Killing Cousins (An Inspector Faro Mystery No.4)

by Alanna Knight

  Vince settled himself comfortably in the opposite armchair. 'Do you get an odd feeling that we might have dreamed the last few hours, Stepfather?'

  'I wish we had, Vince, since it now appears without much shadow of a doubt that we have two murders to consider.'

  'I've been thinking. And, since it is highly unlikely that Troller's death was for any motive of gain, the connection between the two deaths does seem rather far-fetched, don't you agree?'

  Faro did not reply. A moment later, he said, 'Francis Balfray - let us consider him, shall we?'

  'As far as he knows his wife died of natural causes ...'

  'Pneumonia as a result of chronic malnutrition occasioned by gastric disorders. Was that what you wrote on the death certificate?' Faro watched his stepson wince.

  'Not quite. Of pneumonia and heart failure brought about by the effects of a long debilitating disease.'

  'Who was with her at the end?'

  'Francis, Norma and myself.'

  Faro stared into the fire. 'And only Francis stood to gain by Thora's death?'

  'As I've told you, Stepfather. There are no other heirs.'

  'A pity, since they have been married for several years.'

  'Three to be precise. Presumably they still hoped for an heir, before Thora's illness.'

  'And if Francis should die, then, and only then, will all his wife's fortune go to her stepsister,' Faro repeated slowly.

  'I'm told that Norma and she were the last of their line, the last direct link with the Balfrays who had been on the island since the fourteenth century.'

  'What about heirs in that cadet branch of Gibb's?' Faro demanded.

  'You would have to ask Francis or the Captain the answer to that.'

  Faro rubbed his chin thoughtfully. 'I still want to know what made Francis choose the younger plainer sister.'

  'Thora had a very sweet nature, very loving and trusting.' Vince did not sound altogether convinced and Faro smiled.

  'I've seen her wedding photograph in the drawing-room. To be more practical than romantic, let us admit that her fortune was sweeter than her face. It's an old, old story, lad.'

  'We are being cynical and cruel,' said Vince. 'Poor Francis, I don't know how he is going to take the news of Thora's poisoning in his present condition, and to learn that we have a murderer in our midst.'

  Observing his stepfather's expression, he added in awed tones, 'You can't possibly suspect Francis?'

  Faro ignored the question. 'He was laird of Balfray, it was as good as his. He had achieved his great ambition, so why the devil didn't he marry Norma?'

  'From what I've told you already, and Grandma has confirmed it,' said Vince in tones of slight exasperation at his stepfather's persistence, 'Balfray estate is nothing but unpaid bills, and a vast upkeep which Norma is finding very hard to manage, even with the help, or hindrance, of Captain Gibb as factor.'

  'What makes you think he might be a hindrance?'

  'An old sea-dog, as he calls himself, can't be much of a hand with the pennies, do you think?'

  'That depends. I imagine that managing finances on a Navy ship would be in the hands of the purser, but if it was a merchantman...'

  'He calls himself Navy retired.'

  Faro's shrug was expressive and Vince continued, 'To get back to Francis, if you're hinting that he might have planned to marry Norma after getting rid of Thora and inheriting her fortune, I don't think that's feasible. And I doubt whether marriage with a deceased wife's sister is permissible in the Episcopalian Church.'

  Faro frowned. 'Norma Balfray's motive could have been a little more primitive, a festering human emotion.'

  'Jealousy, you mean. Highly improbable as she is going to marry John Erlandson.'

  Faro smiled grimly. 'And betrothals, as we have seen, can be broken. How did Francis react to their announcement?'

  'He was delighted. Erlandson was well received and, I gather, greatly welcomed by Francis as a future member of the family. As for Thora, she approved heartily of the match, happy for her stepsister who had found happiness at last—'

  'In spite of her own actions.'

  Vince ignored the interruption. 'Found happiness in such an unexpected quarter. Who could have guessed that the new minister would be attractive and eligible in every way as an eminently suitable husband for Miss Balfray?'

  Faro was silent as he poked the fire into bright embers. 'So only if Francis were to die now would Norma inherit Thora's fortune.' He looked across at his stepson. 'I think we shall have to watch Francis closely, very closely indeed.'

  'You think he might be in danger?' asked Vince in tones of alarm.

  Faro shrugged. 'Well, it seems that he has already been threatened. And the prankster with the cloak on the cliff path might be more successful next time.'

  With the rapidity that marked changes of weather in the islands, the mists and rain suddenly vanished to leave a sky innocent and benign, as if the presence of a single cloud had never threatened its vast and endless blue.

  Vince looked out of the window approvingly. 'The boat from Kirkwall is due in shortly. Francis' dispensary is alarmingly run down and while he is temporarily out of action, I should hate to have to deal with some emergency.'

  'I should come with you and visit the Procurator Fiscal,' said Faro with a certain lack of enthusiasm.

  Vince smiled. Looks deceived and despite Faro's impressive Viking bearing and island ancestry, he had a regrettable tendency to seasickness, especially when faced with small boats on large seas.

  'I shouldn't advise it. Sergeant Frith won't thank you for pulling rank on him.'

  Faro looked suitably contrite. 'Would you do something else for me? Go into the newspaper office and ask them if they can oblige with any reports of mysterious accidents, drownings and so forth, over the last year.'

  Vince gave him a puzzled look.

  'It's just a hunch, lad. There may be a connecting link somewhere else in the islands. A pattern which will give us some clues.'

  Sitting at the window he began what he called his dramatis personae of Balfray Island, pausing to wave to Vince and Mrs Faro walking down the drive together. The presence of a laden basket on his mother's arm betokened a visit to one of her many waifs and strays.

  As he wrote each name he pondered which, however innocently, might be in possession of some thread that led through the labyrinth. To the list, he added one more name: 'Mrs Bliss?' Was he investigating two murders - or could it be three? What if Mrs Bliss's unfortunate drowning had not been an accident, but the one that had begun it all?

  Throwing down his pen and guessing that his mother might be absent for some time, he decided this was an excellent chance to visit the kitchen and talk to the maid Annie.

  At that moment the door opened to admit a uniformed maid, with an island woman's rosy cheeks and ample girth.

  'Sorry, sir, I thought you were out.' She indicated the bucket she carried. 'Missus told me I was to be sure and put more peats on your fire.'

  Missus could only be his mother and Faro smiled. 'You must be Annie?' A nod indicated that this was so. 'I understand from Mrs Faro that you are a great help to her, that she would be quite lost without you.'

  Annie beamed. 'Missus is very kind to everyone. I expect it's because she's one of us.' And with an apologetic look added, 'Belongs to the islands, I mean, so she knows all our peedie ways.'

  'Have you been at the castle long?'

  'Going on ten years, sir.'

  'You must have seen a lot of changes then?'

  'Oh yes, sir. I was here when Sir Joseph was alive, Miss Balfray's father.'

  'Miss Balfray?' Faro frowned innocently. 'That would be before she married Dr Francis?'

  'Oh no, sir, you've got it wrong. Not her that is gone - her stepsister, Miss Norma Balfray, although we all thought once that it was her Dr Francis was to marry...'

  And Faro found himself listening to a tale he knew well already and which lost nothing of its domestic drama in
the telling, of Dr Balfray's surprising change of heart. Such goings-on had obviously been a matter of eager gossip and speculation in the kitchen.

  'You don't seem to have many servants,' he interposed at last. 'How do you manage?'

  'Oh fine, sir. There's not all that much work unless we have guests. When her that has gone, God rest her, was taken ill, there was no more entertaining at the castle.'

  She stopped and looked at him earnestly. 'We all help each other out, you see. If help is needed in the house, we can always get someone in from the village.'

  'How do the bachelor gentlemen manage?'

  'You mean the minister and Captain Gibb?'

  'Yes, do they have servants of their own?'

  Annie shook her head. 'Not living in. The Captain said he had no call for a woman about the house. He was used to doing for himself on his ship.' She smiled. 'A typical old sailor, the Captain. As for Reverend Erlandson, my cousin Bessie, who cleans the church, cooks his meals and keeps the rectory tidy. I dare say when he and Miss Balfray marry there'll be a different arrangement then.'

  'A housekeeper, perhaps?'

  Annie frowned. 'Housekeepers are hard to keep on Balfray, sir, as Missus may have told you.'

  'Because of Mrs Bliss's unfortunate accident, perhaps?'

  Annie shuffled her feet and regarded them solemnly, searching for the right words, he thought.

  'She wasn't one of us, sir, she didn't know the island ways. She never realised how we all rely on each other. Sometimes she was, well, selfish, thoughtless.'

  Annie permitted herself a grim smile. 'She liked going into Kirkwall and meeting people. She did like the gentlemen,' she added delicately and then closed her mouth firmly in the manner of one who has already said too much.

  Faro was saved from further probing by the entrance of Miss Balfray. 'I thought I heard your voice, Annie, gossiping again. Oh, Mr Faro, I didn't realise.'

  As Annie scuttled out with a brief curtsy, Norma Balfray said, 'I hope everyone is looking after you. We are, I'm afraid, a little short on hospitality at this particular time.'

  As he assured her of his well-being, he was conscious of the intensity of her gaze. For once he found himself at a disadvantage, searching for the kind of conversation that usually came so easily to him.

  Next morning, the real motive behind Norma's most pressing concern regarding his presence at Balfray still troubled him as, beguiled by the sunshine, he walked briskly towards the cliff path.

  With a feeling that all his senses were sharpened by this brilliant light and a gleaming sea, he was not without hope of perhaps stumbling upon some small clue that they had previously overlooked.

  However, as he walked towards the sea wood he found that he was not alone. A girl emerged from one of the paths.

  No, not a girl. It was Inga St Ola.

  Chapter Nine

  'May I walk with you? I feel a need to escape too on such a lovely morning,' Inga added sympathetically.

  It wasn't quite what Faro had intended. They walked in a silence he found both companionable and oddly comforting while he considered what useful information he might extract regarding Balfray and its occupants.

  Suddenly Inga said, 'I expect you've heard about Saul Hoy?'

  When he shook his head innocently, she smiled. 'Come along, Jeremy. It's common talk - I'm the speak of Balfray, as they say in these parts, living all these years with a bachelor who is not my husband.'

  She sighed. 'Saul's a good man, and I expect I would have married him, if he hadn't turned out to be my half-brother.'

  Faro wondered why he felt so pleased when she added, 'We've been very happy in our brother-sister relationship. Living with Saul has protected me from occasional outbursts - when a cow dies, or someone fancies she is being overlooked by a selkie, sometimes they've come to do me violence ...'

  She stopped, her eyes narrowing suddenly, as if reliving such incidents with painful clarity. 'But when they find they have Saul to deal with, it's a different story. Having a protector can be very useful, as I've discovered.'

  'I gather your Saul Hoy was devoted to his younger brother too.'

  'He was. But as for poor Troller, no one else existed in his world except Thora Balfray. It's sad that he died, but I think his life was over the very day she breathed her last.'

  'His death was very strange, bizarre even. You must have known him better than most. Have you any theories of your own as to what happened?'

  Inga shrugged. 'Only what Frith said. Poor Troller set off with some insane idea that he could bring his beloved Mrs Balfray back to life. On the way in the dark he lost his balance, took a tumble down the cliff. He climbed up again, put Thora on the Odin Stone but when its magical powers didn't take effect, well, he decided to end it all.'

  'How?' demanded Faro sharply. 'By what means? You're not presuming that his injuries were enough to kill him?'

  She looked at him, as if bewildered by the question. 'Perhaps, perhaps not. In his distraught condition, he might have helped matters along, taken poison, always accessible to a handyman on the estate.'

  'You mean, he had it with him, just in case? What sort of poison had you in mind?'

  'Oh for heaven's sake, Jeremy,' she said irritably. 'I don't know.' Then, mollified by his expression, she added, 'Probably arsenic, there's plenty of it about.'

  'Is there indeed? Where do they buy it?'

  'Kirkwall, and Stromness too, I believe.'

  'Are we to presume they also sign the poisons register?'

  Inga shook her head, laughing. 'You may presume what you like, my dear Inspector Faro, but I don't think anyone sets much store on signing registers here. It's not as if it was being asked for by strangers, just the local folk, known to all the shopkeepers as having trouble with vermin and the like.'

  'Interesting.'

  She gave him a hard look before continuing, 'Everyone here uses arsenic at some time or other. Killing rats or on flypapers - flies are cruel in the summer.' In a gesture that was becoming endearingly familiar, she pushed back her hair from her forehead. 'Why is it so important, Jeremy?' she added softly.

  He could not risk telling her that Troller had been murdered, as had Thora. Ignoring the question, he said, 'My mother tells me you've been indispensable these last few weeks.'

  Inga looked pleased. 'And so has she. Absolute marvel. The way she stepped into poor Mrs Bliss's shoes.'

  Taking her arm, he led her down the steep and winding path that led to the shore, a wide expanse of empty beach broken by occasional large rock formations. The tide was out and rock pools gleamed full of coloured stones and red sea-anemones.

  Once Inga stopped and climbed across a tiny wall of ancient stones. 'Do you realise that this was once the foundation of someone's house? Long, long ago. Who they were and where they went has been washed away, lost for ever under the sea.'

  She indicated a place beside her on a large flat stone and together they contemplated the vast loneliness of the scene, the great stretch of shell sand uninterrupted into the far distance where the lighthouse was the only habitation.

  Above their heads the sky was strangely empty of seabirds, the seals having temporarily deserted their rocks. Now only a few sheep grazed among the seaweed left by the tide.

  'You'll find this hard to believe, Jeremy, but had you sat here even six months ago, the scene would have been quite different.'

  'Indeed? It looks to me as if it's been here since the beginning of time.'

  Inga shook her head. 'Not so. The sea is so strong, it moves sand and shingle with such rapidity and in such a short time that the miles of shoreline are completely altered and every year landmarks, huge stones that have been used for years and years as anchorage for boats, completely vanish almost overnight. Landmarks long forgotten just as suddenly reappear from under the sea, like this house wall we're sitting on.'

  'Remarkable.'

  'Remarkable it is. It gives living on a small island a feeling of impermanence. Once this pl
ace must have teemed with life, Jeremy. But we are at the mercy of the sea and we must never forget it. We are constantly reminded that we must honour and do reverence to the sea and fear it. Never, never take it for granted,' she added solemnly.

  Faro looked at the stretch of sand before them and lit his pipe, smiling at her as he did so. 'I take it we are safe enough here for a few moments.'

  There was no answering smile. 'As long as you know the tide times, yes. But never come here at floodtide.'

  'Like the unfortunate housekeeper?'

  'Poor Mrs Bliss,' she sighed.

  'What happened exactly?' Faro asked innocently, curious to hear Inga's version of the accident, which turned out to be exactly what he had heard already. With one addition.

  'I was the one who found her,' said Inga. 'It was horrible. I sometimes come down to collect special specimens of seaweed, for some of my herbal remedies,' she explained. 'And there she was, lying at the tide edge.' She shuddered. 'I knew at once that she was dead, still clinging to poor peedie Waifie.'

  'Waifie?'

  'Yes, her dog...that had caused it all.'

  'Had she been missing long?'

  'She'd been away from the castle overnight, we learned afterwards.'

  'Had no one thought of searching for her?'

  'They didn't know she had gone out after the dog until John Erlandson said he'd heard her shouting its name and asked him if he'd seen it And we didn't know that until afterwards.'

  Inga stopped speaking for a moment 'It was very near here, where I found her. Poor Mrs Bliss. If only someone had realised when she didn't go back to the castle.'

  'Wasn't anyone at all concerned enough to look for her when she didn't appear that evening?'

  Inga shook her head. 'No. I gather she was a law unto herself, her own boss. Made her own rules did Mrs Bliss. Used to vanish into Kirkwall or even further afield. So Annie, who was left in charge, told everyone later. It all came out then, how she neglected her duties, but, knowing how hard it is to get a reliable housekeeper on an island the size of Balfray, I expect she felt free to take liberties.'

  Faro made sympathetic noises. 'What sort of a woman was she?'