The police arrived quickly. Tom, Elias, and Aggie did too. Tom and Elias hadn’t checked their phones for a while. They’d both missed my texts. They answered my calls now, though they hadn’t recognized the number. I was glad everyone’s intuition was back in working order. Tom might never let me out of his sight again.
A paramedic attended to Shelagh, who did have a sprained ankle—as she said, she’d received it the day Jack shoved her into her secret room in her library. Neither of them had had any idea that Edwin and I were at the front door. Jack had put her in the secret room and gagged her before he made the library look as if an abducation and assault had taken place inside it. He was going to call the police himself, but when he spied Edwin and me in the back, he had to redirect. He hit himself in his head and propelled himself out for us to “rescue.”
Still, that part of his plan had mostly worked. It was after Tricia picked him up from the hospital that they went back to Shelagh’s, finding her still gagged and tied in the room. They gave her water and some food before transporting her to the apartment.
The blood on the doorframe was fake blood, from a costume store. The police hadn’t shared that with the public, but of course they’d figured it out quickly. I wished Inspector Winters had told me, but he couldn’t share that much with a civilian, even one who’d become a friend. According to Shelagh, Jack was shocked that I’d neglected to tell the police about the secret room. He’d thought he was done for. But I had forgotten about it, and I might never forgive myself.
Findlay and Winston did now live over by Holyrood Palace. They’d been there a few months. Hamlet had come upon an old address; the same one where Jolie had thought her long-ago ex still lived. My gut was right about it being a little weird that Jack mentioned that the men lived over by Holyrood, but I couldn’t have understood why my intuition was trying to get my attention.
Winston and Findlay had been nothing but sober and cooperative whenever they talked to the police, according to Inspector Winters. I wondered if the drinking issue I’d heard about was really a problem or just another figment of Shelagh’s imagination.
We were in Inspector Winters’s station now, all of us, in a common room big enough to hold a crowd but private enough to allow the police to question us without unwelcome ears listening. I’d never been in this part of the station, but I didn’t point that out to anyone. I did wonder how much more there was to see.
Inspector Winters and I had already talked a long time; I was grateful that he tried to answer some of the questions I still had. After Jack and Tricia were arrested, officers had gone over to speak to Darcy. Yes, she’d seen what she thought was her brother taking money from the event at Birk’s stables. Yes, she’d told her father—and clammed up when he and Mort had come upon her at the event. She was afraid they were about to ask her if her brother was a thief. The police were one hundred percent sure Darcy didn’t know that her brother was the New Monster or the person who’d killed their father. Inspector Winters learned that it had been Darcy and Jack in Ritchie John’s flat the day Mort overheard angry voices. Darcy was angry that Jack had caused their father to quit his job, and she wanted her brother to just return the money, but he told her he had other plans, that it was all going to be okay.
Jack had told his sister he was leaving town for a bit, told the police when they’d tracked him down on his phone that he wasn’t in town. The police had known him as Jacques. They would have figured out eventually that they were the same man, but they hadn’t yet.
When we’d witnessed Darcy embracing a man outside her Roost, the weather had been too much in our way for us to know it was Jack, having returned to take care of Darcy, or that’s what he told her at the time. The betrayal she must have felt hurt my heart.
None of them had known the money had been returned. And no one was admitting to doing so. It was being assumed that Ritchie had done it, but that didn’t ring so true to me. When Inspector Winters told me that part, I’d said, “If Ritchie returned the money, why would he still think Jack was up to something? Why would he follow him?”
Inspector Winters shrugged. “We will never know, I’m afraid.”
I looked at Shelagh over my mug of hot chocolate. We were both wrapped in blankets and had been attended to with cocoa and cookies. Tom sat on one side of me, and Elias and Aggie were on the other, in between me and Shelagh.
“Shelagh,” I said. “The next-to-last clue. The Jekyll and Hyde that wasn’t valuable. That came from The Cracked Spine, didn’t it?”
“Aye, Delaney, it did.” Shelagh smiled. “Louis bought it a few months ago. It was, in fact, that book that gave me the initial spark for the hunt. Before I thought about who to include, long before Jack and Tricia.”
Shelagh was fine. My hair was wild and frizzy; I looked like the one who’d been held captive for several days. Shelagh’s hair had been smoothed back at some point. Her sprained ankle was propped up on a chair as ice was being applied. Though her official statement had been taken, she continued to tell the story to anyone who wanted to hear it; many officers seemed interested.
Again, she began to explain what had happened, how Jack had first approached her. Tricia had joined him after Shelagh told him about the treasure hunt. Shelagh then put the hunt in motion quickly, inviting me and Birk before Jack and Tricia could do much more than go along with it. In a way, it was brilliant, in other ways it was stupid and poorly thought out on Shelagh’s part.
Jack and Tricia had both been arrested only moments after I’d made the calls with the drug dealer’s phone. No one had asked me about the phone I’d used. I was glad; I would never tell on Shelagh’s and my unexpected angels.
Inspector Winters also told me that the only reason Tricia stopped by Tom’s pub was because she thought we’d seen her with the Monster, and she just wanted us to think she happened to be in the area. In fact, we’d only seen the flap of a coat. She’d confessed to being with him near The Cracked Spine too, when I’d joined Birk in his car and thought I’d heard a growl. Apparently, Tom was correct, Jack and Tricia were following me, in a way, at least when they weren’t with Shelagh. Inspector Winters told me that Jack and Tricia were pretty sure I was either onto them or about to be. They were trying to divert my “nosiness.” It almost worked because I’d almost played right into their hands.
Tricia wasn’t a librarian anywhere, but she had gone to Firrhill High School. A quick call to the school would have exposed her lie, but I didn’t even think about making such a call. I wondered why she didn’t just come along with Birk and me on the hunt if she wanted to keep an eye on me, but she truly was spending a lot of her time watching Shelagh; maybe going with us wouldn’t have fit with her other duties.
Her being the one to bring up Shelagh’s past during the first meeting at Deacon Brodie’s made much more sense now. She thought she was helping Jack set things up.
After he’d forced me into the flat, Jack had gone back to Shelagh’s house to give Winston the keys. That key ring opened many doors in Shelagh’s world, including all the cabinets inside the stable—cabinets that held grooming supplies, medications, even feed. Initially Jack had told Winston to take some time off, that he’d take care of the horses. It was just another way to try to take control of Shelagh’s life, but taking care of horses is a lot of work, much more than Jack had bargained for. He was ready to give the duty and the keys back to Winston—thankfully, we’d had those moments to escape.
Of course, Jack and Tricia were in big trouble. Jack had murdered Ritchie, and that was by far the worst of their crimes. But they’d committed many other offenses too and had almost gotten away with them.
“What was Jack going to do with you?” Aggie asked Shelagh.
I didn’t think Shelagh remembered Aggie yet, but I’d eventually remind her of their past if Aggie didn’t.
“I don’t know. I really don’t think he wanted to hurt me, or Delaney—and he wouldn’t have grabbed Delaney if she hadn’t gotten off the bus. I think he was trying to figure out what to do next and I’m afraid his choices would have all led to more murder.”
“As I think back to the first meeting in Deacon Brodie’s pub, I realize I mistook your shared smile with Jack as loving, friendly. Now, with what I know, you were icy with each other,” I said.
“He wasn’t happy about the turn of events, and he thought I’d gotten his father there. I hadn’t. I wasn’t responsible for that part at all. Ritchie was there of his own accord, wanting to let his son know he knew he was up to something.”
“Shelagh!” Louis came through the common room’s doors. Brigid followed close behind.
Louis hurried to Shelagh, but Brigid stayed by the doorway. She nodded for me to join her.
No one seemed to notice or care that I stood and moved away from the crowd.
“You okay?” Brigid asked.
“I am. It’s quite a story. I’ll share it all with you.” It was the least I could do.
“I think I know most of it by now, but thank you,” she said doubtfully as she looked toward Shelagh and Louis.
“What?”
“Have you seen the picture from all those years ago? The one that got Shelagh in trouble?”
“No. Why?”
“Want to?”
“Of course.”
She reached into her pocket.
As she retrieved a photocopy of the picture from her pocket, another piece of paper came out too and floated to the ground. She handed me the copy of the picture, and then she reached to the ground for the other paper. She kept it folded, her attention on me as if waiting for a reaction.
I inspected the picture. It was much more disturbing than I could have imagined. Oliver McCabe’s body was facedown in front of the museum. I would have recognized those stairs anywhere.
Surrounding him was a crowd of people.
“Is this Shelagh?” I pointed at a smallish woman in a shabby coat and hat.
“Aye.”
“I can’t see her face well, but she seems … shocked.”
“Aye. Keep looking.”
My eyes scanned the rest of the people in the crowd. At first I didn’t see anything, but a second time over, I did.
Behind Shelagh a bit, hunched over with a dirty face and a terrifying expression was someone else I was pretty sure I recognized. He’d been bald even when he was younger.
“Louis?” I whispered to her.
“I can’t get confirmation, but I’m working on it. Look at him. Look how he’s dressed, the evil in his eyes.”
I looked again. Everything she said was true.
Together we looked toward Shelagh and Louis. They were speaking to each other, holding each other’s hands.
“You think he killed Ollie?” I said, thinking about the word Birk had used when he mentioned his conversation with Louis after Shelagh and he had broken up. Vitriol.
“I don’t know, but I’m going to try to find out.”
“Back then he worked for Shelagh’s family but the connection might not have been made.”
“Aye.” Brigid opened the piece of paper that had fallen to the ground. “It’s the potion he gave us at the museum.”
I glanced at the paper, but there was more than the potion on the page, there were other words along the bottom.
“What else does it say?” I asked as Brigid read aloud.
“‘Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of the day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.’”
She looked at me. “What in the heck?”
“It’s Dr. Jekyll,” I said. “From his final statement in the story.”
They were the words, via a bookish voice, that he’d spoken to me inside Louis’s basement. I rubbed at the hair that had risen on my arm.
“Aye, it’s creepy,” Brigid said.
She had no idea.
“Come with me,” I said.
Brigid followed me back to the crowd.
When there was a lull in all the conversations, I said, “Louis, you did see Jack take the money from Birk’s event, didn’t you? You’re the one who returned it the next day.”
At first he was going to deny it, but even he knew it was time to be honest; well, about most things.
“Aye, lass, it seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Anonymously?” Inspector Winters interjected.
“Aye. At the time, I didn’t know what trouble the lad would bring, couldn’t have known what he would eventually do. I thought he must have needed the money. I didn’t think much about it. Just slipped the money back into the office at the stables the next day. No one saw me.”
“You are the best man on the planet,” Shelagh said to him as she took his hand again. “The absolute best. You always save the day.”
Both sides of me were in dead earnest.
I heard the good doctor’s voice as clearly as if he really were in the room. I looked at Louis.
Maybe he was.
Shelagh turned to me. “You found the book?”
I pulled myself back to the moment. “Yes. Birk, Brigid, and I did. At The Banshee Labyrinth.”
“It’s quite the place, isn’t it?”
“It is, and considering the legend associated with it, we should have probably tried there first,” I said.
Shelagh shrugged. “You had to follow the clues.”
As Shelagh turned back to Louis and everyone fell back into conversations, Elias moved in between me and Tom.
“Ye ken, people do forget that Jekyll and Hyde were the same person. It’s my humble opinion that, ultimately, Hyde was just an excuse for Jekyll tae behave badly without any consequence. It wasnae two different creatures—it was one.”
I looked at Louis, then lowered my voice to match Elias’s. “Are you saying we aren’t getting the full story?”
Elias thought a moment before he answered. “Lass, I dinnae think we will ever get the full story.”
“Aye, ye have a point,” Tom said.
“Yes.”
Ritchie John’s killer had been caught and arrested, Shelagh’s ankle would heal. The New Monster was gone. Or so we all hoped. I agreed with Elias, that we never really knew everyone’s full story. The best we could hope for was that all the monsters were gone for good, but that didn’t mean we shouldn’t stay aware.
We’d all be more careful now, at least for a little while. I looked at my husband and hoped with every fiber of my being there wasn’t a Mr. Hyde in there somewhere. I was pretty sure there wasn’t.
But what about me? Though I’d named the side of the bookshop with the warehouse the dark side because of the lighting, there was still a connotation there. No, we never did know the whole story, and bad usually did come right along with the good.
I squeezed Tom’s hand again, and he squeezed back, smiling at me, his cobalt eyes telling me how much he loved me, how worried he’d been.
I leaned close to his ear and said, “Let’s always be the Jekylls to each other’s Hydes. Or something like that.”
Tom smiled and winked. “Aye, lass, I’ll drink to that.”
We were going to be just fine.