The Seal King Murders Read online

  The Seal King Murders

  An Inspector Faro Mystery

  ALANNA KNIGHT

  To my granddaughters

  Chloe and Julia Knight, with love

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  FOREWORD

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  About the Author

  By Alanna Knight

  Advertisement

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  There are fourteen published novels and casebooks covering the years 1872 to 1887 of Jeremy Faro’s distinguished career as Chief Inspector in the Edinburgh City Police and personal detective to Her Majesty Queen Victoria at Balmoral.

  At the request of his many readers worldwide, eager to know how his illustrious lifetime achievement began, this is the second casebook of Constable Faro, dated 1861. The first is Murder in Paradise.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Human-eyed, beseeching, curious.

  The seals, staring at the ship as it approached the quayside, took newly appointed Detective Constable Jeremy Faro back, dissolving the mist of ten years when, as a boy of seventeen, he had left the island to join the Edinburgh City Police.

  The seals’ expressions resembled his mother’s, pleading and reproachful when he had returned for brief visits, reminding him that he had deserted her for that city of sin and murder.

  Yes, murder. Casting in his lot with the people who had murdered her beloved husband, Jeremy’s father. A tragic fatal accident involving a runaway cab on the Mound was the verdict but Mary Faro was stubborn. She ‘knew what she knew’ and all the lack of evidence to the contrary in this world would never convince her. Someone – notably the Edinburgh City Police – had deliberately killed Constable Magnus Faro.

  The ship moved slowly, carefully negotiating the harbour entrance where Stromness lay in wait. Smaller, less ancient than his native Kirkwall, with no magnificent cathedral or ruined Earl’s Palace, a scatter of grey roofs and walls spilling down the slope of a granite hill where each house seemed to stand on the edge of the roof below, tight-packed with its neighbours and the houses terraced above. A scene eternally crowned by the swooping shapes of white wings and the shrill cries of seabirds.

  Faro narrowed his eyes against the sun, searching the figures gathered on the quayside awaiting the ship’s arrival for a familiar face among head-shawled women, and men heavily bearded beneath their bonnets. He touched his smooth chin; bare-faced it might make him stand out in a crowd, but this fashion for facial hair inspired by royalty had no appeal for him.

  Was his mother there? He could almost hear her first words. How long was he staying this time? His reply, as always, received with a sigh of resignation, while he contemplated that a week of forced inactivity, a mite overlong for himself, was never long enough for her daily recapitulation of the finer details of his father’s last hours and the sidelong glances that implied that their only son had signed up with the enemy instead of scratching a living from an unforgiving soil or sacrificing his short life dragging fish from a reluctant sea. Such was the traditional fisherman-crofter’s existence since the Vikings beached their dragon-headed ships along the shore.

  This time he must make up some convincing story as the real reason for his visit. The very hint of danger to her offspring would set his mother off on a tangent of recriminations.

  This special mission had come from his old friend, Brandon Macfie, detective superintendent of Edinburgh City Police, retired. At their weekly supper in his house in Nicolson Square, he had leant over in a conspiratorial manner, ‘I have a small assignment for you, lad. Dave Claydon, my late wife’s cousin, was an excise officer in Orkney. A lot younger than Meg, they had naught in common; met him only once when he was taking part in a swimming competition here. Fine swimmer too – he won the cup. But he drowned up there boarding a ship for Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago.’

  Pausing, he regarded Faro as if for comment. When Faro managed to look only mildly interested, Macfie sighed. ‘Don’t you see it, lad? Strange, isn’t it, that a champion swimmer should drown?’

  Faro shook his head. Macfie obviously knew nothing about the wild, fierce seas around Orkney that could seize quite large ships and break them up like matchsticks.

  Macfie frowned. ‘His body has never been recovered.’

  ‘Frequently happens, sir. Those wild seas scatter bodies like spindrift. Often end up in far away Shetland.’

  ‘That so?’ Macfie’s eyes widened, he looked amazed, obviously unconvinced, and stretching out his hand to the sideboard for the port decanter, he dragged over a file of papers which he pushed in Faro’s direction.

  ‘It’s all there. Reports from the Orkney Constabulary and the newspaper. No, no, not now. Read them at your leisure.’ Biting his lip, he went on, ‘Somehow, I’m not satisfied with the results, always had an instinct for this sort of thing. You have it too, lad, and I’d like you to use your observation and deduction to see what you can find out for me. Look into it, discreetly and quite unofficially, of course. Don’t want to upset our lads up there.’

  But Faro knew from his experience that there never was a police investigation, nor ever would be, that did not upset a great many people, the innocent as well as the guilty.

  Macfie was saying, ‘They naturally accepted what seemed obvious to everyone – to everyone except me, that is. Family, you know. A week in Orkney should give you plenty of time to ferret things out that their constabulary might have missed.’

  A fond hope indeed, thought Faro, but perhaps fortuitous, as his last brief communication from his mother was a postcard saying, ‘I have taken a situation for the summer with a family here at Scarthbreck.’

  Faro had smiled wryly. The little cottage in Kirkwall where he had grown up and into which she had moved as a bride seemed no longer adequate to contain the vibrant, active and restless spirit of Mary Faro.

  ‘Capital, lad!’ Macfie beamed at him. ‘Your little holiday couldn’t be better timed.’

  Faro sighed. He was dreading this visit and he wondered why in God’s name he had allowed Macfie to convince Chief Inspector Jackson to give him paid leave? True, it was all for his own good: Macfie was anxious for his protégé’s further chances of promotion, especially as he wasn’t doing too well recovering from his first case, a successful chase and final encounter with the arch-criminal who had plagued Scotland’s police forces for years and had almost cost Constable Faro his life.

  The bullet that had pierced his chest had weakened his lungs and a winter fever had resulted in pneumonia. Macfie watched over him anxious as a mother hen – even Mary Faro would have been impressed. He was all for summoning her from Orkney to nurse her lad, but Faro, even in his fraught condition, would have none of that.

  Macfie, however, was determined; wily too. He had heard rumours aplenty of artefacts going missing from archaeological digs.
It was claimed that priceless items of gold and jewels, a treasure trove en route for Edinburgh, had mysteriously vanished, lost when their carrier (none other than Macfie’s cousin by marriage) had met with an accident and had, apparently, drowned.

  The Orkney Constabulary remained silent on the nature of the artefacts, and vague regarding their proceedings for recovering the drowned man, and this failed to satisfy grieving relatives or the authorities in Edinburgh who, according to Macfie’s theory, were not deeply concerned about the fate of the excise officer, suspecting that it was all part of a sinister plot to cheat the Treasury and retain the artefacts, which had never left Orkney.

  ‘You’re just the man to look into all this, Faro,’ said Macfie. ‘You know your island and your islanders. Make a few enquiries just to set my mind at rest, lad, see your folks and add a decent holiday into the bargain. Do you a world of good – come back a new man,’ he added with an encouraging smile.

  And pointing again to the papers, ‘Dave left a widow, you could start with her.’ With a sorrowful shake of his head, he added mournfully that twenty years younger he would have rushed up to Orkney to investigate the case himself. But alas, years of hard living in the police force and a heavy addiction to rich food and wines had ruined his health. Too old now, he was also crippled with rheumatism.

  Whatever bees Macfie had got in a well-worn bonnet, he appeared even in retirement to still possess a thumb that extended into the affairs of the Edinburgh City Police, and Faro suspected that Chief Inspector Jackson, a mild-mannered man quite unlike his predecessor, Detective Inspector Noble, was a little in awe of the ex-superintendent. And so Macfie continued behind the scenes to manipulate young Constable Faro, pressing the point of his excellent qualities, certain that he had promotion potential and would go far.

  ‘If he doesn’t get himself killed in his enthusiasm, that is,’ was how Jackson put it to colleagues over a pint of ale in the local public house. The guffaws that followed said plainly that they thought this extremely likely. Mrs Jackson, however, was a Shetlander, and instead of rivalry between the islands had a fellow feeling for the constable who she decided must have Shetland blood, his appearance so uncannily akin to her romantic notion of what a handsome young Viking would have looked like.

  As for Jackson, his mild-mannered exterior hid a shrewd mind and even a tendency, regrettable as it was, to see far-reaching suspicions in even the mildest of offences. This weakness had produced a splendid vision of Dave Claydon’s death being more than an accident, perhaps involving drugs, smugglers and other double-dealings. Intrigued by the possibilities, and instead of sending Constable Faro, he fancied going himself, taking the missus and making it a bit of a holiday. There was just one drawback. He was a rotten sailor, sick as a dog even on the village pond to say nothing of a notoriously unpredictable sea crossing.

  To Faro he grinned, repeating Macfie’s words, ‘You’re just the man for the job.’

  As for those missing artefacts, Claydon, a man of few words, had not left any enlightenment regarding their origins. Speculation remained of a treasure far too sophisticated for the Neolithic settlement discovered in 1850 and under recent excavation. Much more likely they were from the Spanish galleon, El Rosario, shipwrecked off the coast way back in 1588, though still the subject of many an islander’s daydreams. Black-haired youths with white skins and fine dark eyes claimed that, if they were not descended from the Viking invaders, then their remote ancestor was some nobleman from that very vessel on the run from the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

  None, however, wished to claim lowly descent from an ordinary, nondescript sailor, a foreign mercenary, or even a lowly galley slave, and as if to breathe a whisper of truth into the Armada legend and keep it alive, the occasional coin did still appear and encouraged experienced divers as well as local boys to try their luck, always in search of that pot of gold.

  When this revived Armada gold fever occasionally erupted in his schooldays, Faro always shook his head. He had no desire to join the divers. An unfortunate episode when cut off by the rising tide – he almost drowned in the underground caves – had put an end to any dalliance with the eager swimmers. Besides which, he did not have a sailor’s constitution.

  ‘Couldn’t swim – an island lad who can’t swim!’ It was ludicrous, a constant source of amusement among his fellow schoolmates. Only the fact that Faro was tall and strong and could use his fists to good effect kept the teasing from slipping into bullying.

  This state of affairs also gave rise to more sinister hints to account for his fear of water. The rumour that his grandmother was or had been a selkie, a seal woman. He would have loved to meet her, disappointed that she had been dead for years, according to what little Faro could glean from his mother.

  He soon learnt that she was not to be discussed. Selkie blood was the island equivalent of a black sheep in a respectable family and Mary Faro clammed up, her lips together in a tight line of disapproval whenever little Jeremy said, ‘Tell me about Granny. Where is she? Is she in heaven?’

  His childish curiosity had met with an angry response. ‘That I doubt. I cannot believe that the Good Lord has taken her to himself.’ And violently shaking off the thought, ‘I don’t know or wish to know anything more about her and even if I did, it would not be for your tender young ears. Decent God-fearing people the Scarths and Faros are – what would we be doing with creatures like that? Sitting down with selkies at our Sunday dinner – the idea of it! What would the neighbours think? We’d never lift our heads again.’

  Curious still, as he grew older, Faro was sensible enough to turn his face away and not waste time on such legends. Like fairy stories, he didn’t believe a word of them, all this nonsense about the seal king rising from the waves at Lammastide and carrying off a human girl to his kingdom beneath the waves, to be his bride for a year and a day before returning her to mortal life again. Such illogical nonsense.

  He’d never heard the like of it, although, as his mother insisted, a decent young girl on the island would never walk on that beach at Lammastide. True, the seals were always busy, restless and barking like angry dogs – no doubt that was how the story had arisen. Their heads bobbing out of the water did have an oddly human appearance.

  Oblivious to argument, stubbornly Faro shook his head. From an early age he had to find an answer to everything, stoutly insisting that every question was bound to have one somewhere. Observation and deduction were already his watchwords.

  And that was what turned him into a detective in the making, according to Macfie. When the old man almost adopted him, Faro, for once wrongly, assumed it was on account of his potential. Instead, it was because Faro reminded the lonely old widower of his only son, who would have been a similar age to the young constable, had he not died tragically some years before.

  Faro had his own theories about the seal king and that once-yearly abduction, and for his grandmother’s legendary arrival on the island, a tiny girl caught in the fishing nets of his grandfather, Hakon Scarth. A likely tale just because it was Lammastide when the seals were particularly active – and noisy.

  Most likely, putting an answer to everything, Faro believed she had been a survivor of the Norwegian ship that had sunk a mile out from the shore in a violent storm. There were only two other survivors, a couple of Norwegian sailors with little or no English, but enough furious head-shaking and protests to convince the authorities that they had never seen that little girl before. Unlucky they were, children on board a ship. And so it had proved.

  Faro had decided, cynically no doubt, that they had their own reasons for denial, especially when considering the fact that the strictly illegal practice of smuggling their women aboard ships was ignored by the authorities. Men needed women for carnal reasons: to look after their bodily needs and to darn their socks on long sea voyages.

  Still, he never ceased to regret not having met his grandmother, selkie or no, a legend that his mother wasn’t in the least proud to accept. A decent r
eligious woman couldn’t lay claim to such a heathen creature.

  As he grew older, questions about his grandmother’s whereabouts became more remote, and any hopeful reminders were fielded sharply aside by his sensible, less excitable father with the brief comment, ‘Don’t you be listening to such things, lad.’ Magnus had a short list of answers: ‘drowned while out fishing’, ‘died giving birth’, ‘ran away with a sailor’, ‘took consumption’.

  All very glib and plausible, seeing as these were the most common causes of sudden death or disappearance from the island. Only the more reliable citizens achieved respectable immortality on the kirkyard’s tombstones.

  Returning to his bleak police lodging that evening, Faro had a quick scan of the reports. What was the Claydon man doing anyway, by getting a boatman to row him out to meet the Leith ship and being picked up beyond the bar?

  The boatman who was interviewed gave vague answers, admitting that passengers and crew who missed ship did this quite frequently, and more often than not were seriously drunk and desperately hiring assistance in the form of a willing boatman for what was an illegal procedure. The conclusion was that Claydon, jumping across, had missed his footing on the ship’s ladder and, falling into rough sea, drowned.

  It was a night of fog and mist, the boatman explained, but he had remained circling the area, shouting and calling, to no avail. Regardless, the ship headed out to sea, the captain firmly ignoring the incident which, had it been reported, might have cost him his command.

  Now, as the ship’s anchor attached the vessel firmly to the quay, its arrival heralded by the flashing wings and shrieking calls of seabirds, Faro set aside his list of questions and composed his expression to meet his mother who would have her apron strings ready starched. Bracing himself for a greeting, he had the words and the smile all ready.

  ‘Just come to see you, Ma.’

  CHAPTER TWO