by David Ashton
‘Come in Ballantyne,’ said Roach wearily. ‘Join the throng. Perhaps we may all find partners and dance the quadrille.’
This passed the constable by; he had two left feet to go with the other hazards inflicted by a bountiful nature.
Also he had other things on his mind, the weather had turned unexpectedly mild and the station was crawling with bluebottles.
He fixed his eyes earnestly upon McLevy; the inspector, unlike Ballantyne, had no liking for flies and had been known to wreak havoc with a rolled-up Leith Herald.
‘A report jist in, sir,’ he announced gravely. ‘The sergeant has it at the desk. He wishes your presence.’
McLevy nodded curtly, Ballantyne departed and before the inspector followed he stuck out a stiff finger at the still figure of his constable.
‘Don’t you go anywhere Mulholland, I haven’t finished with you yet.’
The door slammed behind him. Roach shook his head.
‘You’ve been a fool, constable.’
‘I meant well, sir.’
‘The road to hell is paved with such intentions,’ the lieutenant remarked with some asperity.
Roach stood abruptly and flexed his cramped limbs; he seemed to have been sitting at that desk for an eternity and to alleviate the tightness began to practise golf shots, narrowing his eyes as the imaginary balls split the fairway time and time again.
It is always thus with golfers, the real world being such an unwelcome intrusion into the great game.
With a regretful sigh, Roach returned to actuality. He had still to inform the constable about his failed suit, but there was no need to pile it on here.
The lieutenant adopted a formal tone.
‘Let us hope whatever is the case with Garvie, that Mister Forbes may yet provide an innocent explanation and, in that case, there is no harm done. I see no need for official reprimand.’
Mulholland’s heart skipped a beat; had Cupid abandoned that voluptuous goddess with the wispy bits and returned to his rightful owner?
For what could stand in the way of young love?
The door opened and McLevy came back in without knocking. He ignored Roach’s reproving look as regards protocol flouted, took a deep breath and spoke grimly, no trace of satisfaction in his delivery.
‘Robert Forbes has hanged himself. In his study. The body was found by his daughter.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Roach.
Mulholland let out a low moan in the terrible silence.
Love is the very devil.
‘I have sent men to Oliver Garvie’s home and offices,’ continued the inspector. ‘But I doubt our bird will have flown. I was correct. Time was of the essence.’
The constable brought his head up to meet the merciless gaze of his inspector.
‘There was a measure of arrogance in what you did, Mulholland,’ pronounced McLevy in a detached tone that made his words all the more lethal. ‘The Scots have a name for someone who rises in arrogance and falls flat on his face.’
Outside in the station, Ballantyne heard the murmur of voices behind the lieutenant’s door and wondered somewhat wistfully if he would ever, one day, be admitted to that inner sanctum. Rescuing bluebottles could take a man only so far and no further.
‘A puddock,’ said McLevy flatly. ‘You have made a puddock of yourself.’
‘Unfortunately so,’ agreed Roach. ‘Puddock is the word.’
Scylla and Charybdis were the monstrous guards of the Straits of Messina in ancient times who crushed many an unwary ship between them. Avoid the one and you were impaled upon the other.
Thus wrecked between the condemnation of his betters, Martin Mulholland wished in vain for calm seas and a soft wind. What he received instead was a cannonball amidships.
‘Ah well,’ remarked a suddenly cheerful McLevy. ‘We’d better repair to the scene of the crime, constable.’
‘Crime?’ came a cry from the shipwreck.
‘Suicide is against the law.’
The thought of having to face the accusing eyes of his beloved Emily once it became revealed that his visit had been, at the very least, a contributory factor in her father’s demise, sent Mulholland into a guilt-ridden panic.
‘Oh, no – I can’t – I can’t go – sir.’
‘Part of the job,’ was the stolid response.
‘Have pity, sir,’ the constable almost wailed, out of the blue coming over very Irish. ‘Pity is a grand thing.’
‘What’s the problem that needs this pity?’ grunted McLevy, who was anxious to be on his way; the insurance adjuster was not a game bird that would improve the longer he hung there and the man could not be lowered till a senior investigating officer was on the scene.
‘How can I face my Emily? How can I look her in the eyes?’
‘Love conquers all,’ was the unsympathetic reply. ‘Now get your helmet and your cape.’
Mulholland looked to his lieutenant who nodded in bleak concordance with his inspector.
The young man realised for the first time that these two men, so far apart in temperament, shared the same unremitting attitude towards the shorn lamb.
Pity was in short supply.
And so, also realising that if he refused to perform his duty he might as well walk out of the station and kiss the Leith police goodbye, Mulholland screwed up his eyes an instant, opened them again, and then strode out to find his uniform and face the eventual music.
Roach and McLevy looked at each other; suicide was always such a messy business.
‘It’ll be the making of him,’ the inspector remarked somewhat obscurely.
In response, Roach moved to take his heavy frock coat from a stand in the corner.
‘I shall come as well,’ he announced. ‘I feel part way responsible for this débâcle in any case.’
‘You and Mister Cupid,’ said McLevy.
Roach refused to rise to the bait; the inspector obviously knew that he had acted as love’s emissary but he would not grant him the satisfaction of the gory details.
‘Perhaps,’ he remarked dryly, ‘I can be of comfort to the young lady, whilst you and Mulholland examine fibres on the carpet, McLevy.’
‘A fair division of labour,’ was the equally dry response.
As Roach shrugged into the immaculate frock coat and plucked down a tall hat of imposing proportions, something that looked like the ghost of Mulholland appeared in the doorway.
‘Shall we gentlemen?’ said Roach.
The other two nodded and off they went to meet the hanging man.
31
Anything awful makes me laugh.
CHARLES LAMB,
Letter to Robert Southey
The household of Forbes had been in chaos, Emily howling and shrieking like a lost soul while two maiden aunts, Jessie and Jemima, who had turned up as if from nowhere, did their level best to console her.
The maid was also in hysterics; she had turned up late for work that morning and seemed somehow to blame herself.
The cook was wailing in the kitchen where the pulley hung askew over the kitchen table and the very walls reverberated with female lamentation.
While Roach dealt with all this below, McLevy looked up at the bare feet of Robert Forbes; for some reason the adjuster had removed his socks and shoes before tying a rope around the head of the stag mounted securely upon his study wall.
The man had subsequently tied the other end round his neck, stood on a chair perched high upon his desk, and then kicked off into oblivion.
A shaken Mulholland who had been sent downstairs to assist his lieutenant and come shooting back some moments later as if pursued by Alecto the implacable Fury, was engaged with one other constable in untying the knots from the neck of the monarch of the glen and lowering the body to where three other men waited to receive the altered form of the insurance adjuster.
This was accomplished and the corpse laid inside the evidence sheet to be wrapped up and removed to the cold room at the station for examination.
McLevy noted that, from appearances, the man had used the pulley rope from the kitchen but the weather was decent enough they could dry the linen outside.
He almost shared that comforting thought with Mulholland who, through gritted teeth, was pulling the sheet over the waxy contorted features of his once-upon-a-time future father-in-law, but decided against it.
The dead man’s socks and shoes had been carefully laid out on a newspaper on the floor at the side of the desk. The local Herald with a headline that read, ‘Leith will lead the world!’ The print below was too cramped for McLevy to make out in what exactly Leith took up the vanguard position.
Suicides perhaps …
The corpse’s face had now disappeared from view, a few bumps in the sheet indicating where a life had dwelt.
But what circumstances had driven Robert Forbes to such a pass? To end his own existence? To lie and deceive? To betray his very calling? All of this was so much against the proven character of the adjuster.
As he pondered these matters, McLevy found himself at the man’s bureau, rifling through the contents therein.
Possibly this was slightly against the rules but since the nearest member of the family present was dead as a doornail, the inspector assumed tacit permission and delved.
And as he pulled down the corrugated wooden screen that concealed the multitude of narrow drawers making up the top half of the imposing oak varnished desk, he found, prominent and propped up inside, a long white envelope with the name, JAMES MCLEVY, inscribed on the front.
He opened and read.
Everything began to become clear.
There’s no fool like an old fool.
Roach entered through the open door of the study and cast a wary glance at Mulholland where he was helping to manoeuvre the body into a position so that it could be lifted up and taken downstairs to be loaded discreetly into the carry waggon and thence to the station.
The lieutenant crossed over towards McLevy who seemed absorbed in a piece of paper, which he held in hand, and spoke quietly in his inspector’s ear.
‘I have solved part of the mystery,’ he announced.
‘Uhuh?’ muttered McLevy, scratching at his nose.
‘Indeed. Emily noticed that her father this very morning was withdrawn and distraught. When asked the reason, he remarked that it was a great pity the constable could not change his mind.’
‘Uhuh?’ was the unhelpful response.
‘He would say no more about the matter and gave her some money to go shopping,’ Roach continued. ‘Emily loves to shop.’
‘So I have read,’ was McLevy’s obscure rejoinder but the lieutenant paid no heed and ploughed on.
‘Like most women she takes all day to perform that function. That is what Robert Forbes calculated, but he calculated wrongly.’
Roach left these words hanging in the air for he was rather proud of the way he had handled the investigation and waited for his inspector to ask the expected question, but as, at last, McLevy looked up from the piece of paper, his eyes were full of suppressed rage.
‘What have we here?’ Roach inquired, taking note of the anger and hoping he wasn’t going to witness another blast of emotion.
When Mulholland had entered upon the scene downstairs, Emily, who had developed an irrational but intense loathing for the constable as being the bringer of her father’s death, had launched, aided by the spinster sisters who chimed in like some Greek Chorus, a vehement almost frenzied attack upon the young man.
Roach had ordered him immediately from the room but the constable was shaken to the core as men often are when women let rip, and though he seemed to be holding himself together at the moment would have probably realised that romance had been somewhat nipped in the bud.
The lieutenant had been a bit shaken himself; tears often came to his wife’s eyes over dead sparrows and the like, but full-blown female grief left a man helpless.
All he could do was murmur condolences and leave spinsters, Emily, maid and cook to their collective sorrow.
You cannot bring back the dead; Orpheus had made the best effort so far, but then unfortunately looked back.
Roach certainly did not intend to make the same mistake and, with some sense of relief at misery being in the lower reaches and him on high, regarded the still figure of McLevy who held what Roach now discerned as a letter of sorts in his hand.
‘What have we here?’ repeated the lieutenant.
‘The whole story,’ was McLevy’s bitter response. ‘And what a sad, sorry business it is.’
Roach took the letter and read Robert Forbes’ somewhat spidery writing, though that may have been caused by an inner anguish.
James … God forgive me for what I am about to do. I know, for certain, that you will not. I have betrayed everything I hold dear in my life, my reputation above all.
In my loneliness, after the death of my wife, I took to visiting a house of ill repute. Not often, but enough. I formed an attachment to one of the young women, Rachel Bryden by name, and was sufficiently foolish to write her some letters of deep affection.
Oliver Garvie came to me and informed me that the girl was going to make the letters public by selling them to the newspapers. They would be my ruin and hold me up to the most savage ridicule.
He could prevent it but in return he must request a small favour. Small! Only this one time and never again. He assured me that the day the insurance money appeared in his account, I would have the letters in my hand.
It was out and out blackmail and to my eternal shame, but for the sake of my daughter, I accepted the bargain.
There’s nae foule like an auld foule.
After the constable’s visit, I realised that there was no escaping the consequence of my actions and even if Garvie wanted to try to brazen it out, I was finished with lies.
And, so I am.
This is my confession. But I cannot thole the shame of a public prosecution. I have sent Emily out shopping. She loves shopping.
The maid will discover my body. God forgive me.
By the time Emily returns, everything will be tidied up and she will be at least spared the sight of me.
This by my own hand,
Robert Forbes.
Lieutenant Roach glanced over to where the luckless Mulholland sat with the other constables to await orders, a withdrawn disconsolate figure.
A quote from Burns came into his mind.
‘The best laid schemes of mice and men, gang aft agley,’ he muttered. ‘The maid overslept and was late to arrive. Emily came back unexpectedly. Forgotten her purse. On the hall table she found a note directing the maid to go to the police, bring them back, and convey them to the study. It conveyed her instead. A sorry business indeed.’
‘I can find little pity in my heart.’
McLevy’s face was like stone and Roach was moved to plead the adjuster’s case.
‘The shame, McLevy. It broke the man.’
A mild remark which provoked its opposite as McLevy erupted into an expression of the anger he felt within; he had once witnessed another suicide as a small boy looking down at a woman who had sliced her throat like an apple and bled regardless of the horror she had left behind.
He, the son.
She, the mother.
His inheritance.
‘Shame?’ he almost snarled. ‘Who cares for shame? He could have stood up, admitted guilt, taken his punishment – who knows what friends may have rallied round?’
Roach was stung by the broadside and answered back.
‘Would you?’
McLevy fell silent and the lieutenant warmed to his theme.
‘Would even his own daughter?’
‘She never got the chance,’ was the sombre response. ‘All she saw were her father’s bare feet swinging in the air, toenails and all.’
Both men were genuinely exercised now, each seeing something of the other’s point of view but driven by an ethos that was a cornerstone in the way they saw l
ife.
‘Then what should he have done?’ Roach asked. ‘How could he break such dreadful tidings?’
‘Sat with her, told her the truth, begged her forgiveness,’ McLevy responded. ‘If she really loved him as a daughter, she would have been his support.’
‘I somehow doubt it,’ the lieutenant muttered.
‘She never got the chance one way or the other,’ the inspector growled. ‘Her birthright was sacrificed on the altar of his respectability. That is truly shameful.’
While this exchange progressed, Constable Ballantyne had made a surprise appearance at the study door and signalled Mulholland out.
He had been sent from the station to break some bad news to his inspector but had enough sense to know that a body blames the messenger.
Ballantyne had long ago distinguished the constable as being the link between lower and higher, much the same as Mercury would wing up from earth to Olympus, and so, not realising Mulholland’s agonised personal connection to the affair, delivered the intelligence such as it was, and returned to his bluebottles.
This, indeed, was the final straw for Mulholland, and, the colour fled from his rosy cheeks, he came back to inform his superiors that Oliver Garvie had unfortunately flown the coop.
His offices were empty, his house was empty save for the old retainer, and though a search would be mounted in the immediate area and then throughout Leith, he, Martin Mulholland, was not hopeful of its success.
Neither was McLevy or Roach.
It was the last brush stroke in a very black picture.
The whole room went still as if Jack Frost had laid his icy fingers upon the company and frozen them to the spot.
Then McLevy sparked into action; the state of stasis was not one of his favourites and anything is better than contemplation of the void.
He sent the stricken Mulholland plus two other constables in the direction of an address in McDonald Road and instructed them to gain entrance by hook or by crook; that accomplished they were to investigate a room at the back of the house where a man of Garvie’s description would have been renting and might be found.
