by David Ashton
‘You’re taking in all sorts these days.’
Again she said nothing.
The relationship that existed between them was one that dare not speak its name in case it got arrested, but the ground had shifted underneath their feet and now there was enough unsaid between them to fill a literary volume.
‘I don’t suppose a modicum of coffee is at hand?’
This remark, aimed at getting back to safe terrain, met with a curt rejoinder.
‘This is a bawdy-hoose, not a coffee shop.’
That was that, then.
McLevy nodded acceptance and walked off down the winding staircase but halfway down turned back to address her.
‘How did you come across him anyway? Oliver Garvie. Was he a frequenter of your wee nymphs?’
‘I met him at a garden exhibition.’
‘Oh aye. Ye like flowers.’
He could have departed there and then. She could have remained silent. But neither could leave it be.
‘Was it daffodils?’ he asked.
‘Roses,’ she answered.
‘And was he an expert?’
Jean’s mind flashed back to the moment in the garden when she had been inhaling the delicate fragrance of a yellow rose when Garvie had appeared beside her.
She had been struck at first by his absolute confidence in the physical self; he had made no attempt to engage her by the usual channels of flirtation or impress her with his importance or wealth, merely talked about the flowers with knowledge and appreciation.
She responded like a lady of quality but all the time she was aware of how easily he lived in his skin. Like an animal.
Almost diffidently he had suggested tea in the pavilion and it had all led on from there.
Of course he had been primed by Rachel Bryden to know her tastes and predilections and she had been seduced like a fool. Played like a fish. A foolish stupid fish.
And she should have remembered that the yellow rose is a symbol of infidelity.
Yes, he was an expert. An expert in many things.
Jean became aware that the inspector was waiting for an audible response, a strange, oddly vulnerable look upon his face.
‘He appeared to be,’ she said finally.
For a moment McLevy blinked like a disappointed child and opened his mouth as if to say something, but then he sniffed as if something had become lodged in one of his nasal passages, hauled out a large white handkerchief and blew noisily upon the unsuspecting square of cloth.
Jean closed her eyes; she recognised signs of the man going into one of his uncouth phases.
The inspector peered into the hankie with some interest, glanced up as if suddenly remembering that she was still present and adopted pompous delivery.
‘If by any lucky accident that web of informers and street keelies that you have in your employ for matters nefarious, happen to chance upon Oliver Garvie and Rachel Bryden before the forces of law and order, you will deliver these miscreants into my hands.’
‘I will do what I see fit,’ was the retort.
This stung McLevy into further raising his voice like Moses on the mountain.
‘You will do what I tell you Jean Brash, the law is above all things.’
‘Then the law can find them.’
‘Forget your foolish pride, you’re not the first woman to make an idiot of herself over a younger man.’
If Jean had possessed something close to hand she would have hurled it into his great pudding of a face.
‘Well if I ever take another lover, I hope not to find you keeking in through the curtains!’
This remark, so below the belt in implication and inaccuracy, brought a gasp of indignation from the target.
‘You flatter yourself that I give a damn about what you do with a body nurtured on the common wages of sin!’
‘A lot of words for such a lack of interest.’
McLevy jammed the bowler on his head and clattered down the stairs, hurling a backward stricture over his shoulder.
‘If you interfere in the due process of justice then I will bring the law down on you like the Hand of God!’
Such was his impetus off the bottom of the stairs that he skidded on the polished floorboards of the hall, almost crashing into Francine the Frenchwoman as she emerged from the cellar steps to find out the cause of this commotion. Her sinewy arm shot out, fingers splayed like talons to catch him before he fell.
‘Careful M’sieu Inspecteur,’ she said quietly, her face serious and intent. ‘At your time of life, pain is to be avoided unless paid for and supervised.’
McLevy drew himself up with dignity, marched to the door and turned round to deliver a final caution to Jean who stood at the top of the stairs glaring down at him.
‘I warn you Jean Brash, cross me in this affair and I will close your bawdy-hoose down.’
‘Ye havenae got the power,’ Jean asserted, ‘half the city council take their pleasure here.’
The door slammed in answer and he was gone.
Francine shrugged up at her mistress and disappeared back down into the cellar. The General Synod was due to gather in the city soon, so she and Lily, now restored in harmony, were due a busy time of it. Churchmen, unlike farmers, enjoyed the scourge of sin and punishment.
Jean found herself alone, an isolated figure in a plain grey gown.
For a moment she felt once more the sharp knife of humiliation twisting in her gut.
Oliver Garvie and Rachel Bryden.
They had robbed and deceived her, struck Hannah Semple to the ground. They had taken her beautiful black pearls that she loved above all things.
If she got to them first, they’d never see the light of day.
33
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
The Tempest
Leith, 29 December 1879
The Tay Bridge had been miraculously translated back to its former glory. The High Girders were no longer snapped off like matchsticks and stood proudly against the skyline; the men, women and children so dismally drowned, had been sucked back out of the water and carefully returned into place in their carriages as a mother would tuck her child safely in the bed at night.
The train itself, a cheerful puff of smoke from its stack signalling a busy stoker, was in position on the rails high above a calm river, the sky above almost cloudless and the whole aspect depicted a harmony between nature and the machinery of men.
All was peace and stillness.
It was a photograph however, and Alan Telfer looked from it to the baleful figure of James McLevy.
The secretary had answered a loud midnight knock upon the door in the vain hope that it was Sir Thomas Bouch returned from Dundee to relate that the whole thing had been grossly exaggerated, there was no disaster, no deaths, and so everything could return to normal and once more they might incline their heads over the sacred drawings.
But Sir Thomas was in the Royal Hotel in Dundee avoiding the other occupants, mostly comprising the English and Scottish journalists who were at this moment filing telegraph reports to their own papers and the world press, informing them that the first body had been found.
A woman dressed in black, her face white and the skirts floating round her as if she was some sort of sea creature, a jellyfish perhaps.
The name was not yet known but a mussel-dredger had discovered her sliding on her back between two sandbanks in the water.
He had only a long hook to pull her into his rowing boat and, despite being a man who was hardened by the cruel ways of the sea, sobbed and cursed like a madman as he hauled the sodden corpse aboard.
She was the first of sixty eventually found. Another fifteen were never recovered, only the fish knew their whereabou
ts.
Therefore when the secretary, who had remained behind to hold the fort to deal with the expected deluge of inquiries, opened the street door, it was James McLevy he beheld.
Like a spectre on the doorstep … risen from the deep.
The man had pushed silently past and made directly for the study and Telfer had no option but to follow up the stairs and carefully close the study door behind them – the wife of Sir Thomas was also in the house and he had no wish for her to stick her pointy nose into this; since the death of the old servant she had taken up camp in the place and when the news had arrived, had offered to accompany Sir Thomas to Dundee. But the great man had shaken his head; she was too fragile for such affairs.
This refusal had delighted Telfer; the woman could retire to her quarters and sew her eyelids together as far as he was concerned.
He was trusted to hold the fort. Above all people.
A single draughtsman’s lamp illuminated the sloping desk, where the drawings were tidily assembled, and reflected as far as the standing McLevy, giving his features a sinister cast like a villain in the footlights.
He had looked at Alan Telfer and still said nothing. Telfer had looked at the photograph of the bridge.
The silence grew.
McLevy finally spoke.
‘You are guilty of present death,’ he said.
Telfer attempted to twist his mouth into a dismissive smile but under McLevy’s implacable regard it froze as if his lips had been pressed against a block of ice.
‘I assume you refer to the terrible accident?’ he murmured, edging towards a narrow drawer in the filing cabinet where he kept a small revolver; it was a dainty piece, silver-handled, which he had bought in Paris as a curiosity but it could fire and was already loaded.
‘No accident,’ replied McLevy. ‘It was slaughter.’
Telfer was near enough the drawer now that he could wrench it open and open fire in case the man threatened him physically; the inspector was obviously labouring under some powerful delusion and had a dangerous glint in his eye.
The policeman was unkempt, his clothes bearing traces of mud and dirt, a strange feral stink to him as well, eyes bloodshot, chin unshaven; in fact he resembled a wild man of the woods more than an officer of the law. In truth McLevy was close to the point of utter exhaustion.
Word had spread through the city of Dundee like wildfire and the inspector had found himself swept like a cork in a raging torrent of people who gathered at South Union Street, heaving like an animal, filling the road from side to side; women and children were crying not yet sure of a reason but there would be reason soon enough, the men angry and close to violence because the staff of the Tay Bridge Station had prudently barricaded themselves in, not knowing any more than the crowd but, like them, fearing the worst.
A woman lost hold of her child and the throng swallowed it up; she let out a piercing scream of loss and that was enough to start a scuffling panic, fists and voices raised as the crowd swayed to and fro, out of control.
McLevy scooped up the child, a little girl, under his arm and fought his way through to the mother but as he handed the girl over there was a crash of breaking glass as someone in what was now a boiling mob hurtled up against the main door of the station and burst it inwards.
It was an ugly situation; some of the crowd had arrived to meet relatives and loved ones off the train and though the cry that the bridge was down had split the night and window after window had flickered into life as if the city were aflame, not one person knew what was going on.
The bridge was down but where was the train?
For a moment it looked as if the mob was going to break into the station and run amok, but then another cry went up that a boat was going to leave from the harbour to approach the bridge and, like an ebbing flood, the throng melted away heading down towards the harbour and esplanade.
McLevy did not go with them; he had already been on the esplanade and seen enough.
Some other folk had not followed the main crowd, these were the ones who had relatives and loved ones on the train.
They stared at the station door; its structure had been shattered and a great shard of glass pointed up like a finger of ice.
They stared at that door in the dumb suffering hope that it would open and one after the other the passengers would file through, a little shaken by the experience but with tales to tell of how the engine had shuddered to a halt as the bridge fell behind them, then inched its way along to safety while they sang hymns of redemption to raise their spirits.
One after another …
But no one came through the door.
The wind still whistled in the street but quieter now as if satisfied with the night’s work and McLevy whose head had drooped wearily where he was propped up against the station wall, found a sticky sweet being pressed into his hand.
He raised his head to see the child that he had rescued earlier, the donor, her mother smiling anxiously at the inspector as if he held the fate of the world in his hands.
The inspector nodded grave thanks to the little girl and popped the sweet in his mouth. Barley sugar, not one of his favourites and in places covered with the fluff and grit from her coat pocket, but it tasted like manna from heaven.
The strong winds had blown the odour of urine from his clothes and skin but he could still sniff it, and the sweet was fine compensation.
The mother looked across at him where he sucked at the offering with evident relish and felt hope rising irrationally in her breast.
Surely a God who provides barley sugar would have mercy on them all?
The woman smiled and indicated the child who was staring at the inspector to make sure he masticated at the proper time because there was a moment when barley sugar needed to be crunched otherwise it was only half a delight.
‘She’s waiting for her brothers,’ the mother remarked, nodding her head in approval. ‘My husband as well. He’s a schoolmaster. We have friends in Kirkcaldy. Two boys all day, the poor man will be stone tired. Still, all’s well that ends well, eh?’
But her eyes were fearful and the child, looking up at McLevy for confirmation, found something else in his face that suddenly provoked a loud wail of abandonment.
She ran back to her mother and buried her head in the woman’s skirts.
All at once the barley sugar tasted like ashes in his mouth and he spat it out on to the ground.
The mother gazed across at him, tears in her eyes, but McLevy closed his eyelids at the twist of pain in his guts.
He had nothing to offer save contamination.
The others waiting in the street fell silent; the only sound was of the whistling wind and a child’s sobbing.
The station door swung open, but it was only the wind.
No one filled the space.
No one came home.
Somehow the inspector had returned to Edinburgh the next day, sent word to the police station that he was incapacitated by dint of high fever and wandered the streets like one stricken by such, unable to rest or sleep, haunted by the stark images of the previous night, himself like a phantom, without substance as if the very marrow had been sucked from his bones.
He could not eat but managed a series of strong coffees at various stops, which propelled him further on a journey to nowhere.
The ache in his ribs lessened but the pain at the base of his skull, accelerated by the caffeine, intensified till it became like a spike driven upwards through his brain.
The faces he saw on the streets were like grotesques, the features twisted out of shape; sly malignant goblins, witches and warlocks stalked the city, eyes sliding sideways as they passed him by.
A street vendor selling hot chestnuts had, to drum up trade, a small female monkey dressed in a gingham gown chained to a stand beside the brazier.
Children were encouraged to throw nuts at the animal, ostensibly to feed it but it seemed to McLevy that, with evil intent, they hurled the missiles so that the poor bea
st was struck time and time again.
The monkey chattered its teeth together lethargically, the yellow eyes with strangely slit pupils looking out at a world inescapably alien and terrifying.
It screeched forlornly and the children began to imitate the sound, the high-pitched shrieks drilling into McLevy’s head till he could stand it no longer and quit the scene leaving the animal to its simian fate.
What after all could he have done to save the beast?
Bought the monkey?
How could an investigating officer arrive at the scene of a crime with a monkey on his shoulder?
Lieutenant Roach was of crocodile persuasion; he would want to eat the prey. Ballantyne would feed it bluebottles and Mulholland would wish to marry the poor beast. Jean Brash would have it labour in the Just Land. Perhaps Margaret Bouch could care for the lost soul; she would take it to the docks where they might watch the ships together and dream of freedom.
Night had fallen long since as he wandered plagued and haunted, driven to distraction by thoughts that hung before him like flies swarming round the liquid amber eyes of a cow in high summer.
But a cow was not a monkey.
That way madness lies.
As midnight chimed from the nearby church tower of Saint Thomas, James McLevy found himself before a door that seemed familiar.
He knocked upon it and when he saw the face of the man within, he knew why he had come and what his mission was on earth.
Retribution.
Now, in this study with the cold pale eyes of Alan Telfer upon him, McLevy was about to deliver it.
Retribution.
‘You cut corners in the making of that bridge,’ he said.
‘Who tells you that?’ Telfer responded calmly though there was the slightest twitch at the side of his mouth.
‘Hercules Dunbar.’
Telfer laughed, but there was no humour in his cold intent eyes.
‘As I have said before, a drunkard, a thief and a murderer.’
‘I shall grant you the first two but not necessarily the last,’ the inspector replied.