Chapter Eleven
ELEVEN
We go to an Old Town pub we’ve been frequenting.
It’s become “our” place, where everyone knows our names and if I start humming the Cheers theme when we enter, the others have learned to ignore me.
Also, the staff don’t know our names, but they know our order, which is even more important, and the most important part is that our order requires clean glassware.
There are so many things in this world that I’ve gotten used to.
Lowered my standards, as McCreadie would joke.
Which is not untrue. I do things in this world I’d never consider doing in my own.
Washing up each morning instead of showering as I remind myself that less shampooing is better for my hair.
Walking through puddles that are probably filled with bodily waste and telling myself my boots can be scrubbed.
Eating meat pies from street vendors and just stopping if anything tastes “off.” But I draw the line at drinking from Old Town pub glasses that haven’t seen soap or hot water in weeks.
So Gray fixed that. He found a pub that we all liked and explained that I was under his medical supervision and required a soap-cleaned glass, which he would pay extra for.
The staff are so wonderful that they wash all of our glasses with soap, and even McCreadie agrees his pint does taste better without the extra layer of grime.
We lay out what we know about Nellie and her disappearance, with everyone pitching in what they’ve discovered.
There’s a lot we still don’t know, which includes a huge gaping hole around Nellie Carmichael’s life outside work.
Isla helped her get the job at Lady Adler’s, but she knows little of Nellie’s homelife because Nellie had made it clear she didn’t want to talk about that, and Isla had enough experience working with young women to drop the subject.
No one in the Adler home knew anything more.
When it came to her private life, Nellie kept it very private.
So we don’t know whether Nellie had any connection to Puddocky Burn or the nearby villages.
When a teenage girl goes missing from her job, the obvious first people to consult with would be her family, but we don’t know who that is.
Did she have living parents? Siblings? No one knows.
She was just a girl who worked as a maid in a wealthy household.
It is as if she existed only for that role.
I can be horrified. What about paperwork when she was hired? A tax identification number? Next of kin? Emergency contacts?
None of that is a thing here, and Victorians would be just as horrified to learn that it’s a thing in my world.
What do you mean the government tracks your employment?
Income tax does exist in the UK—has since the government needed to raise money for the revolutionary war with France in the last century—but no maid would make enough to be taxed.
And the idea of needing to give personal details to an employer would be considered an invasion of privacy.
Even showing some form of identification would be beyond most people in Nellie’s situation.
She might have a birth registry certificate, but she’s certainly not carrying it around with her.
So we don’t know where she’s from, who to contact, or even whether her name is actually Nellie Carmichael.
The Adler staff did try to help, sifting through what they knew from casual conversation.
Rose thinks she’s from Edinburgh. Lily told Gray that she once mentioned the death of a grandparent.
Mrs. Loomis got the impression that her relationship with her family was neither particularly close nor distant.
She saw them now and then, mostly duty calls.
The one thing I homed in on from the interviews was the frequent mention of her evening outings.
She often left for a while before bed. Talk of a beau is nothing more than speculation.
So where was she going? Home to visit a sibling?
To see friends in Edinburgh? No one knows, but I believe it’s significant.
Having been a housemaid, I know that when I was done with a long day of physical labor, I only wanted to collapse on the nearest horizontal object.
Something—or, more likely, someone—was important enough for her to regularly visit despite her exhaustion.
I keep being pulled back to the lady’s maid, Sully.
I struggle to imagine a maid murdering a housemaid to safeguard her position, but I also think I understand how important that position would be.
People often considered the housekeeper’s job the top of the female servant ladder, and it is, but it also has a helluva lot of responsibility.
It’s the lady’s maid who has an easier job, as well as a direct line to the female head of the household.
I’ve ascertained that Sully left the day after Nellie disappeared, which is suspicious.
However, Loomis confirms a message was received that day and Mrs. Loomis has found it in Sully’s wastepaper basket.
We’ve also confirmed that the coach driver took her to the train station and waited until he was sure she was safely on the train to Glasgow.
If the dead body is found and if it is Nellie, McCreadie will decide whether to visit Sully at her parents’ home or wait for her return.
Without that body, we’re stuck, and so is McCreadie.
As I suspected, a housemaid taking off in the night isn’t a police matter.
Not unless she stole something on her way out, which she apparently did not.
Mostly, McCreadie’s job is finding the missing body, and even then he’ll need to turn it over to Crichton, because it’s his case.
In the end, we’re temporarily stalled, with no leads. We need that body.
This case started with a nighttime knock at the door. And that’s how it continues. This time, when that knock comes, I’ve already retired. It’s past midnight. Isla goes to bed at a reasonable hour unless she’s out with McCreadie. Tonight, he was busy, so she declared her evening complete at eleven.
I’ll often stay up with Gray, and I relish those late nights, once everyone has gone to bed and it’s just the two of us up late and talking.
But he’s working on a paper, and I can’t help with that.
So I end my evening writing a letter to my parents and tucking it under the floorboards, and then I’m in bed not long after eleven.
I don’t hear the knock at the back door.
But I do hear the second rapping—at my bedroom one.
I slide from bed, pull on a wrapper, and ease open the door just enough to peer through and see Gray.
“Hugh has something,” he whispers. “A lead on the body. I presume you want to—”
“I’ll be right there.”
I dress as quickly as I can, which is never quickly, but the guys know to expect that.
I pad downstairs in slippers so I don’t wake anyone, and I find them in the hall on the ground floor.
There, I put on my boots, and we go outside.
We still don’t speak—at this time of year, there are too many windows open.
There’s a hansom cab waiting in the mews. McCreadie speaks to the driver as Gray and I climb inside. It’s only once we’re all in that McCreadie notices how I’m dressed and does a double take.
“Yes, I’m wearing bloomers,” I say. “I’m taking a leaf from Jack’s book. It’s easier for me to be out at this hour if I’m dressed more like a boy.”
“Umm…” McCreadie says. “Not to be indiscreet, but you … aren’t really boy-shaped.”
I shake out a coat I’m carrying over my arm. “That’s why I have this.”
“Still not sure…”
I shove my hair under my cap.
“I am terribly sorry, Mallory, but you do not look like a boy.”
“It’s dark. I’ll stick to shadows. You don’t hear Duncan saying anything, do you?”
“Because I am wisely staying out of this,” Gray murmurs. “But, yes, as long as we are not parading her under lights, she should be fine. Now, this lead, Hugh?”
McCreadie relaxes in his seat. “It actually arose from our earlier canvassing of potential witnesses. While none of them saw anything, the husband of a woman we spoke to apparently did. He was up early feeding their cow when he heard a cart on the road. He looked out, expecting he would know the fellow. It is not exactly a busy road at the best of times, and certainly not at that hour. He said it was a stranger. A raggedy-looking man pulling a cart. And in the cart…”
“Was an oddly human-shaped form, covered by a sheet?” I say.
“Mmm, not exactly. There was a sheet. And there was something under it. But it was not the shape that caught the fellow’s attention. It was the foot sticking out.”
“Yikes,” I say.
“Yikes, indeed. Alarmed, the fellow set off after the cart to see where it went. It continued down the road for about a half mile and then disappeared. Before he could determine where it had gone, it returned, without its load. At that point, the farmer decided nothing was amiss.”
My brows shoot up.
“What is that look for, Miss Mallory?” McCreadie says. “The man saw a cart with a covered heap and a human foot protruding from it. The cart veered off the road and returned with no heap, no cover, and no foot, protruding or otherwise.” He shrugs. “Nothing suspicious in that.”
“Uhh…”
McCreadie sighs deeply. “I suppose you would have thought otherwise?”
“Yes…”
“And thinking otherwise, you would have…”
“Investigated. Found out where the body went.”
“Because you are a police officer. That was your job. However, if you were a farmer, would you have done the same?”
“That is an unfair question, Hugh,” Gray says. “This is Mallory you are speaking to. Whatever her occupation, can you imagine her doing anything except chasing after a dead body?”
“Fine. Imagine you are not you. As an average citizen, what do you do?”
“Alert the authorities.”