by David Ashton
Perhaps not, was her decision. Save it for another day.
Margaret looked across to where their three children, all grown now, huddled together under a weeping umbrella.
Her son’s pale face was set in stone and manly forbearance.
Everyone thought him an absolute brick, and who was she to disagree? He had accompanied them every day to the Court of Inquiry and they had both watched as his father’s proud façade cracked like the very bridge itself.
Every day she had observed Sir Thomas ignore her and lean more and more heavily upon the filial arm as the clouds of shame and disgrace gathered above his head.
And then they had burst.
As she brought this to mind, another squall of rain hit her through the veil, the sudden violence driving some of the mourners back from the edge of the grave.
But Margaret Bouch stood firm. She was the widow after all. Widows don’t give an inch.
The minister droned on, something about the Kingdom of Heaven and how to get there, surely better to quote from the Psalm? ‘Praise the Lord upon earth: ye dragons, and all deeps; Fire and Hail, snow and vapours; Wind and storm, fulfilling his word.’
Praise the Lord indeed, was her unhallowed thought. He had shown no mercy that dreadful night towards the last year’s end, nor, in Margaret’s experience, had he ever demonstrated much inclination towards clemency upon earth.
The Reverend Jeremiah Sneddon of the Episcopalian Church of Scotland, a man in her opinion who more than lived up to his name, had insisted upon being bare-headed and his wispy white hair, plastered to his skull, left him to look like a monkey caught out in the rain.
Margaret had a quick glance round to make sure no one was aware of these profane contemplations but she was safe behind the veil. What a dreadful woman she was to be sure. Last night had she not drunk of strong whisky? And more than one glass. In the morning she had noticed her fingers tremble as she donned the widow’s weeds.
She fumbled for her handkerchief, slyly raised her hand under the damp veil as if touching the cloth to her face, breathed out and sniffed. No. Not a trace. A faint redolence only of violets, from the lozenges sucked so assiduously after her toilette that very morning.
Toilette, Margaret reflected, now there’s a respectable word, for was she not a respectable lady?
She felt as if her husband had been an iron band around her body and now, free of its constraint, she was shaking to pieces as the train roared overhead.
Margaret shivered. One of the newspapers had as its front page an artist’s impression of the calamity, men, women and children falling into the bleak December sea like so many brittle leaves. Although almost a year ago, she could not rid her mind of that image.
And what of Sir Thomas, she wondered? What pictures were frozen inside the cold obstruction of his mind?
She had experienced an impersonal kind of compassion for the man despite the secrets he had concealed. A dutiful pity. But he had shut her from his life and locked her out like a poor beast in the rain. Year by year, the little wife had withered and dwindled while he and his true love kissed and fondled to heart’s content.
Now, Mistress Bouch was free. Free to destroy herself in any way she saw fit.
The minister closed his bible with a dull, righteous thud and Margaret became conscious that she was the focus of many eyes.
For a moment she was confused then remembered the protocol of interment. The widow knelt down, groped for a portion of the damp, sodden earth and cast it into the grave before her. The muddy mass landed on the polished oaken lid, stuck to one of the brass fittings, then slid slowly out of sight towards oblivion.
She hoped sincerely that would do the trick.
And it did. She watched the others follow suit, the rain herding in their thrown clods like a drover, and then the pallbearers began to drift away. Just like her mind.
Margaret had felt such a welcome separation from reality since her lord and master had died and prayed most earnestly for its continuance.
In the meantime, all ceremonies were to be observed and she would play her part. They would all reconvene at the house in Bernard Street; a little too near the Leith docks for some, but Sir Thomas had it purchased as his base in Edinburgh because he liked to walk to the sea and gaze upon that which he planned to conquer.
Reconvene. She could just see it now. Tasteful funeral meats would be passed from hand to hand, malt whisky raised to lips, not the grieving widow’s of course, and then after a respectful time the mourners would take their pious departure, surreptitiously scraping heels on the kerbing stone outside lest some oozing stigma had attached itself to their shoes along with the earth from the cemetery.
Margaret became aware that a man was standing before her muttering words of comfort she could scarcely hear such was the blessed separation.
A fellow engineer to her husband, bound by professional code to attend; a few of these, the family, and that was all Sir Thomas had to see him on his journey.
Not much of a show to be sure, but then the bridge builder had few intimates, certainly not her, no, few intimates, save the one.
She brought his face to mind.
Alan Telfer, his personal secretary, who scarcely bothered to conceal the look of cold disdain in his eyes if she dared to visit Edinburgh and disturb them at their work; this stupid interfering woman, this dowdy squashed creature who witnessed them with their heads together over the sacred drawings.
A fine combination.
But Mister Alan Telfer was missing from the scene due to the undisputed fact that he had, some time ago, blown out his brains.
Quel dommage. So regrettable.
A dreadful sight to be sure, she remembered.
She had borne witness to so many things.
In truth, there were two participants missing from the scene. Where, she wondered, was the other?
A gust of wind blasted the rain almost horizontally into the face of Reverend Sneddon, and the man of god moved hastily to follow the straggle of departing mourners towards the waiting carriages.
He left a space where piety had endured and through that frame, past the attendant gravediggers who stood patiently biding the time to begin their labour, Margaret saw a shrouded figure in the distance under a threadbare dripping tree.
The inspector. He had come after all. How like the man.
4
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies;
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
King Lear
Leith, December 1879
Murder is a dirty business. The corpse of the old man lay in a dismal posture on the stone flags of the scullery floor where it had fallen, body wrapped in a heavy outdoor coat, the blue serge still damp from last night’s rain.
An apologetic little dribble of blood led from the crushed head at the foot of the stairs where the fellow had rested quietly enough until assailed by the shriek of a hysterical kitchen maid who had arrived at the crack of dawn, to help prepare breakfast.
Indeed some ham and a slab of liver, fresh bought that morning from the butchers, were huddled together upon a plate near the sink where the selfsame maid, who had entered from the side door, had dumped them down before turning to discover the carnage lurking behind.
The liver also bore traces of blood though McLevy doubted if it would receive the requisite cleansing.
He also doubted that even if treated so and fried up with some onions and the ham, there would be much appetite in the house.
Nothing tempers the carnal like a cadaver.
Unless you are a policeman.
Constable Mulholland was upstairs exercising his Irish charm on the maid who was a hefty specimen, and one of those glandular females that the inspector avoided like the plague. Mulholland, however, was good with glands.
McLevy was left with the dead butler.
The inspector had painstakingly scrutinised the floor slabs down to the very cracks. Just under the man’
s skull he found fragments of flesh and bone. Difficult to tell whether they had spilled out after his head had been split and he had fallen, or if they were the result of the fall itself. But from the depth of the wound, he would have to assume a blow. A savage blow.
He then poked into the myriad moist crevices of the scullery but found nothing untoward.
A few cockroaches scuttled guiltily into hiding but they, undoubtedly, had an alibi. He remembered reading once in one of his books the fact that cockroaches were revered in Ancient Egypt. A mysterious bunch, the Egyptians.
It would seem as if entry had been forced by the jemmying open of one of the windows at the back garden, which provided access to the lower ground-floor level where the kitchen and scullery were based.
The question was, had the fellow been on his way in to commit the robbery when he encountered the butler, or had he already committed it and been on his way out? The inspector fervently hoped the latter. If nothing had been taken, then nothing could be traced, and that would shut off a fertile source of inquiry because in McLevy’s experience the pawnshops in certain low areas of Leith were veritable mines of information. And he knew how to dig up the lode of crime therein, pick and shovel.
There were some scrapes down the stone steps which suggested that the old fellow may well have been struck at the top wee landing where the door led out into the hall and then fallen like a shot crow. Minute examination of these steps in turn had yielded nothing. The servant’s skull had been cracked open, that was obvious enough, but the murder implement was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the murderer. Not a clue. What a pity.
He leant over and looked into the sightless eyes of the corpse; the old man’s skin was stretched tightly over high cheekbones, the sockets above them deep and hollow, lips drawn back over the teeth as if the butler had sucked in death from a silver cup.
‘I don’t suppose, Archie,’ he said, having been reliably informed that the man’s name was Archibald Gourlay, ‘I don’t suppose ye might pass me a description of your assailant?’
No answer was forthcoming, but McLevy persisted.
‘Anything that might help, no matter how small, rack your brains, sir.’
However the aforementioned brains had a chasm bashed into them, leaving the head looking like an indented round of cheese, and, with a sigh, the inspector brought the one-sided conversation to an end by pulling up gently a blanket which had been laid on the body to cover the bewildered frightened face, then made his way up the stairs to search out some live members of the household.
He emerged into the narrow gloomy hall, with a high, pale, consumptive ceiling, which did nothing to dispel the claustrophobia always induced in McLevy by the trappings of middle-class decorum. Queen Victoria would have been proud of this hallway; it was a testament to her glorious reign. The epitome of denied joy.
A little, grudging natural light came through the cold blue and green stained-glass window above the heavy street door, to be absorbed by the brown mottled walls. A dark knobbly umbrella stand was on sentry duty at the entrance, and halfway down the thin corridor jutted a small table, a wooden bare upright chair at each side, and a vase set on a white doily precisely in the middle of the table surface.
The edges of the lace doily were curled up slightly as if retracting from the general murk, and the vase, as far as he could see, was empty, unless it contained the ashes of some ancestor. Could be. It was a bilious pale yellow colour that might possibly indicate the funereal pallor of a long-dead relative.
McLevy hesitated. All the doors were closed and he had but a hazy notion of the geography of the house having been conducted straight to the murder scene.
He could hear the murmur of Mulholland’s voice from somewhere off to the side and a smothered high-pitched response as the girl tried to gulp down her sobs and talk at the same time.
Aye, now he had the situation. The constable and maid were closeted in the small parlour and this door, against which he now pressed his ear, must be for the main drawing room.
There was no getting away from it, the inspector thought, he was a terrible nosy man. Jean Brash, the premier madam of the best bawdy-hoose in Edinburgh, the Just Land, had many times remarked that if you gave McLevy heaven, he would want hell along with it in case he missed out on something.
It was time he should visit Jean Brash. She made the best cup of coffee in Edinburgh. A Lebanese grinding.
Now, was that more sobbing that he heard through the panel? But not a high note, more like a low choked swallow of regret. On an impulse, he did not knock but silently turned the handle and slid into the chamber like a ghost.
5
I had a dove and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,
With a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving.
JOHN KEATS,
I had a dove and the sweet dove died
A woman stood in the centre of the room, her head bowed, a stray shaft of greyish light from the dark curtained window catching at her figure like a child its mother’s skirts.
McLevy observed the scene silently and, after a moment, she sensed his presence and lifted up a smooth white face unstained by tears, the skin almost translucent. Like a pearl.
The lady of the house. He had briefly glimpsed her as the secretary Alan Telfer had ushered him downstairs to make acquaintance with the corpse. Wife of Sir Thomas Bouch. Margaret, by name.
‘Well Maggie,’ he wondered to himself, ‘your eyes are dry enough, but what haunts you this day?’
She was a petite woman, high cheekbones and above them the aforesaid eyes surprisingly dark and slanted, gypsy fashion, with dark eyebrows arching above like lightning conductors. A compact little body, contained and corseted, the feet deft and dainty.
McLevy was a great observer of women’s feet and what covered their nakedness. These small boots, elastic-sided, peeping shyly out from below the dark severe hem of her dress, though in black leather to match her raven hair with its austere middle-parting, were surprisingly possessed of pointed toes.
Not snubbed in rectitude, but pointing. Straight as a die. At him. Now, there’s a thing.
Nothing betrayed character like shoes. His own were solid and serviceable but that was a disguise like the rest of him and he lived in terror of the day that someone would rip the mask away and reveal him in the light.
When she spoke, her voice was musical enough but in a minor key. Muted. Nothing percussive.
‘How may I help you, inspector?’
She seemed in no way perturbed that he had popped up in front of her with no word of warning. Nothing glandular here, and yet he sensed something, what was it? A vixen bites through her own flesh to escape the wire of the snare?
He must stop drinking so much coffee; it provoked his intuition to hallucinatory extremes.
Back to terra firma.
‘I’m hoping that you can, Mistress Bouch.’
‘It is my fervent wish. Fire away.’
McLevy nodded, but his mind was busy with the last two words. Perhaps her father had been a sharpshooter.
‘Archibald Gourlay?’ he ventured.
‘The poor creature.’
‘The corpse. What were his habits?’
‘Habits?’
‘Uhuh. They may have led him to his death, ye see. I need to know them. I need to know his life.’
‘But surely – by accident, he chanced upon a thief. And suffered – death.’
‘I’m not a great believer in accident.’
For a moment her eyes drifted away and McLevy glanced round the chamber. The walls were a drab olive green, hung with various photographs of bridges, ferry boats and trains mostly decked out in the claret and cream colours of the North British Railway Company.
Indeed, the whole aspect reminded him greatly of a waiting room in a railway station. Perhaps not surprising given Sir Thomas Bouch and his connections, but in the dark
square masculine furniture which lined up against the walls like soldiers, there was not a trace to be found of femininity, not a frill to the antimacassar.
An empty space that people passed through. En route to another destination.
Margaret Bouch spoke slowly, her attention fixed inwardly, as if to hold some emotion at bay.
‘Mister Gourlay had been butler here these past ten years. He managed this household to perfection.’
‘Like a railway timetable?’ McLevy asked, a wicked gleam lurking somewhere at the back of his eyes.
‘Precisely so. He was a kind, gentle old man who lived to serve.’
‘And died, no doubt, in the same capacity,’ muttered the inspector. ‘What of his desires?’
‘Desires?’
‘We all have them.’
McLevy’s remark caused the woman to blink. He was somewhat amused by that; no doubt her acquaintance of policemen was slight, the occasional overbearing chief constable at official functions, and the inspector did not correspond to any known specification. No fixed abode.
‘I never asked him,’ she replied somewhat primly.
‘That’s the trouble wi’ being a servant.’ McLevy frowned as if personally affronted. ‘Nobody ever asks you.’
He noted a flash of outrage in her eyes. Good.
‘Let us therefore leave desires and return to habit,’ he said. ‘Of a Wednesday evening, what was his custom?’
‘It was his night off. He would go and have a few drams with old friends. “A wee gab in the corner of the Old Ship,” he would say. He loved to gossip.’
She essayed a passable imitation of an old man’s voice and McLevy noted that also. A talent for mimicry was rare in a woman of this class and, more especially absent, was the willingness to display such a gift.