Clocks from all over the city were striking eleven o'clock, and it was a bright sunny autumn morning, yet Faro observed how passers by avoided the tall shadow thrown across the narrow cobbled street by the Wizard's House. Men hurried along, heads down, while women, wrapping shawls closer about their heads, drew small children more closely to their sides with a hushed word of warning.
Through the doorway with its ironic inscription, 'Soli deo honor et gloria, 1604', Faro proceeded along the low vaulted passage which led through the tall land to a narrow court behind. There, solitary and sinister, stood the entrance to Major Weir's house. Legend had it that the wizard had cast a spell on the neighbouring turnpike stair so that anyone climbing up it felt as if they were instead climbing down - to the infernal regions below being no doubt the implication.
Faro shuddered. Only the appalling coincidence of a woman's body and a missing duchess, the nightmare possibility that they might be connected, had driven him back to this hell house.
His last visit had been made in darkness; now every detail of the building, every stone, might conceal a vital clue to the mystery. The discovery of a corpse pronounced as dead from natural causes would involve no search for clues except for the purpose of identification.
The door was slightly ajar. Hanging by one creaking hinge, it was unlocked and Faro doubted whether it had seen a key for that purpose in living memory. With only the vaguest idea of what he was looking for, what might be of significance in this puzzling case, Faro was suddenly hopeful. Long undisturbed dust is of admirable assistance to a man searching for evidence of violence and the Major's house was most obliging in this respect. In the thick coating on the floor were the recent footprints of the policemen intermingled with tiny animal tracks identifiable as rats and mice.
Closer observation revealed a clean but wide trail in the centre of the dirt from the front door into the squalid scene of death, ending at the place where the body had been found. He sat back on his heels. Some of the dust had caked into mud. He crumbled it in his hands. Something, or more likely, someone had been dragged along the floor, someone whose garments were wet. Searching carefully again he discovered threads, a piece of cloth caught on a rusty nail. No ordinary cloth either but a shred of fine lace, which he pocketed carefully.
A little further into the room, near an inside drain, the light from the dim window above touched a thin line of gold. He bent down and dragged out a chain bearing an ornamental cross.
Not a Christian crucifix but an eight-pointed cross pattee. Weighing it in his hand, he wished he hadn't found it here, for he had seen the emblem of the Templars very recently. On a backcloth in the chapel in Solomon's Tower.
And a chill - cold and malevolent as the wizard's ghostly hand - stole over him as he remembered that Major Weir had been a Templar as well as a member of the Edinburgh City Guard.
Did this indicate a further sinister twist to the mystery and did the solution to this nineteenth-century disappearance have its roots back in history?
Taking it a step further, was the Mad Bart's Tower a Temple of Solomon and Sir Hedley Marsh the last of its guardians? Could his life as an eccentric and a recluse be a disguise for a secret and never-ending quest?
No. It was too preposterous a theory even for Faro. Besides, it led him far from the missing Grand Duchess, a mystery which must be solved urgently if he was not to find himself facing an irate Prime Minister.
He had a great deal to think about as he sat on the train to Aberlethie. He enjoyed train journeys. Staring out of the window at the passing countryside gave him leisure to get his facts in order and make a few notes.
A halt had been conveniently arranged with the railway company where the line passed over Lethie estate grounds. The walk to the castle through the little hamlet with its cluster of houses was delightful.
He stopped to watch the horses being led across the fields, gathering in the late harvest with the seagulls screaming at their tracks as the uplifted soil revealed fresh delicacies of worms.
Deciding he was in no hurry after all, Faro lit a pipe and leaned on a fence to watch this pastoral and peaceful scene. Around him lay evidence of all those earlier settlements which had held their sway in Scotland's history, then one by one had disappeared. And in the fullness of time, Faro realised, this must be the fate of his own era, too, giving place to a new world waiting in the wings and a destiny as yet unborn. But all would owe their origins to those centuries long gone which had formed the traditions of the Scotland in which he now stood.
When almost reluctantly he at last walked up the stone steps to the castle, he was told that Miss Fortescue was walking with the laird in the gardens.
‘They went in the direction of the old priory.'
The neat lawns and geometric flowerbeds surrounding the castle gave way to a wild garden, the domain of ancient trees of huge girth. Through them could be glimpsed a distant sea, glittering on the horizon, and a ruined wall thrusting into the sky.
Here was the twelfth-century Priory of Our Lady which had once dominated the whole area. Its buildings and harbour, once vital links in a flourishing port, had vanished with a retreating coastline that had left an estuary of the River Forth no longer deep enough to allow sailing ships and steamers safe harbour.
For a while, Aberlethie had acquired notoriety and the close attention of the exciseman as a landing place for smugglers and those on dubious errands and
