You Buy Bones (27 page)

“This is Edinburgh, man.” Bradstreet's face twisted with an appalling knowledge. “There're more than sewers below the surface of the world.”

8: O'er His White Banes

John closed the door behind him and froze, collecting information with his ears and eyes. Every nerve tingled; he was saturated with the song. It floated upward through the hallway, barely audible once he'd left the street.

Parker was in the Vaults of Edinburgh, and Watson was not happy about it but his Adams was in his pocket, and for all his growing proof of demonism, Parker eschewed the sort of violence brought about by any sort of ballistics. His war-wounds had been collected hauling the wounded to safety.

If he is in the Vaults, then his library would be unguarded...

The doctor slipped up the stairs, the pain in his leg momentarily gone in the flush of the hunt. Foolish of him not to think of the possibility, but he'd thought this section of the street was outside the limits of the old subterranean city. The street was outside the borders of Old Town, after all...

Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Watson scolded himself; another old teacher's words coming back to haunt him at the worst possible moment. It was a moment's work to detour back to his bedroom and build up an outline on the bed with pillows and his wadded-up coat. He lit the bedside-candle quickly and thrust the glass chimney around the wax in relief; the flame thrust his shadows across the walls. Closing his bedroom door after him he made his way to the library.

“Bradstreet, pretend I know nothing about Edinburgh. What are you talking about?”

“Niddrey Street,” Bradstreet muttered, and appeared to sight something far away, as if drawing pictures inside his mind. “Edinburgh's got an underground city below the Old Town area... we're not far from it; perhaps the borders went further than most of us know. Maybe this is part of the original street...”

Lestrade was waiting with badly concealed impatience, rising up and down on his toe-tips, hands wrenched into his pockets.

“Build over a hundred years ago, Geoff. I'm sure I don't know why, but for years upon years, you had poor souls, mostly Irish, living underneath the city. Ten to a room no biggern' your little office-room, plus a stove to cook on. The garbage was awful even for
that
time, and disease wiped out whole families at once. The Vaults are supposed to be closed, but you hear thrill-seekers wanting to visit, and they'll pay for the trip down by a guide.”

“Sounds like a sewer,” Lestrade decided.

“It wasn't built to be a sewer, but you may as well call it such.” Bradstreet smacked his gloved fist into his open palm. “That doctor fellow, he's down there. Watson caught on, and I'm afraid he's about to get himself into trouble.”

Lestrade wasn't stupid; he was methodical. “The library.” He breathed. “He said Parker would be likely to have his proofs in his library, and if he's singing underneath the city, he can't very well be in his house guarding it.”

“That's what I was thinking.” Bradstreet admitted, but the men traded uneasy looks.

Watson puffed his breath out in thought, hands on hips as he contemplated the library/study. Glass eyes gleamed back at him from behind glass displays; the real eyes floated listlessly in alcohol under jars, the colours of the iris fading gently over time. Ghostly eyes. He shuddered.

There should be something here. Elspeth Bradstreet's skeleton
had
to be hidden here. And if he could find that... he could find the proof of her murder...

...And there was a door in the wall where there had not been one before.

Watson swallowed hard. He held his candle close and limped to the wall, where the heavy oak panels doubled as fashionable cabinet-drawers. The gap was large enough for a man; a small one. He reached out, touched the edges of the wood. The intricate mouldings were also the handles and hinges; he tugged gently, and the panels opened further without a squeak.

It appeared to be a small dark-room or a re-constructed closet. More jars of preserved items met his eye, organic in nature mostly; but there were rice-parchment paintings of human pathology, hanging in bamboo frames and marked in red ink. Watson wondered where these were collected from; they appeared to be devoted to unique deformities.

He frowned at an image of a man with a flipper for a foot. In another cabinet rested the account of an African king struck by polio; he explained his warped lower limbs as proof of his ancestry as a merman.

He was scowling at a painting of a man with two pupils in each eyeball, wondering if the poor man's claim to pathology was floating in one of these jars, when a draft of air brushed against the hairs on the back of his hand. It smelt not of Edinburgh, but of a forgotten stockyard. The pit of his stomach churned.

Watson's head turned. A panel that he had overlooked as part of Parker's cabinetry for years because of its large size had been left ajar. Not much, but enough that the draught whispered over his skin cold and dank.

A secret passage inside a secret room?

Nothing for it.

He pulled his clasp-knife out of his pocket and in a sudden move, chipped the edge of the door with the blade, marking where he was about to go. A close inspection of the darkness behind the panel-door showed nothing but a void. That could mean his bringing a light inside would be an alert. Still...

Parker had been singing. He must be extremely confident... and he was without a doubt, drunk. That drunkenness might give him the edge he needed.

Watson slipped behind the panel and lifted the candle high, thinning the spill of light at his feet. Just barely, a winding set of stairs spiraled downward. The smell was stronger. Much stronger. Mould mixed in it. Old animal wastes. Lye and ammonia.

Grave-earth smells.

The young man swallowed hard as the ghastly vapours conjured old memories of the dead and dying. Everyone thought Maiwand had been a hot place, but no. He had never been colder than when he had lain in the earth, waiting for help or death.

Watson carefully closed the door in precisely the way he'd found it, but he was forced to step downward with his good leg, just strong enough to brace his weight whilst he moved. It was slow going; it was painstaking. It was maddening. But he kept the candle high with his good arm and stuck out his patience. The mildew became a stench. It burned his nostrils and he breathed out his mouth to lower the risk of sneezing.

The steps ended. The candle gasped against the volume of the darkness. Watson waited, thinking. That cool draft was going to his left; he took a cautious step across the black floor - packed earth, pressed into concrete density from the years - and felt the coolness penetrate his shoes. Faint as foxfire, the stone outlines of doorways caught on the threads of candlelight.

It was as silent as a tomb should be. He heard nothing but his own breath over the pounding of blood in his heart and ears.

Something pale tipped in the candlelight; a scrap of paper on the packed floor. Watson caught a stronger wave of ammonia, knowing it was not natural for this sepulchral limbo. He quickened his step to see a door, leaning open into the black hallway. Glass -
clean
glass - reflected back at him.

The footfalls spidered eagerly up behind him, but his wounds were too fresh and his balance, too fragile. Parker had enjoyed decades of practice after his crippling to learn compensation. Watson heard his own breath leave his lungs as the hands slammed into his chest, knocking him backwards and deeper into the room. His back struck the floor with a grunt of dizzying pain. The candle-chimney burst into fragments in the darkness; he blinked against the sting of shards and the door slammed shut; a final sounding click of a bolt-lock rang in the doctor's ears and with it, his heart forgot how to beat.

“I'm going to go in,” Bradstreet announced. “You back me up.”

“No,
I
am.” Lestrade retorted. He met Bradstreet's glare coldly. “Don't give
me
that look, Inspector. I'm the one with the iron and you'd best think of what would happen if Dr. Parker claimed in court you'd thrashed him? I'm much more his size.”

Bradstreet sniffed his anger down. “You're smaller than he is in both directions,” A grudging admission. “I would adore the chance to see him accuse you of police brutality.” The clever comment did not disguise Bradstreet's worry. “Be careful, Lestrade.”

“Redundant grammar, Bradstreet.” Lestrade turned and as one they grimly met Inspector MacDonald trotting up with a small army of silent policemen.

“He's signalled.” Lestrade told the Scots. “And he feels there's cause to bring us in.”

“God help us.” Was all MacDonald thought of it.

The floor was stinking sawdust and flecks burned his eyes and nose but Watson was grateful. Its softness had saved him the injury of a heavy fall. He spat wood-shavings out of his mouth and fumbled in his pockets with trembling hands. He found his match-box inside a front pocket. He held on to the temptation to move before he could see anything and managed to strike a light after a few tries; his hands were still trembling, but it might have been from the cold and shock more than actual fear. The doctor's brain was coldly, mercilessly analysing his person and what it found was anger warring with humiliation, and a growing horror. The smell that had soaked into the soft sawdust was prevalent now; as a medical man, he knew the reasons for such a stench.

The match caught; he peered about the floor, found the candle and re-lit it with a gasp. The light was blessed. He felt himself relax, just a bit, now that he could see and he clambered to his feet by degrees, dripping sawdust grime and wincing at the pull of his wounds.
My God, will Maiwand never leave?

He was in a collection-room... A very different room from the rooms resting upstairs.

Watson stared, his heart in his throat as he took in the fact he was sealed in a tomb with skeletons hanging inside glass cases.

Parker must have spent years building it up.
Years
. And his father had been in trouble for such murky dealings with human remains... how much had he
inherited
? What had he been exposed to as a child, to defray his sense of the sacred and create this sense of arrogant entitlement?

Elspeth Bradstreet's bones hung suspended in its box. She was a pretty child, with Bradstreet's apple-shaped face and firm nose and large, widely spaced eyes. Next to her floated the hunched-over skeleton of a very old man with an extra vertebra in his back. In life he had been withered; his bones were porous with osteoporosis. Most of his teeth were gone. He would have had pronounced cheekbones under his wrinkles, and a constant grimace of pain from the
otitis media
infection at his left ear that slowly killed him. The bones had been partially devoured by the disease; the candlelight caught the lacy filigree of the remaining bone. In his youth he had been handsome and evenly-shaped with a proud browline and strong chin.

Conjoined twins were mounted in a double box. He recognised Asia in their skulls.

A woman's skeleton hung, toes pointing downward. In life she had been young and beautiful with smooth, even features marred only by double canines in her jaws.

He could see all of their skulls. He could see all of their faces.

Watson forced himself to swallow. His hands shook from the weight of the candle and he got to the nearest table before dropping it. Cold sweat spackled the table-top from his brow.
Breathe
, he reminded himself.
You
must breathe
.
Even as Parker's devilish singing haunted his memory:

Mony a one for him makes mane...

but none sall ken where he is gane...

O'er his white banes, when they lie bare

the winds sall blaw forevermair...

Stop
, he reminded himself.
You are the Queen's Major. There is no wind here to blow, there is no wind at all. And until the door is opened again, there will be nothing in the way of air.

He swallowed again, and made certain the candle was settled. He had to find something that would prize the door. Otherwise, Parker would win with a new murder under his belt, and gain a new specimen for his collection.

I thought him corrupted; I never thought he was mad.

“Careful.”

Bradstreet nodded once, just to show he'd heard his friend's warning, and stepped without a sound into the room after Lestrade. In the hallway the two felt exposed and neglected at the same time. Behind them Bobbies rustled and jangled over the front steps, listening to MacDonald mutter his orders to spread out again, search again lads, look about, keep the truncheons out, and one hand ready for the alarm. Outside and off to the corner of the scrap of green clover a knot of servants huddled with each other and demanded what was happening. It had grimly amused Lestrade to note that there was a fundamental difference between rounding up servants in London: Here the little old ladies had no fear and were happy to treat the abashed Constables like overgrown children in need of a good dose of chapel.

“They're not in here.” Bradstreet's face set tight. “I looked all over this side. The house is empty except for the staff.”

“Watson left a form under his bed. He knew something was up and he couldn't risk telling us. I don't like this.” Lestrade gritted his teeth. “Blast.” He ran his thumb under his chin. “We
do
have Watson's permission to go in after him. That would keep it from being a closed case.”

Bradstreet did not rail at Lestrade's study of procedure at a critical moment. The smallest incident could throw this entire case out of court, never to be tried again. They had to be careful. Everything was at stake.

“However many people are gone,” he warned, “Eventually some of them are going to return. We keep this as quiet as possi-”