by David Ashton
‘No. I mean. Sir. How did you effect escape?’
Again the memory, the thumbs tightened, the yellow teeth bared in a murderous smile, then the man shot up over McLevy’s head like a cork out of a bottle and landed with a crash on two far-gone addicts who lay peacefully behind them in the smoke-filled, opium-scented den of iniquity.
Case concluded. Of course Moxey took the credit.
‘I used a technique,’ said the inspector gravely, ‘called Kissing the Clouds.’
‘Is that Chinese?’
‘No. It comes from Leith. It is adapted from the leg movement of a hanged felon. I’ll show it you sometime.’
Back tae business. He looked down at the body.
‘Once Brennan was safely insensible, the killer finished off the job.’
McLevy anticipated Mulholland’s next question by picking up the dirty, ripped pillow from the mattress and displaying a reddish stain which lay in the centre of the cloth.
‘This mark is recent, even still a wee touch damp. If you examine Brennan’s mouth … well go ahead, examine the damned thing!’
This sudden flash of temper indicated to Mulholland that all was back to normal. He peeled the lips of the corpse apart, peered inside and winced at the rotting stench.
‘Worse than a dead badger,’ he muttered.
The inspector smiled happily. ‘The by-product of gingivitis; observe the gums and you will see another result of the inflammation.’
The whole mouth was in a terrible state but the gums were especially caked with smears of dried blood where the irritation had wreaked havoc.
Mulholland nodded. It made a sense of sorts. He let the mouth fall shut with a hollow clack.
‘The man was potentially smothered,’ he said.
‘Exactly! And the blood in his mouth left marks where the pad was pressed.’ McLevy’s eyes gleamed.
‘And I’ll tell you one more on top of that. It was not a member of the fraternity, they’d just cut his throat and to hell with it. This is professional. High class.’
‘There’s not much in the way of actual proof, sir. A wee bit scratch, a couple of bruises and a stain.’
‘Uhuh. So, you say,’ replied the inspector.
The unspoken question in McLevy’s mind was, of course, why kill the man anyway? Was it some sort of … clean sweep?
The door abruptly flew open and the squat form of Biddy Lapsley stood framed, arms folded. She opened a mouth like the gates of hell.
‘I want my room back,’ she bellowed. ‘This man’s been dead long enough.’
Then. Astonishingly. Tears started to flow down the veined and mottled face.
‘I had hopes for him,’ she muttered brokenly. ‘He was such a fine big specimen. Meat on the bone. He put his lips upon my hand in the hall. A real gentleman. I could have raised him high.’
The policemen looked back at the corpse. It showed no sign of resurrection.
25
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
WILLIAM BLAKE, Songs of Experience
Sir Henry Ponsonby had been in the Queen’s service these nineteen years. He’d arrived as an equerry to the Prince Consort but his exuberance, intelligence and good nature had quickly endeared him to Victoria so much that she almost at once took him over.
For the last ten years he’d been her private secretary; he’d heard the bell of St Paul’s toll the death of her Prince Albert and listened through a door as the Queen cried like a soul bereft. He had seen her through the John Brown scandal, various illnesses, various wars and various threats of abdication if she did not get her own way.
When Victoria became interested in spiritualism after the death of her beloved husband, Ponsonby had even taken part in the darkness, but at a mock Household séance had disgraced himself by laughing so hard that the tears came through the obituary section of The Times, it being part of a newspaper blindfold he had been obliged to wear at the occasion.
Risen through the ranks. First a colonel, then hailed as general and now knighted. But, in his mind somewhere, he was still a decent soldier. Loyal to the bone.
Eliza, as he irreverently called the Queen to others, had valued him as a friend, confidant, and rock upon which impetuous seas might break in vain, most of them being the seas of her own temper when thwarted. But value him, she had most dearly. Until now.
Now he was outside a ring of iron. For he possessed a grievous fault, a terrible sin which had been raised to confront him like a spectre. He was a Liberal.
Of course, he’d always been of that persuasion, proud to be so, pepper the court with the cannon fire of some common sense and a smidgeon of humour. But what had once been regarded with affection, indulgence and, God help him, sometimes even acted upon, was now viewed in the words of one of the Queen’s own telegrams to no less than the Dean of Westminster as ‘opposition proclivities’ to be corrected.
His own wife Mary was also under suspicion but she, God bless her, threatened to go around with a mysterious look on her face as if in hourly communication with the forces of darkness.
Ponsonby could not afford that luxury. He was a servant of Her Majesty, once a most intimate servant, now excluded and distrusted. The Queen had been poisoned against him and he knew the man responsible. As Ponsonby fell, so the other rose in her affections, higher and higher.
Insinuations smeared his good name. That he had carried messages to the enemy, not true, not true, in the midst of Tory plots and opposition counter-plots he took no sides, he steered the middle course.
Much good it did him. He was no longer trusted. It was like a witch hunt. The court of Elizabeth Regina had set the treacherous template for the present one.
Well, mustn’t bleat and moan, one would battle on somehow but it was a damned hard grind.
He looked out of the windows of Osborne House. As happened quite often in the Isle of Wight, there was a fine mist of rain swirling and falling. It was the kind of drizzle that could soak you to the skin. Sly. Insinuating.
Two figures were in the garden. One, tall, emaciated, like a funeral director, by God, held a large black umbrella to protect both himself and the other who sat on a small garden chair and worked busily at a border of flowers.
Yes, he had her under protection all right, humbugged to such an extreme that she detested and feared anyone with connection to the Liberal cause. The very word Liberal, in its essence generous and noble-minded, had been turned into a leprous epithet.
Gladstone in particular was to be reviled and shunned as if he carried that deadly plague. The mere mention of his name caused the Queen to shudder as if someone had walked across her grave.
Ponsonby’s pale, rather protruberant eyes creased in pain at his predicament as he gazed down at the instrument of his fall from favour. The funeral director. Blast and damn the man.
What was that play? His wife had dragged him to it, Hamlet, that was it, lasted an eternity, but there was a moment when the player king fellow had poured poison into someone’s ear. Fatal. Yes. Shakespeare was nobody’s fool.
As the rain smudged its way down the window pane not quite blotting out the view below, the secretary’s lips moved in what was either imprecation or prayer.
In the garden, Benjamin Disraeli swivelled his head to see the pale face jerk back at the upstairs window.
Yes, the fellow was still spying, but Ponsonby could not discern the words exchanged, not unless he had left his ears under the rhododendron bushes.
Normally this observation would have a tinge of humour, but the prime minister did not feel humorous today. He felt like a hunted animal.
His umbrella twitched. Benjamin Disraeli hated the damp. He yearned for a perfect climate and never attained such.
He could almost feel the lining of his bronchial tubes thickening by the second. Another coating of moist slime, courtesy
of the English weather.
A drop of water trickled down the hook of his nose and dripped off the end. Prospects indeed were dismal in all senses, marooned on this benighted island.
Yet, if he was being candid with himself, although he only usually used honesty as a façade to confuse his enemies, he had somewhere welcomed her summons to Osborne.
Ostensibly it was to consult him on various matters of state before she left for Germany to attend the confirmation of her motherless granddaughters, diphtheria having removed her beloved Princess Alice some two years before, but really she wished to be reassured by his company.
The nation was voting. In England they were now at the polls and Scotland would follow some days later. A strange and staggered system but God guide their hand and, if not, Disraeli, his representative upon earth, was her man in a crisis. He would bring the ship home.
Disraeli’s lips quirked a mixture of chagrin and bitter amusement. Yes, what a colossus he was to be sure. Had Count Bismarck not hailed him at the Congress of Berlin as der alte Jude, das ist der Mann?
Of course the Iron Chancellor was somewhat in his cups at the time and ballooned with flatulence, but it was a compliment to be savoured, was it not?
He remembered the scene well. Bismarck awash with champagne and black beer, stuffing himself with seven different kinds of sausage, and Disraeli himself wreathed in cigar smoke as a measure of protection against the flood of indelicate stories being poured by the chancellor into his isolated ears.
‘Put not your trust in Princes,’ Bismarck had also told him.
Ah, where would we be without the irony of God?
Another drip fell from his nose to earth. Back to the present. The election. Yes. The election. Well, well.
As for himself, he could do no more. The game was over. It was up to the country. Already, in England, they had begun to vote. The game was over.
In a strange way, at this very moment, he needed Victoria as much as she him.
They trusted each other as much as either of them could ever trust anyone. Lord Beaconsfield and the Queen.
He had arrived to find her flitting around in a state of almost hectic gaiety. She had immediately dragged him out to the garden and, wrapped in waterproofing, thick gloves to hand, was engaged in digging up some of his favourite flower, the wild primrose, which grew in abundance here.
For him to take home. To enjoy. In triumph.
Victoria struggled with some difficulty to rise from the low chair; between her growing plumpness and the myriad layers of clothing which encased the Royal person, to lever oneself up these days was a daunting endeavour.
Disraeli had the same problem. In their earlier days he thought nothing of throwing himself upon his knees and proclaiming his eternal loyalty to his Queen but now it would take a hoist to get him back on his feet.
He offered a spindly but chivalrous arm for her to lean on and, umbrella hovering overhead, escorted her to a garden table where she carefully packed the primroses and their earth into a shallow basket.
She looked up at him and smiled. Her small stolid form was in odd contrast to his attenuated frame.
‘I am so glad you prefer the primrose,’ she said.
‘It is all the better for being a touch wild, and so retains its beauty for a longer time,’ he replied.
As he smiled the skin stretched tight across his cheekbones like papyrus.
She worried over his health. ‘You smoke too many cigars, Mr Disraeli,’ she admonished.
‘All men have their vices.’ A cynical droop to the eyelids provoked her to laughter.
She spun, surprisingly nimble-footed, away from the sheltering umbrella into the lush perfection of Osborne’s immaculate lawn.
‘Your Majesty is unprotected, and runs the risk of saturation,’ he called as she whirled farther off.
‘Nonsense! It is only God’s rain,’ she replied sharply.
‘God rains on earth and the Queen in England,’ he punned a little riskily.
Her frown vanished and she laughed once more, trailing her heavy skirt through the wet grass like a child at play.
‘When I return from Baden-Baden, you will be once more prime minister, and we shall have a celebration. A masked ball perhaps, I shall arrive as Titania and you as Oberon.’
Disraeli regarded her fondly, but he understood the root cause of these extremities of spirit. Fear of the unknown. Ah well, adopt an earnest tone. Though what is earnest is not always true.
‘Indeed, ma’am, to the confusion of our enemies, we hope to have much cause for celebration.’
Reassured somewhat, she smiled, then looked upwards and clasped her hands together in supplication.
‘Observe, prime minister. The rain has stopped. It is an omen! Our diligence must be blessed!’
Disraeli peered out cautiously from under the still dripping shade. He was dressed in black and his resemblance to a crow was unmistakable.
He furled the umbrella, struck a pose as if it were a walking stick to hand, and responded to her fervour.
‘We shall prevail, ma’am. And I am reminded of something Your Majesty was gracious enough to confide in me in her letters. We must adopt a high tone at all times. William Gladstone will never be a man of the world.’
There was a element of self-parody in this bombast but the Queen seized upon the literal meaning.
‘There are tales he is a secret Papist and a … libertine!’ she exclaimed.
Disraeli smiled inwardly. Indeed Gladstone’s ‘rescue’ work amongst prostitutes had long been the most fertile source of innuendo, and if Beaconsfield had not actually given birth to these rumours, he, when they reached her ears, had certainly never contradicted them.
Over the years, he had made it his business to lace her thoughts with poison, wherever possible, as regards his bitter rival and, though he said it himself, he had made a splendid fist of it.
Fear gives rise to anger. Both can be manipulated. The art of politics.
Victoria brooded upon Gladstone’s faults.
‘He would reduce the empire. We must be prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other, continually. He would deny this. Moreover, he treats me like a public function! He is worse than the Russians!’
Her own words triggered off an alarm close to hysteria and she gazed at him with near-naked entreaty in her eyes, the previous comfort she had found in his assurances gone as if it had never been. Like the rain.
‘You must be my chief minister for ever. I demand it!’
He could not look her in the eyes. He felt he did not have the strength.
‘I am sure the people will choose wisely.’
‘But if they do not?’ she almost shrieked, then walked off abruptly to compose herself in a corner of the garden.
Indeed, thought Disraeli, if they do not, what could he offer her? His mind shifted to a conversation, held in a private club near St James’s Park. A private room, wreathed in cigar smoke, where he had sat with a man he had met barely half a dozen times. A man who moved in the higher, more secret, circles of power. Not yet at the top, but ambitious to be so. A man recommended.
It was not long after he had declared the election, and Disraeli was wondering if he had made a mistake.
They had spoken for near an hour and, at the end of it, the man had leant forward and said, ‘And how may I best serve the Queen?’
‘In whatever way you see fit,’ was Disraeli’s response.
No. He could not offer that. Best take refuge in whatever wit he might dredge up.
He walked across the grass, leant over, and confided.
‘With any luck, Your Majesty, after a resounding defeat, Gladstone will emigrate to Siberia and remain there like an extinct volcano. Forgotten and fossilised.’
Not very good and part-pilfered from a much wittier phrase he had once coined, but it was the best he could manage at short notice and it had the desired effect.
She nodded happily at such a prospect and seemed to have ful
ly recovered her spirits.
Disraeli was anxious to repair inside. He was rather exhausted, his very bones were aching in this damp, God-forsaken universe and a glass of port wouldn’t go amiss.
But Victoria had one more surprise in store.
‘Can you command a waltz, Mr Disraeli?’ she asked.
For once the silver tongue was tied.
‘I – I – have done so at one time without causing offence or accident,’ he finally murmured.
‘Prince Albert danced the waltz quite beautifully,’ she murmured.
She stood. Not looking at him. Gazing into a pleasant middle distance. Disraeli at last comprehended the nature of the silent invocation. His own wife had adored to dance but she was more inclined towards the polka, the rhythms of which he found … most unappetising.
He laid aside the umbrella and approached his Queen.
‘Would Her Majesty consider honouring her most humble servant?’ he almost whispered.
Without more ado, she held out her plump little arms, still encased in waterproofing, her hands safely covered from fleshly contact by the stout garden gloves. He took one of them in his, and put his other arm round her back in a discreet curvature.
They waited in silence. Somewhere high above, a seagull screeched mockingly. Finally Victoria began to hum a tune under her breath.
Disraeli, slowly, like a grandfather clock creaking into motion, began to move gingerly to the melody.
She followed suit. They danced. Ghosts in a garden.
Upstairs, Ponsonby could not believe what he saw. He bit hard into his knuckle to disprove hallucination, and then looked out once more.
The figures still waltzed before his sight. Victoria and the funeral director.
He would have found a measure of comfort, however, had he been able to catch the look in Disraeli’s eyes as he gazed over the head of his sovereign.
They were bleak. Like a cornered beast’s. Fixed upon an uncertain future.
A shaft of pale sunlight broke through the clouds and illuminated the dancers. The rest was gathering gloom.
26
He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth
