Deadly Beloved (An Inspector Faro Mystery No.3)

by Alanna Knight

  Deadly Beloved

  An Inspector Faro Mystery

  by

  Alanna Knight

  ALANNA KNIGHT has written more than fifty novels, (including fifteen in the successful Inspector Faro series), four works of non-fiction, numerous short stories and two plays since the publication of her first book in 1969. Born and educated in Tyneside, she now lives in Edinburgh. She is a founding member of the Scottish Association of Writers and Honorary President of the Edinburgh Writers' Club.

  I've travelled the world twice over,

  Met the famous: saints and sinners,

  Poets and artists, kings and queens,

  Old stars and hopeful beginners,

  I've been where no-one's been before,

  Learned secrets from writers and cooks

  All with one library ticket

  To the wonderful world of books.

  (c) JANICE JAMES.

  DEADLY BELOVED

  Inspector Faro of the Edinburgh police is puzzled to be invited to dinner at the house of the city's foremost police surgeon. Then the police surgeon's wife is reported missing, and a woman's torn and bloodstained cloak is found, but neither body nor real proof is present. As revelations regarding the the woman's home life become more sinister and bizarre. Faro is convinced she is dead, and who has better opportunity for disposing the corpse of an unwanted wife than a police surgeon?

  Chapter 1

  Two weeks after the police surgeon's wife vanished on a train journey from Edinburgh to North Berwick, when all enquiries discreet but exhaustive had failed, the first grim evidence appeared. A bloodstained fur cloak and kitchen carving knife, discovered in the melting snow near the railway line at Longniddry Station, were ominous indications that the case could no longer be regarded as a 'missing persons' enquiry.

  Who could have imagined a furore over the burnt roast at a dinner party as prelude to another sordid domestic crime?

  Such were Detective Inspector Jeremy Faro's thoughts as he painstakingly sifted through memory's tedious details of the evening's events.

  Aware from long experience that the first place one searched for a motive to murder was within the victim's family circle, he concluded that it had been a very dull party indeed. Until Mrs Eveline Shaw went to the piano and played the Beethoven Appassionata. Up to that moment boredom, rather than the very modest amount of indifferent wine served at the police surgeon's table, was responsible for the blunting of Faro's normally keen powers of observation.

  Once upon a time he had believed that mayhem and murder, his daily round and common task with the Edinburgh City Police, were confined to the criminal world. Now he knew that the miasma of molten corruption, seething from grim wynds and tall 'lands' under the Castle's ancient shadow, could no longer be confined to those wretches who stole and stabbed and procured and perverted.

  In recent times crime stalked the respectable New Town, like some ghastly retribution by the ghosts of all those he had hunted down and brought to justice. Now it seemed that their evil shades threatened to roost in the circle of his own family and friends. He would have hesitated to include Dr Melville Kellar in the category of personal friend, but here was a crime brushing uneasily close to 9 Sheridan Place and his own hearth. His stepson Dr Vincent Beaumarcher Laurie was the police surgeon's assistant and the confidant of the missing woman.

  Without having the least pretentions to medical diagnosis, Faro had recognised for several weeks before the event that his stepson was suffering from a malady of the heart. Secretive, vague and preoccupied, Vince was displaying all the symptoms of romantic involvement. Faro wondered if the sudden decision to take a short holiday with his doctor friend Walter in the Austrian asylum for consumptives was a sensible retreat, a prudent flight into neutral territory that would give him time to get his emotions into the right perspective.

  It was not, however, until after Vince's return from Vienna and Faro's disclosures concerning the missing woman, that he learned with surprise and misgiving that the object of his stepson's affection was Mabel Kellar.

  Vince's face had paled as he listened. "I can't believe this, Stepfather.You must be mistaken. Couldn't she have had an accident? Lost her memory?"

  "That was our first thought, lad." "You've tried the hospitals?" "Aye, and the workhouses too." "I visited her the morning after the dinner Party, to say goodbye before I went on holiday," Vince whispered in awed tones. "She was preparing to leave, to visit her sister in North Berwick. It's dreadful, dreadful. Unbelievable."

  Faro poured a large whisky and handed it to his stepson. "Drink this and when you're feeling calmer, we'll talk about it."

  "Calmer? Oh dear God! Who would want to harm her? She was one of the sweetest, kindest creatures on this earth. I loved her, yes, loved her, Stepfather," he added defiantly. "I would have died for her."

  Faro said nothing, inclined to dismiss his stepson's infatuation for what it was: the inevitable attraction to a mother figure. Mabel Kellar was older than his own mother, Lizzie Faro, would have been and Vince, determined to avoid matrimony at all costs, had chosen yet another love where no lasting commitment was possible.

  "She had no enemies. Everyone who knew her loved her," said Vince.

  The evidence, thought Faro grimly, suggested that someone had hated her. Hated her enough to destroy her.

  Later Vince gave Faro an account of that last visit.

  "Thinking about it now, I realise that she was considerably agitated. Very upset. There had been yet another unholy row with Kellar after the guests departed. Serious enough for her to be seeking refuge with her sister. Actually leaving her husband, as he rightly deserves. She should have done so long ago, if she hadn't slavishly adored him."

  "What was this row about? Did she tell you?"

  "She spared me the exact details, hinted at a very unpleasant post-mortem on the culinary disasters of the dinner. Kellar blamed her entirely for her unfortunate choice of housekeeper. I offered to escort her to the railway station as I was catching a train there myself, but she refused. She wasn't quite ready to leave. Packing to complete, instructions to leave and so forth. Oh dear God — I can't ..." And Vince, covering his face, began to sob.

  Faro put a compassionate hand on his shoulder. "There, there, lad." He felt the words were inadequate to deal with his stepson's unrequited passion, since Mabel Kellar had adored only her husband.

  Melville Kellar occupied a position of authority with the Edinburgh City Police. He was highly respected and esteemed, although Vince's daily grumblings painted a picture of a harsh disciplinarian, bigoted and intolerant of human error and inefficiency. Pompous and overbearing, Dr Kellar emerged as utterly callous in his dealings with medical students. Perhaps in order to sleep well at nights, the police surgeon had of necessity retreated into a remote unfeeling shell, a refuge denied Faro, aware that even if he was spared to serve with the City Police for another twenty years, he would never become accustomed to scenes of bloody murder, or be unmoved at a life hideously snuffed out by sudden violent death.

  "Kellar could give his dissecting knives lessons in sharpness," the students who endured his sarcasm were wont to say. And not only students, thought Faro. The honest peeler walking the beat and the hard-working underpaid domestic within the Kellar kitchen existed on a separate plane. They belonged to a sub-species he never cared to let his eyes dwell upon or acknowledge as fellow human beings with the same capacity for joy and suffering as himself. There was a rumour that, in common with Royalty, Dr Kellar expected domestics to stay out of sight unless summoned to appear.

  "If he comes face-to-face with a servant going about her duties, he'l
l dismiss her on the spot. What do you think of that, Stepfather?"

  "If it's true, it's incredible."

  Prior to the dinner party, Faro's encounters with Kellar had been limited to the police mortuary, where his first impression had been of a man slightly below middle height with piercing blue eyes, who made up for his lack of stature with a biting tongue and a high opinion of his own lofty intellectual stature.

  In Kellar's eyes, even senior detectives were mindless fools.

  Faro still recalled uncomfortably the occasion when he had ventured an opinion about the cause of a victim's death at a post-mortem.

  Kellar had rounded upon him, eyes flashing, brows lowered like a charging bull.

  "Are you questioning my findings, sir? Are you insinuating from your somewhat meagre education in forensic matters that you are more capable of an effective diagnosis in this case ..."

  Faro had wilted beneath that volley of invective. As it turned out, his theory was proved correct and Kellar was quick to bask in all the praise without the slightest qualm of conscience. Apology never occurred to him or acknowledgement of the Detective Inspector's shrewd observations which had led to the capture and subsequent sentencing of the murderer.

  Faro shrugged such incidents aside, realising how they could influence his own judgement. In his profession, prejudice could be fatal to the fair-mindedness that was the very essence of justice.

  To be entirely fair, the gruesome daily round at the mortuary presented the surgeon in a very different guise to the host in full evening dress, presiding over the dinner table.

  Faro was at once struck by Kellar's commanding appearance which might well have awed his medical students, who would not necessarily have noticed that their tormentor was good-looking in a silver-haired distinguished way, allying the chilly classical features of a marble Greek god with a smile that was charm itself.

  His smiles that evening, however, were as rare as his replenishment of the guests' wine glasses, too long empty for politeness and indicating that rumour was true. Kellar was tight-fisted and his wife down-trodden and pathetic.

  "A somewhat ill-assorted pair, didn't you think?" he asked Vince.

  "I know what you're thinking," was the defensive reply.

  "Mabel was an heiress and he had married her for her money."

  Faro shrugged. Handsome men often married plain wives. And Mabel Kellar's exterior did indeed hide a heart of gold, if appearances were anything to go by. He had been touched by her devotion to her protegée, Mrs Shaw, that young and beautiful woman scarce past girlhood.

  After lighting a pipe. Faro poured himself a dram and when Mrs Brook had cleared the supper table, he found his concentration wandering from the police report on a fraud case he had recently successfully brought to justice.

  One thought persisted, refusing to be ignored. He had the gift, not always a happy one, of being able to put himself squarely in other men's shoes. In Dr Kellar's case, had his wife gone missing then surely the first places he would have searched, after hammering anxiously on the doors of close friends and relations, were the hospitals.

  There was always the possibility in view of the damning evidence that she had been attacked on the train and flung out of the carriage. There were also several other alarming possibilities which suggested that if she was still alive she might be very seriously injured. As police surgeon, Kellar enjoyed a unique advantage in having easy access to discreet perusal of hospital admissions and a look into their wards if necessary.

  And yet he had failed to do so.Why? And Faro's thoughts returned again to the events of the Kellars' last dinner party. In a pattern that was familiar after twenty years of fighting crime, he found himself meticulously examining every detail of that evening, searching for the first clue into the labyrinth, imagining his host in the role of potential wife-murderer.

  Only two weeks ago . . .

  Chapter 2

  Dr Kellar and his wife lived in a handsome mansion in the Grange, in the recently developed south side of Edinburgh. Built at the beginning of Victoria's reign, strenuous efforts had been made to make it look considerably older. Nothing had been spared in medieval turrets, Gothic flourishes of gargoyles and even hints at a drawbridge and studded door.

  As an architectural purist, a stickler for the clean lines and uncomplicated plans of the Georgian era. Faro dismissed the result as yet another nightmare in domestic architecture.

  "Have you ever noticed," he asked Vince, as the hired carriage bounded down the drive, its myriad twists and turns designed to establish in the minds of arriving guests an illusion of parkland and a rich man's estate. "Have you ever noticed," he repeated, "how often houses resemble their owners?"

  Vince laughed. "Never. Aren't you confusing your similes? I thought that particular one referred to dogs and pets only. Come, Stepfather, not so glum. You'll enjoy meeting Mabel Kellar. And I'm sure there'll be excellent food and wine, and grand company too."

  The first snowflakes were falling as they pressed the bell a second time. Faro, dragging up his greatcoat collar, tapped his foot impatiently. "What on earth can be keeping them? One would imagine an army of servants lurking about such an establishment."

  He was to discover that servants were almost non-existent at the best of times, Dr Kellar's excuse being that he couldn't abide such creatures and more than an absolute minimum posed a dire threat to his privacy.

  At last the door was opened by the housekeeper, her flour-covered hands explaining the delay. A lady of ample proportions in starched apron and large white cap over untidy wisps of grey hair, her chin was swathed in a large muffler.

  "Come in. Missus will be with you in a wee minute," she whispered hoarsely and indicated the staircase. "You'll find master up there, drawing-room, first door left."

  At that moment, Dr Kellar appeared on the landing. "Is that Flynn down there?"

  The housekeeper with a nervous hand adjusted her spectacles and bobbed a curtsey. "Yes, sir."

  "Your place is below stairs, Flynn. Where is your mistress?"

  "In the kitchen, sir."

  "I want her here — at once. Does she not know the guests have arrived?" And for the two visitors staring up at him with some embarrassment, he summoned a wintry smile. "Come away, gentlemen. Come away."

  After they climbed the stairs, he greeted them with an apology. "My wife employs local domestics and allows them home at the weekend."

  This indulgence was not, as it appeared, out of kindness, Vince told Faro later, but because Kellar's chronic meanness made him suspect servants of stealing food and so forth. Most men in his position would keep a resident coachman, too, but the luxury of board and meagre lodgings was the sole perquisite of the housekeeper.

  As for the excellent company, Vince had been sadly mistaken and Faro was dismayed to discover their fellow guests were Superintendent McIntosh of the Edinburgh City Police and his waspish wife, known irreverently in the Central Office as The Tartar.

  Faro suppressed a sigh. He had few off duty hours, especially as criminals took full advantage of the possibilities offered by long dark winter nights. He had no desire to spend one of his precious free evenings in the company of his superior, a man he found opinionated and tiresome at the best of times. McIntosh's acknowledgement, briefer than courtesy prescribed, spoke volumes on his own astonishment and displeasure at seeing Inspector Faro.

  As Kellar ushered them into the drawing-room, Faro observed, sitting at the grand piano, an extremely pretty young woman in deep mourning. Since Kellar did not deign to introduce her, Faro presumed that this was a poor relative, recently widowed, and doubtless regarded by the doctor as just one more mouth to feed.

  The atmosphere was less than cordial and Faro was heartily glad when the distant doorbell announced another arrival. A few moments later Mrs Kellar ushered in Sir Hedley Marsh.

  Known in the Newington district as the Mad Bart, he was the last person Faro and Vince expected to encounter at the lofty police surgeon's dining-ta
ble. Their exchange of puzzled glances was a wordless comment on this odd company of dinner guests. How had the hermit of Solomon's Tower been lured away from his army of cats?

  Faro looked sharply at his hostess. Since it was well known that Sir Hedley despised and avoided all human contact, perhaps Mrs Kellar did have extraordinary powers of attraction, not evident at first glance. Despite Vince's commendations, he was to remember no lasting impression when it was vital to do so. He recalled a plain woman, tall and thin with dark hair pulled tightly back from indeterminate features. What colour were her eyes, was her nose short or long, her face round or oval?

  Faro shook his head. Even details of the elaborate velvet gown had vanished. Was it blue or green? The colour was unimportant for it served only to emphasise her lack of style, while her fingernails testified to her agitation, bearing traces of her recent domestic activity in the kitchen.

  Another surprise was still to come, for the Mad Bart had been introduced as: "My dear Uncle Hedley."

  As they shook hands Faro decided that although Sir Hedley's dress was correct for the occasion, albeit a little out of date, he had not escaped completely from his cats after all. He had, at close quarters, brought their ripe odours with him.

  "I believe you two know each other already," said Mrs Kellar.

  "We do. Inspector and I are near neighbours. How d'ye do?"

  Mrs Kellar smiled. "And I might add, Inspector, you are the chief reason for Uncle Hedley accepting our invitation."

  Sir Hedley grinned sheepishly. "Like good conversation. See you often passing by. Haven't chatted since you took one of my kits. Big fella now?"

  "Yes, indeed."

  Sir Hedley nodded vigorously. "Gave him a name, I hope."

  "Rusty."

  "Rusty, eh. Like it. Like it. Good mouser?"