Service of the Heir: An Edinburgh Murder (Murray of Letho Book 3)

by Lexie Conyngham

  The place was a well, where by day Murray remembered seeing the usual Old Town crowd of water caddies squabbling over their order of precedence. Even now one or two could be seen squatting on their kegs by the light of a little fire, faces in shadow under their big black hats. There were others about, too, stopping for a while on their way from one place to another to warm themselves at the fire and gossip. Mary, face bland, moved confidently into the group and bent to the fire. She nodded to the man who sat on the other side of its smoke. There was little wind in this soft rain.

  ‘Good evening, Mr. Ramsay,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘My, it’s Mistress Macdonald again. I hope it is a happier occasion that brings you to the Grassmarket this time?’ asked the man. He was lame, Murray noticed, one leg twisted almost backwards, and his left arm hung undemonstratively by his side. His right hand, which appeared sound, wielded a clay pipe.

  ‘Not much happier, I fear,’ Mary responded, with a little sigh. ‘It is to do with Jamie Paterson’s death that I am here.’ She saw that the man was staring at Murray. ‘This is a fellow I work with,’ she explained, gesturing to him casually. ‘He’s a man of few words, but he’s as anxious about this as I am. Do you mind I told you at the funeral that no one had a notion why the lad was struck down?’ Her voice, Murray marked, her whole attitude, was much more respectful than it had been in the alehouse, and it was something else, too: it was, he decided finally, more careful. He concentrated on saying nothing and listening well.

  ‘I mind you told me that it was nothing obvious,’ the man agreed.

  ‘We fear,’ said Mary, looking down at her hands, ‘we fear that we may have some information. I told you the police officer wanted to arrest the groom but the doctor and the master stopped him. The police officer has shown no inclination to arrest anyone else, and we have an idea that that could be because it was a gentleman that killed Jamie. A gentleman perhaps with influence.’

  This had not occurred to Murray. He had assumed that the black-thatched police officer Rigg had failed to arrest anyone for the murder through apathy or incompetence: he had not suspected corruption. And yet, given what he knew of the deaths of his father and Matthew Muir, it did make sense. He wondered if it was Mary’s own idea, or whether it was common talk in the servants’ hall. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a youngish man watching him, a frown of mild confusion on his thin face. He ignored him.

  ‘All gentlemen have influence,’ said Ramsay scornfully.

  ‘And we’d like to find out who this one is,’ said Mary, as if agreeing with him. Her cloak and skirts beneath it trailed crumpled into the mud.

  ‘What good will that do you?’ asked the man. ‘Do you imagine he’ll go down on his knees and confess? Present himself to the Lord Advocate and plead to be hanged for his sins?’

  ‘We need to know,’ said Mary simply. ‘Mrs. Paterson needs to know. She has to know why Jamie was killed.’

  ‘Who can say if there was a reason, or just a whim?’ asked the man. ‘Go away, Mistress, back to your secure job, your gentlemanly household. It’ll no be so secure if you go about asking questions that disturb fine gentlemen. Go on home.’

  Mary crouched in silence for a long moment. Murray held his breath. She was perfectly balanced, so still her skirts did not shift on the ground.

  ‘At least tell me what like of gentlemen you see passing down here,’ she said at last, reasonably.

  ‘What like?’ Ramsay sneered. ‘All like, single and married, alone or in crowds. They don’t come down this way much, you ken, for there are cleaner places to find your amusement away from your stiff-backed parlours. Now go away, Mistress Macdonald.’ He shuffled until he had turned sideways, facing away from her. He hid the effort well, but in the firelight Murray could see the damp on his brow that did not come from the rain.

  Mary rose carefully, holding her cloak clear of the fire. She raised her eyebrows rather dismally at Murray, and picked her way back out of the circle again towards him. They turned to walk slowly back east towards the West Bow.

  ‘I had hoped for more from him,’ he confessed. ‘He is a very clever man.’

  The crowds were a little thinner now, the drunks less steady on their feet, the groups less noisy, the couples less inclined to linger.

  ‘Did you notice his leg and arm?’ she asked.

  ‘I did,’ said Murray, absently. He had the impression that one of the shadowy figures was following them, but when he turned to look around, he could see no movement in their direction.

  ‘A carriage ran over him when he was a child. The gentleman that owned it sent his driver to give him a penny, as he lay helpless in the road. I think he would have preferred a whipping for getting in the way.’

  ‘An insult indeed,’ Murray agreed. They passed a dwindling fire with several sleeping forms around it and a bloodied fighting cock in a wooden cage. It was becoming harder to see their way. Behind them, he heard the sound of a slipping foot, and a little gasp of surprise, quickly suppressed. He could feel that they were being watched, and his back tensed. How would Mrs. Chambers explain this to poor George, if he died? Would George even care? His heart was off again, pattering like rain. His hands were ready to clench in an instant.

  ‘So he is not fond of gentlemen,’ Mary continued. ‘He is often pleasanter during the day, but at night he suffers much pain, I believe, and cannot sleep, so he comes to sit by the well and find his own distractions. But he is, as I say –‘

  She stopped. Murray’s hand was tight on her elbow. A cry shot from a passageway, a yelp of pain. They stood stock still. There was a thump, and a grunt. One light shone near the mouth of the passage, from a low window. The fight was beyond it, in the darkness, discreet and desperate. They should have moved on, but before they knew it, there was a harsh breath and a sudden sharp movement, and a man came flying into the patch of light. He fell on his back like a bale of cloth, and lay still, face white, eyes wide, blood at nose and mouth. They froze.

  Chapter Nineteen

  As they stood, a man stepped forward into the light, and wiped blood from his fist. His hands were large and white against the dark of his clothing. He looked impassively down at the body, then seemed to sense them and glanced up, moving back into the shadow in the same motion.

  ‘Run,’ said Mary quietly, and they turned and ran, slipping and staggering over unseen obstacles, Murray’s hand tight on Mary’s wrist so that they should not lose one another in the dark. Only when they had put around three dozen people between themselves and the alleyway did they slow down, and Mary, panting, laughed. Murray stared at her.

  ‘Laugh!’ she whispered, and carried on herself. ‘People won’t wonder what you’re running from if you laugh.’ And she leaned on the wall and cackled. Murray, after a second’s reasoning, joined her, and found it contagious, one part nerves and three parts relief.

  But as they were recovering, wiping their faces with their filthy hands, Murray noticed a shadow standing near them. He tensed, and the shadow moved and came out into the dim light, and resolved itself into the young lad that had watched Murray so curiously by the well.

  ‘Donald!’ said Mary in surprise. ‘What brought you after us?’

  ‘Saw you at the well,’ he said to Murray, ‘Sir.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Mary remarked. Murray sighed.

  ‘And you have seen me before, have you?’ he asked, not bothering to modify his accent, although he kept his voice low.

  ‘Aye, I have, sir. Don’t fret, Mistress Mary,’ he added, ‘I shan’t tell Mr. Ramsay you’re going about with gentlefolk.’

  ‘Well, it was good of you to come and tell us,’ said Murray.

  ‘Oh, it was not that which I came to tell you,’ the boy answered. His accent was like Mary’s, at the same time fluid and precise. ‘You were looking for gentlemen that come down here. Well, I know of one of your acquaintance, sir, that is down here now and then.’ He appeared about to go on, but Mary looked about her suddenly and said,
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  ‘We should be better indoors. Is Jeanie at the same place, still?’

  ‘She is, Mistress Mary. And Angus is there tonight. I’ll take you.’

  Murray realised for the first time that they had run so far that they were well into the nightmarish Cowgate. The high, ancient walls had already closed about them, the dark sky invisible high above. He had no time to shudder, but followed Donald and Mary as they leapt the central drain by instinct rather than sight and negotiated the tricky path on the other side of the street. At last Donald selected an outside stair and ran up it, leading the way into a room partitioned by curtains into three or four separate chambers. A couple were arguing invisibly but vociferously in one of them, and snoring came like a protest from a second. Donald took them to another section, and called out,

  ‘Angus? I have callers for you.’ He found the gap in the curtain and ushered them inside.

  Here, the sounds from the rest of the room were muffled by the cloth. Angus, a broad black-haired man in need of a shave, and Jeanie, thin and fair, were sitting on a narrow bed. The only other furniture in the chamber was a wooden trunk with a top polished from the seats of many breeches. On a hook on the wall, a red coat with yellow facings hung, in the rough serge of the ordinary soldier, and a white crossbelt with the oval regimental badge on it.

  Jeanie and Angus greeted Mary a little too effusively. Murray wondered at this, until he realised that Jeanie and Angus were married but, since Jeanie lived here and Angus was only staying the night, Jeanie was not on the strength, not a sanctioned wife who would live with the regiment and help with laundry and nursing. She was in the same position, in fact, as Mary had been, but the difference, and the reason for their guilty effusiveness was clear: Angus had come home from campaign.

  Mary took their greeting calmly and settled on the lid of the trunk, and with a wicked look said quietly, wary of the room’s other inhabitants,

  ‘And may I present Mr. Charles Murray of Letho, my master.’

  Taken by surprise, Jeanie and Angus quite forgot any due civility, and remained seated on the bed staring. Then, slowly, Angus slid to the floor and bowed. Murray returned the bow, feeling slightly foolish, and Jeanie, spurred on by this, hopped down from the bed and made a curtsey. There was then a little confusion as they tried to offer Murray the bed to sit on, and he tried to decline as there was clearly only room for two, and in the end Jeanie solved the problem by going to fetch a kettle of water to warm some ale, while Angus and Murray demurely took their places on the hard straw mattress. Angus did not, markedly, ask what Murray was doing down the Cowgate well after midnight dressed the way he was: Angus had known, from a distance at least, quite a number of officers in his career, and they were without exception, though in different ways, quite mad. He had decided that it came from having too little to do with themselves.

  Donald had taken up a position near the gap in the curtain, through which he occasionally peeped. It added to the impression he gave that something momentous was about to happen: his eyes were very wide, and he jiggled his feet inside over-large boots as he stood. It was making Murray nervous. Mary watched him for a moment.

  ‘Well, Donald,’ she said, ‘you might as well tell us whatever it is.’

  Donald fidgeted a little more, as he said to Murray,

  ‘I have seen you before, sir, in the place where I work. And the gentleman you had dinner with there, I have seen him in the Grassmarket.’

  ‘And where do you work?’ asked Murray, trying to work out what the boy was trying to tell him.

  ‘At Stone’s coffee house, sir, in the High Street. The gentleman you were with I see there often, and have heard him called by the name of Balneavis. He is a fat man, with a face like the sunset, and he smiles a great deal and eats little.’

  ‘That is the very gentleman,’ Murray agreed, and looked at Mary. Her face was bland.

  ‘So where did you see him in the Grassmarket, Donald?’ she asked.

  ‘In more than one place, Mistress Mary,’ Donald replied, and a frown appeared on his face. ‘But only ever in the street. I have never seen him go into a building or leave one.’

  ‘And with whom does he keep company?’ asked Murray.

  ‘With no one, sir, but himself. It is strange behaviour, even for a gentleman, but I have noticed him several times, and it is always the same.’

  Murray felt that there must be more.

  ‘So what does he do, that it seems so strange?’

  ‘He watches, sir.’ Donald stopped, then expanded. ‘He does not simply walk along the street from place to place, nor does he stop to talk to people nor to look for drink or women. He walks a little, then he stops and looks about him. Where he stops, it is usually a darker part of the street, or even in an alley.’

  ‘And does he watch anything in particular?’ asked Murray, feeling perplexed.

  ‘I could not tell, sir. The times I have seen him, I have looked about me but have seen nothing out of the ordinary except for his own curious behaviour, sir.’

  Jeanie had returned during this statement, and with Mary’s help was pulling pewter cups from the wooden trunk. The ale with which she filled them was warm and tinny.

  ‘What is all this for?’ she asked, once she had squeezed in beside Mary on the trunk. Mary explained once again about the police officer’s reluctance or inability to find the murderer of Mr. Murray’s stable boy, the son of John Paterson in the Grassmarket.

  ‘I heard about that,’ said Jeanie. She had a sharp face and an accent from somewhere in the West. ‘That was the lad with the fair hair, not much below Donald’s age?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Murray. ‘Did you know him well?’

  ‘Ah, no, but I saw him often enough. He wasn’t as bad as some of them, who’ll have your washing down and into the drain if the fancy takes them. Oh, aye, he was up to divilment like all of them, but he was never the one that started it, and betimes you’d see him just on his lonesome, happy as larry, picking up some wee bit of nonsense off the street to take home to show his ma. He’d be well mannered enough, then, too. Oh, I can think of some of them would have deserved being killed off quicker than him.’ Her hands were thin and prim round her cup, red with the laundry work she had mentioned. She no longer seemed to find Murray’s presence the least strange. Clearly if Mary felt at ease with the gentleman, as she seemed to be, then why should not they all?

  ‘What do you know of Matthew Muir?’ Murray asked. ‘Or Dandy, his brother?’

  Angus, less familiar with the neighbourhood than his wife, looked at her, and she shrugged.

  ‘That’s the man the scaffolding fell on. Up in the New Town somewhere. I scarce knew he had a brother.’

  ‘They say he was great friends with a lot of powerful gentlemen,’ said Donald. ‘I never saw him in Stone’s, and I never saw any gentlemen with him around here. I think if he saw them he must just have seen them in their own places.’

  ‘If he saw them anywhere but in his own imagination,’ added Mary sourly, ‘from all I’ve heard.’

  ‘Oh, he saw them,’ said Jeanie suddenly. ‘I’ve just minded. There was one night I had laundry to take to Fortune’s in Prince’s Street. The boy that works for us had hurt his leg, and I said I’d go instead. It was the middle of December, and already dark although it was only maybe three in the afternoon. People were dining at Fortune’s when I went there.’

  ‘And where did you see Matthew Muir?’ asked Murray, leaning round to see her past the bulk of her husband.

  ‘I’m not well acquainted with the New Town,’ Jeanie replied obliquely. ‘I found Fortune’s quickly enough, but then I had to find the back, and I wandered up and down the alley at the back for ages. Then I thought if I looked up at the windows above me, I might see if they had a sign up or if I could see where it looked like a hotel and not like a private house. It was then I saw Matthew Muir at a window. He was on the second floor up, and the light was behind him – it was the back of Fortune’s, as it hap
pened – but it was certainly him. I heard him say, ‘And it will all be over there,’ but I don’t know where or what he meant, because he turned back to the room then and someone else came to the window. I couldn’t see his face, but I saw his arm and shoulder, pointing, and then pulling the sash down. His coat was well-cut, and his shirt was fine. It may have been two floors up,’ she admitted, ‘but I am a good laundrywoman, and I can tell these things.’ She looked at Murray’s jacket as if to prove her point. Her self-confidence certainly inspired trust. Murray thought for a moment.

  ‘Could you tell,’ he asked tentatively, ‘if it was a big room or one of the small private ones?’

  Jeanie considered, a frown sharp on her pale brow.

  ‘A small one, I think. From the sound, and from the light. But I couldn’t be sure.’

  A private party, then, probably. With private business to discuss. What business could a gentleman have with an apprentice notary? And who, in Heaven’s name, was the gentleman?

  They finished their ale, and through the window in some invisible section of the shrouded building they heard a high clock striking four. Murray caught Mary’s eye.

  ‘Time, I believe, for us to return home, Mistress Macdonald.’

  Mary nodded, and picked up her cloak which had lain across her lap. Jeanie and Angus rose politely.

  ‘Thank you all for your help,’ said Murray. ‘I hope that the reward of all our efforts will be to find Jamie Paterson’s murderer, and to bring him to justice.’

  They nodded solemnly, and bows were exchanged. Mary received a sisterly embrace from both, and gave Donald a hand on his shoulder. They left through the gap in the curtain. Donald followed, gave them good night, and vanished proprietorially into the next closet. The argument had stopped, but the snoring was still as lively as ever.

  Outside, the soft rain continued relentlessly and the air was sodden. Mary drew up her hood, and Murray balanced the hat on his hair. They descended the winding forestair carefully, and at Murray’s instruction took their route home circuitously, back down the Cowgate to the Grassmarket. Most groups of drunkards had dispersed, and only individuals lurched across their path, or two men would hold each other up as one vomited in a corner, or was overcome by the sudden discovery of gravity. A couple stood ferociously embraced in a doorway, the man’s ungloved hands pale roots feeling their way beneath the woman’s loose, dark hair, light from the doorway behind her showing the ends of his neckcloth abandoned and tossed over his shoulder. Murray looked away from them, and deliberately watched his feet, as best he could. It was a relief now that there were no crowds to jostle, to brush against his arms or knock him from behind in haste or carelessness. In his society, people might very well lie politely to your face, but at least they left you some breathing space while they did it.