by David Ashton
Roach sniffed in disbelief at the constable’s response and his eyes passed disdainfully over the station cubby-hole where the rank and file hung their uniforms and left spare boots strewn in disarray.
A smell of sweat hung in the air, mingling with the odours from the oft-used water closet next door.
The mirror, now mercifully free from the image of the love-sick Mulholland, was set into the wall by the door and intended for the inspection of both uniform and boots before the Leith constabulary launched themselves upon the grateful populace to protect the righteous and hammer down upon the criminal classes. It had a large crack running haphazardly down its full length with a spider’s web of smaller cracks off to the one side. This side was also discoloured with what looked like a lime-green mould, and for anyone who was not in love as they gazed into the glass, the resultant image reflected was that of a personality lividly split in twain.
Roach looked upon this duality and repressed a shudder. The one was bad enough to regard; unlike most men he was not fond of his appearance.
God knows what Constable Ballantyne thought, the poor fellow being possessed of a birthmark, strawberry in colour that melted down half the span of his face.
Mulholland stood by patiently, and Roach remembered he had come in to complain.
‘I emerged from my office,’ he said querulously, ‘to find the morning shift departed, Constable Ballantyne lost in admiration of the seagull droppings upon our window panes and Sergeant Murdoch apparently in deep contemplation at the station register but, in fact, resting fast asleep on the one elbow.’
‘I don’t know how he does that,’ said Mulholland.
‘The reward of inertia is inertia,’ Roach snapped, misquoting perversely the dictum of Saint Augustine on patience. ‘The place was empty. Empty of you, empty of McLevy, of direction, meaning, empty of life itself!’
This seemed a bit dramatic to Mulholland but Monday mornings can often appear so. Vacant of purpose.
‘I’m sure it will fill up again, sir. Crime never sleeps. That’s what the inspector always says.’
Roach grunted morosely at the proffered saw of consolation and seemed lost in gloom. He hunched over his clasped hands and moved them slowly back, then forward.
Perhaps, in that emptiness, he had seen existence stretching uselessly out before him like the Dead Sea.
Or perhaps the root of his despond had a more prosaic origin.
Mulholland considered the facts before him.
The lieutenant had been playing a four ball on Musselburgh links this Saturday past. A President’s Cup match against one of his own superiors, and the constable deduced that all might have not gone according to plan.
A toss up, in that case, whether to lance the wound or let the man suppurate in silence.
Ah well, Mulholland decided. Better out than in.
‘How did the golf proceed at the weekend, sir?’
The floodgates of grievance burst asunder and spilled out a veritable deluge.
‘I had a five-foot putt on the last green to win the match for myself and partner. Just as I was about to strike the ball, just at that moment, mind you, just then, not at any other moment, Sandy Grant, my own chief constable and a fellow mason to boot, jingled the coin in his pocket. A deliberate jingle!’
Mulholland bowed his head in sorrow and spoke.
‘My Aunt Katie always says, “There’s no limit to the darkness in man. To win the prize, he’d murder the world.”’
This bucolic profundity lumbered past Roach, who was still seething with dejection.
The lieutenant seemed locked in a private misery of a memory too painful to further relate. His gaze was inward, lost in bleak contemplation.
Mulholland took a deep breath. Now or never.
He produced from his pocket a small jewellery box, opened the lid and waved it gently under Roach’s nose as if trying to bring the man back to consciousness with smelling salts.
‘What do you think, sir?’
The lieutenant wrenched himself from the dreadful memory of a putt sailing beyond the hole and brought his investigative instincts to bear.
‘It is a ring,’ he said.
‘An engagement ring, sir. Well bought. Hard earned.’
Mulholland delicately removed the circle from its setting and held it in fingers which had grasped many a criminal collar, but now offered up the object as if it were the Holy Grail.
Roach groaned under his breath. He had been rash enough, prompted mightily by Mrs Roach who had more than a passing interest in all this, to promise the constable some assistance in his suit for Emily Forbes.
He gazed gloomily at the golden hoop of potential matrimony; a hoop he had jumped through with initial enthusiasm and now would continue to do so, like an ageing lion a ring of fire, till the end of his days.
Mrs Roach, like many another female of a certain age and social standing, was obsessed by the memory of a romance she had never experienced and, as blood from a stone, would squeeze it vicariously from any promising situation.
This one was tailor-made. Young love.
‘You were kind enough to suggest, sir,’ Mulholland almost batted his eyelids in an attempt to portray bashful appreciation, an attempt which sat strangely on a face which though blessed with a clear skin, blue eyes and an open countenance, had seen more than its share of murder and mayhem, ‘that, in the fullness of time, you might find your way towards approaching the father of my intended Emily, and, on my behalf, notwithstanding, and without troubling yourself in any way –’
‘I shall speak to Robert Forbes,’ Roach interrupted. ‘But I vouch for nothing. He is an insurance adjuster and therefore not easily impressed.’
‘I shall accept his valuation.’
Mulholland stood before his superior; arms aloft, holding the box up in one hand and ring in another, like some sort of religious icon.
‘Put that miscellany out of sight,’ Roach commanded and, as the constable replaced the ring and carefully secreted the box on his person, the lieutenant wondered how to introduce a note of reality into the conversation.
‘Emily Forbes is a young woman. Very young.’
‘I’m not in a tearing hurry, sir.’
‘There may be other suitors.’
‘I believe I have the inside track.’
‘Then don’t rush the fence.’
‘It’s the only way to get the horse over.’
A stubborn look had appeared on the constable’s face and Roach sighed. He should have known better than bandy equine metaphors with an Irishman.
‘I shall speak to Mister Forbes and see how the land lies for this galloping beast, but in the meantime –’
The lieutenant took a deep breath to indicate the importance of what was to follow.
‘You will make no mention of my part in this to anyone, especially Inspector McLevy. He and romance do not walk hand in hand.’
Mulholland nodded but he could not keep hope from shining in his eyes and Roach felt duty bound to dull the expectation.
‘You must keep in mind also, that Robert Forbes has attained a certain level of society, constable. Levels are … everything.’
The constable’s hand clenched into a fist. This was undeniably true. He had experienced it from some of the young men at the musical soirées where he had first met Emily. Amused condescension. A barely concealed contempt for a social status of inverse proportion to his great height. Very low, indeed. Creeping on its belly, as far as these arrogant chancers were concerned.
Mulholland also took a deep breath.
‘I shall try to rise above myself, sir.’
Roach decided to accept this flat statement at face value and signalled an end to the exchange by returning to his putting stroke and grievance.
‘By rights I should have won that game. Sandy Grant did not play fair. He jingled. A fellow lodge member! And I lost the hole.’
‘There’s nae justice,’ said a voice.
McLevy stood
in the doorway. He had arrived silently and there was no telling how long he had been there.
Both others fell into a cold sweat.
Mulholland’s hand closed protectively over the pocket where he’d put the ring and Roach prayed silently that the inspector had not overheard too much.
If McLevy knew that the lieutenant was acting as love’s emissary, the future would contain more barbs than Cupid’s quill could muster.
‘Where have you been hiding, McLevy?’ Roach demanded, trying to read his fate in the inspector’s face, but the countenance in front of him was blank. The Sphinx would have supplied more indication.
‘I attended a funeral,’ came the eventual answer.
‘Of your own making?’
‘Not directly.’
‘That’s a nice change.’
For a moment McLevy darted a ruminative look towards his superior, then he turned to his constable.
‘We have work before us, Mulholland,’ he said.
‘And what is that, sir?’
‘The fire at the bonded warehouse.’
‘I sniffed it on the wind this morning,’ Roach interposed. ‘But that is a concern primarily for the port authorities and official fire investigation.’
‘Not any more.’ McLevy shook himself as if in anticipation, and drops of water sprayed from his overcoat perilously near to Roach’s highly polished shoes.
The lieutenant cut an immaculate figure as always.
The inspector, as usual, resembled a dog that had just run through a puddle.
‘A report just in at the desk as I arrived. It seems that a body has been newly found amongst the debris,’ said McLevy. ‘That makes it our concern.’
‘What kind of body?’ asked Roach suspiciously.
The ghost of a smile touched McLevy’s lips as he watched Mulholland struggle into his police cape and carefully place the helmet upon his head. With his great height and beanpole figure, it never failed to amuse the simpler side of his inspector.
‘I havenae yet made acquaintance, sir,’ he replied with due deference. ‘But I am willing to wager that it is burnt to a crisp, and dead as a dodo.’
8
O Comforter, draw near,
Within my heart appear,
And kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
RICHARD LITTLEDALE,
Come down, O love divine
The walls and ceiling of the warehouse were blackened by the fire but had stood firm. The wooden beams had absorbed, over the years, enough moisture from the sea and windswept rain, to render them proof against consuming flame.
The body had not been so lucky. It had lain under a pile of scorched debris, until discovered by the workmen brought in to sweep the site lest more combustion be lurking, ready to burst once more into destructive action.
Oliver Garvie looked down at the scrambled mess of something once human, and sighed.
‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t come too near.’
He had met and escorted the policemen through the ruins of the fire leading them to an unsavoury tangle of flesh and bone, the scorched putrid matter peeling from the emerging skeleton. It was curled up in a foetal position, lying on its side, what was left of the face contorted, jaws open in a silent scream.
McLevy dropped to his knees and peered at the corpse, whistling a Jacobite tune under his breath,
‘Charlie is my darling, the young Chevalier.’
The inspector was in his element, oblivious to the stench from the near carbonised flesh and the gruesome picture presented. He pored over the details of the body like a housewife picking out a good piece of meat for the table.
Above him, Garvie and Mulholland eyed each other. It would seem that there was no love lost between them, and they made an odd contrast.
Oliver was very much the man of fashion and cut, even in this sad wreckage, an impeccable figure. His single-breasted frock coat was of a smooth dark material, fastened only with a top button to reveal the silk, silvery waistcoat below. To complete the upper body ensemble, a patterned cravat nestled at the neck of the fine-combed cotton shirt of such dazzling whiteness that might even match the hue from the imagined nightgown of Emily Forbes.
His hair was a glossy chestnut brown that fell in waves towards his left eye; the trousers were discreetly striped, hanging to the bottom of the heel of his boot, and all in all, especially taking into account the heavy sensual mouth which hinted at an aptitude for the boudoir, he presented a formidable proposition.
Through gritted teeth Mulholland would have to admit, given the fact the man’s father owned a succession of butcher’s shops, that Oliver Garvie exuded a certain beefy charm.
The constable on the other hand, was more of a bony proposition, only too conscious of the rough material of his police uniform the collar of which chafed against his long neck, and the fact that, however hard he pulled at them, his wrists dangled out from the sleeves as if he was some sort of half-witted farm boy.
There was also the matter of his helmet with its little metal nipple at the pinnacle. Given its positioning on his great stature, it looked, in the words of his Aunt Katie, ‘like a pea on top of the Mountains of Mourne’.
All this had instantly flashed between them while McLevy whistled.
Garvie spoke down to the inspector, ignoring the tall figure beside him. His tone had the self-assured drawl of a man at ease in his class and social standing, though far from content with the situation in which he found himself.
‘I’ve been here since first light. We found him not long ago. Buried, you see.’
Garvie dabbed at his brow with an immaculate white handkerchief, which he replaced with a flourish into the sleeve of his jacket so that it hung out as if the bold Oliver were a Restoration dandy.
Mulholland stepped past and his nose wrinkled as the stench of the corpse rose to meet him.
‘It’s a wonder you didn’t smell him out,’ he said.
‘Twenty thousand pounds’ worth of top-quality cigars creates quite a smokescreen,’ Garvie observed wryly.
‘Really? I don’t use the things.’
‘A decent cigar is the mark of a true gentleman.’
He smiled at Mulholland as if to take away any hint of disparagement in the remark, but the sting remained.
It is said that if stabbed by a bee, the best resource is to maintain a still quality in order that the insect may therefore withdraw its barb. If the spike breaks off, the bee will die. Allow it to retract the same and buzz about its business, then not only will it live on to serve Mother Nature, but you will suffer less pain.
That is what they say.
Mulholland’s lack of motion however had less to do with enlightened self-interest and more the demeanour of a man wondering where best to plant his large bony fist.
The inspector had part-registered this sniping exchange whilst, like the bee, going about his business.
Having examined the corpse from head to what were left of the feet, he had unearthed one worthy-of-note fact, moved off to find something else of equal interest, and judged it a propitious moment to bring all this nonsense to a halt.
Time for Mulholland to earn his corn.
‘Constable, pass me your scientific opinion on these, if you’ll be so gracious?’
He displayed the first find which he had teased out from under the body, a squat chunk of metal burnt black, with a hole from which some charred fragments of wood protruded.
‘What’s left of a hammer, I would say,’ averred the constable.
‘On the nail. And this?’
The inspector pointed towards an object that had also been buried in the debris, not far from the body.
Mulholland’s nostrils flared at the prospect of displaying his deductive prowess as he moved away from the immaculate Oliver to examine the indicated field of study.
He squatted down, scrutinised, and then pronounced.
‘The flames have fused it all together but, to my mind, this residue before us, is comp
osed of glass and metal segments from an oil lamp.’
The inspector nodded a slow agreement and the constable, with the merest of glances back towards Garvie, raised his voice to make sure that every word was being registered by the cigar fanatic.
‘The aforesaid pieces are near enough the corpus for us to draw certain conclusions.’
‘Conclude away,’ said McLevy whose mind was already moving in another direction.
Auld Clootie. A childhood name for the Prince of Darkness. Jean Scott who had raised him like her own son always warned him to beware the cloven hoof. The right foot of the corpse was twisted and split, but he suspected that the fire had not caused such injury. Medical examination with luck would confirm this and he would therefore have a name with which to conjure.
‘We have observed before entering the building, that the lock on the door was forced, possibly the hammer coming into play,’ continued Mulholland, as if delivering a lecture to the hard of hearing and slow of wit, ‘a clumsy botch of a job. It would seem the thief carried on this ill-conducted modus operandi, dropped the lamp, and inadvertently indulged in self-immolation.’
Oliver Garvie offered an elegant correction.
‘Immolation tends to mean sacrifice, often accompanied by the sprinkling of water. The word you may seek is … incineration.’
A snort of laughter from McLevy brought a pink tinge to Mulholland’s cheeks and the tips of his large ears glowed red. As the constable began to straighten up, the inspector addressed Garvie in loud cheery tones.
‘Whatever the word, he set himself off into a fine wee funeral pyre. A stinking charry mess. Even unto the … bones of his feet.’
His laughter rang through the hushed quiet of the warehouse and a few of the workmen turned round to see what was so amusing about a dead body.
Oliver’s features darkened, though when he spoke it was pleasantly enough, no need to descend to the other’s level.
‘Drollery aside, inspector. I would remind you that I have paid a considerable sum of money to import this cargo and you, the police, exist to protect respectable society.’