving mysteries was my bread and butter, I was good at it, and this had smacked of something I could really get my teeth into. Then there was the fact that the outcome would prove life-changing for the woman concerned, if I found her. Life-changing in every way, mind. Some of what I knew was going to come as a hell of a shock to her. Mind you, what I'd learned myself about her in the last few weeks had shocked me to the core. She'd been to hell and back. It made my blood boil, every time I thought of it.

All the same, when it became clear that she was most likely here in Edinburgh, well of course I thought twice about it—though no more than twice. Maybe I should have, but I'm not superstitious like my da. M'aither! I'm practical, like my ma. A real Weegie, my ma was, a salt of the earth, Glaswegian to her bones. My da never really got over losing her.

Any road! There I was in Edinburgh, finishing my coffee, and there she was, the subject of my current case, right on the stroke of eight, coming out of the tenement close. She was tentative, always so wary. Standing in the open doorway peering out carefully, as nervous as a deer emerging into a forest clearing, her nose tilted in the air as if sniffing for danger. And on cue, there it was again, the minute I set eyes on her, that odd lurching in my belly. My gut was telling my brain that she needed protecting, and bits of me that I didn't care to acknowledge were sending another message entirely to another part of my body, a part that shouldn't have had any interest in this case whatsoever. I was the hunter, she was the prey, I reminded myself, but that word didn't sit right with me. Quarry? More accurate, but I still wasn't happy with it. Quest? I liked that word better.

She stepped into the street and set off, passing within a couple of feet of me. I didn't need to stay too close though, I knew where she was headed, up the steep incline of Victoria Street, past St Giles and on to the Mound, before crossing down into the New Town past the National Gallery and on to Princes Street.

I scanned the broad cobbled street to make sure the Grassmarket was clear of former acquaintances, though I wasn't really expecting to see any. There had been a good few of them down at the West Bow end of the street, men I'd put away, men who'd helped me put others away, but seven years was a long time. They'd have moved on, one way or another. Then I pulled my hat further down over my brow and set out in pursuit.

I strode out, a man with every right to go about his business, neither furtive nor swaggering, hiding in plain sight. I was good at that, I always had been. I'd changed my appearance too, since those Edinburgh days, my hair cropped much shorter, my face clean shaven, my clothes the sombre, well-cut attire of a gentleman of means. Stay alert, but don't keep looking over your shoulder, that was the key to invisibility, and I needed to remain invisible, because though I might be perceived as the hunter, I was very much aware that I could easily become the hunted if my presence in Edinburgh was discovered. My quest was ahead of me, but if I was discovered, I'd be the quarry, unwittingly being stalked by someone else. And unlike me, their motives would be malign.

It might sound difficult, following one person while keeping an eye out for anyone who may be interested in me, but it was second nature. Only when I got close enough to her did I become more focused on what was ahead rather than behind me or off to the side. There was a supple sway to her body, a natural grace that would have drawn more eyes than mine were it not for her pace, which was fast, covering a lot of ground very quickly, though she never gave the impression that she was in a hurry. It was an easy, confident pace, completely at odds with the nervous way she peered out into the street every morning and one of the many contradictions about her that I found intriguing. Mind, if she really was the woman I was looking for, the way she walked was hardly relevant.

‘You know fine and well she's the one,' I muttered to myself as I waited for her to cross over Princes Street before continuing, for the traffic this morning was surprisingly light. I was procrastinating, which wasn't like me, delaying concluding the matter because I was drawn to her, and I wanted to know more about her. I told myself I needed tangible proof, but I knew it was her. The last photograph I had might be nearly five years old, but the haggard woman with the dark circles under her big eyes staring at the camera in what I had learned was a classic institutional pose, was definitely the same woman in the faded blue cloak who was now walking up Hanover Street.

Then there was the name she'd assumed—too much of a coincidence, that. And there was also the address of her rooms. I knew she was in demand, I knew roughly what she must earn, and I knew she could afford better, a respectable area where everyone knew their neighbours and their business. In the Grassmarket, people didn't ask questions, they made a point of not being curious, and I reckoned that's why she chose to live there.

Marianne Little, who was now Marianne Crawford, was also entitled to yet another name. And to another life too, very different from the one she now led, as an agency nanny or governess, currently employed to look after a prominent businessman's nursery while his wife awaited delivery of their fifth child. She hadn't a clue what fate had in store for her and that was starting to bother me. That she'd endured and survived the last few years and come out of it in her right mind was nothing short of a miracle. I'm not sure I'd have fared as well in her shoes.

And now, just when she must be thinking herself settled, I was going to unsettle her. I would be the bearer of extraordinary good news, true enough, but it was going to turn her world upside down, and it was complicated. I had no clear notion of how I was going to go about telling her and no idea at all how she'd take it. I was a complete stranger, I couldn't exactly go walking up to her without a by your leave and launch straight in. Thankfully, I was under orders to say nothing yet. For once, I was glad to be obeying those orders.

I ducked behind a brewer's cart piled high with wooden beer kegs and set off again on her tail. The New Town was problematic for me. It's where the great and the good of Edinburgh reside, and some of those men were high on my list of people I wanted to avoid. I was prepared to bet that whoever had had me silenced was among them. I couldn't get over how far the area had expanded in the years since I was last here, new crescents and circuses with private gardens, imposing town houses and terraces stretching all the way towards Coates in one direction, and Stockbridge in the other. Who was buying all those grand houses, on land where no one of note would have dreamed of residing only a few years ago? I couldn't be sure any more, of who lived where, so my heart thumped a bit harder every time I went near those big, wide cobbled streets. During the daylight hours, most of them would be at their place of work, but not all of them. I looked different. I acted confident. It was enough, I told myself, trying to put it to the back of my mind.

I got to the corner of Queen Street just as she mounted the steps of the town-house door. She used the front door, not the servants' entrance at the back in the mews, and there was a few moments' delay today, in answering her knock. It gave me a chance to study her. It wasn't a hardship to look at her, not in the slightest. She was tall, likely she'd be able to look me straight in the eye, which wasn't something I was used to, being over six foot in my stockings.

She was too thin, in my humble opinion, lack of appetite rather than lack of funds, I surmised, and she had put on some very necessary weight since that last photograph I had in my keeping had been taken. Her hair was a deep chestnut colour with a natural curl. High cheekbones. A nose that wasn't in the least bit pert and that some might even call assertive. A determined chin. Big wide-set eyes. Hazel in some lights, green in others. Cat-like, was how one of her self-styled carers had described them. That particular man had been very insistent about her eyes being her most striking feature other than her height.

‘Ordinary otherwise, you'll struggle to pick her out in a crowd,' was what he'd said dismissively to me as he handed the photograph from their official records over, but even in that image, the first I'd seen, with her face set, part-defiant, part-fearful, I was struck by her. In the later images, the defiance was harder to detect. Doubtless, they'd tried to grind it out of her. They hadn't succeeded though. Despite everything she'd been through, despite all they'd inflicted on her and all the cruel names they'd labelled her with, she'd escaped, and here she was, making her own way.

Just like me? I'd been wrongly tagged too. I'd been called names that could have destroyed me, and my ability to make a living, just as she had. We were both survivors. I knew I shouldn't be drawing parallels. It was one thing to admire her, to feel sympathy, even to acknowledge the attraction I felt, but quite another to be finding connections between us.

Detachment, not becoming involved, not taking sides, were the watchwords of my profession. True, I rely on my instincts, that goes without saying, but I back everything up with facts, logic, hard evidence. Generally, I don't allow myself to feel anything save sympathy or pity or most likely suspicion. But this woman—ach, I keep coming back to it, she drew me. I felt that we were alike in a profound way, that there was an affinity between us. That was a very dangerous road to go down, for it affects your judgement, so I decided the best thing to do was to ignore it.

The door to the town house was opened by a male servant. She stepped inside without looking over her shoulder. Above me, the grey skies were very reluctantly parting to reveal the odd patch of blue, just about enough to make a pair of sailor's breeches, as the saying went. I'd been keeping her under surveillance for almost a week now, and without fail, she brought the weans into the communal Queen Street Gardens to play, often remaining there for much of the day. I usually stayed outside and out of sight, but on impulse I decided to use the key I'd managed to obtain, at no small cost, to gain entry. I took up position on a bench in the furthest corner, opened my newspaper up, and waited.