The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [12]
“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 not help 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 accentuated the other by their proximity: her grace and porcelain beauty rendered his rough edges and weathering all the more acute, and his shadows made her shine all the more brightly.
A stairway folded itself up the inside of the house, light pouring down from a vast skylight four floors above. Mrs. Ruthven led Quire beneath it, and beyond, to a padded bench with thick, carved legs.
“If you would just wait here a moment, I will announce you.”
Obedient, he sat, and watched her approach a tall panelled door opposite. At the last moment, as she raised one hand to tap at the wood, she looked back and settled on him a thoughtful gaze. She washed it away in a moment with a smile, and turned back to the door.
Quire heard only murmured voices from within as she leaned into the room, then she was beckoning him, and closing the door behind him, and he was looking around one of the most luxuriantly furnished chambers he had ever seen. A glittering chandelier that hung from a huge moulded rose in the centre of the ceiling; paintings the size of dining tables on the walls, dulled by age; a small piano of lustrous ebony; high-backed, long-armed chairs so thickly upholstered they looked fit to smother a man should he sink carelessly into them.
And three men. Standing closest to Quire, regarding him with expectant curiosity—therefore, Quire guessed, being John Ruthven—was a tall figure with a strong, if rather thin, face and a white neckcloth tied about a high, wing-tipped collar in a bow so ebullient