by David Ashton
Telfer’s hand rested on top of the filing cabinet and he drummed his fingers upon the surface as if impatient to be done with the tiresome subject of homicide.
‘Then who was responsible for Mister Gourlay’s demise?’
‘That arrives later,’ was McLevy’s flat retort. ‘Let us stick to present death.’
His tongue felt thick and heavy in the mouth, the orifice dry and clogged as if cotton wool had been stuffed inside; the pain was like a knife in his head as he struggled to find the words.
He wondered if eels were feasting on the body of the schoolmaster, the little boys still holding to his hands.
Where to begin, eh?
Retribution.
He also looked at the photo of the Tay Bridge. Never guess it was shot full of holes.
‘Did Sir Thomas know?’
‘Know?’
‘What went on at the Wormit Foundry?’
Alan Telfer’s eyes shifted to where a portrait of the great man gazed down like some biblical patriarch, the wings of hair at each side of the dome of his balding head a mischievous contrast to the full solemnity of his beard and moustache. The face as always was impassive, the eyes deep and brooding.
The secretary had to be careful here; the man before him was swaying slightly and closed his eyes as if some inner pain or conflict was pulling him apart, but what and how much did he comprehend?
‘Sir Thomas soars above the petty details. His work is on a scale that few may recognise. High above.’
‘Like Icarus?’
Alan Telfer chanced a thin smile and McLevy moved to wipe it off the man’s face.
‘The bridge has fallen. The train. Present death.’
Telfer bowed his head.
‘A terrible tragedy,’ he murmured.
‘When I questioned you some time ago about Beaumont’s Egg, you affected to know little of such material and yet you delivered regular shipments to the Wormit Foundry.’
The secretary shook his head as if this whole affair was beyond his comprehension and made no answer.
‘It was used to cover up faults in the construction of the iron girders, the very girders that fell last night and took innocent people to meet their maker.’
McLevy took a step towards Telfer and the secretary’s hand inched open the drawer.
‘Men, women and children. Drowned deep. The divers will find some, others may float to the surface and the river will keep some for itself.’
Telfer took in a lungful of air; it was as if this man had brought the very stink of fleshly corruption with him, as if the atmosphere had contracted so that there was nothing left to breathe, a contagion of mist and guilt.
‘I cannot be held responsible for an act of God,’ he declared.
‘God has nothing to do with it!’
For a moment it seemed as if McLevy was about to strike him and Telfer nerved himself to grab for the gun, but the inspector stopped and put his hand up to the back of his neck as if some inhibitor had been clamped in place.
While the man was thus rooted to the spot, Telfer recovered himself somewhat.
‘I made many visits to the Wormit Foundry but only to check the progress of the work, inspector. Anyone who says otherwise is advancing a vile defamation.’
McLevy said nothing and Telfer was emboldened enough to elaborate further.
‘You have only the word of Hercules Dunbar. A violent man of malicious temperament. How can you accept his word over mine?’
‘There will be others,’ was the muttered response. ‘I have spoken with them. And they told me of other faults. Bolts and ties shaken free and found scattered like dead rats. There will be an official inquiry. The truth will emerge and you will be brought down, Sir Thomas as well.’
‘He knows nothing!’ Telfer cried.
‘He was responsible for that bridge. He designed and built it. It is his creation.’
Alan Telfer saw suddenly a bleak and terrible future staring him in the face. His actions would destroy the only person he had ever loved.
There would be an inquiry. Everything would be revealed. Everything.
And if there was the smallest shred of hope existing, McLevy wrecked it with his next words.
‘And now we come to past murder,’ he said.
On that nightmare walk through the city, his brain had teemed with strange visions, hallucinations almost, as his unconscious mind put together the events of the night when Archibald Gourlay had died.
And now it was laid out before him like a map of destruction.
‘Dunbar saw you that night,’ he said hoarsely, swallowing hard to get enough saliva to form the words.
Words are slippery creatures.
Telfer sensed a killer blow and felt like spitting in the man’s face. How dare he come here with his slime and dirt, how dare he bring death to the Lords of Creation?
‘In the bed together,’ McLevy continued. ‘You were both asleep, you cradling Sir Thomas in your arms.’
The secretary opened his mouth to deny this, and then closed it again. There was more to come.
‘This is how it happened,’ said McLevy, putting out one hand against the edge of the desk to steady himself. ‘Dunbar pushed the old man to the floor as he related and then made his escape with the candlestick. Gourlay was confused, all at sea, a good servant though, whose first thought would be to acquaint his master of these dastardly deeds.’
The inspector laughed suddenly at his choice of words.
‘Dastardly deeds!’
The laughter turned into a gasp as a shaft of pain near split his skull and Telfer, observing the sudden appearance of agony on McLevy’s face, could only hope for more of the same. From whatever cause perhaps the man would die, the secretary thought; perhaps his head would explode into a thousand pieces and no one would put them together again.
But McLevy did put them back together. He was a policeman after all. That was his job.
‘So in the dark, frightened out of his wits, the poor old bugger throws open the bedroom door without knocking and there before his very eyes is what Hercules Dunbar had previously witnessed.
‘Perhaps he called out, “Maister, Maister, thieves abroad!” or some such thing as he rushed into the room. Sir Thomas slept on like the dead but it woke you up from your slumbers and you remarked on Gourlay’s face the knowledge of what he had that moment observed.
‘Bedfellows. A flagrant breach of custom. Brethren of the Fly as they are known in some circles.
‘Before his very eyes.
‘And Archibald Gourlay was a terrible old sweetie wife who loved to gossip, he would not be able to keep this to himself, he might even tell the mistress of the house.
‘That could not be allowed.
‘So you got out of bed and talked softly, calmly, moving towards him as he retreated, his eyes popping as he told you about the theft, perhaps even that he had recognised the man as Dunbar, eh?’
A tired smile spread across McLevy’s face as Telfer’s reaction betrayed the accuracy of that remark.
‘Then you saw your chance. Behind the old man a steep flight of stairs with stone flags below. One push. Blame it on the burglar. One push and you were safe.’
Although the other’s face gave nothing away, it was uncanny how close to the truth McLevy had come, as if he had somehow wormed his way inside Telfer’s mind.
Indeed that is what the secretary had done, stretched his hand forward, hardly touched the terrified old man who lurched back and fell to crack his skull open like an egg, the blood spilling out like soft yolk.
Telfer had watched the body twitch like a person under sufferance of a nightmare, and then grow ominously still.
Satisfied then, that all was protected once more, the secretary had returned to look at Sir Thomas as he lay securely stupefied upon the bed: the great man was addicted to sleeping draughts, which Telfer administered each night.
Without them Sir Thomas could not rest.
And Telfer lay beside him each night, in
all innocence, holding him close, protecting his genius, stroking the side of his face as you would a child.
He would lie beside his love till the morning light and then return to his own bed in the attic room.
Innocent. Only an ugly brutal world would see it otherwise or that pigmy of a wife who would arrive out of the blue with her sharp suspicious eyes, prying, eager to destroy the harmony of fellows together.
Each weekend Sir Thomas would depart for the country and Telfer was free to pursue his own predilections in some specially selected taverns by the docks where the sailors all came in.
And thus refreshed, the secretary came back to Bernard Street and harmony.
He had killed to preserve the peace. A peace that now could no longer exist.
Telfer emerged from these thoughts of dark destruction to find McLevy still before him, the man’s eyes like glowing cinders in the parchment-white face.
‘You have no proof,’ he said. ‘It is Dunbar’s word against mine.’
‘After the inquiry,’ said McLevy, a savage grin on his face, ‘you and Sir Thomas will both be fair game. Disgraced. And the murder trial will follow. The mud will stick.’
He suddenly roared with laughter, a wild berserk note in the sound.
‘Your name is mud!’
This phrase had been once thrown at McLevy and it came back into his head with a vengeance.
The sound he produced was more like the snarl of an animal than human laughter; it filled the study with a mocking, gleeful contemptuous wall of noise that quite unhinged any scraps of composure Alan Telfer had managed to retain.
He lunged for the gun but the inspector, despite his fatigue, had earlier noted the secretary to be enamoured of the sliding area of that part of the desk and was across in a fierce swift movement to wrest the revolver from the man’s nerveless fingers.
McLevy looked down at the implement with a deal of disdain.
‘More like a lady’s gun,’ he remarked. ‘Still, I suppose it might do the trick.’
He laid it on the desk on top of the drawings.
‘Jist in case they blow away when the storm winds arrive. I believe they’re on the way.’
Alan Telfer stood before him like a man stripped naked and for a moment there appeared on McLevy’s face what might almost have passed for a look of compassion.
Then it passed when he remembered the frightened pitiful countenance of Archibald Gourlay and the mother at the Tay Bridge station, terror in her eyes, beseeching him for a certainty he could not provide.
‘I’ll see you in court,’ he said, turned abruptly and made to go. But when he got to the closed door, comically enough, he twisted the handle the wrong way round and had to struggle before wrenching the thing open.
At the doorway he paused for a last word to Telfer.
‘Ye look like a ghost,’ he remarked, and then was gone.
Telfer waited till he heard the outside door slam shut and then moved to the desk and sat down on one of the high stools. This was his. He always sat here and Sir Thomas on the other. Always.
He reached across to the gun, picked it up and peered into the muzzle.
It was clean, as it should be for he, Alan Telfer, was a meticulous man.
He shot from the gun on a regular basis. There was a spot on the remote Leith shoreline where he would go, place a rusty can or whatever he could find in the washed-up debris upon a rock and sight carefully along the barrel.
And then he would press the trigger.
It was a solitary almost childlike occupation where each hit on target was greeted with a suppressed exclamation of pleasure.
His father had been an army man as well as an enthusiastic sadist. His mother had died in the line of duty. Perhaps it was his father’s head he was lining up in his sights.
Now he had a different objective in mind.
Even if Sir Thomas survived the inquiry, and Telfer knew the faults in manufacture and construction that the great man had overlooked in the progress towards grandeur; even if he came out with some reputation intact, his unwitting involvement in a murder trial and the squalid revelations that would be implied in the popular press would completely destroy the name and reputation of Sir Thomas Bouch.
That must not happen.
He, Alan Telfer, would remove the cause.
And a further benefit: people would assume he had committed the act from guilt; the Beaumont’s Egg factor would deflect much of the blame on to him.
It was a pity Sir Thomas would not know of his sacrifice but he could not risk leaving any written letter in case it fell into the wrong hands.
Besides he must do this quickly while his nerve held.
All this had flashed through his mind as he turned the revolver and pressed it into his open mouth.
He remembered as a small boy, a tale in the regiment when a captain who had embezzled the mess funds had blown his head to pieces. But that was with a rifle and a terrible bloody mess.
This would be neat as a cabin boy.
And yet he hesitated. What if the discharge lacked sufficient power? What if the bullet did not reach the brain but lodged somewhere else on the journey?
As a train delayed for a station.
‘Do it,’ said a voice.
Margaret Bouch stood in the doorway her gypsy eyes filled with cold hatred.
Alan Telfer gazed back at her with the same icy loathing. The bitch must have listened at the door, he thought, and for a moment was tempted to spend a bullet and shoot her where she stood.
But there had been enough damage done and she would not reveal the secret to preserve her own name.
Though when he was gone, she would rule.
However there was one consolation.
The innocent comfort he had provided for her sleeping husband she would turn in her mind into something sordid and with any luck the loathing would lodge there and torture the woman to the end of her days.
With any luck.
Once more he lifted the gun and stuck the barrel hard against the roof of his mouth, his eyes unblinking upon her.
Sir Thomas Bouch looked down upon them both; the third player in a twisted triangle.
‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Do it, or I will.’
Outside in the street James McLevy levered himself away from the street door; he had collapsed back against it after banging the portal shut; the resultant noise rang through his head and near shattered his skull in two.
‘Never slam other folk’s doors, Jamie McLevy. It shows a lack of good breeding and impresses not one soul!’
That’s what Jean Scott had often counselled him and she, as in all things, was correct and proper.
Like a sailor in a heavy swell, he lurched from side to side as he moved away from the door heading for the docks where he knew of a tavern that rarely closed.
He would knock at the rearwards door, be recognised, admitted, a hooker of peat whisky would be laid before him in a small back room with perhaps a slice of black pudding or the poor man’s meal of salt herring and potatoes.
And for a moment in his miserable life, he might find some rest.
It was a still night, so the shot when it came from above, sounded like the crack of doom.
McLevy looked up at the lighted window of the study and nodded approval.
Of course he might never find Hercules Dunbar and without the man’s testimony there would be no trial for the murder of Archibald Gourlay, the whole thing being surmise on his part.
In fact he doubted, even with Dunbar, that Lieutenant Roach would consider moving to trial against one of his own kind, disgraced or not.
But best not to mention all this to Alan Telfer, just pile on the guilt and leave the gun in plain view.
Retribution.
It made perfect sense.
Said the madman.
This night he had no more thoughts to think, feelings to feel, or death to bring.
Tomorrow he would lay some flowers on Jean Scott’s grave. Winter ro
ses. Incarnadine.
As he walked off into the darkness Margaret Bouch watched from a corner of the window, ignoring the smell of cordite and the corpse slumped over the desk behind her.
There had been a little blood but the bullet had performed manfully; the man was dead no doubt about it.
She had gazed into his baleful eyes before closing them with two delicate fingers.
There was no doubt that the man deserved to die. She and the inspector had delivered Telfer from his own evil.
It would be their secret. Never told. Inside their minds, for ever.
And so she sang, as she watched the figure in the street below.
‘Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter,
Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter,
Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter,
Earl-aye in the morning.’
Of course the captain’s daughter was another name for the lash of a cat o’ nine tails and the drunken sailor would suffer horribly for his misdeeds but, as she sang, a single tear for some obscure reason, trickled down her face.
Though she was not the crying kind …
34
It is one thing to show a man that he is in error,
and another to put him in possession of truth.
JOHN LOCKE,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
McLevy slurped at his coffee and perused what he had just written in his diary.
Some days had passed since that stramash with the mistress of the Just Land but it had got the blood moving that night and, having returned to the station to agree with Lieutenant Roach a certain course of action for curing the love-sickened Constable Mulholland, he had come back to his lodgings to clarify some details in his case notes as regards the warehouse fire.
He had then checked the seagoing time of a certain ship, the Dorabella in Leith docks, which was bound for Argentina in a few days’ time, and had formulated a plan of campaign.
This involved waiting.
In the meantime both his forces and Jean Brash’s spies had fine combed the city for three days and nights to no avail. The fugitives were not to be found.
McLevy had not been surprised.
