Dagger Magic

Peregrine gazed down at his wife's earnest face with something approaching wonder. "Julia, are you sure? The kind of enforcement work I get involved in from time to time can often get pretty harrowing."

Even as he spoke, it cost him a pang to think of some of the uglier sights he had seen. But Julia's blue eyes never wavered from his.

"You don't have to tell me all the gory details," she conceded. "But you don't have to shield me completely, either. Our lives are now inextricably intertwined. If each of us doesn't grow with the other, both of us will wind up stunted. Trust me to know my own mind in this, darling, and promise me you'll keep that painting."

Peregrine had never heard Julia speak so seriously before. "I promise," he told her. And sealed it with a fervent kiss.

Chapter Five

FOLLOWING their conversation in the hospital chapel, Adam and McLeod went their separate ways. Although both men were now committed to solving the riddle of Carnage Corridor, McLeod had other cases awaiting his attention back at police headquarters, and Adam still had a belated series of rounds to perform at Jordanburn.

Back at the hospital, however, he found it more difficult than usual to concentrate on the reports being rendered him by the nursing staff. Though one half of his mind remained dutifully attuned to the welfare of his patients and concerns of staff, the other half kept wandering back to the unanswered questions concerning how Malcolm Grant, and all those before him, had met their deaths.

He finally finished his rounds just after four o'clock. Faced with the better part of another hour to update his case notes, he resigned himself to the prospect of having to start home during the Edinburgh rush hour and wrote out a set of fresh orders for the nursing staff before starting back toward his office to finish up. Passing through the hospital foyer, a headline caught his eye at the small news kiosk adjoining the reception area:

CARNAGE CORRIDOR CLAIMS TWO MORE VICTIMS

Catching up short, Adam stepped over to the kiosk and picked up the top copy of the Edinburgh Evening News, skimming over the lead story. A cursory reading revealed nothing of substance that he did not already know from his briefing with McLeod and his stint at the Royal Infirmary. There was, however, a black-and-white photograph taken at the scene of the accident. Without knowing quite what he was looking for, Adam bent to examine it more closely.

Prominent in the foreground was the twisted wreckage of the late model Austin Rover that Grant had been driving at the time of the accident. The attendant caption labelled the car a "commuter's deathtrap." Several spectators hovered slightly out of focus in the background, but as Adam continued to study the photo, his attention kept returning to one of them: a woman's pale figure in the upper left corner of the frame.

He stifled an exclamation, already fishing out pocket change to pay for the paper, for the face, though blurred, was one Adam was not likely to forget in a hurry. He had seen it at the moment of Malcolm Grant's death - the last thing Grant himself had seen before the car crash that eventually cost him his life. He could feel his pulse quicken in dawning excitement as he took his trophy back to his office.

Once seated behind his desk, he spread the newspaper on the desktop in front of him, switched on the desk lamp, and delved into the upper right-hand drawer for a small magnifying glass. Leaning forward slightly, he brought the lens to bear on the suspect corner of the photograph, focusing his attention on the pale-faced figure. The resolution was coarse and grainy, but left him with little doubt that it was, indeed, the same woman. Under magnification, her image seemed slightly detached from the rest of the background, almost as if someone had superimposed a solo photo on top of the crash scene.

Whoever she was, she appeared to be in her mid- to late-twenties. The eyes that stared out of the picture were hollow and piercing, their expression disturbingly intense, as if their owner were searching for someone or something. What, Adam wondered, had impelled her to step out in front of Grant's car? And where had she disappeared to afterwards?

Laying aside his magnifying glass, he reached for the telephone and punched in the number of McLeod's direct line at police headquarters. The inspector's voice answered after three rings.

"No, I've not seen the Evening News," he replied, in response to Adam's initial inquiry. "Why? What's afoot?"

"Well you may ask," Adam said. "If you could manage to lay hands on a copy, there's a photo on the front page that I think you ought to see."