Free The Missing Duchess by Alanna Knight Page A

perhaps twelve people - a man and a woman, their swarm of children and maybe a couple of elderly relatives or hangers-on.
    He had almost given up hope of finding Sandy when at last a woman, with several small children clinging to her skirts, answered to the name of Mrs Dunnock. Her clothes were clean, shabby but neat, and when she spoke she nervously pushed a gold bracelet back from her wrist.
    'I'm his ma. What d'ye want wi' him? What's he done this time?' she said wearily, her manner that of a parent used to receiving constant complaints about her unruly offspring.
    'Nothing. Just tell him Inspector Faro came by.'
    'Inspector Faro?'
    Mention of his name panicked her. She stepped backwards, glancing over her shoulder as if someone else might be listening.
    'You're a polis!' she said accusingly, as if he had wheedled his way to her door under false pretences.
    'I'm a detective, Mrs Dunnock.'
    She took a great gulp of air, her hands clutched her wrists and she pointed to his tweed cape and hat. 'Proper policemen wear uniforms.'
    'Detectives don't.'
    'And that gives you the right to come poking your nose into what don't concern you? We ain't done nothing wrong,' she added in a pathetic whine.
    'Neither has Sandy - at least not that we know about,' he said. 'Just tell him there's a couple of shillings for him to put to good use.'
    The woman's eyes glittered at the mention of money, almost as if he had given her a glimpse into paradise. Her defensive manner softened so rapidly, he guessed that this was obviously not what she had been fearing as the outcome of his unexpected visit.
    She managed a smile. 'He's no' at home, but I'll tell him, mister. Where d'ye bide?'
    'He knows that too,' said Faro, and lifted his hat politely as he walked away down the steps.
    An adept at shallow breathing, he was glad to fully extend his lungs again, for even the reek of smoking chimneys in the High Street was ambrosia compared to the vile stench in the fetid house he had just left, with its dreadful odour of rotting meat. God only knew what cheap cuts the poor got from the flesher's disease-ridden stocks, and why many more did not succumb to food poisoning. And as always his final thought when faced with direct poverty was: But for the grace of God, there go I. For such he was fully aware might have been the squalid circumstances of his own life, but for an accident of fate that had made him a policeman's son with a widowed mother prepared to make material sacrifices for his education.
    Even in broad daylight, with a thin sun turning the Castle into the setting for one of Sir Walter Scott's romances, Faro approached the wizard Major's abode with reluctance. Its chilling atmosphere and sinister emanations had remained untouched by passing years and changing seasons. Facing north-east, its windows were untroubled by sunshine, but it was not aspect alone which added to the feeling of foreboding and melancholy.
    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