Fall From Grace im-2

by David Ashton

  Dunbar laughed and Mulholland’s backbone stiffened. No doubt the inspector was up to something as usual, but sometimes he came too near the knuckle.

  ‘So I’ll make a wee bargain with you, Herkie.’ The lupine eyes gleamed in a friendly fashion. ‘If you can lay me out upon the ground, I’ll promise you a good hour’s start from this station before we hunt you down, but if I prevail, you’ll tell me the truth of last night.’

  Although Mulholland’s face remained impassive, he whistled silently to himself inside. This was a new one, and a wild assurance, even for McLevy. There was a history here of sorts, you could almost smell the blood of the past.

  ‘Whit have I got tae lose, eh?’ said Dunbar, the wildness in his eyes matched by a savage grin.

  ‘Only a tooth or two,’ was the serene response.

  And so they began, not for the first time, to engage in warfare.

  Had it been in water Hercules might have stood a chance; the inspector feared that element, a primitive terror of being dragged under in an embrace that filled the lungs, washed out the eyes then swallowed you into a gaping mouth like a mother animal gulping down her own young. Like his own mother drowning him in her madness.

  But it was earth. And McLevy loved the earth.

  Dunbar stood up and flexed his fingers then suddenly made a rush, head down, intending to pin his opponent against the table and get to work at close quarters.

  But the inspector was no longer where he had been, an attribute Mulholland had noticed before in that for someone of such stocky build, he could skip like a mountain goat.

  Which he did, to the side and then as Dunbar crashed into the sharp edge of the table, McLevy erupted into a fury of cold violence that made the constable quite content with his role of observer.

  Stay put. As commanded. It was the inspector’s show.

  McLevy lifted up the fellow by the scruff of the neck and planted four ferocious punches into the belly. At each one, the man doubled over and each time he was hauled back to face the music.

  On the fourth, the inspector let him hang there, hunched over, paralysed by the most profound pain.

  As the fury drained from McLevy’s eyes, Mulholland stepped up and slid the man’s chair under him so that he collapsed back, still doubled over but at least with something to rest his backside upon.

  McLevy perched himself on the edge of the table and waited, his hands primly folded like a priest about to hear a penitent.

  There was room enough for Mulholland so he perched upon the edge as well, though while the inspector’s surprisingly small feet swung in the air, the constable’s were planted squarely upon the floor.

  The silver candlestick was placed between them as if for the enactment of some ritual.

  McLevy sung a song under his breath to keep time with his feet.

  ‘Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling.

  Charlie is my darling, the young Chevalier.’

  A Jacobite air, seditious in origin. Mulholland was not tempted to harmonise.

  Finally Dunbar raised his head to see this strange pair then slowly, painfully, straightened up.

  Give the man his due; he kept to his side of the bargain.

  ‘The bastards owed me,’ he said.

  ‘Elucidate,’ replied James McLevy.

  The story Dunbar told was a long and rambling one full of grievances, imagined or otherwise, betrayal, treachery, the loss of a dear friend, bad practice, and most heinously, the contemptible treatment of a faithful employee. The list was apparently endless but might be summed up thus.

  This, of course, was Dunbar’s version.

  Like his father before him, he had become an expert in the forging of iron but work in Edinburgh being scarce had quit the city to be employed at the Wormit Foundry in Dundee, eventually working his way up to the job of foreman moulder in charge of all under the roof save the turners whose craft was beyond mortal comprehension.

  In that foundry, while the smoke rose and the sparks flew day and night, the fires glowing like volcanic lava in the dark, they had constructed the High Girders, then the cast-iron columns strutted and cross-braced, bolted vertically through flanges which would support these girders to a span of near 250 feet, thirteen of them, that would knit a strand of iron from pier to pier, shore to shore, to form the central structure of a series of black rainbows from the trap rocks of Wormit to the sandy shelves of Magdalen Green.

  To span the river below, in all its moods.

  The Tay Bridge.

  Two and a quarter miles long.

  A lattice-grid of cast and wrought iron. Like a spider’s web across the River Tay.

  The result and solution to a war between two railway companies, separated by the river. The North British on one side, the Caledonian on the other.

  These two enemies had fought for untold years over Scotland like dogs over a bone.

  And to put the matter simply, in order for the North British to prevail, it would have to run its trains straight through from Edinburgh to Dundee and onwards.

  Before the bridge, a journey of forty-six miles took an inexorable three hours twelve minutes and that was the fast train. It involved starting from Waverley station at 6.25 a.m. in a freezing carriage with two smelly fish trucks in the rear, then a ferry from Granton where the fish smell got worse, another train from Bruntisland to Tayport on the south side of the Tay estuary, yet another boat across to Broughty Ferry, and a third train which limped into Dundee carrying the miserable, hungry, disconsolate passengers to their journey’s end.

  And if the weather was disagreeable, as it often was, then the journey was longer than the descent into hell.

  Of course the Caledonian fought the bridge tooth and nail but, at last, after a conflict that almost bankrupted both companies, the North British proved more than equal to its opponent in negotiating the treacherous sands and eddies of disturbed capitalism, and won the day.

  The money was raised, Parliament nodded, Royal Assent was given and then, as the song would say,

  ‘Way hay and up she rises,

  Earl-aye in the morning.’

  Designed by the great Victorian engineer, Sir Thomas Bouch, dubbed so at Windsor Castle by the Queen who had herself on the North British engine, ‘Netherby’, in fine weather with the waters below lit by the evening sun like a picture postcard, crossed the completed bridge in the late June of 1879, and pronounced to all and sundry that she was pleased to confer upon the originator of this grand edifice, a knighthood.

  The Tay Bridge.

  It had been his dream for twenty years.

  Sir Thomas had the most profound faith in himself. It had never occurred to him to think otherwise.

  But that bugger of a bridge took six years to build, ten million bricks, two million rivets, eighty-seven thousand cubic feet of timber, fifteen thousand casks of cement and employed over the years six hundred men, nearly all of whom were paid the princely sum of eight pence an hour.

  What of these men? They broke their bones and gave their lives to build a monster of iron and stone, which had neither mercy nor compassion for the insects that swarmed over its great body like termites building a tower to the heavens.

  The bridge, like a savage god, crushed them as they strove to give it life and form.

  Christ Jesus knows how many were badly injured, but for sure twenty men died, the wind picking them off a girder-span and hurling the body eighty feet down to the waters below, the impact splitting them apart like rotten apples. Or, as a cylinder collapsed, two men sucked into the mud and held in its treacherous embrace till they were drowned like rats.

  An August explosion killed six more, a digging gang on Pier 54, down in the depths, an air bell above, the pumps sucking out the water, then the blast turned their bones to sawdust and cruciformed their limbs.

  The cause of the explosion was never found.

  Meanwhile Thomas Bouch sat at his desk and thought his great thoughts.

  As a result of these deaths,
the wages were raised from eight to ten pence.

  Some of this McLevy gleaned from Dunbar’s own words, some he discovered later, most of the stories and facts were, after all, in the public domain.

  Most, but not all. Not by a long shot.

  And Dunbar had lost his best friend, Tommy Loughran, a nice wee man for a riveter, not three years before, to a wild February storm. Spans twelve and thirteen of the high girders had not yet been made secure to the main structure and down they went, taking Tommy with them. He left a wife heavy with child and two others hanging round her skirts.

  This was not unusual; the life of a working man is cheap. And after all, who was at fault? Surely Nature must take the blame. According to official version, the howling gale battered upon the unsecured girders for three hours till they lost their state of equilibrium on the lifting apparatus and toppled like the Giant’s beanstalk after Jack got to work with the axe.

  So Tommy Loughran died for the greater good of the powers that be and would receive his reward in glory helping Saint Peter instal rivets to fortify the heavenly gates.

  And yet McLevy sensed in Dunbar as regards his friend’s death, a personal guilt as if something was gnawing away at him inside. It would not be an issue of morality, the man possessed no such thing, therefore what was causing unease in a psyche not inclined towards the fine-tuning of conscience?

  As if to confirm his somewhat coarse disposition, the fellow hawked up a wodge of phlegm from his lungs and spat it out on to the floor of the interrogation room where it bounced like a rubber ball.

  ‘The bastards owed me,’ he repeated.

  ‘For what?’ asked Mulholland.

  ‘Whit I did. Whit I did not. The blind eye.’

  McLevy was silent thus far, his eyes fixed upon Dunbar as if trying to see behind the mask the man presented, so the constable was honour bound to continue.

  ‘The blind eye?’

  ‘Whit I turned.’

  ‘To what?’

  Dunbar laughed harshly. He was beginning to enjoy himself with Mulholland but, in so doing, ignored McLevy at his peril. His aching belly could have reminded him of this but physical pain was so much part of his life that he kept it at distance and bore it like an animal.

  ‘Ye ever hear o’ Beaumont Egg?’

  ‘I have not,’ replied Mulholland after a moment of thought.

  ‘Then ye can remain an ignorant Irish pig!’

  Mulholland flushed red and Dunbar tensed himself but now it was McLevy’s turn.

  ‘So that is why you stole. They owed you.’

  ‘They did. And threw me off the job for no reason.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘That bastard Alan Telfer!’

  ‘The right hand of Sir Thomas?’

  ‘A minion! He sneaked in. I was the foreman, no bugger knew as much of the iron-moulding as me. But as soon as that bridge was built, he threw me out.’

  ‘There must have been a reason?’

  ‘He sneaked in the foundry. Witnessed me. I had drink taken.’

  ‘That’s a surprise,’ was the dry response.

  ‘It was my birthday!’ Dunbar said defensively.

  Now it was Mulholland’s occasion for silence as he watched McLevy manipulate the exchange so that the other was forever on the back foot. Yet the inspector somehow gave the impression that he and Dunbar were working towards a common end, uncovering the truth together as it were, though that would change at some point, the constable would have wagered his carefully tended Protestant soul upon it.

  ‘So,’ McLevy mused thoughtfully, ‘to assuage your hurt feelings and empty pockets, you removed from the possession of your former employers, that which you believed rightfully belonged to yourself as compensation for unfair dismissal?’

  Dunbar had momentary difficulty in following this somewhat convoluted reasoning, but got there eventually and near nodded his head off in agreement.

  ‘That is correct. The bastards!’

  McLevy smiled and also nodded, all friends together, but then leant back again, folded his hands together, this time more resembling a Buddha than a priest, and waited.

  Hercules felt obscurely summoned to contribute more.

  ‘And it wasnae the first time,’ he affirmed.

  Mulholland’s long nose twitched in apparent bewilderment.

  ‘It wasn’t the first time you had broken into the place?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  ‘Not at all you had? Or not at all you had not?’

  ‘For the love of Christ,’ Dunbar muttered indignantly. ‘Not at all I hadnae.’

  He shook his head at McLevy as if to say, ‘How do you endure this great gowk?’ and received a complicit headshake in reply, yet the two policemen were playing him like a hooked fish.

  Hercules felt an ill-founded sense of well-being; he and the inspector might be sworn enemies but there was respect to be paid on each side.

  Unlike this dozie from the bogs of Ireland.

  He ignored Mulholland altogether and addressed McLevy as close to an equal.

  ‘It wasnae the first time I had asked for my due. I banged upon their door.’

  ‘And when would that be?’ asked his almost equal.

  ‘Not long since. A Sabbath day. Sir Thomas wasnae on the premises.’ Dunbar puffed up importantly as if he had hammered on the portal like a creditor. ‘I was taken to Alan Telfer and there I made my just demand.’

  ‘What was his response?’

  Dunbar’s face darkened with chagrin.

  ‘The bastard laughed at me.’

  ‘He was a brave man,’ McLevy observed, a tinge of admiration to his tone as if he believed Dunbar a fellow to be reckoned. ‘Or a foolish one, eh?’

  ‘He threatened me wi’ the police.’

  ‘Well that’s where you’ve ended up, right enough.’

  This comment from Mulholland was treated by the other two with the contempt it deserved, and then McLevy hopped off the table to drag over the second chair so that he and Dunbar sat together like two old men on a park bench.

  ‘Surely he could have just shown you to the door like a gentleman, why threaten you, Herkie?’

  ‘Because I threatened him,’ the man boasted.

  ‘With what?’

  For a moment Dunbar almost blurted out what was in his mind, but then his instinctive feral cunning kicked in and he closed his eyes, shaking his head, a self-important smile on his face to indicate the depth of the secrets he held.

  Perhaps it had something to do with this mysterious Beaumont Egg the man had mentioned to tantalise Mulholland, or perhaps Dunbar was giving himself airs to cover the fact that he had gone cap in hand to be treated like a doorstep beggar, but it was time now for the subject of murder.

  ‘So you had your vengeance, eh?’

  ‘I did indeed.’

  ‘While they were snoring, the Great Man and his secretary –’

  Here, Dunbar suddenly let out a loud snigger. ‘Aye, like dirty pigs.’

  The man had a sly look upon his face but McLevy did not wish to pursue this divergence from the main narrative.

  ‘While they were snoring,’ he continued, ‘you made a fool of them, robbed them blind.’

  ‘Whit was my due,’ asserted Dunbar complacently, not realising that he was in the process of tying a noose around his own neck.

  McLevy leant forward from his chair, faced away from Dunbar and made a little movement with his hand like a man feeding bread to the ducks.

  He spoke softly almost in a whisper, as if they were both witnessing the scene.

  ‘You went into the study and looked around, what could you take to make up for the wrongs committed? And there was the candlestick, what better? Inscribed to Sir Thomas who gets all the credit for your labour, the crime fits the insult, eh?’

  Dunbar nodded his appreciation of McLevy’s grasp of the subtle under-currents to this event while Mulholland, who would be an important witness at trial, trained his large pink ears to
wards the two men, side by side, all friends together.

  McLevy carried on with his reconstruction in a soft mesmeric tone, which his superior Lieutenant Roach would have found hard to recognise and alarming to witness, like a wolf lying down with lambs.

  ‘Out you came, into the hall, quiet as a mouse, and there in front of you was Archibald Gourlay, the butler, another quiet man. Face to face. In from the street while you were busy about your righteous task, a wee bit shaky on his feet, whisky on his breath, the drink is a terrible thing, eh Herkie?’

  For a moment Hercules Dunbar hesitated, and then nodded assent.

  ‘He was puggled, right enough.’

  ‘A terrible thing, the drink.’ The inspector bowed his head in the sorrow of wisdom.

  Mulholland also bowed his head but it was to hide the light of triumph in his eyes. They had him now.

  Or had they?

  McLevy continued, his voice quiet and reassuring, as if impending death was to be a pleasant surprise.

  ‘And of course a man as strong as you would not dream of doing harm to a man as old as that, no. Not smash his head with a candlestick as the constable was daft enough to suggest but perhaps, by accident, you wished to escape, he stood in your way, you gave him a wee gentle push, is that the way of it?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Dunbar slowly. ‘Jist a wee push.’

  ‘And down he fell?’

  ‘Over his own feet.’

  ‘A terrible thing, the drink. A man of his age should know better, eh?’

  ‘Dangerous, right enough.’

  McLevy and Dunbar nodded together, wise beyond their years, and Mulholland tried not to catch the suspect’s eye lest it break the spell.

  ‘So, one minute he was there before ye, and the next?’

  McLevy held up his hands palms outward as if to ward off unwarranted accusation.

  ‘Out of sight. Down the stairs. Arse over elbow.’

  He laughed heartily as though no harm had been done, a comical event, like Humpty Dumpty falling, like the old man who would not say his prayers; Dunbar laughed also but then a strange look came into his eyes.

  ‘Not down the stairs,’ he said slowly. ‘I left him in the hall. On his arse right enough. But … in the hall. It was me went doon the stairs. I ran like hell. Then, out the window.’