by David Ashton
‘I hear one of your girls had a wee contretemps,’ he remarked, standing in the ornate hall festooned with décor arabesque and fancy mirrors designed to flatter the clients into thinking they might be Pashas rampant and incarnate should they glance at themselves before ducking into the doorways of sin.
McLevy furnished an odd reflection in his low-brimmed bowler and it is to the mirrors’ credit that they withstood the burden of this adverse radiation without cracking into lines of distressed complaint.
‘What’s it to do with you?’ came her terse response.
Big Annie before she disappeared into the main salon shot the inspector a look as if to warn, hold onto your hat.
‘It would appear as if,’ he offered mildly, ‘there may have been some criminal intent involved.’
‘Intent?’
‘Criminal. I investigate such. That is my profession.’
There was a silence as they measured each other up.
To be truthful McLevy when he heard about some stramash in the market had jumped at the chance to abandon Mulholland in bootless pursuit round the pawnbroking fraternity for trace of stolen jewellery. The inspector’s opinion being that whoever had committed the theft was too long in the tooth to pledge the articles in such an obvious slot.
They would be fenced after the heat had died down and reappear in Aberdeen or some other far-flung outpost.
So he had left his umbrageous constable in the lurch and headed for the Just Land in the hope of a cup of Jean’s excellent coffee while ‘deducting’, as young Arthur would have it. Plus the fact that he was nosy by inclination.
‘Ye better come up,’ said Jean finally. ‘For sure I’ll never get rid of you if I leave it to natural causes.’
So, he did. Come up.
Simone lay face down in the bed, inert and silent. Her bandaged back, high up near the shoulder blade, provided a stark contrast to the lacy confines of a room more usually reserved for clients who had a yen to re-experience the warm glow of infancy.
Everywhere McLevy glanced he saw babyish frills; the coloured friezes on the wall depicted various nursery rhyme characters, one in particular, Little Bo Peep, eminently prominent, shepherd’s crook clasped firmly in one hand while she scanned the horizon for absent mutton.
For some reason, the inspector found this disconcerting so he concentrated hard upon the body in the bed.
‘She appears peaceful enough,’ he volunteered.
‘Laudanum.’
‘That would explain it.’
‘The doctor put a salve on her but he is of the opinion that the scar trace may remain.’
‘Scar?’
‘Acid. Poured down her back.’
‘Dearie me. Who would do such a thing?’
Jean did not answer. McLevy tried again.
‘Did anyone witness the culprit?’
‘Culprit?’
This seemed a feeble word to describe someone capable of such a vicious attack but Jean was also aware that McLevy was a subtle swine, especially when on a case, and might well have used the word to provoke an unwise reaction. So she held to silence.
‘Wrongdoer, then. Assailant. Nasty piece of work.’
‘Not a thing. Nobody saw a damned thing.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘Not even that.’
‘Dearie me.’
It looked as if his chances of scrounging a cup of coffee were somewhat slim, but McLevy was wondering whether to believe Jean’s assertion of this mysteriously invisible spectre who poured acid onto folks’ hinterlands because, if she did know who had done this, the person concerned would suffer a swift reprisal that had nothing to do with the law unless in the Old Testament connotation.
An eye for an eye.
Bugger the coffee, he went for blood.
‘This is your own fault, Jean,’ he said bluntly.
‘How so?’
‘The streets are hoachin’ with two things. One is the advent of mesmerism in our fair city and the other is that yourself and a certain arriviste have been spoiling for a rammy since she opened her doors.’
‘Arriviste?’
‘Don’t keep repeating whit I say. The Countess. The word is a certain French lassie broke ranks. This on the bed wouldnae be the girl by any chance?’
Jean’s face betrayed nothing but she cursed the fact that there was not a dark happening in Leith that did not reach McLevy’s ears. He had a nest of informants second only to her own, but where she garnered intelligence by understated influence of favours granted, dispensed over and under the counter like drugs in an apothecary shop, the inspector ruled by fear.
No mercy.
If he asked, you answered and many were the craven souls who sought to gain what they mistakenly hoped to be protective cover should they ever stray from the path of righteousness.
It is a human trait to lick the leather boots of power and it never gets you anything but a sore tongue.
‘What if it is the girl?’ she replied coolly.
‘You tell me,’ McLevy retorted; he had suddenly spotted the whereabouts of the sheep. They were hunched together in another frieze at a corner of the room and unless he was visually deluded, one of them, a ram no doubt, was tupping an anxious looking ewe.
‘Why should I do your job?’
But having said such, Jean proceeded to perform this very function.
‘The hand that poured the acid might not be witnessed but I believe you know the one responsible.’
‘Do I?’
The inspector’s eyes widened. Now they had changed places. She the prosecutor, he the defendant.
‘A vicious creature. Long nails. Cowardly.’
‘Tae strike from ahent, ye mean?’
‘Exactly. A dirty stinking coward.’
‘These foreign types, eh?’
‘The lowest scum. Worse than policemen.’
‘That bad?’
‘And you know the person. You know the name.’
‘And so do you,’ said James McLevy, the game over. ‘It is your contrivance this happened.’
Jean’s lips thinned but he continued apace, having spotted three ships a-sailing over the recumbent form of Simone on the far wall, so making use of nautical metaphor.
‘Ye have received a shot across your bows. A warning. The message is – give the girl back.’
‘Not a hope in hell.’
‘Then it will be war between you.’
‘I didnae start it.’
‘As always, you are the innocent party.’
‘The history of my life.’
Simone whimpered in the bed and her feet scrabbled under the covers as an animal might do when dreaming.
McLevy stared at Jean’s beautiful but impenitent face and wondered how sin left no mark on the human countenance.
‘Now, here is another warning. Ye have no proof that the Countess was behind this event and if I catch you either in the act itself or instigating attempted vengeance upon the woman, I shall have no option but throw you into the cells and thence to the Perth penitentiary.’
This provoked severe indignation and Little Bo Peep frowned as Jean muttered an expletive under her breath while the inspector walked towards the door.
‘And whit about her? How come she escapes your vile clutches?’
‘Proof,’ came the stern response. ‘If I find proof then justice will prevail.’
‘Justice?’
‘Don’t keep repeating what I say!’
As they glared at each other the door flung open and Hannah Semple burst in like an avenging angel.
She had a page of paper grasped in her mottled fingers and did not remark McLevy who had nearly been knocked over backwards by the outflung portal.
‘Mistress!’ Hannah cried. ‘See whit I’ve got. Lily Baxter pressed it in my hand, a decent wee soul for a’ she doesnae speak a word and witness the way Francine and that Simone on the bed there have been slaverin’ round one tae the other – but see what Lily gave
me!’
These were a lot of words for Hannah who tended to deal them out with care lest she find herself short on occasion, but the keeper of the keys was unaccustomed to excitement of this sort and she brandished the paper.
‘She’s a good wee drawer. Acted it all out for me. A creepy bugger at the back o’ Simone, pouring out, passing by, and here’s his likeness!’
Hannah stopped suddenly. Jean had made no move to take the paper. Her eyes seemed focused beyond as if a malignant presence was lurking.
Then a hand reached out from behind and magicked the image out of her hand.
‘If I may be so bold,’ said a voice.
McLevy held the paper to his eyes and wondered for the umpteenth time if he should risk a visit to an ocular shop.
In focus finally, he saw a figure of a fat podgy body with a huge head out of proportion, which he assumed Lily had created to augment the possibilities of identification.
The face was round, pouch-eyed, a small pouting mouth like a mole, no nose to speak of, the chin weak and the hat above this unattractive assembly a full-blown bowler unlike his low-brimmed affair.
Francine may have been the artist but Lily Baxter had a gift for caricature, no doubt about such.
‘Not a pretty sight,’ he said. ‘How high does he ascend towards heaven?’
Hannah now knew why Jean had looked like a cow stuck in a dank bog. She reluctantly raised a hand about four inches above her own stature of five feet to indicate height.
‘According to Lily,’ she muttered.
McLevy turned the page round so that Jean might share in the pictorial exhibition.
‘Recognise this sconeface?’ he asked.
‘No.’
Hannah thought to offer something but caught a glint in Jean’s eye and sniffed loudly instead.
‘Ugly bugger, eh?’ she said.
‘I don’t know him either,’ McLevy remarked. ‘So his ill favour is not of the parish. But I’ll find him if he stays above ground.’
Simone let out a small awakening groan from the bed and McLevy suddenly shot back to her side and stuck the picture before her dilated eyes.
‘D’ye recognise this malefactor?’ he asked loudly.
She squinted, and then shook her head slowly.
‘Not a visiting randie-boy to the Countess?’
‘They’re all creaking bones,’ said Jean disdainfully.
Simone shook her head once more, then her eyelids drooped and she slid back into the dream that offered a velvet cushion against inflicted agony.
The inspector gave up, shoved the paper into his coat pocket and walked back to the door where he paused for a moment like an actor about to deliver the curtain line.
‘I don’t want any dead bodies of this description found on the streets or floating in the docks.’
He pointed to yet another nursery character that had caught his attention. Fat and egg-shaped.
‘You leave Humpty Dumpty tae me.’
The door closed and he was out of sight.
In the silence, the black outline of a bird flew past the window outside and cast a shadow on the veiled curtains.
‘I’m sorry, mistress,’ Hannah muttered. ‘I didnae know and I didnae see ahent the door. The man’s a bloody menace.’
Jean’s face was thoughtful. She was beginning to map out the lines of strategy.
‘Get Lily to make another drawing,’ she said finally. ‘In fact, if we make use of carbon paper and keep her at it, we may have enough and to spare.’
‘For what?’
‘Handing out to my people. I wish to find this dirty wee gutterblood.’
Hannah nodded. Jean fixed her with a glance.
‘Earlier. You had something to say?’
‘No’ certain sure mind, but…in the teashop. At one of the tables. It might have been him.’
‘And I didn’t notice,’ Jean stated with an edge of annoyance. ‘Because I was too fixed upon the Countess.’
‘She’s a tricky customer.’
‘So is James McLevy,’ said Jean, while a fluted snore from the bed sounded as if in agreement.
Indeed, the man himself was walking through the gardens of the Just Land with much on his deceptive mind.
Despite his warning to the contrary the inspector was convinced that Jean Brash and the Countess would fight tooth and nail until one or other had the last word at the graveside of her rival.
Either woman could kill two roosters in the one second.
For a moment an image from his dream, the cloaked red figure, sprang into his senses and he glanced around swiftly lest the spectre be lurking in the shrubbery, but nothing was manifest. Yet why was his waking thought being harassed by a nightly vision?
He could not answer that, so returned to contemplation.
So be it. Then while they fought like Oberon and Titania over the changeling, he might take them both.
If they broke the law, and there was no doubt they had in the past and would in the future, a habit exacerbated by the coming conflict, if they did, he would get his chance.
A curious melancholy came upon him. For the Countess he did not give a damn but Jean Brash was a different matter.
Where would he find another decent cup of coffee?
He covered a multitude of feeling with that sentence and stopped to look into the big fishpond that Jean had recently caused to be gouged out of the harmless earth.
Women were aye making something. Never content.
Great wodges of thick, dark green ornamental leaves moved gently on the surface of the water, with some large lily pads of an uneasy yellow coloration spreading their empire like Victoria Regina.
Beneath all that vegetation lurked some – to his eyes – bloated exotic fish that had never done a hand’s turn in their life.
Sluggish, pale gold, bilious green, scarlet fins like blood in water, they cruised and nudged below the leaves.
The inspector frowned. It would be his advice to put a net of sorts over the pond to guard against the advent of a marauding heron. These fat layabouts were an easy mark.
But good advice is seldom heeded.
Why had the Countess made such a provocative move?
Who was Humpty Dumpty?
A harsh cry overhead came from a passing crow, warning anyone below: Get ready tae dree yer weird.
Suffer your fate. Complaint gets you nowhere.
McLevy moved off towards the iron gates of the Just Land and disappeared into the evening mist like a wisp of the imagination.
Now you see him, now you don’t.
11
Behold I shew you a mystery;
We shall not all sleep
but we shall all be changed.
THE BIBLE, Corinthians
In the silence of the darkened room a distant grandfather clock chimed seven times. Possibly in another venue at the modest quarters of the Edinburgh Spiritualist Society, a ghost or two had gathered to witness the whirr of a mechanical universe and the striking result of chronological certainty but in the main salon there was so far only corporeal presence and a hushed silence.
The gas burners had been dimmed to a peep so that a pale sickly light caught the occasional white shirt front or brightly pleated dress collar of the latest fashion, but the rest was subdued garmentation, gloomy and overcast as the sky had been all day.
Lieutenant Roach sat bleakly beside his rapt, attentive wife and regretted for the hundredth time that he had partaken so heartily of onions at supper. He had a weakness for fried liver, bacon and the pungent bulb of the lily family; Mrs Roach had instructed the cook accordingly because she wished to flatter his stomach into accepting what his mind would most certainly reject.
A visit to an otherworld where unseen influence held sway and ethereal spirits did not indulge themselves in offshoots of the Allium cepa.
Now he was reaping a digestive whirlwind in the form of repetitive gaseous eruptions that insisted on bursting from whichever conduit might yield t
o pressure.
The audience, of which he was an unwilling and uncomfortable participant, was seated in rows with a centre aisle facing onto a small stage where a single figure sat in a chair, illuminated from each side by a large honey-coloured candle on a simple holder.
The silence stretched.
The figure did not move.
The lieutenant smothered an inconvenient upsurge and blinked his eyes.
Surely the woman would have some kind of visitation shortly? Not that Roach would believe it for a moment but at least it would get the ball rolling towards the hole.
Three places to the rear, in fact the back row, where his massive frame would incommode no watcher behind, Conan Doyle sat between his mother Mary and Muriel Grierson. The young man was conscious of a certain emanation from Muriel’s direction that seemed somewhat odorously provocative.
A perfume most certainly but not a clean sharp cologne to bring a chap to his senses, more of a musky offering like a delicate crooked finger from a shadowed doorway.
He took a deep breath but kept his eyes fixed on Sophia Adler, whose ash-blonde hair shone behind the white veil in the candlelight like a signal to the spirits.
Magnus Bannerman had spoken first and spoken well of the gravitatio universalis, the universal fluid that linked all creatures of the cosmos and flowed through the human body, an unseen magnetic force that might connect us to these unknown worlds.
He painted a picture of a parallel existence where the departed spirits floated in suspension, desperately waiting to be conjoined with those left behind. Waiting for a call, a hand to be stretched across the great divide.
The American even found a modicum of humour. He, Magnus, was not that hand. He held his own up in the air and waggled the fingers. There was a sharp burst of laughter but Sophia, who at that moment was sitting at the side, bowed her head and Magnus quickly returned to serious mode.
Only belief could sustain contact. The credence of those watching and the intense divination of the sensitive.
From us to them. The natural. A sublime interpreter.
Doyle was impressed, but not overly so, by the spiel. He had read deeply of the spiritual world with its phenomenal possibilities and this man reminded a little of a fairground huckster. Yet he could not dismiss the fellow because he sensed that under the delivery, and it did not escape his notice that Magnus’s magnetic power might have part source in his handsome features and flashing eyes – for the women, of course, men are not so easily swayed – under the smooth hypnotic flow of words, there seemed a core of true belief.
