A Quiet Death (16 page)

'I realise that now, and if we had had the slightest idea that—'

Sir Arnold, suddenly overcome, stood up, seized his stick and said: 'I cannot bear this. I am ill. You must excuse me.' He looked dazed, shocked as if realisation had just dawned.

Wilfred Deane touched the bellpull and the butler appeared. 'Sir Arnold will return to his room now.'

The old man brushed aside Faro's outstretched hand and stumbled from the room, dashing the tears from his eyes. They could hear him sobbing aloud as the door closed.

For a moment the two men stared at each other, unable to find the right words. When the sound of footsteps faded Deane continued: 'I realise we should have warned your stepson. Believe me, we would have told him. But how were we to know that he was to be trusted? He might—' He shrugged. 'He might have decided to make some capital out of it.'

'Blackmail, is that what you mean?' demanded Faro sharply.

'Indeed. It has been tried before,' said Wilfred softly. 'There have been other young men. We managed to keep it from Sir Arnold but Rachel was eager for romance and adventure. There was constant danger that she would take up with anyone—and I mean any man,' he stressed the words significantly, 'just for a passing whim.'

Suddenly he put his hands over his eyes. 'Dear God, we should have had her committed. But we couldn't face that, the thought of having her a prisoner for the rest of her life in one of those awful bedlams.'

And Faro found himself recalling Superintendent Johnston's words, that even in the most talented families who produce financial wizards, fate has its little joke and allows genius to spawn the occasional simpleton.

'We tried to do the best we could. This is a large house and we could keep her safe with us, with so little evidence of restraint that I doubt whether even the servants were aware of what was going on. And in those often long sane times, when she was sweet and loving, we foolishly thought that the demons inside her were quelled for ever. She was very clever, you know, and even in her darkest days she could show diabolical cunning. She could outwit us all.'

Wilfred leaned back in his chair. 'And now it's all over. I wish I could say thank God she's at rest. But I can't and I never will.'

There seemed nothing more to say and as Faro stood up to leave, Deane said: 'There will be a funeral, by the way, next Thursday. A small private family affair. If you wish to come—and of course, Dr Laurie.'

'Alas, I am afraid my return to Edinburgh is imminent. I have pressing matters awaiting me there.'

'I quite understand. Nevertheless, if Dr Laurie wishes to be present—at the graveside, there will be no attempt to prevent him so doing. And if he wishes to pay his last respects at the house here, we can promise him our sympathy and understanding.'

As they shook hands he added: 'Will you please convey my sympathy to your stepson. We are both in the same boat, alas, we have both to recover from a broken heart, if you believe such a condition exists.'

And opening the front door: 'There is one more thing, but it may be of some comfort to Dr Laurie. Tell him, as far as Deane's is concerned, that his post with us is secure. There is no question whatever of his being dismissed. We are happy to retain his services as our resident doctor.'

Faro left Dundee hoping only that this was the end of Vince's unfortunate love affair. But in that, as in all else concerned with the events of the past few days, he was mistaken and Vince's involvement with Rachel Deane was to have far-reaching and terrible consequences for all of them.

Chapter Fourteen

In the days that followed Faro could not rid himself of the guilty feeling that he had abandoned Vince at his most vulnerable. Although his sympathetic breakfast with Wilfred at Deane Hall and Sir Arnold's magnanimous attitude towards his young doctor made nonsense of such notions, the certainty that Vince was in mortal danger persisted.

His return to Edinburgh was marked by the anticipation of bad news. None came, only a letter from Vince apologising for the delay in writing. He had been very busy and there had been yet another fatal accident on the bridge:

The watchman who tried to help us must have missed his footing on the ladder during one of his late-night inspections. He was not discovered until next morning. I cannot begin to tell you how this sad event, recalling as it did so vividly all that is still personally so unbearably painful, has upset me.

Faro felt a shudder of dread, wondering if Vince had also absorbed the more sinister implications of the watchman's death. Besides Faro and Vince, he had been the sole witness of Rachel's suicide. The hand of coincidence seemed once more to have been seriously overplayed.

As he wrestled with another of Edinburgh's sordid domestic crimes, Faro's thoughts turned constantly to Dundee and the notes he had made on Polly Briggs' suicide and the apparently unconnected death of Hamish McGowan.

Once again he took up
The Scotsman's
report on the tragic death of Rachel Deane:

Miss Deane took a lively interest in anything connected with Deane Enterprises. Of particular interest to her was the progress being made in the building of the railway bridge and she often dropped in on the bridgeworks to utter words of encouragement to the workers and have a lively chat with her grandfather's engineers.

Faro was impressed by the reporter's active imagination that had completely missed the irony of an evening visit when work had ceased. On this melancholy occasion, Miss Deane had not only dropped in but had also dropped off the bridgeworks to her death.

To Faro, the lies that had been told, white enough to protect the firm and soothe its shareholders, were so transparent he was astounded that intelligent minds could let them go unquestioned. Was this then the hidden tyranny of Deane's, the ability to buy or enforce silence?

Like a festering sore, the incongruities of the events he had witnessed in Dundee grew deeper, stronger in his mind. Many years of training to observe and deduce from given facts could not by swamped by face-saving lies, especially when he had been there, a witness.

And so it was, as the weeks turned into months, that he still found himself on the threshold of sleep reliving those last horrific moments of Rachel Deane's life. In vain he tried to console himself that the girl was mentally unsound, as Wilfred and Sir Arnold had stressed. For only such a sorry fact could justify her mad dash to her death to escape her erstwhile lover and his stepfather.

Faro reconstructed again and again those horrendous scenes, trying to find some grain of sense in Rachel's irrational behaviour. Had she seen Vince and himself in some distorted mirror of her imagination as pursuers? Pursuers who meant to recapture and return her to her imprisonment in Deane Hall. Had her poor sick mind indicated that no one would have the courage to follow her on to the bridge?

Two questions for which Faro would have given much to have answers he believed now must remain for ever unresolved. Did Rachel lose her balance and fall or did she voluntarily decide to quit this life by leaping to her death?

Although Faro now realised that this was one of the conditions of her mental disorder, he would have given much to walk about inside Rachel Deane's mind and discover when Vince's role as lover and intended husband of her lucid moments changed into that of mortal enemy.

Did that satisfactorily explain why she had so viciously attacked Vince after asking him to meet her at Magdalen Green? Why she had rushed out of Deane Hall without changing her footwear into something more adequate for heavy rain?

Again and again he saw Vince's pathetic attempts to replace those frail slippers on her feet when he tried to revive her, to warm life into her still body.

But most disturbing of all was the presence of a large round stone in her reticule—and nothing else. Did this indicate a desperate notion that it would help her to sink to the bottom of the river? If so, this clearly implied she had premeditated suicide before leaving Deane Hall. In that case why had she dropped it beside the discarded slippers?

Faro could not get rid of the alternative notion. That the stone had been intended for a more sinister role, as a weapon of self-defence should any attempt be made to divert her from her deadly purpose.

And he shuddered with dread, when he realised how fatally effective it could have been, aimed at a pursuer. Namely Vince, coming up the ladder directly behind her.

Another picture recurred and remained poised, solid and unshakeable.

As the boats searched those dark waters, suddenly illuminated in the flares, the figures of two workmen in overalls inspecting the place from which Rachel had fallen to her death.

One was tall, well-built, the other smaller, more like the night-watchman in build. Their instinct of shielding their faces was natural, but it seemed in retrospect that they stepped back hurriedly, guiltily, as if agitated at being observed or recognised.

What were they doing there? Were they taking their work seriously, hurriedly repairing or replacing some evidence of neglect or malfunction that might have caused Rachel's death?

Another thought crept in. Had they been her executioners? Had a trap been sprung to make it look like suicide?

After another dawn of birdsong which defeated his attempts to continue sleeping or make sense of the notes sprawled about the bed, Faro realised he was getting nowhere. One pointer remained: since the tone of her note to Vince indicated that their meeting was to be secret, it seemed hardly likely that Rachel had advertised her intentions of going to the bridge at Deane Hall.

It followed that if no one had known of her purpose and no one could have foreseen that her flight would take her to the bridge, how then could that fatal trap have been sprung?

Unless she had confided in someone in Deane Hall.

Faro sighed wearily. That didn't make sense but still the picture of the two men in overalls refused to be banished.

Remaining uneasy, anxious on Vince's behalf without ever quite knowing why, he was relieved as well as delighted to receive a letter informing him to expect his stepson home on a brief visit:

My old friend Dr Sam has recently taken up a post as assistant to the police pathologist and is getting married. I am to attend the wedding. You will be interested to learn that since I last wrote you the McG. have had word from the missing Kathleen. She did not care for London and is now working in a milliner's shop in Rose Street (yes, Edinburgh). The McG. are jubilant at the news and plans are afoot to visit her. I have promised to find time to call in and pay their compliments.

Going downstairs to the kitchen to give Mrs Brook the glad tidings, Faro was relieved to know that there was now a happy ending to what seemed like the ominous disappearance of the two young women. Charlie McGowan's widow had returned for her father-in-law's funeral with a perfectly logical reason for her absence. Now Kathleen Neil was safe and sound in Edinburgh.

Faro remembered having decided many years ago that suspicions without foundation were chronic and incurable diseases of the detective's imagination. But he had also discovered in twenty years with the Edinburgh City Police that, left alone, time often provides simple explanations for the darkest and most baffling mysteries.

Perhaps it was mere curiosity that directed him towards Rose Street as the shops were putting on their shutters. As he stared into a milliner's shop window, he observed a pretty fair-haired young woman arranging bonnets.

This must be 'the fair Kathleen' and on impulse he opened the door, bravely determined not to be overwhelmed by such an entirely feminine establishment.

To his enquiry, the girl shook her head. 'I wish I was Miss Neil,' she said wistfully. 'I only work for her.'

Disappointed, Faro left with the distinct impression that Kathleen Neil must have her own private reasons for concealing from the McGonagalls that her position was grander and more affluent than she had led them to believe.

Faro now awaited his stepson's arrival with pleasure not untinged with misgivings. Remembering the shattered condition in which they had parted company, he was not quite sure what to expect. Although confident that one day Vince armed with the natural resilience of youth would pick up some of the pieces of his life, Faro would not have speculated with certainty that he could also put them together again.

Remembering how long it had taken him to sort out his own life when Lizzie died, he expected Vince to be inevitably changed by the bitter experience of loss.

On the surface, he was relieved to see that his fears and gnawing anxieties were groundless. Here was the cheerful, well-balanced young man, his impish sense of humour undiminished.

Only in sudden silences, a sentence left unfinished, did the cracks below the surface reveal themselves and a sudden bleakness in his eyes showed that Vince's mind had drifted again to that sad shore where he had lost his Rachel Deane.

It was not, however, until they sat at supper together that Vince drained his glass of claret and sighed heavily: 'Well, Stepfather, how long does it take to recover, would you say? I cannot forget her, you know. I see her everywhere.

'The Deanes have been unfailingly kind and considerate. I was wrong about them, I know that now. They were trying to protect poor Rachel from herself. Wilfred was very decent to me at the funeral and asked me to dine with them at Deane Hall. He told me much the same story as I understand he told you. And Sir Arnold too.'