by David Ashton
One of the constables sped into the boot room to do as commanded and the rest began to break up and return to their normal duties, save for Murdoch at the desk who had scarcely stirred as he watched Billy Napier leave the premises with such unprecedented velocity.
Stasis is a kind of duty, is it not?
The three wise men disappeared into Roach’s office on legitimate business this time and Ballantyne, who had received a brusque nod of approval from his inspector for his part in the unfolding morality play, let out a long breath and calculated the time when he’d be able to loose the centipedes.
As he looked over, an old fellow entered the station, shuffled around uncertainly, then plonked himself on one of the wooden benches by the front door.
The constable with bucket and mop went past, heading for the bloody lamppost. Napier by now had no doubt dragged himself into the depths of Leith to lie upon his death bed.
Murdoch had vanished under the desk, with only one meaty hand remaining on top, having been, it would seem, grafted on to that piece of furniture. Ballantyne levered himself up and walked across.
What a time so far: corpses, centipedes, information false- drappit into another man’s ear for the good of the cause and getting a sore neck for recompense.
Surely that would do for the day?
‘Can I help you, sir?’ he asked politely.
George Dunwoody looked up and smiled. At least the teeth did, whatever his inner inclination.
‘Ye can indeed,’ he answered. ‘And I can help you!’
‘That would be a nice change,’ responded Ballantyne a little warily, wondering if he had come across someone bereft of their wits – but the old boy had a sharp glint to his eye and was well enough attired.
‘Ye had a murther – in the harbour – a nicht o’ last week.’
‘That we did. More’s the pity. An old and decent woman.’
‘I noted her picture in the paper.’
George brought a crumpled edition out of his pocket and unfurled it with care.
Sim Carnegie had topped his splenetic article with a family photo of his mother. Younger, but unmistakably Agnes.
The old man’s finger tapped upon the image.
‘I saw her.’
‘What?’
‘And him.’
‘Eh?’
Ballantyne’s exclamation was high-pitched enough that a few glances were thrown their way – whit the hell was daftie up to now?
‘They both passed me. On my way home. Later than my preference because of thae damned students.’
George shook his head in disapproval and Ballantyne resisted the temptation to seize the old gadgie and shake the truth out of him.
Think of the man as an insect. A nice shiny insect.
‘Him? You saw a him?’
‘Tracking her. Behind a distance. A real Jack o’ Dandy.’
George smiled again and the constable tried to compose his face into nothing that might alarm a murder witness.
‘If you might just wait here. I am certain Inspector McLevy would like a wee word.’
Ballantyne set off then changed his mind, returning almost to haul George off the bench.
‘No – better you come with me – things can disappear in this station.’
As they made for Roach’s office, the boy with the bucket came in.
He looked down at the flagstones and began to scrub at some reddish marks that might have been blood or remnants of a rusty nail.
All grist to the mill.
Chapter 27
I am destined by the mysterious powers to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes, viewing life in all its immensity as it rushes past.
Gogol, Dead Souls
Under a covered gazebo, two elegant figures sipped at their coffee as peacocks strutted the immaculate lawns. In a nearby large pond, various heavy-bodied tropical fish dunted up against each other, their bright yellow and orange providing a brilliant contrast to the dreich skies above.
A soft, insidious rain had begun to fall, which made no odds to the fish and enhanced the vivid blue of the male birds – it trembling on the edge of the mating season, the men o’ parts were spreading their wings a little gingerly for an exploratory shiver while the dowdier females pecked around like wifies at a greengrocer display.
The rose bushes now mercifully free of preventative sheathing were coming into bloom; along with other drenched but vibrant flower beds, Cupid was glistening; and the fecund whole might well have been an ideal scene to augment the gardening column in Ladies’ Companion Magazine.
Save for the fact that the equally elegant building that cradled the grounds like a loving mother might require the caption Bawdy-Hoose. Proprietrix Jean Brash, all tastes indulged up to the eyeballs.
Stevenson laughed aloud at that notion, but shook his head at Jean’s enquiring glance.
‘Not worthy of you, my dear,’ he murmured, inhaling the delicate caffeine aroma of the Lebanon, which combined aesthetically with his pungent tobacco to produce a Leith version of Yin and Yang, opposite yet entwined.
Once more he had slid out of Heriot Row while the rest of the house pondered tomorrow’s funeral arrangements, heads bowed over lists; it was an odd twist in his temperament, but the more unreliable he became in other’s eyes, the happier he felt inside.
To be somewhere other than in one’s appointed place lifts the spirit, and do we not all feel this?
A great deal is made of freedom, but perhaps it is no more than an absence from the ties that bind.
Or would we be lost without those ties?
On a whim he had disguised himself in a long, shabby coat and one of his father’s old outdoor sea hats, and fancied that he might flit unseen through the busy streets without recognition.
Of course he had laid away the coat and wafted the hat aside in Jean’s presence.
A velvet jacket with white cotton shirt collar, cuffs that encased those thin wrists at the end of which dangled the surprisingly large hands, and a long pale face that hung in the shade like a mocking portrait. The least he could offer a beautiful woman.
Jean had told him of the adventure with the Scarlet Runners and they had laughed over that.
All the while they appraised each other in not unfriendly fashion; two artists at the height of their profession.
He coughed in the damp air and flicked at some moisture that had gathered by the end of his long nose.
‘The rain never leaves for long,’ Stevenson murmured.
‘A constant companion.’
This wry observation made, Jean suddenly let out a very unladylike snort of laughter.
‘It might have been your backside I let fly at once upon a time, for you were a wild rogue, Robert Louis!’
‘According to many, I still am.’
Many impulses, overt and hidden, had lured him towards the Just Land, all to do with the past, but the present had sparked into life when he had seen the surprised smile on Jean’s face.
A man aye likes to surprise the female.
It is a rare occurrence.
‘Whit a life we’ve led.’
‘And see where we’ve ended, with no discernible trace of sin.’
They both laughed at this sardonic comment, but then he surprised her again, not quite so pleasantly.
‘And we are both in thrall to James McLevy.’
‘How so?’
Jean’s countenance did not alter a jot and she slid a delicate china plate towards him.
‘Sugar biscuit?’
‘I don’t mind if I do.’
He pronounced this in a ridiculously affected English accent to take any sting out of his following words, as he carefully stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray that, for some reason, had the shape of a squatting bulldog, and nibbled at the biscuit.
For Robert Louis was on the prowl. The dark insights he lived by had forewarned him of a beast of sorts on his trail and it seemed to have moved from the realms of imagination into a grim rea
lity.
It was not his nature to be passive unless stricken with illness or faced with a funeral.
The demise of the father? Had that delivered some malignant shambling fate?
‘Death they say is a great release,’ he announced with as much gravity as a sugar biscuit might allow. ‘For instance, Henry Preger was an evil God. James McLevy brought him crashing down to earth. You were thus released from a dire and hateful bondage.’
‘McLevy certainly started the process,’ Jean replied, intrigued to see where all this was leading. ‘But he’s scrounged enough cups of coffee on it – another biscuit?’
‘Thank you.’
They were both disturbed when one of the peacocks let out a mournful wail as the oscillations of his plumage had proven an abject failure; the female seemed to have discovered a long, yellowish worm more to her taste.
Yet again the call of Madame Nicotine was too strong to resist. Thank God he had rolled a day’s supply, for his fingers were covered in a fine sugar dusting and trembling to boot.
Stevenson lit the Lucifer and drew in a soothing draught of high-grade tobacco leaf.
For a moment he created a cloud in front of his face, but when it cleared he found himself under scrutiny from those beautiful but piercing green eyes.
The question to ask of course was, what was his own thrall-dom, but the woman was too intelligent for such an obvious response.
‘Mary Dougan,’ he said. ‘Do you remember her?’
‘I do. Well.’
‘Can you keep a secret?’
‘If necessity demands.’
She poured out more coffee for both. It was still warm and faint wispy steam rose from the surface.
‘Mary is dead. Murdered.’
The green eyes did not change.
‘I had heard. Another body at Leith Station. But not the name. Poor Mary. A decent soul for all that.’
Stevenson resolved to keep the doorstep discovery to himself; the less divulged the better, with women.
‘McLevy seems convinced that part of the answer may lie in my past.’
‘Then I would pay attention,’ replied Jean. ‘He’s seldom wrong.’
Though she was drawn by this turn in the conversation, Jean was also conscious of a prickle of annoyance. Could a man not come to visit without an ulterior motive?
Or was that all they were good for?
Blissfully unaware that he was, for once, conforming to a stereotype, the writer continued his line of enquiry.
‘I have been away so long. Mary. What happened to her?’
‘The usual,’ responded Jean with a shake of the head. ‘I offered her a wee place here, looking after the girls, for she was kindly by heart and would have been a good balance to Hannah, but – she was too set in her ways. The damned circle had closed. No way out.’
Then she smiled suddenly, for she had been struck by a memory of a time before the arsenic had worked its wonders and Henry Preger went floating somewhere in Leith Harbour, when the fiddler had sawed a slow air in the tavern and a young Mary Dougan had danced with a gawky, coltish man.
For a moment it was just the two moving somehow in time to the tune, as if magic had descended on the rough planking, Mary looking up with a shining light in her eyes and the tall youth gazing into a different future.
Robert Louis had been the favourite of all the threepenny whores, due to deferential manners and assiduous provision of pleasure. Give and take.
‘You were her poutie,’ said Jean slowly. ‘I don’t believe she cared for any other man.’
Stevenson bowed his head.
‘I went into business,’ said Jean. ‘And lost touch with her. Years later I saw Mary in the streets. A shipwreck.’
He blew out a long trail of smoke and hunched his shoulders, lost in a distant recollection.
‘It was not your fault,’ Jean continued. ‘A different fate before you. But you were her poutie.’
That was the trouble, thought he, with returning home. All the ghosts come back to life.
His silence lengthened and though Jean felt no real wish to comfort, she considered it only fair to stitch a different button upon the garment of regret.
Besides, out of the corner of her eye she could see Hannah Semple hanging her head out of an upstairs window to signal that time was flying and the looming evening lechery must not be neglected.
Supply and demand.
‘It happens sometimes, with unlucky women, that they fix upon one man. A lifetime obsession.’
His agile mind switched to his own Fanny Osbourne.
‘And men?’
‘Oh, they can get obsessed. But it doesnae last.’
‘What if it happened to you, Jean Brash?’
For a moment, a certain unlovable face swam into her mind, but she shook her head like a horse getting rid of an annoying fly.
‘If it did. I would bring the mannie before me, and shoot him right between the eyes.’
The watcher across the street, hidden by the heavy, low-hanging branches of a late blossoming cherry tree, hissed like a snake, as the man threw back his head in laughter, while the woman laid a lascivious hand upon his sleeve.
She had no right. She was a whore. Flaunting herself like a painted doll. He imagined the cane beating down on that face, the mouth twisted in pain as she sought for mercy but no – there would be no mercy.
See there! Her head was close to his – what secrets were they murmuring?
He had followed Stevenson from his house to this palace of whoredom, this Babylon.
He must leave this scene because he had many other deeds to perform in another life.
But now he knew where to burn the roots of sin.
A page would be found in the tattered and crumpled book.
Then a price would be paid.
And the harlot would squeal like a pig.
Chapter 28
For surely this Mastiff though he was big,
And had been lucky at fighting,
Yet he was not qualifi’d worth a fig,
And therefore he fell a biting.
Alexander Broome, Songs and Other Poems
Now was the moment of truth. The Judas Hole was too high up for George Dunwoody to reach, so a stool had to be brought for the old man to perch upon.
He had waited patiently in the station for many hours until the suspects had been rounded up.
Now they had. Now was the moment.
Inside the cell off the corridor two young fellows, not for the first time, sat disconsolately on narrow beds.
But they were not yet unveiled to George. At the moment all he could see was a panel of wood with a knob of sorts, upon which rested the long fingers of Constable Mulholland.
On George’s other side was a fell-faced McLevy, his pepper-and-salt hair tangled like seaweed from a recent stramash with the students.
‘I envy ye the growth,’ said George out of nowhere.
‘Whit?’
The old man pointed to his own sparse locks.
‘The cauld in winter. Straight through the cranium.’
McLevy fixed the man with a bleak stare.
‘This is a matter of identification, Mister Dunwoody. Craniums have bugger all to do with it.’
‘Fix your mind, sir,’ Mulholland interjected calmly, though his finders tapped impatiently at the knob, ‘on the murder night. Fix the face of the man you saw and tell us, if you please, whether you see it inside.’
George nodded and squinted his pale eyes.
‘Are you ready?’
The old man inclined his head.
Mulholland looked at his inspector, who tugged once at his moustache, which was now sprouting in many directions, perhaps suggestive of the twists and turns of their investigation, and then McLevy also nodded.
The panel of the Judas Hole was snapped back and the noise caused both young men in the room to jerk their heads up. What they saw was a slit of light and what George saw was like a framed picture of two di
stinct faces.
‘The rain was battering in my coontenance, mind ye,’ he muttered, squinting the whiles.
‘Well it’s dry now.’
‘And there he is!’
The old man’s teeth jutted out in triumphant confirmation, as he pointed a cautious finger towards one of the seated men.
‘Him. Large as life. See. No’ a pick on him. A Jack o’ Dandy!’
The other two crammed their heads in from each side to follow the direction of the accusatory digit.
It was pointed at the drawn but defiant countenance of Daniel Drummond.
*
And yet they began the hammer at Alan Grant, once Roach had given his reluctant permission.
The lieutenant had interviewed Dunwoody himself and been grudgingly impressed by the old man’s mental alertness, even if it was allied at times to a slightly askew slant at the world.
But the witness was sharp as a tack, and now insistent that the man he witnessed on the murder night and then in the cell was as claimed.
The Jack o’ Dandy.
He had earlier given an accurate description of the man, including the dragging leg, and made his present case by holding up a single forefinger of each hand.
‘One like the other. Peas in a pod!’
The old fellow had signed his statement and been packed off home with Ballantyne for company to guarantee a supposed safe passage, and then Roach, before the lawyers descended, though this time they would not be so mysteriously forewarned, took a deep breath and set the dogs loose.
Or was it, in McLevy’s case, more the wolf?
Regarding Alan Grant, he was once more pitchforked into a strange jagged world.
He had been at the forefront of the motley crowd of students, more to keep an eye as promised to Jessica on her wild and wilful brother who yelled encouragement beside him as one of the tribe was climbing up the spiral staircase of the Scott Monument in Princes Street to plant a white favour on top of one of the many turrets that festooned this strange Gothic tribute to the Great Man.
Sir Walter himself had been awarded another white favour, on his quill of stone, and the writer’s dog Maida had a collar fastened round his neck with more offerings.