'Spare me the details, if you please.' Faro shuddered. 'I'll take your word for it,' he added, stretching out his hand for the paper.
The doctor, relieved, nodded happily. 'Then I may take it that you are quite satisfied with our findings?'
Faro wasn't, but he could not think of one reason to justify his unease.
He tried to explain his feelings to Vince over supper that evening. Their meetings at meals were rarer than ever, since Vince held his surgery and consulting hours in the downstairs rooms. Fast acquiring a thriving practice, his leisure hours were increasingly devoted to reducing his handicap on the golf course.
'There are lots of reasons why an unmarried woman -thirtyish, you said - might have run away from a respectable middle-class life, Stepfather.'
'Tell me some of them.'
'An unhappy love affair - maybe hopes of marriage with a suitor over several years that had failed to materialise. Perhaps he married someone else and being jilted affected her mentally.'
Faro was disappointed, having hoped that his stepson would be able to come up with a more original selection of ideas than Dr Cranley had offered.
'A Bride of Lammermoor - is that what you have in mind?'
Faro shook his head. 'Such situations belong in Sir Walter Scott's novels, Vince. Surely no sane woman -
'No sane woman, Stepfather - ah, there's the rub,' said Vince triumphantly. 'For whatever the post-mortem revealed about her physical condition, it can tell us nothing of the state of her mind at the time of death.'
'Are you suggesting that what she died of was that condition known to ladies addicted to romantic novelettes as a broken heart?'
'Something like that.' Vince nodded eagerly. 'It can happen, you know. And the reason she was not on the missing persons file is easy. In all probability her wish to escape from the past brought her to Edinburgh from some other town or village.'
'It doesn't explain why a woman gently bred should feel obliged to change into a filthy beggar's gown. And what happened to her middle-class dress and middle-class undergarments?'
'The answer is really simple, Stepfather. No doubt she had to sell them for food and lodging. Hunger can do incredible things to even the most fastidious.'
'This woman wasn't half-starved. I have Dr Cranley's word for that and the evidence of my own eyes.'
Vince shrugged. 'Perhaps she wished to shed her identity with the clothes.'
Faro looked at him. 'You are suggesting the utter destruction of self, of the woman she had been.'
'Something like that. There is another possibility. That whoever found her decided that it was a shame to waste good clothes when they could be sold.'
Faro thought of Sandy. 'I don't think the lad would have that much ingenuity. He seemed quite terrified to go near the body.'
Vince sighed. 'I should stop worrying about it, if I were you, Stepfather. Vagrants are ten a penny and every month some unfortunate falls to the students' dissecting knives. After all, we have to be practical about it. And once dead, the fresher the bodies the better for our purposes.'
'You make it sound like a flesher's shop,' Faro said accusingly.
'And so it is.' Vince eyed him candidly. 'All in the interests of medical science. Remember that one dead body dissected may lead to a hundred - perhaps a thousand - live ones being saved from the ravages of disease.'
Then, almost eager to change the subject, for he know only too well what his stepfather was like once he got a bee in his bonnet, namely, an unidentified corpse in the police mortuary, Vince continued: 'But you wanted to ask me something about this new-found cousin.'
'I have invited him to dinner on Sunday. You will have your chance then to form your own impressions.'
Chapter 3
At their first meeting, when Faro had set down Leslie Godwin at the somewhat bleak lodging in the Lawnmarket, he had found himself thinking of his own comfortable house in Sheridan Place, run so smoothly by their housekeeper Mrs Brook, that model of efficiency. Guiltily, he had remembered the empty rooms upstairs and almost involuntarily this space had been filled with a satisfying picture of his cousin in temporary residence.
As the days had passed the idea grew in his mind. Faro had few relatives and Leslie was quite a find. A second successful meeting when he came to dinner and was very impressed by his surroundings confirmed that the two men had much in common.
Both had been subjected to danger from an early age, Leslie to wars, Faro to violent crime. Both knew how to deal with the unexpected, the art of survival perhaps an inheritance down the generations from that distant Viking ancestor.
Faro noticed with delight when Leslie dined with them that Sunday how Vince's air of reserve fast dissolved as the evening progressed and the talk veered from Leslie's recent progress as guest in the homes of Scottish nobility to his more exciting tales from the battlefield. Of how, confessing to the sketchiest of medical knowledge, acquired out of necessity, Godwin had used his own ingenuity and common sense to keep a seriously wounded prisoner alive until help arrived.
Faro, listening to the two men swapping medical experiences, decided that perhaps Godwin, who talked so cynically about taking enemy lives, was being excessively modest about those he had also saved.
The fact that Vince too was impressed by this relative reinforced the proposal Faro had in mind. He now felt certain that his stepson would approve of Godwin sharing their house during his short stay in Edinburgh.
Vince's reaction was exactly what he had hoped for.
'A capital idea, Stepfather. Let's ask him tomorrow night.'
Godwin, returning to his lodging the following evening, was clearly puzzled but pleasantly surprised to find the two of them waiting for him.
Faro had to put their proposal to him then and there, guessing by his cousin's nervous glances towards the window of his apartment as they talked that he
