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“I’m looking for lodgings,” Monk replied. “Possibly for a week or two. Have you a room?”
She glanced at him rapidly, summing him up, as was her trade.
“Aye, I have.” Evidently she approved of him. If he had more clothes in his case of the same quality as those he was wearing, they alone would pay his rent for a month or more. “Come in and I’ll show ye.” She backed away to allow him in, and he followed gratefully.
Inside was narrow and dimly lit, but it smelled clean and the air was warm and dry. Someone was singing in the bowels of the kitchen, loudly, and every so often a little sharp, but it was a cheerful sound, and he felt it welcoming. She led him up three flights of stairs, puffing and blowing noisily and stopping on each landing to regain her breath.
“There,” she said between gasps when they reached the top floor and she threw open the door to the room he was to occupy. It was clean and airy and looked out over the Grassmarket and the roofs opposite.
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “This will do very well.”
“Ye up from England?” she asked conversationally.
She made it sound like a foreign land, but then strictly speaking it was.
“Yes.” It was an opportunity he should not waste. There was certainly no time to spare. “Yes, I’m a legal consultant.” That was something of a euphemism, but advisable, and better than suggesting he was from the police. “Preparing for a trial concerning the death of Mrs. Farraline, up at Ainslie Place.”
“She dead?” the woman said with surprise. “How’d that happen? Still, she was getting on, so little wonder. Contesting the will, are they?”
There was interest in her face, and her assumption certainly caught Monk’s attention.
“Well, it really isn’t something I should discuss, Mrs. Forster….” He took a chance, and it was not contradicted. “But I daresay you won’t need me to tell you everything anyway?”
Her smile broadened knowingly. “Money ain’t always a blessing, Mr….?”
“Monk, William Monk,” he supplied. “Lot of money, is there?”
“Well, ye’d know that, wouldn’t ye?” Her eyes were bright brown and full of amusement.
“Not yet,” he prevaricated. “But I have my guesses—naturally.”
“Bound to be.” She nodded. “All that big printing works, been there ever since the twenties, getting bigger all the time, and that fine house up the new town. Oh yes, there’s a lot of money there, Mr. Monk. Well worth fighting over, I should think. And the old lady still owned a fair piece of it, or so I heard, in spite of Colonel Farraline being dead these eight or ten years.”
Monk thought rapidly and took a gamble.
“Mrs. Farraline was murdered, you know? That is the case I am concerned with.”
Her face was aghast.
“Ye don’t say so! Murdered? Well I never! The
poor old soul. Now who in the good God’s name would have done a thing like that?”
“Well, there is suspicion it was the nurse who accompanied her on the train down to London….” He hated saying it, even in so slight a way and without naming Hester. It was almost like an admission that the idea was possible.
“Oh. What a wicked thing to do! Whatever for?”
“A brooch,” he said between his teeth. “Which she gave back, and before anyone missed it. Found it in her own baggage, by accident, or so she said.”
“Oh yes?” Mrs. Forster’s eyebrows rose with delicate skepticism. “And what would a woman like that be doing with the sort of brooch Mrs. Farraline would wear? We all know what nurses are like. Drunken, dirty and no better than they should be, most of them. What a terrible thing. The poor soul.”
Monk felt his face burning and his jaw tightened as if he would grind the words between his teeth.
“She was one of the young ladies who went out to nurse our soldiers in the Crimea—served with Miss Nightingale.” His voice was rasping and without any of the control he had sworn he would keep.
Mrs. Forster looked nonplussed. She stared at Monk, reading his face to see if he had really meant what he had said. It took her only a glance to assure herself that he did.
“Well I never,” she said again. She took a deep breath, her eyes wide and troubled. “Perhaps it was not her after all. Had ye thought o’ that?”
