by David Ashton
So even now she denied complicity, just a loving mother with a rambunctious son. Well, he’d let her off with such for the moment.
That’s what McLevy would have thought and it had some merit but Mulholland would soon fly above him. High into the clouds, with wings of gold. Higher and higher.
‘What was the plan?’ he asked softly.
‘He was tae fire the place. Daniel said nobody would be there tae stop us. Guaranteed.’
‘Guaranteed, eh?’
‘That’s whit he said.’
She fell silent again and Mulholland resisted the temptation to follow that line of questioning which could be revisited later. The absent watchman could wait. Gently does it, and always remember she was a Catholic. Faith is the key, even a ruptured disreputable faith like hers.
‘The Lord loves a penitent, Mary,’ he murmured.
‘So, he does,’ the old woman conceded.
She looked at the box he held as if it contained, like Pandora’s, all of the inflictive evils.
‘Daniel was molassed wi’ drink. He ripped open a case, threw that thing at me. I didnae even know I had it till I got hame. I ran terrified. Whit I could see in my mind. My poor wee lamb.’
‘So you hid the box away?’
‘Aye. It was all I had left of him. The wee lamb.’
She bowed her head once more and though Mulholland knew the man’s reputation as an unmitigated thug, he nodded as if he had personally witnessed Daniel gambolling in the fields, covered in a woolly fleece, bleating like a soul possessed.
‘What happened to him? Your wee boy?’
Mary’s eyes creased with pain. She was a wily old bird, a born survivor, and no doubt, in time, would try to wriggle off the hook, but at that moment her face held such a depth of suffering that Mulholland almost found it difficult to meet her gaze.
Almost.
‘What transpired that night, Mary?’ he repeated.
‘Daniel, he – bent over tae light the shavings. Fell on his face. The oil must have splashed all over him. He went up like Bonfire Night.’
For a moment her lips twisted in grim humour and Mulholland judged it time to make his move. On to what really mattered, never mind the burnt lambkin.
‘He was to fire the place, you said?’
‘Aye.’
Deep breath now.
‘Who put him up to it, Mary?’
‘A fine gentleman.’
If Mulholland had breathed in any more, he would have bloated up like a bullfrog.
‘Did you perhaps glimpse this gentleman?’
‘No’ really. I don’t get out much.’
The constable deflated somewhat. Mary carried on regardless.
‘Daniel met up with him. In private, room back o’ Devlin’s tavern.’ A note of pride entered her voice. ‘My son had been recommended.’
‘This gentleman. Did he have a name?’
Mary gave him a sceptical look and Mulholland realised that in his eagerness to pursue and pounce, he had asked a profoundly stupid question. As if a man who was planning arson would leave his calling card.
‘Did Daniel say what the man looked like, maybe?’
‘A’ he said was … fine and fleshy.’
‘Fleshy? Like a butcher’s boy?’
‘I wouldnae know, I wasnae there.’
Mary’s eyes had narrowed and Mulholland realised that she suspected he was trying to tie her into the event more tightly than she wished to be. Either she was as innocent as she pretended, or she was a willing accomplice to arson, but that could wait.
He pitched his voice to a more even, soothing note.
‘Anything else? Did your wee boy notice anything else about this fine fleshy gentleman?’
Mary thought for a moment then nodded vigorously.
‘Aye. Right enough. A hankie.’
‘A hankie?’
‘In his sleeve. Daniel thought it awfy class. “I’ll dae that Mammy,” he said. “I’ll wear my hankie up my sleeve.” But he never did.’
She choked back a sob, however Mulholland’s mind retraced a moment in the warehouse when Garvie mopped at his brow and stuffed his handkerchief back so that it flounced out from just above the wrist.
Another nail in the coffin of proof.
‘What about payment?’
‘After the job was done.’
‘Where?’
‘Whit difference does it make?’
She was correct, the question superfluous even as he spoke it. Garvie now knew the man was dead and he wouldn’t be hanging about the back room of Devlin’s waving money at the passing trade.
Besides, Mulholland had something a deal more powerful up his own sleeve.
‘Ach,’ said Mary, out of the blue. ‘When I saw his poor body, it knocked the stuffing out of me.’
She had shrunk back into herself, face crumpled, eyes bewildered and lost.
Mulholland smiled; he could afford compassion now or rather he could let his natural compassion emerge. For when the other farmyard boys wanted to hang a cat up by the tail and shoot arrows at it, was it not himself that persuaded them to give the animal at least ten yards of a start?
‘Otherwise you’d have told me nothing. Eh, Mary?’
‘Probably not,’ she replied with a weary humour.
Their eyes met. Mulholland glanced down at the find from the coalbunker, which now lay wedged between his bony knees. He lifted it up and offered it forth like a holy relic. A wafer on the Catholic tongue.
‘So you could attest, on the Holy Book, this box of cigars here … it comes from the warehouse?’
‘That I can swear,’ said Mary piously.
The constable opened the box and sniffed again. The bitter acrid smell from within brought such joy that he felt another leap coming on.
But he resisted the temptation and continued to crouch on the stool like a praying mantis.
He sniffed once more then glanced up expectantly.
Mary nodded. ‘Perks o’ the job, Daniel said. He ca’d them Stinko D’Oros.’
‘Indeed they are.’ Mulholland closed the box with a snap. ‘The cheapest, nastiest cigar on the market. Foul as a dead badger. Stinko D’Oros. My Aunt Katie used to smoke them before she turned to the pipe.’
‘God help her now,’ offered Mary.
Mulholland stood suddenly. He had what he wanted and he knew exactly what to do with it. This was his moment. All the lines of his life had converged like a railway terminus. Bound for glory.
No time to waste.
‘Mary,’ he said urgently, ‘I have to get somewhere and I’m trusting you’re not going to run out on me. Am I mistaken in that trust?’
‘Where have I got tae go?’ she replied with a bleak smile. ‘And anyhow, I want tae bury my son. Whit’s left o’ him.’
She sighed and shook her head like a weary animal.
‘I’ll take my licks.’
‘And I’ll put a strong word in for you at trial, see if I don’t.’
He was already moving to the door, the cigar box stuffed into the poacher’s pocket of his long black coat.
Mulholland turned to survey the old woman in the chair, every detail of the room etched into his mind. This was a moment he would never forget, a moment when his life had taken a decisive spin for the better.
‘You’ve helped me something fine,’ he declared grandly.
‘What have I done?’ asked Mary.
But the door had slammed and the constable was gone.
Now Mulholland crashed a heavy brass knocker upon another door in Doune Terrace. The knocker was in the shape of a fish with pouting lips that put the constable in mind of the man himself, though when the door opened, it was not Oliver Garvie but a uniformed supercilious old flunky who appeared, his lip curled slightly at the sight of the wild-eyed lanky figure looming in the half light.
‘I’m a policeman,’ said Mulholland. ‘Where’s the master of the house?’
The old fellow blinked. This was not a
customary doorstep greeting.
‘Mister Garvie is not at home,’ he said carefully. ‘His return is unspecified. I would suggest, sir, that you make your way back in the morning.’
‘That’s a grand suggestion,’ said Mulholland, pushing past the fellow, ‘but time and the hour waits for no man.’
The flunky gazed in dismay as the wet from the constable’s large heavy shoes seeped on to the highly polished floorboards of the hall.
He had no option but to close the door and watch as Mulholland took tenancy of a chair in the hall beside an equally highly polished, delicately carved table, where business gentlemen were supposed to deposit their visiting cards in a silver tray.
The constable clenched his hands together tightly, his previous certainty and bravado somewhat mitigated by the surrounding rich furnishings and opulence. And this was only the hall; God knows what the rest of the place was like. No doubt the water closet had a chain of jewels.
‘The matter is urgent,’ he announced loudly, as much to encourage himself as to inform the old man, who was staring at him as if he were a creature from the zoo. ‘It cannot attend tomorrow. I’ll wait my hurry.’
‘What if he doesnae come till late?’ said the old fellow plaintively, knowing Garvie to be a night-owl and also that he could not get to bed while this weird intruder lurked in the hallway.
‘I’ll wait longer,’ was the reply.
‘Is the master expecting you?’
To this almost desperate question, Mulholland closed his hand round the engagement ring box hidden deep in his pocket, and, thus fortified, reverted to his candid, blue-eyed, wouldn’t-harm-a-fly face.
‘To be sure,’ said the constable. ‘I saw him only this very morning and our meeting has been on the cards since then. On the cards.’
20
Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature.
JEAN-BAPTISTE MOLIÈRE,
Tartuffe
Leith, December 1879
Hercules Dunbar looked at the silver candlestick and then up at the hard intent faces of the two policemen.
One minute he’d been like a pig in straw, five o’clock in the evening, the whole night standing by, two pliant whores in the shape of Big Nosed Kate and Sally Toms arching their backs over him blistering the sheets, and then the locked door to the private boudoir at the back of the Foul Anchor tavern splintered open from a hefty kick and all hell broke loose.
Kate threw an empty bottle of whisky at the tall policeman who avoided it neatly; she then launched herself, naked as a jay, to follow the trajectory of the missile but he sidestepped her as well and she hit the wall with a thud then crumpled to the floor.
Sally, meanwhile, who had been at the opposite end of Hercules and was therefore slower on the uptake, screamed ravishment and blue murder to the heavens, her naked bosom still part covered in Edinburgh Fog, a dessert of whipped cream, sugar and nuts, from an earlier frolic, quivering with fear and indignation. It was a bosom out of proportion to the rest of her slight structure, and all the more impressive for that fact. The policeman’s eyes popped; the last Edinburgh Fog witnessed had been on a dish in a teahouse with a paper doily underneath and the young lady at that moment in his company bore little resemblance to either of these hellcats.
Hercules had taken the opportunity while the man was thus distracted to grab some clothes and squeeze himself out of the rear window of the tavern.
It was a long drop, and as he lay there winded, a pair of boots approached in the early evening murk, until they filled the frame of his vision. His hands were snatched behind his back and the restrainers put on.
He looked up.
Jamie McLevy.
Some things never change.
McLevy, now in the interrogation room of the Leith station, in turn looked down at Hercules Dunbar. The man still had the raw-boned frame of his youth but dissipation and hard living had scored lines into the face and hollowed out the outlines of his body.
Yet the fellow was not without feral humour. What he lacked was a moral compass.
It’s too late now, as Confucius had remarked in one of his books.
‘Well Herkie,’ said the inspector, ‘you left a trail a mile wide.’
‘Is that so?’ Dunbar grinned defiantly. ‘Jist as well. Ye’d never have found it else.’
The policemen had trawled round the half-uncles, the local name for the small pawnshops in the wynds and closes of Leith, until striking gold or rather silver at Ned Hamilton’s lair in Vinegar Close. While Ned had denied any knowledge of stolen goods or the like, his eyes kept flicking to an empty tea chest wedged against the back wall.
McLevy simply walked up and booted it aside to reveal a locked box cut into the brickwork behind where Ned kept his real stash in the hidey-hole.
Hamilton tried to claim rights of property but when McLevy threatened to pick the box up bodily and throw it through the window of the shop out into the street, the man produced a key, opened it up and amongst the tangle of cheap jewellery, garish bangles, rubies of glass, watches and fob chains, was what they sought.
A silver candlestick, luckily not yet melted down, still inscribed to Sir Thomas Bouch, who most certainly had not dropped by Vinegar Close to pawn the object.
The threat of being hauled up before the judge as a fence and resetter of theftuous plunder squeezed out a name from Ned’s unwilling lips, and then it was merely a matter of sifting through the low taverns of Leith until they found out where Dunbar had holed up to spend his ill-gotten gains.
Ill-gotten, indeed and much good it had done him, two ascendant whores and an Edinburgh Fog.
All present regarded the silver tribute from Dundee, as outside the interrogation room Constable Ballantyne sat quietly at his post and dreamed of being a hero.
‘You pawned that candlestick,’ McLevy said quietly enough.
‘I found it in the street,’ came the ready response.
‘That was lucky,’ offered Mulholland mildly, taking his tone from the inspector.
‘Luck is often on my side.’
‘Good. You’ll need it,’ McLevy smiled, his wolf-grey eyes fixed upon the prey. ‘The charge is murder. The judge will be waiting. Judge MacGregor. His family own a hemp company. Hangman’s rope is made of such.’
‘Murder?’ Dunbar’s jaw dropped and his face expressed what seemed like honest amazement. ‘I dinnae do murder.’
‘You broke into the house of Sir Thomas Bouch in Bernard Street, a night previous. You stole that silver. An old servant tried to stop you in your tracks.’
‘You killed him where he stood. Smashed his head. Probably with that candlestick,’ Mulholland chimed in helpfully though he knew unfortunately the silver stand had been given a good wipe and no trace of death remained.
‘I never touched him!’ Dunbar realised his mistake and tried to retract at once. ‘I wisnae there. Ye cannae kill a man if you’re no’ there. That’s impossible.’
‘Kate and Sally don’t think so,’ replied the inspector evenly. ‘Ye boasted your prowess of thievery to them. And they were only too pleased to pass it on.’
‘They’re good girls, they wouldnae do that.’
‘Oh yes they would,’ Mulholland shook his head benignly. ‘Especially after we put a charge of accessory before them.’
McLevy smiled grimly. ‘It’s amazing how murder can leave you dancing on your lonesome, Herkie.’
A wild desperate light came into Dunbar’s eyes though, had he but realised, Kate and Sally, even under threat, had stuck to the code of the Fraternity and refused to betray the man they had straddled to such good effect.
McLevy was relying on the proven fact that there was not a criminal born whose tongue would not loosen with whisky and lewd cavorting.
It was a bluff, but by the look on Dunbar’s face, thought Mulholland, the bluff would not be called.
‘And then there’s the matter of the footprint,’ said the inspector.
The constable blinked. Footprint?
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‘In the garden. Where you jemmied at the window. Your left boot sunk a deep mark. Mulholland here took a cast and I’ll wager, we’ll match you up to perfection.’
At McLevy’s words Dunbar glanced down with some dismay at his treacherous foot sinister, then up at Mulholland who, behind a knowing smile, concealed the fact that the heavy overnight rain had obliterated any imprints below the window to a unidentifiable sludge.
Another bluff. Life is full of them.
‘Dancing on that rope, eh Herkie?’
The inspector let out a roar of laughter. He had switched to outright provocation, this was his technique of interrogation, always switch the ground, never leave a certainty beneath the feet, not unlike the hangman.
Dunbar lunged forward in the chair where he had been deposited, hands still manacled behind.
There were two chairs and one bare table in the interrogation room. The walls were a dirty white with various smears of what might well have been some bodily discharge; McLevy had locked the door and pocketed the key.
It was a long narrow space with no windows, claustrophobic, insulated, like being confined within the pod of a vegetable; tailor-made for confession.
‘If I wasnae cuffed, we’d see who the man was here!’
This howled threat brought a response.
McLevy stepped behind Dunbar and unlocked the manacles.
‘There ye are, my mannie,’ he said. ‘How’s that?’
Dunbar rubbed at his chafed wrists. Now that he was free, he was curiously bereft of action. McLevy stood in front of him, arms hanging slack by his side, Mulholland was to the side, lounging back against the wall but not quite touching the surface.
‘Two against one, eh?’ Dunbar’s throat was dry and what was meant to sound like a jeer came out in a wheeze.
‘Not at all.’ McLevy spread his hands as if to show that he carried no weapon. ‘The constable is merely an observer, and will do what I command him. He is far below me in rank and must perform accordingly.’
Then turning to the aforesaid constable, McLevy pointed an index finger as if addressing a dog and ordered.
‘Stay there!’
