by David Ashton
All this he observed yet he did not see the face he was searching for, and so his gaze swept round again to the round ‘O’ of the poet’s mouth as he brought his masterpiece near a proclaimed conclusion.
‘Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay,
I hope that God will protect all passengers
By night and by day,
And that no accident will befall them while crossing
The Bridge of the Silvery Tay,
For that would be most awful to be seen
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.’
McGonagall screwed up his face mournfully to indicate a heartfelt concern at that grim possibility before launching into a last verse that praised amongst others a certain Thomas Bouch and then ended with the last lines, inevitable in rhyme, hidebound in rhythm, bawled out to the rafters in artistic crescendo.
‘Which stands unequalled to be seen,
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green!’
There was a genial if drunken roar of approval and the poet removed his hat to take a very small collection inside the hollow crown before throwing the stick over his shoulder and launching into a boisterous ditty called ‘The Rattling Boy from Dublin’. This song brought even more approbation from the many Irish present who seemed to know the words as well as its author did, and McLevy resumed more inward contemplation.
The inspector had come across the Tay Bridge by an early-morning train and not remotely enjoyed the experience; as well as a morbid dislike of being immersed in water, he was not drawn either to heights, earth being his preferred element. And, though it was a flat calm day, the river below like a glass reflecting the image as if the bridge reached down into the very depths, the inspector could have sworn that as the train picked up to a considerable speed there was an uneasy shifting movement under his backside.
It might well also have been an optical illusion, caused by momentary vertigo when he was unwise enough to poke his head out of the window and experience the feeling of being pulled down towards the profound deep beneath, but to his shaky eyes there appeared a vertical oscillation in the High Girders as the train flew past.
However none of the other passengers, who included a fair quota of women and children, seemed in the least perturbed, and so the inspector quit the carriage at the other side, scolded himself for a faint-heart and then spent all day in the city of Dundee, out of his parish and on his lonesome.
Anything beyond Leith was, in his opinion, foreign soil; the rest of Edinburgh he could just about thole but Dundee, in terms of psyche and personality, might well have been darkest Africa.
The natives spoke the same language, that much was true, but they seemed kind-natured and lacked the flinty unstated disapproval with which the Edinburgh citizens regarded their fellow man.
Also they did not give with one hand and take back with the other.
Furthermore the Dundonians lacked malice, the sine qua non of the sentient Celt and, rather than holding a grudge against their obviously superior rival across the water, seemed to derive a deal of humour from the opposite camp.
They placed McLevy as belonging there by his accent and commiserated his unfortunate fate to be landed amongst such a tight-arsed community.
That was that, then.
However, though pleasant enough, the natives were also wary, volunteered no more than the recipient deserved and could smell the police a mile off … Which meant that all his inquiries about Hercules Dunbar came to absolutely nothing.
The same result as had manifested in Edinburgh after the jail breakout. The man had vanished and it was McLevy’s hunch that he may have headed back to his old haunts here to secrete himself amongst the exiled bridge workers, perhaps pick up the odd piece of labour and be safe from the strong arm of the law.
In the person of James McLevy, inspector of police … who had trailed about the place since mid-morning till his feet ached from the hard pavements, cursing himself for a fool who would use his only day off on a wild goose chase.
It being a Sunday, Roach and Mulholland would be safely ensconced in the house of God, while he traipsed from tavern to tavern and one disreputable lodging house to another; starting off near to the Wormit Foundry where Dunbar had once been employed, then sniffing his way like a mongrel dog towards the docks. At least this was familiar territory, not nearly as large as the Leith equivalent but the scurry of rats chittering under the piers seemed familiar and the run-down waterside taverns had the same depressing similarity.
This was where he was happiest. This is where he belonged. With the dregs of humanity.
On this somewhat sour thought, the inspector watched as McGonagall brought his remarkably cheerful lament for Dublin’s Biddy Brown, the lost love of the Rattling Boy, to an end and assumed a heroic pose as the cheers rang forth.
The inspector had heard of the poet and the sublime horror of his verse, but this was his first live experience of the man and he would be happy enough if it were the last.
It was too late now to return to Edinburgh. The evening was upon them, a heavy wind rattling the thick windows of the tavern; he would have to register in some cheap flea-bitten hotel and take the earliest train back.
Empty-handed. But at least now he knew the composition of Beaumont Egg. The voices slurred that told the tale but enough of them agreed, after a bought drink or two, that it consisted of beeswax, fiddler’s rosin, the finest iron borings, all mixed together with a little lamp black and then used to cure any holes in the iron castings by being melted in with a red-hot bar.
It became hard as a rock and would not melt in the sun but it was not iron. It was grafted on and therefore might be picked out by keen point or shaken loose by great force.
This was from the foundry men but one of the painters of the bridge, a man still in work, daubed with red lead like a savage, boasted of finding at least one hundredweight of fallen iron bolts inside the lower booms of the bridge.
However it was all drunken hearsay. He could just see the contemptuous smile on Alan Telfer’s face if it was brought before the man’s attention.
There was a sudden outburst of noise and McLevy was hit in the face by a shower of hard dried peas.
It wrenched him out of a black study to see that the publican had grown tired of the fact that Poet McGonagall, who had just announced grandly that due to public demand he would repeat ‘The Rattling Boy’ in its entirety, had monopolised the audience’s attention to the extent that they had rapidly slowed down their consumption of drink.
Therefore they were not filling the publican’s coffers to the brim, so he had instructed one of his barmen to throw a wet dirty beer-slopped towel into William’s countenance.
While the poet was still reeling from this insult to his honour, the publican and some of the other barmen had picked up handfuls of dried green peas and were hurling them with malign gusto at the Bard of Bonny Dundee, some of which had sailed past him to sting the inspector.
The poet stood his ground proudly. His sallow well-kippered skin had suffered such painful assaults before and he uttered an immortal couplet in response.
‘Gentlemen if you please,
Stop throwing peas!’
Unfortunately this provoked a howl of laughter from the audience who had cruelly shifted sides; it is ever thus for a creative soul amongst the barbarian hordes.
The publican and his men redoubled their efforts and the supply of missiles seemed never ending because they drove the poet, who was trying to bat the peas away with his stick, backwards towards the door out into the street.
McLevy thought idly to interfere but then froze as a door to a private side room opened and four men emerged to see what was causing the hullabaloo.
One of the men was Hercules Dunbar.
Changed in some ways, but not quite enough.
28
I am poured out like water, and all my
bones are out of joint: my heart also in the
midst of my body is even lik
e melting wax.
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, Psalm 22, v14
From a dead calm and eerie stillness, the heavy gale had roared up like an animal from ambush and was battering at the whole length of the Tayside. The devout worshippers returning from their Sabbath meditations were assailed by flying slates and roof tiles as if the devil himself had decided to punish their piety by a demonstration of what happened when Pandora took the lid off the box.
The elemental force of wind and rain ripped the tiles, laths and plaster from attic roofs exposing the good holy people of the house as if they had been stripped bare of decency, naked to the howling laughter of Satan.
Chimney cairns capered and danced like witches in the road, while a shower of masonry fell like giant hailstones and smashed into the pavements below, splitting into shards so sharp they would have drawn blood had the faithful not clung to the shelter of the walls and edged their way towards the refuge of respectability.
Along the shore, bathing huts were ripped asunder, the roofs departing bodily to join in the dance or fly out into the darkness of the raging river.
Surely evil was abroad? Surely the Storm Fiend had risen from his dark lair in the deep and erupted into a frenzy of farts and belches to shake the holy where they knelt in prayer? Was not that heavy blinding rain the sign of a monster lifting its leg from on high to pass its water, marking out the territory below?
None of these thoughts occurred to Hercules Dunbar as he laughed wildly in the chaos, crossing over a small public park near the Magdalen Green. Having bade goodbye to his friends and watched them stagger off towards the poorer billets of the city, he had turned in the direction of more salubrious quarters. Which is where he now belonged.
He was hurled off his feet by the force of the blast and rolled over in the grass like a scrap of paper, but good whisky had rendered him immortal.
And his luck had turned in the shape of a widow woman, a fine lusty specimen towards whose domicile his footsteps were now directed.
Jenny Wilson, an Inverness lassie, come to the city as a maid of all work, had married above her to an older man, Tom Cathcart, a bank teller from Dundee who keeled over one day face first into the money he was counting. She inherited a fine wee pension from the bank and a small house at the other end of the Green.
And she was greatly enamoured of Hercules Dunbar.
God bless the human heart, which in the banker’s case had completely failed him.
Jenny could put on some airs and graces, enough to get by, however in reality she craved rough usage in her bedtime activities, something the banker was not equipped to deliver but Hercules had in abundance.
In fact the first time she had essayed a far from maidenly glance at his rampant manhood, it had, as she confided later, fair taken her breath away.
They had met in this selfsame park; her small Cairn terrier had got itself into difficulties with a swan who had grabbed the dog by the neck when the stupid beast had got too damned close in a waterside encounter, barking fit to burst.
The swan then went swimming out to the middle of the pond and proceeded to thrust with combination of graceful neck plus vice-like beak, the yelping animal under the water with the obvious intention of drowning this ill-matched skittery opponent.
Hercules had been sitting on a nearby park bench nursing a sore head from excess of the night before but washed, clean and neat enough attired since he was hoping to gain employment with a small foundry under an assumed name.
He had grown the beginnings of a fine moustache to further disguise himself and it bristled manfully as he, having seen that the wifie was, while shrieking her distress, a well-endowed buxom-looking creature, waded out some distance, swam the rest, and then hammered the swan a blow between the eyes that caused the powerful neck to cease its murderous activities.
Then he had returned with the bedraggled terrier, the hero of the hour, and his wet garments, which she insisted on washing and drying at her home, once discreetly removed, never quite resumed their former station.
In fact, the banker, though lacking the graithlike girth and vigour of Hercules, was of a reasonable match in height and size so not only did he inherit the wife he got some decent clothes as well.
For the first time in his life he lacked for nothing; the woman hauled away under the sheets like a trawler but she did not lack common sense and allowed him a daily sum to have a drink and treat with his friends but not too much that he might get boastful.
Of course the idea was that he would eventually find gainful employment but nothing that would tire him out too much as regards his other duties.
So no wonder Hercules Dunbar was roaring as he rolled over in the grass like a happy child.
The howling wind redoubled its efforts, a westerly gale of up to eighty miles an hour that in other places tore off the shutters and cracked the very windows, but the widow woman’s house would be safe enough.
It was in a secluded street, the neighbours were not nosy and if questions were asked, he was a respectable working man who lodged there.
And in a strange way he had become a modified figure in his new fine clothes though the uneasy fear of being stripped down to the bone and made to view himself like a naked animal, never left his split disposition.
His father’s fist had seen to that. One blow had cut him in half.
Hercules hauled himself up against a creaking tree, shook himself like a dog to rid his hair of the dripping raindrops and then saw the figure of James McLevy standing before him, like a terrible ghost of retribution.
The inspector had jammed his bowler into the side pocket of his coat and his hands swung loose in the whipping wind.
‘Aye, Herkie,’ he said. ‘A grim night, eh?’
Dunbar nodded, all happiness fled.
The inspector could have explained how he had watched the quarry and his companions laugh at the pea-spattered poet’s untimely exit then, after an affable word with the publican, the bill settled, off they went into the wild darkness.
How he had followed on and waited patiently till the group parted company, the numbers being too heavy for the one man.
How he had observed Dunbar roll in the grass like a child and been affected by the strange recollection of when, as young Jamie McLevy, he had crawled through the rushes to steal a pair of boots that had kicked him once too often.
But he said nothing of this save the following.
‘You hammered my young constable and caused him grievous injury. You dunged upon the honour of my station.’
‘That’s good,’ was the response. ‘As for the constable, he’ll know better now.’
‘You left a message that we would meet in hell. This night seems as close as we can get in life.’
A gust of wind howled its agreement and one of the young slender trees in the park simply snapped into two pieces as if hacked down by an axe.
McLevy braced himself against the squall and moved forward slowly to where Dunbar was wedged back against the tree; the man’s eyes gleaming in the darkness like those of a hunted animal.
Both men were saturated from the rain but it ran down their faces to no avail. They had other business on hand.
‘You remember now, Herkie,’ the inspector shouted above the distorted clamour of enraged nature, ‘the last time we got to grips, you suffered the worst of the exchange. I believe my fist and your belly made strong acquaintance.’
‘I have it in my mind,’ Dunbar called back. ‘But things can change, I am a changed man now.’
‘Aye, you have more hair and are better dressed but I doubt the beast remains the same under your skin.’
The inspector was now almost within touching distance and for a brief moment the wind abated, so that he spoke quietly to the desperate figure crouched before him.
‘I would advise you to slip the restrainers on and come to the fold of justice like a wee lamb. Is that possible for you to entertain?’
Dunbar nodded his head in the weird stillness.
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br /> ‘That is possible,’ he replied, then as the wind broke into another furious tantrum, he used the force of it at the back of him plus the propelled impetus from a foot which he had placed behind him on the trunk of the tree, to shoot forward like a bullet and take McLevy by surprise, bringing them both crashing to the ground.
Close quarters had always been an advantage to Hercules Dunbar for his bones were hard as cold chisel.
He wedged a steely forearm under McLevy’s throat and began to press up into the soft flesh. The aim was simple, to crush the windpipe until a lack of breath separated the victim from a conscious state and left him with a neck like a wrung chicken.
The taller man was on top, his full weight pressing down, one arm busy at its chosen employment, the other pinning McLevy’s right hand so that only the weaker left was free to flap uselessly at the side.
The policeman’s eyes were bulging with effort as he tried to break loose but as the pressure intensified on his windpipe, he began to gasp for air though God knows there was enough of it flying around.
The inspector’s skin took on a bluish tinge and Hercules bared his teeth in a savage grin.
‘Things change, eh?’
Another jolt with the forearm brought a shuddering retch from McLevy as he fought to get some air into his lungs; the inspector could feel his senses slipping, a darkness behind the eyes.
‘Your Auntie Jean will no’ help you now,’ Dunbar taunted. ‘Another mad auld bitch.’
It is possible that had Hercules reflected on such a remark he may have considered that to insult the only woman McLevy had ever truly loved might not have been the best way to induce subjugation but he had blood in his eyes and, at these moments, the primitive emerges club in hand.
However, one caveman deserves another.
McLevy’s left hand scrabbled desperately in the loose earth with renewed force and came upon a by-product of his favourite element in the shape of a flat heavy stone which he raised up to smash into the side of the other’s face.