The Coffin Lane Murders Read Online Free

waste.'
    Ten minutes later Kate was on her way home. Good-nights said, the carriage departed through the snow and Olivia carried a sleepy Jamie up to bed while Vince and Faro returned to the dining room where Mrs Brook had stoked up the fire.
    Stretching out their legs to the blaze they shared a nightcap, a splendid single-malt whisky.
    Faro sighed contentedly. This was his favourite time of the day.
    It was a great life. A great life, here with his beloved family. Who could ask for more?
    Who indeed?
    He was to remember those happy hours that evening with the snow falling gently in the garden beyond the windows.
    It would be a long time before such content was to be his again.

Chapter 3
     
    They found the first victim lying beneath the blood-soaked snow in Coffin Lane.
    PC Dean, heading towards Dalkeith Road on his normal beat, had taken the short cut and made the discovery by the merest chance of observing a hump of newly fallen snow with an effusion of pink.
    His immediate idea was that some wounded animal lay beneath. Closer inspection revealed a white hand, a cold, dead, unmoving woman's hand. She had been thrust into the snow-filled ditch during the night and the heavy fall of snow had hidden the terrible sight until morning.
    PC Dean knew what he was about. A practical, well-trained policeman not given to bouts of panic, he knelt down and, carefully scraping the snow away, followed that dead hand up to arm, shoulder and then to neck, although there was little possibility of the woman still being alive.
    At last the dead face was revealed, a ghastly grey with the snow melting on eyes that were wide open and frozen in death.
    She had been stabbed through the chest.
    He looked desperately around the still-empty landscape. The procedure to be followed was particular.
    Find a doctor in case there was hope of resuscitation and then summon his superior officer. In this case he was fortunate in having both nearby.
    It was unlikely that anyone would disturb the corpse or be in the vicinity in such weather but PC Dean lost no more time. Leaving the scene he plunged towards Sheridan Place. He moved as quickly as was humanly possible through several inches of snow, marking as he did so that, apart from a few animal tracks, the whole of Edinburgh seemed to have been brought to a complete standstill.
    He had the world and the corpse he had just left to himself, and trying not to keep looking back over his shoulder as if the old man with the scythe might be following, he was greatly relieved to find Inspector Faro and Dr Laurie at their breakfast.
    Dr Conan Pursley was with them, having been benighted and unable to return to Solomon's Tower after attending the deathbed of a sick patient in the influenza outbreak.
    Within minutes all three were hastening back to Coffin Lane with Dean, a passing errand-boy entrusted with a shilling in his pocket to alert the Central Office that the mortuary carriage would be required.
    Faro knelt to examine the woman's body, wondering why murders at Christmas time seemed so much more gross, their brutality a further blasphemy against the season of goodwill. As PC Dean explained the circumstances of his gruesome find, he knew that the heavy snowfall also helped to establish the time of death as sometime during the hours of the previous night. It also destroyed any hope of finding clues.
    PC Dean stood by watching them carefully scrape the snow off the body. Meanwhile the small crowd who wait in readiness to gravitate towards any disaster were gathering and had to be kept at bay.
    Faro shuddered for as the body was uncovered a great effusion of blood spread across the snow. The stab wound in the woman's chest re-opened allowing the blood to run freely again.
    The three men stepped back sharply and Faro remembered in horror the old adage about victims bleeding when faced with their murderer.
    He glanced quickly over his shoulder. Was one of the faces in the group of onlookers staring so curiously at the