Chapter 4
‘Wake up.’
The words slipped through the darkness in the room.
I didn’t want to wake up. I wanted to stay beneath the warm blankets. But that voice persisted. Just as it had dozens of times in the dark and cold of that tiny room under the eaves of The Church.
‘Ye must wake up, ye young noddy!’
Sleepyhead, my friend called me, and I was, from tending to the ‘ladies’ and their gentlemen callers late into the night.
‘Ye must wake up. girl.’
“Dory?”
I slowly opened my eyes, and she was there standing by the window as I fought my way up out of the dream. The air sparkled in the beam of light that slanted through the smudged glass and surrounded her. She turned and looked at me.
‘Ye canna sleep now. There are things ye must do. Things ye must know... dangerous things. Ye must be careful!’
“What things? Dory?” I searched the room.
It seemed so real, as if she was there. A dream? Or something more?
There was no one at the window, only that pale light, the stillness of the morning broken by the distant sound of a vendor on the street below, and from the kitchen beyond the door.
I dressed for the day. I thanked Elizabeth for the supper the night before.
“Not that ye touched it,” she commented, not unkindly. “Breakfast then, more than just coffee. Yet need to have food in yer stomach, girl.”
I ate the biscuit and ham she placed before me.
"I heard ye call out. A dream with all that's happened?" she added.
Was it a dream, I thought?
“I suppose that ye will be returnin’ to London now,” she went on as she poured more coffee, then sat across from me at the table.
I shook my head.
“There are things I need to do. I will be meeting with Inspector Landry this morning.” She nodded.
“I thought as much. Ye should know that the room is yours for as long as ye need.”
I had asked wot she rented it for when she first offered it to me. I refused to accept charity or be a burden.
“A burden?” she had exclaimed at the time. “’Tis no burden. It’s pleasing to have someone about.”
At the time we had agreed on a shilling per week.
I laid a shilling and several more smaller coins on the table before leaving for my meeting with Inspector Landry.
“For the supper and breakfast this morning as well,” I explained.
She nodded, though I sensed the money was of minor importance as she laid a hand against my cheek in parting. I was not used to such displays.
“There are those, the old ones,” a soft smile curved her lips as she explained, “who believe dreams are real, that they are things that are passed on from spirits. Of course, not many believe in such things anymore.”
Was it a dream? Or nothing more than the horror of arriving in Edinburgh to find my friend had been murdered?
I tried to make sense of it as I rode to the police station where I was to meet Inspector Landry.
All I knew was that it had seemed real. As if Dory was there in the room, determined to warn me, keep me safe as she had years before at The Church.
But to warn me about...what?
“Miss?” the driver called down from atop the coach, bringing me back from my thoughts.
I stepped down from the coach and paid the driver, then entered the police station. As I had the day before, I gave the constable at the front desk my name and informed him that I was to meet with Inspector Landry. I waited on a bench seat in the foyer.
“Miss Montgomery,” he greeted me. “Are ye certain ye want to do this? It’s not usually somethin’ a young lady would ask for.”
I assured him that I was very certain. He nodded.
“The morgue is in another part of the building. The main entrance is on the adjacent street.”
Inspector Landry pulled on a heavy coat with neck scarf and hat. He also carried an umbrella as he escorted me out to the sidewalk.
“Sir McQuarrie has arranged for a man of his acquaintance by the name of Munro to meet us. I’m told you are acquainted with him as well.”
Munro. I was not surprised after our encounter the previous evening.
We walked to the corner and continued down the adjacent street to a brick and cut stone entrance with signage for the morgue.
I was not unfamiliar with such places, having previously accompanied Mikaela Forsythe on an inquiry case.
However, as she said at the time, no amount of experience could prepare one for the smell of such a place or the sight of a body, laid out naked with all assortments of injuries on a steel table.
We entered the foyer of the morgue and then stepped into the front office that might have been any business establishment with a clerk at the counter. Except the business here was death.
The smell was as I remembered it, that cloying stench that filled the back of my throat along with the sharp, pungent scent of embalming fluid for some of those inside those walls.
For others, as I had learned, those of no family or means, there was only the smell of decaying flesh, followed by a quick burial in a nameless grave after a crime was solved.
Inspector Landry went to the counter to sign in while I waited apart, the smell of the morgue stronger here as an attendant in a white apron appeared with a clipboard, that unmistakable odour following him in a smothering wave.
I closed my eyes as the smell washed over me, along with the image of Dory’s body from the night I found her.
A strong hand closed around my arm.
That familiar icy gaze locked with mine. I attempted to pull my arm free.
“I’m all right.”
“Of course, ye are,” Munro replied. “Ye might want to sit down before ye fall down. Have ye eaten this mornin’?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’ll take it that ye have not, just as I thought. And now yer about to fall to the floor. Ye might want to remember to eat before taking yerself off to view dead bodies.”
I managed to free my arm.
“And ye are an expert?” I replied, stronger now.
Inspector Landry returned and nodded to Munro.
“The police surgeon is waiting.”
We followed Inspector Landry through a door that opened onto a long hallway, with a half-dozen doors simply marked ‘Examination Room,’ with numbers—one, two, three, and three more on the opposite side. He stopped at Room No. 3 and opened the door.
I had told myself that it was no different than another time I had been inside a morgue. However, this was different. A thin, balding man acknowledged us, read the paper that Inspector Landry gave him, then motioned us to follow him.
When we reached one of those steel tables, he pulled back the sheet that covered the body that lay there.
“Is this the victim, Inspector?”
He nodded with a look at myself.
I stepped closer. The body that lay there was naked except for the sheet that had covered it.
Without the clothes Dory had worn the night I found her, I now saw the bruises down her arms and on her hands in the harsh glare from the overhead lights. My attention was then drawn to the ghastly cut across her throat.
There had been a great deal of blood the night before, but there was no way to know the cause of it in the meager light. Now, as I stared at my friend’s body and saw the full extent of the injuries, my stomach tightened.
I was not aware that I made any sound as a darkness crowded in at the edges of the room.
“Are ye all right, Miss Montgomery?” Inspector Landry inquired.
“Of course. Please continue,” I replied. I wanted to know as much as possible about what had happened.
“I have made a preliminary report,” the surgeon pointed out. “The cause of death was the knife wound as you can see.”
“What else can you tell us?” Inspector Landry inquired.
The surgeon nodded. “It appears the woman struggled when she was attacked. That would account for the bruises that you see. The attack possibly came after...” he paused, then continued, “the usual activity we see in these situations,” he added.
“There was indication of an activity of an intimate nature before the woman was attacked. And there were also traces of opium, also consistent with these situations.”
A transaction, the usual reason...for a prostitute. Opium?
“Aye,” Munro commented.
I looked up in surprise but made no comment.
Dory never used drugs of any kind. She told me more than once that it dulled the senses.
“I canna have some blighter takin’ advantage and not pay the full amount with me brain in a fog. I keep me wits about me.”
Yet I reminded myself that it had been several years since I last saw my friend. Things changed. Had they changed for her as well?
Oh, Dory, I thought. I reached out and touched her hand—now cold and lifeless.
How many times had she comforted me as a young child, and now there was no amount of comfort I could offer in return.
“Did you know the woman?” the surgeon inquired. “Is there family to be notified...?”
I shook my head and took a steadying breath.
“There is no one,” I replied. Other than myself, I thought.
“Wot else can ye tell us?” Inspector Landry inquired.
“My observations are typical of things we see on the street, Inspector. Not unlike the murders in London some years ago, those four prostitutes attacked and murdered.”
Typical, nothing unusual. Except that it was neither of those... I was certain of it.
Inspector Landry thanked the surgeon for his time.
“I will make my final report, that will include a note about the presence of opium,” the surgeon replied, then as an afterthought, “There was an item found in the woman’s clothes. It appears to be of little value, you might wish to have it since there is no family,” he added.
He went to a side counter and retrieved a small envelope. He returned and handed it to me.
I opened the envelope and stared at the object I found there—a small yellow metal charm in the shape of a heart, with the letters A.D.G.
I do not know if I thanked the surgeon or said anything at all as I turned and left the holding room, that metal charm clenched tight in my hand.
Out on the street the air was sharp, biting as snow began to fall. I lifted my face to the cold and the sting of the flakes as I closed my eyes, a memory just as sharp: