Owen nodded eagerly. He felt as if they were discussing mutual friends. "Do you know anything about the woman in the Crippen case?"
"Ethel LeNeve? Smith was her married name. Oh, she died in 1968," Keenan replied, edging away from Owen.
"It's really great to meet somebody who knows all this!" Owen said reverently. "All my friends think I'm crazy. Can we have a drink after the tour and talk some more?"
The Englishman shrugged. "If they haven't called time by then, I might," he said in weary tones suggesting that he didn't care one way or the other. Kevin Keenan didn't usually enjoy discussing crime with amateurs. They were always asking awkward questions about the Yorkshire Ripper, or wanting to know what it was like behind police lines at death scenes. He had a set of memorized answers that enabled him to hold such conversations without actually listening to them, but occasionally even that proved a bit of a strain.
Owen nodded happily and scurried back to tell Cameron and Elizabeth of his good fortune in finding another expert on crime. They shushed him, too, but he took it in good spirits and settled down to enjoy the remainder of the tour, his brain seething with plans to waylay his new friend immediately afterward and to find out just what his crime-related living actually was. Owen experienced a momentary qualm: suppose the stranger was a criminal? Was there a Mafia in Britain? But this anxiety soon passed. Owen was sure he would never be so lucky as to meet anyone that interesting.
Adam Lyal took them down a narrow cobblestone alley, which he said was haunted by the ghost of an old sailor. As he launched into an explanation of the sailor's ill-fated life, a "ghostly" apparition dashed out of the shadows in front of him and lunged at the startled audience, evoking screams from most of the ladies. After a few more menacing gestures
aimed at the loudest screamer, the figure ran back into the shadows of a side street. When the tourists had quieted down, the highwayman smiled. "Of course," he said, "I've never seen the ghost myself."
The party continued down the alley to the Grassmarket— the scene of Adam Lyal's demise, he told them. They clustered around the iron-railed plot of grass containing a circular stone monument, the memorial to all those executed in the square over the years.
"Was Burke executed here?" Owen wanted to know.
Elizabeth tugged at his arm. "Hush, Owen! This is a tour, not Meet the Press!
"I'll show you where he used to live—in Tanner's Close," Adam Lyal said patiently.
He led the way up a steep dark street, his cloak flapping about his legs. A wino, cradling his bottle in a paper sack, was settled for the night in a doorway. The noise of so many footsteps shook him out of his stupor, and he looked up just in time to see the chalk-faced ghoul stride past him. After a few moments of startled silence, the derelict called out, "Have ye no been weel, man?"
Cameron and Denny were still snickering at this unscheduled performance when the tour made its next stop, but the highwayman had the last word: "He was on the tour last night," he announced.
He launched into a description of the mad old woman said to haunt this particular close, when suddenly the confederate appeared again, this time in a woman's dress and wig, making the tourists scream again and running off into the night as before.
By now the group had discerned the pattern of the tour,
so that at each stop, they braced themselves for another fright. Sometimes the accomplice appeared and sometimes he didn't, but the anticipation of his dramatic arrival kept the tension high.
"The ghost is wearing gym shoes!" Denny whispered to Cameron. They had begun to look for the accomplice, to see if they could spot him before he attacked.
"It's a wonderful idea for a tour, isn't it?" Owen said to Elizabeth.
She smiled. "Are you thinking of doing one in America, with all your knowledge of crime?"
Owen shook his head. "American murders are too spread out for a walking tour. And probably too gruesome anyway. Well, I suppose you could do Chicago, but it wouldn't be the same. Mafia executions? Leopold and Loeb killing a little boy? Richard Speck and the eight student nurses? Nobody would pay to see that."
Except possibly you, Elizabeth thought, but aloud she agreed that it wouldn't work as a paying concern.
In the darkest close of all there was not room for the group to form a circle around the guide, so they leaned in clumps against the brick wall of an ancient building, as he paced up and down the cobblestones. "The plague came to Edinburgh, did you know that?" he asked in menacing tones. "It came and went half a dozen times through the Middle Ages, brought from the Continent by . . . rats!"
As he uttered the last word, Adam Lyal's ghostly assistant, his face red-streaked with plague pustules, rounded the corner and drew a squeaking black rat from the folds of his cloak, waving it menacingly at the shrieking tour group. The women in the party shrank back against the building, and Elizabeth found that she had grabbed Cameron's arm without a conscious thought. After prowling up and down the line of cowering tourists, shaking the rat at those who screamed, the assistant seemed to single out the man in the green anorak. Lunging at him with the rat, as if to cause him to be bitten, the accomplice drew close enough to his victim to speak to him, while those nearby tittered nervously, perhaps in relief that they had not been chosen instead.
After a few moments of terror the assistant dropped the still mewling rat at the feet of a hysterical French girl, and ran out of the close. By that time most of the party had already realized that the creature was only a toy, but the tension of the horror-laden tour and the surrounding darkness had done its work on their nerves, and the screams continued.
The spectral highwayman, amused by his audience's reaction to the trick, leaned against an ashcan, waiting for the panic to subside. When the squeals had died down to a thin murmur, he stepped forward to resume the narrative.
"As I was saying, the plague is no stranger to Britain. In 1348 and again in 166S, the disease arrived on British shores, carried in ships along with—"
He got no further before he was interrupted again, this time by the man in the green anorak, who pitched forward onto the pavement at the highwayman's feet.
In respectful silence, the tourists watched him die.
CHAPTER
6
Owen Gilchrist did not enjoy the murder investigation nearly as much as he might have expected. Someone who doted on true crime stories and biographies of former chief inspectors should have welcomed the opportunity to observe police procedure firsthand, but instead of being thrilled with his good fortune, Owen found himself both uncomfortable at the long wait in the chilly room and oddly apprehensive about his own turn at being questioned.
When the police arrived in Fishers Close to take charge of the corpse and to escort the members of the tour in for questioning, Owen was too nervous to pay much attention to what they did. He found later that he could not remember whether the deceased was covered with a blanket or an oilskin groundsheet, whether the surgeon had arrived with the police or not, and just what was said to him by the officer who noted down his name and address.
He did remember blurting out that he had spoken to the
unfortunate victim. And what had they talked about, please? Well, murder, actually. Despite the chill of the night air, Owen had been sweating when he arrived at the police station. He would probably get pneumonia from it, he thought— another victim for the unknown killer.