Shadow of the Serpent im-1

by David Ashton

  Footsteps. A man ran into the close. His brow was sweaty, a big beefy man, purple-faced and pursy. He had a wild look, knuckle-handed, a clout from one of these big fists might break your jaw. But worth a try.

  ‘Hey, mister,’ called Billy. ‘D’ye want tae see where she was split? The auld whoory woman?’

  The man stopped dead, his face looked like someone had just kicked him in the testicles.

  ‘It’ll cost ye,’ said the bold Billy. ‘She bled like a pig.’

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Not true. He’d only heard where it happened, not come to see. Only heard. But there was the name, high on the narrow wall. Frank could read, he was a good reader, his mammy had taught him, it put him a class above. He read it now. Vinegar Close.

  ‘She died where you look, Frank,’ said a voice. ‘Did your guilty conscience bring you down here?’

  A shadow had appeared like a bird of ill omen in the entrance of the close. McLevy. The light streamed in behind his shrouded figure.

  As Brennan desperately tried to wrench himself away, it was as if his feet were stuck in mud, like a dream where the odds are stacked against you; a feeling not helped when Mulholland stepped past his inspector and clipped Frank a judicious blow with his truncheon, just at the back-hinge of the knee.

  The constable had varnished and decorated this instrument himself. It was made of hornbeam and delivered a blow like a hammer. The big man collapsed, howling in pain, to the ground. He sat there, blubbering like a baby, till they hauled him up and pinned him against the wall.

  The various crumpled, poverty-stricken inhabitants of the close who had been sitting on the steps, stupefied in the pale sunshine, vanished in an instant. Only Billy and a couple of girls were left. The boy recognised Mulholland.

  ‘Are ye goin’ tae buy us any more buns, sir?’

  The constable tossed over a small coin before the God-forsaken wee devil let the cat out the bag.

  ‘Now, get to hell out of it,’ he said sharply.

  They did. So it was just the two policemen and Frank Brennan in the empty court.

  ‘You broke my poor leg,’ the big man whined.

  McLevy smiled but the wolf’s eyes were without pity.

  ‘That’s only the beginning, Frank.’

  The inspector puffed out his cheeks. He had not enjoyed the pursuit, anything above a brisk walking pace was, in his opinion, indecorous.

  As Mulholland put the restrainers on and hauled the man off, McLevy added more salt to the wound.

  ‘Wait till we get you to the station. Wait till the door closes. Wait till we send out for the bucket and the mop.’

  The three men disappeared through the opening of the close and then it was empty. Only the red patch remained, a last little patch of urine steaming faintly beside it in the wan sunlight.

  The mist spiralled up then disappeared like a departing spirit.

  10

  When the sun sets, shadows, that showed at noon

  But small, appear most long and terrible.

  NATHANIEL LEE, Oedipus

  McLevy’s method of interrogation was simple. He tailored it to type. With Frank Brennan it was fear. The looser his bowels, the greater chance of truth.

  Although the man seemed an abject coward and easy mark, he possessed, nevertheless, bovine strength and an animal cunning which had to be taken into consideration.

  Fear was a science. McLevy was a great student of scientific invention. See what it had given humanity in recent years, barbed wire and dynamite for a start.

  They brought Brennan into the interrogation room, a bare functional space with mysterious stains of varying colours on the walls. In one corner might be seen a large gouge in the bare plaster as if a bear had swiped its claws along the surface.

  There was a small table with two rickety chairs, one on each side, in the centre of the room. They sat him down and then both the inspector and Mulholland fell into what seemed like a trance.

  The silence stretched. Brennan licked his dry lips. He looked down at the table surface. It, too, had stains, some faded yellow, some pale red which had soaked into the naked grain. There was also a deep scratch which had been scored the length of the wood in a diagonal slash. That appeared more recent. Perhaps yesterday. Ten minutes ago, even.

  Sweat poured down his face. Still the policemen said nothing.

  A young constable came in with a bucket and a mop. Brennan’s eyes bulged as the items were left in a prominent position. The constable departed. McLevy turned a large key in order to lock the door, put the key in his trouser pocket, then leaned back against the panels of the wood.

  Mulholland was standing quietly behind the man so that Brennan’s head was near jerked off his shoulders trying to keep an eye on both these evil bastards at the same time.

  Finally, McLevy moved to sit opposite the big man at the table. The inspector laid his hands upon it like a minister about to deliver a sermon. Brennan flinched slightly as if too near the hot flame.

  A big flashy-dressed fellow, certain women might find him attractive; he possessed a false gallantry which fooled them time and time again.

  McLevy adjudged it the moment to begin. There was a rancid odour from the man’s mouth, either he had some gum disease or he lived on carrion flesh.

  ‘So ye killed her, Frank,’ he said. ‘Was there any particular reason?’

  Delivered in such tones as would suggest a pleasant choice between two fine whiskies set upon the bar, it inveigled Brennan into a nodding agreement before self-preservation set in and he howled denial.

  ‘I did no such thing! Why would I do that, now?’

  ‘She wasnae bringing in the coin. Ye like your drink. Ye saw her on the corner, not a penny had she earned.’

  Mulholland chimed in. ‘Justifiable anger, Frank. Ye’ve a terrible temper, everyone knows that. It just swept over you. A righteous wrath, then the sword was lifted.’

  ‘I don’t possess such weapon as a sword.’

  ‘But you have the anger, no denyin’ that,’ said the constable, closing one of his blue eyes in a wink of complicity. ‘The wrath.’

  ‘Righteous,’ agreed McLevy. ‘A man needs his money.’

  ‘I’d plenty of money for drink that night. I bought for the whole place.’ Brennan affected a haughty air to cover his desperation. ‘I had people at my beck and call, they kissed my hand. Late into the night, we drank.’

  ‘How late?’ Mulholland took over, he had noticed the inspector go very still all of a sudden.

  ‘It was past three in the morning when I spent the last penny. I bought for all, a roaring boy. The landlord was of the company, he’ll tell you.’

  ‘The changeful wing of an alibi.’ Mulholland quoted a dictum of his yet silent inspector.

  Brennan had got some of his nerve back. ‘John Docherty is an honest man. An upstanding host!’

  ‘How so?’ McLevy sprang into life.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said plenty of money. Bought for all. How so?’

  Brennan’s eyes shifted sideways. ‘I won it in a game of chance.’

  ‘Ye’re a liar.’

  Mulholland backed off; this was the inspector’s show.

  McLevy’s eyes bored into Brennan, the big Irishman tried for bravado. A mistake.

  ‘No one names Frank Brennan a liar, no one living on this earth – ’

  The inspector’s hands moved so fast, Mulholland missed it entirely. Brennan did not because he found himself grabbed by the shirt front, pulled bodily out of his chair and spun round like a child’s top till he slammed up against the wall with an impact that near jolted the malodorous teeth from out his head.

  Then he was off again, another circle, and then another, round and round, a bizarre dance of controlled violence, till the big man was deposited back into the very chair from which he had been plucked.

  Slack-jawed, eyes glazed, he watched as McLevy deliberately unbuttoned the hooks and eyes of his tunic, slid it off and laid it neatly
on his own chair. His shirt followed to reveal a long-sleeved red semmit, over which he hitched his braces again in two straight lines to contain his little mound of a belly. A comical sight if you discounted the coal-black fury in his eyes.

  ‘Is there any water in that bucket?’ he asked.

  Mulholland craned his long neck. ‘Full to the brim, sir.’

  ‘I will ask you once more, Frank Brennan.’ The inspector might have been carved out of stone. ‘How so?’

  The big man’s mouth opened and closed. No words emerged. McLevy, now standing over him, reached forward slowly and took hold of the front of Brennan’s throat. He cocked the other hand and sighted down it as if about to release an arrow.

  Brennan was paralysed. The fingers of the hand on his thrapple were digging into the soft tissue. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the man would rip out the whole works; where is the mercy of God here?

  ‘How so?’ There was no mercy. Not in these eyes.

  An awful smell arose as Brennan lost touch with his bowel movements and emitted a long fearful fart. Mulholland wrinkled his nose but the inspector didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Where did you get the money, Frank?’

  ‘I was paid. Services rendered.’

  ‘What service?’

  ‘I – I – ’ Brennan’s eyes filled with water and he shook his head. McLevy’s hand tightened as the truth and one more fart were squeezed out. ‘It was gentry. See, this fellow hailed me outside the tavern. I was on my way to find poor Sadie, descry how the wee soul was faring – ’

  ‘Ye were off to skim the cream like many a pimp before you. So?’

  ‘He offered me a payment. He had a friend he said, liked the cut of Sadie’s jib. He would pay me in advance. I was to go back in the tavern. Enjoy myself. Services rendered.’

  McLevy let go of the neck and wiped his hand on his semmit. Brennan would not meet his eye. He massaged his throat in the terrible quiet.

  The inspector could not afford the luxury of disgust, or the bile that rose in his gullet. He whistled softly to keep it at bay … ‘Charlie is my darling, the young chevalier.’

  ‘This gentry. What did he look like?’

  ‘He kept to the shadows,’ said Brennan eager to help now, wrongly thinking the worst was over. ‘Silver hair, tall enough but not as me, in a doorway, black gloves, he wore black gloves.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He smelled of soap.’

  ‘Scented?’

  ‘Carbolic.’ Brennan nodded wisely. ‘Thought I to myself, that’s an odd thing.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Gentry don’t use such. My mammy washed me in that soap.’

  ‘Not clean enough.’

  The inspector walked away to put some distance between them. Mulholland slid in again. ‘Anything else about him?’

  Brennan shook his head, Mulholland persisted. ‘What about his voice, you said he spoke to you, what was the sound?’

  ‘A whisper only. Slow words. But born to command.’

  ‘An Edinburgh voice?’

  ‘I’d hazard … not of the Celtic strain.’

  ‘From the South? English?’

  ‘Born to command.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Not a bit. I’ve racked my brains for you, I can remember no more.’ Brennan sighed heavily. ‘He put the coin payment in my hand, I walked back into the tavern. A mysterious event.’

  ‘Mysterious?’ McLevy laughed but it was a harsh bitter sound, a terrible twisted anger inside him. ‘Ye sold the poor auld whore, left her defenceless, and while you were drinking yourself stupid on the proceeds, her body was being hacked to pieces!’

  ‘That was terrible mischance for the unfortunate soul,’ came the sententious response. ‘And I blame myself something awful, but who can know the workings of God or the wiles of Satan?’

  The flame in McLevy’s eyes went out and a cold light replaced it. As he walked back to the table, Mulholland moved in reflex as if to intervene, then thought better.

  ‘You’re scum, Frank,’ said McLevy. A dispassionate judgement more eviscerating than physical violence. ‘At least when Burke and Hare sold bodies, they had the grace tae kill them first or rob the grave. When you sold Sadie Gorman she was alive, her heart was still beating, there was still mischief in her eyes. You are death’s pimp. The very man to whom you sold her would be the man that took her life.’

  ‘You don’t know that!’ cried Brennan.

  ‘I know it,’ was the cold response. ‘And I’ll make sure everyone on the street does as well, every last sinner. Everyone of the Fraternity. When you look in their eyes, you will see what you’ve done. Not one person will be your friend. A ghost. A dead man walking.’

  He went back to the door, opened it with the key and bawled out, ‘Ballantyne!’

  After a moment, the young constable appeared. He came into the room with some caution, eyes widening at the sight of his inspector in his red semmit and braces, then the after-reek of the farts wafted over. He gazed warily at the seated Brennan.

  ‘Has this man soiled himself, sir?’

  ‘Not yet son,’ said McLevy. ‘Not yet. Stick him in the cells.’

  Brennan rose unbidden and walked on shaky legs to the doorway. A strange dignity had taken possession of him.

  The young constable, not wishing to get too close, gestured him through the door but the big Irishman turned at the last.

  ‘This won’t make ye think any the better of me,’ Brennan said in a drained voice, ‘but I owe some such to her. The last three, four nights, Sadie thought someone was watching at her. In the streets. I didn’t pay no heed.’

  He looked at McLevy like a whipped cur hoping for a biscuit.

  ‘Ye’re right,’ said McLevy. ‘It makes you even worse.’

  Brennan turned and left. Ballantyne followed. The door closed. Mulholland let out a long breath to relieve the tension in his gut and McLevy began slowly to don once more his shirt and tunic.

  ‘We can’t hold him,’ said the constable.

  ‘I know that. Let him fester for a while. Something else may come to his mind.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘So do I. But let him fester anyway.’

  ‘That old saying, sir.’ The words popped out before Mulholland could get them back. ‘“To err is human, to forgive divine” – it doesn’t cut much with you does it?’

  The inspector finished the last hook and eye then adjusted the hard upright collar of his tunic. Useful that collar in case somebody ever wanted to garrotte you from behind.

  ‘Forgiveness?’ he said. ‘Tell that to the corpse.’

  11

  Go, and catch a falling star,

  Get with child a mandrake root.

  JOHN DONNE,

  ‘Song’ (‘Go, and catch a falling star’)

  from Songs and Sonnets

  The black cat hesitated in the moonlight; it was a neat decision. Behind the lighted window of the attic room was the possibility of succour, but she was a cautious female.

  She padded across the oily slates of the roof. The dampness of a late March evening had filmed them to a disagreeable slickness, not at all to her liking.

  A fastidious creature, she. Let other females, a lesser breed, fall into disrepair, fur matted, ears chewed, necks an easy target for the tomcat’s teeth. She was above such careless rapture. She was a special case.

  The cat reached her destination and yowled. After a moment the window opened just wide enough for her to pass through with dignity intact, and in she hopped. The frame came down smartly and it was as if she had never been.

  Now, you see it, now you don’t. Moonlight is deceptive.

  On the other side of the glass, not long after, McLevy wolfed his poor man’s supper, salt herring and potatoes, while the cat lapped daintily at a saucer of milk a discreet distance away.

  They both finished almost at the same time. The inspector belched gently. Herring did repeat upon the breath but when a lowly
constable he’d lived on that provender. Now and again he must return to the past.

  He crossed to the fire where a coffee pot had been left to keep warm on the hob, poured some out into his cup, heaped in many spoonfuls of sugar – having a reprehensibly sweet tooth – then returned to his table at the window and sat to look out over his city.

  McLevy stirred the black tarry mixture and reviewed events.

  They had checked back at the tavern to find that Brennan’s story held water. The man had indeed spent like a sailor and caroused until way past the time of Sadie’s death. Under guise of questioning to find out if anyone had seen the supplier of Brennan’s windfall, McLevy had let out what the big man had sold to gain such a fine recompense.

  To judge by the reaction from some of the old biddies in the tavern, Brennan, once released, would be fortunate to survive with his chuckies intact. Bad luck.

  Which left this mystery man.

  Roach, on being given the report, had counselled against too much supposition on that score – nothing was known, only a payment. The lieutenant would still prefer a drunken navvy on his way home with a sharp blade to his shovel.

  Mulholland nodded both ways. The boy would go far.

  But McLevy did not approve of shadowy figures in doorways. That was his domain.

  Had the man been stalking Sadie? Given Brennan his thirty pieces of silver to make sure the pimp was safely out of the way?

  Was there something in her past life which might be the cause of her death or was it possible that she was just a target of a vengeful killing lust against all whores?

  McLevy felt in his bones that the latter might be the true path. In his mind’s eye he could see, as he had done in reality many a time, the proud stance of her on the corner.

  That daft feather dancing in her stringy hair. Her unashamed proclamation, here I am, bugger the lot of you, ye’ve been in and out of me all my life, here I set myself, come and get it. The very swagger was a reproach to probity, sin laughing at virtue. Come and get it.

  What darkness in the heart had been unleashed by that sight, a torrent so strong that it swept all before?