The sound still echoed in her ears, to a certain extent numbing her against the awful aftermath of finding her few pieces of jewellery gone; most galling of all a diamond brooch that Mamma had bequeathed her, being an especial sad loss, a mother-of-pearl music box that played ‘Flow Gently, Sweet Afton’ – a wedding present from Andrew’s employees at the funeral parlour – and a large amount of cash she had foolishly not lodged into her British Linen Company savings account when she had discovered it recently, hidden in a locked bottom drawer in Andrew’s desk in the study.
The desk had also been hastily ransacked, the papers strewn over.
All this in varying degrees of accuracy, detail, and emotional heat she reported to McLevy as he stood like a block of wood amid the carnage of the rifled drawing room.
The inspector noted it all down while covertly observing the way Muriel rested upon the manly arm of young Arthur. He, of course, was unaware that dependence has its own tendrils but in the inspector’s experience when a woman leant upon you, it was always a good idea not to lean back.
Tempting, but not a good idea.
The wifie had an oval-shaped face and was pretty enough in a china doll fashion but McLevy sensed a restlessness of sorts. As if she had spent her life striving for something just out of reach.
Not an uncommon condition for the female; women often dream of a better life in another universe.
He evidenced her age at near forty, though she dressed younger, and guessed there were no children.
Funeral parlours do not encourage procreation. Roach, his own lieutenant, had undertaker’s blood running in his veins, and he was also childless.
McLevy and his constable had snuffled round the house, outside and in, to discover a few things that the inspector was keeping to himself for the moment.
Mulholland was presently closeted with the now unburdened Ellen; the constable was good with maids and this one, short and dumpy, with a face that would never threaten Helen of Troy, was tailor-made for his Irish charm.
The inspector just frightened dumpy women.
‘Arthur has been a tower of strength,’ declared Muriel, ‘with my own poor husband dead and buried.’
McLevy, as soon as he’d seen the portrait, had recognised Andrew Grierson, a miserable bugger who aye looked as if sizing you up for an imminent wooden box.
‘I’m sure Arthur has been,’ he muttered, ‘and will be ever more, but whit was he doing here?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Muriel, who was beginning to form a dislike of this uncouth creature. Could he not see her distress, her demonstrable lack of jewellery?
Arthur, who had been conscious of her hand tightening on his arm, sending a palpable tremor through the limb, sensed insinuation of some kind in the inspector’s words and hastened to defend the fragile form beside him.
But he did so with some care, because Mister Doyle, despite headstrong ways and occasional rush to judgement, was no-one’s fool.
He had observed that McLevy unsettled people. The inspector had done it at the station to his colleagues, to Arthur himself, and was doing it again.
To the unsuspecting Muriel.
Doyle recognised the technique himself from the rugby scrum. It was all a matter of equipoise. Keep the opponent off balance, the feet slipping under, limbs splayed, then apply the pressure.
And hammer him down.
‘I happened here by chance,’ he offered. ‘I was delivering a note from my mother to Mistress Grierson.’
‘Mistress Doyle and I are old friends,’ added Muriel, ‘and were to meet this evening.’
‘The note was to confirm a time,’ Conan Doyle said firmly. ‘A little later than planned.’
‘But I may now have to postpone,’ said Muriel, ‘with this dreadful loss of property. This…catastrophe!’
McLevy had a fine ear for the tonal nuances of respectable Edinburgh and this seemed to be quite a song and dance from her, as if something was being concealed, but he nodded as if it all made sense.
‘On a cursory examination, there appears no sign of forced entry,’ he announced, shoving his notebook deep into his coat pocket. ‘All windows front and back apparently intact, no boiler hammer crashing through the panels of your door, no jemmying of the outside locks.’
While stating the obvious, he had one ear cocked to the other room out by the hall where Mulholland was no doubt beguiling the stolid wee Ellen, his hair neatly parted, blue eyes shining as if butter would not melt in his mouth.
But it would. Butter.
That hornbeam stick of his had cracked open many a criminal pate and had the man not looked up at the suicidal revolving feet of his once potential father-in-law?
The constable had been down many dark alleys and was as near to insidious and shifty as McLevy himself in the onerous pursuit of justice at all costs.
He also had an innocent face that invited female confidence, which he would have then no scruple in abusing.
But since McLevy had not heard any wild self-incriminating cries, he must assume that Ellen was holding also to her story.
A’body sticking to their guns.
‘Ye left the house after a bite tae eat at half past one o’clock in the afternoon,’ he stated pedantically. ‘And returned at three o’clock, that same day. An interval of one and a half hours. Doesnae leave long.’
Conan Doyle nodded a mature agreement.
‘I would concur with you, inspector,’ he stated, as if indeed they were investigating the crime as equals. ‘And it leads me to an inescapable conclusion.’
‘Whit might that be?’
‘Mistress Grierson assures me that the front door has a spring mechanism that locks automatically upon closing; I myself, on finding larceny, examined the outside back locks and windows before searching out authority.’
‘Authority,’ the inspector scratched his head as if puzzled by something. ‘That would be me?’
‘Exactly!’ beamed the young man, as if the slower student had caught the current. ‘I agree with you, sir, no sign of a break-in.’
‘Apparently.’
‘Definitely! What do we then conclude?’
‘Oh, you go first,’ was the shy response.
Doyle drew himself to his full height under Muriel’s admiring gaze.
‘Examining the known facts I can only therefore deduce someone has procured a copy of the house keys.’
For a moment a shadow crossed the woman’s face and then she let out something very close to a wail.
‘Oh, say not so, Arthur!’
The young man tried to soften the severity of his supposition.
‘No-one is blaming you, Muriel –’
‘I
‘Whit about Ellen?’ grunted the inspector. ‘Does she have a set?’
‘Ellen has been with me for nearly ten years, I would trust her with my life!’
‘Whit about your husband’s keys?’
‘They were buried with him. Alongside his measuring stick for the deceased and his wedding ring still upon the finger. It was stipulated so in his will.’
While McLevy mulled over that strange request, Doyle put his hand to his chin in a manner that suggested deep contemplation.
‘So, we have two possible sources, both of which would seem –’
‘Three!’ McLevy, who had endured quite enough of this highfalutin elucidation, marched out into the hall followed, after a second, by the others, Muriel letting go her vicelike grip on Arthur’s arm to squeeze her skirts
