Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
T he smell hit Esme at the same time as her brain caught up to the fact that she wasn’t just seeing a rumpled sleeping bag underneath a pile of clothes, but she was actually seeing a lifeless corpse. She put her hand over her mouth and nose, gagging.
It was a man. He was wearing a black shirt and jeans and had spiky white-blond hair. There was a long black leather coat thrown casually to the right of the sleeping bag and the leather gleamed in the half-light as if it was wet. The corpse’s skin had the waxy appearance of the very dead.
The recognition started with the leather coat and then washed over her in a single wave. It was the man who had visited the bookshop. The one who didn’t believe in magic, but liked collecting books about it anyway. The man she and Luke had smiled about, had considered a harmless enthusiast. Iain.
She took a step closer to the pile of clothes, part of her brain still hoping that perhaps she was mistaken. That the smell was due to rotting food, not a person. Perhaps Kate Foster was just a really bad housekeeper and not, as it appeared, a deranged murderer. The urge to laugh bubbled up and Esme recognised the impulse as hysteria. There wasn’t time for that now. She was a healer. Almost a trained nurse. She ought to check for signs of life.
Esme opened her mouth to ask if the man was all right, but more of the smell got in the moment she parted her lips and she couldn’t help retching. She swallowed hard and covered her mouth with her hand, knowing enough from television that she really shouldn’t vomit all over a crime scene. She also knew that a smell like that meant decomposition. The man was definitely past saving.
Esme couldn’t move for a moment. She couldn’t be a nurse or a helper, there was nothing to heal, and in that absence she froze. There was a dead man in this sad little room and nothing she did would change that fact.
She couldn’t stop staring at the collar of the black shirt. It was open at the base of Iain’s neck and the fabric was shiny around the button where someone had used too hot an iron. She could see flakes of dry skin, sprinkled white on the material. At once, she could imagine Iain picking the shirt from his wardrobe and putting it on. She could see him brushing those flakes away, maybe even worrying about them being visible. The vulnerability of it made her lose her breath. The thought that this man had got dressed one day, with no idea that his life would drain away a few hours later. It was the sheer random mundanity of it that made her head spin.
As she stared at the shirt collar, she saw something move. It was a flash of creamy white wriggling at the edge of the black fabric.
Bile was already rising, Esme’s instincts knowing this was very wrong before her conscious mind caught up. With another step, her gaze locked onto the gruesome sight and unable to look away even as she felt her revulsion growing, she comprehended what was underneath the shirt. Maggots.
Finally, her muscles remembered how to move. She took a step back. She had to get out. Kate Foster could return at any moment. Esme hadn’t imagined the creature at the castle. She wasn’t going crazy or being deceived by jealousy. Either Kate Foster was something other than human, or she was seriously unhinged.
Luke was pottering about in the bookshop, refilling some gaps in the shelves with books from the stockroom. If somebody had quizzed him on why, exactly, he had picked up a volume of folk herbal remedies and placed it with the books on military history, he couldn’t have told them, but he felt the bookshop hum with satisfaction so knew it was right.
He had tea in his favourite mug and a piece of fruitcake, delivered by Fiona that morning. In return, she had gone away with a handful of board books for Hamish. Luke hadn’t even been aware that the shop stocked books for toddlers, but Hamish had crawled through the stacked shelves until they appeared.
The shop wasn’t the only one humming. He realised, with a second of shock, that he had been doing the same. Humming with a contented happiness and calm that would have seemed impossible to the Luke of a few months earlier. If his father and brother could see him now, they wouldn’t recognise him. The thought brought a pang of guilt, but it was too small to puncture the bubble of satisfaction. He had always been the quiet, bookish one in his small family, it was just the bar for that label had been so incredibly low and it had been so thoroughly ridiculed, that he had feared he would never be anything other than a carbon copy of his dear old dad. A macho archetype who used his size and strength to get his own way. Violent. Angry. And filled with a raging grief that was a fire that would never burn out.
The landline rang and he answered. It was Mona, the woman from the Edinburgh bookshop.
‘Do you want to buy a shitload of stock?’ She sounded upset.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Conrad called from New Zealand. He’s decided to make his sabbatical permanent and he says he’s closing the place. He doesn’t want me to run it anymore. So that’s me out of a job.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Luke said.
‘Me too,’ Mona said, sounding pissed off. ‘So, do you want stock? You’re welcome to come up and have a look at it all. Conrad said to call a house clearance place, which is basically paying somebody to take all the books. It’s his money he’s burning, but it still isnae right. I don’t know why he’s suddenly in such a hurry. I do the accounts and place is solvent, even with paying me and the rates going up last year. I don’t understand. What if he’s having a wee moment and then he comes to his senses and regrets it?’
Luke listened to Mona vent, his own mind whirring. ‘Did something happen?’
‘Not that I know of,’ she said. Adding quickly, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘Of course not,’ Luke tried to be soothing.
‘Conrad said it was too dangerous, which is pretty doolally. Right?’
‘Maybe not so crazy. You know I said about toxins on books? I got hurt by some really badly. Have you received any strange deliveries? Books from other shops that you weren’t expecting?’ Having found the hexed book from the Shambles, Luke was pretty sure that was the only source, but he didn’t want to take any chances. He didn’t want a nice kid like Mona getting hurt.
‘Nothing like that,’ Mona said. ‘It’s been business as usual. Better than usual, really. I put us on Insta and I’m getting some traction. There are collectors all over the world and they love the thought of buying from a wee place in bonnie Scotland. Especially the Americans.’
‘So it’s definitely not a financial decision. Something has spooked him?’
‘Sales are up. Accounts are healthy. Which I pointed out. Speaking of sales, look out for a guy called Iain. I sent him your way.’
‘I met him,’ Luke said. ‘Matrix coat.’
‘Aye,’ Mona laughed, sounding more like herself. ‘He’s a wee character. But, hang on… you met him?’
‘He came to the shop. Told us you had recommended us.’
‘He was in here on Monday, asking after the same stuff and he went all vague when I mentioned your place. I assumed he hadn’t made the trip.’
He had probably forgotten, Luke thought. The wards protected the island and tended to make people forget about it once they left.
‘I gave him your address again, though. He said he was gonnae visit.’
‘Thanks,’ Luke said. ‘And good luck with whatever you do next. I’m sorry about the shop.’
‘Me, too,’ Mona said. ‘It’s a wee shame.’
Luke couldn’t settle to work or reading after Mona’s phone call. His first instinct had been to call Esme. He realised that she was always the person he wanted to speak to. About this or anything in his life.
He prowled to the fridge, hoping to distract himself with some food. His stomach growled as soon as he thought about eating and he realised he hadn’t had lunch. The fridge was empty apart from a half a pint of milk and a sliver of cheddar. He stared at the uninspiring offerings without really seeing them, still thinking about Esme. He wasn’t just attracted to her, he was man enough to admit it. It was something far deeper and far more terrifying than that. Unable to work out what to do with that information, he went with the more straightforward problem to solve. He would go to the pub for an early dinner.
He was the only customer at The Rising Moon, which suited him just fine. Seren kept decent Wi-Fi for customers and he used his phone to browse the newspaper archive for the York area. Mona’s call had reminded him of something the barman in the Shambles had said about Graham. Mona had said that Conrad had told her running the Edinburgh shop was too dangerous. Had somebody threatened him? Or had he heard that somebody connected with the shop had died and decided that it was, somehow, his fault?
The barman in York had said that Graham had been really upset by the death of one of his regular customers. He had said it had been suicide, which might not make the news, but it seemed worth a look. If the customer had been a regular, he might have been local to York and therefore of interest to the local news. And at least Luke had a fairly small time period to check, just a month or two before the Shambles Book Emporium burned.
On the second page of results, he was rewarded by a headline dated a couple of weeks before the fire in the bookshop: Man falls to death from city walls. Clicking on the story, Luke read that the man’s body had been found in the early hours of the morning and the death was being considered ‘suspicious’. There was a picture of the spot next to the ancient York walls, worn stone steps visible in one corner of the image. The police were appealing for witnesses. A follow-up article was linked at the bottom of the story, below a panel of adverts. Dated a week later, the article named the deceased as Nicholas Jones, and that police were no longer treating the death as suspicious. The man was known to have been suffering from an illness and they asked that the family’s wishes for privacy be respected at this difficult time. There was a picture of Nicholas Jones in presumably happier times. It showed a hipster-ish man wearing a waistcoat, shirt and jeans. He had long dark hair and the cheekbones and colouring that Luke associated with native Americans. His arm was slung around a young woman who was gazing up at him adoringly. The expression of love wasn’t the only striking thing about the photograph, however. He recognised her.