Nor Will He Sleep

by David Ashton

  His Irish blue eyes and soft spoken ways had lulled many a female criminal into an unwise move, though it must be said that his luck with women was just terrible unless arresting them.

  Which is why he had recently taken up bee-keeping.

  So there were three faces, all with a tale to tell.

  The fourth belonged to a female body that lay on the slab. It was waxy as a dead moon, already shrivelled, and covered with a sheet to hide the poor naked form with livid bruises that marked her at regular intervals.

  This face was empty, the eyes staring and the jaw tight shut.

  ‘Found by the early morning constable down by the docks, brought in with the carry-wagon.’

  The lieutenant sniffed in disapproval at the faint musky smell coming from the inspector’s coat – was there a whiff of rodent?

  ‘I was here to receive it. I arrive on time for my bounden duty.’

  McLevy grunted and peered more closely at the corpse; in his experience there was never any hurry to view a dead body, after all they weren’t going to make a run for it.

  He had much on his mind and so had taken a circuitous route to the station to mull over a strange and jagged dream that had invaded his few hours of repose.

  No sooner arrived than he had been summoned in to gaze upon the latest murderous offering from the parish.

  The inspector tossed his low-brimmed bowler onto a little table supposedly reserved for the medical instruments of the police surgeon.

  Roach sighed.

  ‘Well?’ he enquired snappily.

  ‘I think I know the face,’ Mulholland announced from on high.

  ‘Ye should,’ McLevy muttered. ‘Some years ago, a wee keelie stole the poor box from St Stephen’s Church.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ replied the constable, coming over a little Irish as his memory sparked into life. ‘Ran like hell up Forres Street, pursued by the devout.’

  ‘Right intae our worshipful arms.’

  ‘What were you doing in the vicinity?’ the lieutenant asked with a suspicious gleam in his eye. ‘That’s Heriot Row and the environs. Respectable citizenry.’

  ‘We got lost,’ was McLevy’s stolid response. In truth when he and Mulholland went on the saunter only the devil knew where the journey would end.

  ‘She was in the van of pursuit, I remember now. Put on a fair turn of speed for her age,’ offered the constable.

  ‘Not any more,’ said McLevy, lifting aside the sheet to display the inert body.

  ‘And the poor box was empty,’ Mulholland recalled.

  ‘A’ that palaver for nothing.’

  ‘A decent devout soul on the path of righteousness,’ Roach muttered querulously. ‘How does she end up dead as a doornail in Leith Harbour?’

  ‘God’s mystery, sir.’

  McLevy moved to stand at the top of the cold slab behind the head of the corpse; for a moment, to the disconcerted Roach, he took the appearance of a minister at the pulpit, but Mulholland knew his man better and merely straightened up a little.

  Facts were about to unfold.

  ‘Agnes Carnegie,’ the inspector pronounced. ‘Lodges somewhere in Salamander Street, a deal o’ distance from St Stephen’s but she made the pilgrimage.’

  A quirk of black humour twisted McLevy’s lips.

  ‘Ye’ll know her son, Mulholland. Sim Carnegie. An auld freen of yours.’

  The constable’s face tightened as he made the connection.

  ‘The newspaper man?’ Roach said. ‘That’s all we need.’

  The lieutenant took a deep breath within his immaculate uniform and set the official investigation on its way.

  ‘Now we know who she is – why did she die?’

  ‘Not robbery,’ replied Mulholland crisply, the memory of his last encounter with Sim Carnegie pushed to the side though a vestige of anger lingered. ‘Her handbag still had the purse. Intact. Not much to send home but intact.’

  He stopped to see if McLevy had anything to add but the inspector’s attention seemed to be still fixed on the rigid shrunken face of the departed Agnes.

  It brought back a memory of the dream. Himself as a young man. Lost in a forest of insinuating ferns and female laughter and then looking into a pool of water to see there reflected an old wizened apparition.

  He had come awake sweating like a hog.

  ‘Cold blood,’ Mulholland said suddenly. ‘Murder in cold blood.’

  ‘How so?’ Roach questioned.

  ‘If you look at the blows. Even spaced. Like a tiger’s stripes. Matched on each side. That takes precision.’

  ‘And precision,’ agreed McLevy, ‘demands cold blood.’

  He had spotted something at the side of the corpse’s jaw, the merest sliver of paper of some sort and, without a by your leave, abruptly wedged apart the mandibles and stuck his fingers inside.

  ‘Open Sesame!’

  Roach let out an outraged yelp.

  ‘That is the function of the police surgeon!’

  ‘Doctor Jarvis isnae here, sir,’ replied McLevy, delving industriously. ‘If he were, we’d smell the claret. Now see!’

  With the air of a magician the inspector had produced from the sunken mouth a wodge of wet paper, which he neatly picked open to disclose a white, crumpled relic of sorts.

  He slid the relic to the side with a damp forefinger and squinted hard at the paper.

  ‘It is a page from the Bible,’ he announced.

  One part of the writing that had a line scored underneath seemed to jump from the segment and McLevy quoted it with due solemnity.

  Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones.

  Roach blinked his eyes in disbelief.

  ‘Sacrilege!’ he reproached the bare, uncaring walls of the cold room. ‘To desecrate the Holy Book and stuff it in a poor woman’s God-fearing mouth!’

  ‘And her no doubt dying at the time,’ observed McLevy dryly.

  ‘No sign of such in the handbag,’ Mulholland observed. ‘Perhaps the killer carries pages with him.’

  ‘A calling card,’ said the inspector.

  The lieutenant shook his head.

  Though both faces before him were set in solemn lines, he felt as if the whole event had moved into a weird divergent universe where Satan’s hooves were scudding on the rooftops.

  He took refuge in scrutinising the crumpled relic.

  This he could name. Upon this he could contribute hard-earned knowledge.

  ‘A white favour,’ he almost spat out the words. ‘These damned students were down the harbour last night and left a female undergarment atop the mast of the Excise ship!’

  ‘It also had a white favour I am reliably informed, sir. Stuck in the breastworks.’

  This poker-faced statement from Mulholland set Roach’s mind spinning in an ever more tempestuous gyre.

  ‘The harbour last night was swarming with the White Faction. Is it possible their wild behaviour overstepped the mark?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ allowed McLevy. ‘All things are possible.’

  The inspector replaced the sheet and, as one man, the three, McLevy nipping up his bowler on the way, suddenly strode from the Cold Room like the end of an Act upon the stage. Agnes was left sole remnant, the white sheet spread over like a shroud. McLevy had forgotten to close her mouth and she looked cheated from a last word.

  The main hall of Leith Station seemed like a complete other world; Sergeant Murdoch near somnolent at the public desk as usual, the constables just changing shift and a deal of good-natured horseplay amongst the young men giving the impression indeed of animals in a field.

  Normally Roach would frown upon such behaviour, but at this moment he welcomed the earthy normality; then just as he was about to slip into a more comfortable role, his roving attention was caught and the lieutenant’s eyes near popped.

  ‘Ballantyne!’

  The addressed recipient, a young gawky consta
ble whose face was marked by a livid scarlet birthmark that extended down the neck, turned with a faintly bemused air.

  Ballantyne was a strange mixture of unconscious innocence and the occasional cryptic remark that caused the listener to wonder whether this boy was as gormless as he appeared to be.

  At first he had been relentlessly bullied by the herd but, without in any way cosseting or making exception, McLevy and Mulholland had put the boot in hard against a few backsides to alter that particular situation.

  The young constable often amused McLevy, but this did not apply to the lieutenant now, who pointed an accusing finger at Ballantyne’s reasonably well-ordered tunic.

  ‘What – what is that – there?’

  The constable looked down at the small emblem tucked into one of his top buttons.

  ‘I found it in the street,’ he replied cheerfully enough. ‘It’s a nice wee colour.’

  It was in fact one of the favours from the Scarlet Runners; perhaps the boy had picked it because the hue matched his own marking, but in Roach’s case it was the red rag to a bull.

  ‘Remove it from your person and let me never again see such a monstrosity festoon the decent environs of this station!’

  The constable’s mouth opened and shut like a goldfish, his pale blue eyes blinked, then he slowly removed the favour and slid it into his trouser pocket.

  A snort of suppressed laughter brought Roach’s head whipping round but McLevy and Mulholland were graven images.

  ‘An old woman lies dead,’ said the lieutenant bleakly. ‘I suggest you begin an investigation.’

  ‘We’ll do that right away, sir,’ McLevy averred.

  ‘And you might start with the White Faction!’

  ‘That’s immediately on our mind, lieutenant.’

  Mulholland’s dutiful response failed to satisfy Roach, who felt that these two found some secret amusement in all this tomfoolery, but a piercing stare produced no discernible reaction and so he turned back to the hapless Ballantyne.

  ‘Never – again!’

  With that apocalyptic warning the lieutenant strode off into his office, slamming the door behind.

  ‘That’ll shake Her Majesty,’ said McLevy.

  Roach’s beloved Queen Victoria had pride of place in various portraits on his office wall, but despite best effort she was forever hanging on the slant.

  The inspector turned to Ballantyne, whose fair hair had flopped over a downcast face.

  ‘Try no’ tae annoy the lieutenant, eh?’

  ‘It jist seems natural,’ came the reply.

  McLevy shook his head, a smile that might even have been mistaken for affection on his face.

  ‘Away ye go and save the cockroaches.’

  Ballantyne nodded and off he tootled. He had a great interest in the insect world, and spent much of his time at the station shepherding invertebrates into small boxes to be shaken out into a quiet byway, safe from the marauding boots of the constabulary.

  A thoughtful silence fell between McLevy and Mulholland.

  ‘The lieutenant’s in a rare bate.’

  ‘There was of course the recent incident,’ Mulholland responded, ‘where a woman had her posterior pinched in Constitution Street and the lieutenant got the blame, he walking behind at the time.’

  ‘A student prank no doubt.’

  ‘I believe so. But he was sore offended.’

  This deadpan exchange over, McLevy’s mind flitted back to the body in the Cold Room.

  He had seen Agnes Carnegie sometime in the harbour streets, a small, grim, dark-clad figure; that sort of dismal denying rectitude was everything he detested in the baleful essence of the unco’ righteous.

  Nevertheless the woman was dead. Most cruelly murdered.

  Had she blundered into this by accident or had the cause, as so often in his experience, risen from the dark roots of a blighted past?

  Time would tell.

  Yet the wizened, shrunken face, like a trophy on a cannibal’s belt, stayed with him.

  Was that to be his fate?

  Love gone. Life fled.

  Too late now. Was it Confucius said that?

  He became aware that Mulholland was regarding him curiously, a habit the constable had fallen into of late.

  ‘Murder most foul,’ he said, jamming on his low-brimmed bowler. ‘That’s our profession.’

  Mulholland also stuck his helmet aloft, which resembled a pea on the crest of a mountain, and they left swiftly.

  Ballantyne, trying to coax a small beetle into a Lucifer box, watched them depart the scene. One day the constable dreamt of being an intrepid investigator, feared by many and envied by all.

  He glanced round to make sure there was no untoward observation and teased out the favour from his pocket.

  It was still a nice wee colour.

  Chapter 5

  Anger is one of the sinews of the soul.

  Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profane State

  The magpies of the Just Land leant out its neatly painted, neatly grooved windows and tried to suppress laughter that shook them like rag dolls.

  A demanding night afore; the May Cattle Tryst when the heavy-boned men of the Lothians bulled their way into the city, sold their stock, and kicked over the traces, before lowing back o’er the lea towards their muddy farmyards.

  After a wild series of reels to greet the world of nature, there was many a rutted furrow and many a swollen plough-graith primed to dig high or low; loud were the cries and deep were the bellows.

  Some of this would have been better employed in the marital bed, but it is aye a mark of the male animal that he makes his loudest noise away from home.

  After such ramstam milling – they may not have been Gallic but by God these men could give it laldie – the magpies had lain late abed wondering idly what it might be like to be a farmer’s wife, then rose at the same time as if linked by some satiated cycle to consider the garden of the Just Land.

  It was a sight to behold.

  There was their mistress Jean Brash, still in her elegant morning décolletage, flitting about like a demented moth and getting wetter by the second in the rain, as she and her right-hand woman, Hannah Semple, keeper of the keys, attempted to gather in a most unusual harvest.

  It falls out as follows.

  To prevent unwanted impregnation or passing of the pox from one precipitous plunge to another, the most learned scientists and engineering talents of Her Gracious Majesty’s realm had produced – the sheath.

  Animal intestines soaked and then tied with a piece of ribbon. French Letters, English Overcoats, name them as you wish, they were to be attached to the erect male member with the requisite amount of firmness, though a too-tight ribbon might stem the flow and numb desire.

  But that was where they belonged.

  On the aforesaid member.

  Not festooned round the bushes and rose banks, stuck arbitrarily upon a naked twig, flaccid and glistening in the rain save for a number that had been inflated by unknown means and pinned at height on branches to wave gaily in the conniving wind.

  The Scarlet Runners had struck in the night, leaving their red favours to provide safe convoy.

  Jean had risen to discover this, let out a howl for Hannah, and been hard at harvest since.

  The sheaths had been left high and low, so she was forced to use long bamboo sticks to knock them off like so many fairground trophies.

  ‘Ye’ll catch your death o’ cauld,’ Hannah panted, hauling at one guilty specimen which stretched like a sausage skin before pulling free with a sodden twang. ‘The Lord be thanked, at least they’re empty o’ purpose.’

  Jean’s own red hair was plastered to her face, the dressing gown of fine silk moulded to and slithering round her lean shapely body in what might well have been deemed erotic invitation had it not been for an expression that would have stopped a charging satyr in his tracks.

  ‘I’ll kill the swine,’ she muttered, her green eyes narrowed to a
pin-point of rage.

  ‘Oh mah Goad,’ exclaimed Hannah. ‘There’s wan on the boy Cupid.’

  Jean recently had overseen a small statue to the son of Venus installed tastefully in a shady nook, but now to accompany the playing of his pipes, Cupid had a wrinkled embellishment upon his stubby appendage.

  As the mistress of the Just Land jerked the thing from its locus with a furious twitch the magpies above could contain themselves no longer.

  A loud peal of hilarity rang through the damp air.

  Jean looked up and all was sudden silence. Nothing is more terrifying than a beautiful woman in a rage.

  ‘You girls come down here,’ she said coldly. ‘And get tae work gathering.’

  As the windows slammed shut in chorus, the back door to the garden opened and Lily Baxter emerged.

  Lily was a small, sunny-natured creature, deaf and dumb since birth, but a bundle of attractive curves.

  She and her lover, Maisie Powers, who appeared behind, had been comparatively underused the previous night, due to the fact that in the Just Land cellars they catered mostly for inflicted pain with, if requested, lacerating bondage.

  The farmers got quite enough of that in the calving season, so the two women, expert with whip and thistle, had rested on their laurels yester-evening.

  Lily’s face was grave and she pushed the large, somewhat lumpy figure of Maisie to the front. The big girl also held one of the offensive casings.

  ‘I found it stuck tae the front door knob,’ she said.

  Jean closed her eyes for a second.

  ‘Take it away,’ she ordered. ‘It’s bad for business.’

  Lily meanwhile had picked up one of the bamboo sticks, used for supporting plants, and was swishing it through the air with a thoughtful expression on her face.

  ‘Take it away!’

  The two vanished and there was silence in the garden, broken only by the soft hiss of rain.

  ‘We could maybe reconnoiter some o’ the better quality,’ suggested Hannah helpfully. ‘Waste not, want not.’

  Her mistress made no reply. They made an odd couple in the wet grass, Jean graceful as a swan despite her bedraggled ensemble and Hannah a clumpy figure in her woolly gown and rubber boots.