Shadow of the Serpent

by David Ashton

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?

  He closed his eyes and he was walking towards her, the weapon in his hand.

  Mouth smiling, her eyes full of mischief, his heart seared with hatred, kill the harlot, kill the disease where it spreads. Hot blood.

  Or was it a cold act? Detached. Watch her fall. Lie in the gutter like a dead animal. Just an animal.

  The cat suddenly shot bolt upright, fur rising like a hairy nimbus from the back of her neck. A creaking board on the stairs outside. Gardyloo!

  Mrs MacPherson, his landlady, up to get his dirty plate, though God knows she was always complaining about the stairs and hated the fact he had his meal brought up from the dining room.

  He hoped most earnestly she wasn’t accompanied by her West Highland terrier, Fergus, a decent enough wee tyke but representative of what McLevy considered a vastly overrated breed rejoicing in the name of man’s best friend.

  Fergus loathed the feline species and so, for his sake, did Mrs MacPherson, though she did not possess the dog’s olfactory abilities.

  McLevy quickly shooed the cat into his small bedroom, shoved the saucer of milk inside to keep company, and shut them both in just as a knock sounded at the landing door.

  As he made his way to answer, something nagged at the back of his mind. Mrs MacPherson was a rap-a-tap-tap, that was just a rap-a-tap, what was going on here, surely the woman wasn’t adjusting her habits?

  He threw open the door, gaze automatically adjusted to the eye-level of the dumpy Dundonian frame of his landlady, only to find that he was, in fact, staring at a female bosom. Safely ensconced in material right enough, pale purple, deep collar, glimpsed behind the dark outdoor coat, but a not inconsiderable statement of undoubted femininity.

  A polite cough brought him swiftly up to the face. The light from his room shone past his shoulder and illuminated her in the shadows of the hallway; the countenance was part hidden by her bonnet but the skin was clear, apparently unlined by travail, peaches and cream, and yet it had a tight stretch. Blue eyes, but there was a darkness to the colour. A troubled sky.

  The mouth was firm, lips a touch on the thin side. A very beautiful face though. The kind you’d see in the old paintings, damsel in distress with young men dying all around her; fatalities of a misplaced desire to rescue what was perfectly capable of looking after itself.

  McLevy’s sympathy was always with the dragon lurking at the back.

  As they stared at each other, the landlady’s voice floated up from under.

  ‘I hope ye don’t mind, Mr McLevy,’ she called. ‘But the young lady says she knows of ye and I am covered all over in flour.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mrs MacPherson,’ he shouted back. ‘Tend tae your oven, that’s the important matter.’

  Sure enough, the enticing smell of newly baked bread could be discerned wafting up the stairway.

  The dog barked below, perhaps it sensed the cat. The woman took a deep breath.

  ‘Are you James McLevy?’

  ‘You have heard me so identified.’

  ‘I must apologise for disturbing your supper.’

  He quickly wiped at his mouth with the back of a hand. Damn herring that left an oily spume.

  ‘My name is Joanna Lightfoot. I … have great need of your assistance.’

  He glanced doubtfully back into the recess of his room.

  It wasn’t exactly a midden but, not unlike his own mind, nothing seemed to know its place.

  Seeing his hesitation, she took another deep breath, then her eyes closed and she slumped forward.

  He grasped her by the elbow. They were stuck mid-portal. The indignant cat started scratching at his bedroom door.

  Between women. A fine predicament.

  12

  Tell me, where all past years are,

  Or who cleft the Devil’s foot.

  JOHN DONNE, ‘Song’, op. cit.

  The cat cast a final, baleful, slant-eyed glance at the female sitting in the cracked leather armchair by the fire, slid out of the open window then ghosted off into the moonlight.

  McLevy closed the frame and remained gazing out over the rooftops. He could feel the heat of the woman’s gaze on his back but resisted the urge to turn round immediately.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I am not in the habit of giving in to weakness.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ he muttered.

  Now he did turn and gave her a long hard scrutiny, making no attempt to hide the fact.

  ‘What is the name of your cat?’

  She was not ready to begin. Not yet. He could wait.

  ‘Bathsheba, I call her. But she’s not mine. She just visits. Like yourself.’

  She looked away into the flames of the coal fire. He was not deflected and redoubled his examination.

  ‘Ye’re not as young as you first appear.’

  The blunt statement seemed to amuse her.

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive.’

  ‘I’ve often found that so. In my profession.’

  She had taken off the bonnet. Her hair was done up in a chignon of sorts, with stray golden tendrils escaping from the general confinement. Under the outdoor coat that now lay open, her gown was of a crushed silk material, the bodice a darker purple than the rest.

  It was quality. Expensive. The style promised freedom to the body, not yet delivered but … a certain yield to the swelling pressure. Very fetching. A bonny picture. The itemised Eve.

  ‘I am approaching thirty years of age.’

  ‘I can believe that.’

  She sat at once upright and there might have been the slightest narrowing of the eyes.

  McLevy whistled cheerfully under his breath as he retrieved his coffee, making no effort to offer her a cup.

  He could not to himself say why he was acting in such a boorish manner, though, to be truthful, he didn’t ever have to stretch too far to attain such an attitude.

  Perfection often annoyed him and he loved to give it a wee dig in the ribs but that wasn’t the whole cause.

  Anyhow, a swooning woman was grounds for deep distrust, as was the rare and perplexing sight of a female by his fireside. He could sense complication. A feminine psyche going back right tae the very caves themselves. A psyche whose ruthless inner certainty it was his bounden duty to disrupt.

  He sniffed. She was wearing perfume. A rose fragrance. Reminded him of Jean Brash. Females and their odours.

  ‘Or is it just because I possess beauty?’ she said.

  His turn to narrow eyes.

  ‘What was that? I must confess I was lost in thought.’

  ‘The reason for your lack of manners.’

  ‘Oh that? No, that’s nothing to do with beauty. That’s just … part and parcel.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it. Most men take me at face value. It is so … inevitable, I suppose, given their limitations.’

  One in the gut for him and nothing he did not deserve but why did he feel an obscure danger threatening?

  Maybe she was right. Just beauty. In pale purple. That would be threaten
ing enough. Ah well, cheat fair.

  ‘What is your preference in coffee?’ he ventured.

  ‘Black.’

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘A small plantation.’

  McLevy smiled suddenly, a beguiling glint in his eye. It was rather alarming. Like the wolf in Red Riding-Hood.

  He brought her the coffee as directed, put it almost meekly into her hand, then retreated to regard her from a secure distance at the other side of the fire. She took a gulp. It was like bitumen.

  ‘Joanna Lightfoot. Mistress or Miss?’ he asked.

  ‘Miss.’

  The merest flicker of an eye but she caught it.

  ‘I know. At the prime of my life and still not married. Such a waste. I am tortured night and day, waiting for my Prince Charming.’

  McLevy sensed some twisted truth in her words and a hidden barb. Perhaps directed against herself. Women were the very devil to read. Like the Sargasso Sea.

  ‘I wouldnae place ye from round here.’

  ‘You may place me from Liquorpond Street, in London. That is where I was born,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I’ve heard tell of that location.’ It was a notorious slum quarter, mind you nothing to the Via Dolorosas of his own fair city. ‘You’ve come up in the world.’

  For a moment it appeared as if she thought to say something then she lowered her eyes.

  ‘Ye remarked you had need of my assistance?’

  Her fingers plucked at the bodice, which gently constrained the soft, no doubt sweet, flesh that poets eulogised and McLevy kept his mind resolutely free from contemplating.

  ‘I read in the evening newspaper,’ she stopped fiddling for which he was most grateful, ‘about a murder in Leith. Yourself, the investigating officer.’

  ‘I am indeed,’ he replied. And waited.

  ‘The death blow was most … singular?’

  ‘That’s one description. Sadie Gorman was split like an old apple tree, but she did not bring forth sweet scent.’

  He chuckled to himself in a macabre fashion but his eyes never left her.

  She rose from the chair, walked restlessly away from him into the centre of the room and looked around. The wallpaper seemed to be composed of brown flowers. She’d never seen brown flowers in all of her life. The place had an air of neglect, like an empty box. The ceiling had cracks running all over like a spider’s web, two threadbare carpets lay like dead animals on the bare floorboards, the place was clean enough but sterile. As if McLevy lived his life somewhere else. Not even a picture on the wall, and, more importantly, not a mirror to be seen.

  ‘This lacks a woman’s touch,’ she said.

  ‘As Samson did Delilah’s?’ McLevy muttered as he shook the coffee pot hopefully and received a dry response. With a disappointed grunt, he banged it back on the hob.

  The inspector was getting fed up with all this. A small fishbone had lodged in one of his back molars and he was dying to hook his thumbnail in there. Manners maketh man, however.

  ‘Did you come up here to talk about decoration or murder? There’s only the one that interests me, so declare yourself.’

  The colour heightened in her cheeks for a moment, then she suddenly stamped her foot on the floor.

  He noticed her boots were in the latest mode. Boots strangely interested him, of Italian leather he would surmise, tight to the ankle, the laces looped so neatly.

  Her feet almost as large as his own. In fact … he walked towards her so that they were face to face. She was near the same elevation as himself, now what would all this equality produce?

  She looked him straight in the eye, then delivered a body blow.

  ‘Thirty years ago in Leith. There was a similar death, was there not?’

  13

  Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

  And to keep off envy’s stinging,

  JOHN DONNE, ‘Song’, op. cit.

  Leith, December 1850

  Sergeant George Cameron lay in a hospital bed of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, what a place to end your days.

  He had no relatives to gather round and dab their eyes, for which he thanked his Protestant Redeemer. They were all up in the Highlands gutting trout and chasing sheep.

  What a scunner. Some drunken fool in a tavern brawl sticks a penknife in his leg, the blade snaps off, the young doctor, Jarvis by name, just qualified, full of mince, opens up his flesh but cannae find it.

  ‘Dropped out,’ he says. ‘It must have dropped out.’

  But it hadnae dropped out, the stupid bastard had missed the damn thing entirely. It had lodged just below the back of the knee and by the time inflammation had alerted Cameron, the thing found and removed from its hidey-hole, his blood was evil-poisoned.

  Amputation had been suggested – that would be nice, on the saunter with a wooden leg. But even for that, the fever must abate, and it had not abated; it raged through him like a forest fire.

  A hand came down with a big white hankie and wiped the sweat off his face. Dabbed the tangled eyebrows. Constable James McLevy. All his damned fault.

  He should have been Cameron’s rearguard, what happened though he’d got carried away and had not observed the eleventh commandment. In matters of communal violence, always stay back to back with a fellow bulls-eye.

  Somebody’d nipped the helmet from the young man’s head, he’d gone on the chase and while he was thus engaged a drunken sailor had stuck his ’baccy knife into Cameron’s nether limb.

  See the big white face staring down, the agony and guilt in his eyes, serve the bugger right. At least he would be alive to feel such agony. A spasm of pain went through Cameron and he reared up in the bed, then collapsed back.

  God help him, he was like a gaffed fish.

  ‘Well now, what have ye got to say for yourself?’ he demanded fiercely. Well he meant it fierce but it came out more like snuffed mutton.

  ‘I wish it had been me who suffered the blow.’

  ‘So do I, son. So, do I,’ muttered Cameron. ‘But for some reason the Almighty thought otherwise.’

  Another spasm took him and the young man stood helplessly by, like a mourner who didn’t know where to lay the plate of funeral meat.

  ‘Shall I fetch the nurse?’

  ‘For God’s sake no! She’s a Paisley woman, what comfort is there in that?’

  The constable gently mopped the soaking brow again.

  ‘I am truly sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry? Sorry’s not good enough!’ Cameron glowered up, his pupils dark with pain. ‘Now you listen to me, the next time I close these eyes o’ mine, will be the last. I’m not opening them another go.’ His gaze went inwards and his voice lost power.

  ‘Too much suffering, Jamie. I’ll be giving up the ghost. Now here’s what you must do. You must tell our noble commander Lieutenant Moxey that I am to be buried with full honours and attendance.’

  ‘I’m not sure the lieutenant will pay much heed to me,’ the constable replied. ‘But I’ll stand in front of his face until he does so.’

  Damn the boy, and damn this dying, George would have enjoyed teaching him the craft.

  ‘Just mention a bawdy-hoose, name of the Happy Land. Then ask after his wife. He’ll do it.’

  By God he would, the dirty auld leglifter – ever since his good woman had taken to her bed with a wasting disease he’d been at it like a fornicator reborn.

  ‘Now, on the day, the burial day, you must pray for rain. Buckets of it.’

  Cameron laughed painfully at the look on the boy’s face.

  ‘Rain?’

  ‘Aye. The high heid-yins, the powers-that-be, will all be standing there. I would wish a long service, a deep-ribbed minister who loves his own words, and the east wind blowing a sleety lash in their faces so they all may catch their death of cold.’

  This time the laughter racked him so deep with pain that he had to stop even his last pleasure. Down to the real business. He beckoned the constable in close and pointed to a small mother-of-pe
arl box which lay on his bedside table.

  The young man brought it to him with due solemnity as if it contained the ashes of his ancestors.

  ‘That box was a nuptial gift to my own good mother, pity it wasnae a gun tae shoot my father on the wedding night,’ the sergeant announced heavily.

  ‘Then ye wouldnae be here,’ said the constable.

  Damn the boy again. Damn his gallows humour. Damn the tears stinging at his eyes. He didnae wish to disgrace himself, let the boy see strength. Strength was everything.

  Cameron fumbled for his eyeglasses, stuck them on his nose, opened the lid with impatient trembling fingers and took out … a fragment of thin black cloth.

  ‘Ye remember this?’

  ‘I do. From the murdered girl. In her hand.’

  ‘That was the bond, Jamie. Between us. We looked at death thegither then. Now, we do so once more.’

  He put the fragment back and pressed the box into the constable’s hand.

  ‘It always irked me, the vicious bastard, I never brought him in to kiss the hangman’s rope. Poor wee lassie, it was her first time a-whoring, did ye know that?’

  ‘I was there when her brother told you.’

  ‘So ye were, so ye were,’ the sergeant’s eyes began to droop and with an effort he prised them open again. Behind the thick glasses, magnified, they blinked like an owl.

  ‘It was in all the papers, you ‘member that?’

  ‘I do indeed,’ replied the constable.

  A silence fell. Cameron stared into space and the young man produced a headline from memory.

  ‘A Lamb to the Slaughter,’ he quoted solemnly.

  Cameron’s head jerked back as a shaft of pain burnt through his body. He looked up at the constable.

  ‘The case is yours. One day you will solve it. I charge you so. Don’t fail me, now.’

  ‘I promise I will do everything in my power.’

  ‘Until the day ye die!’ demanded Cameron.

  ‘Until the day I die,’ came the pledge.

  Cameron leant back exhaustedly on the pillow, his mind was beginning to go, the poison dancing in his veins, what was that air he always enjoyed? Tam Lucas of the Feast, damn me but he could not recall the tune.