The Missing Duchess Read online

  '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.'

  'It doesn't explain why a woman gently bred should feel obliged to change into a filthy beggar's gown. And what happened to her middle-class dress and middle-class undergarments?'

  'The answer is really simple, Stepfather. No doubt she had to sell them for food and lodging. Hunger can do incredible things to even the most fastidious.'

  'This woman wasn't half-starved. I have Dr Cranley's word for that and the evidence of my own eyes.'

  Vince shrugged. 'Perhaps she wished to shed her identity with the clothes.'

  Faro looked at him. 'You are suggesting the utter destruction of self, of the woman she had been.'

  'Something like that. There is another possibility. That whoever found her decided that it was a shame to waste good c
lothes when they could be sold.'

  Faro thought of Sandy. 'I don't think the lad would have that much ingenuity. He seemed quite terrified to go near the body.'

  Vince sighed. 'I should stop worrying about it, if I were you, Stepfather. Vagrants are ten a penny and every month some unfortunate falls to the students' dissecting knives. After all, we have to be practical about it. And once dead, the fresher the bodies the better for our purposes.'

  'You make it sound like a flesher's shop,' Faro said accusingly.

  'And so it is.' Vince eyed him candidly. 'All in the interests of medical science. Remember that one dead body dissected may lead to a hundred - perhaps a thousand - live ones being saved from the ravages of disease.'

  Then, almost eager to change the subject, for he know only too well what his stepfather was like once he got a bee in his bonnet, namely, an unidentified corpse in the police mortuary, Vince continued: 'But you wanted to ask me something about this new-found cousin.'

  'I have invited him to dinner on Sunday. You will have your chance then to form your own impressions.'

  Chapter 3

  At their first meeting, when Faro had set down Leslie Godwin at the somewhat bleak lodging in the Lawnmarket, he had found himself thinking of his own comfortable house in Sheridan Place, run so smoothly by their housekeeper Mrs Brook, that model of efficiency. Guiltily, he had remembered the empty rooms upstairs and almost involuntarily this space had been filled with a satisfying picture of his cousin in temporary residence.

  As the days had passed the idea grew in his mind. Faro had few relatives and Leslie was quite a find. A second successful meeting when he came to dinner and was very impressed by his surroundings confirmed that the two men had much in common.

  Both had been subjected to danger from an early age, Leslie to wars, Faro to violent crime. Both knew how to deal with the unexpected, the art of survival perhaps an inheritance down the generations from that distant Viking ancestor.

  Faro noticed with delight when Leslie dined with them that Sunday how Vince's air of reserve fast dissolved as the evening progressed and the talk veered from Leslie's recent progress as guest in the homes of Scottish nobility to his more exciting tales from the battlefield. Of how, confessing to the sketchiest of medical knowledge, acquired out of necessity, Godwin had used his own ingenuity and common sense to keep a seriously wounded prisoner alive until help arrived.

  Faro, listening to the two men swapping medical experiences, decided that perhaps Godwin, who talked so cynically about taking enemy lives, was being excessively modest about those he had also saved.

  The fact that Vince too was impressed by this relative reinforced the proposal Faro had in mind. He now felt certain that his stepson would approve of Godwin sharing their house during his short stay in Edinburgh.

  Vince's reaction was exactly what he had hoped for.

  'A capital idea, Stepfather. Let's ask him tomorrow night.'

  Godwin, returning to his lodging the following evening, was clearly puzzled but pleasantly surprised to find the two of them waiting for him.

  Faro had to put their proposal to him then and there, guessing by his cousin's nervous glances towards the window of his apartment as they talked that he was too embarrassed to invite them inside.

  'My dear fellows. I'm grateful - touched even - by your kindness.' He shook his head. 'But I must decline. I am somewhat set in my ways, I've lived alone and lived rough, too long. It's no use trying to civilise me. I come and go and sleep and wake all hours of the day and night. I couldn't put you and your excellent Mrs Brook to all that inconvenience. I'm much better off with my Sergeant Batey, he's served me faithfully for umpteen years and he's used to my ways.'

  'He could come too. We have plenty of room in the attics.'

  Godwin chuckled. 'You haven't met him yet. I guarantee he's as eccentric as his master, which suits us both well. He'd drive Mrs Brook - and you - mad. No - no - I couldn't think of inflicting us both on you.'

  'We might persuade him yet,' said Vince as they walked home. 'Incidentally, we're invited to Aberlethie for the weekend. Terence and Sara are having a few guests.'

  The weekend house party was popular among Edinburgh's rich and fashionable merchant class - those with mansions grand enough and gardens magnificent enough to allow gratifying illusions of rubbing shoulders with the aristocracy. And this was the society, Faro thought cynically, that Vince, self-declared man of the people, now moved in.

  Sir Terence Lethie was one of his stepson's new golfing friends, and the proximity of a course to the castle suggested to Faro that he might have to make his own amusement.

  Faro had a solid lack of interest in golf; he was immune to its fever, declaring that he spent enough time on his feet without regarding the pursuit of a golf ball across a green full of holes and aggravating hazards as an agreeable way of spending his leisure hours.

  When he protested that he would be out of place in such an assembly, Vince smiled.

  'Some of Lethie's Masonic friends have been invited. And Terence wants you to come specially, a guest of honour.' He coughed apologetically. 'He wants you to tell them about some of your cases.'

  'So I'm to sing for my supper, is that it?'

  Seeing his stepfather's expression, Vince said: 'I thought you wouldn't mind. And since you are so interested in local history you'll have a chance to meet Stuart Millar. He's a near neighbour.'

  The local historian came of a famous family of travellers, one of whom had accompanied Sir James Bruce of Kinnaird on his travels in Abyssinia in the last century.

  He was also a Grand Master in the Freemasons. Most of Vince's new acquaintances belonged to the order and Vince was being urged to join as an 'apprentice', the first rung on the ladder.

  This was an invitation Faro had resisted personally for many years, despite Superintendent McIntosh's hints that 'it could do great things' for him. Although he refrained from saying so to his superior officer, Faro was happy to have reached his own particular niche in the Edinburgh City Police by his own merits, rather than by joining what he regarded as an archaic secret society for ambitious men.

  He was also content to remain Chief Detective Inspector, since the next step up that ladder would involve sitting behind a desk issuing orders and signing documents, work which he would find extremely dull after twenty years of chasing criminals and solving crimes by his own often unorthodox methods of observation and deduction.

  'The Lethies are having some quite illustrious visitors,' Vince assured him. 'None other than the Grand Duchess of Luxoria, the Queen's god-daughter.'

  Faro had read about Luxoria, one of the bewildering number of European principalities set adrift by the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire, its borders forever under threat of annexation by other powerful states. But the tiny independent kingdom tucked away in central Europe had managed to survive centuries of warring and predatory neighbours.

  He knew little of its complex politics since European history was not one of his interests, but he had been vaguely interested to read a legend connected with the Scottish Knights Templars, who had taken refuge there from persecution, rewarding the Luxorians with some holy relic brought from Jerusalem.

  Luxoria might have remained in obscurity and never achieved even a small paragraph in the local newspaper but for the Scottish connection. The Grand Duchess Amelie claimed descent not only from Mary, Queen of Scots, but was related to both Her Majesty the Queen and the late Prince Consort.

  'Didn't they have a revolution - oh, fifteen years ago? I seem to remember reading about it,' said Faro.

  'Full marks, Stepfather. I had it all from Terence. The Grand Duchess inherited after her father's death. She was opposed by her wicked cousin, who had been set up, not against his will, as President and puppet ruler. She was then forced to marry him in what is to all accounts still a wretchedly feudal system of government.' Vince continued: 'A political marriage which would guarantee the succession and save further bloodshed. The Luxo
rians love their Royal Family, it seems, in spite of it all.'

  At the thought of their own Royal Family, Faro smiled wryly. There were many disillusioned citizens in Scotland who applauded Ireland's demand for Home Rule. There were many others too in Britain generally who would have considered it a 'good thing' to bring down the Throne. The Queen was far from popular, spending most of her time in Balmoral Castle guarded by the fiercely protective John Brown, with only token appearances at the seat of government in London, to the dismay of her statesmen.

  The French Revolution remained heavily in the forefront of men's minds. Less than a century old, others than the Luxorian Royal Family were feeling echoes of a drama that could still make princelings shake in their shoes. The secret files of the Edinburgh City Police held information concerning a tide of aristocratic refugees seeking sanctuary at the Palace of Holyroodhouse as privileged guests of Her Majesty.

  On the eve of their departure for Aberlethie, Faro was summoned to Edinburgh Castle to investigate an attempted burglary. As he walked up the High Street from the Central Office along the West Bow, the bright moonlight and a sky wreathed in stars seemed to emphasise the sinister menace of the darkly shuttered Wizard's House.

  Again Faro relived the child he had been, four years old, holding tightly to his weeping mother's hand as she took him on a pilgrimage past the spot where his father had died. Or had been murdered, as she maintained and as he was to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt many years later.

  At the Castle, Colonel Wrightson, who had entertained him so regally at the regimental dinner, was surprised to see him again.

  'Good of you to come, Faro. I appreciate your personal interest.' He smiled. 'Surely this is rather low-key for you?'

  'Not at all. Anything that happens on the outside of the Castle walls is for the police. Once inside, then it's yours.'

  There was little to see beyond a broken window and a displaced iron bar, but all suggested that the would-be intruder was a man of considerable strength as well as the possessor of a remarkable head for heights. It also hinted to Faro that this might be a situation worth keeping his eye on, a prelude to something even more dangerous.