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

by Lexie Conyngham

  ‘Thank you, sir!’ said Murray, surprised.

  ‘Mrs. Wright, a cousin of mine, is growing older in years and has just married off her last child. She is intending to move in with her new son-in-law, and although she has always kept a good stable she no longer sees the need or wishes to have the expense. I can enquire for you, if you wish.’

  ‘Thank you very much indeed, sir. I should wish it, if it is convenient for you. Do you know the servants in question yourself?’

  ‘I have met the groom on several occasions,’ said Thomson. ‘He is a very good man, from Haddington where my cousin lives at present. His wife is dead and his children live with his own parents.’ Thomson had an aptitude like Blair’s for talking with servants. ‘He is a first class groom, which is why,’ he lowered his voice, ‘I did not wish to mention it in front of our friend Dundas. He has an acquisitive eye when it comes to good servants. This Irishman must be good, for the one that has left for London was one of the best grooms in the country.’ He nodded to confirm his point. ‘Of course, he has had no case for quite some time to pay for such luxuries, but when you marry money, why should you need to work?’ He indicated the Raeburn portrait over the fireplace that Murray had noticed before, and raised his glass. ‘To Lady Sarah Gordon,’ he said quietly. ‘The toast of Edinburgh for her beauty, and a rich catch into the bargain.’

  Gordon, thought Murray. Now, where had he heard of a Gordon recently? A common enough name, but something was niggling. He looked up at the painting of the youthful Dundas family, the handsome parents, the three sturdy boys, then his gaze dropped and lighted on the little drawing he and Ella had noticed the previous week. The drawing, he could see even from here, was of a baby girl, and her name had been Catherine Gordon Dundas.

  Too much wine, was his next thought. He excused himself from Thomson, who had half-turned away anyway, and slipped out of the room on to the landing, where a door set into the curved landing wall opened into a water closet. The door, too, was curved to fit, very beautifully New Town. On the other side of the tiny room was another door, which would lead into the master bedroom, presumably, like the one in his father’s own drawing room – his own drawing room – in Queen Street. Was it more discreet to have the public doorway in the drawing room or on the landing? He pondered this as he returned to the landing, but his thoughts were cut short as Miss Warwick burst from the drawing room door and ran into him.

  ‘I beg your pardon!’ he exclaimed, then looked more closely at her. She was barely holding back tears. ‘You appear to be in some distress. May I be of assistance?’

  ‘Not unless you can give Harry Dundas fifty guineas, and make him buy me a horse as he promised!’

  ‘I’m sure Harry Dundas has no need of fifty guineas from me,’ said Murray, taken aback.

  ‘He says he has. He says he can’t afford to marry me. He says ... and Mamma said they were all most horribly rich, and could marry both of us! Someone, somewhere is lying to me! And I don’t know who!’

  She had not even looked at him during this odd speech, and now she stamped her foot like a child and swept off up the stairs, presumably to whatever chamber she was staying in. Murray blinked and returned to the drawing room to make his farewells.

  The walk home was short and he was occupied in thinking that whatever Mary’s reservations, working on his own he could learn more in a drawing room in half an hour than he could all night in the Grassmarket or even in the Canongate. Perhaps it was a question of territory.

  He stopped in mid-stride. Now there was another instance of that not uncommon name. His Jacobite acquaintance in the Canongate stair where Dandy Muir had lived was, of course, Miss Gordon.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Murray found himself balancing on one foot, and put the other one down, feeling rather foolish. He removed a glove and drew out his pocket watch: the informal dinner had been earlier than usual and it was only three o’clock. There might still be time to do something about this today. He turned around and walked briskly back through St. Andrew’s Square and towards the Old Town.

  Blair, fortunately, was in. His manservant showed Murray in to the study and left them with a decanter of brandy, returning a moment later with a second glass.

  ‘I have a feeling,’ said Murray when the servant had gone, without much preamble, ‘that I know what name to look up in the Council records for sales of land. I have no evidence that you could call firm, but it seems to me that Mr. Dundas is in some need of money at present, and that selling land that his wife brought to the marriage, should it fortuitously happen to be in the place where the Council wishes to expand the New Town, would be a profitable and timely venture for him.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Blair, on a long note of surprise, as though he had forgotten to instruct his mouth to stop while his mind considered this possibility. He jumped up, mouth still in an O-shape, and peered at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘There is just time, if we hurry.’ He rang the bell in a slightly frantic fashion, tilting his brandy glass to his flexible mouth with the other hand. The servant came and returned with their cloaks and hats, and they hurried back into the rain.

  Later, Murray was to find his memories of that afternoon housed in a repeat pattern of walking half a pace ahead of Blair’s shambling figure, urged on by him to greater speeds, his sense of urgency at last meeting a similar haste in someone else. The fact that the whole business could have been left to the next morning was not even for a moment taken into consideration.

  Blair’s friend with the friend in the council chambers was whisked away from his family fireside in Nicolson Street and borne along with them to the chambers, a thin wraith of a man powerless in their hands. He led them to the room of some senior clerks and between them they prevailed upon one particular grey individual to show them the documents transferring land to the Council’s hands for selling on to builders or individuals, extending the orderly stripes of the New Town like a careful mother adding borders to the gown of a growing daughter.

  ‘The instruments are in the order in which we acquired them,’ explained the clerk in a dusty voice, leafing through the documents. They were unbound, and in the spiky Latin of several different writers. It took a little while to grow accustomed to each new hand. ‘You’ll see,’ said the clerk, ‘that the first couple of inches of the text are just the starting formula. If it’s the name of the seller that you’re speiring, you just need to look around here.’ He pointed to where the seller’s name was written in this particular case, in slightly larger letters. ‘Now, the instruments for the area north of Queen Street Gardens should be near the end, so I should suggest that you start there and work backwards.’

  Most of the land, which extended further north than Murray had ever suspected, had been sold to the Council by Heriot’s Hospital. This was unsurprising: they owned huge tracts of land between Edinburgh and the shore. It was transferred in portions, neatly described by local names and circumscribed by the names of neighbours, past and present. Henry Raeburn, the artist, who lived at the other end of Queen Street in York Place, had sold some land in Stockbridge. And, after a search that was starting to hurt Murray’s eyes – as the tallest of the party, he was standing rather further away from the documents than was comfortable in the candlelight – thirty or so documents from the bottom of the pile they finally found a sheet of deckled paper which, about two inches down the spiked copperplate, bore the seller’s name: ‘Willelmus Dundas, advocatus filius Henrici Dundas advocati in civitatem Edinburgensis’.

  ‘You were quite correct,’ said Blair, wide eyes staring up at him from under the sinking fringe of his wig. ‘It seems that Dundas chose to cash in some of his assets.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Murray, thinking hard. ‘I wonder.’ Dundas was fond of talking about his various land transactions, intended or merely thought about. In two or three lengthy social engagements, Murray could not remember any mention of this particular sale. ‘I wonder where he had the land from.’

  ‘That’s an ea
sy one,’ said Blair’s friend, Mr. Leslie, who had been silent for so long that Murray did not immediately identify his voice. ‘The Register of Sasines is what you want for that, in the Sasine Office. All the land transactions in Scotland are there, inheritance and purchase both. But anyway,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘it should say in this instrument here.’

  Three pairs of eyes – the council clerk had returned to his desk and left them to their own devices – blinked hard and tried to adjust again to the thin copperplate Latin. They read to the end of the page and turned it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Blair’s friend, most accustomed to the work, ‘Here it is. This sale went through in December, last month. It says here that the notary states that “Mr. Dundas sells the land in the names of himself and his spouse, Lady Sarah Dundas or Gordon, who inherited the land as heir general of Miss Christian Gordon of Balkiskan who died 1804, vest and seised in the lands above described”.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Murray. Blair looked at him, but did not speak. Murray leaned over and turned the page back over again, with one long, careful finger. He pointed to some words at the top of the page, in the few lines they had been encouraged to pass by.

  ‘This name – who would this be? One of the council representatives?’

  Mr. Leslie peered over his arm.

  ‘No, that’s the name of the notary public who would have carried out the transaction. Johannes Pollock, it says.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Murray, ‘that is rather what I thought it might have said.’

  ‘Can we go to the Sasines Office place to follow this whole business through?’ Blair asked, fidgeting.

  ‘We had better do so,’ said Murray. ‘Perhaps there is still something which might explain all this.’

  Mr. Leslie, it transpired, was also well acquainted with one of the sasine clerks, so he was once more swept up and taken with them as a kind of walking visiting card. Outside in the street again, the citizens of Edinburgh who had to venture out of doors were each huddled against the rain, cocooned individuals, bound in their own little worlds under hats and plaids. Murray felt cut off, isolated from the normal lives of those around him, set apart by the colour of his clothes and the growing mass of information he was holding in his mind, building each fact into a sea-wall, holding back the ebb and surge of his grief for his father.

  Damp in the Sasine Office, they found that Mr. Leslie’s friend could not immediately lay his hands on the document they required: the registers were in long lines of toffee-brown leather bindings, some new and soft, others dried, crackling with age. The registers ran back nearly two hundred years, an astonishing record, explained the clerk. They were arranged by county, with the names in gold on the caramel spines.

  ‘There are two possibilities, sir,’ said the clerk, fingering the spines as he spoke, not looking at their faces. ‘Either the land involved in the transactions in which you are interested is just in the one county, or it is in two or several. If it is in just one county, likely the transaction will have been registered in the County register of sasines. If it covers more than one – or there could be other reasons – the registration should be in the General Register of Sasines. Do you have the dates when the transactions took place?’ He spoke with the precision of one not much accustomed to talking, and particularly seemed to relish the pronunciation of ‘transactions’.

  ‘One was in last December,’ said Mr. Leslie, at a nod from Blair, ‘and involved, I believe, property solely in Edinburgh county.’ Murray nodded, too. The clerk stalked to a wall of the room without hesitation and ran a finger along the tops of the narrow volumes, smoothing and levelling them, until he found the last Edinburgh county volume in the series, soft leather not yet polished by use. He drew it out and opened it, cradling it paternally, and turned the stiff pages.

  ‘What was the name, sir, of the person disposing of the property in the transaction?’

  ‘The name is Dundas,’ said Murray clearly. The clerk did not react.

  ‘Dundas. That is of assistance, as the names are written in the margins. Dundas, you say, yes.’ He stopped flicking through the pages and paused, lips bitten hard together, reading with quick eyes. Murray and Blair waited, Blair fiddling with his coat buttons, Murray hardly breathing. The clerk turned a few more pages, stopped again and looked up.

  ‘I believe that this is the transaction for which you are searching,’ he said, and carefully laid the book down on a small table. He pointed at the page. The wide margin contained several figures and the word ‘Dundas’ in capital letters. Mr. Leslie read faster than the other two.

  ‘Yes, Mr. Blair, this is the one. Last December. Land north of Queen Street Gardens, Edinburgh, sold to Edinburgh Town Council with the permission of Lady Sarah Dundas or Gordon, the land previously belonging to Miss Christian Gordon of Balkiskan who died in 1804.’

  Murray looked and read the details for himself. Again, the name of the notary public was given as John Pollock. The gist of the Latin was that Pollock had brought these documents which had been presented to him by William Dundas, and that Pollock had drawn them up as a licenced notary public. Murray wondered how many John Pollocks were licenced notaries in Edinburgh, and suspected that there were very few.

  ‘Do you know this John Pollock?’ he asked the clerk.

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ the clerk replied. ‘He used to do a great deal of business, up to two or three years ago, I suppose. Since then I believe he has been in ill health.’

  ‘So you have heard nothing of him for two or three years?’ asked Murray.

  ‘Oh, I should not say nothing, sir,’ replied the clerk. ‘He is still quite active, as you can see by the fact that he drew up this document. But he has not visited this office personally for some time. He sends his clerk, his apprentice, with transactions to be registered. His apprentice is a Mr. Muir, if I remember correctly.’

  ‘I believe you do,’ said Murray drily. He caught Blair’s eye, and was pleased to receive a smile of approval. Blair bounced slightly and asked thoughtfully,

  ‘Mr. Leslie, did you not say that inheritance is registered here, as well as purchase?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the sasine clerk, before Mr. Leslie could reply, ‘transactions of all kinds concerning land are registered in these books.’

  ‘So we could, in fact, find the entry for 1804, for when this Miss Christian Gordon of Balkiskan died?’

  ‘Quite right, sir,’ said the clerk. ‘I do not believe that Balkiskan is in Edinburgh county.’

  ‘No,’ said Murray, ‘I believe it is in Perthshire.’

  ‘Quite, sir,’ said the clerk. ‘The General Register, then, is indicated, as there is land in both Perthshire and Edinburghshire. Please to come this way, gentlemen.’ He led them out of that room and along the flagged passage, and into another similar chamber, similarly lined with toffee stripes of book spines. The rooms had only small windows in the thick walls, and the clerk carried the only candle: outside Murray could hear the rain still slashing at the glass. The pool of light held by the clerk flowed away as he went again to almost the end of a run of volumes. Murray was briefly overwhelmed by the idea that the rain outside was waves, and that the waters were rising rapidly about them. The clerk pulled out a volume, and began to flick through it far too slowly.

  ‘Gordon, you said, but you do not have a month. And it may, of course, be, sirs, that the transaction was not registered until some time after the lady’s death.’ He had begun right at the beginning of the volume, and was working his way through page by page. Murray tried not to tap his foot on the floor. He made himself go over what they had learned so far in his head: Dundas had sold land to the Council in December which his wife had inherited from Miss Gordon who had died in 1804. The notary who had registered this sale was apparently John Pollock, who had in fact been so ill for the past three years that he could not leave Montrose. Instead, his apprentice had registered the documents on his behalf – or in his name, at least. Now
, of course, his apprentice was dead.

  ‘No, gentlemen, it was not registered in 1804,’ said the clerk suddenly, snapping the book closed. He exchanged it for the next volume, and began to run through it in the same careful way. It did not much surprise Murray when the clerk did not find the transaction in the next volume, either. After all, Miss Gordon of Balkiskan, who had died in 1804, had still been looking quite lively when her servant had led Murray to her flat in the Canongate last week. He drew out his watch.

  ‘Mr. Blair,’ he said, ‘I think perhaps we should pay a visit to the Canongate.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Although there was not now the same urgency to visit all necessary offices before they closed for the night, Blair and Murray still walked at considerable speed, as if pursued. The Canongate was busy with office workers going home and women hurrying to stalls and shops where the vendors were packing away their wares, hauling down soaking shutters, folding up benches and stands and in some cases oilskin shelters hinged like leathery wings. The stair that Murray had visited twice before, under equally unpleasant circumstances, was dry: there were no footprints on the sandstone steps. As they climbed, they passed the door of Dandy Muir’s flat and Murray wondered when the burial was to be, but he recoiled from the thought of going to it. He had brought the household enough trouble. He did not want his presence to cause any more.

  As before, the stair grew lighter towards the top. It was dark outside, but a candle had been lit on the wall by the top door. The herbs on the landing were due to be watered, but the rain battered against the high window that gave them light on better days than this. The bright blue door seemed to glow in the candlelight.

  ‘Is this it?’ asked Blair, as though they could go further up. Murray rattled the risp, and did it again before the well-dressed old maid, Jessie, came to the door in some confusion. When she saw Murray she did appear to be pleasantly surprised, and then gave Blair a courteous glance as well.