EIGHT #2
Aly’s eyes flared wide, but she smoothed her expression. “Enlighten me.”
Calum pulled the kilt pin out and slid it across the table, his eyes on Aly’s face. Her lips whitened around the edges, but she said nothing.
“I’ve arrested you for failure to comply with a Section Thirty-Three order, a charge which carries a fine of two pounds.
” Aly’s face paled, her bottom lip quivering.
She swallowed. Calum’s throat tightened, but he pressed on.
“You were also caught carrying weapons without authorisation, which carries a further fine of three pounds.” Calum tamped down the guilt that clutched at his insides.
It was cruel to threaten her with a fine she couldn’t pay, but she knew more than she was saying and he needed to find Gibson’s killer.
“Or you can cooperate and I can caution you instead.” He gestured to the kilt pin. “Where did you get this?”
Aly flicked her head to toss the hair from her eyes. “It was a gift.”
“A gift,” Calum repeated. “And who gave you this ‘gift’?”
The corners of Aly’s mouth curled up in a catlike smile. “A burgess. Name of Craig Gibson.”
“A dead burgess,” corrected Calum, watching her closely to see her reaction. The fact that she’d known Gibson’s name didn’t do much to corroborate her claim that it had been a gift; there were illustrations of him in the papers often enough that she could have recognised him as she robbed him.
Aly’s expression didn’t change. “I rather gathered that when you claimed it was taken off the body of a murder victim. All I can tell you is that he wasn’t dead when he gave it to me.”
“Do you want to know what I think?” Calum said, his voice quiet. “I think you slit his throat and stole his kilt pin.” He watched her closely, searching for a reaction.
She didn’t give him one. “You’re new around here, aren’t you?”
Calum stared at her, taken aback. “Excuse me?” He’d worked hard to lose his accent when he’d moved to Mossburgh; the round vowels from the countryside rising and falling with the lilting of the fae tongue had made him stand out.
His height and the white streak in his hair made him memorable enough without his accent adding to the pile.
“You’re new to this station house, aren’t you?
Probably stationed in a nicer part of town before.
” Her accent, on the other hand, was perfect.
Her posture, too, so upright she could have been in a set of stays, though the wrinkling of the front of her waistcoat suggested she wasn’t.
She was someone who had spent time learning the ways of the wealthy members of society—time and money, if he was right that her coat had been cut for her.
“What do you mean?” Was his resentment at being sent to Station House Eight that obvious? Morrison had been demoted, but he’d not been shunted to the Shit House, where careers went to die—and he was the one who had broken the law, not Calum.
“If someone round here had been trying to rob him, they’d have taken a lot more than his kilt pin.
The kilt itself, for a start. And his boots, socks, sporran, belt, handkerchief as well.
Coat and shirt, too, if they could get them off.
” She jerked her head at the kilt pin. “You know how much I got for this? A shilling and sixpence. With the amount of fabric in a kilt? It’d fetch as much as you earn in a month from any decent fen—from any decent pawnshop. ”
Calum latched onto that. “So, you admit to pawning this so-called gift?”
Aly gave a half-shrug, her clavicle showing through the threadbare linen of her shirt. “You can’t eat silver.”
Calum considered her. He’d seen true hunger before, and it was more than just a lithe, fae-like slenderness.
It was what he saw when he looked at Aly, the desperation in her eyes and hollowness of her cheeks.
He knew how it felt, too, not just the clawing emptiness in your stomach but the way that it clouded the mind and dulled everything else.
However much she could ape the behaviour of the better-off members of society, she no longer had the cash to even feed herself regularly.
Certainly not to feed herself well enough to carry the weight of a body twice her size.
He knew she wasn’t the murderer, and he believed her that a mugger would have taken more than the kilt pin, but he certainly wasn’t buying the tale that it had been a gift. Perhaps she’d come across Gibson’s corpse, and it was all she’d managed to grab before the police had arrived.
“You stole it, didn’t you?” he said, looking her in the eye.
“I told you—”
“It was a gift, yes, you said that. Problem is, I don’t believe you. Particularly not when you’ve previously been arrested for shoplifting.”
That got her attention. Aly’s jaw slackened, surprise darting across her features before she smoothed them into place. “If you’ve seen the arrest record, you’ll know I was let off.”
“With a caution,” Calum said. “That means you did it.” Not to mention the burglary, which he still wasn’t entirely certain hadn’t been her doing.
Aly wrinkled her nose. She had a small nose, and the expression was practiced, almost dainty. “Bit of a stretch, to go from shoplifting to robbing a corpse. Besides, you said his throat was slit? You’d have to be fae-touched to steal from a body like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because it belongs to someone.”
“What do you—of course it belongs to someone, it belongs to Burgess Gibson.”
Aly shook her head, copper ringlets slapping against her gaunt cheeks. “No, that’s not what I mean. If someone slit his throat, they did it to send a message. It’s a messy way to kill someone, and not exactly discreet.”
“You mean this was targeted?”
“That would be my guess, anyway. That or someone so incompetent even you lot would’ve caught them by now.”
Calum ignored the insult, attempting to steer the interview back into his control. “Let’s say that this kilt pin was a gift, as you said. Why would he give it to you, anyway?”
“He gave it to me in exchange for—for services rendered.”
“What sort of services?”
Aly rolled her eyes. “Do I need to spell it out? The sort of services an unhappily married man normally pays a woman for.”
Calum didn’t ask what made her think Gibson’s marriage was unhappy. It was obvious enough if he was sneaking around visiting prostitutes. “And why would he go to you for these services rather than a licensed guild member?”
“I don’t know, maybe because the Guild of Courtesans doesn’t do barter?” Aly waved a hand at the kilt pin, her manacles clanking. “No one would take that if they had the option of a customer with actual cash instead.”
She leant forwards, laying her fingers on Calum’s arm. “Look, kilt pins aren’t the only payment I’m willing to work for. I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement here. I haven’t done anything wrong, and you must have better things to do than waste your time on petty crime.”