A small group had gathered just off the street near the alcove below the office, including Mr. Dooley.
“What is it? Has something happened…?” I asked.
It was then Munro appeared.
What was he doing here? And then I saw Mr. Cavendish on the sidewalk just behind him. He had been badly beaten, his face bloodied and the platform he used to get around left in splinters.
I knelt beside him. His lip had been split, his beard caked with blood, and one eye was badly swollen.
“I tried, miss,” he said, looking up at me. “But I couldn’t stop ’em. They was on me afore I knew what had happened, and then they got poor Rupert.”
The hound lay nearby, sprawled on the sidewalk.
Such things were not unusual, I knew. Most usually for robbery. But Mr. Cavendish had no coin, at least none that anyone knew of. He lived on the streets with Rupert, and was well liked by all. Who would harm a crippled man, and a mongrel dog?
Brodie knelt beside me. “Can ye describe the one who did this?”
Mr. Cavendish shook his head. “Sorry, Mr. Brodie.”
“There were two of ‘em. They wore costumes according to what he told me when I first got here,” Munro explained. “Impossible to know who they were. And they used this on the hound.”
A white cloth, smelling sharply of something now very familiar. Ether!
“It was good that ye came along when ye did,” Brodie told him as I adjusted the bandage at Mr. Cavendish’s head that someone had provided.
“It might have been worse.”
“Aye,” Munro replied. “The lass was here… The ones that did this have taken her.”
I was immediately on my feet. “What are you talking about? Who was here?”
“The girl, Lily,” Munro replied.
How? What reason did she have to be there?
But I knew. Curiosity for certain. She had asked me about my work with Brodie. And then there was that stubbornness and daring learned on the streets of Edinburgh.
My sister’s words came back to haunt me. “She reminds me of you…”
“Brodie…?” I couldn’t say anything more for the sudden tightness in my throat.
“I arrived just after,” Munro told us then. “Yer sister was concerned after a conversation they had regardin’ that first inquiry case of yours, and sent me to find her.
“She told Miss Lenore that ye might need her help,” Munro added. “And there’s more…”
He led the way up the stairs to the office while Mr. Dooley tended to Mr. Cavendish.
“This was found, nailed to the door.”
He handed an envelope to Brodie from the desk.
Brodie opened it, took out the contents, and swore.
“What is it?”
He looked over at me. I took the envelope from him and the photograph that had been inside.
I stared at it, then looked up at Brodie.
