Quest for a Killer (13 page)

Obviously Jimmy’s appetite had not been impaired by his encounter with Leo as he accepted a second very large slice of cake and I refilled the teapot.

He sat with Thane at his side and looking across at me said, ‘I saw you before, missus. You were at our digs.’

‘Sheridan Place? You all stay there, do you?’

‘Most of us clowns. Mr Wood is a grand fellow. Makes us very welcome. Good beds and good breakfasts to set us up for the day. Not too costly either. Seems to like our company.’ Pausing, he laughed. ‘Mind you, he does expect a little entertainment thrown in.’

‘What sort of entertainment?’

‘Juggling and card tricks, that sort of thing. Harmless stuff. Nothing spectacular like we do at the show. I’ve tried to persuade Pa what he’s missing. Likes his grub but he doesn’t seem to mind discomfort at all. Prefers his old caravan where he can be near the animals, keep an eye on them.’

Pausing, he bit his lip and looked embarrassed,
obviously remembering his own shortcomings with regards to Leo.

‘I seem to remember there were five of you in the act. What about Joey,
King
of the Clowns?’ I asked lightly.

Jimmy frowned. ‘No. He stays somewhere else. Never told us where exactly. Just around. He hasn’t been with us very long, joined the team when we came to Edinburgh.’

And that was very exciting news, confirming all my theories. I felt a glow of triumph as he added, ‘Took Bertie, our other Joey’s place, when he took ill – poor lad had consumption, circus life was too hard for him. Boss was desperate for a replacement, then this chap turns up, says he’s used to working with horses – might have been a jockey, but a bit too tall for that. Anyway, boss was very impressed when he saw him in action – so were we. Took to it as if he had been born to wild riding.’

Shaking his head, he frowned. ‘Poor chap – been in an awful accident some time; that’s why he wears a mask all the time.

Pausing, he grinned as if this was significant.

‘Expect that’s why he doesn’t want to stay with us, all sharing rooms and that sort of thing, nothing much any of us can hide. Boss wasn’t too keen, but Sam – that’s his name – is good with animals, brilliant with horses, great rider and he’s very strong and sharp on his feet. He’s never admitted it, but the lads and I decided that he’s been a soldier, fighting in one of those battles in South Africa, pensioned off after his accident.
We’ve tried to get him to talk about it, but he just nods vague-like and won’t be drawn into details.

He shrugged. ‘Nice enough chap, but keeps himself to himself; main thing is that he’s good with the team, reliable in our act. You’d never guess in the audience, I expect it looks like random dashing and falling about all over the place, but we’ve rehearsed it very carefully. We all know exactly what to do and where to position ourselves with those horses. The speed we work at, the exact timing needs five of us to make it work and nobody can afford to make a mistake. All over in two or three minutes. But lose your attention, miss your cue and it could be as dangerous as going into the lion’s den, and just as fatal.’

He looked solemn for a moment, remembering. ‘And daily danger makes us share everything, the good things and the bad, and because Sam is so secretive, if he wasn’t a soldier, then we all wonder where he came from, why he left whatever it was he did and if he has a wife and kids tucked away somewhere nearby. We don’t even know how old he is, although we guess he’s in his forties.’

He shook his head, ‘He’s a bit of a mystery.’

He was indeed, I thought, but Jimmy’s information was invaluable in helping me unravel some of it.

‘What’s Sam’s surname?’

Jimmy frowned. ‘Can’t remember if I’ve ever heard it.’ He gave me a look as if this question had surprised him. ‘Nobody bothers about such things – call each other by first names, only the boss gets Mr Hengel.’

‘What brought you into the circus?’

‘I was born into it, you might say, never knew any other life.’ And he told me about his ambition to be a lion-tamer like his father and how he had spent his childhood trying to get to know wild animals and make them trust him.

After he left, I remembered his words: his curiosity and speculation about Joey’s background. A mercenary soldier fitted well, the scar could be from a bayonet thrust. I was certain, more than ever, that Sam (if that was his real name) had robbed the bank, killed the clerk and broken into houses in Newington.

Had he somehow engineered some excuse for a meeting with the philanthropist Felix Miles Rice, demanded money, and when it was refused, attacked him? A plausible theory but the only thing I couldn’t make fit in were those two identical suicides of the girls in St Leonard’s. And if this was the same man, what was he doing lurking about the convent and making advances to Marie Ann? Whatever they were he had succeeded in terrifying her.

Writing it all down made quite a long list for one man, and throwing down the pen, I asked myself the one vital question that refused to be answered: why?

Every crime has to have its motive, and unless Joey was some sort of a maniac or a madman who killed at random, the links were too insubstantial. The two girls who had died were friends and the similarity of their deaths suggested they had known their killer, and although they had worked briefly at Rice Villa, this had no real significance. They belonged to that peripheral army of men and women, taken into hotels, maids or
waiters during the summer, or to work in fields during harvest time. Had Sam as a casual labourer met the girls then?

Certainly no link had been established between the girls and the bank robbery except that they had taken place a short distance from each other in the Newington area.

Burglaries in wealthy residential areas were random and commonplace, but where did the attack on Felix Miles Rice fit in, an incident which the police were taking very seriously indeed?

And then I came to the great flaw in the argument. If ex-soldier-cum-clown had just taken refuge in the circus when it came to Edinburgh, how had he time to plan the bank robbery, rig up the girls’ suicides and attack Felix, unless he already had Edinburgh connections?

Jimmy’s information had seemed so promising but now I realised there was a vital piece of the puzzle missing: I had to find Joey’s – or Sam’s – real identity and I did not have the slightest idea where to look for it.

I had dismissed the incident with the deaf novice at the convent as the reactions of a timid girl scared of all men, and the surge of disquiet that the presence of any strange male brought to an enclosed order of nuns. But now remembering the man’s scarred face that had terrified the young girl, it fitted with the injuries Jimmy said Sam had suffered in an accident.

I went over and over the details of my conversation with Jimmy. Was I mistaken and were there two killers at large, unconnected with each other? I had a
lot to tell Jack, a list of theories to put to him.

Alas, it was not to be. Jack had called the night I spent at Rice Villa and left a note that he had been called to Glasgow – urgent domestic matters to sort out, which I guessed concerned his wee daughter.

I had just laid my logbook aside when Elma arrived on her daily visit. She came upstairs, apologising for disturbing me, and looked quite distraught, holding a shivering Rufus in her arms.

‘I don’t know what’s come over him, Rose. Do you think he might be ill?’ He certainly didn’t seem his usual aggressive self, licking her face. Nervously she went on. ‘It’s all so sudden, Rose. He was perfectly all right when we left home, ate all his food, eager as always for his walk and then, when we got on to the hill, he started sniffing about, behaving so oddly, and rushed back to me. He seemed scared to death.’ Pausing, she gave me an accusing look. ‘I thought your Thane had attacked him but he was nowhere in sight.’

‘Thane would never attack your dog, Elma,’ I said firmly. ‘You say he was fine until he went sniffing about.’

‘That’s right. Something has terrified him.’

When I laughed out loud, she looked at me reproachfully and cuddled him closer. ‘I don’t think it’s funny, Rose. He might be seriously ill – dying, my poor wee darling.’

‘Do sit down.’ I cleared some books off the chair beside my desk. ‘I can give you the answer. There is nothing wrong with Rufus beyond a case of fright, I assure you.’

‘He’s never frightened.’ She hugged him closely as if to protect him. ‘You’re a brave wee thing, aren’t you, my darling?’

Ignoring that I said, ‘What terrified him was that he caught the jungle smell of a lion from the circus.’

She jumped up and shrieked. ‘Oh no! Is he still out there?’

‘Sit down, please, and listen.’ And I told her the dramatic story of the morning’s events, Thane’s rescue and Jimmy’s visit and our conversation about the clowns living in Sheridan Place, my old home.

‘All of them?’

‘No, just four of them.’ And because in Jack’s absence I had to confide my suspicions, I told her everything about Joey, and how Jimmy had described him as a man of mystery.

At the end, she said, ‘Are you thinking the same as I am, Rose?’ I shrugged and she whispered, ‘Do you think he could be the killer the police are looking for?’

‘Maybe.’

And so we went downstairs to the warm kitchen and over a pot of tea we put the pieces together. Sweeping aside my own uncertainties, where I had only speculated Elma persuaded me that I had come up with the killer’s identity.

‘We are good together, Rose. I think I’d make rather a good detective, don’t you?’ she said triumphantly.

I merely smiled and she frowned. ‘But how are we to prove it? We’ll have to think of something.’

‘And that will need to be soon. The circus is leaving at the end of the week.’

‘What about your policeman friend?’

‘Away in Glasgow.’

And I remembered Jack’s note: ‘If you have any vital information to report, talk to Inspector Gray.’

It was very frustrating. I had so much to tell Jack, who at least took me seriously. Although I had met the inspector several times I got the distinct feeling that he was not impressed by the presence of a lady detective on his patch. Polite and a little patronising, my activities were regarded by Edinburgh City Police with contempt, something of a joke.

He was hardly the person to whom I would wish to unload my theories with nothing to support them – a list of coincidences and conjectures which would hardly even qualify as circumstantial evidence.

Now with Jack offstage I must sit back and patiently await newspaper reports of any progress the police made and chose to make public. I expected progress to be slow and, as Jack had observed on more than one occasion during our relationship, patience was not one of my virtues.

But curiosity certainly was. I had to know the outcome so I was determined to continue on my own, lead where it might, in the hope that I would have progress to report to Jack on his return.

At least I had one confidante, my friend Elma. With her boundless enthusiasm as my new advisor, she would discourage any flagging spirits on my part. If that did nothing else, her adopted role would provide a welcome change from listening to her daily anguish about Felix and the hospital’s heartless treatment of an
anxious wife before Peter had arrived to accompany her each day.

I gathered they had made friends with the police guard, who was probably glad of their company for an hour or two.

There was more dramatic news on the way. The coma slowly draining away the life of Felix Miles Rice continued and was to claim an innocent victim.

On the night after Elma’s last visit when she had decided to help me with my investigation, Felix’s valet Hodge took his own life by walking into Duddingston Loch. ‘Of unsound mind, distressed by the accident and his master’s grave condition,’ was the verdict which everyone at Rice Villa, including Elma, accepted.

Everyone but me, that was. If Felix had died there might have been a reason for Hodge blaming himself, but I was a strong believer in the old saying that where there was even a flicker of life there was still hope, and although his life hung on a thread, there were plenty of indications that Felix Miles Rice was a fighter.

Our brief interview had convinced me that Hodge knew more about the events leading to Felix’s attack than he was prepared to admit or had included in his police statement.

He was protecting someone. And then, because it
was the way my mind worked, as I went over every detail very carefully I remembered something that might well have been vital evidence.

Normally a sound sleeper, I had woken in the early hours of the fateful morning of his suicide. Something had disturbed Thane.

He had growled and I’d heard the rumble of a carriage on the road outside the Tower.

Traffic on the village road to Duddingston, past the loch and the church, was a rare occurrence at three in the morning. The grandfather clock on the landing had obligingly struck the hour and, with moonlight streaming through the window, I’d lain awake for some time.

So when I later heard the account of Hodge’s suicide, my mind returned to that carriage. Was it likely he had left Rice Villa and taken a hiring cab to his grim destination? I didn’t think so; my probing detective mind headed towards an altogether more sinister interpretation. Convinced that Hodge knew a great deal more than he was prepared to admit about the events leading up to his master’s attack, the irresistible assumption was that he had been lured from Rice Villa and murdered, then transported as a dead passenger in a closed carriage to the loch.

Only his murderer knew the answer, but it was highly unlikely to have been the Miles Rice carriage.

Initially I had been shocked by Elma’s news when she had first arrived with Rufus to tell me of Hodge’s suicide, but once I had had a chance to consider the implications of the valet’s death, my
theory that Hodge had been murdered intensified. After thinking it all through carefully, I told Elma of my suspicions.

She laughed. ‘Rose, you can’t be serious. Who on earth would want to murder poor old Hodge?’

‘Someone who reckoned that he knew too much about Felix’s attacker.’

Her eyes widened at that. ‘But surely, Rose,’ she protested, ‘Hodge found him – you can’t be suggesting…’ She paused as though overcome by a dreadful thought too difficult to put into words. ‘I can’t imagine him quarrelling with poor old Hodge, but if they did have a fight over something or other… Felix could lose his temper. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly – and if Hodge knocked him down,’ she added slowly, no doubt picturing the scene, ‘then perhaps he was afraid that when Felix recovered he would lose his job. Guilt could have made him take his own life: he was so conscientious, he would have felt his life was completely ruined. All those years with one master, and then dismissed without the remotest possibility of a reference.’

I did not mention that guilt was more likely to have made him pack his bags and depart from Rice Villa than end his life by walking into a loch on a cold night. She went on, ‘Should my poor Felix not recover, then Hodge naturally feared that he would be unable to live with the terrible consequences, that he had taken his master’s life.’

Such reasoning seemed too way out for me to even remark upon and I sat down at the table. ‘There is one
vital fact missing from your argument. When I talked alone to Hodge in your house, I was certain by his manner that he was protecting someone.’

She frowned, moving that thought around in her mind for a moment. Then shook her head and said calmly, ‘Why would he want to protect anyone who had hurt his master?’

‘I’ve no idea, Elma, but in a way I feel responsible for what happened to him.’

‘Why on earth should you blame yourself? That’s a mad thing to imagine.’

I shook my head. ‘I think he guessed that I knew he wasn’t telling the whole truth.’

She shrugged. ‘Well, we’ll never know now, will we? Whatever he knew or didn’t know has gone to the grave with him.’ She sighed, ‘My poor Felix, he will be distraught when he recovers and hears about this.’

I looked at her and thought she hadn’t considered that Felix was also just as likely to carry the answer the police wanted to the grave.

‘Peter is very upset, he thought highly of Hodge.’ She smiled. ‘I think he was a little envious of a gentleman having a valet, you know. Had half a mind to ask Hodge to ‘do’ for him.’

Her face darkened. ‘Poor Peter, he had no idea the doctors wouldn’t even let him – a member of the family and with his medical training – over the threshold. However, the nurses are so nice and sympathetic and I persuaded them to let us both sit at the bedside.’

She sighed deeply. ‘Sometimes we sit for hours, Rose, but we don’t mind, it is such comfort to be together and everyone knows us. Even the police guard, such a nice friendly chap despite his authority.’

It was around this time that Peter began accompanying Elma on her day walks over the hill. I had a strong suspicion by the drift of our conversation about the mysterious and sinister deaths that she had confided in him.

While Peter was critically examining the ancient tapestries in the great hall with the eye of someone, she hinted, who knew a great deal about the value of antiques, we were alone in the kitchen and she whispered almost by way of apology, ‘Peter and I are very close, always have been. There isn’t anything we can’t tell one another.’

I wasn’t too pleased about that; I wished I had thought to ask her to keep to herself my suspicions about Hodge’s death. What she told me clearly meant that being a twin meant having no secrets, and confidences were shared as a matter of course.

Now Peter seemed as keen to display detective abilities as his twin, although his theories were of little use and too fantastic to be remotely worth even a momentary consideration.

Meanwhile the circus was preparing for its farewell performance. In a few days they would be gone, carrying away my prime suspect, at large to kill again.

The problem was that even with two very amateur detectives I failed to get a satisfactory motive, apart from a bank robbery that had gone wrong, and two
suicides that were still an enigma and might not even be connected.

Felix was the greatest mystery of all. Although we agreed that he had been expecting a visitor that afternoon – a visitor whose identity I was certain Hodge had known and failed to reveal – it seemed highly unlikely that the visitor was Joey, especially as both Elma and Peter assured me that Felix never went to the circus and dismissed such entertainment as very low-class indeed.

Sometimes I found myself both baffled and irritated by their well-intentioned enthusiasm.

If only Jack would return. Of course, I had the option of consulting Inspector Gray with my theories, none of which anyone, least of all a detective inspector, would credit as hard evidence.

Then, perhaps as fate would have it, we had an unexpected meeting in Jenners restaurant where I was awaiting the twins’ arrival. As always they were late and Inspector Gray had to pass close to the table where I was sitting to pay his bill.

A greeting, chilly but civil enough, as he bowed over my hand. He had never approved of me, of course, and I knew, via Jack, that he considered the idea of lady investigators quite ludicrous. Added to this he had, in the earlier days of my association with Jack, decided that a female sleuth was a bad influence on one of his team, a positive deterrent on Sergeant Macmerry’s hopes of promotion.

Polite but uncomfortable at this unexpected encounter,
he asked after my father. What news? And as always I had only a lame reply – that he was well and travelling in Europe. I did not mention his companion, the writer Imogen Crowe, although I was certain that Gray knew of their relationship.

An opportunity not to be missed, I asked him how his investigations were proceeding.

This took him by surprise, his eyebrows shot up, a look of consternation as he asked, to what was I referring?

‘The poor bank clerk, of course, and those two mysterious suicides.’

He regarded me silently, his face expressionless, and then with almost a twitch of amusement, he shrugged my remarks aside.

‘My dear young woman, allow me to assure you that we have everything in hand. There is absolutely nothing regarding these two incidents of which you have no doubt read sensational accounts in the newspapers that need concern you in your role as a private detective.’

I bristled at his tone; he could not hide the sneer as he added, ‘If, however, though unlikely, we felt at any time in need of your services, then we would not hesitate to get in touch immediately.’

His patronising tone infuriated me and, as I espied Elma and Peter approaching, I rose from the table and determined to have the final word. I said stiffly, ‘Then may I suggest you give some attention to the circus.’

‘The circus?’

‘Yes indeed, the circus at Queen’s Park, before they move on and you are too late to catch your killer.’

At that, with as much dignity as I could muster, I left him and walked quickly across the restaurant to lead Elma and Peter to another table.