by David Ashton
Tonight the wait was over. A long shot but worth a try.
There was time to spare yet and so he had put pencil to paper. The first in a long time. A good omen.
He peered down; there was no doubt that eyesight was playing tricks upon him and he might have to consider the purchase of reading glasses.
His two latest book purchases, the Arab legends and Poe’s short stories were squared neatly at the right-hand corner of the table. The Eastern typeface was generous though slanting but Poe’s was crabbed and narrow, and the inspector wondered if this had damaged his optics somewhat, to say nothing of the content as regards his mind.
‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ for instance … a madman kills an old man because of a supposed evil eye, buries him under the floorboards and then is betrayed by the louder and louder beating of the dead man’s heart.
The strange fancies of the author’s mind stirred McLevy’s own uneasy imagination. Sometimes he felt haunted by his own history as it beat louder and louder in the confines of his soul.
He took a deep breath to still this shivering within and muttered his own written words as an incantation against the guilt that followed him like a black dog.
The Diary of James McLevy, 13 November 1880
The past and present collide like two bulls in a field and so it is in my thoughts this evening.
Robert Forbes and Sir Thomas Bouch, two men far apart in temperament and standing yet inextricably linked by their fall.
They had built an image of themselves in their psyche that could not endure the cold blast of reality.
In Forbes’ case it was a slippery whore who roused him from his widowhood to an ardent desire that had lain dormant in him, no doubt since birth.
He found himself not what he thought himself to be and as his penis blossomed, so his common sense dwindled.
If we ever find the letters he wrote to Rachel Bryden, I expect they will be filled with protestations of love.
Nae foule like an auld foule.
But are we not all fools in the end?
Over love especial.
And now the other case.
Sir Thomas thought himself to be a giant and in that iron certainty lay the seeds of his own destruction.
According to the late Alan Telfer, the bridge builder towered above us all like a Colossus but there’s only one God and he does not take kindly to competition.
Heat did for Icarus, and the howling wind blew Sir Thomas Bouch away like a shrivelled leaf.
On a more practical note, Mulholland, another soaring specimen, has been, some days ago, sent back to Ireland to recompose himself and his Aunt Katie will hopefully fill him with barnyard saws and Irish stew so that he will return to Edinburgh a sadder but wiser man.
But time is a great healer and an engagement ring may fit on many fingers.
After the speedy and very private funeral of her father, Emily has fled to the country with the maiden aunts. I believe somewhere in Stirlingshire, where pulley ropes perform their proper function.
As for myself I have no place to fall and business on hand. So I shall close this ledger and return to it when occasion allows.
While he did so, an indignant scrape upon the window announced the arrival of Bathsheba and McLevy sighed.
He would have to feed the cat and pour out her milk but then there was the rest of the ritual. She had to retire to her little niche by the fireplace and groom herself from head to toe before embarking on to the moonlit slates of Leith.
Still there was yet enough duration.
On the desk beside the diary where it lay, was an oilskin pouch, which McLevy gently parted to reveal the outline of a heavy black revolver.
He crossed to slide the oilskin into the side pocket of his heavy outdoor coat.
Time enough.
While the cat tucked into her provender he walked over to the narrow cupboard where he kept his hidden treasures, opened it up and carefully laid the diary back to its provided place beside a mother-of-pearl box that had been given to him by a dying man more than twenty years ago.
He carefully prised up the lid and looked in. It was somewhat gloomy in the cupboard but sufficient for him to discern amongst other things, a broken grubby scrap of white feather, a lock of golden hair, and a fragment of black material.
Mementoes of past crimes.
One of which he had promised the dying man to solve but had yet to deliver.
He closed the lid again and noticed a rolled-up pamphlet of paper stuck into the corner of the cupboard.
McLevy frowned. An interloper.
He pulled the paper out, closed the cupboard door and walked to the small table by the window where he penned his most profound ruminations.
He spread out the paper to read and the words of Poet McGonagall thus thundered in his mind.
Oh, ill-fated bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build
The less chance we have of being killed.
Bathsheba finished up her milk and with natural grace, jumped up to her appointed spot by the fire. She licked her paw, dabbed daintily at her whiskers and looked over where McLevy stood like a statue, paper in hand.
Then she licked again and began to groom behind her ears, a hive of activity compared to the still figure at the window, marooned in the moonlight.
But animals have not time for memory; they live in the present.
The past is a uniquely human predicament.
35
I can endure my own despair,
But not another’s hope.
WILLIAM WALSH,
Song, Of all the torments
Dundee, 28 February 1880
As the crowd filed into the building that housed the Board of Trade Inquiry, they were regaled by a poem, in its own way almost as disastrous as the event itself.
William McGonagall had begun composition the day after the bridge fell, that is the Monday, and ended with a sorrowful sweep of the pen on the following Tuesday evening.
Even by his standards it plumbed the depths, although the poet might offer as excuse the fact that having rescued an officer of the law that fateful night, he had returned to his home and attempted to pacify with the monetary contents of his collection a long-suffering wife.
The poor woman was driven to distraction by the transformation of what she had thought to be an ordinary weaver catapulted into the grinding jaws of the Muse, then chewed up and spat out to emerge as a fully fledged poet before her very eyes.
McGonagall gave her the coins, went to his bed and slept soundly through till morning.
Thus he missed first-hand experience of the searing catastrophe and the howl of collective grief when it finally became known that the train was lodged at the bottom of the river with survival an impossibility, unless a beneficent God reached down his kindly hand.
But, as the Sabbatarian ministers so piously pointed out later, travelling on a Sunday was a profane act of the North British Railway Company and its passengers, transgressing the Law of God and desecrating the day he had lain aside for drawing breath.
So with his mighty right hand He had thrown a storm to punish the sinners for He was, as they never tired of telling you in the bible, a Jealous God who guarded the Sabbath like a roaring lion.
Therefore rather than bringing deliverance, God might well be a number-one suspect.
As the people hurried past, McGonagall offered the sheets of his poetry in vain except for the one woman, Troll Barbara, a squat powerful figure and the only female welder in Dundee, who pressed a coin into his hand, crunched the paper up in one massive paw and disappeared through the door that led to the I
nquiry Court.
The poet wondered about starting all over.
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say, etc. etc.
But somehow this morning he lacked the strength to launch off once more into the epic lay and merely stood with his arm outstretched like a statue in long coat skirts and a wide-brimmed hat; the folk bustling past were content enough to treat him as such, ignoring the still figure in their rush to find a decent seat to view the spectacle, for it was the third day of proceedings and the revelations were coming thick and fast.
A stocky figure approached the poet who perhaps resembled more a scarecrow than a statue. The man also put forward a coin but this was of some value, in McGonagall’s opinion, approaching the worth of the verse inscribed in the pamphlet that he gravely offered forth.
The fellow accepted it equally gravely and stashed it into his pocket.
The light of recognition flashed in the poet’s mind.
‘You are the man from the walnut tree!’ he exclaimed.
‘I am Inspector James McLevy,’ the officer himself replied, ‘and I have to thank you for your labour that night.’
McGonagall struck a proud attitude.
‘As well as a poet,’ he declared, ‘I am also a Tragedian. I have often essayed Othello on stage. It gives a man great strength in crucial predicaments.’
McLevy wasn’t sure how smothering Desdemona with a pillow equated to hauling out a sodden officer of the law from under an ancient nut tree, but he contented himself with bowing solemnly to the poet, who replied in kind, and then without another word, both men went their separate ways.
The inspector to the inquiry, and McGonagall to roam the streets with the beginning of another masterpiece beginning to form in his teeming mentality.
He had suffered much on the stage; eggs are wonderful and yolky to eat but not flying through the air towards you, yet nevertheless the fact that the clergy ranted against the theatre had brought his blood to boiling point.
For did not the best plays see vice punished and virtue rewarded?
Some versical fragments began to run in McGonagall’s mind as the Muse sped round the wide rim of his hat.
We see in Shakespeare’s tragedy of Othello, which is sublime,
Cassio losing his lieutenancy through drinking wine;
And, in delirium and grief, he exclaims – ‘Oh, that men should put
an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!’
Thus uttering these lines aloud, the last one of which was the best he would ever write, the poet passed out of sight and for this moment left the stage.
At the same time, the inspector stood at the back of the inquiry room behind one of the pillars, watching as the final witnesses from a succession of workers from the Wormit Foundry, faces so pitted with iron dust that it seemed as if they were composed of the element itself, gave evidence in halting bewildered tones as if they had been hauled bodily from their place of work and then bolted into place in front of the examining board, council and gentlemen of the press.
The Wreck Commissioner, Henry Cadogan Rothery treated them gently enough, because these were not fellows who understood the rights and wrongs of the situation; they did what they were told. No more no less than that.
But from their words, and the testimony of the previous, a depressing and calamitous picture had begun to emerge.
Beaumont Egg. That very name which they mentioned time and time again started to assume the magical dimensions of an iron-clad panacea; it had been used to plug faults in the castings, the blown-holes, cracks and fissures of all shapes and sizes, the remedy was always at hand to be melted in, left to harden, smoothed over, painted, then waved goodbye.
Available at all times from the foreman’s office.
Black magic.
Unfortunately the purveyor of this sorcery, Hercules Dunbar and the supplier of same, Alan Telfer, were unable to give statements. The former had disappeared from sight and the latter had died by his very own hand.
But other foremen testified that Telfer had brought the substance and its use was common practice.
While all this was in motion, Sir Thomas Bouch sat at the very front so that the audience were treated to a view of his broad back. His son was adjacent to him and on the other side the diminutive figure of his wife.
McLevy had pondered whether to offer evidence to the inquiry but since Dunbar had vanished there seemed little point in offering the testimony of a man who wasn’t there.
And as regards the events of the night of Telfer’s suicide, he awoke the next morning refreshed, headache miraculously gone, but with a hazy fragmentary memory of what had passed between them.
And he preferred to keep it that way.
At the back.
Meanwhile, at the front, Margaret Bouch glanced sideways at the impassive face of her spouse and wondered what was going through his mind.
The image of her husband and Alan Telfer in embrace whether innocent or lascivious had initially disgusted her but now it merely provoked curiosity.
Had Telfer put a bullet in his brain from guilt or to protect the one he loved?
If the latter then this was love indeed.
The kind that kills.
In the late morning and all through the afternoon, the court, having heard evidence from lesser beings, summoned before them the professional classes who had taken part in the construction of the bridge.
One after another they were revealed to be lacking in the basic requirements for their proper function, ranging from honestly incompetent as in the case of Henry Noble the supposed Inspector of the Tay Bridge, an assistant to Sir Thomas whose only practical experience was that of an apprentice bricklayer, to Albert Groethe, Manager of Works, a confident Christian and decent to the core who had to admit nevertheless, ‘I am not a practical iron man.’
Thus the Wormit Foundry had been left unsupervised and the bridge itself neglected and uninspected from May 1878 to December 1879.
Then there was much talk of wind and pressure, though none of the esteemed gentlemen had been on the doomed train to experience the reality of same, but finally Sir Thomas Bouch himself had been brought to the stand.
His blank face hid a growing numbness and the wall he had built round himself for protection proved no stronger than the bridge in contention, as question after question cracked the façade to reveal the bewildered soul behind the great man.
His refrain became, ‘I cannot answer that question for my memory does not serve me well.’
Already there had been savage attacks upon the very design of the bridge itself but to that query he shook his head like an animal besieged on all sides by predators.
No, he insisted, the train must have been lifted off the rails by the force of the wind and crashed into the High Girders.
Nothing could withstand that blow.
The fault was not his design but a flying train.
He seemed oblivious of the catalogue of failure that had been laid bare, and the gathering storm of public opinion.
So when he was asked the fatal question by Rothery, the Wreck Commissioner, ‘Sir Thomas, did you in designing this bridge make any allowance at all for wind pressure?’
‘Not specially,’ came the reply that damned him for ever.
Henry Cadogan Rothery blinked for a moment as if someone had smashed a fist in his face.
‘You made no allowance?’
Sir Thomas Bouch shook his head as if mystified by the repeated question.
‘Not specially.’
‘Ye dirty murdering bastard!’
Troll Barbara had drunk three hookers of whisky washed down by the same number of draughts of ram-stam beer that morning early, and though her constitution was not unused to such intake, the mixture swilled around in her brain to fuel a furious anger and resentment at the dry proceedings of the inquiry.
She had worked on the bridge for a short while and had heard the stories o
f retaining bolts shaken loose by the vibrations from the speeding trains as they exceeded the lawful limit on the bridge while they raced the morning ferry boats across the river.
Although Barbara could testify well and good to the work she had accomplished, a terrible feeling of guilt coursed through her at the thought of all these dead souls, innocent and unavenged.
And that she somehow was a part of it.
So she rose in her anger and howled an accusation at the man she considered responsible for the poor bloated bodies that were still coming to the surface after all this time.
One had even been washed up on the Caithness shore.
It had travelled further than the train.
‘Sir Thomas Bouch, I call ye out!’ she cried in her grief and fury. ‘I name ye as a murderous swine with not a decent bone in your body!’
Uproar ensued as the court officers and attendants tried to haul the berserk woman from her place; others took her part and McLevy noticed amongst them, the wife of the schoolmaster, her face flushed with rage and pain as she joined in the wall of abuse directed at the bridge builder.
Missiles were thrown and Sir Thomas was hustled away to the side for protection; he looked up at his accusers who were now losing momentum as Troll Barbara was manhandled out of the court, his face impassive, head slightly cocked to the one side as if observing from on high.
Not all of the spectators had entered the mêlée and, as order was being restored, McLevy, who had noted with some relief that the little girl who had given him the barley sugar was not accompanying her distraught mother, became aware of another’s scrutiny.
Sir Thomas’s son had followed after his father so the faithful little wife had been left to fend on her own.
Margaret Bouch, unattended and out of the spotlight, had also turned to observe the chaos, and spotted McLevy standing at the back behind the pillar.
He withdrew slightly at her regard, and then peeked round again like a schoolboy.
The ghost of a smile touched her lips and she raised one gloved hand, forefinger pointed, thumb upright like the raised hammer of a gun and shot him where he stood.