SIXTEEN
Calum glanced at the clock tower across the square.
His informant was late. The lad worked in the dockyards, and Calum had picked him up as part of a raid on a smuggling operation a couple of years back.
Every time Calum saw him, he swore up and down he was on the straight and narrow and yet, remarkably, he always had information about the criminal underworld.
Never about smuggling, though; he always claimed ignorance about any illicit imports.
Calum checked the clock again. He was due to call on Gibson’s widow in a quarter of an hour, and it was easily a ten-minute walk away. There was still no sign of George.
He began walking away from the square and to the end of the close, stopping at the sight of a youth jogging towards him, his flyaway hair escaping his plait. “Sorry I’m late,” he panted.
“Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps you should leave fifteen minutes earlier than you expect to need to?”
“Why would I do that?” George tossed a stray hair out of his face. “Then I’d just be hanging about waiting for you to show up.”
“So instead you expect me to hang about waiting?”
“You get paid for it.”
Calum tilted his head, conceding the point. “I arranged this meeting to ask you about someone in particular. Do you know a woman named Aly? She’s small, ginger, wears a greyish-blue tweed coat?”
George paled. He shook his head, so vigorously he jolted loose another strand of hair. “Never heard of her.”
“Never? You look scared.” He pulled out a bodle. “There’s money in it for you if you tell me what you know.”
George fidgeted with the buttons on his coat, avoiding Calum’s gaze. “Why are you asking about her? What’s she done?”
“What makes you think she’s done something?”
George shook his head again, his entire body trembling with the motion. “I have to go. Bye.” He waved a hand and darted off, ignoring Calum’s protestations.
Dread knotted Calum’s stomach as he walked to Gibson’s house.
George had been scared when Calum had mentioned Aly.
She claimed to only be involved in petty crime, nothing that would strike fear in her peers.
But George hadn’t even been willing to talk in exchange for money. That was a first for him.
There was more to Aly, and her involvement in the underworld, than she was telling him. The knowledge, which made his pulse quicken at his throat, shouldn’t have bothered him as much as it did.
He banished thoughts of Aly from his mind as he chapped on the door to Gibson’s house and Donaldson led him through to the parlour.
Calum wondered how much longer the secretary would continue to work there now that his employer was dead.
He doubted Gibson’s widow could afford to keep him on, not with the way her husband had been pawning jewels to fund his habits.
The room stretched the entire length of the house, dwarfing Calum and the tall, fair-haired woman already seated there. Sunlight, so rare in an Eskalian winter, streamed through the sash windows, bathing the mahogany floorboards in warmth.
Calum accepted the teacup and saucer from Donaldson, who withdrew and left Calum and Gibson’s widow alone. “I’m very sorry for your loss.” He hated this part the most, the words that were so rote as to be meaningless; the only meaning they held was in what they conveyed if they were left unsaid.
Gibson’s wife dipped her pointed chin in acknowledgement. She sat straight-backed and dry-eyed, her printed floral petticoat arrayed around her on the upholstered chair. “Can we get this over with? The lawyers are coming later with the will, and of course there’s the funeral to arrange.”
“Of course.” Calum opened his notebook. “Your name, for the record?”
“Joyce Crawford.”
“When did you last see your husband?”
“Five weeks ago. He brought the children to say goodbye to me before I left port.”
“And how did he seem to you?”
Crawford lifted a shoulder, her embroidered fichu undulating with the motion. “A bit distant and distracted, but that was normal, ever since he became a burgess, ever since he started—” She clamped her mouth shut, her lips tight.
“Ever since he started buying magic?” Calum asked quietly.
Her mouth fell open. She snapped it shut. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Calum looked at her. Her fingers were clenched in her petticoat, crumpling the fabric. He recalled Donaldson’s words about her argument with her husband. She knew he was up to something, that was certain. “What, then? Since he started visiting prostitutes?”
Crawford gave a hollow laugh. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but I can tell you it’s wrong.”
Calum’s breath hitched in his throat. He clamped his hand around his notebook, the sharp edges of the paper digging into his fingers.
He’d known Aly was hiding things from him, but the dread that had begun to unfurl at George’s reaction to her name now clamped icy tendrils around his gut.
If she’d lied about how she got the kilt pin, that threw into question everything about their arrangement—and about his faith in her. “What do you mean?”
Crawford’s jaw tightened. “I know my husband, and I know his faults. Paying for something he could easily get for free wasn’t one of them.”
Calum took note of that, his heart sinking with the realisation that Aly had lied about this, too.
Perhaps nothing he knew of her was true.
For all he knew, even the story of her mother throwing her out of the house was a lie.
“But he was buying magic, wasn’t he?” It was a question relevant to the investigation, but it was also, crucially, information he’d got from Aly.
Her hands clenched in her skirts. The pressure around Calum’s heart loosened. Perhaps Aly hadn’t lied about everything then.
Calum closed his notebook, leaning forwards. “Look, I have no intention of harming your husband’s reputation, but—”
“His reputation?” Crawford’s tone cut through him like a knife.
“Why should I care for his reputation when he gave so little thought to it while he was alive? Why should I care what he was doing with his time, as long as he wasn’t here?
Frankly, I’m happy he’s dead. Happy he can’t keep throwing away my bairns’—his bairns’—inheritance to get high.
And happy I don’t have to live in this—this tomb with him.
” She clapped a hand over her mouth, as though she couldn’t quite believe what she had said.
“Why didn’t you just divorce him?” Calum asked.
She sat there, her fingertips pressed against her pale lips.
“I couldn’t.” She lowered her hand. “I’m a merchant, and my work takes me away from the city.
When the children were wee, Craig stayed home with them.
He’d get them in a divorce. I’d rather live with him and the children than alone without any of them. ”
“You couldn’t afford to, either, could you?” It was a guess, but an educated one. “Not with the way your income’s been lately.” Nor could she afford to be married to a spendthrift.
Crawford sniffed. “It’s been a difficult year for merchants.”
And so she had stayed in a marriage she hated, until her husband conveniently died while she was out of town.
Calum tucked his notebook in his pocket and took his leave.
Her alibi was above reproach, but the more he thought on it the more he found it altogether too convenient that he had died when she couldn’t possibly be suspected.
He mulled it over in his head as he walked back to the police station. Crawford was, by far, the strongest suspect thus far. If Gibson had been killed over his work, the killer would have made their motive clear, not simply abandoned the corpse in a dark close.
That left the crime lords. He knew Gibson had bought magic through at least one of them.
An unpaid debt, perhaps? Calum frowned. Surely if Gibson owed his killer money, they’d have taken it off his body in gold and fabric.
There had been the letter about poking his nose into the crime lords’ business, but the threat had been to expose him for buying power, which would have been a perfectly effective way of discrediting anything he had to say without resorting to murder.
Every way he looked at it, the only strong motive he had was for Crawford.
“The wife did it,” he announced when he returned to the police station.
“She can’t have done,” Clare said. “She was in Ardstede.”
“We don’t have proof of that yet,” Calum said.
“Aye, we do.” Hugh held out a signed statement.
“I went down to the harbour and found the Royal Sovereign, like you asked.” He said the last bit in a sullen tone, his lips twisting into a moue of distaste.
Calum had indeed sent Hugh down to the harbour to find the ship, after he’d received a letter in the spidery scrawl favoured in Ardstede that morning from the Kingsward Port Authority confirming that Crawford was on the passenger manifest for that ship’s departure the morning after the murder.
Calum snatched the paper from Hugh’s hand.
It was written by the captain of the Royal Sovereign confirming that Crawford had boarded in Ardstede twelve days previously—the morning after the murder had taken place—and had arrived in Mossburgh that morning.
The ship had put in at multiple ports along the coasts of Ardstede and Eskalan where, the captain said, Calum could contact the relevant Port Authority to confirm Crawford had been there.
“Well, maybe she paid someone who looks like her,” Calum said. “How well does he know her anyway?”
“Read the next line,” Clare said.
The captain said that Crawford had been sailing with him for several years, and they had conversed on the journey so there was no mistaking her; Crawford had spoken of her excitement over seeing her children again after weeks away.
“She could have bought him off,” Calum tried. “Or convinced him to lie.”
Clare let out a shriek of laughter, then pressed her lips together, composing herself. “Don’t let Graham hear you saying that.”