I tried the latch. The door was locked, no doubt after the police removed Ellie Sutton’s body. I needed to work quickly if I was to get inside without being seen.
My work with Brodie had provided me with a few new skills that were useful from time to time. After watching him pick a lock, I had insisted that he teach me how it was done.
There had been some argument over that, of course, however, in the end I had persuaded him to show me his methods. I had then practiced on the lock on the door to the office.
“Ye have a natural feel for it,”he had announced at the time, when I successfully picked the lock on the third attempt. Yet, not in a complimentary manner.
“I willna have yego around picking locks unless I’m there, in case there should be any trouble.”
In this instance, he was not here and I needed to get inside the flat.
I made a bend in the tip of one hairpin that I pulled from my hair tucked under the cap, then another in the closed end of the second hairpin so that it formed an angle for a lever.
I then inserted the first one into the lock and used the second one to move that one carefully back and forth as I listened for the telltale click of the inner parts of the lock.
Of course, all of it was dependent on the type of lock, as Brodie had explained it. Those found in most upper-class residences as well as business establishments might be more difficult, or there might even be a second locking mechanism such as a dead bolt. But not here.
I carefully applied a bit of pressure to the hairpin that was the lever and heard a distinctive click as the pin inside clicked back as it would have with a key. I smiled to myself, retrieved the hairpin, and entered the darkened flat.
I closed the door behind me and was immediately seized from the back of my jacket, my cap jarred loose from my head with a muffled curse.
I prepared to defend myself as I caught the vague scent of cinnamon, followed by another curse. And then something muttered in Gaelic, equally offensive by the sound of it.
A ghost, Munro had called him, speaking as one who shared that experience when they were lads in Edinburgh.Hecould hide and no one would ever find him. Or...find him in the most unlikely place.
It seemed that I had found my ‘ghost.’
“Good evening,” I greeted Brodie, which brought another curse. “It is good so see you again.”
I heard a faint click and the flat was suddenly illuminated by the beam of a hand-held light that he rudely flashed in my face.
“What the devil are ye doin’ here?” he demanded.
I pushed the lamp aside. “I might ask you the same question,” I replied and rubbed my scalp where the cap had been so rudely removed along with several more pins and a few strands of hair.
“Isn’t it a bit dangerous for you to be here?” I added.
“And what is this?” He waved the cap at me.
I snatched it back. “Part of the disguise that Templeton provided so that I might go about without being followed.”
“No wart on yer chin?” he commented. There was no mistaking the sarcasm.
He was in a temper, and being particularly peevish with a reminder of a previous disguise I had worn in that first inquiry case.
“I only needed something to get past the constables if I should encounter them.”
“Good God, Mikaela! Have ye no sense?”
“Present company excluded, I have remarkable sense.”
“We made a bargain when we left Edinburgh,” he reminded me. “Ye promised that ye wouldna endanger yerself.”
He did have a convenient memory, edited for the purpose of his own argument.
“I promised that I wouldn’t endanger myself unless it was absolutely necessary,” I corrected him, struggling to keep to a whisper.
“Itisabsolutely necessary. And I will not sit idly by while you’re in danger of being arrested and possibly imprisoned.”
