Chapter 3 #2
The cushions had been different.
Someone had been here afterward.
Fear moved coldly beneath my skin, but anger arrived immediately behind it.
I walked through the flat slowly, photographing everything before I touched it.
In the bedroom, the wardrobe doors appeared closed until I noticed the left one sat several millimeters farther forward than the right.
Isla would never have noticed. I would. The lower drawer of her dresser caught when I pulled it open, and a fresh scrape marked the runner where someone had forced it shut too quickly.
Nothing valuable was missing. Jewelry remained in its dish.
Her tablet lay inside the bedside cabinet.
Emergency cash still occupied the ridiculous ceramic sheep she had bought during a weekend in the Highlands because she claimed no burglar would ever search inside something that ugly.
Whoever had entered Isla's home hadn't come for money; they had been looking for something specific.
I crouched beside the desk where Isla did most of her work from home and ran my fingers along the underside.
Fresh tape residue marked the underside of the desk, proving something had been attached there recently and was no longer where Isla had left it.
My heart hammered harder as I sat back on my heels. Perhaps the police had removed it. Perhaps Isla had. Perhaps whoever searched her flat had found exactly what they came for. I hated all three possibilities because each left me with another question I could not answer.
Then I noticed the wastepaper basket.
Isla shredded client documents obsessively, but ordinary notes usually ended up crumpled beneath her desk. The bin was empty except for one narrow strip of thick cream paper caught beneath the liner. I pulled it free carefully.
It was part of a sample label bearing the words Alderwick House — Entrance Hall.
Beneath the printed title, Isla had written the address of the same Georgian townhouse I had already connected to the Blackridge payments, along with a date from six weeks earlier.
That date was long before Blackridge Hall was supposed to have become suspicious enough to attract Isla’s attention.
I sat very still as the significance settled over me. Isla had visited the Edinburgh property before she disappeared, which changed the entire timeline I had been working from.
The police believed the trail began in England because Blackridge Hall was the last project anyone knew she had been investigating.
I had believed it too. But if Isla had visited Alderwick House weeks earlier, then Blackridge might not have been where she discovered the first inconsistency.
It might have been where she finally understood that several inconsistencies were connected.
My phone rang sharply enough to make me jump, and Detective Kerr's name appeared on the screen. I answered immediately. “I found something.”
“That generally means you’re about to tell me you’ve gone somewhere I asked you not to.”
Despite everything, I almost laughed. “Not yet.”
“Skye.”
“I’m at Isla’s flat.”
His sigh carried clearly through the phone. “Why?”
“Because someone searched it after your people released it.”
Silence.
The change in him was immediate. “What makes you think that?”
“Because whoever did it put everything back wrong.”
“That isn’t—”
“Before you say it isn’t proof, I have your photographs. The sitting room is different. A drawer was forced. Something was removed from beneath her desk. And I found a project label connecting Isla to an Edinburgh property six weeks before she vanished.”
This time he did not dismiss me.
“Send me the address.”
I looked at the cream strip in my hand.
“I will.”
“Skye.”
“Yes?”
“Do not go there.”
I closed my eyes.
“You know me well enough by now to understand how useless that sentence is.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Give me one hour.”
One hour.
Twenty-three days of people asking me to wait had made an hour feel unbearable.
“I’ll send you everything,” I said.
“That wasn’t an agreement.”
“No.”
I ended the call before he could make another attempt.
By the time I returned to Thistle & Stone, I had already pulled the original planning records for Alderwick House from the city database.
The townhouse had been built in the early nineteenth century and altered repeatedly over two hundred years, but one feature caught my attention immediately.
The historic plan showed a rear service passage running parallel to the main corridor.
The most recent plan did not.
According to the modern drawing, that section of the building contained nothing but solid wall.
Nearly four feet of it.
No Georgian builder wasted four feet of interior space for no reason.
I enlarged the plan until the pixels blurred and compared it with a street-view photograph of the rear elevation. Three windows.
The modern interior drawing accounted for two.
I felt the same cold certainty that had settled over me when I unfolded Isla’s tracing paper.
It was another missing space inside another altered building, with another wall pretending there was nothing hidden behind it.
I packed my measuring tape, laser measure, tablet, camera, a small flashlight, and copies of the historic plans into my leather work bag. Then I took Isla’s sample label and slipped it into the inside pocket where I normally kept client keys.
Outside, the Edinburgh morning had brightened without becoming cheerful, weak sunlight pushing through clouds while rainwater still gleamed across the pavement. I locked the office behind me and looked through the glass at Isla’s empty chair.
“I found where you went,” I murmured.
Whether that brought me any closer to finding her was another question entirely.
Twenty minutes later, I stood across from Alderwick House.
From the street, it looked perfectly respectable.
Pale stone rose behind black railings, with tall windows and brass hardware polished to a mirror shine. Nothing about the elegant Georgian fa?ade suggested secrecy, confinement, or a missing woman.
But buildings lied when people taught them how.
I looked from the third rear window visible between neighboring roofs to the plan on my tablet and felt my pulse begin to climb.
Somewhere inside Alderwick House was a room that officially did not exist. And Isla had known about it six weeks before she disappeared.