Dangerous Pursuits (A Rose McQuinn Mystery) Page 2

  Mrs Laing was always eager for a gossip since living-in servants were sparse indeed in Carthew House, an unusual and eccentric economy in an affluent family. Since they returned to Edinburgh, she grumbled, she had fully expected to have the responsibility of engaging a domestic staff.

  The children, aged three and five, were in Nancy's own words 'a bit of a handful'. But not even their wayward antics were beyond her patient tolerance and love. Indeed, it was that devotion to Mrs Harding's turbulent toddler which recommended Nancy Brook to the Carthews as a suitable nanny.

  For her part Nancy was delighted at the importance of her new situation, especially as the salary offered by the absent father was far in excess of the normal nursemaid's wage - a fact that did not equate with Mrs Laing's hints at their being 'a wee bit grippy wi' their money'.

  Nor were Nancy's duties demanding. Her employers were kindly and considerate beyond the norm, providing her with a handsome bedroom and sitting-room.

  She was delighted, her hopes set high for an exciting year.

  On that score at least she was not to be disappointed, with a sinister turn of events beyond even her wildest imaginings.

  Or my own.

  Chapter Two

  Beyond the garden, the weather was changing, the mist lifting, and I decided that some fresh air would be agreeable. It would be restorative for my depressed state to wander on Arthur's Seat with my sketchbook, particularly as I had a reason.

  A promise made to my stepbrother Dr Vincent Beaumarcher Laurie, junior physician to the Royal Family and at present at Balmoral Castle. A watercolour of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, a view looking down from the hill across the gardens and parkland, was his request as a wedding anniversary present for Olivia.

  As this was something special and my painting is very much a hit or miss business, best when it is spontaneous, I felt nervous about its success.

  "Nonsense,' said Vince. ‘Olivia thinks you are a great artist and that you should be doing this sort of thing professionally.'

  The anniversary was still a month away but matters had been brought to a climax since in Olivia's absence, I had been invited to accompany Vince to the royal lunch in Edinburgh tomorrow.

  Princess Beatrice was opening the new Hospital for Sick Children in Sciennes Road. According to the newspapers it had cost £47,000 with 118 beds and extensive outpatients' departments, designed by architect G. Washington Browne who had already contributed some splendid buildings to the newly developing south side of the city at Newington.

  I realized I need entertain only a forlorn hope of having my painting ready for this unexpected meeting with Vince. Or of justifying Olivia's faith in me, I thought, flipping through the pages of my sketchbook of indifferent drawings with growing despair.

  Occasionally I returned from expeditions with some small sketches that pleased me but when I attempted to transfer them into colour, the magic died and rich mud was the result.

  'Now or never,' I said to Thane who was stretched out with his massive head at my foot. This was his favourite position, which took up most of the floor, but when I was seated he liked to establish what might be termed a toehold of physical contact.

  Making certain that my pencils were all sharpened I prepared to leave. On my way through the kitchen, I paused at the larder to inspect the remains of a joint of roast beef, intended for Jack's supper after our evening concert at the Assembly Rooms this evening. Alas, I had received a message via Lenny the local 'beat' constable, that Jack was involved in a case.

  He was sorry.

  How often had I heard those words. I would never manage more than a couple of slices of meat which was already two days old, but it need not go to waste.

  From the kitchen window I saw Auld Rory, old soldier and gentleman of the road, as he called himself. Less flatteringly designated an old tramp by Jack, he was wandering past the back garden, his eyes on the ground always searching for any curiosity that might fetch him a few pence.

  Auld Rory was a newcomer to Arthur's Seat brought to my notice by Thane.

  One stormy evening recently, I had been caught in a downpour without my umbrella, hurrying back from Newington. Thane was on the road to greet me as I approached the road leading to the Tower. Briskly he shepherded me somewhat reluctantly towards what looked like a bundle of old clothes by the roadside.

  Not a corpse, I prayed, shuddering. Then the clothes stirred, began to cough. Thane ran towards him, barking gently, and turned to me with a look of despair. As if to say, Be sensible, Rose, you can't leave the poor old chap lying by the roadside, sorely troubled by a bad cough like that...

  'You invited him in,' said Jack in shocked tones when I told him next day.

  'Of course,' I said. 'I wasn't going to pass by on the other side like the man in the parable of the Good Samaritan.'

  Jack gave a heavenward glance of despair. 'A tramp, Rose. A stranger who might be anything - anyone - he might have a criminal record, so spare me the biblical quotations. Things and people have changed a lot since they were written. And you are a woman on your own, remember - living in isolation.'

  'By my own choice,' I replied.

  'Aye, not by mine. There's plenty of new houses half a mile away and you just have to say the word. You could be living among civilized folk...'

  He went on in the same vein, his favourite reprise. I listened politely, not wishing to remind him that there had been a particularly brutal murder among those same civilized folk just weeks after I had arrived.

  A murder that I had solved.

  So I let him get it off his chest. The story that always ends with us getting married and settling down in domestic bliss, in a house with pot plants in the windows and lace curtains. One with a nice cosy kitchen and with me doing his washing and ironing, darning his socks, cooking delicious meals.

  And terminally ill with boredom.

  Finally I interrupted and said, 'No cause for you to concern yourself. Our old tramp is harmless.'

  'And how do you know that?' he demanded.

  'Thane liked him.'

  'Thane! For heaven's sake. You can hardly rely on a dog.'

  'He's not a dog. He's a deerhound.'

  Jack wasn't to be put off. 'He's a canine,' he said firmly. 'And animals go by sense of smell. Not to put too fine a point on it, old tramps probably smell great to them.'

  I tried to be calm. 'I trust Thane's judgement.'

  Jack put back his head, saw the funny side and roared with laughter. 'Darling Rose, you'll be the death of me, but I love you just the same. Come on now, sit on my knee. Let's be friends again,' he added tenderly.

  Such an invitation was irresistible. A few hugs and kisses and there my case rested.

  Once again. For the moment.

  Jack was convinced that he had won but although I'd never be able to convince him, the reason Thane liked the old man was that he recognized a fellow spirit. Auld Rory had 'nae hame', as he told me. Like Thane he preferred to sleep under the stars.

  A recluse whose home was under hedgerows and in ditches, in earlier times he would have achieved fame as the hermit of Arthur's Seat, his life a gift to the ballad writers.

  As he wandered around the Newington area, people who encountered him regularly accepted him as 'the old tramp', ladies edging away nervously, often to the other side of the pavement.

  Simple but harmless, Rory sang a lot. Mostly it was 'Soldiers of the Queen' and if he had been a man who enjoyed a drink, he would have been accused of ‘the drink being on him'.

  Of his past history I knew little, in a moment of confidence, he said that he was born in India, his father was an Irish soldier from Antrim in a Scots regiment, his mother Highland. He had known nothing but army life. So much was evident from the way he walked - or marched - along the road and from the military set of his shoulders.

  What he had been like in youth was difficult to consider. And although he was willing to be friendly and courteous too, I was in the role of patient listener.


  It was difficult to have a conversation with him, as his face was so covered with hair, it was like talking to someone through a thick hedge. He had as much hair on his face as Thane, perhaps another reason why the deerhound found a certain affinity. He was apt to break off a conversation suddenly and stare into space, cocking an ear unnervingly to listen to the silence - this was yet another reminder of Thane.

  One thing I never doubted: Rory had all his senses but something dire had happened to him during his army life in India.

  Once, in more expansive mood than usual, he sat in my kitchen while the rain poured down the windows and hinted that he had been wounded, tortured by rebel tribesmen and left to die. He had survived by something of a miracle.

  'Jesus saved me,' he said simply. He was now a devoted reader of the Gospels, bound to the image of a Christ with whom he shared the fellow feeling of having not even a roof over his head. Living on fresh air and the occasional charity of passers-by, he had no possessions but a bible, his clay pipe, which I rarely saw lit, and a blanket to keep out the cold.

  God would provide, give him his daily bread, he said. More than often I was the provider, I thought, guessing how he would appreciate fresh meat between slices of new bread.

  As I put them together I reflected this was the fate of many of my doomed suppers these days. I would willingly have given the old man a bottle of ale purchased on Jack's behalf, except that Rory was strictly tee-total. Long ago in his boyhood he had taken the pledge of temperance and had, in his own words, never seen good reason to break his vows.

  Outside Thane ran over to him. There was a lot of head-patting and, on Thane's part, an excess of joyous tail-wagging.

  I stood by smiling indulgently with the pleasure of watching a couple of children.

  Man and dog were friends without a word shared, they knew each other in a bond I could not possibly understand, happy in their existence, fellow creatures living under a firmament of stars.

  'Bless ye, lass,' said Rory, taking the package containing his supper to which I had added a slice of Jack's favourite fruit loaf. 'Aye, ye're a grand wee lass, so ye are.'This, I presumed, related to my diminutive size rather than my mature thirty years. 'And where's that bonny man o' yours the nicht?'

  'On duty, as usual.' I had never tried to explain that Jack wasn't my man in the way respectable folk understood as a lifetime's obligation 'for better for worse, for richer for poorer'. I suspected that an old soldier as worldly-wise and unconventional as Rory wouldn't have cared one way or the other as he opened the package and grinned at me. He doubtless knew the ways of policemen and guessed without being told how this generosity came about.

  His glance took in the sketchbook under my arm too.

  'Ah, weil, lass, I'll no' be delayin' ye. God bless.'

  As the afternoon light was already waning, I was quite relieved. With the right sympathetic audience, ready and eager to listen, Rory was a natural story-teller. Catch him in the right mood and he would expound at great length on his service in the outposts of the Queen's Empire.

  Did I ken that he had once served alongside General Carthew's regiment in the Sudan campaign? He had read about Edinburgh's well-decorated illustrious soldier in the newspapers I got from Jack and handed over to him.

  'Did I ever tell ye...' His stories always began with those words, so that I knew there was some great tale to be unfolded.

  'Did I ever tell ye my laddie was the General's batman?'

  I'd heard it before but on one such occasion there was an unexpected embellishment.

  'The laddie wasna cut out for soldiering, although he'd been born and reared in the barracks wi' the rest of us. He was a gentle kind o' lad and hadna ony taste for fighting. He wasna a coward though,' he added with a reassuring glance. 'Why, I'd seen him separate snarling dogs, and rescue small bairns who got into danger. He dragged two bairns out of a swollen river too. But he wanted other things from his life, things I didna understand. When his ma died, he was fourteen, our only bairn. Maybe if she'd lived, it would have been different, what happened. She'd have sent him back home, here to her kin. That was aye in her mind, though the dear lass never put it into words, afraid to offend me. So after the funeral, he said he would stay on with me.'

  He stopped, sighed deeply, his eyes half closed as if seeing it all. 'I never stopped blaming myself, not after all these years, ever since the day they told me that my laddie barely seventeen had been waylaid and murdered in an ambush.

  'They never found his body and he was missing, presumed dead, ye ken. I still canna believe it,' he added with a bewildered shake of his head. 'I was sure then and still am that he's alive - somewhere. Something tells me.'

  He had stopped, raising his hand, listening, eyes closed, sniffing the air as if it could tell him where his laddie was now.

  Turning, he looked at me. ‘I’ll find him some day, ye ken. That I will.'

  I nodded sympathetically. 'I lost my husband - in Arizona.'

  I wondered if I should explain Arizona but he nodded vigorously. 'I ken where that is - in the Wild West,' he added proudly. 'Did the Red Indians get him?'

  'All we know is that he was reported missing - most probably killed in a local massacre.'

  He was silent then he took my hand and held it tight, his eyes filled with tears. An unexpected gesture, and I looked at him in amazement as a bond was formed between us.

  He had loved a son who had vanished, who he refused to believe was dead. I had loved a husband who had disappeared without trace.

  After that, he began to arrive at my back door and sit in my kitchen at regular intervals when Jack was absent, as if seeking comfort with another sufferer at the hands of destiny. The days were closing in. Darkness coming earlier meant long evenings and I looked forward to human companionship with Thane stretched out in front of the fire between us, as I listened to tales of Rory's parents and the Great Famine in Ireland, the massed emigration only equalled in disaster by the Highland Clearances.

  I also learned at first hand the reality behind newspaper reports of trouble in India, of the desperate battles, the squandering of men's lives in order to hold on to the outposts of the Empire. Their boast of 'gallant men' defending the Empire masked the truth, of newly raised regiments like the 96th Foot reinforced by a pioneer battalion and a scratch force of Sikhs more accustomed to handling picks and shovels than rifles, with half-trained tribal levies to support the most dangerous expeditions ever undertaken by the British Army.

  The slaughter was glossed over with no list of casualties and only a line or two in the daily papers, which did not expand on the fierce cruelty inflicted on soldiers or the hardships and tortures that were not for the eyes of polite and gentle readers.

  Rory had witnessed the treachery of the Chitralis who, at peace with the regiment, had invited them to a polo match; when the vigilance of the guards was diverted by such an innocent amusement, at a given signal, the match was suddenly ended. Picking up their knives, the tribesmen began to dance, a wild dance applauded by the onlookers delighted by this unexpected entertainment. Until the tribesmen turned their knives on the polo players and slaughtered every one of them.

  Besieged in a mud fort, under attack, the soldiers in Rory's regiment had to eat the horses with their pea soup. It didn't bother Rory, a foot soldier.

  'Meat was food. Any kind of meat, ye ken, rats, dogs, anything that was flesh. But an officer might be a wee bittee squeamish about eating his own horse, so they worked out a system so that they didna' know whose horse they were eating wi' their soup that night.'

  And so another bond was forged between us that day. I had lived in forts with Danny in Arizona besieged by Apaches. I had not questioned what I was eating either. In one such fort I had given birth and subsequently lost our baby son.

  Remembrance came back swift and fierce; the bile rose in my throat as Rory talked and darkness steadily enclosed us, the past refusing to be banished in a warm safe kitchen in Edinburgh, with a deerhound
lying by the fire.

  I wanted to stop him but I could do nothing to stem the tide of reminiscences opening old wounds, all twisting knives in my heart sharp as any tribesman's treachery.

  At last, perhaps aware of my silence, Rory apologized for 'boring me wi' his long stories'.

  I assured him I wasn't bored. He looked at me, shook his head, sighed and said, Well, he was an early bedder.

  As was his habit he left abruptly and I watched him from the door, deciding he must have eyes like a cat's as he walked unflinchingly towards his favourite ditch where an overhang of rock once part of Samson's Ribs hid and sheltered him from the elements.

  On the day of my walk to St Anthony's Chapel, aware that the weather was changing rapidly and what the onset of winter might have in store for him, I asked Rory why he didn't go home to the Highlands and what brought him to Edinburgh of all places.

  He looked into space for a few moments and I wondered if he had heard me or was a little deaf as I sometimes suspected. Then with a sigh he said, 'I was led here.' And turning his head he looked at me intently. 'God willed that I should come here and find my laddie.'

  His late wife's birthplace seemed a forlorn hope in which to find a young soldier who went missing presumed dead long since in India. Perhaps I didn't conceal my thoughts too well for he shook his head and stood up.

  Straightening his shoulders he leaned both his hands on the table and stared across at me.

  Shaking his head vigorously, he said, 'I ken well that he is here. I've seen him, lassie.'

  'You've seen - that's wonderful,' I said, wishing to God that I could see Danny McQuinn wandering around Edinburgh.

  His expression was far from joyful. 'Na, na, lassie, nae so wonderful. He was coming out o' one of them posh places in the city. I didna' recognize him at first and he didna' see me.'

  'Why didn't you speak to him?' I demanded.

  'Na, na. I couldna - seeing what had become o' the lad I loved.' He choked on the words. 'I was glad his ma had gone long since. It would have broken her heart. Like it did mine.'