A Rip Through Time(61)

When something bites my leg, I look down to see a flea. I leap up, smacking at it, to the delight of the drunk woman. Within an hour, I stop panicking at every flea bite. Within two, I am huddled in the corner, knees drawn up, shivering with cold and disgust and fear that threatens to crystallize into full-blown terror.

When I decided not to run from the first constable, I’d shrugged off any fear of a night spent in prison. I was tough. I could handle it.

I can’t handle it. The twenty-first-century dweller in me is freaking out, like a teenage spring breaker tossed into a foreign prison cell. I’ve been around dirt. I’ve been around rats. Even been around lice and fleas. But this is all that tenfold.

There’s a men’s holding cell right across from ours, and a guy who keeps ranting, and when I make the mistake of looking over, he leers back from a face with a pit for a nose. It takes everything in me not to scream.

Oh, I try to rationalize. This is simply the face of abject poverty. These poor people, encrusted with filth, crawling with pests, their minds and bodies eaten away by alcohol and mental illness and syphilis. It’s tragic, and I should remember that and not be freaking out like that damned spring-break brat, huddled in a corner lest she touch something icky.

But all the rationalization in the world doesn’t help when fleas and lice are crawling over me and I’m trying hard not to look at the man without a nose. Then there are the rats, creeping ever closer, bold and disease-ridden vermin waiting for me to drift off so they can snatch a bite.

I try to focus on other things. I was attacked by the raven killer, the very man we’re searching for. He might also be the twenty-first-century guy who tried to kill me. Focus on that. Fall into the implications of it and spend the night dwelling there instead.

I can’t. I try, and I cannot form a single coherent thought, all my awareness consumed by the horror of my surroundings. I am in jail. I am alone. I don’t even have the damned locket, the very thing I took all these risks for. The officers confiscated the locket along with my knife and leftover coins, and I doubt I will see any of them again. All this, and I still lost my chance to make things right with Isla.

The night is endless. Then morning comes, and I’m thirsty and hungry, and I need to pee but there’s a puddle under the bucket, and I don’t know how to use it without stepping in that. I’m torn between hoping for breakfast—even bread and water—and knowing I won’t dare touch anything that arrives.

While we’re in the basement and I can’t see a window, the activity level tells me it’s well into the morning hours. Footsteps overhead double and then triple. Someone comes to collect a prisoner and mentions the “procurator fiscal’s office” and I mentally pounce on that, remembering it’s what they call the crown prosecutor here. I am overly delighted with myself for recalling that, which proves my grip on reality is slipping.

A constable collects the drunk woman, saying her husband is here. She howls that she doesn’t want to go and tries to cling to me as she’s dragged out. I try to ask if anyone’s notified Dr. Gray, but passing officers don’t even glance my way, as if I’m one of the ranting inmates, screaming nonsense.

Soon I’m envisioning another night in this hellhole. No one is going to contact Gray or McCreadie. Or they have, and Gray has washed his hands of me, like a stray dog abandoned to the shelter.

Then I hear Gray’s footsteps, as preposterous as that sounds. Recognizing footsteps? Like that dog hearing her master? It is ridiculous and revolting, and yet I am instantly on my feet, smoothing out my dress.

Then I see him, and my guts twist.

I’ve come to get a better sense of Gray since I woke in his house. At first, he’d been clipped and cool, either bristling with annoyance or grim with determination. That facade had melted as he relaxed around me, passionately discussing his work or cheerfully examining murder wounds or blissfully digging into a cream pastry. Yet even at his stiffest, it was hard for Gray to fully inhabit the role when he had ink speckles on his cheek, one sock forgotten, or his hair tumbling uncombed over his forehead.

The man who strides into the prison today is different. He is spotless in his attire, as impeccably dressed as McCreadie. Wavy dark hair tamed and styled. Clean-shaven and cold-eyed. The last is the worst. Even when he’s only half present, there’s a glitter in Gray’s dark eyes, a sign that his brain is spinning in twenty directions. Now his gaze is shuttered, and he walks purposefully alongside a young constable.

At a noise, I glance down the hall to see two more officers, both in plain clothes, standing outside their offices, watching. Another clomps down the stairs and hovers there. They’ve come to see the spectacle. Only the spectacle isn’t me. It’s the doctor who cuts up corpses and calls it science, but we all know what it really is, don’t we? Sick bastard.

I see it in their stares, as cold as his own. In the curl of their lips. I want to snarl at them that, someday, men like Gray will change their entire profession. The work of men like him will help the police catch criminals who’d otherwise remain free. It’ll let them convict criminals who’d otherwise walk free. And, just as important, it’ll let them exonerate those who should be free, the innocent fingered by circumstance and released by evidence.

“This her?” grunts the officer leading Gray to my cell.

“It is,” Gray says.

The constable opens the door, and I walk forward with as much dignity as I can. Before I can leave, the constable stops me with a raised hand.