FIFTEEN
Ashriek of laughter cut through the air. Aly snapped her head round to see a gaggle of children bowling hoops in a patch of sunshine on the drying green, dodging around sheets and sarks laid out to dry.
Turning back around, Aly looked at the house down the alley. A nondescript terraced stone house, like the entire street, with diamond-pane windows and a heavy oak front door.
It was this front door that Aly watched from the edge of the drying green.
Calum had given her a description of Margaret and the address of the house she lived in.
Aly had been waiting for the last hour and her shoulders were beginning to ache from huddling against the wind, but Margaret had yet to appear.
Aly rolled her shoulders, working the tension out. She was ready to head home and try again later when she spotted a dark-haired figure approaching the house she’d been watching. Average height, curvy figure and—when she turned her head in Aly’s direction—hazel eyes, just as Calum had said.
Aly stepped out into the street behind her, her steps only slightly faster than Margaret’s. Fast enough she didn’t seem to be hurrying but would catch up quickly enough. She hailed Margaret as she drew near, slowing to match the other woman’s pace.
Margaret turned round, narrowing her eyes. “Do I know you?”
“You’re Flora’s pal, aye?”
Margaret took a half-step back. “Aye.”
“We met at, oh I can’t remember, was it Hogmanay last year?”
Margaret frowned, but she didn’t walk away or dispute Aly’s assertion.
“I was wondering—have you heard from her? I heard—heard she’s missing.” Aly widened her eyes at the last comment, emphasising her concern.
Margaret’s face crumpled. “Aye, I haven’t seen her in weeks, and the police are doing nothing.” She stepped into the house, Aly following before Margaret could shut the door.
“Why are they doing nothing? Wasn’t she an apprentice?” Aly said, recalling what Calum had said. He’d not specified which of the missing people had been an apprentice, but it was worth asking either way.
Margaret gave her a sidelong look as they climbed a narrow, dark staircase.
“She was, but . . . well, you know how apprenticeships don’t pay enough, aye?
You’re meant to live with your parents when you do it.
” Aly knew that well. It was how she’d fallen into criminality, trying to stretch her meagre apprentice income to the end of the month and never quite able to make the sums work.
“So she salched to make ends meet, is that it?” Aly said, keeping her voice soft.
Margaret’s cheeks turned pink. “How—how dare you!”
“I’m not judging.” Aly held her hands up in a placating gesture. “I know plenty of folk who’ve done the same.” Herself included.
Margaret’s shoulders slumped. “Aye. Not very often, you know. But the guild found out, and that was that for her apprenticeship.”
“And let me guess: Now the police are saying she wasn’t working for a guild, and they’re not bothering to look any further,” Aly finished, with venom.
“They say she just left,” Margaret said, leading Aly into a low-ceilinged room with a wooden cot in one corner and a narrow wardrobe against the wall by the door.
“Left! She wouldn’t have left without her watch.
But it’s still in her bedside table. Her room’s next to mine and I went and looked before going to the police. ”
Aly frowned. “Her watch?”
“Aye, a nice silver one. Got it from her gran for her twenty-first. She wouldn’t—she wouldn’t just leave without it.” She dropped onto the bed and collapsed into sobs, her shoulders heaving.
Aly extended an arm to comfort her, her own mind whirring. Even if Margaret was wrong, and Flora wouldn’t take the watch out of sentiment, she would surely have taken it to pawn; even a poorer quality one would still pay for a good few meals.
Margaret pulled away. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t . . .” She sniffed, wiping at her eyes.
Aly squeezed her shoulder. She wanted to say something encouraging, that she was sure Flora would turn up, or that she would make sure she found her, but any of that would be a lie.
If a salch disappeared, the most likely scenario was that they’d died in the course of the job and their remains had been thrown in the canal.
She left Margaret when it became clear the other woman had no further information, tiptoeing along the edge of the floorboards to the room next door.
It was awful, stealing from a dead woman, but it wasn’t like Flora had any use for the watch.
And it was too strange, her salching instead of pawning it.
Salching was painful and dangerous; any chance to postpone it even a few days was welcome.
She curled her fingers around the brass doorknob and twisted it slowly, her breath catching in her throat as she waited for it to creak, but there was no sound beyond the sniffling from Margaret’s room, intermingled with laughter from the room across the hall.
Aly pushed the door open, just enough to slip through, stepping from heel to toe to keep her gait silent as she entered a room that was the mirror of the one she’d just departed.
The contents of the bedside table rattled when she tugged the drawer open and she froze, ears alert for approaching footsteps, but the low tones of conversation continued across the hall, while Margaret’s room had fallen quiet.
The watch shone amongst a handful of small coins and a wooden comb.
It was a plain silver watch—and a functioning one, too, the ticking so loud it was a wonder it didn’t attract the attention of the entire house.
Aly snatched it up and dropped it into her pocket.
Her hand hesitated over the drawer, then she grabbed the coins, too, her fingers curling round the cold metal.
If—and it was a big “if” indeed—they found Flora alive, she’d pay her back.
Heart in her throat, she crept back across the room, turning the doorknob before closing the door so the latch wouldn’t sound.
She slipped down the stairs and out into the street, the watch a ponderous weight in her pocket.
“Ispoke to Margaret.” Aly leant against the cold stone wall next to Calum, and immediately regretted it. She was too close, almost close enough for her arm to brush his, and she was too aware of the few centimetres of damp air between them.
Calum turned his head to look at her. “Did you get anything out of her?”
“This was Flora’s.” Aly dug the watch out of her pocket, turning it over in her hand. It was real silver, without any personalised engraving that might have reduced its price. “What time do you make it?”
Calum pulled his own watch out, tilting it to catch the light from the streetlamp. “Twenty-seven minutes past five.”
Aly flicked open the watch in her hand. “Same here.”
“What are you thinking?” Calum asked, frowning.
Aly snapped the watch closed. “I’m thinking this watch would fetch a good couple of quid at a pawnshop, so Flora must have been very attached to it to keep it when she was desperate enough for cash to salch.
” She’d tracked down Cameron at his day job in the shipyards and surreptitiously enquired as to whether or not Flora had ever sold through the Caoineag, which she had, though he didn’t recognise any of the other names Calum had given her.
Nor did Aly, which meant none of them had salched for Grant, either.
“She what?” Calum’s voice was sharp.
“She was salching,” Aly repeated. “She had an apprenticeship, but the pay for those is rubbish. It’s not unheard of for apprentices to salch on the side.
” She didn’t look at Calum as she said any of this, afraid of the disgust she knew would be written on his face.
The scars on her arms burned, chafing against the soft linen of her shirt.
“Anyway, I was hoping there’d be something special about this watch, like an inscription that leads us to Flora’s grandmother’s home and we’d find her safe and sound there, but it’s completely ordinary. ”
Calum held out his hand. “I might be able to use it to track her.”
“You can do that?” Aly was impressed despite herself.
She’d heard of hunters in the Highlands using magic to track their prey, but it was a rare talent, and it didn’t seem to apply to people—it was one thing to find a pheasant, any pheasant, on a moor surrounded by rabbits and insects, but quite another to find a specific human in a city stuffed full of other humans. “Where did you learn how to do that?”
Calum ducked his head, avoiding her gaze. “It’s a long story.”
And an interesting one, it seemed. There was more to this upright copper than first appeared.
She held out the watch. “Well, I hope you’re successful, however you manage to do it.
” Her fingertips caught on the calluses at the base of his fingers as she dropped the watch in his waiting palm, sending a shiver up her arm.
She jerked her hand away, fighting the urge to linger on those calluses.
“Me too,” Calum said, his voice quiet. “Tracking spells are finicky things. Sometimes the person or thing you’re tracking is too far away, sometimes there’s not enough of a connection to the item you’re using to track, sometimes you just lack the mental focus to do it properly.”
“And what if the person you’re tracking is dead at the bottom of the canal?”
Calum’s eyebrows lifted. “Is that what you think happened to her?”
“She was a salch. The life expectancy for that isn’t great.”
“How do you know she was a salch?” Calum asked. “Did Margaret tell you that?”
“Aye.” Aly wrapped her arms around herself, tucking her hands under her elbows. “It’s not difficult to tell who’s a salch if you know what to look for.”
“You mean the scars.” It wasn’t a question.