Trick of the Light im-3

by David Ashton

  ‘Someone who was often in the house.’

  ‘Such as who?’

  This stopped the train of deduction in its tracks because the one person present who might qualify for that possibility was Doyle himself. However Muriel, who had been, for her, strangely silent since the revelation of the twitched curtain, suddenly launched forth like someone with a story to tell.

  ‘Of course, when Andrew died the house was invaded by tradespeople; the reception of the coffin, the mourners, the relatives, it all needed to be catered for.’

  ‘Aye. Nothing like a deid body tae provoke appetite.’

  Muriel nodded vigorous agreement.

  ‘Ellen and I were rushed off our feet; I had to employ extra staff, provide food, whisky – the amount of whisky consumed at a funeral is nothing short of scandalous – and I distraught with grief. That would surely be the time and opportunity.’

  Conan Doyle had moved out of the limelight and now watched from the side. Although he had a highly developed sense of chivalry towards the frail vessel of womanhood, he was also trained to observe.

  And it struck him with some force that the inspector was playing Muriel like a hooked fish.

  Had he, Conan Doyle, man of medicine, acute of sensibility, a student of the great Joseph Bell who taught him to be on constant alert against the assumptions of a lazy mind, to take the contraposition to implication and only deduce from known facts – had he also been played like a fish? For a moment he caught a glimpse of himself in a long mirror that hung by the side of the coat stand in the hall, and with his protruding eyes and droopy moustache, he might well have been mistaken for a large cod.

  With an effort he shook off this unflattering comparison to hear the inspector cast another query.

  ‘But your husband died two years ago. Why wait until now to utilise this presumed copy. What has changed?’

  McLevy hauled his notebook out and licked his lips, turning pages, peering down as if to refresh his memory.

  ‘Ye found a sum of money in his desk. Notes of the realm. Near a hundred pounds, ye said?’

  A nod in answer.

  Silence is golden.

  ‘Approximately two weeks ago, ye said?’

  Another nod.

  ‘A deal of money. Ye should have banked it. Bankers aye like to see money coming in at the door.’

  ‘I didn’t like to…handle such.’

  ‘Was it tainted?’

  ‘It was – Andrew’s.’

  ‘Well, it’s gone now. A fierce amount. What use would he have had for it?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  The garrulous Muriel had suddenly clammed up like a clabbydhu.

  A door further up the hall opened quietly and Mulholland slipped out. McLevy had positioned himself so as to have the vantage, looking out past the other two down the corridor.

  The constable shook his head to signal that Ellen had tucked in her elbows and given away nothing.

  Conan Doyle cleared his throat. His features had altered from cod-like, more towards that of a Chinese Mandarin.

  ‘Is it your contention, inspector,’ he announced gravely, ‘that there is a connection between the discovery of the cache of money and the larceny?’

  ‘Possible. Possible. All things are possible.’

  This cryptic response galvanised the policeman into sudden action as if what he had just said had unleashed a font of energy in his own being.

  ‘Who else did ye tell about this treasure trove, eh?’ he demanded fiercely.

  ‘Only Ellen, of course,’ replied the startled Muriel, ‘And –’

  ‘Arthur, of course,’ said McLevy. ‘Naebody else?’

  A moment, then she shook her head.

  A moment. But McLevy registered such slices of time.

  He suddenly smacked his hands together, which sounded like a gunshot in the stillness.

  ‘You’d be surprised the number of folk who leave their spare keys on a nail by the door and anyone who knows the working of a household bereft o’ common sense would, as I did, check their whereabouts.

  ‘Now!’

  He almost jumped up into the air, and Mulholland, who had witnessed this explosion of energy before, often with violent consequences, hoped that nothing untoward was about to happen to Big Arthur and wee Muriel.

  ‘I examined the keys for traces of wax but found none,’ McLevy continued. ‘That means damn all. They could have been cleaned, and it is my contention they played a part in all this but not in the way, Mister Doyle, that you would have me believe.’

  ‘I would not have you believe anything, inspector,’ replied Conan Doyle stiffly. ‘I merely suggested a possible mode of deduction.’

  ‘Deduction?’ McLevy gave another little jump. ‘Deduction depends on experience, sir. And experience is hard-earnt!’

  Having delivered that pithy aphorism, he strode past, heading towards the rear outside quarters of the house; as they trailed after him, the others were taken aback to see the bold Mulholland looming in the narrow space as if he had materialised out of nowhere.

  The constable nodded politely but did not follow. He moved instead towards a small window at the hinder part of the premises and took up his station there as a silent jerk of the head from a passing McLevy had so instructed.

  Left alone for a moment, the constable felt a strange lightness enter his being and whipped out his hornbeam stick to brandish it in the air in the manner of The Count of Monte Cristo. He thrust it forward into an imaginary opponent’s guts, a man who bore a marked resemblance to his own inspector, and was about to eviscerate a dead ringer for Lieutenant Roach when a dry cough brought him round to face the maid Ellen.

  She must have emerged behind him as silently as he had accomplished earlier and regarded him with wary eyes.

  ‘I’ll away and make some tea,’ she announced.

  7

  Swerve to the left, son Roger, he said,

  When you catch his eyes through the helmet-slit,

  Swerve to the left, then out at his head,

  And the Lord God give you joy of it.

  WILLIAM MORRIS, ‘The Judgement of God’

  The inspector was out in the garden looking at the back wall of the house by the time Doyle and Muriel caught up with him and he gestured all around as if to say, whit do you make of this?

  Truth to tell the place was not a verdant proposition; a despondent lawn of sorts, some wilting blooms that had shot their autumnal bolt and various gorse bushes that no doubt longed for a wild highland hillside.

  Perhaps this emaciated Eden might have served as metaphor to the state of joyless marital rectitude within, as the vibrant growth of Jean Brash’s fauna and flora at the Just Land testified to the luxuriant and fertile nature of sin, but the inspector’s attention was fixed upon an area of earth just below a small high window.

  The large leaves of some yellowed ornamental brassica of sorts obscured the patch but when McLevy knelt to separate the leaves, the part print of a shoe was revealed.

  ‘Whit d’ye make of that?’ he asked of Doyle.

  ‘It is very small.’

  ‘Uhuh? A dwarf maybe?’

  This was unfair to a certain extent, since McLevy and Mulholland had already more or less worked out the modus operandi of the break-in before the inspector had decided to wreak further havoc in the despoiled household.

  A normal tactic for McLevy, who considered that in burglarious activity the crime from outside usually had its counterpart within.

  Yet why he chose to involve Conan Doyle in the process was a mystery, except that there was something about the young man; his mixture of bumptiousness and sensitivity, arrogant belief in his own acuity allied to a vulnerable awkwardness that irritated and intrigued McLevy at one and the same moment.

  Who else could he possibly know that might fit such a description?

  Having displayed the dwarfish concavity, the inspector then indicated a part of the wall below the small window.

  Doyl
e peered keenly at the house bricks and noticed some faint scrapes on the stone. This he reported to his mentor, who then asked for a conclusion.

  ‘An animal of sorts?’ Doyle responded somewhat weakly.

  ‘I’ll show ye a trick,’ said McLevy. ‘Mulholland!’

  In answer to this bellow, the small window high above suddenly flew open with a wrenching shove and Mulholland’s long nose poked out, followed by the rest of his face.

  ‘It is a simple matter,’ McLevy declared to the bemused Muriel and the young deductor. ‘If you examine the wood of the window frame you will see it bears the mark of a thin forcing tool, low down. I would imagine it has aye been hard to shove open and pull shut, swollen wi’ weather nae doubt.’

  ‘Yes,’ offered Muriel, anxious to make a contribution. ‘It has never functioned to proper office, I was forever saying to Andrew –’

  ‘Aye, well, Andrew is no longer extant,’ said McLevy callously. ‘I take it to have been jammed shut but not fastened secure. Neither flesh nor fowl.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Muriel swayed slightly but Arthur did not offer the steadying arm she desired. He was on the case.

  McLevy now spoke quietly, almost disinterested.

  ‘Your movements are watched. There is a side lane runs along where ye leave your bins out for the scaffie men and as soon as you depart, two of the thieves scale the wall into your garden. Quick tae the back part of the house, one on the other’s shoulders, lever open the window and then –’

  ‘But the size of the aperture!’ Doyle could not forbear interrupting.

  ‘No’ for the likes of you and me Mister Doyle.’

  ‘A dwarf?’

  ‘A snakesman,’ said McLevy.

  Conan Doyle’s mind entertained the sudden picture of a creature, half man, half reptile, slithering up the wall.

  ‘A small boy,’ Mulholland said loftily, ‘on the back of an accomplice, wriggles in at the window.’

  McLevy resumed the tale.

  ‘To the front door, keys from the nail, unlocks. The accomplice, dressed perhaps as an honest tradesman, has knocked upon the front door, it is opened as if by the maid, he steps inside. To any onlooker a normal procedure. The criminals make a heavy lift, wedge the high window back shut, keys replaced on the nail, out the door, close it fast, spring lock jumps into place. All is – as was.’

  Mulholland watched from the aforementioned window as his inspector spread his arms like a man about to perform an illusion.

  ‘Hey presto: the mystery of the locked room!’

  After a short squeezed bark of laughter, McLevy dropped his arms to scrutinise the man and woman before him.

  ‘All this jiggery-pokery is not unusual for the criminal fraternity; they are a devious crew, indeed it has aye struck me that if they applied such intelligence to lawful pursuits they would rule the Empire – no that is not unusual – but it leaves some questions hangin’ in the breeze.’

  He ignored Conan Doyle and fixed his gaze upon Muriel.

  ‘Assuming, as I think it just to do so, that the money found was the felonious motive, how did the criminals know this? How did they know about the jammed window? How did they know the location of the keys?’

  The mistress of the house made no reply; her fingers which, like her mind, had not been still this whole time, curled into her palms to make two small fists.

  At this moment, Ellen the maid, a stoical wee soul, born and bred in the locality, came wandering out the back door from the kitchen, her demeanour showing no trace that she had witnessed a police constable attempt to skewer two of his superiors where they stood.

  ‘I’ve made a pot o’ tea, mistress,’ she announced. ‘Can I tidy the drawing room and lay out the cups and saucers?’

  Muriel looked at McLevy, who nodded permission; he had made severe examination and gleaned all there was to hand.

  ‘I shall now make some enquiries amongst your neighbours as regards tradesmen at your entrance,’ he announced to Muriel. ‘But respectable folk are remarkably unobservant and I’m not hopeful.’

  ‘I’ll wedge the window tight,’ Mulholland said helpfully. ‘But you need to get a decent joiner in and a strong catch new-fixed.’

  So saying, he popped back out of sight like a jack-in-the box and the window was duly pulled shut.

  There was another moment’s silence. McLevy stood completely immobile, as a stone statue.

  A bird sang. Short, staccato notes, like a warning.

  ‘Would ye no’ have a wee cup of tea, inspector?’ asked Ellen out of the blue. She might indeed be dumpy but showed no sign of fear.

  He looked into her eyes. They reminded him of his Aunt Jean’s, brown, steadfast under scrutiny, and it was to his everlasting shame that he might suspect this honest maid of having a lover on the sly and tipping the transgressor off about a bottom-drawer bonanza.

  He could hear his aunt’s voice.

  Jamie McLevy, is there nothing in this wide warld that ye don’t hold in deep misdoubt?

  Muriel and Conan Doyle were somewhat taken aback to see a warm smile light up the inspector’s face as he inclined his head respectfully towards Ellen’s chunky form.

  ‘No thank you, miss,’ he said. ‘I have business on hand. A policeman aye has business on hand.’

  She smiled in return and for a moment he was reminded of someone from childhood, then he turned towards the others and pointed down to the earth below the window.

  ‘Don’t touch the soil. I shall send a man round to make a cast of the footmark, though to my eyes it is a common shoe, nondescript amangst its fellows.’

  He had not removed his low-brimmed bowler during all this time but now tapped twice as if to wedge it on his head before stepping up close to Muriel.

  ‘Mistress Grierson,’ he began and for a moment her heart thudded against the tight confining corsetry.

  Her thoughts ran wild. What if he suddenly said, I arrest you for the murder of your husband Andrew that you have poisoned tae death wi’ rancid meat and buriet vegetables, and I suspect you also of fondling the flesh masculine – what if he knew her guilty secret?

  But he said nothing of the sort, though his face was solemn, grey eyes piercing, seeking a trace of culpability in her own.

  ‘Once more I am brought back tae the question; who knew of the discovery in the desk, the located spare keys, the jammed window? Somebody did. And used that knowledge.’

  Her chin came up slightly.

  ‘In that I cannot help you, inspector. I have lost a great deal that is precious to me. I believe it is your task to find it.’

  Once more she grasped onto Arthur’s arm. This time in a firm taking.

  ‘And I have disclosed nothing to a living soul!’

  McLevy’s face was impassive at this vigorous denial.

  ‘I shall make enquiries in the usual quarters for your purloined valuables, but you can kiss the money goodbye.’

  A brusque nod and he was out of sight.

  The bird sang once more. A sharp, piercing note.

  Muriel avoided Ellen’s eyes.

  ‘I’ll awa’ an’ lay out the tea then,’ said Ellen, but at the doorway she suddenly stopped.

  ‘My mother knew him,’ she remarked.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Muriel asked.

  ‘McLevy. The thieftaker.’

  ‘Is he noteworthy?’ Doyle said with sudden interest.

  ‘Aye. In Leith especial. A’body kens him. And fears as well. High and low. No mercy.’

  For a moment Ellen’s eyes narrowed as if she had some personal experience of such to relate but then she resumed her theme.

  ‘Anyhow, my mother knew him. The inspector. Her family lived in the same cobbly square as him and his auntie. When he was a wee thing.’

  ‘What was he like?’ Conan Doyle enquired eagerly.

  ‘Hammered,’ was the succinct response. ‘The big boys battered hell out of him every day.’

  ‘Why?’ he pursued.

 
; ‘Jist devilment, I suppose. Then one day it stopped.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘Nobody knew. But my mother was playing that time. She saw the leader o’ the gang. A big shamble of a laddie. On his hands and knees, crawling, bleeding like a pig. Spewing like his bones were broken. Jamie McLevy was half his size. Watching on. Tackety boots. His auntie must have bought them. Iron at the toe. Brand new upon his feet.’

  These were the most consecutive sentences Muriel had ever heard the maid utter in her life.

  ‘I think I can draw an inference there,’ murmured Doyle.

  ‘My mother said when she looked intae his eyes it was like a wolf on the trail. A wild beastie.’

  Ellen passed on into the house.

  Muriel wondered if it was worth her while to become tremulous but Arthur had a faraway look in his eye.

  Meanwhile outside, McLevy and Mulholland walked slowly in silence to put a little distance between them and the persecuted front door of 42 Bonnington Road.

  ‘What do you think to all this?’ asked the constable.

  ‘That wifie is hiding something,’ replied the inspector, scowling at the innocent pavement. ‘And I will find it out.’

  ‘Something between her and Big Arthur?’

  ‘I doubt it. On his side certainly not.’

  Then they stopped and looked at the houses surrounding, each with the shut-faced prim expression of a spinster at a wedding.

  ‘I don’t fancy our chances,’ said the constable.

  ‘Neither do I,’ grunted McLevy. ‘But it has tae be done. You take even this side, I’ll take the odd opposite.’

  And yet neither of them moved.

  Since Conan Doyle had approached them at the station, this was the first moment of a guarded privacy they normally enjoyed day in day out.

  On the saunter.

  Each with his thoughts but an understanding forged by bitter experience of the dark side of humanity. Mulholland still immune with a young man’s vitality, McLevy only too aware that everything gathered during the years was no protection against his own transitory nature.

  As is the habit of men they spoke about such things rarely if at all, but something had changed.