“How do you know that?” he demanded.
What could I tell him? That I ‘saw’ his encounter with the customer? What would he believe? I didn't know what I believed. I only knew what I had seen was as real as if the man who purchased those feathers was there.
“Are ye all right?” Munro asked.
I nodded.
But I wasn’t all right. I could hardly breathe as I looked at the heads displayed on the wall that seemed to stare back at me.
Munro thanked the taxidermist, then slipped his arm underneath mine and we departed. I was grateful for that strength, then for the biting cold air as we stepped out onto the cobbled sidewalk by the street.
“He’s lying,” I managed to say as my teeth began to chatter from the cold. “He sold more than two dozen of the feathers to a customer.”
“Aye, it was obvious he chose not to speak of it. Sir McQuarrie’s office is not far. It will be warm there.”
There was more, but I didn’t speak of it then as we walked to the corner, where he found a driver and we returned to the attorney’s office in Parliament Square.
I satat the carved wood table before the warmth from the hearth in the library in Sir McQuarrie’s office.
The heat from the fire gradually warmed my hands and feet. The cup of hot coffee that Simon brought slowly warmed the rest of me. Almost all of me.
I had no way of knowing what I had experienced at the taxidermy shop any more that I understood the encounter as Munro and I left Jenners Department store. I only knew that it had happened...and had happened before as an old memory returned.
‘It is evil, the things ye see. Yer soul will be cursed unless ye turnaway from it. Ye must turn away and repent...!’
I was four years old at the time, as near as anyone knew, as the nun stood over me, my gown stripped from my back, and the lash fell and fell again until it drew blood. As if she could beat out of me the things I saw and knew that no one else could hear or see. And so I had learned to survive, to hide the things I saw, and ignore the whispers that spoke to me.
The only thing I did understand was that I had to leave or I would die in that place. The things I 'saw' and 'heard,' the ability that had guided and protected me, no longer appeared.
I thought of that now, my fingers curling with the faint tingling that was there. What did it mean after all this time? How did I know the things that came to me now?
Even now, when I closed my eyes, I saw my friend once more. I didn't know what it meant. I only knew that she was there.
“He was lying. He had a customer who purchased at least two or three dozen of them. It was the man who murdered Dory.”
I didn’t expect Munro to believe me, and I saw the doubt in the expression on his face. Still, he didn’t scoff or berate me, nor did he laugh at me and call me a foolish chit.
Instead he watched me with that piercing blue gaze.
“How do ye know this?”
“I know what I saw at the market,” I replied. As for what I had seen at the department store and then the taxidermy shop...
That was difficult to explain. I didn’t even know how to explain it.
“So, are ye a witch then? Or perhaps the Cailleach?”
I had heard of the goddess that some believed in from the old ways. A hag was a more accurate description, used to frighten small children. But not all of them.
“If I was, I would have turned ye into the toad that ye are sometimes!”
“A toad?” he asked, with more than a little amusement.
Not that I expected him to believe me.I didn’t know if I believed it.
“I know wot I saw!” I argued. “The same as I saw...”
“Wot else did ye see lass?”
