Nor Will He Sleep

by David Ashton

  The rain had stopped and the wind blew a sour fetid odour through the tobacco smoke.

  Was it the Monster?

  Nothing so outlandish.

  His eye fell upon a spattering of vomit upon the path that the rain and wind had failed to clear. Some drunken juggie no doubt, for Stevenson’s sensitive long nose could detect the lurking dregs of John Barleycorn in the smell.

  For a moment he felt a childish disappointment: no adventure, no treasure, no malevolent figures in the fog – just a dreich Edinburgh morning, where the only battle was between lamplight and the grey tinge of looming cloud.

  And then he saw the Beast.

  Almost at his feet, huddled to the side, wrapped in a blanket like some obscene cocoon, the face washed clean by the air, white and staring.

  Not at him, the neck jerked askew, livid brand on the flesh, eyes averted, staring wide at death’s door.

  For a moment, the sight so unexpected, Robert Louis forgot to inhale.

  Then he let out a stifled shriek. Not of terror, more as if something he had expected in the depths of his psyche had arrived to greet the wanderer.

  A visitor at the gate.

  Chapter 22

  Bad as he is, the Devil may be Abused,

  Be falsely charged, and causelessly accused,

  When Men, Unwilling to be blamed alone,

  Shift off those crimes on Him, which are their own.

  Daniel Defoe, History of the Devil

  Stevenson smiled a little wearily. He had recited the more prosaic version of the finding of a corpse upon my doorstep and wondered whether Queen Victoria, from her high vantage on the wall, was entertained and believed the story.

  Or did Her Majesty harbour secret doubts?

  He shifted to another pair of eyes that had probably witnessed more lying than a politician’s mistress.

  ‘My first thought was to lug the cadaver away from the house and disclaim all knowledge,’ the writer admitted with disarming honesty. ‘But then – I thought – what if it were me lying there? Would I not wish a more ethical observance?’

  ‘On the other hand,’ replied James McLevy. ‘Being dead, you might not give a damn.’

  ‘True,’ came a somewhat florid response. ‘But, taking my first assertion as proven, I suppose there are scraps of conscience not yet pulverised by the grinding hypocrisy of our civilised world and so – I thought of you, inspector.’

  Indeed McLevy, sleepless at his attic window, chewing hard upon his moustache, had heard his name called from the streets below.

  He gazed down to see Robert Louis who had battled through the city in the biting cold, bare-headed, his hastily donned clothes and velvet jacket a poor protection against the knife-edge cut of an East wind, clutching the scrap of paper with the inspector’s address given in the tavern under very different circumstances.

  Stevenson resembled nothing so much as a character in a threadbare adventure tale, beckoning urgently as if to invite the watcher to join in some dubious enterprise.

  They had knocked up Mulholland on the way back, and everything had followed on.

  Now all were cosily tucked away in Roach’s office, the interrogation room being deemed a touch brutal for the frail personage of such a world-famous creator, and the cold slab, now in possession of the corpse, an equally grim prospect.

  From the inspector’s view, Stevenson was holding up fairly well after what must have been an exhausting time, but was there a tremor that might be exploited?

  Just in case ought was hidden.

  For the writer and the policeman are aye on the look-out for something hidden.

  It might even be concealed from the subject himself; that makes no difference.

  Kick over the stone – see what crawls below.

  ‘The vomit is not that of the corpse,’ said James McLevy. ‘No marks on the clothing, no traces of sick in the mouth.’

  He did not mention the other contents of the mouth. Keep that up the sleeve.

  ‘Clean as a whistle,’ said Mulholland cheerfully, well aware of his inspector’s intent.

  ‘Might it have been from the killer – the vomit?’

  A reasonable question, as Stevenson fidgeted somewhat having been told that Lieutenant Roach frowned mightily upon the smell of tobacco in his quarters.

  ‘I doubt it, ’ said McLevy. ‘The murder too precise.’

  ‘Precise?’

  ‘The blows, sir,’ chimed in Mulholland. ‘On the nail. The distance between them. Exact. A cold measure. Even the Police Surgeon couldn’t miss it.’

  ‘Precise folk don’t tend tae vomit.’

  Having delivered this judgement, McLevy sat back in Roach’s leather chair and folded hands over a corporation that grew a little rounder with every passing year.

  It was a comfy chair; he could get used to being a lieutenant. Stevenson sat across the desk from him and the constable, as usual, stood like a giraffe in the corner.

  Mulholland looked at the writer with a curiosity that he made no effort to conceal.

  The Irish have always admired writers, unlike the Scots, who regard them with deep suspicion, and the English who try to pretend they don’t exist.

  The fellow was thin as a rake, but had darting, lively eyes and a turn of mind that seemed never still – now what kind of animal would Mulholland place him to be? Some kind of thoroughbred that’s for sure. Greyhound or horse.

  Unaware he was being thus translated, Stevenson offered another contribution to the debate.

  ‘A drunkart blown in by the wind?’

  ‘Time will tell.’

  McLevy leant forward. Kick over the stone.

  ‘The woman – do you know her?’

  The writer frowned.

  ‘I am not sure. Something in the face. I glimpsed it but briefly.’

  ‘We can go back tae the cold slab. She’s laid out like a dish o’ fish.’

  The inspector laughed coarsely and Mulholland knew well the technique: innocent or guilty, stir the pot.

  Stevenson’s fingers twitched. He was gasping for a cigarette, and feeling oddly under siege.

  He had been delighted to accompany the police; it avoided the inevitable wrangle over his refusal to toe the line of God even with his father due to be interred,

  Also he had been intrigued, and revelled in the chance to observe the mechanics of a real investigation.

  What he had not reckoned on was being the centre of it.

  ‘Something in the face,’ he repeated slowly, and indeed in his mind a tantalising elusive recognition was swirling.

  ‘Mary Dougan.’

  To this flat statement Mulholland nodded accord. They had both known the woman at first sight, though the face was drawn by death and the mouth no longer smiling – in spite of the blows fate had dealt, Mary had always found a smile.

  ‘She was a good-natured soul, but a little on the weak side,’ offered the constable.

  ‘A whisky diver,’ said McLevy bluntly.

  At the name, Robert Louis had flinched, his worst fears realised. What he did not wish to see in the ruined features came rushing back into his mind.

  ‘I knew her in that case,’ he stated simply. ‘My God, how she has changed.’

  ‘Life and death. Mark ye deep.’

  McLevy’s sardonic comment struck a flicker of light in Stevenson’s eyes, but then the inspector signalled that the floor was his and the writer, in a strange gesture, raised an imaginary cigarette to his lips, took a deep drag, and then blew out as if to release memory.

  ‘A threepenny whore. I was a young man. Her regular. She was modest and decent for all that. The other girls were . . . wild. I knew them all.’

  A dispassionate tone, but the sigh that followed told a different tale.

  ‘I had to leave Edinburgh. Ae fond kiss and then we sever. She clung to me. That bonny face. Awash with tears.’

  ‘Did she love ye then?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Stevenson hesitated for a moment. ‘Love
is a mystery, is it not?’

  He gazed down at his long fingers, stained yellow at the ends from tobacco smoke, as if they were either to blame or might provide an answer.

  ‘I was desperately ill. And had to leave the city. I never saw her again until this sorry day.’

  This rendition of lost affection, even with a three-penny whore, had silenced McLevy strangely, and the constable hastened to fill the gap.

  ‘How long ago was this, sir?’

  ‘Eighteen years or so, I would estimate.’

  Mulholland looked at McLevy, who roused himself from some inner contemplation and waved his hand.

  The constable produced a crumpled, damp piece of paper, which he then smoothed out.

  ‘This was found inside the mouth of the corpse.’

  He carefully read the text; again it seemed as if underscored by a nail.

  Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return hither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

  ‘Does that ring a bell, sir?’

  ‘Other than the anatomical accuracy. Not remotely.’

  ‘It seems to have a religious bent.’

  ‘Unless it is meant ironically.’

  McLevy grunted what might have been an agreement to this, but then fixed Stevenson with a direct stare.

  ‘There is, however, one question that must be answered.’

  ‘And what is that?’ asked the writer, before suddenly erupting into a racking cough, which he finally stifled with the aid of a large white handkerchief.

  ‘My lungs crave the blessed weed,’ he murmured.

  ‘Well, they’ll have tae wait.’

  No hint of any former intimacy, no matter how fleeting, was displayed on the inspector’s face, and it stirred the steel of Stevenson’s nature.

  He cocked his head to the slant and Mulholland realised that he’d got the animals wrong. Neither dog nor horse – but a bird.

  Magpie, jackdaw or crow. Bright, glittering eyes and always a deceptive move ahead.

  ‘What is the question, prithee, kind sir?’

  To this gently mocking repetition, McLevy’s face changed not a jot, and Mulholland grasped that there was another conversation taking place, one that with all his experience and knowledge of the inspector might still be a mystery.

  ‘Why was the corpse left at your door?’

  Now it was the writer’s turn to stop in his tracks while McLevy pressed forward.

  ‘You admit that you knew her from the past?’

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘Time is a creature wi’ its own rules. And the other woman, Agnes Carnegie, murdered in exactly the same fashion, a piece o’ bible page stuffed in her gob, she worshipped at St Stephen’s Church where your own mother kneels to pray.’

  Robert Louis desired a cigarette most fervently, but he could not refuse the challenge.

  ‘You see a connection between the two?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘And you think I may be the bridge between – the bridge this murderer walks upon?’

  Mulholland looked up at Queen Victoria – like himself she was listening intently.

  ‘Again, it’s possible. Is there nothing more you can tell us of Mary Dougan?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘Only what I have said before. She was part of a different life.’

  Both men sat perfectly still.

  ‘Of course it might all be coincidence,’ remarked the writer finally. ‘In the long process of time.’

  ‘I’m not a great believer in coincidence.’

  ‘Neither am I. Unless it suits me.’

  Stevenson smiled wryly. McLevy nodded assent to that.

  A soft knock at the door and on the inspector’s call, Ballantyne entered. He kept his eyes carefully averted from their famous guest, and in fact was one of the few at the station who had noticed him being sneaked in at the back.

  A man who tracks the movement of scuttling insects is hard to sidle past. Also he had been given a task suited to a particular talent for discrimination.

  ‘Ye told me tae report anything of import amongst the sick bits, sir?’

  Indeed Ballantyne had been handed the evidence bag and told to exercise his forensic capabilities.

  ‘I found this.’

  He proudly unwrapped a piece of tissue paper to display a small fragment of material.

  It was scarlet in colour.

  Mulholland leant over from his great height and made an educated guess.

  ‘Could be a piece of . . . a favour.’

  ‘The students?’ queried Stevenson alertly.

  ‘They . . . may have a hand in it somewhere,’ muttered the inspector. ‘Hard tae tell. All things are possible.’

  This had brought McLevy’s thoughts back to an uneasy terrain, so he laid them aside for the moment.

  ‘Ye’ve done well, Ballantyne. Away ye go now.’

  But as the constable reached the door, another call.

  ‘Ballantyne!’

  McLevy nodded towards Stevenson and then to the fragment on the desk.

  ‘Silence is golden, eh?’

  The young man stiffened with pride or outrage, his birthmark pulsing in the throat.

  ‘Not a word will pass my lips, sir.’

  However, he could not then resist, since he had earned a modicum of praise, taking part in what he perceived to be the grander scheme of things.

  He turned back and addressed Stevenson as if on equal footing.

  ‘I liked Treasure Island. We don’t have any pirates in Leith, though. Not any more.’

  Robert Louis nodded sagely. ‘And which is your favourite passage, sir?’

  ‘When the boy was in the barrel.’

  ‘What kind of barrel?’ asked Stevenson, to test the mettle of this admirer.

  ‘Apple. Jist as well it wasnae herring.’

  One of the constable’s oddly placed remarks, where a man was none too sure whether to take literal or ironic import.

  Having delivered his plaudit, Ballantyne finally found the way out.

  Stevenson caught a moment of humour between the other two policemen as the door closed.

  ‘A valuable helper,’ he remarked.

  ‘He has his moments,’ Mulholland replied.

  The writer suddenly experienced a shaft of pure addiction that sent him bolt upright; a wrench of desire that took him out of this world into another.

  It is often so with smokers. As if part of their body is elsewhere. In thrall to Madame Nicotine.

  ‘If there is nothing more at present, then I shall bid you farewell, gentlemen,’ he announced with some force.

  ‘Aye. Ye need your wee indulgence, eh my mannie?’

  ‘Indulgences are what the Pope sells,’ snapped back Stevenson.

  He rose, strode to the door and then, struck by a thought, turned to face the inspector.

  ‘This killer – is a picture forming in your mind?’

  Mulholland was impressed by the tenor of that question; it was a side of McLevy not many perceived, but Stevenson had instinctively grasped the workings of that odd intelligence.

  The inspector gave this query serious consideration.

  ‘He is a man – obsessed. But concealed. And cunning. His obsession may be yourself. What you represent. Or some-thing else completely, I do not yet know.’

  The words touched a vein of thought that had been plaguing Robert Louis regarding those he had once considered close to him but who now were not so.

  ‘Might it be . . . a jealousy of fame?’

  ‘All things are possible,’ was again the response. ‘But he is – separated. Apart from himself, even. You will never know to look at him. Such killers are hard tae fathom.’

  ‘Like Jekyll and Hyde?’ Mulholland threw in suddenly.

  ‘Marcus Aurelius,’ the writer replied, ‘held that the arts merely imitate natural forms. Not the opposite.’

  McLevy grinned and abruptly banged the
desk, throwing Roach’s immaculately assembled inkwells out of true.

  ‘Aye. You pair are far too langheidit for me!’

  He let out a whoop of laughter, as if some tension had been released and pointed at Stevenson.

  ‘We’ll try tae keep our own secret and get you out of here without a soul seeing save Ballantyne.’

  ‘I thank you for that.’

  ‘And you – Mister Stevenson – must make sure that not one of your household breathes a word.’

  ‘It will be done.’

  ‘It had better be. If this case breaks, we’ll have the press delving intae every orifice.’

  The inspector scowled at that notion and looked down, as if Sim Carnegie might yet shelter in some intestinal duct.

  ‘I would appreciate the privacy,’ said Stevenson soberly. ‘I have a father to bury.’

  ‘We all have our duties,’ McLevy retorted dryly. ‘Now – there’s a hansom cab rank at the back of the station. Ye can puff yoursel’ tae death all the way home.’

  Robert Louis nodded meekly enough and made for the door, but the inspector had not quite called it a day.

  ‘One thing more. The bible page. It was ripped from a holy tome that Agnes Carnegie was taking home tae repair before she met up wi’ the devil. Guess the owner of that Good Book?’

  ‘Someone of a religious bent?’

  ‘The minister of St Stephen’s church. Just round the corner, eh?’

  Stevenson frowned in thought. Indeed it would seem there was a malevolent convergence – was he the centre where all roads met, or was it just the writer trying to pull all threads together?

  As he made finally to leave, the inspector had yet one more straw to lay upon the camel’s back.

  ‘And you, my mannie – you being such a clever bugger wi’ your Roman emperors – see if ye might delve back and find something that might help wi’ this investigation.’

  Stevenson turned to grin.

  ‘All things are possible.’

  But then his face changed in memory.

  ‘Mary Dougan. She was a bonny girl.’

  With that he was out the door to follow Mulholland.

  For a moment McLevy pondered deeply.

  If there were an informer at the station, as had happened when Sim Carnegie finessed them with finding out about the white favour on his own mother’s corpse, keeping the enquiry in hugger-mugger would be a hard task.