Trick of the Light im-3

by David Ashton

Or was changing.

  ‘Ye made a right show of yourself wi’ Ballantyne,’ McLevy said grumpily

  ‘I was only trying to help,’ came the huffy response.

  ‘Ye were sookin’ up tae the lieutenant. The boy is afflictit, an easy mark.’

  Mulholland flushed in anger and shame.

  He bit his lip to restrain a riposte of how the affliction did not stop the inspector tearing lumps out of Ballantyne if he banjaxed a case procedure.

  At that moment a call turned them both round and Conan Doyle came striding up towards them, the picture of health and certainty.

  ‘Inspector McLevy!’ he cried breezily, as if the two had just met by chance. ‘I wonder if I might beg a favour?’

  McLevy made no response. Favours were not his speciality.

  ‘I dabble a touch in the writing of stories. Adventures. Tales of mystery. Haunted houses.’

  Doyle roared with laughter, as if recognising the ludicrousness of a hale and hearty fellow like himself having truck with such pastime.

  ‘But I have great interest in detection. In-vestigation. And I wonder if I might accompany you at such.’

  ‘I don’t detect ghosts,’ said McLevy.

  ‘You can’t get the restrainers on them,’ Mulholland added somewhat stiffly.

  ‘Of course not.’

  Having agreed this, Doyle’s face took on a serious mien and he spoke quietly, soberly, a different man entirely.

  ‘But does not the function of policeman and doctor bear similarity? We analyse, we observe symptoms, eruptions on the body and mind, you of guilt, me of malady? Identify the offender, cure the contagion. Protect the innocent.’

  McLevy scratched his nose. It had begun to itch.

  ‘Crime,’ he remarked tersely, ‘is certainly contagious.’

  ‘Yet we all desire to catch it, do we not?’

  ‘Indeed we do.’

  A glint of humour came into McLevy’s face. There was a shrewdness to this young man that belied his bluff manner.

  From Doyle’s point of view, he was intrigued by a similar incongruity of overt behaviour and subtle thought.

  ‘I would consider it a great honour…’ Doyle’s voice lowered in tone, ‘if I might attend your…casebook of enquiry?’

  The inspector’s lips quirked at such portentous description as regards some of his more mundane ‘enquiries’, for instance, the time he and Mulholland had trawled the back-yards of Leith to find half a dozen abducted hens, solving the mystery through the deformity of one which, though plucked of all its feathers, still lacked the one eye and one leg it had lost during a life of adversity.

  However, he had also witnessed bodies hacked to pieces, and on one particular occasion a face blown so far apart that it looked like a spilt bowl of stewed rhubarb.

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ said he. ‘But it cannot be these present shenanigans; you have too personal a connection and it’s no’ enough challenge.’

  ‘You will solve this case?’

  ‘Never all of such. There’s aye a loose thread. It’s only in books everything is remedied.’

  McLevy looked up at the sky, which was unremittingly overcast, and pursed his lips.

  ‘I’ll try tae find ye a ghost or two wi’ murder thrown in.’

  ‘Good man!’ exclaimed Doyle, as if all were done and dusted and he had not perceived the sardonic tone. ‘I shall await your pleasure, sir.’

  With that he nodded to the silent Mulholland and then strode on up the street, scattering a few pedestrians in his wake like the liner Oceanic.

  ‘Did ye no’ wait for your cup of tea?’ McLevy called after.

  ‘I have to get back to mother,’ came the unabashed reply. ‘Family comes first!’

  McLevy watched the young man until he turned the corner and disappeared.

  The inspector became aware of his constable’s critical scrutiny and wondered what expression had been on his face.

  Whatever shape taken, it was vanished now.

  ‘All right,’ he said as if all so far had been an everyday occurrence. ‘You take the even, I’ll take the odd.

  8

  An’ when Massa rode in the arternoon,

  I’d follow wid a hickory broom;

  De poney being berry shy,

  When bitten by de blue-tailed fly.

  TRADITIONAL, ‘The Blue-tailed Fly’

  Glasgow, 1864.

  My Dearest Melissa,

  I have little idea if this letter will ever reach you and I can offer no kind of address to which you may reply should that eventuality occur.

  I have been mightily sick crossing the Atlantic Ocean to reach this godforsaken place. I call it so because I am staying in lodgings down by the docks and what I see from my window does not induce the notion that any kind of decent God-fearing people exist in these parts.

  Rather I watch the Devil in all his many guises and humanity so wretched and base as near defies description.

  Possibly I am seeing all this through jaundiced eyes. I disembarked but two nights ago, was smuggled in like a plague carrier and have been kept out of sight ever since.

  The only time I ventured forth was last evening in the darkness when the streets were awash with a tide of men and women spilled out from the taverns. The Scotch are in the main a small race and damned ugly.

  How did I come to this pass?

  The night I spent in your sweet arms still lingers with me but directly after came horror one hundredfold.

  Gettysburg.

  The battle lost.

  After the defeat, it was a nightmare journey, the wounded groaning their lives away, dragged on wagons, calling for a mercy we could not grant them.

  We were attacked on all sides by the Bluebellies, a heavy rain beat down on us as if the Almighty himself was on the Union side. The screams and shrieks of the dying haunt my sleep and burn images indelibly in my mind to this day.

  There is little glory in war that I can see.

  We took refuge in the town of Williamsport and had not Jeb Stuart and Fitzhugh Lee arrived in time with their troops, it would have been all up with us. The Confederate Army would have been no more.

  General Robert E. Lee would have broken his sword.

  But they came. And so the war continues.

  We made it through to Virginia although the Potomac River was swollen to flood by the rain and there…there I am afraid…I forswore my reason. Fell into a fever.

  How long I cannot say. Time lost meaning.

  When I recovered, I was told that I might serve my country in another capacity. I was then taken to a rendezvous with Secretary Mallory, a heavy-set man with a thin rim of beard and shrewd in the eyes.

  I was given orders, papers I must deliver in person.

  I will seal this letter now, the messenger is due to leave by the Evelyn; Curious how many ships bear names of the gentler sex. I pray he will make it through to Galveston and see this delivered.

  As for me, I wait for further orders. I am still a soldier though at present I discharge the duties of a secret Confederate agent.

  Bonded to stealth.

  I miss your sweet face.

  But love seems to have little purchase in this world.

  Let us hope the South wins, and that we may all find peace.

  Your husband,

  Jonathen

  9

  Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!

  Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back:

  Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind

  For which thou whip’st her.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  King Lear

  The chattering magpies of the Just Land had descended on Leith market like tidings of such birds.

  In their gay bonnets, bright colours and fashionable outdoor coats, parasols twirling, daintily avoiding the muck below lest it cling to their shiny black halfway-laced boots, they moved from one glittering bauble to the next with little cries of joy and excitement, d
isplaying such innocence that the onlooker would have been hard-pressed to guess their chosen profession.

  Perhaps a boldness in the gaze, a candid assessment of the males before them, either passing respectable or the cocksure peddler at his stall, that weighed such men in the balance and found the exact avoirdupois and possible cost of their carnal inclinations. Perhaps that might have tipped the wink.

  The peddlers looked them straight in the eye; the passing respectable if they had previous acquaintance and a wife to hand craved invisibility, as if they were on the other side of a thick veil.

  Or if no previous acquaintance enjoined, they clenched buttocks in distaste as golden opinion does when confronted by noxious depravity.

  It is difficult to walk in such a state and the motion often resembles a bad case of haemorrhoids; yet virtue surely thus contained must be its own reward.

  A distance aside from the main party, Francine and the Countess’s Simone rattled away to each other in quick-fire French, much to the chagrin of Lily Baxter who was accustomed to being Francine’s light of love. Of course she could not give utterance to her annoyance, being a deaf mute, but her face, which was by nature sunny, was set in sulky lines. Beneath curly tousled hair, the childlike open countenance bore witness to the unhappy thoughts that ran in her mind.

  Lily and Francine had been lovers and followed their craft for nigh on two years. They had stretched, scourged, thistled, and inflicted requisite degrees of pain upon the supplicatory clients of the Just Land, sending them home milked dry of deviation to their wives who would have, in the words of Hannah Semple, died wi’ their leg up, had they known of their husbands’ compulsive drive for subjugation. Francine’s speciality.

  The Frenchwoman ran the show: severe, leather-clad in the manner of an Egyptian princess, her chalk-white beautiful face gazing with dispassion at the hopeful mounds of flesh spread-eagled below; like a cartographer plotting out proposed lines of mortification.

  Lily darted here and there around the Berkley Horse, a piece of equipment that had set Jean Brash back a pretty penny but was worth its considerable weight in gold, giving access – fore, aft, over and under – to the quivering recipient.

  At the altar of agony, in the cellar of the Just Land, Lily was the acolyte, bearing the instruments of salvation with an innocent fervour, only the occasional grin letting show the mischief in her mental process.

  Now and again she popped her head up above the straps and buckles of the horse like a jockey who had just won the race. A wicked flash to her lover, then out of sight.

  Two of a kind.

  But that had all changed since the arrival of Simone.

  Both women were from Paris, but while Francine was of an educated background, a sophisticate whose artistic bent for painting had been sidetracked into stripes of a different kind, the other was a guttersnipe whose assumed airs and graces fooled most, but not Francine who knew the real thing, or Lily who could smell the fake a mile away.

  However it amused the Frenchwoman as she watched Simone change shape like a chameleon to attract and seduce.

  Francine was attracted for certain but the other verb had yet to come into play.

  Now that Francine spoke constantly in her native tongue her voice had dropped in tone, the French vowels and gutturals sliding into ancestral cadence, the language a warm, sensual flowing stream, no longer shot through with Anglo-Saxon ambiguity, and Lily, who could not hear all this in any case, was left out in the cold.

  A touch on the elbow brought her round. It was the other girl from the Countess, Jessie Nairn. She was also from the streets – Paisley, the west of Scotland – and the harshness of her life showed in the eyes. Whatever good deeds done or witnessed were lost in the mists of time.

  Jessie spoke slowly, forming the words with her lips; she had already learned how to communicate with Lily.

  ‘Have ye lost your big rub-a-dub then?’ she asked.

  Lily’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘I’d help ye out,’ said Jessie. ‘But I like the hairy men. Bigger the better.’

  She roared in most unladylike laughter while her eyes appraised Lily with cool calculation.

  The mute turned her head away and looked over to where Francine was standing with Simone, the tall woman wearing a dark mannish jacket that accentuated the slim lines of her figure. She jutted out one hip and Simone laughed at some remark. Very Gallic. Very gamine. Very droll.

  I hope she burns in hell, thought Lily, the jealousy rising in her throat as a fear of loss, a fear of the love that made her tremble in the moist night never being hers again, never filling her eyes with tears, never catching her breath away, never…

  This time the touch on her elbow was more like a sharp punch.

  ‘Ye must be desperate, ‘Jessie asserted. ‘The woman’s nothing but skin and bones.’

  The image of Francine as a skeleton in leather caught Lily’s fancy and her eyes lit up in sudden humour. She punched Jessie back in the muscle of the arm and stuck up her small fists in the parody of a prize-fighter.

  ‘C’mon,’ said the Paisley girl. ‘We’ll buy you a scarlet ribbon.’

  The market was still crowded, though some of the barrows were being wheeled away. While Big Annie Drummond, who was supposed to be keeping an eye on the assorted magpies as senior heaviest member, was distracted by a cream cake stall and two of the barrows had crashed wheels with vituperative results, a small portly man stepped out from one of the crooked wynds that fed into the square.

  Simone had found a pretty embroidered handkerchief and was holding it up to the light admiringly while Francine impaled the hawker with a glare as he tried to charge her an extortionate price for a miniature wooden figurine.

  God knows how it had ended up in Leith but it was of African origin with a rounded belly and tapered breasts, the shape of which reminded her of Lily’s.

  Her recollection jolted, Francine looked up to see her lover staring at her from across the square while Jessie rummaged amongst a tangle of cheap ribbon.

  The Frenchwoman smiled but Lily’s face did not move a muscle and while all were thus engaged, Alfred Binnie, the portly man, uncorked a small phial of liquid and, as he passed behind Simone, poured it delicately high on her back.

  For a moment it was as if time suspended, everyone frozen in the scene except Binnie who passed through like something in a sleight of hand; then came the acrid smell of burnt clothing as the powerful acid found its way through the thin outdoor coat, inwards into the crinoline folds of the dress, burrowing further like an incendiary worm to the epidermal layers. And there it found a place to feast.

  A piercing scream from Simone rent the air and all except Lily stopped in their tracks to look around for the source of such howled disturbance.

  From the deaf mute’s point of view she watched her rival’s mouth open and close in silent agony as her body shuddered in pain; then Francine ripped off the back of the coat with her powerful hands and further ripped the layers of respectable apparel off the body like an impatient lover until white skin was revealed.

  A livid mark ran down parallel with the backbone and the revealed naked flesh in a crowded market place might have put Francine in mind of some morality depiction from the middle ages, had she not been otherwise occupied.

  One of the market folk, an old man who sold posies and blooms, cut, lifted and stolen from reputable Leith flower-beds by his own grandchildren, grabbed a cheap linen tablecloth from an indignant fellow hawker, dunked it into a bucket of water and threw the dripping material to Francine who caught it like a matador and pressed it up against the smouldering skin.

  Simone’s body arched and she fell limply backwards so that her head rested upon Francine’s shoulder.

  The rest of the magpies, with Big Annie in the vanguard and showing a remarkable turn of pace for one of her tonnage, hurtled towards the pair, feet churning up the mud, their faces contorted with concern.

  Again from Lily’s vantage, it was like a shadow pl
ay for children where the grotesque shapes collide and spin around each other but no harm is done.

  The only other person who had not moved in all of this was Jessie Nairn, who stood beside Lily with a thin piece of scarlet ribbon dangling from her fingers.

  She was calculating her chances of survival. One way or the other.

  10

  Many a carcase they left to be carrion,

  Many a livid one, many a sallow-skin –

  Left for the white-tail’d eagle to tear it, and

  Left for the horny-nibbed raven to rend it.

  ALFRED,

  LORD TENNYSON, Battle of Brunanburh

  Jean Brash in a fury was a fearsome proposition. Her green eyes were ablaze with wrathful animosity as she leaned over the balustrade and looked down at the policeman below who, from her vantage, was an unwelcome foreshortened intruder.

  ‘What the hell do you want, McLevy?’ she almost spat, having emerged from an upstairs bedroom.

  Big Annie Drummond, who had puffed her way up the stairs to deliver the news of the inspector’s arrival, now made better weather of the descent while the man himself gazed up at her mistress with a bland expression of general goodwill.

  ‘I hear one of your girls had a wee contretemps,’ he remarked, standing in the ornate hall festooned with décor arabesque and fancy mirrors designed to flatter the clients into thinking they might be Pashas rampant and incarnate should they glance at themselves before ducking into the doorways of sin.

  McLevy furnished an odd reflection in his low-brimmed bowler and it is to the mirrors’ credit that they withstood the burden of this adverse radiation without cracking into lines of distressed complaint.

  ‘What’s it to do with you?’ came her terse response.

  Big Annie before she disappeared into the main salon shot the inspector a look as if to warn, hold onto your hat.

  ‘It would appear as if,’ he offered mildly, ‘there may have been some criminal intent involved.’