Page 103 of Disturbing the Dead
I take out my own phone, but Dad snatches it.
“No spoilers,” he says. “Your nan didn’t want you looking up anything about your life there. As for who was convicted, it’s only a spoiler if this person actually committed the crime.”
“So who was it?”
He hesitates, and then says, “Selim Awad was convicted of killing his brother-in-law and Dr. Gray’s young assistant, whom he strangled in a tunnel. A week later, she died of her injuries.”
The breath goes out of my lungs. “Me. He was convicted of murdering me, which made him seem to be Sir Alastair’s killer, too.”
Dad nods. “The housekeeper testified that you two went to the tunnel after hearing that Selim had been stealing artifacts from his brother-in-law.”
Mrs. Wallace testified. That means she survived.
My father continues, “She was knocked out and you were strangled. While she didn’t see your attacker, Lord Muir spotted Mr. Awad fleeing the scene.”
“Lord Muir being the actual person who strangled me.”
“He framed Selim Awad,” Mom murmurs. “Starting with what you overheard at the market.”
I glance over and then wince. “Of course. It was strange that the market seller knew so much about who was supplying the artifacts. He’d been fed a story that, if uncovered, would lead back to Selim. So what happened to Selim—?” I stop.
I know what would have awaited Selim Awad. What awaited all convicted killers in that time period.
The hangman’s noose.
THIRTY-TWO
We don’t solve the mystery of who killed Sir Alastair. Oh, Lord Muir tops the list, but I’d known that when I’d seen who’d been strangling me… in the exact same way Sir Alastair had been strangled, right down to the knee in my back.
Except Muir has an ironclad alibi, which McCreadie has verified. I still suspect he’s framing Selim, but that will need to be proven. No one else makes an obvious suspect. Mom is delighted by the link to the Edinburgh Seven and fangirls over me meeting Sophia Jex-Blake, but the students’ only connection to the murder is that Lord Muir seems to have been using Sir Alastair to speak out against them.
I won’t say Selim’s fate gives me an excuse to return to the nineteenth century. If there is a choice to be made, then I must make it, and I can’t take the cowardly route, casting myself as a martyr who sacrificed her place in the world to save a near stranger. I must go back for me, as painful as it is to even think of leaving my parents.
That won’t happen by walking into 12 Robert Street. Still, we’re going to try, and the next afternoon, we’re making our way down the sidewalk, pulling our luggage behind us.
Walking down Robert Street physically hurts. I can’t help but think of all the times I walked it with Gray and Isla, or with Simon or Alice, heading out on errands. If I half close my eyes, I can imagine I’m with them… until a car rumbles past, shattering the illusion.
No one meets us at the house. It’s just us and a lockbox. I push open the familiar door and unfamiliar smells roll out, and I want to back away.
This isn’t Gray and Isla’s house. It’s a sterile rental, stinking of floor polish and disinfectant. It’s like a family home after everything has been moved out and cleaned for the next residents, except I’d actually have preferred bare walls and empty rooms. This is fully furnished—in upscale Scandinavian, like Ikea for the one percent. Normally, minimalist decor suits my minimalist tastes, but here, in this grand old town house, it makes me shudder.
How many times have I grumbled about the eyeball-assault that is Victorian decor? But there was warmth and enthusiasm in the jumble of colors and styles, like when I was five and insisted on a purple bedroom with a princess bed and posters of unicorns and rainbows. I loved that room, and I love my parents for giving it to me without a single “Are you sure?”
As we leave our bags in the front hall, I remind my parents of that old purple bedroom, how much I appreciated it, and how it reminds me of the Gray town house.
“The gas lighting helps,” I say. “You can’t see as well, so the colors don’t completely blind you. I keep imagining the day when the world gets electricity and they realize exactly how garish that gold and scarlet wallpaper is.”
“Or they don’t care,” Mom says. “Remember Aunt Lillian’s house?”
“I do,” I say with a smile.
We’ve come in the front door, and the room layouts on this level are also the same. I take my parents into what would have been the “funerary parlor” and I give a mini lecture on undertaking in the nineteenth century, and they are as patient as they’d been when I’d regale them at dinner with whatever weird facts I’d learned at school.
The funerary parlor has been redone as bedrooms, and I smile to think of people settling into the cozy little beds where Addington had performed autopsies and Gray had dissected corpses. Do guests ever wake to the dull splat of an organ being dropped into a bowl? Or hear a distant voice saying, “Hugh? Please hold this severed limb for me”?
Next I go down to the basement. What was Mrs. Wallace’s domain—the kitchens and her living quarters—is a children’s suite, with two small bedrooms and a den with a TV and game consoles.
Then it’s two flights to the second level or, in British parlance, the first floor. This area is the least changed. The rooms remain intact, and even in their original functions, from the dining room to the library. The only difference is that the drawing room has been divided to form a tiny bathroom and a kitchen even smaller than the one in my condo. I guess if you can afford to rent this place, you aren’t planning to cook.
