TEN
Gray was not exaggerating. When he shows me where Catriona was assaulted, I can only gape and wonder what the hell a nineteen-year-old housemaid was doing here. As I theorized, it’s the same spot where I was attacked in the modern day. Ironically, in that period, this is a picture-perfect tourist street designed to make you feel as if you’ve stepped into lovely Victorian Edinburgh, when the reality is that it’d been a street no Victorian tourist would set foot on. The narrow, cobbled road—quaint and cozy in the twenty-first century—is so dark and shadowed that it might as well be labeled Battery Boulevard.
As we walk through the neighborhood, I resist the urge to pull in my skirts like a proper little miss, my pretty nose upturned, curls flouncing. While I’d patrolled in modern tenement neighborhoods, this is worse than anything I’d seen in Vancouver. This is true squalor, with the stench to match, the kind of place that reminds me how, only hours ago, I’d acknowledged that some people would happily take Catriona’s job. Now Iseethose people, for whom a daughter in service would be “the one who got out”—the pride of the family, sending home whatever shillings she could spare.
Catriona wasn’t from this neighborhood. So what was she doing here? The answer, apparently, can be found just a few steps from where her body was discovered.
As we stand in that alley, Gray points to a hand-lettered sign in a nearby grimy window. “You were in there, having a drink.”
“It’s a pub?”
He clears his throat. “It passes for such, but Hugh—Detective McCreadie—says it is a known den of…”
“Iniquity?”
He looks startled. “No, not at all. There’s nothing of a salacious nature about it. I was going to say den of thieves, and then realized my phrasing might be offensive.”
“Not if I used to be a thief.”
“Yes, but you are no longer one. So I presume you were meeting a former compatriot for a drink. A social engagement.”
I look at that grimy window and try not to shudder. You’d need topayme to drink anything served in there.
“All right, so I was spotted in that… establishment,” I say.
“Spottedleavingit,” he corrects. “The proprietor would not confirm you had been a patron.”
“But I presumably was. Then I came out and was pushed into this alley here, where I was hit on the head and strangled. Or I was strangled and struck my head in falling.”
I drift into memories again, trying to remember exactly what I’d heard and seen. A shadowed figure throttling Catriona. She’d been conscious, so she must have hit her head when she fell.
Stop that. Solving the attack on her isn’t my business. Getting home is my business. My only purpose in being at this spot.
I start to walk down the alley and halt. I don’t want to cross through time with Gray standing right there. I owe him better than that. I stop short and wave my hand. “Do you know precisely where I fell?”
He shakes his head. “You were not discovered for several hours. When you were, it was by a passing constable. He recognized you—having seen you once before with young Findlay.”
Constable Findlay? Detective McCreadie’s assistant?
I open my mouth to ask why I’d been with Findlay, but then I remember yesterday, when McCreadie had seemed to expect that Findlay might wish to speak to me. I’d thought it might be a romantic entanglement. They were of an age, and Findlay would be a good social match for Catriona.
Gray continues. “Recognizing you, this constable sent for me, and I attended you here before bringing you home.”
“No one had noticed me missing?”
“It was one of your half days off.”
So Catriona had a half day off, and that night, instead of being home in bed, she was here, in this pub, possibly meeting an old colleague, possibly continuing her “felonious” ways.
As a detective, I’d start there. Former—or not-so-former—thief gets attacked leaving a black-market dive bar. While it’s possible it was a random attack, it’s more likely connected to her criminal endeavors. She pissed someone off. Double-crossed someone. Or even just refused a gig, that classic “one more job.”
Of course, none of this matters to me. I’d love to solve the attack on Catriona, as an apology for borrowing her body. But even if the answer miraculously fell from the sky, I doubt her attacker would ever see justice. She’s only a maid, and this was only a physical assault in a neighborhood where it might happen to anyone alone at night.
I suppose Catriona figured she could take care of herself. Just like the detective who ran into this alley a hundred and fifty years from now, alone at night, following the cries of a woman in distress.
Seems we both aren’t as street-savvy as we thought.
I turn to Gray. “Thank you, sir, for bringing me here. I think I shall linger and see whether any memories return.”