The Coffin Lane Murders (6 page)

'It must have been here for hundreds of years, there's some sort of inscription under the lichen,' he said triumphantly. Taking a knife, while they watched intrigued, he carefully scraped away the thick green encrustations to reveal a large but exact replica of Kate's brooch.

'The owl moons clasper!' gasped Kate.

'The very same, dear. What a strange coincidence,' said her mother-in-law.

Sir Hedley, called upon to express an opinion, merely grunted. 'Never seen it before,' he said shortly and went back indoors, showing a complete lack of interest in their activities.

Kate, however, was very excited by the stone's discovery, certain that it must be connected with the missing French gold sent to Scotland in 1745 to finance the Young Pretender's disastrous uprising.

As they crowded round the stone, one glance told Faro that it was much older than Kate's clasper. Even lacking an archaeologist's knowledge, he realised that the stone must have formed part of the Templars' Chapel which had preceded the present Tower, and had probably played some significant role in their mystic rituals.

Faro's observations did not please Kate. She gave him an angry glance, refusing to relinquish the romantic legend. Taking command of the situation she insisted that they dig a pit beneath the stone in search of the buried treasure.

'Think of it, what a find,' she said, clasping her hands and watching Conan and Vince hurling out spadesful of soil, ably directed and assisted by William Pursley and less enthusiastically by Faro.

Every time they stopped digging for lack of breath, or to ease aching backs, she leaned over excitedly, saying, 'Well, have you found something?' She was rewarded with a negative shake of the head, a groan and a sigh as more soil was flung out of the hole.

Watching them throw down their spades as darkness fell, Conan attempted to ameliorate his wife's disappointment at the broken dream of buried treasure with a promise to write to the Society of Antiquaries.

'I'll send them a drawing of the stone and the clasper. See if they know anything about its history.'

Faro sighed. This was not the first time he had encountered Charles Edward Stuart's missing French gold.

It had figured in an earlier case at Priorsfield when a skeleton, dug up in the gardens with a knife in its ribs, was assumed to be the missing Frenchman who had failed to reach his destination, the gold accounting for the sudden wealth of the owners of the then humble inn.

Faro had little faith in buried treasure. Mostly it turned out to be buried secrets best left unearthed, as he and Vince had found, more likely to destroy than enrich the inheritors.

Olivia was intrigued by Sir Hedley's lack of interest in such an exciting discovery.

'Why do they call him the Mad Bart?' she asked on the way home.

'It's just a local nickname,' said Vince.

'He seems harmless enough.' She sounded relieved. 'I mean, was he ever dangerous?'

Faro laughed. 'Not a bit. I understand he earned it from shouting abuse at passers-by, particularly royal carriages travelling along the road in front of the Tower, on what he regards as his property, en route from Holyrood Palace to Duddingston and beyond.'

'Maybe he's softened with age,' said Vince, 'but we have it on good authority that he used to rush out and shake his fist at them, shouting, "Hanoverian upstarts", "Go back to Germany", "German lairdies, the lot of you", and similar insults.'

Olivia giggled. 'How awful.'

'Particularly if you happened to be one of the outriders of Her Majesty's carriage,' said Faro. 'I will say for the Queen that she remains implacable, staring grimly in front, hopefully either too involved in admiring the scenery or stone deaf-'

'Or both!' said Vince.

' "Long live King Jamie, long live the Stuarts" were Sir Hedley's milder statements - it might be called disturbing the peace with treasonable conduct,' said Faro.

Solomon's Tower was and always had been a staunchly Jacobite stronghold from the days when Charles Edward Stuart visited it on his arrival in Edinburgh, dining with the then occupier and considering what to do next while his followers were somewhat more damply and inconveniently encamped outside.

The contemporary account read:

The detachment passed without being observed by the garrison of Edinburgh Castle, so near as to hear them distinctly call their rounds, and arrived at the nether bow Port without meeting anybody on their way, and found the Flodden Wall of the Town which flanks the Pleasants [sic] and St Mary's Wynd mounted with cannon but no person arrived.

Their demand for admission refused, Mr Murray [of Broughton] proposed to retire to a place called St Leonards hills [Arthur's Seat] and after securing themselves from the cannon of the Castle, to wait for orders from the Chevalier where to attack the town.

'It must have been a memorable occasion for the Prince staying in the Tower, if you are right about it having once been a Templars' Hospice,' said Olivia.

Faro nodded. 'As a building with a long and bad reputation, and the Prince known to be susceptible to omens, he must have been aware that this roof had often sheltered his thrice great-grandmother Queen Mary, and was her secret rendezvous with the Earl of Bothwell.'

'Indeed,' said Vince. 'They had both enjoyed its hospitality, and little good it had done either of them.'

'Or Scotland,' added Faro sadly. 'And Kate's brooch doesn't look like an ancient plaid pin to me.'

'It's just a replica,' said Olivia. 'She told me that the original was far too valuable historically and that it's kept in a glass case in Edinburgh Castle alongside a modest amount of jewellery and miniatures belonging to Queen Mary, including the rosary she wore going to her execution. Such sad relics,' she added.

Now as Kate stood on the front doorstep at Sheridan Place, she sighed. 'What a glorious moon. So beautiful.' She touched her brooch. 'The clasper likes moonlight, the silver glows even brighter somehow.'

Across her shoulder, Olivia grinned at Faro. Too practical to take such nonsense seriously, and knowing Kate's romantic story, she was much readier to accept Faro's theory.

'Allow me to escort you to the surgery,' he said.

She laughed. 'Thank you, you're very kind, but Conan's visiting his parents today. He's worried about his mother.'

A shadow touched her face as she realised the reason for Faro's offer. A woman had been murdered not a quarter of a mile from where they stood.

'Brent is always available for Kate and Conan,' Olivia reminded Faro gently. 'Ah, there he is now.'

They watched the carriage disappear around the corner. A wisp of a final wave from Kate then Olivia said, 'The snow does look quite magical. Moonlight changes everything, doesn't it?'

Gazing up at the sky, Faro sighed. It was a time of such beauty, whose obverse was danger and evil. The words from
Macbeth
leapt into his thoughts, conjured up from some deep-seated awareness that all was far from well: 'By the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes.' He was right to feel uneasy. Murder had been committed. But where there was murder, there had to be a solution. In his experience there were very few unsolved crimes.

Someone, somewhere, always held the vital clue. What could account for his sense of imminent disaster? Everything possible had been set in motion to track down the killer.

Police constables had been alerted to make discreet inquiries from neighbours and tradesmen around the region of Miss Errington's house and details of any suspicious circumstances or persons would be reported back to him.

Two days later he awoke to a hammering on his front door. He heard Mrs Brook's protesting voice and instinct told him that the call was urgent and that he was needed.

Jumping out of bed he stared over the banister into the agitated face of PC Dean looking up at him from the hall below.

'There's been another murder, sir. Another woman-'

'Where?' shouted Faro, already pulling on his clothes.

'Coffin Lane again, sir. Just a few yards from where we found the first one.'

Chapter 7

Five minutes later, Faro and Vince were in Coffin Lane.

As they stared down at the second victim, they were joined by Conan, whom PC Dean had met on his way to the surgery, returning from a difficult confinement.

Vince paused in his brief examination, looked up at them and shook his head. 'Stabbed in the chest. The wound proved fatal almost instantaneously.' He gestured towards the centre of the lane. 'I reckon he grabbed her - over there - stuck the knife in her and then dragged her body over here to the side of the road for concealment in a snowdrift. There hasn't been any more snow and there are smears of blood across the road.'

The snow was too hard-packed for anything as useful as footprints; there were just two faint indentations a short space apart which suggested the heels of some inert figure had been dragged towards the snowdrift.

'When did it happen?' Faro asked Vince as he completed his brief examination of the body.

'More than twelve hours ago. Say, eight o'clock last night - would you agree, Conan?'

'Almost certainly. The police surgeon will doubtless confirm that.'

The mortuary carriage arrived. The two doctors departed fearing that they had a line of patients in the waiting-room, leaving Faro to accompany the corpse.

With Jim Dean at his side he did his best to appease the constable's curiosity without giving too many indications of his present line of thought, or the serious and sensational indications of this new and gruesome discovery.

'Is this a random killing, sir? Do you think there's some connection between the two of them?'

'I have no idea, Constable,' said Faro honestly.

He went down into the police mortuary praying that this was not some unknown woman and that there would be a link between the two killings.

This time the victim looked slightly better off than Molly. Her clothes were a pathetic bundle lying on a trestle beside her, but they did not look like a servant's clothes: the navy blue serge costume was of good quality as were her hat and gloves.

There was no darned underwear or stockings. Although she had lain in the snowdrift all her linen looked fresh-laundered. There was a gold brooch and a wedding ring, a pair of fairly new boots and one patent shoe, which had presumably fallen out of the basket she was carrying.

He recalled Conan picking it up and looking round for the missing partner.

Dr Craig beamed at Faro. 'Same weapon as was used on the first victim, Inspector,' he said triumphantly. 'Could be the identical knife.'

That was one possible link, thought Faro hopefully, as he asked, 'Any identification?'

'Indeed yes. Here! This was in her outside pocket.'

Another letter, but this time addressed to Mrs Ida Simms in Briary Road, Glasgow.

Faro skimmed the contents. It was signed 'Yours affectionately, Mary Fittick' and the notepaper was headed 22 The Villas, Musselburgh.

It appeared that Mrs Ida Simms was coming on a long-awaited visit to her friend and for the first time, since there were precise directions from the railway station at Waverley to the Pleasance where she would take the train from St Leonards to Musselburgh.

'Fortunately for us, she didn't commit all these directions to memory,' he said.

But what had led her to continue her journey past the station to Coffin Lane?

He took a carriage to St Leonards where he was in luck. The Musselburgh train was just about to leave. He decided to interview Mrs Fittick and fully expected that she would reveal some link with her friend and the murder of Molly Blaith.

Staring out of the window at the snow piled by the side of the line on the single-track railway, he was suddenly hopeful.

Until the meeting with Mrs Fittick, he deliberately pushed to the back of his mind the idea that this was a random killing and that they had some kind of a maniac to deal with.

The snow was even worse in Musselburgh, the roads mere tracks of brown slush, but at last he found his way to The Villas where a plump, pleasant-looking woman in her mid-forties opened the door to him.

Her look of surprise changed to one of horror when he introduced himself, and producing the letter she had written to her friend, explained that Mrs Simms had met with a fatal accident.

'Oh, how awful. I can't believe it. Poor dear Ida. She's always so careful about everything. It's this terrible weather. She must have slipped and fallen-'

Alerted by her weeping, a younger version of the distraught woman rushed in and put a consoling arm around her.

'I'm Tina - her sister. What's all this about?'

As Mrs Fittick sobbed out that poor Ida was dead, Tina's angry, reproachful look in Faro's direction said quite pointedly that the whole thing was his fault.

These were the times he hated most, having to break such news to family or friends. He had never had the heart for it. It sickened him, although other detectives in his senior bracket had no such compunction about handing over this worst part of the whole sordid crime business to some unfortunate constable.