by Anne Perry
“No … no, of course not,” he said grudgingly, but his eyes were still wary and Monk noticed that there was a very fine bead of sweat on his brow. It sharpened his attention and he determined to pursue it to the end.
“After all,” he added, “if it were so, it might provide an excellent motive for murder. I imagine Mrs. Farraline would not have permitted such a crime to pass unpunished, even if privately rather than publicly?”
Baird hesitated, but the expression on his face was as much anger and grief as any overt fear. He was a more complex man than Monk had at first assumed—his rather contemptuous assessment of a man who would prefer Eilish to Oonagh.
“No,” Baird conceded. “She would deal with embezzlement one way or another. I imagine, if it were a member of the family, she would do it herself. In fact, even if it were not, she would still choose not to make it public. Such things are not good for a company’s reputation.”
“Quite. But it would not be pleasant for the culprit.”
“I imagine not. But what makes you think there is anything wrong with the books? Has Kenneth said something? Oh … is it Kenneth you suspect?”
“I don’t suspect anyone in particular.” Monk said it in such a way as to leave it open whether he was speaking the truth or deliberately being evasive. Fear was a most effective catalyst from which might come all manner of other revelations.
Baird considered for several minutes before continuing. Monk tried to judge whether it was guilt or the desire not to be unjust to someone else which held him. On balance he thought guilt; there was still that beading of sweat on his face, and his eyes, for all their straight, steady gaze, had an evasiveness about them.
“Well, I know of no way in which I can help you,” Baird said at last. “I have little to do with the financial side of the business. I work with the paper and the binding. Quinlan works with the print itself. Kenneth does the accounting. When Alastair is here, he makes the major decisions: which clients to accept, new business, that sort of thing.”
“And Mrs. McIvor? I understand she is also concerned in the management. I have heard she is most gifted.”
“Yes.” His expression was beyond Monk’s ability to read; it could have been pride, or resentment, or even humor. A dozen thoughts flashed across Baird’s face, and were equally quickly gone. “Yes,” he repeated. “She has a remarkable acumen. Alastair very often takes her advice, both in business decisions and technical ones. Or to be more accurate, it is Quinlan who takes her advice on matters of print style, typeface and so on.”
“So Mr. Fyffe has nothing to do with the accounting?”
“Quinlan? No, nothing at all.” He said it with regret, and then savage self-mockery the instant after.
Monk found himself more deeply confused about him. How could a man of such emotion, self-perception and sense of irony be in love with Eilish, who seemed to have nothing to offer except physical beauty? It was so shallow, so short-lived. Even the loveliest thing on earth grows tedious if there is no art of companionship, no laughter, wit, imagination, power to love in return, even at times to provoke, to criticize, to lift by struggle, quarrel and change.
The thought brought Hester back to his mind with sharpness like a shooting pain.
“Then I had better look into it,” he said with a curtness totally unwarranted by the conversation.
Baird looked reluctant.
“That would be better than sending in auditors,” Monk went on.
It was a threat, and Baird recognized it as such.
“Oh certainly,” he said too quickly. “By all means. That would be expensive, and make people anxious that we have cause to think there is something wrong. Yes, you look into it by all means, Mr. Monk.”
Monk smiled, or perhaps it was more of a grimace. So Baird was quite happy that Monk could find nothing wrong in the books, or if he did, it was not Baird who had put it there. And yet he was afraid. For what?
“Thank you,” he accepted, and turned to go back out into the corridor again as Baird rose from his desk.
He spent all the rest of the day at the Farraline printing company, and found nothing whatever that furthered his cause. If the books had been tampered with, he had not the requisite skill to find the evidence of it. Tired, his head aching and his temper extremely short, he left at half past five and went back to his lodgings in the Grassmarket, to find a letter from Rathbone awaiting him. It was devoid of good news, simply informing him of his own progress, which was woefully little.
Monk spent over three hours of that evening standing in Ainslie Place, growing colder and more wretched, hoping Eilish would make another sortie to wherever it was she visited, somewhere beyond Kings Stables Road. But midnight came and went, and no one stirred from number seventeen.
The following night he took up the same position, by now sunk into an icy gloom. And at a little after midnight he was rewarded by seeing a shadowy figure emerge, cross the open area of the center, pass within ten feet of where he stood motionless, his body trembling with cold and excitement, and once again walk rapidly along Glenfinlas Street, past Charlotte Square towards the crossroads.
He moved after her, keeping thirty yards’ distance between them except close to junctions where she might turn and he lose sight of her. And this time he also looked back over his shoulder at regular intervals. He had no intention of being struck from behind again, and ending up senseless on the ground, with Eilish vanished into who knew where?
The night was colder than last time, a rime of frost forming on the stones of the pavement and making the air tingle on his lips and in his lungs. He was glad enough to move quickly, although the speed and ease of her pace surprised him. He had not expected so languid and lazy a woman to have the stamina.
As before, she went past the Princes Street Gardens along Lothian Road and turned left along the Kings Stables Road, passing almost under the shadow of the castle, tonight its massive, rugged outline only a denser black against the cloudy, starless sky.
She crossed Spittal Street, making towards the Grassmarket. Surely she could not have a tryst with anyone who lived in such an area? It was full of tradesmen, innkeepers and transients like himself. And what about Baird McIvor? If the emotion he had thought between them was in fact only one-sided, then he had been more profoundly misled than ever before.
No, that was not true. His ability to be misled by women, beautiful women, was almost boundless. He remembered with chagrin Hermione, and how he had believed her softness of word and deed to be compassion, and it had proved to be merely a profound desire to avoid anything that might cause her pain. She chose the easier path, in anything, because she had no hunger in her soul that would drive her beyond hurt in order to win what she wished for. There was no passion in her at all, no need either to give or to receive. She was afraid of life. How more grossly mistaken could he have been in anyone?
So was Eilish deceiving the gullible Baird every bit as much as her sharper, more critical husband? And Oonagh? Had she any idea what her beloved little sister was doing?
Had Mary known?
There were still people around the Grassmarket. The sparse gas lamps casting pools of yellow light showed them standing around or leaning idly, staring about them. An occasional burst of laughter, jerky and more than a little drunk, gave indication of their state. A woman in a ragged dress sauntered past and one of the men shouted at her. She called back in a dialect so broad Monk did not understand her words, although her meaning was plain enough.
Eilish took no notice, but she did not seem afraid and her pace was steady as she passed them and continued on.
Monk remembered to look behind him, but if there was anyone following, he did not know it. Certainly there were others about. One man, black-coated, was ambling along about thirty feet behind him, but there was nothing to indicate he was following Monk, and he did not take any notice when Monk stopped for several seconds before going on again. By now the man was almost up to him.
They were
approaching the corner of Candlemaker Row where Deirdra had turned off, and then the towering, cavernous slums of Cowgate, and all the steps and wynds between Holyrood Road and Canongate. Eilish had walked almost a mile and a half, and showed no signs of slowing down, still less of having reached her destination. What was even stranger, she seemed to be completely familiar with the surroundings. Never once did she hesitate or check where she was.
She crossed the George IV Bridge, and behind her Monk glanced up towards the beautiful Victorian terrace with its classical facade, like the old town from which they had come. He had thought perhaps she would turn and go up there. It was the sort of place where a lover might live, although what manner of lover would expect, or even allow, a woman to come to him, let alone walk it alone, and at night?
At the far end, only a hundred yards away, was the Lawnmarket, and the home of the infamous Deacon Brodie, that portly, dandy figure who had been a pillar of Edinburgh’s society by day, sixty years before, and a violent housebreaker by night. According to tavern gossip, which Monk had listened to readily in the hope of learning something about the Farralines, Deacon Brodie’s infamy rested in the duplicity of a man who in daylight inspected and advised on the security of the very premises he robbed by night. He had lived in the utmost respectability, in the Lawnmarket, and kept not one mistress with an illegitimate family, but two. He had escaped capture when his accomplices were arrested, fleeing to Holland, only to be caught by a simple trick and returned to Edinburgh, where he was hanged with a jest on his lips in 1788.
But Eilish did not turn up towards the Lawnmarket; she continued on and plunged into the filthy cavernous gloom of Cowgate.
Monk followed resolutely after her.
Here the lamps were farther between and the pavement in places only eighteen inches wide. The cobbles of the street were rough and he had to go carefully to avoid turning his ankle. Huge tenements reared above him, four and five stories high, every room filled with a dozen or so people, crowded in without water or sanitation. He knew it from long familiarity with London. The smell was the same, dirt, weariness and all-pervasive human effluent.
Then suddenly the darkness was total and he fell into a violent sensation of pain, both before and behind.
When he woke up he was numb with cold, so stiff he had difficulty in making his arms and legs obey him, and his head ached so badly he hated to open his eyes. There was a small brown dog licking his face in friendly and hopeful curiosity. It was still dark, and Eilish was nowhere to be seen.
He climbed to his feet with difficulty, apologizing to the dog for having nothing he could give it, and set off on the short, bitter walk back to the Grassmarket.
However, he was all the more determined not to be beaten, least of all by a shallow and worthless woman like Eilish Fyffe. Whether her midnight trysts had any relevance to her mother’s death or not, he was going to find out exactly where she went and why.
Accordingly the following night he waited for her, this time not in Ainslie Place but at the corner where the Kings Stables Road ran into the Grassmarket. At least he would save himself the walk. During the day he also purchased a stout walking stick and a very well constructed tall hat, which he jammed on his still-throbbing head.
During the day he had taken the precaution of walking the length of Cowgate so he would know every yard of it in the semidarkness of its sporadic gas lamps. In the shortening autumn light it had been a grim sight. The buildings were in ill repair, crumbling stonework, battered, half-obliterated signs, walls stained and weatherworn, gutters shallow and running with water and refuse. The narrow wynds leading off it up towards the High Street were crowded with people, carts, washing and piles of vegetables and rubbish.
Now as he stood in the doorway of an ironmonger’s, waiting for Eilish, he could picture every yard of it in his mind, and he was determined not to be caught again.
It was twenty minutes past midnight when he saw her slender figure emerge from the Kings Stables Road and turn into the Grassmarket. She was going a little more slowly this time, perhaps because she was carrying a large parcel of some sort, which, to judge from her less graceful, more awkward gait, was quite heavy.
He waited until she was about fifteen yards past him, then he moved out of the doorway and walked after her, keeping close to the wall and swinging his stick casually, but with an extremely firm grip.
Eilish walked the length of the Grassmarket, crossed the George IV Bridge without looking right or left, and went into Cowgate. She gave no sign whatever of knowing that anyone was following her. Never once did she hesitate or glance backwards.
What on earth was she doing?
He closed the gap between them now that they were in the dim cavern of Cowgate. He must not lose sight of her. She might stop any minute and disappear into one of these high buildings and he would have great difficulty in finding her again. They were all at least four or five stories high, and inside would be like a rabbit warren, passages and stairs, half landings, room after room, all crowded with people.
And of course there were the stairways and alleys and wynds, any one of which she might have taken.
Why did she know no fear, a beautiful woman walking alone after midnight in such a place? The only conceivable answer was that she was perfectly aware of someone following her to protect her. Baird McIvor? It seemed absurd. Why on earth meet here? It made no kind of sense. No stretch of the imagination, short of insanity in both of them, accounted for it as a lovers’ tryst. There were any number of easier, safer and more romantic places far nearer home.
They passed South Bridge, and ahead of Eilish he saw a shadowy figure, body bent, a sack across its shoulders, hurry from a side alley and disappear into another, heading towards the Infirmary. With an involuntary shudder he remembered the grotesque crimes of Burke and Hare, as if he had seen a thirty-year ghost heading towards Surgeon’s Hall with a newly murdered corpse on his back to present to the huge, one-eyed anatomist Dr. Knox.
He glanced backwards nervously, but there was no one unwarrantably close.
They were level with Blackfriars’ Wynd and Cardinal Beaton’s house on one corner with its jutting overhang and crumbling stone. His information earlier that day had told him it had been built in the early fifteen hundreds by the then-archbishop of Glasgow and chancellor of Scotland during the regency and the monarchy of King James V, before England and Scotland were united.
Next was the Old Mint, a dilapidated building with a walled-up doorway with the inscription over it BE MERCIFUL UNTO ME, O GOD. He knew from the daytime that there was also an advertisement for Allison the chimney sweep, and a little picture of two sweeps running, but he could not see it now.
Eilish continued on her way, and Monk gripped his stick more tightly. He disliked carrying it. The feeling of it in his hand brought back sickening memories of violence, confusion and fear, and above all overwhelming guilt. But the prickling in the back of his neck was a primal fear even greater, and against his conscience his hand closed more tightly. He turned every now and again to look behind him, but he saw only indeterminate shadows.
Then suddenly at St. Mary’s Wynd she turned sharply left and he almost lost her. He ran forward and only just prevented himself from colliding with her as she stopped in front of a dark doorway, the parcel still in her hands.
She turned and looked at him, for an instant afraid, then as her eyes, used to the darkness, went beyond him she cried out.
“No!”
Monk swung around just in time to raise his stick and fend off the blow.
“No!” Eilish said again, her voice powerful with complete authority. “Robbie, put it down! There is no need….”
Reluctantly the man lowered the cudgel and stood waiting, still gripping it ready.
“You are very determined, Mr. Monk,” Eilish said quietly. “You had better come in.”
Monk hesitated. Out here in the street he had a fighting chance if he were attacked, inside he had no idea how many men
there might be. In an area like Cowgate he could be disposed of without trace or necessity for explanation. Grisly visions of Burke and Hare came back like nightmares yet again.
Eilish’s voice was full of laughter, although he could not see her face in the gloom.
“There is no need to be alarmed, Mr. Monk. It is not a den of thieves, it is simply a ragged school. I’m sorry you were struck when you followed me before. Some of my pupils are very jealous for my protection. They did not know who you were. Creeping along the Grassmarket behind me, you cut a very sinister figure.”
“A ragged school?” He was stunned.
She mistook his amazement for ignorance.
“There are a lot of people in Edinburgh who can neither read nor write, Mr. Monk. Actually this is not a ragged school in the legal sense. We don’t teach children. There are others doing that. We teach adults. Perhaps you didn’t realize what a handicap it is to a man not to be able to read his own language? To be able to read is the doorway into the rest of the world. If you can read, you can make the acquaintance of the best minds of the present, no matter where they live, and all the past as well!” Her voice rose with enthusiasm. “You can listen to the philosophy of Plato, or you can go on adventures with Sir Walter Scott, see the past unfold before you, explore India or Egypt, you can—” She stopped abruptly, then continued in a lower tone. “You can read the newspapers and know what the politicians are saying, and form some judgment for yourself whether it is true or not. You can read the signs in the streets and shop windows, and on labels and medicine bottles.”
“I understand, Mrs. Fyffe,” he said quietly, but with a sincerity that was totally new to him where she was concerned. “And I know what ragged schools are. It is simply an explanation which had not occurred to me.”
Then she laughed aloud. “How very candid of you. You thought I had some assignation? In Cowgate? Really, Mr. Monk! With whom, may I ask? Or you thought I was a master thief, perhaps, come to divide the spoils with my accomplices? A sort of female Deacon Brodie?”