“Come on, now,” he said, walking towards the entrance and dragging the woman along with him. “The police need to ask you a few questions.”
“Am I under arrest?” the woman asked.
“No,” Billings replied. “You’re coming along with me voluntarily to help us with an investigation.”
“No, I ain’t!” The woman dug her heels in and tried breaking away from the detective’s grasp, but Billings would not let go.
“Yes, you are!” and he continued pulling her towards the doorway until they were both out of the tavern.
“The name is Anne. Anne Black. But nowadays people call me Knuckles Nancy.”
Nancy was sitting at the table in the interview room. Thwaite was sitting opposite her, taking notes. Billings and Flynt were standing behind him, leaning against the wall, listening in.
“Why do they call you that?” Thwaite asked.
“Because of this.” She took her right hand out of her coat pocket and slammed it on the table. Four fingers had been cut off at the knuckles. Only her thumb remained.
“What happened to you?” Thwaite asked.
“He cut’em off, didn’t he?”
“Who did?”
“Me pa.”
“Why?”
“Got caught stealing money from his coat pocket.”
“Why did you try to steal his money?”
“Why do you think! Because I didn’t have any of me own. He wouldn’t have cared if it’d been somebody else’s pockets, but nobody steals from Dark Joe Black. That’s what they called him. Me pa. Dark Joe Black, the scourge of Blackness. He’s dead and buried now, thank God. Was found drowned a couple of years ago in the Firth of Forth.”
“Let’s get back to business, shall we?” Thwaite shook his head at all the irrelevant horror stories he’d just heard. “Do you know why you were asked to come over and speak to us?”
“I weren’t asked!” Nancy replied. “I were dragged!”
“We are investigating the murder of a wee lass. The daughter of a celebrated American actress. Perhaps you’ve heard of the case?”
“Aye. I have.”
“The girl was wearing a gentleman’s frock coat when she disappeared. She was not wearing it when she was found dead twenty minutes later.”
“That’s ’cause I took it.”
Thwaite was taken aback by the sudden confession and paused before speaking. “You admit to stealing the coat?”
“It weren’t stealing. The girl was already dead when I found her. It’s not a crime to steal from the dead, is it?”
“Actually, it is.”
“Well, I didn’t know that.” She reached for the pocket of her coat and retrieved a pawn ticket. “There you go,” she said, throwing the ticket at Thwaite. “Have your blooming coat back! Now, can I go?”
She was about to rise from her seat when Thwaite held his hand up to stop her. “Not quite yet,” he told her.
Nancy sat back down again.
“Do you know who killed the girl?”
“No.”
“Did you see anyone running away from the crime scene?”
“No.”
“We won’t charge you if you tell the truth.”
The woman hesitated. “All right, then. I did see someone. A man.”
“What kind of man?”
“Just a man. He were walking away from Grindlay Street Court.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. I only saw him from the back. He were young, I think. In his twenties. But he had a bald patch on his head.”
“What was he wearing?”
“A grey coat. Black gloves. No hat.”
“How tall was he?”
“My height.”
“Is there anything else you can tell us about him?”
“He were drunk, I think. Kept swaying as he walked. And he kept muttering to himself.”
“What was he saying?”
“I couldn’t hear well. He kept mentioning the girl’s name.”
“Kitty?”
“No. Moira.”
“The girl’s name was Kitty.”
“Well, it’s the wrong girl, then, ’cause I definitely heard him say Moira.”
As soon as the interview finished and Knuckles Nancy left the room, Flynt rushed to the table and grabbed Thwaite’s shoulders.
“That’s the name the medium mentioned!” he said, shaking the Scottish inspector about. “That’s the exact same name!”
Thwaite frowned and shook Flynt’s hands off his shoulders. “What are you talking about?”
“Bovlatska!” Flynt replied with the same tone of excitement. “At the hotel. During the seance. When she spoke to Kitty. She said she had been accosted by a man who kept calling her Moira.”
Thwaite and Billings thought about this. They had both been dismissive about the seance, but this did seem like an extraordinary coincidence.
“I told you she was the real deal!”
Thwaite turned to look at Billings and frowned. “Well, you’ve really gone and thrown a fecking spanner in the works now, haven’t you?”
Billings looked down at the ground and said nothing.
“What fecking right have you to go about arresting people in my city!”
“I didn’t arrest her,” Billings said, without lifting his head. “She came of her own free will.”
“Yeah, I bet she fecking did! We had the whole case sorted,” Thwaite turned his attention to Flynt, “and now this wee little upstart of yours has gone and fecked it all up!”
“I don’t see why this changes anything,” Flynt answered. “The man she saw could still have been Bunny McVey.”
Thwaite shook his head. “She said the man was the same height as she. McVey was shorter. Nor did he have a bald patch on his head.”
“She only saw him briefly,” Flynt answered. “And in the dark. I’m not sure we can trust this woman’s testimony.”
“No, we can’t,” Thwaite agreed.
“She came across as entirely unreliable.”
“Aye, she did.”
“She probably made the whole thing up in order not to be charged with stealing.”
“Aye.”
“So why don’t we ignore her testimony altogether and go back to the original suspect. After all, we have his confession.”
Thwaite shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it weren’t him.”
“But he confessed.”
“I made him confess.”
“You don’t want to go back to square one, do you?”
“No, I don’t. But I’m gonna have to.”
“Why?”
“Because that wee little upstart of yours has gone and given me a conscience!” He turned his face back towards Billings, who was still leaning against the wall, staring down at the ground. “Is he always this righteous and smug?” he asked Flynt.
Flynt looked towards Billings and narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he said, the disdain clearly audible in his voice. “He is.”
10. Excerpt from Gordon Campbell’s Diary
Friday, 19th February, 1892
If it were my mother writing this diary, she would tell you that tragedy had struck. She would tell you that the week had started with a disaster and would undoubtedly end in a tragedy. I, on the other hand, try to remain level-headed and realistic. Yes, I did fracture my wrist this morning when I tripped over a bicycle on my way to work. And yes, I have been laid off from work with no pay for at least the next three weeks until my wrist is healed. But it is hardly the end of the world.
It is, however, an inconvenience. I have savings on which I can fall back, and my mother has her pension, but we will have to be tightening our purse strings this month. There will be no more steaks till May, and I won’t be able to take Rhona and Moira out this weekend as I had promised. But all these things are trivial. I don’t really care about meat, and I can take my girl and her daughter out
later in the year when the weather is warmer. The greatest inconvenience to my life right now is this blessed plaster of Paris cast in which my lower right arm is trapped. (It had to be my right wrist, of course! I cannot write with my left hand, as these illegible scribbles will surely testify.) The plaster cast is heavy and smelly, and it prevents me from sleeping. But worst of all, it is itchy. I am forever poking my mother’s knitting needles into the cast, something the doctor has warned me not to do. But the itch is incessant and irritating, and I can hardly bear it.
So there it is. I have mentioned the word. The ’itch’. The ’worrisome itch’. Of course, I am reminded of Alexander Campbell and his painful affliction. Just writing the word down in my diary sends shivers down my spine, but the doctor has assured me that this is perfectly normal and expected. However, in the back of my mind the worry remains. Will the itch get worse? Is my accident the first and least of a series of tragedies which await me? Is this the beginning of the curse? I know that my mother thinks the same, which accounts for the fatalistic outcries with which she welcomed my bad news. But as I said before, I am trying to remain level-headed and realistic. Anybody could have tripped over a bicycle. And the curse usually skips a generation. My father was the last to succumb to it, so I should be safe. I shall hang on to that hope. I dread to think what will become of me if I do not.
Tuesday, 23rd February, 1892
The situation at home has become intolerable, and my mother is to blame. On top of the sleepless nights and the confounded itching, I am constantly being subjected to my mother’s scrutiny. She won’t let me go out of the house, and when I do, she insists on accompanying me, worried that something unsavoury might happen to me if she is not there to protect me. She is forever on her knees, praying for me, begging Jesus for protection. She says she has noticed a change in my personality. I have become grumpier, more irritable and moody. She says she witnessed the same changes in my father shortly before he attacked her with a kitchen knife. She is convinced that the curse has begun.
How am I to remain level-headed and realistic with this kind of behaviour going on? Of course I am moody and irritable! My right arm is trapped in a plaster contraption and it is burning up! I am tempted every night to break open the plaster cast and scratch my skin off, and it takes all the energy I can summon to resist that temptation! I can do without the stress of a maniacal mother pestering me night and day with Jesus!
The other night, while I lay awake, trying to resist the urge to stick a screwdriver down my cast, I was thinking about the Greek legends that I used to read in my youth and the prophecies in them, which came true simply because the heroes of the legends believed them to be true. It occurred to me that I might be in a similar situation. If my mother keeps believing that my accident was the result of a curse, and if she continues to drive me mad with her prayers and warnings and precautions to such an extent that I end up pushing her down the stairs and killing her, then the prophecy of the curse will have come true through her own doing and not because it was inevitable.
I have been talking about my mother to Rhona, and she has suggested that I stay with her until my wrist has healed. I am tempted to take her up on her offer, although it would hurt my mother enormously if I did so (although she knows that I am engaged to Rhona, I have yet to tell her that Rhona already has a daughter – it would break her heart if she finds out that I am marrying a fallen woman).
My mother is a pest and a burden, but she means well. And deep in my heart, I am not entirely convinced that she is wrong about the curse. I too have found myself changing a little these last few days. I have been having morbid thoughts. In the midst of my despair, I have often wondered whether I would not be better off chopping off my lower arm completely, rather than suffering any more of this infernal itching. And the comment I made earlier about pushing my mother down the stairs – that was not a nice thing to say. But it is a thought that has crept into my mind on more than one occasion. My heart is pounding in my chest as I write this. Could this be the beginning of something horrible?
Friday, 26th February, 1892
I have made the right decision in leaving my mother’s house and moving in with Rhona. Rhona is quite different to my mother. She knows about the curse but quite rightly dismisses it as silly superstition. This makes all the difference. My mother’s persistent concerns, however well intentioned, only served to increase my own worries and doubts, which in turn inflamed the itching. My arm does not itch half as much now that I have moved out.
Rhona lives in one of the large tenement buildings in the old town. These buildings all look the same to me, but it turns out that there are vast differences between them. The front of Rhona’s building overlooks the High Street, which means that it is considered a more respectable building than those at the end of the close, which only overlook each other. One’s status within the building is measured by the floor one lives on. The higher up you live, the lower the status. Rhona lives on the third floor of a six-story building and is very proud of that. Her daughter Moira cleans for the people living below her, but Rhona will not allow her to clean for the people who live above her, because she considers that to be below her station. Even though she has been asked to do so repeatedly and the money would certainly have come in handy. The neighbours on the two bottom floors consider themselves to be in charge of the building and its inhabitants, and they certainly give themselves airs and graces. Only last week, they evicted the young woman who lived on the top floor because she had been caught wandering the streets of Edinburgh on her own at night. When I pointed out to Rhona that she too wanders the streets of Edinburgh alone every night when she returns home from work, she explained that she was entitled to do so because as far as the neighbours were concerned she was a widow (which is a lie, of course), but there was no cause for a young, unmarried woman to be strolling up and down the High Street unless she was up to no good.
Rhona has given me strict instructions on how to behave. I am not to have my own key, because Rhona has made it perfectly clear to the people living below her that I am a guest, invited to stay at her house until I recover from my injury, and guests do not have keys. Under no circumstance am I to enter Rhona’s bedroom. The neighbours below know which room she sleeps in, and I have been assured that they shall be listening carefully to my footsteps to check that nothing indecent is going on upstairs. If any whiff of impropriety is detected, Rhona will face the same fate as the young woman on the top floor, so I am to confine myself to my own bedroom, the parlour and the corridor. That means that from the moment Rhona goes to the tavern at eleven o’clock in the morning to one o’clock at night when she returns from work, I am trapped every day in this building with Moira.
Moira doesn’t like me and has barely said a word to me since I moved in. Rhona says that’s because she is used to having her mother for herself and doesn’t want to share her with anyone. She has told me to be patient with her. She has assured me that Moira will warm to me in due course.
That may well be so, but the real question I ask myself is, will I ever warm to her? I don’t like that girl. She is spoiled and impertinent and has a shifty and dishonest look about her. I know I shouldn’t think such bad things about a nine-year-old girl, and I certainly hope Rhona never reads this, but diaries are for writing the truth, and this is how I really feel.
Sunday, 28th February, 1892
I´m in the doghouse. Rhona hasn´t spoken to me all day. And it started with the best of intentions. I tried to keep myself occupied. I find that the itching is less severe when I have my mind on other things. So, while Moira was cleaning for the neighbours downstairs, I did the best I could to tidy up the house with my one good arm. I wanted Rhona to come home to a nice clean house and was determined to have the fire lit and roaring in the drawing room by the time she walked through the door.
Never have I felt so useless! I spent almost three hours clumsily shoveling coal into a bucket with my left hand and carrying it up three flights of stai
rs (I must have gone up and down those stairs five or six times!). By the time I restocked the coal basket and knelt down before the fireplace to light the fire, I was sweating and trembling with exhaustion. And that´s when the trouble started.
As I reached out for the coal basket, I found that it was three-quarters empty! I almost panicked. My heart was pounding in my chest. I thought I was finally going insane. Hadn´t I just spent three hours restocking that basket? What happened to all the coal I had carried up from the cellar? Had I filled the wrong basket?
I got up and wandered around the apartment, looking from room to room for the missing coal, when I passed Moira´s bedroom and saw a warm flickering light shining through the bottom of her door and heard the crackling of her fire. The little pest had stolen my coal to warm her own bedroom! I felt a terrible rage well up within me. A rage which I had seldom experienced in my life. It was horrific and abnormal and the cause of my current tribulations.
I honestly can´t recall exactly what happened after that, but according to Rhona, when she came home, she found me lying on the sofa, pale and trembling and angrily muttering to myself. She asked me where Moira was. I did not respond. She went to her daughter´s bedroom and found her there, cowering in a corner of her bedroom, crying and trembling with fear. Moira claims that I banged ferociously on her door (which fortunately she had kept locked), and that I shouted at her, screamed insults at her and even threatened to kill her.
I find it hard to believe that I should have acted in such a manner towards a nine-year-old girl, but the dents on the wooden door and the bruises on my knuckles bear testimony to her claims. And this morning, the neighbours came up to complain to Rhona about me. Not just about the commotion last night, but also about the pile of coal that had been deposited on the second-floor landing.
The Campbell Curse Page 11