“What shall I say?”
“Anything—tell them I’m sick; tell them I’m dying. Whatever you want.”
There was a pause, then the sound of retreating footsteps. He drew more tobacco into his lungs before leaning back in his chair, head thrown back, eyes closed.
How could he be dying, he wondered, when he was already dead?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“I seem to have . . . an adviser, I suppose you’d have to call him,” Ian said to his aunt. They were having their usual Sunday afternoon tea in the parlor, in front of a roaring fire. Having gorged on roast beef, they were enjoying tea and shortbread while Lillian did Ian’s mending, which she insisted on doing for him once a month. He pretended to protest, and she pretended to believe him.
“Oh?” Lillian said, peering at the needle she was attempting to thread. She was nearsighted but refused to wear glasses. Holding it up to the light, she squinted as she tried to push the thread through the tiny hole. Ian knew better than to offer to help. “What sort of adviser?”
“He’s a librarian.”
“How did you come to meet him?”
Ian smiled; Aunt Lillian loved a good story. “I’m sorry to disappoint you with the rather unextraordinary fact that I met him at the library.”
“Ah, well, these things can’t be helped,” she said, finally passing the thread through the eye of the needle.
He told her about Pearson, carefully omitting their meeting the night before. But he did make the mistake of revealing that Pearson was English.
“Ach, the English!” She spat the words out contemptuously. “They’re a pallid group o’weaklings. Can’t even manage to measure a proper mile.”
Ian helped himself to more tea and shortbread. “Auntie, we’ve not had Scots miles since you were a girl.”
“Because the English are too feeble to walk them,” she said, biting off the end of the thread after tying it up.
Aunt Lillian seldom missed an opportunity to malign the English, whom she despised with a passion. The longer Scots mile—based on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh—was obsolete, having been replaced by the official English system of measurement for the last time in 1824 (though there were still places in Scotland where the residents obstinately refused to use the English system).
“So your friend is English. I suppose we’ll have to forgive him for that.” She sighed.
“How very kind of you,” he remarked drily. He sometimes wondered if her political attitudes were more pose than conviction.
Lillian shot him a sharp glance as her fingers deftly whip-stitched a button on one of his shirts. “You missed quite an evening last night.”
Ian frowned—did she know he had been with Pearson? “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you’d easily find a friend to join you.”
“Well, I didn’t, and you would have enjoyed it, being ‘a student of human nature,’ as you like to call yourself.”
“I should love to hear your account of it,” he said to mollify her. It was also unlike Lillian to get snippy like this.
“It was most extraordinary,” she said, brightening. “He really did seem to have the power to make people ignore pain. He had them do silly things as well, but it was the needle through the arm that really impressed me.”
“Tell me about it,” Ian said, intrigued.
She recounted the hypnotist’s act from beginning to end, and when she had finished, he leaned back in his chair.
“Such abilities could be a wonderful or terrible thing,” he said. “To have such power over people could be a source of great good or great evil.”
“He insisted that he was doing nothing save ‘liberating’ the person’s innate abilities, but I’m not sure that’s accurate. In every case, they did as he suggested.”
She went on about Monsieur Le Coq’s presence and charisma, until Ian had to smile. “Why, Auntie, I do believe you are smitten.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she snapped. “At my age—really!”
But her eyes sparkled, and the color in her cheeks was more than just the heat cast off by the fire in the grate. Ian regretted his decision to forgo the performance—anyone who could make his aunt Lillian blush like a schoolgirl was a man to be reckoned with.
“I’m glad the citizenry has a distraction. The papers are outdoing one another to cause mass hysteria over these murders.”
“I heard there was a brawl in front of the police station.”
“Where did you get that information?”
She put down her mending. “I assume that’s where you received that bruise on your forehead.”
“The editors of the Scotsman took it upon themselves to give the killer a lurid name,” he said, ignoring her remark.
“Ah, yes—the ‘Holyrood Strangler.’ You must admit, it does have a certain ring.”
Ian groaned. “Not you, too!”
“I’m only pointing out it’s an appropriate name. Did Chief Inspector Crawford like my photographs?” she said, adroitly changing the topic.
“Yes, and he wanted me to give you a message.”
“Yes?” she said, biting off the end of the thread. Aunt Lillian constantly misplaced her sewing scissors, using them to cut peonies and twine and to do numerous other household tasks. Ian had offered many times to buy her a second pair, but she always refused, insisting that she liked the ones she had. But they never seemed to land in her sewing kit, so she invariably resorted to biting off the ends of the thread.
“Detective Chief Inspector Crawford asked if you would consider working with the Edinburgh City Police as a photographer.”
“Did he, now?” she said casually, a little smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “Fancy that.”
“Would that interest you?”
“I never thought about turning my talents to crime solving—but then, neither did you, until . . .” She bit her lip and looked away. “But that’s all you seem to think about now. It wouldn’t kill you to have a lady friend, you know.”
“‘Love is a smoke raised with the fumes of sighs.’”
Lillian wrinkled her nose. “I hope you don’t do that in front of your superior officer.”
“What?”
“Quote Shakespeare.”
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”
“I’m sure he finds it very irritating.”
“And I enjoy irritating him.”
“It sounds like an ideal relationship,” she said, selecting a new spool of thread from her sewing kit.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” she said, pouring herself another cup of tea.
“Were my parents . . . happy together?”
She rose stiffly and fetched a torn tablecloth from the bottom drawer of the rosewood armoire. “I don’t suppose you’ll take some advice from your old aunt Lillian.”
“Ah, Auntie, we should all be as young as you.” It was flattery, and he knew it—and knew she thrived on it.
“Oh, gae on with ye,” she said, reverting to her Glaswegian roots.
“What’s the advice?”
“Let the dead rest in peace. You’re only tormenting yourself with it.”
“You sound just like DCI Crawford.”