The Missing Duchess (2 page)

Shifting from one foot to the other, he announced with determined regularity that he wanted home. 'I only found her, your worships. I never done nothing.'

Constable Reid drew Faro aside. 'Shall we let him go?'

'I think that would be in order. Get his name and address, though.'

Gratefully, Sandy stammered out the information and bolted from the scene, his hand tightly grasping the shilling that the gentlemen had given him plus an extra penny and instructions to summon a carriage. His tornado-like exit almost swept Dr Cranley, portly and majestic as a ship in full-sail, off balance.

The Police Surgeon's examination was brief: 'Natural causes. Massive heart attack, I'd say. Vagrant, taking shelter, no doubt; although she looks uncommon well-fed,' he added.

As he straightened up, regarding the fetid dark room of death with disgust, the stark contract of men in evening dress surrounding the corpse struck Faro anew.

'What makes you think she was a vagrant?'

Cranley regarded him irritably. He knew Inspector Faro's reputation but he was already late for a supper engagement and intended to be out of this vile hole as speedily as possible. Death he was used to, but he feared for his elegant clothes where every movement produced an acrid cloud of dust.

'Look at her rags. Filthy. Nothing underneath either,' he added primly, hastily adjusting the ragged skirt he had lifted to reveal a bare thigh. 'Fallen on bad times, I expect, usual story. We'll do a complete post-mortem when we get her to the mortuary. Ah, here they are, at last. You've taken your time,' he added impatiently as two constables bearing a stretcher stumbled along the narrow passage.

Reproached for their tardiness, they explained that they had been delayed at Leith by an 'incident'.

Followed in solemn procession by the living, the dead woman was carried out to the police carriage. Under the flickering lamplight Faro tucked one of her limp hands beneath the rough blanket.

His quick glance confirmed Cranley's diagnosis that she had indeed fallen on bad times. And very recently too. The last resort of starving women who possessed such splendid hair was to sell it to the wig-makers. But like her hair, her fingernails were not only clean but well-grown and neatly manicured,, her palms uncalloused.

These were hands that had not seen anything resembling hard work in a very long time. If ever.

Undoubtedly a lady's hands.

Chapter 2

At 9 Sheridan Place - the home Faro shared with his stepson -Dr Vincent Laurie, newly elected treasurer of the local golf club, was wrestling with his predecessor's accounts. He was therefore only mildly interested in his stepfather's encounter with a long-lost cousin, especially since he knew nothing of Godwin's family connection and had nothing but contempt for their neglect of widowed Mary Faro and her young son.

Vince prided himself on being a man of the people and the Godwins belonged to the social system that had branded him illegitimate after his mother, a fifteen-year-old servant, had been seduced and abandoned by a noble guest in the big house where she worked. Even though she had eventually regained respectability through marriage to Jeremy Faro, such scars were burned indelibly into Vince's soul.

'The family's behaviour wasn't Leslie's fault, Vince. He was just a child at the time.'

Then why has it taken him so long to track you down, Stepfather? Answer me that.'

'He's been abroad for years,' said Faro defensively, with an added reason for wishing Vince to think well of his cousin.

'I'm not convinced.'

'You will be when you know him better. I'm sure of that. If you'd been with us last night -'

As he went on to describe the scene in the Wizard's House, Vince paid careful attention. Eyeing his stepfather shrewdly, he said: 'I take it you disagree with Dr Cranley's verdict that death was from natural causes.'

Faro shrugged. 'I'm not sure. But let's just say, this was no beggar-woman.'

'No doubt your "missing persons" will provide a satisfactory explanation.'

On the list Faro consulted in the Central Office the following morning, there was no one who fitted the description of the dead woman in the mortuary.

Dr Cranley stared at him resentfully over the top of his spectacles. Detective Inspector Faro's appearance signalled that the routine the police surgeon endeavoured to keep as smooth and untroubled as was humanly possible could be in imminent danger of severe disruption.

Faro regarded the sheeted figure. 'Any marks of violence?'

'Only a bruised and swollen wrist. She had fallen quite heavily. My findings have confirmed that she died of a massive heart attack.'

'Surely that's unusual in a woman so young,' said Faro. In death, there remained an indefinable look of refinement about that waxen face.

Cranley shrugged. 'Heart failure can happen at any age, Faro. And I would speculate, it is not all that unusual in the case of a protected and pampered middle-class woman who is suddenly subjected to direst poverty.'

Faro sighed, his attention again drawn to clean hair, to delicate hands with long tapering fingers and neatly manicured nails. They worried him.

'What makes you so sure she was middle class?'

Cranley sighed, drew back the sheet. 'Observe the narrowness of her waist, the distorted line of bosom and hips. I would say that she was richly corseted for most of her adult life. You don't get that shape among the poorer classes, Inspector.'

'So what would make this one become a beggar?'

The doctor eyed him pityingly. 'Many things, Inspector. Family scandal, for a start. Bankruptcy. A faithless lover - or a straying husband -'

'I suspect this lady, whatever her station in life, was unmarried.'

'Indeed?'

'Observe the third finger of her left hand. Married women tend to bear marks of a thick wedding ring, the skin it covers is paler due to lack of exposure.'

'Of course, you are probably right.' Cranley smiled thinly. It was a matter of constant irritation to him that Inspector Faro usually was right. 'We will no doubt find that out when her identity is established. Incidentally, she is not virgo intacta, but she has never borne a child. That we do know.'

In the days that followed, Faro went about his routine work at the Central Office praying that there would be no major crisis while Superintendent Mcintosh was away attending a family funeral in Caithness. Sergeant Danny McQuinn, who Faro had learned to rely on, was also absent, seconded to Aberdeen on a murder enquiry.

Rifling through the new reports each day, he noted with relief that the Queen was safely tucked away in Balmoral Castle, absorbed by visitors for the last of the autumn shoot.

There had been a flurry of anxiety when unconfirmed rumour hinted that she might be contemplating a brief private visit to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Even such unpublicised royal one-day visits were calculated to give Edinburgh City Police nightmares, light security measures and extra police duties were only a small part of the expenses involved in the protection of a monarch whose popularity had steadily declined during her long widowhood.

Faro sighed. He hoped Her Majesty would change her mind. She frequently did.

As for the newspapers, they had been having a field day. With no sensational crimes for some time, they were quite overjoyed at any item to raise their sales.

'Body found in Wizard's House. A Third Tragedy. Is Major Weir's ancient curse still active? Does his evil spirit still malevolently guard his ancient abode of magic, seeking to avert the threat which hangs over the future of the historic West Bow?'

For some time, the Edinburgh Improvement Commission had been urging that the West Bow be demolished to make room for more salubrious modern dwellings.

'Especially,' they argued, 'as the evil reputation of Major Weir's house has caused it to remain empty for the most part of two hundred years, and has made even the poorest families shrink from sheltering under its roof.'

However, even when fears of witchcraft and black magic began to disperse in the more benevolent wake of the Age of Reason, and Major Weir's house was regarded with less terror by neighbours, all attempts at finding a tenant with strong enough nerves to inhabit it failed miserably.

Some fifty years earlier, in the 1820s, William Patullo, an old soldier of reprobate and drunken habits, moved in with his wife. They moved out again the next day after a terrifying ordeal in which it seemed that all the powers of hell had been loosed upon them. As they spread the story of their discomfort far and wide, the shades of superstitious terror closed in once more.

In more recent years, the house had served as a gunsmith's shop. The business had failed for not even a shopkeeper could stay for long.

Undeniably, two deaths and an accident had followed the Improvement Commission's decision, but they could hardly be classed as tragedies. The first death could not have come as a surprise. The demolition contractor was a man in his eighties, who breathed his last in his own bed, surrounded by his devoted and weeping family.

Even Detective Inspector Faro would have been hard-pressed to find anything remotely suspicious in such a peaceful end. Especially after a talk with the family physician, a golfing friend of Vince's who had expected his long-ailing patient to expire several years earlier. The funeral over, the eldest son, who had inherited the business, fell on the turnpike stair and broke his leg.

An unfortunate accident but hardly classifiable as 'a second tragedy'. Another death, however - the unidentified corpse of a beggar-woman - breathed new life into the old terrors and superstitions.

The press, hungry for sensational news items, were not unhappy at this resurrection. ('What fearful sight had stopped her heart and brought about this untimely end?') As they dusted down and reprinted once again details of Major Weir's infamous life, Edinburgh citizens shuddered and took to the other side of the road to avoid the menacing shadow cast by the newspaper-designated 'house of death'.

When Faro was handed the Procurator-fiscal's report with the Police Surgeon's usual request for an 'unidentified and unclaimed' corpse, his questions were once again greeted with a certain lack of enthusiasm.

'I can find no evidence of anything other than heart failure,' Dr Cranley told him.

'You are quite satisfied with the post-mortem?'

'If I wasn't, Inspector, then I would hardly be making this request. I regret having to disappoint you,' Dr Cranley added heavily.

'I think "disappoint" is an inappropriate word, doctor.'

Dr Cranley sniffed. 'Come now, Inspector. I realise with few murders on hand at the moment you must regard it as your duty to be on the look-out for anything remotely suspicious -'

'Let me assure you, sir,' Faro interrupted, 'murders are a commodity I could well do without. I don't invent them for my own amusement.'

Cranley smilingly dismissed Faro's protest and indicated the document on his desk. 'Then perhaps you would be so good as to sign the paper, Inspector, so that no more time might be lost.'

As Faro hesitated, Dr Cranley continued, 'I must urge you to be brisk about it. You surely realise more than most the value of this still-fresh corpse for my students. It is rare indeed that we get the chance of such an excellent unmarked specimen. One, in fact, with all the organs in prime condition -'

'Spare me the details, if you please.' Faro shuddered. 'I'll take your word for it,' he added, stretching out his hand for the paper.

The doctor, relieved, nodded happily. 'Then I may take it that you are quite satisfied with our findings?'

Faro wasn't, but he could not think of one reason to justify his unease.

He tried to explain his feelings to Vince over supper that evening. Their meetings at meals were rarer than ever, since Vince held his surgery and consulting hours in the downstairs rooms. Fast acquiring a thriving practice, his leisure hours were increasingly devoted to reducing his handicap on the golf course.

'There are lots of reasons why an unmarried woman -thirtyish, you said - might have run away from a respectable middle-class life, Stepfather.'

'Tell me some of them.'

'An unhappy love affair - maybe hopes of marriage with a suitor over several years that had failed to materialise. Perhaps he married someone else and being jilted affected her mentally.'

Faro was disappointed, having hoped that his stepson would be able to come up with a more original selection of ideas than Dr Cranley had offered.

'A
Bride of Lammermoor
- is that what you have in mind?'

Faro shook his head. 'Such situations belong in Sir Walter Scott's novels, Vince. Surely no sane woman -

'No sane woman, Stepfather - ah, there's the rub,' said Vince triumphantly. 'For whatever the post-mortem revealed about her physical condition, it can tell us nothing of the state of her mind at the time of death.'

'Are you suggesting that what she died of was that condition known to ladies addicted to romantic novelettes as a broken heart?'

'Something like that.' Vince nodded eagerly. 'It can happen, you know. And the reason she was not on the missing persons file is easy. In all probability her wish to escape from the past brought her to Edinburgh from some other town or village.'