“I don’t understand.” Edwin moved around the table and sat on the other end of the couch. “That doesn’t sound like something you would do.”
“I bought this after we were talking in the bookshop. Remember our conversation about Burke and Hare?”
Edwin blinked. “Oh. Aye.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Two weeks ago now,” Birk said. “You weren’t there.”
“Birk and I were at the back table and a customer asked if we had any books on the killers,” Edwin said.
“Man, woman, old, young?” I said.
“Woman,” Edwin said.
“Hair, height, description?”
“Hair pulled back. Trim, attractive.” Edwin blinked. “Am I allowed tae say ‘attractive’ still or does that break a rule?”
I nodded that it was all right.
“Not Sophie or Rena,” I said to Edwin. “You remember them?”
“Aye. Not them.”
“Curly or straight hair?” I asked.
“Straight, pulled back like Edwin said,” Birk said. “Why?”
“Any chance you mentioned the scalpels?”
“I didn’t know about them,” Edwin said.
“What scalpels?” Birk asked.
“How long after the conversation in the bookshop did you get the email?” I asked Birk.
“The next day.”
I thought for a long, almost desperate moment. Was I onto something? If I was, it was a foggy something.
“We need to take this skull to the police,” I said. “But we’re going to make one stop along the way.”
It took us a few minutes too long to get out of the house because no one could figure out who should carry the box. Ultimately, we chose Birk. Edwin steered the Citroën back toward downtown. I sat in the backseat and tried to figure out if the person who’d come into the bookshop could have been Lola, and how that might lead us to a killer.
* * *
“Oh my goodness,” Joshua said. “You really think this had something to do with Burke and Hare?”
“I don’t have any idea, but I was thinking about the skull room at the university. Have you received any notices, heard anything new, regarding skulls missing from there?”
“None,” Joshua said. He turned to his computer and typed. “No, nothing new at all. Do you think I should inquire? Maybe someone just hasn’t noticed? I can say I heard about the jawbone that was mentioned in the news. I’ll leave this skull out of it for now.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“All right. I’ll send an inquiry right away. If there are skulls missing from the skull room, I’ll be a hero,” he said.
I couldn’t help but hope that skulls were missing from the skull room.
“What about the people who have access to the skull room?” I said. “There’s a limited amount, right? Artair has a key. Is there a record of who has the keys somewhere?”
“I don’t know how it works. I’ll see if I can find out from the director of my museum. She knows how the university does things,” Joshua said. He pulled out his phone and sent a text but didn’t receive an immediate response. “She’ll respond when she can, or wants to, I suppose. She’s on holiday, so I don’t know.”
“I’m sure the skull room isn’t the only place for skulls,” Edwin said. “It’s a medical school. There might be more skulls there than we could conceive of.”
I remembered the memorial service. I had no idea how many corpses and skulls and skeletons were nearby, but I was sure there were more than I wanted to dwell on.
“Joshua, do you know anything about a missing Burke and Hare body?” I asked.
“You mean a victim whose body was stolen or not found? No, nothing. But who’s to say? Things were so different back then. Not everyone was accounted for like now. There’s a good chance that not all of the victims were found, but the research to confirm that would be daunting, maybe impossible.” He thought a moment. “You do know that Burke’s skeleton is kept under lock and key at the university, don’t you?”
Birk and Edwin nodded, and I said, “You did tell me that, but you don’t know where?”
“It’s a well-kept secret, but … no, it can’t be that,” he said as he looked at the box.
“Joshua, what?”
“No one knows what happened to Hare after he was released, or his body, at least historically. See what I mean? Less accountability.”
We all looked at the box and then at each other.
“No,” Birk said. “That would be impossible.”
“That would be something,” Edwin said.
“I can’t think…” Joshua said.
“But it’s possible, right? I mean, we don’t know for sure,” I said. “Would there be a way to determine if this is William Hare’s skull?”
“DNA, I don’t know. Perhaps,” Joshua said. “Depends on any artifacts and any DNA left on them.”
The notion that there was even a slight chance that we had most of the skull of the killer William Hare was almost too much to grasp. But as exciting and historically significant as this idea was, my hopes for finding Mallory’s killer deflated because of it. How could the two of these mysteries be part of the same thing? But how could they not be? How could all of this be happening at once and not be tied together?
“We probably need to get this to Inspector Pierce,” I said. “They can do the proper procedures to find an IP address and track down whoever sent this to Birk, as well as put an age to the skull. Not to mention match it to the jawbone, maybe try to test for DNA.”
Of course these mysteries were all connected. Someone just had to figure out how.
Joshua escorted us out of the museum. “I’ll let you know if any notices come in, Delaney.”
“Thank you. I really hope we don’t have William Hare’s skull.” I looked at the box in Edwin’s hands.
Joshua smiled. “Oh, I think it would be pretty cool.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Inspector Pierce was intrigued by the rest of the skull (we assumed now that the jaw piece and the rest of the skull did belong together), but he was mostly intrigued by Birk. He asked Edwin
