Shadow of the Serpent

by David Ashton

  7

  I met a lady in the meads

  Full beautiful, a faery’s child

  Her hair was long, her foot was light

  And her eyes were wild.

  JOHN KEATS, ‘La belle dame sans merci’

  McLevy on the saunter, Mulholland loping along at his side like an Irish setter.

  This had once been the inspector’s favourite pursuit, a gentle perambulation through the streets of Leith to observe his charges, most of them doing their level best to avoid his eye.

  The delvers, the nymphs and their pounces, the low and high thieves, the bolters, the pleaders, the sneaks, the climbers, the thimblers, the cardsharps, the young keelies with their shooting jackets, caps and fancy girls, the dollymops, shopgirls and maids who slipped out from their place of work to sell their favours, then last but not least, the lost causes.

  This was McLevy’s private appellation for the unfortunate carriers of the pox who gave many a man his Canongate breeks, so called because that particular quarter, despite the nearby sanctuary of Holyrood, had become a hotbed of venereal splendour.

  He knew them all. They belonged to him. The bolder fraternity stood proud and cheeked but inside, in the gut, they recognised he was their master.

  Once he had heard an exasperated mother threaten her snottery son with the words, ‘If ye don’t do what ye’re tell’t to, I’ll get McLevy to come and throw ye in the jail, like he did yer father!’ He had become the bogey man, a myth in his own lifetime.

  Recollection brought a smile to his face but it faded as he regarded the changing scene.

  Constitution Street, down which he and the constable were wending their way towards the Old Docks where, with a bit of luck they would find Frank Brennan, was a handsome wide thoroughfare, thronged with carriages and, despite the present election fever, sober-suited and pious-minded pedestrians.

  An example of the new respectable parish and there was more to come. The Leith Improvement Scheme was shortly to be enacted, a swathe from Great Junction Street would be cut through all the closes, narrow lanes and courts, ending at the Tolbooth Wynd.

  His own subjects were being herded like animals farther and farther back into their lairs, cleansed from the main promenades, and he mourned their passing.

  ‘What joy can be found in a stiff collar and tight whalebone?’ he announced suddenly.

  Mulholland had been casting a wary Protestant eye at the sole representative of Romanism in Leith, the Catholic chapel of Maris Stella, cruciformed, high-roofed, fetid, he was certain, with incense.

  A black-clad priest emerged blinking into the light of day and waved over. McLevy waved back.

  ‘Father Callan. A decent enough soul,’ he opined.

  ‘You know him well, then?’

  ‘Sufficient. He keeps his own counsel. More’s the pity.’

  There was a cryptic quality to that remark which hinted of past encounters but Mulholland let it lie. He was unsure of the inspector’s religious bent. The man did not worship at any known designation.

  There was a rumour that his mother might have been Catholic, but, in that case, it would have been a miracle for McLevy to attain the rank of inspector. Mark you, come to think of it, miracles were exactly what the Pope sold to all and sundry. And what of indulgences? Plenary, partial, temporal or perpetual, all sold to the highest bidder.

  Martin Luther had the right idea, nail rebellion on the chapel door and foreswear the Diet of Worms.

  ‘So?’ said the inspector fiercely. ‘What joy?’

  The constable was lost. ‘Ye’d have to come at me again with that, sir.’

  ‘Come at ye, I’ll come at ye all right.’ McLevy took a deep breath and changed tack. ‘Sookin’ up!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  The inspector glared at Mulholland in a sudden fury. ‘Ye were sookin’ up!’

  ‘I was not!’ came the injured response.

  ‘Ye were. To the lieutenant. Sook, sook!’

  Mulholland indeed was plotting to ask for some time off in order to attend his Aunt Katie’s third marriage in Kerry, she was a terror for the altar that woman. He had no scruples about buttering up Roach to that end, but hadn’t thought to be caught out at it. He tried the dignified card.

  ‘It appears to me that, for once in your life, sir, you run the chance of mistaking polite agreement for – ’

  ‘Sookin’ up! Kiss my arse, I’ll bring ye parsley.’

  My God, see the man scowling up at him like a frog with the mange. Mulholland wished to be a heron looming over that foul-tempered amphibian. A heron with a long sharp beak. Stab through the belly. Out come the guts.

  McLevy smiled thinly. ‘You’re thinking something nasty about me, constable, because I caught ye blowing in his ear. Something nasty.’

  ‘Farthest thing from my mind, sir.’

  McLevy could not explain whence came these fierce squalls of rage which shook him like the aspen tree, but he enjoyed them anyway. Good for the blood.

  ‘You’ll go far, Mulholland,’ he said ambiguously.

  ‘That is my intention.’

  The inspector took a step back and appraised his constable.

  Mulholland stood his ground. He knew that squinty-eyed look and had seen many quail before it, but he was sterner stuff.

  The two of them remained like statues as the people brushed past and who knows how long they would have been frozen there had not a woman’s voice interrupted.

  ‘James McLevy,’ the tone was low, husky; a liking for strong coffee and the best champagne had moulded the melody of her laughter. ‘Can you not pick on someone your own size?’

  A splendid private carriage had stopped, and leaning out of the window was a female McLevy knew only too well and for far too long. Jean Brash. Her full lips curved in a smile, hair red as the deepest sin.

  Despite her forty-some years, like porcelain was her complexion. Her sea-green eyes with their deep mocking inner light sparkled in the weak rays of the Leith sun. He had almost drowned in these eyes a few times but fear, a dark primitive fear of losing his very soul, had hauled him back from the edge. Just as well. He could not swim.

  In sport, she extended a dainty, gloved hand, which he took in his paw and bowed over in equal mockery.

  Twenty years ago they’d walked the same streets, whore and constable, then, by various crimes and misdemeanours, Jean raised enough money to emulate the vigorous activity she witnessed below and above her person. She became half-owner in a low dive of a bawdy-hoose, the Happy Land, a place of sliding panels and slippery licentious women where a watch and wallet might disappear in the blink of an eye.

  Her partner, Henry Preger, a notorious desperado, died of accumulative poison in mysterious circumstances, and with sorrowful heart she moved up a notch to her next bawdy-hoose, the Holy Land.

  Many years passed. She and her girls grasped the staff of righteousness. The place burnt down. It had been insured as a lodging house and the head of the company was a regular client, so with that money and what she had garnered from the sweat of the two-backed beast, Jean moved right up the hill to inhabit a stately mansion that she named the Just Land. She was now the premiere madam in Edinburgh.

  Men of the cloth, men of justice, medical men, fellows of the university, all respectable, all with the same itch to scratch, slipped in at the back door.

  Safe in the knowledge that the sheets were clean, the champagne decent, the magpies raring to go, wallets and confidentiality guaranteed, they indulged their libidinous, maritally marginalised passions up to the very hilt.

  Some of them even brought their own wife’s clothing for the lassies to don.

  Some of them even wore it themselves, corsets, drawers and all.

  Jean Brash provided a cornucopia of depravity with the one proviso that no violence was visited upon her girls.

  On the other hand, the said girls were not averse to dishing it out.

  She had invested in a Berkley Horse precisely for that
purpose, a device upon which the gentleman might be stretched and flogged from any angle. A particular favourite for those captains of industry who spent their days ruling others with a rod of iron.

  Jean had, moreover, within easy reach, a selection of whips, birches, canes and battledores.

  Thistles were also very popular. In season. Jean even grew them in her garden. Onopordon acanthium, she knew the Latin name for many plants. The tap root of the thistle was one foot long. She’d found a use for that as well.

  There was a time McLevy’s desire had been to see her on a transportation ship but that chance had gone.

  Now, she was protected by a bullet-proof decorum, and if not legalised most certainly tolerated, since a sizeable proportion of the city council found their way to her abode for various non-municipal satisfactions.

  Still, there was always the hope that one day he might view her fair visage through the bars of a cell. Crime had brought Jean to this pretty pass, crime might yet be her undoing. There’s always hope.

  She knew what he thought. And he knew that she knew. It was a perfect circle.

  They observed each other with a certain bruised affection, like two pugilists who had hammered for many rounds, in many bouts, at each other and found respect in the adversary’s punching power.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for a while, James. It’s not the same without you … indulging yourself in my wee bower.’

  She made the best coffee in Edinburgh. Like her, he was a fiend for coffee. They would sit in her rose-filled garden, sip the brew, and gossip together like a pair of old sweetie-wives.

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ said he.

  ‘Aye. Persecuting the innocent,’ rasped a voice from behind and an older woman leaned out from the shelter of Jean’s fashionable back.

  Snub nosed, pug-faced. Hannah Semple, keeper of the keys of the Just Land and Jean’s right hand. A squat tough old bird.

  McLevy had personally sent her twice to Perth Penitentiary, once for common assault and the other for a cut-throat razor held under the nose of a recipient of her dubious charms who had been reluctant to pay the piper. The fellow flinched convulsively and had a chunk cut out of his neb. Serve him right in McLevy’s opinion but unfortunately he was a magistrate’s son.

  Hannah’s life had been on a downward course, a third conviction would have seen her die in prison, but Jean Brash had redeemed the fallen soul; all that practice in the Holy Land had not been in vain. The older woman loved her mistress as well as her caustic nature would allow and would happily kill to keep Jean safe.

  ‘Poor auld Sadie Gorman,’ Hannah sucked at her teeth and resisted the temptation to spit out of the carriage window, ‘didnae deserve that, eh?’

  ‘The wages of sin, Hannah,’ was his solemn reply.

  ‘Stick them up your backside, McLevy. If it wasnae for sin you policemen would have bugger all to do with your life.’

  This time she did spit, accurately past Jean out of the carriage window and close enough to McLevy’s foot that he jumped back a little.

  ‘Now, now, Hannah,’ murmured Jean. ‘The inspector is merely being provocative.’

  Her face became grave, the green eyes thoughtful as she thus addressed him. ‘I liked Sadie. She was a wild wee devil. She might have remained in my company but she would go her own way.’

  Then her eyes creased up. ‘Though even when I saw her of late, old as the hills, plying her trade, she still could make me laugh.’

  ‘Aye, she had humour. By the bucket!’

  McLevy suddenly let out a harsh whoop of laughter, a strange sound which caused some decent folk in the street to turn and others to avoid the group quite altogether.

  ‘In Meikle John’s Close, she emptied a full chamber pot from high above, aimed at my poor head. Gardyloo!’

  ‘Did she hit the mark?’ Hannah asked hopefully.

  ‘She did not,’ said Mulholland. ‘He jumped sideways and out. I got the full deluge.’

  ‘He knows better now.’

  McLevy made the remark with a serious air and both women could not resist laughter. Mulholland, calculating he was being paid back for sucking up to the lieutenant, cut his losses and played a part.

  ‘Like the urine of the wild boar,’ he announced.

  More laughter. Then silence. Jean leant out farther so that she looked McLevy straight in the eye.

  ‘They say she was cut to pieces. Is that true?’

  ‘She more or less held together,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘One blow. I don’t think she saw it coming.’

  ‘Otherwise she would have got the hell out of the way,’ said Jean, nettled by his apparent insouciance.

  ‘I have to agree with you there,’ McLevy replied.

  He glanced up at the coachman. Angus Dalrymple, a massive figure. Once he’d been a respectable tradesman, a blacksmith, but now he sat behind the horses and his twin daughters worked tandem in the Just Land.

  ‘Keep it in the family, eh Angus?’ McLevy said happily.

  The man stared straight ahead. The inspector turned his attention back to Jean.

  ‘Sadie was a wily old cove. But she never saw it coming.’

  ‘Then it was trade,’ she asserted.

  ‘That’s possible.’ His face gave little away.

  ‘If I hear anything on the streets,’ she had a network of spies, ‘you’ll be informed.’

  McLevy said nothing. Mulholland hastened to fill the silence. ‘Any information will be welcome, ma’am.’

  Jean withdrew into the carriage. ‘Take us onwards, Angus,’ she commanded, then in the same tone, as the driver clicked at the horses, ‘You will find this man, McLevy.’

  He stiffened at the arrogant tenor of her words. ‘I’ll do my job,’ he muttered.

  ‘Sadie Gorman did not merit such a death.’

  ‘That’s what happens when you live outside the law. One minute you’re safe, the next, the axe falls.’

  A cold look passed between them.

  ‘If I ever lived outside the law,’ she replied, ‘it was from necessity. Now, I have no need.’

  ‘Crime is a bad habit,’ said McLevy. ‘Ye never lose it.’

  She smiled suddenly and leant out again so that their faces were almost touching.

  ‘When you find this murdering bastard,’ she whispered softly, ‘I’ll have the coffee waiting.’

  The carriage departed and one of the horses left a large mound of dung behind as a parting gift.

  McLevy marched off abruptly down the street with Mulholland lengthening his stride to keep pace.

  The inspector sounded like he was chanting something under his breath; the constable caught a few notes and recognised the old Jacobite air, ‘Charlie is my darling, the young chevalier’, usually heard when McLevy was in the extremities of good or bad humour. Which held sway was difficult to fathom from that exchange.

  By now they had reached the bottom of Constitution Street. Mulholland swung left automatically heading for the Old Docks, but McLevy halted to point the other way.

  ‘That new building which stands so proudly in Salamander Street there, what is its function, constable?’

  ‘It’s the slaughterhouse, sir.’

  ‘So it is,’ said McLevy. ‘So it is.’

  8

  But keep the wolf far thence that’s foe to men,

  For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.

  JOHN WEBSTER, The White Devil

  Frank Brennan gasped for breath as he lumbered up the steep brae of the Coalhill. The hounds of hell, oh Jesus, and he innocent as a newborn babe, had stalked him all the way along the Old Docks. He could hear them howling still.

  Thank the Living Saviour that bastard Mulholland was such a height. His helmet stuck out like a pea on top of a mountain through the dusty windows of Docherty’s Tavern and Frank had seen it miles away, above the crowd.

  Just time enough for him to dive out the window, kick the scabby hens out from under his feet in the backyard, and be about to prise
open the rearwards door when some instinct caused hesitation. He looked through a crack in the wood and what did he see but nothing more than a much worse bastard, that vindictive evil snaffler, McLevy.

  Waiting to sink his claw.

  Frank had managed to clamber over a couple of walls to the side and come out at a back alley on to the docks; he’d crossed over the wee bridge which led to the shore and then he’d run for his life, leaving the warm cosy tavern behind.

  He’d been revelling in the sorrow of Sadie’s death and the drinks bought in sympathy, him pleading the broken heart and the whisky going down nicely; mind you he’d bought them all enough the night before, only his due, money to burn the night before, money to burn. Blood money.

  Don’t think on that, Frank, don’t think on that.

  Then an old bitch, Agnes Stein, one of the wrinkled crones Sadie used to sit with in the corner, had walked straight up and given him the evil eye. Evil.

  ‘I never did a thing wrong,’ said he.

  She picked up a whisky glass and threw the contents straight in his face, the waste of it as well, and her voice rang out through the place.

  ‘Ye were her man. Ye should have been on the qui vive, on the streets with her, watchin’ her survival. Ye’re not even a half-decent pimp!’

  The black mist came down and he raised his hand. The landlord grabbed it. She was just an old woman, let it be, Frank.

  No matter how old, he’d break her neck, no one insulted him like that.

  Then the mist cleared, he looked out the window and saw the constable from afar, tall as a gallows tree.

  These thoughts in his head as he got to the top of the brae, nearly safe now. Duck into the wynds down the other side, ye could lose the devil himself in there. Behind him a police whistle sounded, oh Jesus, it sounded close.

  He took a deep breath and hurtled himself over the break of the hill.

  Up above, in the cold blue sky, a flock of ravens wheeled in circles, attention fixed on something in the distance below.