AllFreeNovel
Share Us
McCreadie continues, “A few days ago, the man—Andrew Burns—complained of stomach troubles but brushed it off as ‘feeling poorly.’ Then, the night before last, he was visibly unwell and told his companions his wife had made his favorite pudding.”
“Uh-huh.” I bat my eyelashes. “Tell me more.”
“The pudding was very rich, and he feared he’d been eating too much, which was upsetting his stomach. But he hated to turn it down when she’d gone to all the trouble—and expense—to make his favorite sweet.”
“Let me guess. She never had any herself? Insisted it was all for him?”
“He didn’t say. As he was drinking, he became violently ill. One of the lads”—he glances around, his gaze lighting on a couple of the children—“was sent to fetch Burns’s wife. By the time she arrived, he was in the roadway, nearly passed out from retching.”
“And her reaction?”
“Annoyance, according to the witnesses. She said he was going to drink himself to death and she wouldn’t make it easier on him. She stalked off. Two men carried him home and put him to bed.”
“Did his wife say anything to them?”
“Unfortunately, they were not among those willing to talk to us.”
“Is that suspicious?” I say with a flirty giggle as I lean forward. “Or just the state of things around here.”
His lips quirk in a half smile. “The state of things around here. Is it the same in your time?”
“I’m sure it’s the same in every time. So you’re having trouble finding witnesses willing to talk.”
“We are.”
“And that’s why we’re here.”
“It is.”
“What happened after Mrs. Burns left?”
“The two men returned and spoke to others here, but our witnesses didn’t overhear what was said. The next day, one of the regular lasses”—his gaze crosses a few at the bar, suggesting he means a situational sex worker—“went by his house with a bottle of stomach bitters. Mrs. Burns ran her off. Created enough of a scene for a neighbor to take an interest, slip into the flat, and check inside the Burnses’ apartment.”
The first time I heard someone here say “flat,” I’d been confused. In modern-day Scotland—like England—that means what I’d call an apartment. In Victorian Edinburgh, a “flat” is a level in a building of units called apartments, which makes more sense. And a “tenement” is simply an apartment building rather than a slum.
I say, “So the neighbor checked in on Burns. How was he?”
“Dead.”
“Ah. And the coroner, uh, police surgeon ruled the cause of death was poison?”
McCreadie gives me a look.
“Right,” I say. “You have Addington, and the only thing he can reliably be counted upon is to tell whether the victim is actually dead.”
“No, he got that wrong once, too. Twice, if you count the time he called Duncan in to remove the body, and there was no one there. We never quite determined whether the ‘corpse’ was stolen or walked away or only existed in Addington’s mind. He did have quite a lot to drink that evening.”
“Wait,” I say. “I know Addington uses Dr. Gray’s funerary parlor to conduct his autopsies, but I haven’t seen the victims of these poisonings there.”
“Because Addington didn’t conduct autopsies.”
I blink at him, forgetting our flirting.
“You do realize, Mallory, that when you give me that look, I feel as if you are judging our police system and finding it wholly inadequate.”
“It… is a work in progress.”
He gives a sharp laugh and taps my hand. “You do not need to be so circumspect. I recognize the inadequacies of our system.”
