‘Hippolyta,’ he said, ‘why are you so determined to become involved in this? Is it – could it possibly be because you think that I am guilty?’
She stared at him. His voice had faded towards the end of his question, as if he feared the answer. He still stared at her, but now his expression was softer, almost pleading. She forgot her fears, and pulled herself quickly across to touch his knee.
‘Of course I don’t,’ she said firmly. But she could not help adding, ‘Not of murder, certainly.’
‘Are you sure?’ His hand hovered near to hers, but not quite touching it.
‘How could you think I do?’ she demanded. ‘I know you were out that night, but why on earth would you kill Colonel Verney? He was your friend, almost your patron, I thought. And Forman … he was nice. He loved his cats.’ She tailed away, watching him: he did not seem convinced by her assertion. ‘Why on earth do you think I think you killed them?’
‘Well, Miss Verney told me …’ he began, then looked directly at her. ‘Miss Verney told me that you had confided in her that you were very much afraid I had killed her uncle,’ he said at last.
‘I never did!’ Hippolyta reeled back on to her heels.
‘She also told me that you were growing very fond of Dod Durris,’ said Patrick, his face reddening. ‘You do seem very easy in his company.’
‘He’s an intelligent man – and I’m trying to convince him that you – my husband - are innocent of the murders.’ She glared at him. ‘It’s ridiculous. How could you believe her?’
‘Well, I’ve known her for more than two years,’ said Patrick, ‘and she’s always been perfectly honest. Why should I suddenly think that she was lying?’
‘Because I’m your wife! I’m the one you’re supposed to believe!’ Even as she said it she thought it sounded childish, but she had gone this far. ‘I suppose you have always preferred her to me? I wonder you did not marry her.’
‘Prefer Miss Verney? Of course I don’t!’ He frowned, surprised if anything. ‘We have always enjoyed the same music, as you know: she is a fine musician. But I have never wanted anything more than that from her.’
Hippolyta stared into his eyes, thinking.
‘I suspect she wanted something more than that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see it at first, but that’s what it is. She must have wanted you before, but you went and married me instead … She’s nowhere near as nice as I thought she was,’ she finished sadly.
‘I suspect several of us are thinking that – including her cousin,’ said Patrick. ‘She seems to have led him up the garden path, too.’
‘Well, I think so.’ Hippolyta followed that line of thought for a moment. Even if Julian Brown had an alibi for the night of the murder, Basilia Verney did not. Was she the person Hippolyta should be investigating? Or did she just want to think that because she no longer liked her? ‘Dearest, do you promise me you have never entertained any thoughts about Miss Verney?’
‘I promise you, my dear,’ said Patrick, and he reached out to touch her cheek. ‘She could be the most wonderful musician in the world, and I should still prefer you – particularly if she has lied to me.’
‘If what you say she said is true, she has lied to you,’ Hippolyta confirmed, and it felt as if her heart were growing strong within her. ‘I never told her, or anyone, that I was afraid you had murdered anyone, and I have not grown fond of Mr. Durris, I promise you.’
The next few moments were taken up with the kind of embrace that ought to follow a young couple’s first quarrel, and few words of any sense were exchanged. Eventually, Hippolyta sighed a happier sigh than she had for days.
‘Do you think she murdered her uncle?’ she asked.
‘Surely not!’ said Patrick. ‘She may be a liar and a manipulative one, but I cannot believe she is a murderer. But one thing is certain: I look forward to the moment she moves out of this house, for she seems to have been nothing but trouble since she appeared.’
‘I am sorry, my dear.’ Hippolyta was contrite. ‘I should not have asked her to stay with us.’
‘Not at all,’ said Patrick, ‘you could do no other: and I have come to realise in our short time together that, if nothing else, you are the most determined hostess I have ever met. Since you came I have had to share my home not only with my new wife and servants, but with a bereaved murder suspect who sleepwalks, her maid, a sick coachman who might or might not have been a thief, and seven white cats!’
‘Oh!’ said Hippolyta. ‘When you put it like that …’
‘Never mind! The cats, at least, are mostly delightful.’ He lifted the candle and showed her three of them, curled up cosily on his desk chair in the shadowy room. ‘Now, I think it is time you and I went back to bed.’
Hippolyta allowed him to help her up, then twisted her fingers together, eyeing the lantern where it still sat lit on the bookcase.
‘What?’ he asked, with amused wariness.
‘I suppose you’ll never let me go and break into Mr. Strachan’s shop cellar now,’ she said in as small a voice as she could manage. Patrick gave a brief laugh.
‘Oh, my, you’re serious!’ He raised the candle to look into her face. He thought for a moment. ‘My dear, I cannot let you go out about the town at night on your own. It is neither respectable nor, in the current climate at any rate, safe.’
‘I know,’ she whispered, disappointed.
‘But if you will allow me to come with you – as your junior accomplice, of course …’
She looked up. His face was straight, but his eyes were laughing.
‘You’d come?’
‘I’ll come,’ he said. ‘But please: think of my medical practice. Let us try our level best not to be caught!’
‘Let us hope,’ Patrick whispered as they skirted the green, fearing to cross the exposed space, ‘that the night watchman does not take us up as a courting couple up to no good, and bring us before the Kirk Session!’
‘That would be distinctly embarrassing, on several counts,’ Hippolyta agreed, and felt an awful giggle rise from somewhere in her stomach. She clutched his hand but pinched her ear hard with her other hand, hoping to use the pain to quell the hysteria. It almost worked.
‘We should sneak out together in the dark more often,’ Patrick went on, apparently oblivious to her struggles. ‘It reminds me of the old days of our wooing, though then we were permitting to go no further than the end of the terrace after dark, as I remember.’
‘We’re a little further than that now!’ She squeezed his hand, then nodded across the street. ‘But besides that – we’re here.’ Something about the dark bulk of the shop front above them sobered her, and she swallowed quietly. ‘Do you think Mr. Strachan has a boy sleep in the shop overnight?’
‘I shouldn’t think so: this is not Edinburgh or Glasgow,’ said Patrick confidently. ‘Though I suppose it would be a useful alarm against fire … And there are so many strangers here in town these days, and they would know his shop well. Perhaps he has taken some precautions.’
‘You are very reassuring, dear,’ said Hippolyta solemnly.
‘Well, we shall have to find out,’ said Patrick, rather less confidently. He grasped her hand a little more tightly, nodded at the entrance to the lane down the side of the shop, and with a glance about for any movement in the vicinity, crossed the street, Hippolyta nimble in his wake.
The lane was very dark, and between them they tried to conceal the lantern light from anyone passing by or looking down on the street, while still making use of it to avoid anything unsavoury underfoot. In a moment, however, they emerged into a generous yard, with the shop building behind them, a kailyard on one side and what looked like the back of a privy on the other. Beyond was a long patch of open ground, the nature of which they could not quite determine in the dark. Turning their backs on it, they examined the back of the shop. There was space enough there to turn a middle-sized cart and horse, a back door to give access to it, three shuttered windows on the floor above, a
nd at their feet, as Hippolyta had hoped, a rough wooden hatch with a looped iron handle, leading, inevitably, to the cellar. She had been right: the cellar door seemed much less sturdy and secure than the back door.
It seemed so, but as it turned out, the cellar hatch was very tightly fastened. Patrick pushed and pulled at the iron loop, but the hatch moved only very slightly, making it clear that it was barred on the inside.
‘I suppose it has to be,’ he said in a low voice. ‘He’ll have wines and spirits and teas and coffees down there: he wouldn’t want just anyone walking off with them.’
‘Wretched man,’ Hippolyta muttered. She stamped very quietly on the hatch, just to show it how she felt about it. ‘I suppose the back door is just as bad.’ She stepped carefully around the hatch, and climbed the narrow step up to the back door. There was a latch, and she tried it, gently working it so that it would not rattle. The door swung open, so suddenly she almost fell off the step.
‘Oh!’ she squeaked. It sounded tremendously loud, and they both froze, and listened. The shop was silent, and no sound came from the houses on either side. They slipped in through the door, and eased it closed behind them. They were in.
What they were in was a little hallway, the width of the door and not much longer. There was a door ahead of them, and one to their right. Both were closed.
Patrick was holding the lantern, so Hippolyta tried the door ahead of them. It opened easily too, and they found themselves in a little business room, with a shuttered window almost behind them facing the back of the building. Shelves lined one wall, and on one of them was a series of tall, cloth-bound volumes of a healthy width, all with dates on the spine.
‘Ledgers?’ Hippolyta whispered.
‘I’d say so. Lots of them, though.’
They moved more closely, and studied the volumes carefully. Some were indeed ledgers: others had handwritten words on the spines: ‘Day book’; ‘Stock book’; ‘Correspondence’. All were well-worn, and when Hippolyta lifted one or two down they did indeed contain what they should contain. Mr. Strachan was clearly an organised businessman.
‘See: deliveries from Aberdeen,’ Hippolyta pointed her finger at a page in the stock book from the previous week. The list included fish of various kinds, some cutlery, Belfast and Dutch linen, rum, wine, and three kinds of tea, one of particularly fine quality. The price of the bulk items was listed beside each one, as well as the price per pound, or per yard, or per piece, which Strachan evidently intended to charge for it. His profits were not perilously low.
‘Come on, I thought you wanted to look at the cellar,’ said Patrick. ‘I suspect it’s the other door.’
‘Just a minute: let me see an old ledger.’ She scanned the shelf, and as all the sections were in neat chronological order she quickly found the ledger for 1809 to 1812. She drew it out, knocking a little dust off the top of the pages. ‘Here: this must be his father’s handwriting.’
Strachan’s father’s hand was less well formed than his son’s, but the records were still kept clearly. Hippolyta scanned the pages quickly. The columns of income and expenditure, profit and loss, told a slightly different story from the one indicated by the stock book of last week: old Mr. Strachan had run a much more dicey business, often in the red, and handling produce and goods that were more local and of, as far as Hippolyta could judge, a lower quality. What had happened to make the difference? Was young Mr. Strachan simply a better businessman?
She skipped down the columns and flicked through the pages, while Patrick held the lamp steady. Then she hit what she wanted: on the fifteenth of May, 1810, there had been a massive sum on the income side. It had not been spent all at once: to judge by the following sheets, there had been some building work, a little investment in a better quality of stock, and one or two new lines of products. More significantly, perhaps, it was at this point that old Mr. Strachan’s writing all but disappeared, and young Mr. Strachan’s took over.
‘A marriage settlement?’ Patrick breathed in her ear.
‘Maybe. It says ‘per Mr. Strong’.’
‘That would make sense.’
‘But what I need to find out is whether there are odd sums coming in over the last few years, ones from the Burns Mortification.’
‘You’ll never have time to go through all those ledgers,’ Patrick objected. ‘And they’re so tidy he would be sure to miss any you took away.’
‘If only …’
‘No, come on,’ said Patrick. ‘Is he likely to make a ledger entry that says ‘Money embezzled from Burns Mortification, two pounds, ten shillings and fourpence? It would be better hidden than that: you’d never find it.’
She gave the ledger a last hard stare, and reluctantly slid it back into place on the shelf.
‘I suppose I hoped it would be obvious,’ she sighed. ‘But if Mr. Burns finds something out, then there would have to be an investigation, wouldn’t there? Someone could come in and examine the ledgers, someone who knows more about these things than I do.’
‘I thought you looked very competent,’ said Patrick, impressed.
‘Father let me play in some of his deedboxes when I was small,’ Hippolyta explained. ‘I always liked old bits of paper, so when he wanted me to learn my numbers he did it with some old accounts. Not that I was ever terribly good at them. Well, what about the cellar, then?’
Patrick put an arm around her shoulders, and led the way back to the other door they had passed as they came in. This time, it was locked, but they returned to the business room and found a rack of keys over the tiny fireplace. It did not take long to identify the cellar door key, and they quickly opened the door and found themselves, much as they had expected, at the head of a set of stone steps leading down into a generous and well-kept cellar. Above their heads, as they stood surveying the room, was the hatch to the yard, bolted with a heavy bar, and a ladder leading to it.
‘No paperwork down here,’ said Patrick, slowly turning with the lantern.
‘No, but they’re fine stores, aren’t they?’
The walls were lined with heavy shelving, on which, all clearly labelled, were rows and rows of bins and barrels and baskets, as clean and tidy as ever Hippolyta had seen a cellar. No mouse or spider would ever contemplate setting up home here: they would be out in an instant, and nowhere to hide. She walked slowly down the room, admiring a feat of organisation that even her mother would have been proud of.
Her mother … She stared at the barrel in front of her.
‘Patrick.’
‘Yes, my dear?’
‘Does this look familiar?’
He stepped over, lifting the lantern. The barrel had been painted with white paint with the words ‘French brandy’, with an official air. But the foot of the barrel – quite a large one, but one that could be rolled, she thought, easily enough by one strong man – was coated in a fine layer of blue powdery paint.
A noise above them made them both leap. Footsteps.
Patrick seized Hippolyta’s hand and looked wildly around the room. If a mouse had nowhere to hide, nor did they. He quickly blew out the lantern, and pulled her back towards the stairs. Their feet made no sound on the flagged floor, but they could hear the footsteps above them, moving slowly, as if checking the building. They approached very close, Hippolyta reckoned, to the door of the business room.
Patrick was reaching up above his head in the darkness, moving something. The bar across the hatch to the yard, that was it. The ladder to the hatch was hidden very slightly round the corner from the stairs they had descended, and he pushed Hippolyta on to the lower rungs, bundling her cloak after her. The door of the business room opened over their heads, and there was an awful pause. Whoever it was, would they check the cellar, or open the back door to look in the yard?
The second they heard the cellar door move, they were out, though Hippolyta scarcely knew how. She had the dead lantern in one hand and Patrick’s coat tails in the other, and they scrambled not for the lane, but back, away
from the shop, into the darkness behind it. There was a thump, and Patrick stopped suddenly, then she could hear him feeling quickly around something, scuffling and swearing very quietly under his breath. A voice cried out from the shop.
‘Tam!’
‘Fit?’
‘Did you no close the cellar hatch after yon eggs arrived?’
‘I did.’
‘You did not. That’s the second time this month, Tam. Mr. Strachan’ll skin you alive.’
‘Och, dinna tell him, Al, please?’
The voices were young: the shopboys that Hippolyta had wondered about. She peered back: dimly she could see a white face at the hatch, looking in her general direction. She turned away quickly, aware that her face was just as white.
‘I thought I heared something,’ said Al faintly.
‘Fit kind of a thing?’
‘I dinna ken.’
There was a thump, and an explosion of sound which it took Hippolyta a moment to identify. Then she smelled the rich aroma in front of them: Patrick had bashed into the hen house, and set the hens squawking.
‘It’s likely a fox!’ cried out Tam in excitement. ‘Should we gang after it?’
‘Ach, no,’ said Al, and he began to haul the heavy hatch closed. ‘Likely it’s away by now, and yon henhouse is built like Crathes Castle: no fox is going to get into that yin.’ There was a final thud and the sound of the bar being slammed back, and Tam and Al were seen no more. Hippolyta felt in the darkness for Patrick.
‘Are you all right?’ she whispered urgently.
‘Oh, just fine.’ There was a hint of irritation in Patrick’s voice. ‘Strachan’s damned Crathes henhouse has given me a black eye, that’s all.’
‘Oh, heavens! We’d better think of a good story for that. No one is going to want an accident-prone physician, are they?’
She reached out around the solid henhouse and found Patrick’s hand, and he slipped his arm around her waist. Holding each other, they managed to negotiate the lane again into the street, and after a moment to check that no night watchman was around, they made their way back, circumnavigating the green, to their own front door, and slipped quietly inside. They took their damp clothes upstairs and spread them out to dry before Mrs. Riach found them, and were cosy in bed before Patrick’s old repeater watch was prepared to give them four o’clock.
A Knife in Darkness Page 26
