The Edinburgh Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

to him. The broad streets were flanked by wide pavements. Some were lined with gaslights, standing to attention like an honour guard of thin, stiff soldiers. The terraces of noble houses ran on and on, most of them fronted by iron railings, all studded with great doorways. Fashionably dressed folk moved to and fro—the women in their capacious skirts, the men in their tall hats and high collars—with calm, refined purpose.
    The frontage of Ruthven’s house in Melville Street was not somuch pleasing as stern. A few steps led up to the imposing door. A boot scraper was set into the flagstones, and Quire regarded it for a moment or two, debating whether to yield to his instinct to use the thing, merely because it was there. He sniffed and instead gave the door knocker, a heavy ring of solid brass, a few firm raps.
    As he stood there waiting upon the threshold, two ladies of evident means strolled by, arm in arm. They watched him as they went, and he had the uncomfortable sense that they thought him as out of place as he felt. He smiled and nodded, and they smiled demurely back before looking away and murmuring to one another.
    The great door swung open, and Quire found himself greeted not by some servant as he had expected but by a strikingly attractive woman of middle age, to whom the adjective demure could hardly have been less applicable. Her décolletage was far more revealing than had been the fashion for some time, exposing a great expanse of smooth skin, divided by the deep crevasse between the swell of her breasts. She regarded him with an expression so open, so appraising, that he found it unsettling.
    “Is Mr. John Ruthven at home?” Quire asked, his discomfiture putting a slight quaver into his voice.
    A smile pinched at her lips, and her knowing eyes widened a little. A fragrant perfume was stealing into Quire’s nostrils, all floral piquancy, much like the woman who wore it.
    “He is,” she said. “Have you a name I might share with him?”
    She stood aside as she said it, and ushered him in with an unfurling of her long, pale arm. He entered, catching a waft of that perfume once more as he passed by her.
    “Sergeant Quire,” he told her.
    “How nice. I am Isabel Ruthven. Can I take your coat?” she asked him, wholly unperturbed by the appearance of a policeman on her doorstep. “You have no hat, then?”
    “Ah, no. No, I don’t, madam.” He felt an irrational flutter of embarrassment at his lack of headgear, as if its absence constituted some grave social misdemeanour. There were few things he cared for less than the strictures of society’s hierarchies, yet he could nothelp but be aware of them, and of the difference that lay between him and those who would live in such a house as this.
    She hung his coat on an ornate stand in the hallway. He watched her neck as she did so: the line of her dress fell almost as low across her back as it did her front. He could see her shoulder blades moving beneath her white skin.
    “Mrs. Ruthven,” he said. “It is Mrs. Ruthven, is it?”
    “Indeed.” That smile again, which seemed at once guileless and far too suggestive.
    “Could you tell your husband that I have something of his that I would like to return to him?”
    “Of course. Come, he is in the drawing room. There is a seat just here you may wait on.”
    She escorted him down the hallway, walking fractionally closer to him than was entirely comfortable or proper, so that her voluminous skirt brushed heavily against his leg. He thought it must be deliberate, but an instant later found that notion silly and chided himself for being so foolish.
    A single rug was stretched out the length of the hallway, all burgundy, blues and creams. A massive side table, its chestnut surface so thoroughly polished that it almost glowed with an inner fire, held an ornate mirror fringed with gilt curlicues. As they passed it by, Quire glimpsed himself at Mrs. Ruthven’s side in the glass, and noted how each of them