by David Ashton
This water rose twenty miles away in the Pentland Firth, meandered through the countryside and then dipped sharply all the way down towards the Leith docks.
There was a secluded spot near to where Great Junction Street branched over the river, where the boys would throw off all their clothes and dare each other to feats of derring-do, Herkie taking particular pleasure in hurling others into the water and listening to their howls of fear as the fast-moving current almost dragged them to the bottom.
He was a good swimmer, naked body gleaming in the water like a fish as he held someone under until they begged for mercy and promised him anything he asked.
This usually involved ritual humiliation or even sexual favour for, as has been already noted, Herkie was big for his age.
Therefore, though he was king, he was not beloved by his subjects.
So when his boots disappeared, the gang did as well, leaving him searching alone by the riverbank.
He had left a neat pile of his clothes, the heavy boots on top in case of strong wind, but when he returned dripping and boisterous, they were gone.
One of the smaller boys was supposed to stand guard but he had become distracted, pitching a hail of stones at some swans upstream who were disputing the tenancy of the running water.
Herkie would have given him a good kicking but he did not have the implements.
No one had seen anything untoward; no one had noticed a figure, which had crept out from the reeds, made a lift, then back behind the rushes to hide like Moses in a basket.
Herkie had eventually given up the search and now was on his reluctant way homewards.
The sharp cobblestones hurt the boy’s bare feet but that was nothing to the pain he would suffer when his father found out the loss.
Dirkie Dunbar was known as the Iron Man, part because of his skill shaping that metal in the foundry, part because of the heavy cutting edge of his fists and the cold implacable intent with which he crashed them down like a heavy hammer. He had three sons who lived in abject fear of his anger. Herkie was the youngest and his bowels were already loose at the prospect of those fists.
What could he tell his father?
Nothing that would make any difference.
The frightened boy could feel the bruises already.
And then he saw them. His boots. At the other end of the narrow alley, on the cobbles, neatly arranged with the toes pointing off as if waiting for him to slip them on and rampage his fill.
A pale shaft of sunlight shone into the passage and illuminated the leather, glinting off the metal toecaps as if guiding him to their side and Herkie was full of rejoicing not caring how they got there.
A gift from a Protestant God perhaps.
Or perhaps not.
As Herkie rushed forward to claim his prize, a figure stepped out and stood between him and his property.
He blinked in disbelief. It was the wee porker, the boy he had not long ago battered and kicked till he had spewed up all over him. A dirty Papish vomiter.
Then the penny dropped. The wee bastard, he must have stolen the boots.
What did not occur to Herkie was that the reason the boots were now on show might be part of a larger picture, no; his only thought was how come the wee porker knew where to make the theft? How come he knew?
Then the big boy remembered some time ago, he and some others had held the porker’s head under the water till he was near drowned. He was feart o’ the water, couldnae swim a stroke, they had dipped him up and down like a witch, that was great fun.
They had left him sprawled out on his face with the slime pouring out of his nose and mouth. Great fun.
But it had been by the Water of Leith and would explain why the porker had known the prime location.
The wee bastard.
‘You stole my boots!’ The big boy fairly howled.
The other’s slate-grey eyes were unmoving.
‘Ye can have them back.’
‘I’ll murder ye!’
‘Ye can have them back.’
‘Bring me.’
‘Come and get so,’ said Jamie McLevy.
Herkie was at least a head taller than his opposite, stronger, and older, a hard dirty fighter, but he was on his own and something in his opponent’s stillness should have warned that the outcome might not be like past encounters.
He moved forward, bare toes gripping at the cobbles.
‘Yer mammy cut her throat, they hung her on a hook like a pig and a’ body laughed. Mad auld Papish bitch.’
The insult did not achieve the hoped-for loss of reason, cause the boy to run headlong for vengeance and give Herkie a chance to get his powerful arms wrapped round. Once he got to close quarters he could crush and gouge. The fight was his.
But no. The other was still out of reach; he had not budged an inch, neither back nor forward.
Herkie let out a howl and made his move, hurling himself towards his target but he should have looked down.
The right tackety boot of Jamie McLevy crashed in just below the kneecap, paralysing the bigger boy to the spot with the most hellish pain as if his bone was splintered.
The other kneecap suffered the same fate from the same tackety boot.
He fell to the ground, mouth open, almost retching with agony. A foot came down on his outstretched hand, crunching the fingers to the stone beneath. The other hand went the same way. No favourites played.
The bigger boy might as well have been crucified.
He lifted his head and watched as the other solemnly unbuttoned himself and carefully urinated, first into one of Herkie’s boots, then the other. No favourites.
‘Ye can have them back,’ said Jamie.
There was not a trace of feeling on his face. The eyes were blank, impersonal almost and all the more petrifying because of it.
Only a small boy but he carried a wilderness of anguish and the terrible fear that one day his mother’s madness might infect and drown him if it had not already done so.
He walked out of the passage into the sunlight and was gone without a backward glance.
After a long time, Herkie Dunbar crawled painfully towards his boots and when he got there, sniffed cautiously.
Not too bad a smell, all that Holy Water must purify the pish, with a bit of luck he could rinse them out and no one would ever know.
That he had lost the fight.
When McLevy’s eyes came back to focus, he found he was once more looking at the blank page of his diary. He had sat at the table with best intentions, then not written a word and instead slid off into memory.
The cemetery meeting with Margaret Bouch this very morning had no doubt triggered that particular recollection, because Dunbar, the grown man, had played a part in the history of Sir Thomas and his tragic fall.
More and more McLevy drifted in and out of the past these days, a sign of age no doubt but in this case also, a wish to avoid some uncomfortable aspects of his present situation.
Aspects and images.
Margaret Bouch, her tongue outstretched to catch the falling drip. And swallow it down.
Jean Brash at the window, red hair against the white skin of her naked shoulders as Oliver Garvie delved in.
How long had McLevy sat on that wall looking at the finally closed curtain?
Not long. His backside had become too damp and he hoped the result would not be investigational haemorrhoids.
If an entanglement it was none of his business but what if there was more to it than that?
There was certainly not less. It was obviously a full-blooded affair, red in tooth and claw.
He reviewed the case so far, but was conscious that there was an element of avoidance in the process; two women, one close to hand, the other through a glass. McLevy did not delude himself that he was unaware of how love could rage.
He was by no means an innocent but had always taken his satisfaction in other cities, never close to hand.
And as regards love, he had never brought it home.
The prospect was terrifying. To lose yourself in another person. To lose yourself. Like madness.
Perhaps he would write of this later in his diary. A confidence, between himself and the page.
Meanwhile, back to the certainty of crime.
The night of the fire, the watchman had been absent and when he and Mulholland went a’ visiting, the man’s wife informed them that he had a fever. Sure enough the fellow lay in bed sweating and pallid but that could have been downright fear.
While Mulholland distracted the woman, McLevy ducked in to the scullery for a quick snoop, and spotted, shoved to the back of a shelf, a near-full bottle of whisky. Fine quality at that.
Medicinal, the wife said when challenged, and she aye bought fine quality.
Her clothes and the furnishings of the two cramped rooms, three children sleeping next door, would seem to contradict that but short of dragging the man from his sickbed and hauling him to the station, an act that though tempting might be hard to justify to his Lieutenant Roach should the accused collapse and die leaving his snottery offspring fatherless, McLevy had to leave it there.
He would be back though, he said, and fixed the trembling man with a baleful stare but the wife was unimpressed.
They had nothing to hide. Why pick on poor folk?
But she was wrong there; McLevy would pick on anybody plus, if they were that impoverished, how afford the whisky?
And the watchman’s absence was very convenient. The inspector did not cleave to convenience. Or coincidence.
He wondered for a moment how Mulholland was faring with old Mary Rough. The constable had probably given up long ago and was standing underneath Emily Forbes’ window serenading her like a smitten Sicilian.
The inspector moved towards the faint-glowing fireplace where his coffee pot stood on the hearth. As he poured out into his stone mug, he glanced in and frowned to see the network of cracks running along the interior; he’d be losing precious coffee to those cracks.
He’d arrived too late for supper so had to make do with his own bread, cheese and pickle. The bread was three days old, the cheese ten, and the pickle time out of mind.
This was his second cup of bituminous coffee, reduced to what looked like a black sludge. It would go well with the pickle.
McLevy looked around his room and sighed contentedly. Save for the books, it bore little trace of the person within and that was just how he liked it.
Two battered armchairs, one with a broken spring for guests who never arrived, a couple of thin stringy carpets that had seen better days and the spindly-legged table which served for meals and scribbling.
The whole place maintained clean as a whistle by his landlady, Mrs MacPherson.
Not a mirror, not a photograph to mar the looping whorls of brown flowers on the faded wallpaper.
Of late he had, to his surprise, become increasingly shipshape, not that it reflected in how he presented himself to the outside world, but in this room everything was kept in its place.
Even his beloved books were arranged in neat piles, the spines facing outwards for easy identification, stacked up against the brown wallpaper, some of the towers reaching up to almost waist height. He played a childlike game where he imagined them to be like columns of a temple and took great pleasure in favouring one then another in terms of how high they might aspire.
His reading was voracious, eclectic, and he relished the retention of obscure facts and strange turns of phrase from literature or poetry.
Such are the ways of the solitary man.
A scratching at the window intruded upon these reflections and an indignant yowl claimed his attention.
A visitor.
He walked over, reached across the table to raise the sash window and the black shape of Bathsheba ghosted in to make at once for two chipped saucers near to the fire containing, respectively, a recently poured ladle of milk and some leftover scraps of cheese and pickle.
The cat dived into the cheese, sniffed in suspicion at the pickle before dismissing it altogether, then moved over to lap with some rapidity at the milk.
It always struck McLevy that the intake of liquid on such an occasion was out of proportion to the lingual exertion involved, but he was not of the feline species.
He waited patiently until Bathsheba emptied the saucer and then watched her jump up to the hearth where McLevy had arranged an old torn red semmit, far enough from the meagre flames not to catch a spark but sufficiently near to absorb some warmth.
One of the armchairs, the one without the broken spring, was set before the ingle and McLevy sat down to regard the animal thoughtfully.
She would rest for about half an hour and then be on her way, over the rooftops to a world he could only wonder over, where yellow eyes gleamed in the night and various small birds and rodents found their own world abruptly terminated.
A time before Bathsheba had obviously been pregnant, some dirty old tom had pinned her to the slates. It had been her first litter but he had never seen trace of offspring and did not like to dwell upon their fate.
Now, she was returned her svelte queenly self.
‘What kind of mother are you?’ he suddenly demanded. ‘Did ye drop the poor wee buggers off the roof?’
The cat yawned and buried her head into the fur near to her tail.
McLevy rested back his own cranium, noted a damp patch on the ceiling and frowned.
In the morning he would call on a banker who owed him a favour and who also knew more about the financial dealings in Edinburgh than any man alive. The information McLevy sought as regards Oliver Garvie would be confidential but the pastime the banker wished to keep hidden from the world was also a clandestine matter.
He closed his eyes and drifted.
Secrets everywhere.
19
I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into
the world was saluted and surrounded by
innumerable joys. My knowledge was divine.
THOMAS TRAHERNE,
Centuries of Meditations
As Mulholland almost galloped through the damp streets, his mind raced with the probabilities of glory. A golden future.
Emily in adoration trembling as the ring was fixed upon her finger and the organ swelled. Mrs Roach tears in her eyes, the lieutenant waggling the stripes of promotion discreetly by his side, Robert Forbes beaming proudly at his newly adjusted son-in-law, and McLevy, nose out of joint at a case cracked in his absence, skulking at the back of the church, knowing that time was not on his side and the younger man was coming through.
On the rails. The old horse tiring, the thoroughbred sweeping past with nary a backward glance, or maybe a small compassionate flick of the eyes, then kick the turf, great clods of earth spraying all over the lumbering beast behind, as it headed towards the knackers yard!
From these thoughts, it is not difficult to observe that the constable was getting a mite beyond himself.
This exhilaration prompted Mulholland to laugh aloud as he forded the puddles of East Claremont Street, causing a respectable couple coming towards him to quicken their pace past, and a young nymph of the pavé, the girl could not have been more than Emily’s age, to sniff a potential joker on the ran-dan and hiss quietly from one of the wynds,
‘In here my mannie, warm and cosy, like a robin’s nest.’
She must be new on the bones not to recognise him even in his civilian clothes but Mulholland had no time to lay out the dangers of the life she led, no time to fix her with a piercing glance so that she felt the weight of authority, not his lustful body, pressing upon her.
The constable waved a hand; palm outstretched like a holy saint warding off temptation, and strode on through the faint glimmering light of the street lamps.
The girl watched his figure disappearing into the gloom and sighed. A cold damp night, her feet soaking wet, and not a randie-boy in sight. Still, not long till the taverns emptied and she might yet make a catch.
Sh
e took out a small mirror and gazed at her face in reflection. No sign of the pox. But you could rarely tell from countenance who did or did not possess such.
Men cursed and called it cuntbitten, women suffered the same and called the raspberry-like scabs grandgore.
She’d had unprotected congress with a baker’s apprentice the night before, no sheath to hand, and hoped the young man was clean-living.
But if he was so, what was he doing with her?
She giggled like a child at that. He had promised her a puggy bun, her favourite, a treacle sponge mixture inside a pastry case, on their next mounting and maybe he’d be her regular and after that, who knows?
So wished-for affection overcomes bitter experience to kindle hope in the human heart.
But she was also a practical girl and looked after the departed Mulholland with a sense of regret.
Thought she had a chance there, it’s not often you see a man with such a smile on his face.
Not often.
The constable meanwhile was still bound for glory and the New Town, in the shape of Doune Terrace just below Moray Place where Oliver Garvie had his residence.
An elegant façade where rich folk could look down on the lowly worms crawling through the streets. Well we’d see about the worms, eh?
He had worked his way through the back roads and now was coming around Royal Terrace, close to his destiny, and as he walked along he suddenly skipped up into the air like a demented giraffe as his mind replayed that last exchange with Mary Rough.
The old woman, all mirth and merriment gone, levelled her gaze at Mulholland who cradled the wooden box in his hands. The constable had found a little stool to perch upon where he sat like some sort of giant insect, because he did not want to be towering over Mary.
No. Sympathy was the key.
A long silence. Then finally she spoke. Resigned.
‘He was drunk that night. I went along tae try and keep control. Some hope, eh?’