The Scottish Play Murder by Anne Rutherford Page B

an awkward moment. Then he swung the door wide so they both could see the body.
    The woman cried out, “Oh, Angus! They’ve killed Angus!”
    More doors opened down the hallway. “What did you say? Angus?”
    “Oh! He’s been murdered!”
    Tenants began to creep from their rooms. “Angus?”
    “Oh! Angus is dead!”
    A crowd gathered at Angus’s door, those at the back shoving in and those at the front shoving back, trying not to get too close to the body. Angus’s neighbors cried out their distress. Suzanne watched them gather. More of the curious came up the stairs from the lower floors, asking about the outcry. Suzanne, with a calmness she did not feel, slipped away down the stairs and walked from her friend’s violated body to return to the Globe. There she would summon Piers, who would notify Constable Pepper of the body, and Daniel, who might know what fashionable fellow might have something so terrible against Angus as to want him dead.
    *
    “’T IS that Ramsay fellow, I tell you.” Daniel stood by the door, still with his hat in hand as Sheila stood by to relieve him of it along with his gloves and sword.
    “Daniel, be so kind as to show me the bottoms of your shoes, would you?” Suzanne sat on the sofa in her sitting room.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Humor me, if you please. Show me your soles.” She gestured to him that he should be quick about it.
    Puzzled, Daniel lifted his shoes one by one and showed her his soles, then put them down.
    “Thank you.”
    Still puzzled, Daniel said, “You’re welcome, I suppose.”
    Suzanne sat back on her pillows with her hands folded in her lap and said, “Don’t leap upon an assumption that Ramsay is guilty simply because the two of you are not bosom friends.”
    “Of course not. Neither does my not liking him make him innocent.”
    “Granted. In any case, do give over your hat and gloves to Sheila, and have a seat.”
    Daniel absently complied, and sat on the sofa next to her. She turned toward him some, the better to keep him from laying his arm along the back of the sofa behind her neck. It was a favorite tactic of his to touch when touching was not welcome, for she was still not steeled against his too-casual advances, and so she liked to make them difficult for him. He said, leaning toward her in his insistence, “You must see the truth, that Ramsay has killed two men, one of them your friend.”
    “Ramsay has killed nobody. The man who murdered Angus was a nobleman, and I’m willing to bet it was the same man who did in the Spanish pirate.”
    “How do you think it wasn’t Ramsay?”
    “Besides having spoken to a witness who saw a nobleman visit Angus recently, there were bloody footprints on his floor. They were footprints of fashionable shoes. I’m certain Ramsay wears Scottish brogues. Flat soles that are a single piece of leather. They’ve no heel at all.”
    Daniel turned up the sole of one of his shoes to look at the bottom. “You think I killed Angus?”
    “Don’t be silly. There’s no blood on your shoes, and besides, you have no reason to want Angus dead. I think the man who killed Angus also killed the Spaniard. There is a connection between them. Angus was at the table with Ramsay and the pirate the night the Spaniard was murdered.”
    “So was Ramsay there, too. I’m telling you, it was him. It’s time to make queries of him.”
    Suzanne had to admit he had a point, though she wished he weren’t so eager for it. The footprints told an entirely different story.
    Daniel continued, “That is, if he would tell the truth should we ask.”
    “We? Are you offering to interview him yourself?”
    “He would no sooner tell me the truth than he would yourself.”
    “I have no reason to believe he would lie to me.”
    Daniel laughed. “Unless, of course, he’s guilty. And except for the rumors from Edinburgh which indicate he might very well be guilty of other crimes.”
    Suzanne declined to answer, for she was still curious