Maggie (18 page)

When he heard of the proposed visit to Salamanca Street he said firmly it was “no place for a woman”, and, to Maggie’s disappointment, the colonel and the earl elected to leave her behind with Miss Rochester.

She retired to her room, wondering how to pass the day. There was a knock at the door, and, thinking it was a hotel servant, she called, “Come in.”

The earl stepped into the room. He stood just inside the door, looking at her.

Maggie was wearing a midnight-blue silk velvet dress with a white spot pattern and white lace decoration. The sophisticated cut emphasized the roundness of her bosom, the tiny span of her waist and the soft well of her hips. Her eyes looked enormous in her pale face and against the black masses of her hair.

“Just popped in to say goodbye,” said the earl, wondering what there was about Maggie that made him behave in such a stilted, unnatural fashion.

He was standing just inside the door. She rose and came to meet him.

“You will be careful,” he said, taking both her hands in his.

Maggie could feel a tingling up her arms and tightened
her grip in his. He looked down into her eyes and drew her gently towards him. Her lips were pink and beautifully curved. He noticed once again the beauty of her mouth.

He bent his head and Maggie closed her eyes.

“Lord Strathairn!”

The colonel’s voice sounded from the corridor outside.

The earl muttered something under his breath and released Maggie’s hands.

“Goodbye,” he said awkwardly. “We shouldn’t be too long.”

“Goodbye,” echoed Maggie faintly, letting her arms fall to her side.

He turned on his heel and was gone.

Maggie crossed to the window and stood looking out at the marching sea of umbrellas below her on Gordon Street. The wind had died down but rain was still falling steadily from a lowering sky.

“Oh, how I wish I were out of this confounded mess,” he had said. If her name was cleared, what would her future life be like? Maggie wondered. Perhaps she would never see Peter, Lord Strathairn again. But he would not drop her entirely. That was not his way. He would ask kindly after her from time to time. He might even invite her to his wedding.

Better just to go away somewhere and try not to think of him again, try to forget a pair of warm lips against her neck and the way her body had ached and burned.

Dolly Murray read the newspapers in a stunned silence. The London newspapers did not usually concern themselves with what went on in Scotland, but a murder was a murder and an earl was an earl.

The stories they had printed were those that had been telephoned down to them by their Scottish colleagues. The photographs of Peter and Maggie had turned out very well and had arrived in time to catch the afternoon papers.

Picking up a gold fountain pen, Dolly carefully drew a moustache and a beard on Maggie’s face and felt better. She realized with alarm that she had missed Peter terribly. She had been so quick to disassociate herself from him when it appeared he was socially ruined. But now he was being hailed as a knight in shining armour.

An image of the Strathairn fortune and the handsome Strathairn earl loomed large in Dolly’s mind. August was approaching, and quite a lot of society took themselves off to the grouse moors and stately homes of Scotland. She racked her brain for some way in which she could secure an invitation to a home near Peter. Of course, she could just arrive at Strathairn Castle.

He could hardly throw her out. The more she turned over this last idea, the better it seemed. She would need to pretend to be sympathetic to that awful Scotch thing everyone was making such a fuss about. Dolly remembered the lovelight in Peter’s eyes in their happier days. No, he was not indifferent to her. Far from it. It should be easy for a sophisticated woman of the world like herself to get him back on a string. The daughter of a Highland counter-jumper was no competition… no competition at all.

The Marquess of Handley threw down the papers. Why on earth had they not just hanged that tiresome girl and been done with it? He regretted that marriage business and hoped it would never come out. But he had had a longing to take that priggish earl down a peg or two. Crashing into the Scottish aristocracy and preaching morality, and he only an army captain and an Indian army captain at that.

It was time to call on Robey and Ashton and threaten them into silence again. There was no knowing what those two weak young men might do under pressure…

Salamanca Street seemed to crouch at the foot of a jumble of
cranes and shipbuilding yards. It was one long row of black and evil-smelling tenements. The earl thought he had seen the worst of the poverty that Glasgow had to offer, but Salamanca Street proved him wrong.

Dirty children covered in scabs played barefoot in the rain. Huge shapeless women, their feet thrust into carpet slippers, shuffled along with their eyes on the ground. The men were small, stooped and almost all drunk. One lurched past, his red eyes focusing mindlessly on the earl and the colonel. “We arra people,” he said, and the earl wondered whether it were a cry from the heart to tell these well-dressed strangers that they were still on the planet earth. The colonel thought it all sounded vaguely Bolshevist. The smell emanating from the closes was terrible. All about the air resounded with the hammer and clang of the shipyards, dreary, metallic, erratic sounds punctuating the dreariness of the scene.

A rag and bone man at the corner was exchanging filthy rags for even filthier ones, his pony shivering and stamping in the mud.

“Well,” said the colonel with rather forced jollity, “perhaps if we find out who owns this dreadful property, we might find a connection with the inspector. Let’s try this first close.”

Both men went up it a little way and then reeled out into the street, their handkerchiefs to their faces. “We’ll need to try another one,” gasped the earl. The close, or communal entrance, they had just tried boasted a broken stair lavatory with the door missing, and the contents had flooded down the stairs. “And did you see that creature holding a bottle of milk up to the gas jet?” said the earl. “What on earth was she doing?”

“Getting a cheap drunk,” said the colonel. “When they can’t afford anything to drink, they run the coal gas from the gas bracket through their bottle of morning milk as a substitute.”

“Dear God,” shuddered the earl. “I’ve a good mind to buy this property myself. Surely if these people were better housed, they might have a chance of leading normal lives.”

“Oh, some of ’em would,” said the colonel dryly, “the ones that don’t gamble or drink. Buy it by all means, but don’t expect a mass recovery. The evils of poverty burn deep. The children might benefit and that should be an incentive.”

“Look, number four does not seem so bad as the others. Let us try it,” said the earl.

The close to number four was smelly but free of refuse. They knocked at the first door and got no reply; the same at the doors of the first landing. On the second landing, there were four chipped, gashed and battered doors with the names of the occupants scrawled in pencil on the filthy whitewashed wall at the side.

The earl was beginning to wonder if they were going to find anyone at home, when, on the third try, the door opened and a little old lady peered out at them.

“We want to know who owns this property, Madam,” said the colonel.

She stared at them for a long time and then jerked her head. “Come ben the hoose,” she said, turning and walking back into her flat.

The earl and the colonel removed their hats and followed her into one room which served as kitchen, living-room and bedroom.

It was painfully bare, but clean. A box bed with thread-bare hangings took up one wall and a black coal range took up the other. There was one table and one chair, and, apart from that, the room had no other furniture.

“Why dae ye want tae know who owns the street?” asked the old lady, sitting down on the one chair and placing her red and wrinkled hands on the oilcloth covering of the table.

“I would like to buy it,” said the earl.

Her faded blue eyes twinkled with amusement. “Buy Salamanca Street! Are ye wan o’ thae rantin’ Wullies?”

“No,” said the colonel, seeing that the earl did not know what she was talking about. “My friend is neither a preacher nor a reformer. Why won’t you just tell us who owns it?”

“Because I dinnae ken,” she replied with some asperity. “We pay the rent tae the factors, Berry and Berry, in Hope Street. Of course, there’s some that don’t have tae pay, but I’m no wan o’ them.”

“Surely the owner cannot be a very bad fellow if he at least allows some of these miserable creatures to live rent free,” said the earl in an aside to Colonel Delaney.

But the old lady’s sharp ears picked up the aside and she gave a harsh laugh. “The wans that dinnae pay hiv got pretty lassies in the family. That’s why.”

“I don’t understand,” said the colonel. “Why should having a pretty girl in the family exclude one from paying the rent?”

The old lady rose to her feet, looking frightened, and started to push them towards the door.

“Ah’ve said too much,” she kept muttering over and over again.

“But, dear lady,” pleaded the colonel. “You have nothing to fear. We will protect you.”

She opened the door and pushed them out onto the landing. “Off wi’ ye,” she said in a trembling voice. “Ye’ll bring nothing but trouble.”

The chipped door slammed in their startled faces.

Out they went into the dismal street again, out into the dismal rain and the sights and smells and sounds of poverty.

“We’ll try the factor,” said the earl. “I gather that’s what they call an agent here.”

“We can if you like,” said the colonel gloomily. “But I have a feeling we won’t get much further.”

At the factor’s office, their demand for the owner of
Salamanca Street was first met by dumb insolence and then, as they grew more insistent, with outright threats. They were finally told in broad vernacular just where to go and when they got there, to perform an impossible anatomical feat.

“Which leaves us exactly where we were,” said the earl gloomily as they stood in Hope Street outside the offices of Berry and Berry.

“Not quite,” frowned Colonel Delaney. “What was that business about young girls? Does the owner demand his
droit de seigneur?
I wish now we had stayed in Salamanca Street and tried some of the other tenants.”

“Let’s go into a pub and have lunch,” said the earl. “I can’t think on an empty stomach.”

Over lunch of ashet pies and peas and beer, the earl and Colonel Delaney picked over the little information they had.

“You know,” said the earl slowly, “all this time we’ve been forgetting about the Marquess of Handley. What was that threat he made to Robey and Ashton to keep them quiet?”

“That he would report their visits to a brothel in Renfield Street to their families. A Madame Dupont runs the place.”

“Strange,” murmured the earl, and fell silent.

“The newspapers,” he said at last. “Couldn’t they help us to find the owner of Salamanca Street?”

“I doubt it,” replied the colonel. “These factors are paid well to keep the names of the owner quiet.”

“Well, if it isn’t Captain Peter—Lord Strathairn!”

The earl looked up and flushed guiltily as he saw his old friend, Mr. Farquharson, looking down at him.

“Sit yerself down,” said the elderly tea merchant as the earl tried to rise to his feet. He eased himself down onto the wooden settle next to the earl who introduced him to the colonel.

“There’s no need to look so guilty,” said Mr. Farquharson. “After reading about you in today’s papers,
I’m not surprised you didn’t have time to call.”

Now, Colonel Delaney was an enthusiastic amateur detective and he could not hear any conversation which took any interest away from the fascinating problem of who killed Inspector Macleod and so he promptly set about roping in Mr. Farquharson to help. He did not, however, tell him about the earl’s ‘marriage’ to Maggie.

Mr. Farquharson listened in amazement to the long tale of intrigue and speculation.

“I think,” said Mr. Farquharson at last, getting to his feet, “that I could easily find out who owns Salamanca Street. I have some useful contacts. You wait here a wee bit and I’ll be back.”

And so the earl and the colonel waited, each absorbed in his own thoughts.

After some time, Mr. Farquharson returned, flushed with success.

“Here’s your man,” he said, pushing a slip of paper across the table.

Colonel Delaney and the earl looked down at the name which seemed to leap out of the page.

“The Marquess of Handley.”

“And,” went on Mr. Farquharson, “he owns that place of Madame Dupont’s in Renfield Street.”

“So,” said the colonel with great satisfaction, “we must pay a call on this Madame Dupont. There’s obviously some connection between the pretty girls of Salamanca Street and that house of pleasure.”

Unnoticed by the three men, a small, wizened clerk from the offices of Berry and Berry slid out of the booth behind them and made his way quietly out of the pub.

Miss Rochester and Maggie enlivened the long day by reading novels and watching the increasingly heavy downpour slashing against the windows.

Miss Rochester was just going to suggest ordering tea when a hotel servant announced the Marquess of Handley.

“Oh,
no
,” cried Maggie. “He’s the man who forced Peter to marry me.” But the words were hardly out of her mouth when the Marquess himself strolled into the room.

“What do you want?” demanded Miss Rochester harshly.

Maggie had half risen, putting a trembling hand out to a chair back to support herself, turning away from the marquess as she did so.

“I am here to escort you to the Earl of Strathairn,” grinned the marquess, taking off his silk top hat and flicking off raindrops from its shiny surface with one long finger. “He has accepted my humble apology and awaits you at my house.”

Maggie swung around to face him. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Oh, I would if I were you,” said the marquess with unimpaired good humour. “Together we have managed to find evidence which acquits you, Mrs. Macleod, of the murder of your husband.”