Nor Will He Sleep

by David Ashton

  Beneath the dimpled, or in more manly terms, cleft chin was where the real trouble lay.

  The heart.

  Some years before, the inspector, after laying low a brute of a killer by dint of shooting the bugger on top of a roof while receiving a simultaneous battering, had commenced to experience various shafts of pain in the chest and innards. These shafts were sharp and took the breath away.

  After suffering for many years as a man is apt to do with what he does not wish to acknowledge, this thorn in his flesh became more insistent and harder to disguise from such as Mulholland and Lieutenant Roach at the station.

  McLevy began to suspect that Roach, not a man noted for his perception of other’s woes, was giving him the odd little sideways look, so the inspector decided enough was enough and went to see the doctor.

  A doctor in Glasgow of course; Edinburgh was a village for gossip and there’s nothing the Scots enjoy more than the cataloguing of other folk’s ailments.

  Alexander Pettigrew was the reconnoitred specialist: an attenuated yet boisterous fellow whose false teeth flew in and out of his mouth with alarming rapidity.

  The inspector had grudgingly bared his upper body to be poked and prodded, suffered an interrogation as regards his dietary habits, and even at one point been cross-examined on the subject of sexual activity.

  Pettigrew clacked his teeth happily at the baleful glare this question produced – nothing irritates the male Caledonian more than enquiries into the activity of nether regions.

  The doctor finally sat down at his desk while McLevy donned his shirt and jacket, then put his medical fingers together to form a barricade and then beamed.

  ‘Your heart,’ he pronounced, ‘is like an old carthorse that has been hauling a heavy load up too many braes, its poor hooves striking sparks from the cobblestones, the beast frothing at the mouth, badly fed and worse treated.’

  This created a vivid picture in McLevy’s mind except that it was himself he envisaged, lugging a scaffie cart up Coal Hill while the criminal classes of Leith jeered and threw big dods of mud at his suffering carcass.

  But who was driving the vehicle? When he looked back, he saw a bulky figure silhouetted against the dull sky – the man was wearing a low brimmed bowler and brandishing a whip.

  Pettigrew at the desk bore a fixed smile on his face as if it were cemented; in fact the only time the doctor had frowned in any way was when McLevy had described his plethora of tavern provender augmented by many mugs of coffee, each furnished with four to six large sugars, that he gulped during the day and especially at night.

  Having exhausted his carthorse simile, the physician moved in for the kill.

  ‘Mend your ways,’ he declared with a hint of the Old Testament, ’or the Grim Reaper will mend them for you.’

  His patient seemed unimpressed. Pettigrew clarified.

  ‘Death. Will strike you down.’

  ‘I deal wi’ death every day,’ muttered McLevy.

  ‘You are an undertaker by occupation?’

  ‘Of a kind.’

  McLevy had volunteered nothing in terms of his job.

  ‘It causes you a measure of strain?’

  ‘More like mortal trepidation – from time to time.’

  The healer shook his head in cheerful sorrow. ‘Then you must give up the profession!’

  The atmosphere in the consulting room changed suddenly as if an icy ghost had slid in, and the doctor found himself pinned back by the bleak menace in the opposite eyes.

  ‘My profession is my life.’

  The flat statement lay on the desk between them like a fallen angel, until Pettigrew leapt to his feet and pointed an accusing finger from his tall lanky frame.

  ‘Do you sleep?’ he demanded.

  ‘Whit?’

  ‘With such caffeine ingestion – do you sleep?’

  The inspector considered this.

  ‘But rarely,’ he replied.

  The doctor waved his arms in triumph as if he had diagnosed the disease.

  ‘Then worry no more about your aforesaid life. Either change your ways my dear sir, or you will attain the longest sleep known to man. An everlasting quiescence. Oblivion!’

  On that dramatic note, a sour-faced McLevy had paid the Messenger of Doom, quit the scene and travelled back to Edinburgh as fast as the train could take his newly maligned shell of humanity.

  The present incumbent of this cracked and fissured carapace left a grumpy face plus Glasgow memories in the mirror and crossed to a recessed cupboard, there to unlock the door panel with the gravity of a parish priest about to delve into the sacraments.

  Here he kept mementoes of past cases all related for the most part to homicidal intent; either accomplished or abandoned depending on which way the hangman’s rope had swung.

  In pride of place was a narrow red ledger, itself a product of the relatively innocuous crime of embezzlement though it did involve a respectable suicide; this he carefully removed to lay upon the scratched surface of his battered old table-cum-writing desk.

  Above the table was a large window that looked down from a height over the gleaming, mysterious city – this was his family, his keeping and his fate. Auld Reekie.

  He sat, pursed his lips solemnly, slugged back some cold coffee from a mug, dipped his pen and began.

  Diary of James McLevy.

  7th May, 1887.

  It has been some years since I ceased to write in this book and my motives for stopping are as puzzling to me now as the reason why I recommence.

  The past wreaks vengeance on the present.

  These words have been running in my head all day. If I set them down on paper, perhaps they may let me be.

  They are accompanied by a dull feeling of dread, nothing you could pin with a finger but lurking as though perceived by someone else who has deposited the pending catastrophe with me for safe keeping.

  Lurking.

  And another thing.

  Why is it that iniquity reveals nothing in the visage?

  Here’s me, a bastion of law and order looking like a demolished edifice compared wi’ Jean Brash who keeps the most notorious bawdy-hoose in Edinburgh, revels in all levels of corruption and yet has the appearance of a milkmaid at dawn. Well, nearly.

  Is there some toothless old harpy in the Just Land to whom she transfers the marks of sin? Who sits sookin’, plook ridden, at some crumbly sugar biscuit in the darkness of the cellar? I must take scrutiny, next time I visit.

  Jean Brash. The woman is untouched. Like a picture in a frame.

  But I bear the scars of every murderous crime I have set my seal across. They sear me. Old yapping ghosts.

  Scars of body and soul.

  A curious innocence in my heart yearns for redemption.

  There is a wild energy prowling in the city. Young. Dangerous. A roving, vagabond energy. The devil is on the loose and who knows what flavours he will throw in the pot?

  As usual I am in the middle but I feel the ground shaky as if the centre lacks cohesion.

  Oh to be young again. What a foolish thought.

  McLevy carefully blotted this guddle of half-baked insights and closed the book.

  A noise from the streets below brought him to the window and he looked from his attic room over the black slates drenched by the slant rain of May, down at the torches flickering in the distance by the harbour.

  A youthful reckless energy. Hazardous to itself and other folk or was that just the opinion of an old man whose voice echoed in the fumbling darkness?

  Ach tae hell with it. He defiantly poured some tarry dregs from his fire-scorched coffee pot into the mug and let the humid tincture trickle through tombstone teeth as the enamel rim brushed annoyingly against the stalwart bristle of his moustache.

  But there was scant doubt. Heart or no heart, pain or no pain – the devil had come to town.

  What mask was he wearing?

  Chapter 3

  Watchman, what of the night?

  Wat
chman what of the night?

  The Watchman said,

  The morning cometh, and also the night.

  Isaiah, ch21, v11. The Bible

  A more piratical hirsute adornment under a very different nose, long and finely shaped, sifted the fumes of nicotine through its filaments as the owner of both neb and fusker gazed thoughtfully out at the respectable street below.

  Heriot Row was a fine example of rectitude rewarded; it may have led at one end to the slightly suggestive curves of Abercrombie Place but of itself was straight as a die.

  His father would have approved, no doubt still did approve, lying himself undeviating in the coffin, hands folded, good book closed for the journey, cold white face arranged so that demonic senility had left no trail.

  An empty space.

  Thomas Stevenson, father of the miscreant Robert Louis, was waiting for his burial in some days’ time.

  Patience father. It will come. And I shall see to it. A splendid affair. No expense spared. Clouds of glory.

  Stevenson sucked a long draft of smoke deep into his waiting lungs, a blessing they still functioned to purpose, and held it close like a lover. It crept into the crevices of his bony shipwrecked chest, calming the nerves, soothing the feelings, until released with a whoosh.

  Leaving behind?

  Another empty space, my friend.

  He tapped the cigarette ash off into his palm, regarded the tiny mound gravely, then blew it away towards nowhere.

  The whole house was asleep, thank God; his wife Fanny no doubt engaged in phantom operatic adventures provoked by her instinctual organs; his mother Margaret hopefully not actually slumbering in widow’s weeds, though she had taken to mourning like a duck to water, slept the righteous sleep; and Lloyd, Fanny’s son but not his, would be snoring like a log.

  Like a log.

  Good boy. A consecration if he but knew it. Sleep.

  And Robert Louis? The famous Robert Louis? Left with and by himself, which, to tell truth, was no great hardship.

  Peace to torture himself with guilty imaginings, amuse same with the observed traits of humankind, or bear witness to the wellspring whence the strange beings that peopled his tales of adventure and woe issued forth, unbidden, at times most terrifying, but never unwelcome.

  From the depths they arose and to the depths they descended.

  All grist to the mill.

  He sucked once more upon his self-rolled, Papier Persan, tobacco conduit to the stars and murmured in the half-light.

  Come lend me an attentive ear,

  A startling moral tale to hear,

  Of Pirate Rob and Chemist Ben,

  And different destinies of men.

  Indeed. Different destinies.

  They had arrived and for two days the old man had stared at Stevenson as if he had sprouted from the moon.

  Then Thomas passed over to that blessed veil where along with the Almighty, various Presbyterian dignitaries would no doubt be waiting to hail him for a life well spent, consult their pocket watches and congratulate the devout traveller for arriving bang on time.

  Pre-destined.

  Or an empty space.

  Faites vos jeux.

  Louis shivered suddenly; someone had walked over his grave. To see that face empty of meaning, eyes dilated, jaw agape, made a brutal mockery of conscious existence.

  In many ways he had feared his father, especially the irrational rages that contrasted with the decent generosity and kindness shown to his wayward son.

  The dark forces he rode like a rider in the storm, in his father had been buried under pillars of rectitude.

  And at the end, had they not taken vengeance?

  Put his senses to fire and pillage, destroyed the inner essence, gouged out the soul and left a vacant carcass to rattle and creak like a haunted house.

  Ahh!

  Tobacco had burnt to the stub and singed the tapered authorial fingers. Stevenson swiftly extracted another cigarette from his case and passed the immortal flame from one to the other. Cigarettes without intermission, save for when coughing and kissing – both of these carry sufficient danger by themselves, wouldn’t you say, old chap?

  He flipped the stumpy remnant out through the open window and watched with some malicious glee as it sparkled like a sinful firefly upon the respectable flagstone before a drenching rain put paid to further adventures.

  Edinburgh rain was like no other. He had returned but a few days and already his body ached, nose constantly dripping.

  How could this hero, creator of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde into which it was rumoured that Queen Victoria herself had inserted royal fingers to ruffle these pages of charted depravity, how could this hero stand before his household gods with a snottery nose?

  Louis caught an errant nasal effusion in a large white handkerchief and regarded himself in that part of the window pane not covered by the heavy curtains. It was a ghostly image: pale, long face like a disappointed donkey; drooping but sly moustache; prominent bony forehead; and dark eyes that darted right and left before settling once more into a fixed perusal of the countenance, heart-shaped; the hair long and brushed back from the somewhat large ears.

  Earlier that day, in his father’s desk, he had come upon some cached photographs, posed formally with Thomas who stared at the camera as if preparing for a life of filial disenchantment over the doleful creature with an old man’s head on a young body standing there beside him.

  Stevenson had felt a sudden piercing to the heart, replaced the images and closed the drawer.

  Enough. Enough regrets for this night.

  He struck a sudden comical pose, cigarette held aloft like a holy relic, and pranced like one bereft of wits before inhaling once more with bravura.

  That’s more like it. That’s the ticket.

  A wry smile spread across the other’s face in the window pane – what a fool to behold.

  A dolt. And a workhorse.

  He ignored the faint sneer that had appeared in the visage opposite and peered past it into the dark night. The young men who had gathered earlier to jostle in Heriot Row for a glimpse of ghostly legend at the upstairs fenestra, had been driven away by the incessant rain, or perhaps they had better mischief in mind.

  As a law student he had prowled the streets in licentious drunken gallivants, but these medical boys would seem to have codified their pursuits into tribal lines.

  Somewhere in the house a clock chimed midnight and in the silence each separate sound spread dark vibrations that permeated one after another, into his very being.

  A sound of foreboding.

  As if something was being cradled and created, an evil likeness in his name.

  And then wrenched from him to have another life and spread atrocities in the wet and bitter night.

  The man known to one and all as Robert Louis Stevenson pulled himself out of that particular pit to drag some more emollient tobacco into his lungs, let it seep into every possible pore and then stood quietly in the shrouded room.

  Let it come. Whatever it be. Above or below nature. He did not fear the unknown.

  It lay within him like a hungry beast.

  Let it come.

  Chapter 4

  Death like a narrow sea divides,

  This heavenly land from ours.

  Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs

  Four faces were to be observed in the Cold Room at Leith Station.

  One belonged to Lieutenant Robert Roach, an elongated snouty affair, not unlike an irritated alligator. His long jaw twitched unhappily as he glanced at his erstwhile subordinate who shook the raindrops off a heavy coat and sucked thoughtfully at one end of his moustache.

  James McLevy. Roach had known him for nigh on fifteen years and still the man was a mystery. There were rumours the inspector was a secret Papist, frequented opium dens, most certainly had a strange and twisted relationship with Jean Brash who ran the best bawdy-hoose in Edinburgh, and had kil
led men with his bare hands.

  The lieutenant was prepared to discount the opium since he was the one who had sent McLevy in under cover; as regards bare hands the level of violence he had witnessed unleashed, even at a distance, would always make such a possibility as long as it was directed at the criminal classes Roach was prepared to grant a little leeway – but in his Presbyterian bones he sensed a strange otherness of religion in the man.

  It might be a mere Jacobite leaning but with Pope Leo XIII daring to celebrate his priestly version some months after the oncoming Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, it was as well to be on guard.

  The House of Windsor had been making conciliatory moves in the Vatican’s direction but these moves had not crossed over the border.

  Nor would they ever.

  As regards Jean Brash – that was a mystery beyond all powers of deduction.

  One thing was for sure. The man might look like a midden, scorn authority like a street keelie, ignore the wise advice of his superior officer to the point of blind insolence, but James McLevy was a Thieftaker. The best in the city, the best Roach had ever witnessed.

  A combination of the aforesaid violence, fierce forensic intelligence and weird insight cut through murder and crime like a knife through butter.

  Not that Roach would ever admit it. Or deal praise. But nothing pleased him better than seeing his Chief Constable Sandy Robb at the Masonic monthly gathering, to murmur such as . . . The Pearson case is closed. The poison the judge used to kill his butterflies was utilised by his own wife. As my inspector observed . . . hoist with his own petard.

  Of course this deadly ability was buttressed by the owner of the face on Roach’s other side.

  Martin Mulholland towered a good eight inches over the inspector and four over his own lieutenant. He had an open candid countenance that bore no trace of the myriad murders and bloody adventures through which he had trailed his large boots. The bar-room brawls he had taken part in alongside his inspector with lethal hornbeam stick to hand was part of Leith legend. Still a humble constable, he had refused promotion many times because he preferred to be on the saunter with McLevy to any other activity.