'Have you any idea what caused your father's death?' Faro asked.
'Bad lungs, he had,' said Joe, who had appointed himself spokesman. 'He was fooling around, drunk as usual. Fell into the horse trough outside the World's End Tavern. Lads he was with were all larking about, didn't realise he was dead, took him home, put him to bed. Will and me wasn't home - we was at the horse sales in Glasgow, so he lay for a week. When we got back, the lads was scared they'd be blamed, and so to cut a long story out, they carted him up to St Anthony's, dumped him there.'
'Have you names and addresses of these lads?'
'They're on the paper there,' Hogan said smoothly. 'Constable wrote them down along with our statement. Gave my word no harm would come to them. Gave my hand on it.'
And I dare say you had a lot of money pressed into it, thought Faro grimly. He looked at Dr Cranley, whose expression said he didn't believe a word of it either.
'And here's Da's birth certificate, if you want it,' said Willy carelessly.
'What next?' Faro asked Mcintosh after the pair of highly improbable grieving relatives had left.
'Not a great deal,' the Superintendent replied, glancing through their statements.
'Dammit, the man was murdered.'
'We can't prove it. You know that and so do I.'
'The Hogans are criminals -'
'And so are their friends. They'll all swear blind that the brothers are speaking the truth.'
'I want to look further into it, sir. I'm not prepared to let it go at that.'
'You're wasting your time, Faro.'
'I've done that before and I'm prepared to do it again in the cause of justice.'
'Then try not to bring down a hornet's nest on our heads.'
'If it means bringing a murderer to justice, I'll even do that, sir.'
When Mcintosh looked doubtful, Faro asked angrily: 'Look, you don't believe that story, do you, sir?'
'It's just daft enough to be true. The whole family is wild -'
'Extortionists, fraudsters -' Faro began heatedly.
'But always clever enough to evade arrest. There's money behind them.' The Superintendent shook his head. 'We all know that.'
'Stolen goods, smugglers, too. And no lack of alibis -'
'We haven't a hope in hell of finding who's backing them,-Faro,' Mcintosh interrupted impatiently.
'Why not?'
'He's not in our "Secret and Confidential" files, that's why. He could be a foreigner. Or a stranger - we have Highlanders, Irishmen, God knows all, passing through the warrens of the High Street, every day and lurking in the sewers of Wormwoodhall.'
Then we should be looking for whoever is behind them, the man who pays them.'
'Indeed we should. He should be the subject of your most scrupulous investigations,' said Mcintosh primly.
'And I'm starting right now, sir,' said Faro, picking up the statement that Dr Cranley had given him.
He spent the rest of the morning in the area of the High Street that the Hogans called home, known to the constables on the beat as the Thieves' Kitchen.
Much to his surprise he found the first two men on the list readily enough. They were sitting smoking their clay pipes on their front doorstep. For once they were not in the least troubled by the arrival of a senior detective. They greeted him genially, ready and agreeably available to answer his questions.
Too readily available, even anxious to corroborate in exact detail the statement that the Hogan brothers had made, thought Faro grimly.
'Aye, we kent the auld fella well, a demon for the drink he was, right enough. Ever since he left the sea, two months ago and arrived back in Edinburgh, nothing but trouble -'
Faro left with a warning that they could be charged with criminal activity. Concealing a dead man. They were not easily frightened by this threat of the law and Faro realised that it would be a waste of time talking to the other two youths on the list.
He walked down the street, conscious of their sniggers behind his back, knowing that for a couple of golden guineas they would have sworn that their grandmother was the Archbishop of Canterbury and their grandfather the Pope in Rome.
His way back to the Central Office took him past the head of Bowheads Wynd. He stopped and regarded it thoughtfully.
His cousin's observations had confirmed his own suspicions that the lad Sandy had been withholding vital information. A word with the lad might be all the use he was going to get out of an otherwise wasted morning.
He would take Leslie's sound advice, persuade Sandy Dunnock by gentle means and a lubrication of silver, or if that failed, something more forceful like a threat or two, to disclose in full the events of that fatal night.
It was not to be.
There was a small crowd gathered around the tall land where Sandy lived. With a sense of foreboding, Faro pushed his way through.
Two constables were already there bending over Sandy Dunnock, who lay with his arms outstretched to the sky. Unmarked except for the back of his head, mercifully hidden, and the angle of his neck.
He was dead.
'Capering about on the roof. Lost his footing,' Constable Boyd told Faro, as they prepared to carry Sandy's broken body up to the top floor.
Faro followed them inside, suddenly feeling old and sick. As they climbed the stairs, he asked Constable Boyd what had happened.
'I've already talked to his mother. She was sleeping. Heard nothing. In a bit of a state, as you can imagine. Neighbours are with her.'
Faro stopped, leaned against the cold stone wall.
'What was he doing on the roof?'
'Someone was chasing him. Escaping the police, so the folk down there say.' Listening to Boyd's account, Faro had already substituted 'murderer' for 'police'. He had come too late and someone had effectively silenced for ever any dangerous answers Sandy might have given to his questions.
The accident or murder of Sandy made Faro angrier than he had been so far,
