TWENTY-THREE
Calum settled himself on a chair in Gibson’s sitting room, pulling out his notebook and a pencil.
Crawford, Gibson’s widow, sat across from him, her lips a thin line.
She smoothed her polished cotton skirt. “I really don’t see what this is about.
I’ve already told you everything I know. ” Her tone was frosty and clipped.
Calum got straight to the point. “Were you aware your husband was having an affair with a colleague?”
Crawford’s eyes widened for a second, then her expression smoothed. “Well, I suppose I’m not really surprised. It’s not as though he took much interest in me.”
Calum frowned at her. She was too calm; there wasn’t a hint of anger, not even the slightest suggestion of disbelief or accusation that Calum was lying to her.
She’d said Gibson wouldn’t pay for sex when he could get it for free, so perhaps she’d known about his relationship with Edzan. Perhaps she’d killed him for it.
“He broke off the affair a few days before he died.” Calum kept his eyes on Crawford as he spoke, looking for any sign of a reaction. “He told his lover he needed to focus on his marriage and children.”
“Did he now.” Crawford spoke without inflection, her hands clutching her skirts tightly.
“Did his behaviour change at all, in the days leading up to his death?”
Crawford sniffed. “I wouldn’t know. I was in Ardstede.”
Calum leant forwards. “Ms. Crawford, where were you on the night your husband was murdered?”
Crawford’s knuckles turned white against her dark skirt.
“As I have said, multiple times, I was in Ardstede. My ship departed the morning after my husband died, so the first I learnt of his passing was when I arrived back in Mossburgh.” She ducked her head, her throat bobbing.
“Donaldson was waiting for me at the harbour.”
Calum considered her. She was shorter and slighter than her husband—but so, too, was Edzan.
While either of them might conceivably have had the strength to lower his body to the ground, neither would have been able to slit his throat at the angle the pathologist had identified.
He’d sent Clare to ask the other burgesses if Edzan had been out sick all week.
He’d been so preoccupied with Grant and the fae it had utterly slipped his mind to ask Lewis that morning, and he was quite certain the question wouldn’t be welcome now.
Calum’s fingers tightened around his pencil, but he pushed aside the memory of Lewis’s parting words.
Clare had confirmed Edzan hadn’t been to work in the time between when she’d received Gibson’s final letter and when she’d received news of his death.
That suggested she hadn’t known he was dead—or was covering for herself.
Either way, neither woman had killed Gibson herself.
He remembered what Aly had said, about the slit throat being a message.
Perhaps even the way Gibson’s body had been so readily discovered was deliberate, too.
It would, after all, be easy enough to weigh down the corpse and roll it into the canal so it would never be found.
Unless, of course, that meant waiting seven years and a day to inherit his money, the money Crawford had complained of her husband frittering away rather than preserving for his children.
“How’s business going?” he asked.
Crawford blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You’re a merchant, aye? I understand that’s been a tricky business this year.
What would happen to you and the children if your husband left you?
” She’d already claimed he’d take the children, but it was equally likely he wouldn’t and would leave her with a precarious income and several children to care for.
Crawford went very still. “Leave. Now.”
A rush of satisfaction went through Calum, buoying him as he tucked his notebook and pencil in his pocket and departed, the pieces slotting into place in his mind.
She’d hired an assassin to kill her husband, and to leave his body somewhere it would be found, so that she could inherit his money.
Whether it was in revenge for the affair, or simply because he was throwing the money away buying magic, Calum didn’t know, but she’d done it.
He just had to find out who she’d hired to prove it.
“Remember when we first met and you told me Gibson’s body ‘belonged’ to somebody?
” Calum’s pulse was throbbing in his throat as though he’d asked her something far more personal, his cheeks warming at the memory of the truth he’d confessed to her and the feel of her hands on his in the kitchen of his house.
Aly’s lips quirked up at the corners. “‘Met’ is an interesting choice of words. Sounds like we were introduced in a pub.”
Calum huffed out a chuckle. “Right. Well.” Why had he told her about Caoimhe?
More to the point, why was she here, in this dark, damp alley, after what he’d told her?
He’d admitted to being broken and damaged; anyone in their right mind wouldn’t want anything further to do with him after that.
Yet here she was, teasing him about his choice of words, giving no indication he’d spilled out his darkest secret in front of her the previous evening.
He felt a rush of warmth towards her for it.
He opened his mouth to thank her, then thought better of it.
It was much too personal, for one thing, and for another, he wasn’t even sure what he’d thank her for.
For not being utterly repulsed by him after his admission?
She would hardly take that as a compliment, even though her acceptance of him was so rare amongst those who knew his history with Faerie.
Instead, he said, “Could someone have hired an assassin and specifically requested that the body be left somewhere that it would be found?”
“To send a message, you mean?”
“To send a message, or just to make sure he’s legally dead rather than missing.” He laid out for her his reasons for suspecting Gibson’s wife. “She has a solid alibi—eyewitnesses place her in Ardstede the morning after the murder—but what if she hired someone?”
“Of course!” Aly’s eyes lit with excitement. “She wouldn’t want his body dumped in a canal, because then she can’t access his assets until he’s legally dead. That’s, what, five years?”
“Seven. And a day.”
“Seven years and a day?” Aly let out a low whistle. “I’d want to make sure he was found dead quickly, too.”
Calum suppressed a chuckle. “And it looks like a random act of violence when she’s in another country. So, if we find the assassin, we can link them back to her.”
The excitement drained from Aly’s expression. “They won’t talk, you know.”
Calum’s enthusiasm fizzled. “Not to me, perhaps. But they might to you. You’re the Wulver’s deputy, after all.”
“Aye, perhaps.” Aly worried at the tassel of her braid.
“There’s not much of a career for an assassin if they start grassing up their customers.
But there’s only one crime lord I know of who would leave a body like that, or let their employees do the same.
Maybe I can lean on her, convince her the Wulver is furious that this happened just a stone’s throw from one of his pubs.
That might . . . that might make her more afraid of him than the consequences of cliping.
” She glanced up at Calum through the veil of her eyelashes.
“But I can’t guarantee anything. She might not talk. ”
“I’ll come with you.”
Aly nodded, her hands relaxing at her sides.
“You said you think you know who it is. Does that mean you have a name?”
“Only her alias. The Cailleach.”
“If you can find out her real name, that would at least be enough for me to look for a link in Gibson’s widow’s financial records or something like that.” He didn’t feel as confident as he sounded. “But I’d still like to meet with her.” A confession would provide corroboration.
“I can arrange that. I’ll let you—” she broke off, her eyes widening. “Shit, someone’s coming.” She grabbed the lapels of Calum’s jacket, tugging him into a shadowed doorway, and dragged herself up until her lips crashed against his.
Calum froze. She smelled of heather and violets. Her lips were soft and warm and gentle against his own. She trailed her fingertips up his throat, sliding them into his hair, and at the feel of her thumb against his neck he came undone.
He returned the kiss, pressing up against her as she leant against the doorframe. His hands tangled in her hair, the strands as soft as silk thread between his fingers. Heat blazed beneath his skin, everywhere she touched him pinpricks of fire, branding him with her touch.
He wanted her, desperately so. He wanted to trace every part of her with his fingertips, his lips, wanted to feel her hands exploring his bare skin, to hear the sounds she’d make with him buried inside her.
He wanted more than that, too. He wanted to wake up next to her, to spend whole days with her without murder investigations or crime lords or anything to do but enjoy each other’s company.
The prospect of a future with her unspooled before him, bright and sunlit.
She pulled away. Her eyes were wide, her lips swollen from kissing. Calum was breathing heavily as though he’d just run from a cù sìth, his hands still cupping her face and buried in her hair.
“I think we’re safe,” she whispered, as Calum noted the sound of receding footsteps.
He let his hands drop, taking a step back. His lips felt suddenly cold, the heat draining from his limbs.
“I’m sorry about that.” Aly looked past him, down the close. “I figured whoever it was, they’re not going to look twice at a couple snogging in a dark corner.”
Calum nodded. It was a twitchy motion, like he was a marionette, nodding because it was what he was meant to do. “Right.”
Aly jerked her head. “I should probably go. Try to contact that assassin for you.”
Calum nodded again. Méabh’s eyes, he was an idiot. He watched her leave, her hands in her pockets and her shoulders hunched against the cold. It had been nothing but a diversion for her, a spot of misdirection to avoid suspicion.
But it had been much more than that to him.
He’d known it from the moment her fingertips brushed his throat, sending sparks over his skin.
He’d never felt attraction without affection, never understood how the two could be so divorced for others.
He’d been pretending that he felt sympathy for her because he saw something of his own past in her circumstances, but sympathy didn’t explain the way her touch broke him asunder and put him back together again.
He was falling in love with a crime lord’s deputy, and he knew in his bones there was no way it could end well.