The Ghosts of Tullybrae House (11 page)

A half hour
later, Emmie still had no excuse for why she needed to back out of being dragged along to Dr. Iain Northcott’s party. Out of time for a last-ditch attempt, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, begrudgingly assessing her dressed-down ensemble. A fitted long-sleeve tee-shirt replaced the blazer and button-up, and she had traded her black slacks for a knee-length corduroy skirt, and brown suede slouch boots.

Her friends on the dig crew had already been to their hotel to change, and had returned in slightly better outfits than those in which they typically worked. It made Emmie feel hugely overdressed in comparison. Still, her attempt earned an appreciative once-over from Dean, followed by a slightly less subtle ogling from Adam.

“For God’s sake, Adam, give it a rest,” Ewan expostulated. Adam’s response was a boyish grin and a few deliberate chomps on his gum.

They piled into the Renault Kangoo with Ewan at the wheel. Emmie said nothing as the others began to chatter excitedly. She was too distracted by an unexpected lightening, almost as if a blanket had been pulled from her body. The Highlander, it seemed, would not be following her to Edinburgh. Or couldn’t, perhaps. She was struck by the sudden clarity of her thoughts, the sharpness with which her mind focussed on things other than him. It was disconcerting, for she hadn’t realized how harnessed her mind had become. Dependent on his proximity, his mood.

The separation from him, though, was also disconcerting. She’d been warm under the blanket. Now that it had been removed, she felt the chill of being alone. Without him.

Him. The Highlander. A man she’d never met and never would meet. Not even a man—a spirit, a presence. A ghost. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to pay attention to her friends, to quell the uncomfortable churn in her belly.

The drive to Edinburgh should have taken more than two hours, but Ewan’s lead foot cut the commute almost in half. Other than five sets of white knuckles, the passengers arrived unscathed.

Historic cities never ceased to amaze Emmie, and Edinburgh was no exception. It was a city of juxtaposition: Its castle, seemingly carved into the crown of the ancient volcanic mountain, loomed over a blend of history and modern life that existed side-by-side. She wondered if, in times of quiet reflection, its inhabitants were as awed by the raw beauty of it as she was.

Ewan took them off the South Bridge road, and down a series of side streets that wound around the collection of buildings comprising the main campus of the university. Fittingly, the School of History, Classics and Archaeology was a stately building of yellow stone dating back to the latter years of the eighteenth century. It was housed in the William Robertson wing of the Old Medical School, and proudly displayed a statue of the aforementioned Robertson himself atop a rearing horse in its courtyard.

Having driven around the front for Emmie’s benefit, Ewan parked the car outside a rear entrance, where the team proceeded to disembark and unload the cardboard boxes with their carefully wrapped finds. There weren’t many. Adam, Dean and Ewan took the lot, leaving Famke, Sophie and Emmie to follow into the building.

“You look very nice tonight, Famke,” Emmie offered.

The tall, svelte Dutch woman accepted the compliment with quiet grace. She wore a tailored, tan-coloured button shirt, and slim-cut jeans. Her light brown hair had been straightened, and hung just below her shoulders.

“Thank you,” she said. “So do you.”

“And what am I—chopped liver?” Sophie put in with mock offense.

“I was getting to you,” Emmie laughed. “I started with Famke first because I already complimented you on your socks.”

“Smooth.” Sophie grinned, pulling the hem of her printed tee-shirt over her denim mini skirt.

Famke tisked. “You’re going to freeze in that tee-shirt.”

“That’s why I’ve got a cardy in the back of the van, isn’t it?—A cardigan, a sweater,” she clarified when Famke gave a confused grimace at the slang term.

Famke responded with something in Dutch which Emmie fancied was a lament over the butchering of the English language by native speakers.

They trailed after the boys down a series of clean, modernized hallways. The interior of the building surprised Emmie, given its historic exterior. Pale wood panelling adorned the white and glass walls; the floors were tiled in slate. Classrooms and computer laboratories were still lit up here and there, housing a handful of dedicated students who were choosing to work later than their peers. Her curious gaze met that of a young man within one small study room, and she felt a thrill of nostalgia as she recalled her own days spent in study halls just like this one.

They proceeded towards a rear staircase, where Famke raced ahead to open the metal door for the guys. Single file, they descended the concrete stairs into a basement that was far more institutional looking than the main floor. Corridors, research laboratories, offices and archive storage rooms tracked outwards from the bottom of the stairs.

“Let’s get these to Receiving,” Ewan ordered. He, Dean and Adam headed down a corridor to the right, while Famke and Sophie proceeded to another room on the left with Emmie in tow. The room, she saw when they unlocked the door and turned on the fluorescent overhead lights, was a workstation of sorts that the team appeared to be using for an office. Waist-high lab-style desks rimmed the walls, their surfaces scattered with computer monitors, paperwork, microscopes and other technological gadgets. In the middle of the room was a stainless steel examining table. Here, too, textbooks and binders full to brimming were stacked precariously on top. The whole room felt like an afterthought, like a place which advertised that great work was done elsewhere.

“Sorry about all this.” Famke fanned a strong, slender hand at the mess. “Our department has just gone through a major inventory. The natural history museum at Oxford U was interested in some of our things from Skara Brae for their Neolithic exhibition, so our department head thought it would be a good idea to inventory everything else at the same time.”

She perched on the edge of a tall metal stool in front of one computer monitor, while Sophie went to another. Flicking three sheets of pink paper off a mouse, she wiggled the black plastic object to wake her computer up, then logged on to check her email.

“You were at Skara Brae?” Emmie put in.

“Well, no,” Famke answered. “We collaborated on the project after more recent excavations. Some of the stuff was sent here for identification and analysis, carbon dating, that kind of thing. We also re-evaluated the artefacts that were carbon dated back in the nineteen seventies. Soph was there briefly.”

“Undergrad year. The Bay of Skaill was unreal,” Sophie confirmed, still glued to her monitor.

“That’s amazing.”

Before she could ask anything more about the famous Scottish site, Adam popped his head around the doorframe.

“You birds just about ready?”

“Gimme a minute,” Sophie said as she typed furiously.

“Cor, Soph. Whoever he is, the bloke can wait.”

“The bloke is Professor Kothari. He wants to know about the black-burnished piece he brought up from storage. So if you don’t mind, mate—”

“Yeah, awright.”

“Hey, Em,” Dean said eagerly, stepping from behind Adam. “While Soph’s doing that, wanna come see something cool?”

“Keep it in your pants, mate. She’s seen one before,” Adam joked.

“Lord give me strength,” Sophie sighed to her monitor. Dean cuffed Adam’s ear.

“Sure, I’ll come,” Emmie said. She made a show of shaking her head at Adam as she passed, but could not keep the stern face for long.

“C’mon.” Dean snatched her hand and led her down the hall.

The way he was holding her hand, and the fact that he was dragging her away from the others, set her on edge. Dean wasn’t trying to make his move, was he? Leading her to a quiet corner to confess something? Until now, none of his overtures had been serious enough for her to worry about. She prayed he hadn’t plucked up the courage to step up his campaign tonight.

Her discomfort increased when he let go of her hand, placed his palm onto the small of her back, and guided her into a darkened room. The moment he flipped the light switch, however, she felt a little silly. As she looked into the space, it was clear that Dean had a very good, very thoughtful reason for taking her away.

On several stainless steel gurneys topped with white linen sheets were laid out the bones of four human skeletons.

Her eyes absorbed the scene with amazement. A sense of overwhelming sadness, mingled with a sense of awe, settled over her. Four human skeletons, four people that had once been alive, that had once had hopes and dreams, thoughts and feelings.

“I thought you’d be interested,” Dean explained, suddenly shy. “You know, being a historian and all.”

“This is absolutely incredible,” she breathed.

He stepped farther into the room, beckoning her to follow.

“This is all for the first year criminal forensics students at UWS and Glasgow Caledonian. They come here on field trips to view the bones.”

“Ah, forensics,” Emmie said, understanding. “Let me guess: There’s something about the bones that will tell you how they all died.”

“I probably should have asked if you’ve taken forensic archaeology before,” he chuckled. “You haven’t seen this kind of thing already, have you?”

“No. Forensic archaeology was one elective which I really wanted to take, but it just didn’t fit into my schedule in undergrad.”

“I’ll give you the condensed curriculum, then.” He inclined his head towards the body in the farthest corner.

“This gentleman, we call him John Parker.”

“You
call
him John Parker?”

“It’s not his real name. At first we called him Parker, but Irene—one of the graduate studies teachers here—her grandson’s name is Parker, and she was creeped out by it. So we made Parker his last name and added John.”

“Why Parker?”

Dean wiggled his eyebrows. “Because he was found beneath a parking lot down in Dorset. See here?” He traced a finger along the bones of the neck. “That there is a clean break between the second and third cervical vertebrae.”

“Not an accident,” Emmie speculated.

“Smart girl. Probably not. A fall likely would have resulted in a fractured break, jagged edges. When we see a clean break like this, it usually indicates one thing.

Emmie stared, mesmerized by the separated vertebrae. “A hanging?”

“A hanging. And in this case, there was a bit more to substantiate the theory. The parking lot they found him under was behind Dorchester Prison. They were repaving after it closed, and the workers inadvertently uncovered hundreds of remains. All of them had the same clean break in about the same location of the vertebrae. The official conclusion is that the site is the long-forgotten mass grave for condemned criminals.”

“And someone just paved over it.” She shook her head, knowing too well the disregard of people for historic places.

“I know, right?” Dean agreed. “But it was first paved back in the nineteen forties. They didn’t think about that kind of stuff as much then.”

Still captivated by the evidence of the hanging, Emmie let herself be guided to the next body. It was a small frame of bones. A child.

“This is Lucy,” he said with surprising tenderness. “Female, between the ages of three and ten.”

“Not exactly a precise identification, is it?” She traced a finger along a tiny arm bone.

“Well, Lucy’s Victorian. Malnutrition being what it was, it’s hard to tell a lot of the time. We think it’s malnutrition for a few reasons.” Carefully, he picked up a collarbone, which was fractured in the middle. He pulled the ends apart to show her the bone’s inner composition. “This is far too porous to be considered a well-nourished child. Also, we think she’s somewhere closer to five because of the way the frontal and parietal bones here in the skull have fused. Generally speaking, that’s too fused to be any younger than two, but not fused enough for her to be in the pre-teen range.”

Emmie nodded thoughtfully, examining the sutures of the skull, and followed Dean to the next body.

“Now this young lady we know. Her name was Mary Vincent, and she, too, was Victorian. Died in eighteen fifty-nine.”

“Is that evidence of disease?” Emmie asked, immediately picking out the scarred skull, sunken nasal cavity and deformed jaw.

“Syphilis,” he confirmed. “The bones make her a dead ringer for a syphilitic prostitute. That, as well as the fact that she was buried in the cemetery at St. Luke’s in London—it’s a famous paupers’ lunatic asylum from the era. Syphilitics went mad by the end of their life, as you probably know.”

She did know. “I went through an Alcatraz phase once. Al Capone is said to have declined in health and mental state there from his syphilis infection. Sad… not about Capone,
specifically
, but you know what I mean. Sad for Mary and her lot.”

“I know. It’s all sad. And what’s even sadder is that Mary was estimated to be about fifteen at the time of death. Now, if you know anything about syphilis, this is an advanced stage we see here. Sufferers of the disease can often go anywhere from ten to twenty years with symptoms coming and going before they’re got in the end. So it’s quite possible that she contracted the disease at the age of at least—”