Maggie (17 page)

A massive silver teapot was carefully put down on a special wooden stand and covered with a tea cosy of orange and pink wool. A huge four-tiered cake stand was placed on the floor beside them so that they had to stoop to reach the tiny cucumber sandwiches on the bottom plate.

Having seen to their needs, Flora Meikle dismissed the parlourmaid and then stood sentinel in the corner of the room.

“Oh, do go away,” said Miss Rochester sharply, and, when the housekeeper had left the room, she added, “What a terrifying woman. Just like a wardress!”

“I would like to get started right away,” said the earl. “I don’t care if the grim housekeeper is hurt because we don’t eat her beastly tea. Where’s the inspector’s study, Maggie? Or where did he keep his papers?”

“Downstairs at the back,” said Maggie. “I think I would like to go to my bedroom and see if there are some things I could take with me. Not clothes, but books and pictures.”

“Very well,” said the earl. “Take Miss Rochester with you and leave me to Mr. Macleod’s papers.” He smiled at Maggie, but it was a mechanical, preoccupied smile.

“Did he really kiss me?” wondered Maggie as she led Miss Rochester up to the second floor. “Perhaps he was drunk. Men are strange when they are drunk. Goodness, he agreed to
marry
me when he was drunk.”

A bit of the black day outside seemed to move into her heart.

She felt herself becoming angry with him. She wanted to be rude to him, shout at him, punch him, do anything to get a response.

The earl toiled away for an hour, going through a mass of papers which all seemed to be receipts, dating back some
thirty years. The inspector had never thrown anything away, it seemed.

The door opened and Colonel Delaney came in, saying he hadn’t seen either Ashton or Robey but the young men were expected at The Club for dinner at seven that evening.

“Find anything?” he asked, putting a hand on the earl’s shoulder in what the earl considered was an overly familiar manner.

“There’s nothing here,” said the earl testily, moving his shoulder impatiently under the colonel’s hand. “Only this scribbling on the side of the blotter.
Salamanca Street, Govan
, written over and over again.”

“Well, we’d better go there and poke around,” said the colonel.

The door opened and Miss Rochester erupted into the room, her eyes bulging. “You’d better come upstairs!” she screamed. “You’ll never guess what we found.”

Both men raced up the stairs to Maggie’s bedroom. Maggie was sitting staring at an open jewel box. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds flickered in the gaslight, for the day was so dark the gas had had to be lit.

“Where did all that come from?” demanded the earl.

“I don’t know,” wailed Maggie. “It wasn’t here before. I didn’t own any jewellery at all.”

Colonel Delaney rang the bell beside the fireplace and they all waited, staring mesmerized at the jewels until Flora Meikle walked into the room.

Maggie twisted around on the dressing-table stool. “What are these doing here?” she asked the housekeeper. “I’ve never seen them before.”

“Well, I thought they must be yours, Mistress,” said the housekeeper righteously. “After the trial, I was redding up the cellar and I found this tin box in a corner behind the boiler. I thought you must have hid it there for safekeeping and when I got a message from my lord, saying as how you
were coming today, I dusted it and opened it and found the jewel box inside and put it on your dressing-table.”

“But I’ve
never
had any jewellery!” exclaimed Maggie.

Flora Meikle sniffed. “How was I to know? Mr. Macleod was aye saying as how you were the daughter of some rich laird.”

“But it came out in court that I am a shopkeeper’s daughter.”

“Oh, aye,” said Flora undaunted. “But there’s a lot o’ rich shopkeepers around. Just look at Mr. Lipton.”

“Send for the police,” said the earl, appearing to come out of a dream.

“And while you’re at it, get the newspapers here as well. I want no cover-up just because Macleod was a policeman.”

“What!” screeched Flora, shocked to the very core. “Are you trying to tell me that the maister was up to no good? That man was a saint, a veritable saint. ‘No good will come o’ marrying a young wife, and one o’ thae Highland folk at that’, that’s what I told him.”

“Damn your impertinence,” said the earl wrathfully. “Send someone to fetch the police immediately. I don’t suppose this dreary dump possesses a telephone.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, my lord,” snapped Flora. “We mayn’t be English, but Glasgow is the most modern city…”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” interrupted the colonel. “Where is the instrument? You stay here, Lord Strathairn, and you too, ladies. I won’t be long. Come along, Miss Meikle. You should know not to bite the hand that feeds you. If Mrs. Macleod keeps you in her employ after that last outburst, then she’s much more forgiving than I would be.”

A bare half-hour later Maggie’s bedroom was in an uproar.

The Press were back in force, waiting with baited breath while Superintendent John Menzies studied the jewels one
by one and consulted a list handed to him by one of his subordinates.

He gave a heavy sigh. “Get the fingerprint kit up here,” he said. “These jewels are all stolen goods.”

“Are you trying to say that Inspector Macleod was a resetter?” asked one reporter, licking his lips.

“What does he mean by ‘resetter?’” muttered the earl to Colonel Delaney. “Do these idiots think the inspector reset stones as a hobby?”

“No,” smiled the colonel. “This gets more and more fascinating. In Scotland, a resetter is what you would call in England a receiver, or in common slang, a fence. I wondered how the good inspector could afford a mansion like this.”

“I’ll no be saying a word right now,” the superintendent was saying severely to the reporter, “and I’ll thank you to remember that.”

“The Press can wait downstairs,” said the colonel. “I’m sure they’re dying to know the outcome.”

But the gentlemen of the Press refused to budge. It was not often they had a chance to watch the fingerprint experts at work. Soon two men from the C.I.D. added their presence to the already crowded room and got to work, spraying white dust over the jewel box. Flora Meikle was sent to fetch the tin box in which the jewel box had been concealed and to find any personal articles of the inspector’s which might still carry his fingerprints.

Colonel Delaney was explaining to Miss Rochester that he made a hobby of criminology and that this method of detection was called the Galton method, pioneered by Sir Francis Galton not so long ago.

At long last the detectives reluctantly gave their findings. Fingerprints on the tin box which had contained the jewels were those of Flora Meikle and Inspector Macleod.

“Aye, well,” said Superintendent Menzies desperately,
“Poor Macleod had probably taken them from a resetter and was on the point of putting in a report and handing them over when he was poisoned.”

“But I’m afraid there’s clear evidence the inspector hid the box behind the boiler,” said one of the detectives. “There’s clear marks of the inspector’s hands, showing where he leaned on the boiler when he was trying to hide the box.”

One reporter, overcome by hard work, a long day, whisky and excess of emotion was crying quietly in a corner. He still couldn’t believe his luck.

“This is a black day for the polis, that it is” said the superintendent, relapsing into the vernacular in his shock.

“Didn’t you ever think it strange that a police inspector could afford a house like this and servants on his salary?” asked the colonel curiously.

“Och, no,” said Superintendent Menzies heavily. “He aye put it about that he had come into money after the death of his first wife and that his second had a powerful dowry. We saw no reason to doubt his word.”

Maggie felt a strange sensation of elation and relief. Her husband had been a criminal. Therefore it followed that all men were not as her husband. She remembered how she had accepted his coarseness and brutality as normal behaviour. Now all those people who had testified that Inspector Macleod had been a fine upstanding man, a pillar of society, would have to think again.

The earl, Miss Rochester and Maggie sat down to dinner in the Central Hotel in Glasgow that evening in a more optimistic frame of mind. Miss Rochester was positively girlish and kept taking out a small mirror and studying her reflection and pushing wisps of hair back from her broad forehead.

“So,” said the earl at the end of the meal, “I have decided
that your late husband, Maggie, was an out-and-out villain, and some criminal considered he hadn’t been paid enough for his loot and put arsenic in Macleod’s tea.”

“I would like to think that,” said Maggie slowly, “but surely any criminal would hit my husband in a fit of rage or threaten to expose him. If my
husband
had murdered someone, then it might make more sense. I cannot see a criminal, a burglar, resorting to poison and paying some woman who looks like me to buy arsenic. I can’t see any woman a criminal would employ being able to afford a coat with a sable collar. Och, the whole thing’s daft.”

“Good heavens, girl,” snapped the earl. “Here I am, doing my best to unravel this mystery and all you can do is raise stupid objections.”

“They are not stupid,” Maggie flashed back. “I knew my husband…”

“Oh, I see, you knew he was a criminal. Perhaps you are a criminal yourself.”

“Peter!” Miss Rochester flapped her hands in embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” said the earl, not sounding sorry in the least.

“Let me go on trying to work this thing out. There’s that thing he was working on with Knight. He was sure it would earn him the rank of superintendent. Surely it couldn’t be anything criminal. It sounds more as if he were on the point of exposing someone. And it couldn’t be any ordinary criminal because he would be expected to do that as part of his day’s work anyway.”

“Oh, here’s the colonel!” cried Miss Rochester, turning red. “He will tell us what to think.”

“I’m sure he will,” said the earl dryly.

But the colonel was in a subdued mood and sat quietly drinking brandy while three voices tried to tell him all the possible explanations of the inspector’s death.

At last he raised troubled eyes to the earl and said, “This
is more than a simple piece of villainy. A lot of time and planning and money went into this murder. I saw Lord Robey and Mr. Ashton at dinner and they told me quite a shocking story after having extracted my promise that I would not go to the police.”

Colonel Delaney briefly outlined Lord Robey’s story of the marked cards and the bottle of laudanum.

“Why?” said the earl, looking dazed. “Why should Handley go to such lengths to humiliate me?” Maggie winced at the “humiliate”.

“Well, Robey says Handley has a passion for revenge.”

“That still doesn’t explain it. He had never met me before. I did not say anything at all that could possibly have annoyed him. There was a prostitute with a baby tried to solicit him and he got rid of her very cruelly and I was angry. But that would surely not be enough…”

Miss Rochester clapped her hands. “But don’t you see?
Handley
must be the murderer. He has a lot of money and by all accounts he’s a thoroughly nasty man!”

“I thought of that,” said Colonel Delaney quietly. “If Handley and the inspector met, then nobody ever saw them. Handley had no need to sell stolen jewels. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t care what Robey says,” said the earl grimly. “I’m going to sue Handley for the dirty trick he played on me.”

The colonel fingered his moustache. “If you take Handley to court, Handley will revenge himself on Robey and Ashton by exposing their visits to a certain—forgive me, ladies—house of pleasure run by a Madame Dupont. Not only that, but the whole story of that marriage of yours would be made public. Do you want that?”

“Good gracious!
No
!” said the earl, looking appalled. Maggie flushed miserably and stared into her empty coffee cup but the earl did not notice.

“First of all, I think we should put up here for the night,”
said Colonel Delaney. “I took the liberty of telephoning Strathairn Castle and asking your man to travel up with a change of clothes for you all…”

“That’s damned high-handed of you,” stormed the earl. “You take too much upon yourself.”

“I do, don’t I,” said the colonel. “But admit! What would you have done without me today?”

The earl looked at him stonily and then his handsome face broke into a reluctant smile.

“Do you usually take people’s lives over like this?” he asked.

“Not usually,” said the colonel. “Not since I was in the Greys when it was my job to order men around. But this is a bit like a battle, wouldn’t you say?”

The earl threw up his hands. “It’s a battle, Colonel. Let’s hope we do not end up having a battle with you! What horrible plans have you for tomorrow?”

“I think we should investigate that Salamanca Street in Govan. We’ll need to take the ladies with us, or Mrs. Macleod rather…”

“It doesn’t sound a very salubrious address,” protested the earl. “They would be better to wait here for us.”

“No. I think they should come. Mrs. Macleod might recognize someone or something. Something that she’s seen or heard and has forgotten.”

“Very well,” sighed the earl. “Oh, how I wish I were out of this confounded mess.”

Miss Rochester was gazing adoringly into Colonel Delaney’s eyes, the earl was yawning, and so no one saw the look of naked hurt on Maggie Macleod’s face.

It was Roshie who prevented the ladies from going to Salamanca Street. He arrived at breakfast the next morning with a sheaf of newspapers.

The earl was slightly embarrassed at the enthusiasm and
sentimentality of the stories. Maggie was portrayed as a model of Scottish womanhood and innocence who had been harshly treated by an inept police force, and the earl as a sort of Sir Galahad, riding to her rescue.

The full story of the inspector’s jewels took up the inside pages. Reference was also made to the loyalty of the Strathairn servants, Mr. Roshie Munro being quoted as saying he had always known Mrs. Macleod had not done it and he was supporting his master in every way. Which was a lie. Roshie was still suspicious of Maggie. But he had been a gentleman’s gentleman for years and could recognize a change in fashion or public opinion just before it happened.