Shadow of the Serpent im-1

by David Ashton

  McLevy smiled at a passing young woman who was clutching at her fashionable chapeau as the wind picked up.

  ‘Hold on to your hat,’ he advised.

  Mulholland was not to be diverted.

  ‘And why did you not tell me of this George Cameron business before?’

  ‘I like tae keep things up my sleeve,’ was the nonchalant reply.

  ‘That’s for magicians!’ Mulholland said sharply. ‘I’m supposed to work along, not guess magic tricks, leave all that prestidigitation to Pope Leo. This is nothing less than a weird and crazy fantasy, not one shred of proof!’

  ‘Of course it is,’ agreed McLevy blandly. ‘Stories, supposition, ghosts and mirrors. We can’t tell that tae the lieutenant, he’d have a heart attack.’

  ‘He’ll have one of them anyway when he finds out what we’re up to and he’ll tell you what I’ll tell you. Stop. Right. Here!’

  McLevy did so. A piece of paper had blown against his face and he had automatically caught at it. It was an election pamphlet, a picture of William Gladstone, arm raised, finger pointing. The words below the image said simply, The People’s William. He is the man.

  The inspector crumpled the paper up and threw it into the air so that it sailed over the side of the South Bridge, which they stood upon now, down to the Cowgate below.

  He watched as it gave the appearance of life, dipping and swooping, but it was at the mercy of a stronger element, a force of nature which would not be denied.

  ‘It may all be moonshine,’ he said quietly. ‘But I made a promise to George Cameron which I must try to fulfil.’

  He brooded further as they walked on, Mulholland shaking his head like a cow plagued with flies.

  ‘If these two murders are connected in any way, and there is any chance, no matter how strange and fanciful it might all seem, of finding the perpetrator, then I shall go right tae the end.’

  ‘Ye’ll be on your own, then,’ said the constable bitterly, still smarting about being kept in the dark.

  ‘That doesnae worry me, I was born so.’

  McLevy was equally bitter, feeling he’d been let down.

  ‘I asked you along because I value your opinion but if this is all ye can offer, then the least you can do is keep your mouth shut and not clipe on me tae the lieutenant.’

  ‘I am not a clipe,’ said Mulholland stiffly. ‘I do not betray, but I have my duty.’

  ‘So did Pontius Pilate,’ was the caustic response.

  Both noses were out of joint and, to tell the truth, there were deep feelings of disappointment on either side. As George Cameron had been towards him, so McLevy may have wished to be to the constable, father to son.

  But that was to overestimate the young man’s need for a parental shadow, and also somewhere evidenced a refusal on the inspector’s behalf to acknowledge that he lacked the same generosity of spirit as the big Highlander.

  In frozen huffy silence, they had traced their path back to Leith station, a nondescript building even more nondescript inside. Sergeant Murdoch at the desk, half-asleep as usual, dust motes floating in the air around him.

  Ballantyne with his tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth was attempting to write up a report. He did give them a quick glance, paused as if to say something, then got his head back down swiftly as the highly polished door which led to Lieutenant Roach’s inner sanctum, the only door in the place with a shine worth the mention, swung open and out stepped the man himself.

  Roach often put McLevy in mind of a crocodile for some reason. The lieutenant possessed a long jaw which he habitually worked from side to side when perturbed, and bulging slightly bloodshot eyes which hinted at sins suppressed.

  The man’s neat white collar and black tie peeped out of the open neck of the official braided frock-coat.

  Stiff and tidy. McLevy had never seen him out of uniform, and wondered idly what he wore. Perhaps a scarlet cloak and boots of Castilian leather?

  Roach pursed his lips. ‘You’ve been out all morning, McLevy.’

  ‘On the case, sir. On the case.’

  A jovial reply and swiftly in, lest Mulholland blurt out his procedural misgivings.

  A wintry smile from the lieutenant, the man had something on his mind, something in the back pocket.

  ‘My suspicions were correct,’ he said bleakly.

  McLevy blinked. Surely Roach hadn’t got wind of what he was purposing, who could have told him? And yet the lieutenant had an uncanny knack of sensing when McLevy was up to mischief. A knack developed by dint of the fact that Roach usually was the one who got it in the neck.

  Mulholland stepped forward. ‘Suspicions about what, sir?’

  The big lanky unctuous bastard was going to betray him, McLevy was sure of it.

  Roach took a deep breath.

  ‘At the lodge last night, Chief Constable Grant laid his hand upon my shoulder and said … Women chopped in half are no great advertisement for our fair city, lieutenant. Murder is a blot. Clean it up. Sooner before later.’

  The lieutenant jerked his jaw in painful memory.

  ‘And I have to say the way he was looking at me confirmed my worst fears. As if I had the pox.’

  ‘A grand suspicion, sir. I remember you saying the very words. A plague carrier, did you not say?’

  A sidelong glance at McLevy indicated where Mulholland thought the source of the pestilence might lie but, to the inspector’s relief, he added nothing to the above words.

  In fact, McLevy was a little ashamed of his earlier accusation. Mulholland might well sook up, but he wasnae a clipe. Not yet. The inspector was safe. No one would tell on him. He was safe.

  His ears were buzzing and the ground seemed to move beneath his feet, surely Edinburgh wasn’t suffering a tremor of the earth?

  He closed his eyes and in his mind he was a wee boy looking up at his mother; her mouth opened and shut; he couldnae hear the words but the spittle was fair flying in his direction.

  She raised both her hands, fingernails like talons, but then her face changed to that of a desperate sanity. She crossed to the door, locked it, put the key on the table, then turned towards him.

  The woman reached out tenderly to touch the boy’s face and then snatched something up from the table, flung herself away into the alcove bed set into the small room, and pulled across the curtain.

  The wee boy stood alone. He was hungry. He went to a chair, clambered up on it and sat carefully by the table.

  Maybe if he was good, nothing bad would happen? He waited. Time passed. The curtain was closed.

  McLevy came out of this disquieting reverie to realise that Roach had addressed a question to him. Both lieutenant and constable were awaiting a response.

  ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he muttered. ‘I have not quite grasped the implication of your last remark.’

  Roach’s eyelids blinked down, then up again, the skin a thin membrane; by God the man did look like a crocodile.

  ‘A simple query. You are the investigating officer, McLevy. What is the progress of the said investigation?’

  ‘I have suspects in mind, sir. When I am more certain, I shall acquaint you.’ Mulholland sniffed audibly. ‘And now if you will excuse me?’

  He badly needed to sit down, dizzy spells were a bad sign, too much coffee the night before, a fractured sleep, his fast not broken, the portents of a gathering obsession.

  ‘You will not be excused,’ said Roach with a certain grim relish. ‘D’you know of a woman … Bridget Lapsley?’

  ‘Keeps an auld hoose in Meikle John’s close,’ replied McLevy promptly, glad to get back on even ground. ‘Rents the rooms tae all and sundry. When in drink, is prone tae caterwaul all night. Hence her familiar – Biddie Yammerlugs.’

  ‘Your knowledge of Leith’s depraved and lost souls never ceases to amaze me,’ said Roach bleakly. ‘She sent in word not half an hour ago. I was almost on the desperate point of rousing Sergeant Murdoch, when into the station you fortuitously march.’

>   ‘What word did she send?’ McLevy muttered.

  ‘One of her lodgers has died in bed.’

  ‘I’m surprised she didnae throw the body out the window, rent and be damned.’

  ‘Well, she did not. You are to inspect the corpse.’

  ‘Are the circumstances doubtful, sir?’ Mulholland attempted to supply an interest singularly lacking in his inspector.

  ‘McLevy will tell us that.’

  Roach turned to go back into his room. The inspector was still a little shaky; what he wouldn’t give for an aromatic cup of Arabian best in Jean Brash’s garden, the early roses matching her red hair, listening to the fluting calls of the whores as they hung out the morning-washed bed linen.

  ‘Could one of the constables not pay a visit?’ he said with a hopeful glance at Mulholland.

  ‘It is your concern,’ said Roach. ‘It is connected. As you are so fond of telling me, everything in Leith is connected.’

  On that cryptic remark, the door closed, leaving the inspector hanging out to dry like the whorehouse sheets.

  ‘You’re not the only one keeps things up the sleeve, eh?’ said Mulholland.

  24

  When boys go first to bed,

  They step into their voluntary graves.

  GEORGE HERBERT, ‘Mortification’

  And looking down at the dead body of Frank Brennan, this one hour later, he had to acknowledge the accuracy of the constable’s observation.

  It was common knowledge, even the lieutenant would have heard, that McLevy had fingered the big Irishman as being morally if not physically responsible for Sadie Gorman’s death. Roach must have enjoyed the thought of the inspector suffering, he would most earnestly hope, terrible qualms of guilt over the result of his machinations.

  McLevy did indeed feel a certain queasiness in the pit of his stomach but rather than pangs of conscience he would more put the attribution down to the stench in this grimy box of a room.

  There was the memory, however, of the appeal in the big man’s eyes, when he had tried to make amends by revealing that someone, so Sadie told him, had been watching at her and Brennan had paid no mind.

  As McLevy, in turn, had paid no mind to that pathetic effort of atonement.

  Frank Brennan had died unshriven. The inspector would have to live with it.

  He brought his mind round to the present. One question only. Was the death natural?

  He gazed down at the pasty white face of the corpse, still dressed in shirt and trousers and lying where the man had, no doubt drunkenly, fallen on to the mattress. At least he’d managed to kick off his shoes; the Irishman’s big toe stuck comically out of the frayed and holed sock.

  Was the death natural, accidental as it were? Was it suicide? Was it murder? From his examination, he thought he knew the answer. Brennan’s eyes stared open. He reached forward with his fingers and gently closed them.

  The door opened and Mulholland entered, his head near touching the ceiling of the narrow room.

  ‘I’ve seen more space in a prison cell,’ he announced.

  The constable then fell silent. He was still in the huff. McLevy took note and sighed.

  ‘I realise I have caused offence with my accusation of yourself being a clipe. I now take it back. You may be many things, constable, and undoubtedly are, but a clipe is not one of them.’

  This, from the inspector, was the equivalent of the legendary Ashes of Contrition, and Mulholland, realising such, bowed his head in dignified acceptance then delivered.

  ‘I spoke to everyone in the house, never met such a disreputable assembly in my whole life, ye could not believe one single word spoken. And Biddy wants the room back.’

  ‘She told me that earlier.’

  To Mulholland’s previous annoyance he had been dispatched to question the rag-bag collection of labourers, sailors and one-eyed trollops that made up the lodging-house inhabitants.

  McLevy had meanwhile closeted himself to interview Biddy before chasing her out to annoy the constable. She had followed Mulholland from room to room, complaining loudly of the inspector’s lack of esteem for a decent respectable woman, the like of which she fondly imagined herself to be.

  ‘Still on about that, eh? Is she going tae fumigate the place?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’

  ‘Well, she’ll have to wait,’ grunted McLevy. ‘This may be the scene of a murder.’

  ‘Murder? There’s not a mark on the man, he died natural, unless you think poison?’

  ‘No. I do not think poison. See the lock on the door over there?’

  Mulholland shook his head. ‘But the door was ajar late this morning, the reason Biddy stuck her head in to discover the dead body. And let out a fearful scream she told me.’

  ‘Aye, so she did. That must have been something tae hear.’

  Mulholland still didn’t move to the door, so McLevy indicated to the only other piece of furniture in the place, a spindly three-legged chair drawn up near to the dirty mattress, which lay on the floor, acting this moment as bed and bier. On the seat of the chair lay a large key.

  ‘What does that tell you?’

  ‘Brennan came in drunk, fell to bed and forgot to secure the lock,’ said the constable.

  ‘Yet Biddy said he was fierce particular about that, she was surprised tae find the door pushing open.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ said Mulholland rather snidely. ‘He’d be in fear of his life what with you telling the criminal fraternity of how he betrayed one of their own.’

  McLevy ignored the barb. ‘He kept the key by his bed, close to hand. Drunk or not, I don’t see him forgetting.’

  He pointed silently at the door and Mulholland crossed without further comment to crouch down and examine the lock.

  ‘Well?’ demanded the inspector.

  The mechanism was black-encrusted, a wonder the thing worked at all, but there were two fine scratches, just newly made by the looks of it, of a type the constable had seen before in his travels. He looked over at the other.

  ‘Lockpicks, d’ye think?’ said McLevy.

  ‘Could be,’ replied the constable slowly. ‘Hard to tell, but … could be.’

  He thought further. ‘However, if crack open and enter why not secure when leaving, unless …?’

  Something one of the lodgers had told him, Archie Galbraith, a retired cooper who still held on to some vestige of dignity while drinking himself to death on what he used to watch being put inside the barrel.

  ‘I got up in the middle of the night, tae answer the call of nature, ye ken? Dark. But my aim was good, right in the middle of the bucket. I heard a door creak, shouted out my name, “Archie Galbraith here!”in case it was somebody with drink looking for good company. Went and looked, near knocked the damn bucket arse-over. The hall was empty, naebody on hand, but I could have sworn the door tae the outside close had just shut. A draught of cauld air. Gives ye a terrible thirst, man. Cauld air.’

  ‘It was in my mind to tell you, sir,’ he said as McLevy gave him a basilisk stare after this was related. ‘But the old fellow’s so far gone, you couldn’t put credence on his words.’

  ‘Yet his call would interrupt, ye’d have to get out the door quick. Intae the close. That would explain why there was not the time to use the skeleton keys to lock it up again, after the deed was done.’

  ‘What deed?’ asked the constable in some exasperation. McLevy had his I know a secret face on, a most irritating sight to behold. ‘There’s not a mark on the fellow!’

  ‘Oh yes there is,’ said McLevy.

  He signalled the constable over and they both knelt down by the body as if in prayer.

  McLevy tilted the man’s head back with some difficulty, to reveal the neck. On each side, just under the jawbone, was a small bruise.

  ‘I near missed it myself,’ he muttered, ‘though I expect the eagle eye of Dr Jarvis would have brought it to our notice.’

  Mulholland peered closer, in truth he wasn’t
sure why the inspector was putting such weight upon what looked, to his eyes, innocuous enough.

  ‘It’s hardly a death wound, sir. Could be the result of a fall or anything really. Louse bites even, and the man scratching.’

  McLevy looked at him as if perplexed by such monumental ignorance, then remembering that the two had but presently repaired the rent in their professional rapport, heaved a magnanimous sigh and, in the manner of Moses on the Mount, revealed what he considered to be the imprint of God’s incontrovertible evidence.

  ‘Thumb marks,’ he said. ‘Pressing each side on the carotid artery. Unconsciousness is instant. An eastern practice, attributed to the Thuggee system. Assassins. Indian, by nature. Followers of Kali, the Goddess of Destruction.’

  ‘How would you know all that, inspector?’

  The constable seemed unaware of the implied insult in his question, so McLevy, not for the first time, decided to give him benefit of doubt.

  ‘The aforesaid practice was almost inflicted upon me by an opium runner who had a den by the dockside and specialised in getting his customers doped to the eyeballs, practising his black art to knock them out, then killing them, robbing the bodies and dumping the cadavers weighted down with rocks through a trap-door at the back into the sea where they nourished the denizens of the deep. Coal-fish and crabs mostly. Bottom feeders.’

  McLevy had a sudden vivid memory of the man leaning over him, face contorted in a hideous delight, sliding his thumbs up each side of the neck.

  ‘I had been sent in under guise of an opium user, by dint of my complexion. I think Lieutenant Moxey, my superior officer at the time, was trying to get rid of me.’

  ‘Did you have to puff the pipe?’ Mulholland asked eagerly, fascinated by this racy anecdote.

  ‘I did not inhale,’ was the stern response.

  Although, mind you, there was a certain heightened aspect to his recollection. McLevy could have sworn the man had a tattooed serpent on his face, but at the trial it had mysteriously vanished.

  ‘And did he kill you, sir?’

  ‘Obviously not.’