Contents (57)
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-One
- Fifty-Two
- Fifty-Three
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Also by Sharon Gosling
McCreedy’s smile thinned into an unpleasant line. ‘It’s property that is currently in the hands of the solicitors, Mr. Jones. At the moment it belongs to no one.’
Ezra put his hands on his hips, breath recovered, anger growing. ‘Well, it’s definitely not yours, McCreedy. You should remember that.’
She looked him up and down. ‘You should be careful at this time of night, you know. You could give some poor woman a bad scare, running up on her out of nowhere. You should remember that.’
Ezra set his jaw, gritting his teeth, the subtle racism contained in such a threat all too clear, at least to him.
‘Pack up,’ McCreedy told the surveyor. ‘We’re done for now. It’s too dark anyway.’
Ezra went up and over the hill, walking now, warming down but still riled. As he passed the lighthouse tower and looked down towards the row of houses at the bottom of the slope, he saw that Edie’s print room was still lit, though the blinds were drawn. Seething over his encounter, he opened the gate and went down the path to knock on the door, pausing only for a moment before pushing it open.
‘Edie, I’ve just seen—’
Edie yelped, startled, turning around suddenly from where she had been bent over the Belfast, her hands full of glass shards. Ezra was struck by the acrid smell of burning and saw the pile of singed paper, the candles in disarray, the splash of water on the flagstone floor.
‘What are you doing, sneaking up on me like that?’ Edie demanded, angry.
Ezra stepped into the room. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’d be fine,’ Edie snapped, ‘if you hadn’t just tried to give me a heart attack.’ She dumped her load of smashed glass onto the sheets of newsprint spread out on the workbench and began to fold the paper closed around the shards.
‘Edie,’ Ezra said, softer now, reaching out to touch her arm, a brush of his fingers against her sleeve.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Just—don’t.’
She didn’t turn back to face him. He could see the tension in her shoulders. Her hands were still shaking. He looked back at the mess on the bench behind him, wondering what had happened.
‘Well,’ Ezra said quietly. ‘You know where I am.’
He left her there and pulled the door shut behind him. His last glance back showed her still hunched there, rigid and unhappy, and he wondered what it was about him that brought out all of Edie Strang’s worst instincts.
Thirteen
Any free time Rachel had was now all spent in the hidden room at the top of the tower, trying to pick apart its secrets. She had looked up all the information the bookshop had on camera obscuras, and when she had exhausted that, Rachel coaxed the laptop into life and searched the Internet. This was how she learned that the oldest continuously working example in the world was in a windmill tower in Dumfries. It had first opened in 1836, and had been in constant operation since then.