“Ah, yes—table tennis.”
“Right you are, sir.”
“Thank you, Bernadette!” Ian cried, kissing her upon the forehead. “You have been most helpful.”
The good lady blushed and waved her flour-coated hands at him. “I just hope you can use what I told you to solve poor Mr. Wycherly’s murder.”
“Take care of Miss Harley, will you?”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
By the time Ian left the Harley residence, he was faint with hunger. His head felt light as a balloon; he had an odd floating sensation as he walked down the street, as though half levitating, like a magician’s assistant. He bought a meat pie from a street vendor and gulped it down so fast, he nearly choked. Wiping his fingers on his handkerchief, he strode with purpose toward the Canongate, the epicenter of all that was shady, vile, and unlawful.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
George Pearson stood at his window overlooking the Royal Terrace, a steaming cup of tea on the sill. There was little free space in his large but cluttered seven-room flat, so windowsills often served as impromptu tables. The steam rising from the cup fogged the lower portion of the glass, but George could see the street well enough. He watched the pedestrians on the pavement three stories below. He could make out the faces without being seen himself, his stocky body tucked behind green brocade window drapes.
He had always felt more comfortable hiding behind things—reference desks, curtains, doorways. Out in the open, he felt his body was exposed, dangling like a useless appendage and waiting for instructions to a language George had never fully understood.
And so George collected. China, furniture, doilies, histories of the world—it hardly mattered. Surrounded by his objects, he felt safe, protected. Collecting filled a yearning inside him, like a giant maw, a hunger that knew no satiation. The objects were the physical representation of something much deeper and keener. He could not bear the thought that all the world’s knowledge would someday be lost. He believed that deep within inanimate objects lay a truth more real and necessary than the merely corporeal world.
He reached for his tea and took a sip, grimacing as he swallowed. He had forgotten to buy sugar, and on top of it, let the pot sit too long; the expensive blend of oolong he favored turned bitter quickly. He set the cup back down on its matching bone china saucer, a delicate robin’s egg blue. George was feeling restless. Even the sight of his exquisite—and expensive—Royal Doulton china failed to placate his jittery nerves. He had spent his Saturday afternoon reading—not his usual history texts or books on botany; he had turned his attention to crime in all its gory and salacious detail.
Crime was his passion, and when he became interested in a subject, he immersed himself in it. And, to be honest, he was more than a little taken with DI Hamilton. His fine figure and keen gray eyes had cast a spell on George Pearson.
He took another sip of bitter tea and gazed at a young couple strolling arm in arm along the pavement, the girl leaning into her companion and pressing her shoulder into his side. The bonnet she wore prevented him from seeing her face, but every aspect of her attitude and movements telegraphed her happiness. The two of them were not especially well dressed, so George knew they hadn’t much money, but they looked so happy that his heart swelled with envy. He knew such public affection would never be part of his own life—his desires were aberrant in the eyes of society. He could alleviate his bodily cravings in such low, degrading establishments as existed in Edinburgh, but the idea was abhorrent to him.
In spite of his cluttered flat, George Pearson was a fastidious man, and the thought of groping strangers in dark and dingy rooms was more than he could bear. He was a natural romantic, given more to love than to lust, longing for soulful union rather than rude, animalistic coupling. And so he lived in a state of continual desire, tormented by the vision of love all around him. But there was something in the longing itself, a sharp sweetness he had come to believe was better than nothing at all.
When he met DI Hamilton, George resolved to make himself useful to the young detective. He gazed at the pile of books stacked on the floor next to his favorite wing chair, its venerable armrests covered with tattered doilies. The one he had been reading lay on the cushion, open to the chapter on motive. That was the tricky aspect of these killings, George thought. He wondered if he had more in common with the murderer than he would care to think.
George gazed at the book, its pages browning at the edges, and wondered if such a man could be found at one of the places where he had vowed never to set foot. Outside, the light was seeping from the sky as it slipped from cobalt to midnight blue. George bit his lip, standing for a moment undecided, then reached for his coat. The night beckoned, and so did the allure of danger. He felt a thrill in his veins; as he locked the flat behind him, he realized he had never felt more alive.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
When Scotland’s King David I established Holyrood Abbey in 1128, he would no doubt have been mortified to learn its eventual fate as a palace of the British monarchy. As for the neighborhood known as the Canongate (from the old Scots word “gait,” meaning road), its destiny was even less savory. Originally named after the clerics of the nearby abbey, Canongate was now the location of all manner of vice and depravity. When a member of Edinburgh’s police force needed to track down a criminal, odds were the miscreant would turn up in the warren of dilapidated tenements stacked like chicken crates atop the spiderweb of wynds and alleys weaving between the city’s shrugging fa?ades and crumbling walls.
It was to this seedy locale that Ian Hamilton’s search took him. If one needed to procure opium without any questions being asked, Canongate was the place to go. Armed with only vague references to an owl and a Chinaman named Pong, he set about to find where Stephen Wycherly might have procured the drug.
On Saturday night, the already considerable level of drinking and debauchery increased several notches. Swells from the New Town seeking a night of illicit companionship roamed the rough-hewn cobblestones alongside the neighborhood’s denizens—an unpleasant mix of thieves, ruffians, and pickpockets. Home to most of the city’s slaughterhouses as well as a fair number of pubs, the Canongate had a distinctive aroma of warm blood, cold steel, and stale beer. The slaughterhouses were dark, but lights blazed brightly in pub windows, shouts and drunken singing spilling out into the streets along with rowdy bar brawlers. As Ian passed the Hound and Hare, stepping carefully over refuse and piles of horse manure, he heard half a dozen inebriants bellowing the lyrics to a popular bawdy song.