Rose McQuinn 7 - Deadly Legacy

Rose McQuinn 7 - Deadly Legacy

Alanna Knight

Allison Busby (2012)

Edinburgh, 1901. Rose McQuinn has agreed to help her neighbour, Mrs Lawers, by delivering what she claims to be a family legacy to her only living relative. Conveniently, the trip allows Rose to meet with Detective Inspector Jack Macmerry's daughter to try and re-establish contact with her on his behalf.

Soon, Rose's philanthropic journey takes a turn towards the dangerous when she is attacked on a train and, on returning to Edinburgh, discovers Mrs Lawers and her maid are dead. Befriending a young first-time mother and investigating the history of Mrs Lawers' family, Rose finds links not only between the two, but also to Royal history, London's theatre community, and her own home in Solomon's Tower. But when Jack is shot on duty, her attention shifts to him and his desire to get to know his daughter.

Balancing the murder investigation alongside her obligations to family and friends, Rose discovers ties that reveal the past has not completely left the present.

Deadly Legacy

ALANNA KNIGHT

For Jenny Brown,
Helen and Morna the Mulgray Twins,
with love.

Contents

Title Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
AUTHOR'S NOTE
About the Author
By Alanna Knight
Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

Autumn 1901

Anyone out walking on Arthur's Seat that Sunday morning, breathing in the September sunshine and bold enough to stop and stare into the kitchen window of Solomon's Tower, would have found their curiosity rewarded by a scene somewhat familiar in many Edinburgh suburbs. A scene of tranquil domesticity.

While I frowned over a book, Detective Inspector Jack Macmerry solemnly read a newspaper, and a dog, larger than normal, occupied the rug in front of a cheerful log fire.

But all was not as it seemed; there was much that was not revealed by that first glance at this picture of married bliss. Not least that we weren't married, except under the Scottish law of 'marriage by habit and repute'. Writing up Rose McQuinn's last case in my new logbook, I had not yet lost my sense of excitement at setting foot, as it were, in a new century. The last night of December 1900 had seen a terrible gale sweep nationwide across Britain, leaving a trail of destruction violent enough to bring down one of the ancient stones at Stonehenge.

Despite the Astronomer Royal's assurance that numbering begins at one, not zero, to many that storm was an omen for the new century, especially as rumours had drifted from the Isle of Wight that Queen Victoria was approaching the end of her sixty-three years' reign, described by some as 'glorious'.

Her death on 22
^nd
January shocked an entire nation, destroying delusions of her immortality and prayers for her survival, which were not shared by her son and heir, who had given up hope of ever being king while his stubborn old mother ruled over him (as well as her subjects) with a rod and will of iron.

However, this royal drama made little change to the war with the Boers, an event paled to insignificance by Her Majesty's funeral cortege followed by the crowned heads of Europe, most of whom were close relatives. All recorded on what promised to be a new marvel of our age: moving pictures, viewed by thousands for the first time.

But to return to that domestic scene in Solomon's Tower. Another look at DI Macmerry would have revealed that his anxious frown was not caused by whatever changes the reign of the new king, Edward VII, might bring to the Edinburgh City Police. He was in fact much more concerned regarding the welfare of three-year-old Meg, his motherless daughter, visited far too rarely in Glasgow and now to be even more inaccessible, having recently moved with her adoptive parents to a rural area of Perthshire. Added to that was the seed of doubt in his mind as to whether the child really was his, or whether he had been trapped into marriage by the oldest trick in the book.

As for the dog by the fire, Thane was not in any sense a domestic pet, but a very large deerhound whose origins lay within the mysterious depths of that extinct volcano Arthur's Seat, from which he had emerged to become part of my life and my protector when I first arrived in Edinburgh six years ago.

On this particular Sunday morning, Jack tried to put his concerns about Meg out of his mind and was engrossed in an article concerning the anniversary of the Battle of Prestonpans, Prince Charles Edward Stuart's successful prelude to the disaster of Culloden.

It was a well-known local fact that during his 1745 campaign laying siege to Edinburgh, the prince had lodged down the road from Duddingston while his army, their cannon trained conveniently on the city, had camped on Arthur's Seat and most likely in this very house, Solomon's Tower.

This possibility was substantiated when Jack and I came across the existence of a secret room at the top of the spiral staircase. Besides past centuries' accumulation of dust and spiders' webs, evidence of human occupation was indicated by a uniform cloak hanging behind the door and the abandoned fragment of a yellowed and almost illegible map on the table. These tokens gave no hint as to the identity of the occupant - Jacobite or Hanoverian deserter - who had presumably left in a great hurry with his pursuers hot on his heels.

Jack and I decided to close the door on that incident in history and the room had been reopened by me, two years ago, for another fugitive fleeing from the law. A secret refuge and a tragic incident that I did not want to remember but found hard to forget.

To return to Prestonpans. The secret room and that long-ago battle, all would have remained part of Edinburgh's history had not Thane, on one of his rambles with Jack on Arthur's Seat, unearthed a rusted sword, identified by a military antiquarian to be of Jacobite origin.

This find was a turning point for Jack and had him delving into historical accounts, where more interesting and alluring facts emerged than twentieth-century police files offered. Such as the rumour of French gold, which had followed the prince to Scotland to assist in his campaign but had mysteriously vanished and, in doing so, had intrigued historians ever since. That it might have reached the prince in Duddingston preparing for battle led Jack to the intriguing discovery that Arthur's Seat had a hundred hidden caves suitable for buried treasure.

Because of his profession of solving murders, the existence of an unsolved mystery on our doorstep, so to speak, was irresistible and, with Thane, walks on unexplored sections of the hill became Jack's favourite leisure pursuit.

Had Jack been a Highlander loyal to the Stuart cause, I might have understood, but he was a Lowlander, his duty owed, his oath of allegiance given, to the Queen, a direct descendant of the House of Hanover.

As this new hobby coincided with our discovery of the secret room, Jack now saw himself in the role of military historian, declaring that perceived wisdom held that most successful battles were fought in summer, when there was food for men and horses, while in the autumn Highland chieftains were unwilling to call their clansmen to take up arms, leaving harvests to rot and families to starve in the bitter winter - a theory disproved, Jack pointed out, by the springtime disaster of Culloden and the autumn victory at Prestonpans.

Now each September Jack and I would go on a carriage drive, allegedly for a breath of fresh East Lothian air, but in reality a pilgrimage, a walk across the old battlefield with Jack making encouraging noises to Thane, hoping that he would unearth a treasure greater than the King George II coin, his sole discovery to date.

Hopeful for something larger, like the Jacobite sword, all he ever received from Thane was a look of reproach that said plainly he was not that kind of animal. Besides, it was certain knowledge that this particular ground had been traversed and trampled across by souvenir hunters for a hundred and fifty years and what Jack was expecting was a miracle.

I refused to be convinced about the Stuart cause, and Jack, completely failing to understand my lack of excitement and enthusiasm, looked at me in amazement.

'I thought that Bonnie Prince Charlie was every Scotswoman's hero.'

I shook my head. 'You've been influenced by too many tales of Flora MacDonald. He certainly wasn't mine.'

For me, the past was gone and I was content to bury it along with the very recent past which had confirmed my widowhood. Now it was the present affairs of Scotland, along with the whole rapidly changing face of Europe and worldwide events, that engrossed and concerned me.

I didn't much care which king or queen ruled over us as long as they understood that women were no longer men's chattels, playthings or breeding machines.

Women's suffrage was my burning issue, rather than a royal prince, a pretender to the English throne whose family exploits were a historical disaster. I refused to regard as a hero the incompetent misguided prince who had cost so many loyal followers their lives, and the terrible disasters wrought by Butcher Cumberland on the survivors. Indeed, I considered the Jacobites initially responsible for the Highland clearances.

My battles were with the times in which we now lived, and I was deeply involved with the Women's Suffrage Movement in Edinburgh - my 'obsession' as Jack called it - since I had lately been appointed chairman of the committee which met each month, and we were shortly hoping to welcome the great Emily Hobhouse herself.

My fellow campaigners were amazed that men could be so blind to the Boer War, which had exposed every kind of social weakness in Britain, in particular malnutrition, poverty and ignorance. Even the newspapers had seized upon the fact that in every big city, almost a third out of eleven thousand volunteers for the war would be rejected as physically unfit.

The census figures were most revealing, showing a budget lingering on tariffs and refusing to consider welfare in a country where middle-class families now had an average of four children, while in labourers' families the figures of infant mortality and child bed-deaths had changed little since the Middle Ages.