Akin to Murder

by Alanna Knight

‘Carving knife, from the kitchen.’ The man must have run into the kitchen, seized the knife and returned with it, but Faro still did not understand why he had bothered to kill a well-known local prostitute. There had to be something other than his reputation at stake, such as a very jealous wife.

  ‘I need to ask you this,’ Faro said delicately. ‘Was there any possibility that she was carrying … disease? Syphilis, for instance,’ he added, imagining the consternation of wives with roving husbands if she was spreading that about the village.

  ‘I doubt that. Never wanted children – she used to laugh and say all men were careless but she had ways and means of avoiding pregnancy. Very meticulous about washing herself down there after I’d been with her, much more than most respectable women, I imagine, since she had too much to lose – her nice steady income.’

  If this was true, then it sounded as if her killer had some urgent personal reason for wanting to get rid of Charlie and used this as a great opportunity.

  ‘Was it someone you knew? Someone you might have made an enemy of?’

  Charlie laughed. ‘I had no enemies that I knew of. They were all my mates, drinking companions, and I had never tried to seduce their wives or sweethearts, if that is what you are hinting. They all knew about Annie and imagined I had plenty of that at home with an oversexed wife to want any on the side,’ he added grimly. ‘And I’m ashamed to say they knew that I wasn’t objecting to her helping to keep a roof over our heads and a wastrel husband in drink. That was her hold over me.’

  Faro was visualising the scene. A sordid murder case. The kind that the police knew only too well, with a few subtle differences. The married pair were well aware of each other’s shortcomings. As Charlie condoned his wife as a prostitute, there was no necessity to kill her. She was, in fact, the goose laying the golden egg, keeping him in drink and an easy-living style between occasional jobs. That was what held the marriage together.

  What about the other people, the shadowy ones offstage? Apart from the killer, her stepdad and his mates, who knew all about Annie?

  ‘Did she have any family?’

  ‘A married sister, a nurse at the poorhouse. Nora is very respectable, a pillar of the church and the women’s guild, bitterly ashamed of Annie’s behaviour letting down the family, in common parlance she refused to let her darken their door.’

  Faro made a mental note. This was one to interview. Nora might be the kind who absorbed local gossip and enjoyed relating it to her friends.

  ‘Did she get on well with her stepfather?’

  ‘Well enough. He had an older son from his first marriage.’

  Faro remembered the young man he had talked to at the inn. A handsome stepson. That was an interesting possibility. As if Charlie read his mind, he laughed. ‘I know what you’re thinking. But Frank has an invalid wife, they’ve been married for years and he’s devoted to her.’

  Devoted or no, that was another interesting possibility. Another reason for not being found out. Faro frowned, his mind was racing back over Charlie’s details of the scene of the crime. The picture that Charlie’s return to consciousness had evoked. All those bloodstains between the kitchen and the bedroom. None of these details had been recorded in the police report – merely that she had been found in the bedroom, lying on the floor with a knife in her chest.

  Now a very different pattern was emerging. After her client had knocked Charlie out, Faro imagined him hastily dressing and pushing Annie aside, hurrying through to the kitchen, presumably on his way out of the house. Had Annie, enraged, followed him, perhaps in his eagerness to escape, he was forgetting to pay her, something like that? She had tried to stop him leaving, even going as far as seizing the carving knife and threatening him. A struggle, but a big, strong man, according to Charlie’s description of him, he had turned it on her. Perhaps he had never meant to kill her but there she was, lying with a knife in her chest. He panicked, had to think of something fast and he had the answer, dragged her back into the bedroom and put her down beside Charlie. The perfect and obvious answer that the police would accept. Her husband had come home, found her with a man and killed her.

  Charlie was watching him. It was growing cold, a fine drizzle like a requiem to his wretched unhappy tale was drifting down from the top of the hill. At last he said:

  ‘You’re very silent, sir. Do you believe me now – that what I have told you is the God’s honest truth?’

  Faro sighed. ‘None of these details were reported in the summing up of the evidence.’

  ‘Would it have changed the verdict, do you think?’ Charlie asked eagerly.

  ‘It might well have done so.’ He had no intention of telling Charlie what he thought might have happened, but this murder was a sordid domestic case with elements all too familiar in police records. ‘Get it over with and have a hanging,’ avoiding unnecessary delays by suppressing prisoners’ statements, was Gosse’s motto.

  What calamity of destiny had brought Charlie to Edinburgh?

  ‘What brought you here?’

  Charlie laughed. ‘I can hear it in your voice – anywhere but here. Sorry about that, sir.’

  ‘What did you leave – what about your parents?’

  Charlie seemed surprised. ‘Ealasaid has not told you?’

  ‘Not a word, nothing about her past – before … before Vince.’

  ‘Poor Ealasaid. They were so cruel to her.’ Pausing for a moment as if remembering that terrible revelation, he went on. ‘We had a relentless, God-fearing father and he died of apoplexy the year after … after that. He was preaching at the time and everyone reckoned he had gone straight to heaven. Mother always regretted Ealasaid being sent away, but there was nothing she could do to persuade Father that it was wrong, that what had happened was not their daughter’s fault, that the guilt lay at the laird’s door. Anyway, she had never been very strong – she took consumption, and after she died three years ago, among her things I found a letter to me from Ealasaid. It said that she was now in Edinburgh and would I get in touch with her.’ He sighed. ‘Ealasaid tells me there were other letters to me, scores of them, through the years but they had been destroyed by father.

  ‘It made my decision; suddenly I had to get away, I was weary, had enough of struggling to make a living on that croft for my mother and I. Always fascinated by railways and trains, I wanted to be part of that new world, so I made up my mind: better to be a labourer than a poor farmer scratching a living. I had to find Ealasaid and suddenly that was important, like the fulfillment of a dream. I can spare you the details of how I got to Fisherrow, met and married Annie. The lusts of the flesh, drinking and gambling had been born in me, I’m afraid, waiting to make sure of my downfall. I had never been in love before, hardly knew any lasses and Annie seemed like the love of my life I had been waiting for. No one ever told me, just smirked behind my back, about the devil she was. Well, more drinking to forget, lost my job. You know the rest.’

  He sighed and said sadly, ‘So now, too late, I’ve found Ealasaid who could have redeemed me. Even as a child, she was always a good influence.’

  The door of the cottage opened, a light shone across the yard and Lizzie called, ‘Come in, you two. You’ll catch your deaths sitting out there in the cold.’

  Since death had been the subject of their conversation both men managed a weary smile.

  ‘Coming, Lizzie.’

  ‘Thank you, sir, for believing in me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go quite that far yet. We have to prove it to the police. And stop calling me sir, will you?’ he added wearily. ‘My name in the family is Jeremy.’

  Following him indoors, Faro recognised that in this intimate conversation, Charlie had revealed much about himself. In fact, he had got to know more about his brother-in-law in half an hour than he had learnt about his wife since their first meeting and all their time together as husband and wife. He had not even known that Lizzie’s name was not Elizabeth but Ealasaid, until Charlie informed him.

  But
now, in addition to those other problems, there was a new and vital one with no time for delay. If what he had heard this evening was right in every detail – and his gut feeling was that this was the true story of Annie’s murder – with so much flimsy evidence, how could he possibly prove Charlie’s innocence and set all of them free?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘What on earth have you two been on about, out there in the cold?’ Lizzie asked.

  Charlie laughed and said something in Gaelic. Lizzie’s eyes widened, her eyes filled with tears as she rushed across and put her arms around Jeremy, hugging him. ‘There, I told you, now you see he is innocent.’

  That, Faro decided, was taking it a bit far as she added, ‘You are a clever detective, now all you have to do is to prove it.’ Again that assumption, as if it would be an easy matter before Faro had even begun to outline the difficulties. He would need to go right back to the beginning, before Annie’s murder. He thought of all those clients anxious to remain anonymous, one of whom was her killer, and that made a search for the legendary clue in a haystack simple by comparison.

  He would start with her sister Nora, a nurse at the poorhouse, which might lead to some of the gardeners and railwaymen, possible mates of Charlie’s. A very slight thread, like Ariadne’s through the Minotaur’s maze, but perhaps a nod in the right direction of also establishing what had happened to Agatha Simms’s remains, which now seemed somewhat irrelevant in the search for Annie McLaw’s killer. Or was he back at the very beginning and this a tiny knot to unravel another murder – if murder it was – that of Tibbie’s mistress Celia?

  And to cap it all, where was Tibbie and why had she failed to meet up with Mrs Brook? Was Tibbie connected with the poorhouse? Was she the lame woman, the one he had seen being forcibly restrained from boarding the train from Musselburgh – the one described by the railwayman as ‘one of their loonies’?

  Such were his gloomy thoughts amid the air of family celebration around him. Vince still regarded Charlie with a modicum of suspicion, angry that he had been fooled into believing that story about the gypsy camp and Charlie’s escape from a forced wedding, but most of all Charlie making him promise to remain silent was hardest to forgive, especially when it also put his mother and his stepfather in danger from the law for sheltering a killer.

  But Lizzie was jubilant and oblivious; as far as she was concerned, they were in the clear and her clever Jeremy had listened to Teàrlach and understood. He would put this particular Humpty Dumpty together again, find Annie’s killer and proof of his innocence would bring about a ‘happy-ever-after’ end like the romantic novels she relished.

  Faro, watching her, tried but failed to echo the laughter, the relief. Poor Lizzie, did she not realise even after her own tragic story that life was not like that and reality provided for most people, not happy endings, but compromise, taking nd accepting what the dice, fate or God, whichever you believed, had directed your way?

  All he had when he started off next morning back to the Central Office was the terror of a wanted man hiding from the law, concealed under the roof of his cottage, a brother-in-law he now felt might be telling the truth, or was he just being hopeful that he could prove his story?

  Remembering other crimes that he had solved, crimes that in retrospect seemed easy because he had only himself to put in danger, sometimes emerging with a narrow escape from death and a bullet or knife wound as a permanent souvenir, he sighed deeply. He had been a single man then, not married with a wife and stepson in jeopardy, aware that they were breaking the law and, if they were found out, would go to jail. And his disgrace would follow, the end of his career with the Edinburgh City Police.

  He thought with uncharacteristic envy and lack of compassion how easy and simple it would have been had McLaw, guilty as charged, been taken to prison and in due course hung by the neck. As for Lizzie, she hardly ever looked at the newspapers, relying on Faro to read her any news of interest, avoiding horrible crimes. She skirted round such matters even if her husband had been eager to discuss the details, the solving of which added up to their daily bread. It was as if their mention might cling and somehow sully the atmosphere of their dear little cottage. But what if she had known that John McLaw was in fact Teàrlach, the beloved brother she had not seen for fifteen years?

  As he was walking up the High Street a hansom carriage with its coat of arms passed him and stopped a few yards ahead. The passenger opened the window, glanced briefly in his direction and then moved on.

  He had a glimpse beneath the large hat of long dark hair, the woman who at first glance so resembled Inga St Ola. Would that sight never cease to send his heart racing, even after so many more urgent matters that needed his attention? The woman was readily identifiable as Lady Belmuir, doubtless on one of her shopping visits to the city.

  As he entered the office, Gosse was sitting at his desk behind a mound of papers, plus a weighty addition of what were now daily reports of sightings of McLaw and claims to that reward. He pushed some over to Faro.

  ‘See what you make of this lot. I’d appreciate your comments.’

  Faro picked them up, some were ill-written, hardly legible. Today he had twelve in his hand, from near and far, from the city limits to Peebles, but all began the same: ‘I have seen this wanted man in our village/ street/church/inn/garden and I am claiming the reward of fifty pounds.’

  ‘When you’ve read these – they’re the most legible – there’s another ten.’ Gosse groaned. ‘It’s like a flood every day now. You can’t do them all and we haven’t enough constables for the local ones. Most are rubbish, anyway.’

  Was the inspector beginning to regret that poster, which had instigated such a flood? Faro refrained from gently reminding him that he should have recognised that this would be the inevitable result. Surely he knew enough of the greed of mortal men and women to realise that the enticement of an indifferent illustration of a wanted man, rough-looking with a beard, and the promise of fifty pounds on delivering him to the local police would produce an avalanche of claims.

  ‘Where would you like me to start today, sir?’ Faro had noticed one from Dalkeith, the end of the local railway between Edinburgh and Fisherrow. He handed it to Gosse. It was better written and would provide the excuse he needed to drop off the train at the poorhouse and talk to Annie’s sister, Nora, as well as making some enquiries about the missing Tibbie.

  Gosse glanced briefly at the letter and skimming through the claims, said, ‘You might as well take these other two and do Fisherrow on the way back. You can take the train but you’ll need to do it on your own. I cannot spare any of the lads, they had better concentrate on those close by,’ he added with some relish, doubtless anticipating the inconvenience and humiliation that would cause his sergeant, little guessing that, this time, he had behaved exactly as Faro wished.

  About to part company, they were interrupted by a constable at the office door. ‘Sir, there is a lady here wishing to speak to DS Faro urgently.’

  Faro looked up. Was this Mrs Brook here to report Tibbie as a missing person? Gosse nodded tight-lipped, and gave him an angry look. He had a different interpretation, about to give Faro a right telling-off if this was his wife here again keeping him from his duties.

  But it was neither Mrs Brook nor Mrs Faro.

  ‘Lady Belmuir, sir,’ announced the constable as he was pushed aside to admit a vision, emerging in a cloud of perfume, beneath a large hat and a velvet cloak.

  Gosse leapt to his feet, bowed extravagantly. ‘Your Ladyship—’

  He got no further. The laird of Belmuir turned her back on him and swept round to face Faro whose acknowledging bow was less extravagant than that of his superior who was looking open-mouthed, clearly taken aback by this aristocratic visitor from the ranks of the gentry.

  She pointed to Faro. ‘It’s you I wish to see.’

  Gosse, speechless, stared from one to the other. How were these two acquainted and how dare she ignore him, addressing his sergeant
as if they were alone together and Inspector Gosse did not exist?

  ‘Mr Faro,’ she was saying, ‘I am here to report a robbery from my town house, in Moray Place.’

  Tall for a woman, they were almost eye to eye, both a good six inches taller than Gosse, who was not impressed and interrupted:

  ‘If you please, Your Ladyship, this is my province, not my sergeant’s.’ That was a lie, to start with. It was usual to report such incidents to the constable seated behind the main desk inside the main entrance.

  Gosse had recovered from the imagined insult, pulled himself to his full height and, bowing, smiled: ‘I am Detective Inspector Gosse, and I will immediately attend to Your Ladyship’s report of this incident.’

  ‘Report,’ snapped that lady. ‘It’s more than that. I am Belmuir and a valuable painting has been stolen, a priceless Leonardo, been in the family for countless years.’

  Gosse, whose neck was rising rather red above his collar, was sweating slightly as, with another bow, he motioned a seat to Belmuir. She stared at it contemptuously, preferring to remain standing where she could overshadow this menial.

  He cleared his throat, another bow. ‘Detective Sergeant Faro will take the details, Your Ladyship.’ Ignoring him, she swivelled round to face Faro, who took out a notebook, preparing to take down the details of when and how, etc.

  ‘Proceed, Faro, what are you waiting for?’ Gosse snapped, and with another bow, ‘This will not, I hope, delay Your Ladyship,’ he added with a gulp, for this was gentry in his office, almost royalty and an exquisite lady to boot. Here was a chance to prove his efficiency and, more than that, exert all his charisma on the female sex. What a chance! Imagination flashed a momentary glimpse of the future, of sitting at the dinner table by the side of this graceful, gorgeous creature. What woman could ever resist him, he decided, as he said:

  ‘I will be honoured, Your Ladyship, to take on this case for you and handle it personally.’