by David Ashton
Accordingly he returned to the cards, turning them over slowly while she walked to the window and looked from the hotel onto the sober thoroughfare of George Street spread out below, not yet echoing the busier parallel of Princes Street a few roads further down.
The weather was mild but the distrustful citizens paid no heed to the possibility of clemency; heads down, hunched as if suffering a driving rain, they shuffled and darted in the gloomy afternoon amidst carriages and sundry vehicles like denizens at the bottom of the deep, half-blind, anxious to avoid contact lest it contaminate.
At least that is how it appeared to Sophia. So much of her time when alone was spent in a world of shifting shapes and snatches of voices on the wind, that she was sometimes unsure where one world ended and the other commenced.
But she had worshipped at the shrine and cleansed her soul. Now it was almost time to begin.
Vengeance.
She was nineteen years old and had waited long enough. This was the city. Sophia had made her plans. Now it was time. Magnus snapped over a card and muttered in annoyance at the result. Then he suddenly laughed; it was one of his most attractive features, a sound that seemed to come from low in his belly and fill the room with genuine physical pleasure.
‘What is your future?’ he said, sliding one more unsuccessful card into the overlapping talon.
She smiled, remembering the way the flimsy door had creaked open in San Francisco and she had clutched a small derringer under the table in case her intuition had deceived, but no – a man stood there, liquor on his breath, a wild, desperate look to his eye. Caged inside himself.
The chosen one.
An empty space that she could fill.
It would take time but she had the power. He was the instrument.
‘How much did you charge that night?’ Magnus asked.
‘Five dollars. It was all you had,’ she answered from the window, watching a vagrant dog barely escape the wheels of a hurtling carriage, the coachman whipping the horse on in brutish fashion.
As the vehicle plunged off, the barking dog was joined by another, a yellow cur, slinking, less brave, the weaker of the two animals.
But strong enough to kill a rat.
Magnus laughed once more and puffed out a last thin column of smoke before stubbing out the cheroot. She liked that smell on his breath, it brought back memories.
Good before they became otherwise.
Her mother’s eyes looking into hers. Dilated, wild and wanton.
The broad back of a man. A man she recognised only too well.
She pulled herself back from memory. The hotel room was a pale peach colour, which she found restful and untainted by previous association: the place newly converted from three buildings meshed together.
The Spiritualist Society of Edinburgh, though not the main thrust of the organisation, had done them proud. It was the end of a long tour of Victoria’s kingdom and Sophia had insisted Magnus arrange that it end here. They had travelled all the main cities, word of mouth creating a hunger for what they had to offer. Another world. Where the dead spoke.
But not all of them. Some stayed hidden. Waiting for a sign. Waiting for vengeance.
She shivered with a hunger of her own and crossed back to lay her hand upon his shoulder. Corporeal comfort.
Magnus was halfway through the game. Finely poised.
‘You think it can be solved?’ he asked.
‘How would I know?’ she replied.
Something in her tone stilled his restless fingers and he remembered the moment when he had pushed open the door and entered that dirty little airless room to find a figure sat facing him in the shadows, face and hair concealed behind a white veil like a bride’s, one hand under the table, one palm upwards pointing towards him.
Like any good gambler he had established the ante, slid over his last five dollars, and waited for his future to be told. No crystal ball to look within.
The figure spoke and asked his name. He gave it. She had a soft accent, Southern hint perhaps, hard to tell.
His own had no trace of a family of ten, in Pittsburgh’s fair city, grinding poverty and empty guts.
His father all the way from Armagh found a German woman to his liking and set about recreating the very reason he had left Ireland in the first damned place.
A big man. Big hands. Michael Bannerman. Worked in the steel mills on the south side as a puddler. Magnus was the oldest. He got the knuckle first. His privilege.
Truth be told, he was probably an evil brute to have around, big like his father, violent in temperament, and, from an early age, slippery with the stair-head girls.
The breaking point had come when his devout mother Marta, back early from kissing the Pope’s backside, discovered her own first born bare-arse naked with the wife of her husband’s best friend, Sonny, who worked down the docks with an iron hook instead of a right hand.
Turned out the damned priest had keeled over, a heart attack, hence Marta back at the wrong time, hence her scream to see a decent neighbour and wife spread-eagled up against the cellar wall, hence her wastrel son hauling up his pants and rabbit-footing out of there never to look back.
Magnus sometimes wondered what had happened to the wife, Maria, Spanish blood she had running in her veins, hot to touch. Then he thought of that hook.
Spanish blood.
He was fifteen. After that, on his own.
Took on another identity. Clever with cards, words, took on another voice, buried the stink of a ferrety existence, buried the times when his father’s fist had smashed him to the floor, buried all his dark violence deep behind a smile, down forgotten deep to the entrails.
Buried the beast.
That was the past. Another life.
‘Put your hands in mine,’ the voice had said.
The figure extended both of hers, palms up, across the table and he covered the white fingers with his own great paws. He felt a jolt of sorts run up his arm and the shape opposite shuddered as if lightning had struck her down the very middle.
She whipped her hands back and regarded him through the veil. The silence brought out anger, as if she was intruding into a secret, like someone at a circus peering in a cage.
At the hidden violent animal.
‘I have paid you five dollars,’ he growled, as a bear might. ‘I demand to know my prospects.’
There was a sound behind the veil that might have been smothered laughter, then the gauze was lifted and he looked into a pair of violet eyes that pierced him to the bone.
‘You’re a dead man,’ she said, pale skin glowing in the dark. ‘You’ve run out of time. You have no prospects.’
He knew this to be the truth.
She was young, he could see that now. Might be no more than seventeen years. Or seven thousand.
That damned superstitious Irish blood; it infected him with wild belief.
He had switched away from the eyes. Down to the mouth. The lips were rosebud pink, sensuous. Forming words.
‘You have but a single chance,’ they said. ‘The only future left …is the one you have with me.’
That’s where it had started.
All this had flashed through his mind as recollection froze him in front of the spread deck.
Sophia reached forward and in a sudden movement, smashed all the cards together, foundation aces, kings, queens, treacherous one-eyed jacks, she destroyed their various citadels, then pulled his head round so that he was looking up at her.
‘The only future left,’ she said.
After such a declaration, her eyes crossed focus, a comical phenomenon that happened when she had been in the fierce grip of the other world or as a harbinger of sexual passion.
Either way, it always made him laugh. But then he delved deep into her body and the power was like nothing he had ever known.
And then he forgot the world.
6
Oh! What a snug little island,
A right little tight little island.
THOMAS DIBDEN, The Snug Little Island
Muriel Grierson lived in fear of her husband, Andrew. The fact that he was dead in no way lessened the anxiety she felt at his house being desecrated by the removal of its most valuable contents while she and the maid Ellen were out shopping for provisional salvation at Leith market.
Of course this expedition had been at Andrew’s posthumous behest, for he frowned upon money wasted over vegetables or meat – the cheapest cuts simmert lang, taste aye as guid as hutheron veal was his oft-repeated dictum.
Although it was nigh on two years since he had last glowered at her over such a repast bolstered religiously by the root vegetables in season – mair time buriet, mair flavour tae be found – she could not rid herself of the parsimonious habit of picking over the stalls that offered wrinkled provender.
So, when she returned with the laden Ellen trailing behind after such a frugal foray, her first response on opening the front door to find the furniture agley then going into the drawing room to discover drawers pulled out, contents scattered, was to look up in horror at the portrait of her husband, draped in black crêpe, that scowled accusingly down at her; her second action was to scream.
The sound still echoed in her ears, to a certain extent numbing her against the awful aftermath of finding her few pieces of jewellery gone; most galling of all a diamond brooch that Mamma had bequeathed her, being an especial sad loss, a mother-of-pearl music box that played ‘Flow Gently, Sweet Afton’ – a wedding present from Andrew’s employees at the funeral parlour – and a large amount of cash she had foolishly not lodged into her British Linen Company savings account when she had discovered it recently, hidden in a locked bottom drawer in Andrew’s desk in the study.
The desk had also been hastily ransacked, the papers strewn over.
All this in varying degrees of accuracy, detail, and emotional heat she reported to McLevy as he stood like a block of wood amid the carnage of the rifled drawing room.
The inspector noted it all down while covertly observing the way Muriel rested upon the manly arm of young Arthur. He, of course, was unaware that dependence has its own tendrils but in the inspector’s experience when a woman leant upon you, it was always a good idea not to lean back.
Tempting, but not a good idea.
The wifie had an oval-shaped face and was pretty enough in a china doll fashion but McLevy sensed a restlessness of sorts. As if she had spent her life striving for something just out of reach.
Not an uncommon condition for the female; women often dream of a better life in another universe.
He evidenced her age at near forty, though she dressed younger, and guessed there were no children.
Funeral parlours do not encourage procreation. Roach, his own lieutenant, had undertaker’s blood running in his veins, and he was also childless.
McLevy and his constable had snuffled round the house, outside and in, to discover a few things that the inspector was keeping to himself for the moment.
Mulholland was presently closeted with the now unburdened Ellen; the constable was good with maids and this one, short and dumpy, with a face that would never threaten Helen of Troy, was tailor-made for his Irish charm.
The inspector just frightened dumpy women.
‘Arthur has been a tower of strength,’ declared Muriel, ‘with my own poor husband dead and buried.’
McLevy, as soon as he’d seen the portrait, had recognised Andrew Grierson, a miserable bugger who aye looked as if sizing you up for an imminent wooden box.
‘I’m sure Arthur has been,’ he muttered, ‘and will be ever more, but whit was he doing here?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Muriel, who was beginning to form a dislike of this uncouth creature. Could he not see her distress, her demonstrable lack of jewellery?
Arthur, who had been conscious of her hand tightening on his arm, sending a palpable tremor through the limb, sensed insinuation of some kind in the inspector’s words and hastened to defend the fragile form beside him.
But he did so with some care, because Mister Doyle, despite headstrong ways and occasional rush to judgement, was no-one’s fool.
He had observed that McLevy unsettled people. The inspector had done it at the station to his colleagues, to Arthur himself, and was doing it again.
To the unsuspecting Muriel.
Doyle recognised the technique himself from the rugby scrum. It was all a matter of equipoise. Keep the opponent off balance, the feet slipping under, limbs splayed, then apply the pressure.
And hammer him down.
‘I happened here by chance,’ he offered. ‘I was delivering a note from my mother to Mistress Grierson.’
‘Mistress Doyle and I are old friends,’ added Muriel, ‘and were to meet this evening.’
‘The note was to confirm a time,’ Conan Doyle said firmly. ‘A little later than planned.’
‘But I may now have to postpone,’ said Muriel, ‘with this dreadful loss of property. This…catastrophe!’
McLevy had a fine ear for the tonal nuances of respectable Edinburgh and this seemed to be quite a song and dance from her, as if something was being concealed, but he nodded as if it all made sense.
‘On a cursory examination, there appears no sign of forced entry,’ he announced, shoving his notebook deep into his coat pocket. ‘All windows front and back apparently intact, no boiler hammer crashing through the panels of your door, no jemmying of the outside locks.’
While stating the obvious, he had one ear cocked to the other room out by the hall where Mulholland was no doubt beguiling the stolid wee Ellen, his hair neatly parted, blue eyes shining as if butter would not melt in his mouth.
But it would. Butter.
That hornbeam stick of his had cracked open many a criminal pate and had the man not looked up at the suicidal revolving feet of his once potential father-in-law?
The constable had been down many dark alleys and was as near to insidious and shifty as McLevy himself in the onerous pursuit of justice at all costs.
He also had an innocent face that invited female confidence, which he would have then no scruple in abusing.
But since McLevy had not heard any wild self-incriminating cries, he must assume that Ellen was holding also to her story.
A’body sticking to their guns.
‘Ye left the house after a bite tae eat at half past one o’clock in the afternoon,’ he stated pedantically. ‘And returned at three o’clock, that same day. An interval of one and a half hours. Doesnae leave long.’
Conan Doyle nodded a mature agreement.
‘I would concur with you, inspector,’ he stated, as if indeed they were investigating the crime as equals. ‘And it leads me to an inescapable conclusion.’
‘Whit might that be?’
‘Mistress Grierson assures me that the front door has a spring mechanism that locks automatically upon closing; I myself, on finding larceny, examined the outside back locks and windows before searching out authority.’
‘Authority,’ the inspector scratched his head as if puzzled by something. ‘That would be me?’
‘Exactly!’ beamed the young man, as if the slower student had caught the current. ‘I agree with you, sir, no sign of a break-in.’
‘Apparently.’
‘Definitely! What do we then conclude?’
‘Oh, you go first,’ was the shy response.
Doyle drew himself to his full height under Muriel’s admiring gaze.
‘Examining the known facts I can only therefore deduce someone has procured a copy of the house keys.’
For a moment a shadow crossed the woman’s face and then she let out something very close to a wail.
‘Oh, say not so, Arthur!’
The young man tried to soften the severity of his supposition.
‘No-one is blaming you, Muriel –’
‘I never let them out of my possession.’
‘Whit about Ellen?’ grunted the inspector. ‘Does she ha
ve a set?’
‘Ellen has been with me for nearly ten years, I would trust her with my life!’
But could ye trust her wi’ your jewellery? was the thought in McLevy’s distrustful mind.
‘Whit about your husband’s keys?’
‘They were buried with him. Alongside his measuring stick for the deceased and his wedding ring still upon the finger. It was stipulated so in his will.’
While McLevy mulled over that strange request, Doyle put his hand to his chin in a manner that suggested deep contemplation.
‘So, we have two possible sources, both of which would seem –’
‘Three!’ McLevy, who had endured quite enough of this highfalutin elucidation, marched out into the hall followed, after a second, by the others, Muriel letting go her vicelike grip on Arthur’s arm to squeeze her skirts through the door. The inspector walked rapidly up to the front entrance and pulled aside the draught excluder curtain to disclose a bunch of keys hanging from a nail.
‘Oh dear,’ said Muriel feebly. ‘I forgot. The spare set. They’ve been hanging there since the beginning of time. Andrew always kept them by the door in case of –’
‘Catastrophe?’
Conan Doyle paid no heed to the sardonic tone in the remark.
‘Of course. Now the solution is obvious!’ he cried.
‘Is it?’
Nothing in McLevy’s experience was ever obvious. All things had, lurking within them, a subtle subversion.
‘Remove the keys,’ said the young man eagerly. ‘Press them into soft wax, imprint both sides, replace, then make a metal copy from the imprint and no-one is any the wiser.’
The inspector put on what Mulholland would have recognised as his daftie face where he let his jaw drop and eyes widen; it served him well in that the more folk felt obliged to elaborate, the more they gave away.
He did not necessarily suspect the fellow before him of malfeasance but somebody somewhere had something up the sleeve, up their jooks, a secret thought, a notion withheld.
‘Who would do all that?’ he asked.
‘Anyone who knew of the location.’
‘And who might that be?’