by David Ashton
Older members of St Stephen’s Church muttered darkly it was the devil dancing in the dark of night that moved the benches, his cloven hooves beating a rhythm that resonated then translated into sinful shifting; John, though he nodded politely, kept his own counsel.
As he did in most things. A quiet watchful young man bound to follow his father Jonas into the ordained ministry of the Church of Scotland, he was of average height, a stocky build, sandy-haired with a calm disposition.
A certain quiet humour occasionally informed his words but in contrast to his father’s more public persona, he was a private soul.
He looked across to where the wiry figure of Jonas Gibbons stood talking with the two policemen, one indeed rising like a steeple above the minister, and then John knelt down not in prayer but to run his eye along the line of the next pew.
It was also out of true.
Satan’s slant in the House of God.
On the outside St Stephen’s Church faced the elements with the usual equanimity of Craigleith stone, hewed sharp to cut through inclement weather.
A broad flight of steep forbidding steps provided occasion to contemplate myriad sins as the faithful laboured upwards to the main door, above which, rising a good 160 feet into the air, was the bell tower.
It pointed uncompromisingly to heaven and set at the top was a clock face to inform the passing citizen just how much time was left in this life.
St Stephen’s resembled not so much a house of worship as a fortress of religion. Had there been slits for the archers of God to shoot through at the unbelievers not one devout eyebrow would have been raised.
For this was a deity who valued defence.
Preferably in advance of attack.
The interior shunned ostentation; it was set in octagonal lines with doors leading to staircases that spider-webbed upwards to mysterious destinations. At the back similar doors opened onto descending stairwells that guided to rooms where children schooled and mothers plotted sales of work. After that the stairs plunged into the murky depths of the foundations.
What was hidden in those depths?
Something forgotten or still remembered?
Jonas Gibbons stood below the high-imbedded pulpit whence, in deep resonant tones, he preached fiery sermons that attracted the godly from his dreich rivals all over the city, and bowed his head in sorrow.
‘Poor woman,’ he murmured, though it was close to a rumble. ‘She has gone to the bosom of a merciful Lord.’
‘It’s not where she’s gone that concerns me,’ said McLevy. ‘So much as who sent her there.’
The minister seemed to accept the remark at face value.
‘Thou shalt not kill,’ he responded.
‘Not if I’ve got anything to do with it,’ grunted the inspector and signalled to Mulholland, who produced a crumpled piece of paper from his tunic pocket, which he smoothed out best he could and then presented.
It had been agreed between them that the constable would retain any pieces of evidence, since McLevy inevitably misplaced them in the crevices of an untidy attire or lost them in his station cupboard.
‘Would this bring anything to your mind, sir?’ asked Mulholland.
Gibbons peered down at the scrap and then brought it up closer; he was somewhat short-sighted but considered glasses a vanity. Which way the vanity worked was open to question, however he let out a cry of recognition.
‘I am almost certain. It is from my own bible!’
‘Is it missing a page then?’ enquired McLevy suspiciously.
‘No. But – oh – poor Mistress Carnegie.’
‘If you might just – proceed to the nub, sir.’
Gibbons nodded at Mulholland’s polite dig in the ribs and sighed.
‘The Good Book. Its back-binding had come loose.’
‘No doubt through reputable usage,’ encouraged Mulholland.
‘No – it was the moths,’ replied Gibbons. ‘Mistress Carnegie offered to take it home for repair. She was very handy with a needle. And thread. My own wife, Martha, lacks that ability.’
‘Very sad,’ said McLevy. ‘Well there was no sign of any book, good or otherwise.’
‘I’m afraid that is correct, sir,’ added Mulholland. ‘The killer may possibly have taken it.’
‘My personal bible? In the hands of a murderer?’
‘Unless he chucked it in the harbour,’ McLevy hazarded.
The minister’s head came up sharply at this but Mulholland diverted potential indignation.
He had summed up Jonas Gibbons as a man who admired the sound of his own voice. The man was small of stature and had a handsome broad face, with mutton chop whiskers luxuriant in the Lord’s name that formed a furze under the neck but left the strong chin bare. A formidable personality, but despite all this a certain childlike need for attention.
Women are often sore attracted to such men and the older ladies of the church no doubt fluttered around like insects to the flame.
‘Are you absolutely certain sure, sir,’ ventured the constable, ‘that the page is from your book? It may be vital as the case unfolds.’
Gibbons nodded acknowledgement, then called over his son and acquainted the young man with the sad facts. John, after strong scrutiny, confirmed the provenance of the page.
‘It is from my father’s bible I have no doubt,’ he said gravely. ‘The spine had weakened.’
‘Was the page clutched in her poor hand?’ asked the minister.
‘Not quite,’ answered McLevy, who had a sudden flash of the open mouth and his own hooked, inserted fingers.
All four of them looked down at the stone floor as if the body had been transported there.
Agnes Carnegie’s presence lay before them and each saw a different spectral version of the crumpled corpse.
In McLevy’s mind, she looked up accusingly, her mouth still gaping from his horny-handed intrusion and her voice rasped out.
I wait tae be avenged. I demand it. Whit kind o’ Thieftaker are you? Where is my vengeance? Sappie-heid!
‘The Lord gives, the Lord taketh away,’ the elder Gibbons intoned.
‘And the police have to aye be finding the solution,’ the inspector muttered. ‘We’d be obliged if you might provide us with the woman’s address – ’
‘Wait!’
Gibbons held up his hand as if struck like Moses on the mountain.
‘Were not the students by the harbour last night?’
‘A known fact, sir,’ Mulholland replied tersely.
‘Could not their wild and immoral behaviour have led to this unfortunate pass? Striking down the godly in their jealous frenzy? Satan knows no bounds!’
‘That is true, father,’ said John quietly. ‘But there is perhaps a distance between wild behaviour and the taking of a life.’
He looked McLevy straight in the eyes, an unusual act for a member of the public in the presence of a policeman, and nodded.
‘I will fetch the address from our records.’
As John moved off his father smiled proudly.
‘A good boy,’ he announced. ‘Fruit of my loins.’
Trust you tae take a’ the credit, thought McLevy somewhat unkindly. It was to the minister’s good name that he toiled hard amongst the poor in the extremities of the city, but he had, to McLevy’s thinking, the fault inherent in most men of God.
What was it Mulholland’s Aunt Katy would say?
Once you think you’ve got the inside track, there’s no gettin’ past you.
The constable’s consideration, however, had shifted once more towards the accuracy of the blows meted out to the pitiful Agnes. What kind of mind would produce exaction of such violence?
Was it purely accidental or had she somehow provoked the attack?
If accidental, the investigation would be a long haul but if not? The blows, the insertion, might well betoken an amoral, cold and calculating mind.
From which direction?
Another long haul.
&nb
sp; He looked around this church where everything seemed to have its place.
‘God and Satan – a similar precision,’ said McLevy aside, as if he had somehow read Mulholland’s thoughts.
A side door opened and three women came through with blameless tread. In the lead was a frail birdlike creature and it was to her that Gibbons directed a heartfelt cry.
‘Martha – a most terrible happening!’
He moved swiftly over to the three, spoke softly, raised his hands as cries of outrage and fear came in response, and then bowed his head.
The women fell to their knees before him as if stunned, Gibbons clasped his hands together and the sound of prayers arose like bees buzzing around one of Mulholland’s hives.
John, who had returned with a slip of paper, took one glance at the scene, another at the police, then also fell dutifully to his knees and prayed for the departed soul.
McLevy and Mulholland stood there.
It was too far down for the constable, and the inspector lacked the inclination.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Chapter 8
Ah, Raleigh! you can afford to confess yourself less than some, for you are greater than all. Go on, and conquer noble heart! But as for me, I sow the wind and I suppose I shall reap the whirlwind.
Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!
Stevenson watched the backs of the two figures as they moved along Heriot Row, and regretted he had been unable to glimpse the faces.
One, like a beanpole, was crowned with an absurdly small helmet, while the other bore a heavy coat and had the rolling gait of an animal new emerged from its lair.
Police, from the uniform of the tall one, but what struck the writer was the unhurried stroll of both, as if they had all the time in the world.
‘Louis?’
Fanny’s voice buzzed in his ear like a wasp and drew him away from the window.
She and his mother Margaret were seated in two armchairs, one ensconced in mourning weeds, the other with a black silk scarf draped round her neck but other than this, more accoutred for a climb up Arthur’s Seat.
No, he was being unfair, but his wife’s dress sense would never chime with respectable fashion any more than his own. Fanny was a buccaneer; in his imagination he saw her boarding a grappled ship, cutlass atween the teeth, ready to loose forth rapine and riot –
‘Louis?’
This time the wasp had grown mightily and almost filled the room with angry vibration.
Stevenson lit a cigarette with great care and deliberation, knowing this would provoke but unable to help himself. He had been immured in the family home for days now and felt a most profound desire to have a tantrum, kick the polished furniture, disgrace himself by passing water in the aspidistra and generally behave like a spoiled child.
‘Yessss?’ he drawled.
The bone of contention was that Robert Louis had decreed that his father’s funeral was to be a grand affair with over a hundred guests and at least forty carriages.
A heartfelt tribute or compensation for a meagre internal mourning?
Not an easy question to contemplate or answer.
The reception would be here, hands shook, heads shaken, plenty of manly forbearance and womanly lace handkerchiefs; then it would be on to the New Calton Burying Ground on the other side of the city, where Thomas would be laid to rest in a manner befitting a man of constructional bent and strong Christian beliefs.
His own father Robert already lay there with the inscription, there remaineth therefore a rest in the people of God.
Another lighthouse engineer.
It had, on a recent feverish night, occurred to Stevenson that he might propose the erection of a small pharos near the family vault that would act as a warning beacon ’gainst grave robbers but he had thought better of it when dawn laid her grey, grim fingers in the sky.
This was the problem.
Stevenson had started the task full of vigour and vim, organising, overseeing, full of the traditional ancestral energy that supposedly descends on the son when his father slips the leash of life, but Messrs Phlegm and Mucus had begun to follow him round like a black dog, so that he felt every breath was like drowning in a catarrhal mud flat.
Now the arrangements were being borne by his mother, wife, and cousin Bob who was remarkably unaffected by the noxious clime and seemed to have taken over the role as man of the house.
He and Louis had been inseparable as young rascals, but as men grow older they do not necessarily improve, and Stevenson could sense a certain tension. It cut him to the core that fame and good fellowship do not easily walk hand in hand.
Jealousy lies dormant even in the best of friendships.
Yet for the moment, Bob was captain of the ship, with Fanny an extremely reluctant figurehead as baleful mermaid, and his mother a steady hand upon the tiller.
This image comforted Stevenson, but it had to be admitted that though the crew had accepted responsibility that did not mean they liked the charter.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
Not at all.
He came out of this reverie to find the gaze of both women firmly fixed upon him; Fanny smouldering like a pre-eruptive volcano and his mother’s regard tinged with worry that there might be two funerals instead of just the one.
To augment the point he took a deep draught of his cigarette and coughed like a gutter drain.
Margaret closed her eyes and Fanny narrowed hers. She was well aware of the manoeuvrability of her spouse, and while she did not doubt he was indeed internally affected, he was not quite at death’s door.
Not yet, and she hoped not ever.
For she loved him dearly, in her way.
But he was tricky as Mercury.
‘Louis – you have not said a word?’
‘Haven’t I?’ he murmured. ‘I expect so.’
‘There is much to do.’
Stevenson swallowed along with the phlegm a waspish retort that he could not fail to be aware of this since it was pushed in his face on an hourly basis. He contented himself with a noncommittal, ‘I expect there is.’
Fanny was not to be deflected.
‘You spend your time looking out of the window.’
‘I’m hoping the weather might change.’
Margaret, who was a decent, sweet soul and in time to come would prove to be as hardy an adventurer as the two in her presence, sensed there might be a storm brewing that had nothing to do with weather.
She had developed this intuition through near forty years of marriage with Thomas, whose sudden intemperate outbursts of rage often directed at or caused by his wayward son had to be subsumed and cradled, but, of course, never dealt with directly.
That was not in her marriage vows.
A soft answer turneth away wrath.
‘I wonder if you remember, Louis,’ she remarked gently, ‘a saying of your father’s – All hands to the pump?’
‘Maritime, I believe,’ replied her son. ‘He often went to sea. To tame the wild ocean. I myself enjoyed being under the surface. The vasty deep.’
Twenty years before, he had gone diving. In Wick of all places, where half the population spoke Gaelic and the other half didn’t speak much at all.
Despite bone-crushing weights and great bolted helmet he had found the experience exhilarating.
Weightless, womblike.
Like a world of dreams.
All hands to the pump, eh?
Stevenson had a sudden onrush of anger and grief; his father’s face swam before him, slack-jawed in his dying bed like an imbecilic gargoyle, like a gargoyle!
He wrenched away from the women back to the window lest hot tears betray a wounded heart.
From the presented back view they watched a lazy plume of cigarette smoke rise into the velvet curtain while his voice floated, itself like an insubstantial vapour in the air.
‘Where is Lloyd? Where is my bonny boy?’
This was Fanny’s son, who had rece
ntly declared he might wish to follow the compromised occupation of story-telling despite, in truth, being somewhat lazy by nature and showing little gift or talent for the calling.
He adored Stevenson as a father figure and the older man revelled in such adoration, returning a deep affection of rare quality.
The young man was possibly and wisely staying out of the firing line.
‘He is occupied,’ Fanny answered briefly.
‘At what, pray tell?’
‘Writing. Lloyd is writing.’
‘Dear me.’
Stevenson watched the streaks of rain slide grudgingly down the glass and swore inwardly that by hook or by crook, he would be out on the streets tonight.
The darkness might be his disguise.
Enough of the four walls of rectitude.
By hook or by crook.
‘Writing?’ he said with grave intonation. ‘Dear me. What a strange and unrewarding pursuit.’
Chapter 9
Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful jollity,
Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathèd smiles.
John Milton, L’Allegro
The operation had been performed with near military precision.
A grimy carriage whose driver wore a shapeless hat pulled down over his eyes, drew up near the immaculate, gold tipped wrought iron gates, which stood sentry over the back garden of the Just Land.
Some six young men disgorged, all muffled up, two carrying most carefully a small cauldron of tar, the other four each a bulky sack that they bore with ease.
The cauldron was set down on the wet pavement, not fissured, not cracked, for this was an area well kept by the authorities whose officials at the end of weary day’s vigilance over the heaving city might well enjoy forbidden fruits at a somewhat reduced price. Be that as it may, two heavy brushes were dipped in the mixture and the sticky pitch lathered onto the elegant ironwork.
This took a matter of moments and, due to the murky weather, there were no witnesses to record the shaking out of the large bags of cheap red feathers, which sailed gracefully through the damp air to land on and adhere to the tar like stranded leaves in Autumn.
