By the time January 1st had rolled around, and the New Years crowds were dispersing, over 24 students had been arrested, detained and questioned. Another 30 had slipped through the fingers of the police and five others had disappeared only to reappear days later, muttering about a detective before collapsing from exhaustion and pain.
Constable Lennox could do nothing about the actions or the disappearance of the detective himself. Not while the students would roll in and out, and without Lennox personally overseeing the work of his colleagues and employees, even more would never even be investigated.
It was as the detective had said, ‘“Even if they aren’t aware of it, your men and the public are on the side of the kidnapper. Not my dear McKinley.”
And though his actions were unlawful, and Lennox could never condone them, as a family man himself, he couldn’t condemn the detective either.
“We’ve found Cairn sir,” a young constable popped his head into the room. “Caught him at a family home near the isles.”
“And?”
“We haven’t been able to detain him without proper evidence.”
“Not even for questioning?”
The constable shrugged. The conversation piece ended there and already the constable had stayed for a beat too long.
“Sir.”
“Yes?”
The young constable shifted awkwardly. He placed a hand through his short blonde hair. “Why do we not declare this a cold case? It was a young lady, perhaps she was just scared and ran away.”
Lennox sighed. “Because the detective is an old friend of this department, that and they are easily able to dig up information about us that should never see the light of day. Beside, this is a McKinley we are talking about. They were never one to run. Scared? Sure. Running away from what they deem ‘justice?’ Never.”
“But sir, is this even justice? Three women enter a university that by tradition have never accepted women, and now they want to push for anti-” He hesitated in continuing, almost like he feared that the detective was somehow listening. “They want to change tradition and then one of them goes missing. Whose to say that something actually happened to her?”
The grandfather clock that had been sitting right in front of the young constable’s foot, had tipped over and slammed down with all its weight without any prompting. The constable yelped and tried to push it off and it wasn’t until Lennox had lunged forward to help him that it finally reached the floor.
“How peculiar.” Lennox stated tentatively. “20 years and that has never moved by it’s lonesome. Take this as a warning.”
The young constable stumbled out of the room and to the nearest hospital.
How peculiar it was indeed. A young women, Annette McKinley spreads fliers using an address book, leaves at a certain time, returns and then disappears within a phonebooth. A phonebooth which had not been working. Lennox looked at the notes on his desk, then straightened up. The librarian of which the detective had spoken to was paraphrasing, most likely left unintimidated by the eccentric inspector and unaware that he was under official investigation.
“I’m leaving for the library.” He pulled his jacket over his shoulders. “Find the detective.”
The process of questioning was long, and methodical, and for good reason. Witnesses always had to be exact in their statements. Each word was intentional, an interpretation and good police officers made sure to never purposefully suggest a different story, unless there was one to contradict the statement given.
However, the detective was not trained in the police force, and the librarian was alone that night. It was by sheer luck that Constable Lennox was well acquainted with the librarian himself.
“Hello Ewan.” Lennox beckoned the door the moment the librarian opened it. His eyes were drawn to a new time piece, a pocket watch, dangling from his belt loops.
Ewan pushed his glasses up his nose. “Oh, I thought you were the other one coming back for me.” He laughed nervously, then let Lennox in without hesitation.
“I wanted to question you properly, not by some juvenile impulsive detective, but myself.”
“Of course.” Ewan led him further into his study. He was shaken, paling more by the minute.
“Why are you so nervous?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Cut it.” Lennox leaned forward, repositioning the light to shine in Ewan’s face. “Carefully now, tell me everything that you remember from the night Ms. McKinley went missing.”
The librarian swallowed, despite the distance made between the two of them, he still scooted back in his chair. Then he cleared his throat. “Well, I remember, I remember that she came in around 11:29. Asked for the phone book, then asked for the address book when I could not provide the former. When I told her I could not provide the latter, she took to bribing me. Over 40 quid, I thought she must be a rich lass but I took the bribe.”
40 quid was indeed impressive. Though, not enough to pay for a new, custom made, timepiece.
“She came back around twelve, she said she was going to go home and I offered to walk her.”
“Where?”
“Home.”
“No, where did you offer to walk her home? Inside the library, or outside the library?”
“Inside.” His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “What does it matter.”
“Continue,” Lennox said without considering the second remark.
“I watched her walk down the street when I decided to return the reference book, I heard the lass scream. When I came back, I found the door left ajar.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Because that was not the story recounted to me by the detective.”
“People scream all the time in Edinburgh, and I can’t be expected to think straight with the detective of all people, breathing down my neck.”
“You didn’t think that someone was to-”
“I didn’t know the story at the time.” Ewan said firmly, “Believe me when I say that if I knew the whole story, I would not have-” his eyes bulged and he paled just a bit. Lennox had caught him and he knew it. “There was a young man that came not too long after,” He admitted. “He asked for directions to the nearest station, and whether or not I had wire cutters, you see, he’d lost his own after he’d been attacked.”
“Or maybe after he had attacked,” the detective blocked the light coming from the front door. He marched forward and threw a pair of golden shears on the table, stained red on the blades. “Good work Chief, I was still faster. Cairn paid a visit to every police station call box and cut the cords beforehand, trailing Annette. I checked the first night of the case and I was right, the intervals between each call was the same as the time it took to walk there. Then I traced Annette’s footsteps to the last apartment she would have visited, and finally, around the time and place you said Cairn would have arrived from, I found these. He’d been busy in making sure that Annette couldn’t call for help.
“Wee lass was smart, wasn’t she? Maybe she didn’t want the protests to be reported, eh? Maybe she was the one who took the shears.”
“Then why would she try and call? Why call at all? This was a premeditated decision, and Annette was smart enough to see through it.”
“But it doesn’t make sense, I saw Annette after the young man came. She was fine then.”
“She had disarmed him,” the detective concluded. “But it wasn’t enough, Cairn is a rich man, he could buy wire cutters easier than anyone else. What’s more is that she probably caught on she was being followed, decided she could call the police since the library would’ve been the last stop on her list and therefore the box outside of the library would have been left unaffected. What she didn’t know was that he’d already cut the box, it was bait.”
“That’s baseless,” Ewan argued. “What is the accusation here?”
“Not about you, Ewan.”
“What did Cairn do? If you’re saying that he killed that young lass, where is the body?”
The detective and the constable shared a gaze. There was one place that a person could hide a body with ease.
January 2nd, Cairn had been detained by Irish police under investigation of homicide. Protests over his freedom ran rampant in the streets and the detective was waiting upon a call from Chief constable Lennox from the safety of his own flat.
Truthfully, not much can be said about the detective’s time in his flat. They know he drank about an hour before being found. That he sat in his chair, papers from friends of Cairn piled high on his desk to exonerate him. Other letters about his daughter’s tuition.
He gave the phone great consideration.
There were two calls that he was expecting. One from Annette, and the other from the chief.
The one question that no one had ever asked the entire investigation was just who had made the calls? If it was Lennox who called, then it couldn’t have possibly been McKinley who’d been making the calls. And if it was McKinley, just where was she really?
A trill curl of his phone and he received it immediately.
He breathed, harshly. “Hello?”
“Detective McKinley?”
“That’s me.”
The voice on the other line shuffled. Something like running water in the background obscured the sound of their voice.
“Dad?”
Detective placed his hand over his mouth. “Annette?”
“I-di-I did some-” her voice cut out, it was significantly more distorted than the first call that he’d received. “I did the right thing.”
“I know.” He said calmly. “Where are you?”
“Cairn. It- Cairn, Dad.”
“I know.” He leaned forward, head placed in his hands. “Where are you?”
The phone clicked. He turned to stare at the ear piece, breath heavy in his chest. Then two minutes later, it rang again.
“Detective?”
“What did you find?”
Chief Lennox hesitated. “Alisdair, I’m…I’m so sorry. We’ll bring her to justice, I swear, we just need you to sign on as a witness. The facts are all there, but, no-”
Detective placed the phone on the receiver. He pulled the first letter off of the stack, labeled “To the Family of Annette McKinley.” With a neat red lettering beneath his address that read “urgent.” the contents of the letter itself was a request to talk about McKinley’s tuition and the potential for her to officially leave the school.
The phone rang again, and on the off chance that it was Annette, the detective picked it up again. “Annette?”
“Detective, please.” The detective fixed a box with a loud resonance to the speaker as he inspected the large window that was raised above his desk. “I know how this must feel, we just need you for the trial.”
“I know. I’ll do it,” he said with finality. A shadow passed by the window, just as the detective had thought it would. “It was Cairn. She admitted it.”
“No, detective,” Lennox sighed through the speaker, “he was out of the country when we found her. If she was making those phone calls, and we have multiple stations to confirm it then that means she must have died after those calls.”
“We can’t prove it was her.”
“She said her last name, it sounded like her, did it not?”
The detective hesitated before responding. He looked between the letters from Cairn’s friends and the letter about Annette’s tuition, and the decision was made clear. “She called me before you called me. And I mean, right before. She told it was Cairn.”
“…What?”
“I know how it sounds, but it’s true. I heard it, we can prove it, if we keep a phone in the courtroom and wait, then we’ll know for sure. That it’s her, that she could contact us that…” He paused at the sound of shuffling outside his window. It went from the glass panes, to the alley at his right wall then finally it was too far for him to hear.
“Detective?”
“Hold on.”
Silence. The night seemed less innocent now that he knew Annette was no longer in it. He put the phone back to his ear. “I don’t think I’m alone.”
“What?!”
Glass shattered in the distance, his front window and he was sure of it. Detective grabbed his cricket bat from his desk, it’s weight shifting in the phones receiver. What happened next was nothing Lennox could describe from the other side of he phone.
There was a tousle, that was for sure and then a bang followed by something heavy dropping to the floor. The initial sound had had been enough to split Lennox’ eardrum, but it was the second point of impact that he sent men to the detective’s house.
“Detective?”
He heard a tumbling sound from the other side of the phone.
“Detective, what happened?”
1, 2, 3. Clicks, like the phone had been hung up. Lennox looked out the booth towards his men and Annette McKinley, who was laying in the same dress she was attacked in.
“Dad?” Lennox flinched, it wasn’t the detective and though the voice wasn’t clear, he knew for sue who it would have been.
According to the files of the Edinburgh archives, the case of Detective Alasdair McKinely began and ended on January 2nd of 1896 with an open and shut case regarding a breaking and entering on Baker’s street. However, recent research uncovered statements that it traced back to December 12th, over the report of a missing person who has now been identified as his daughter, Annette McKinley.
Abbey and Pekrul had, as consequence for their part in the protests, been removed from Edinburgh University. Pekrul, unfortunately, was never to return to the collegiate levels and quickly left the country.
Without the testimony of the detective, any charges towards Cairn were dismissed by the court and he transferred to Oxford University the following semester. Detective McKinley’s attacker was arrested immediately and confessed just as quickly.
Thus far, there has been no answer as to who had called St. Monica’s station on December 12th.