Shadow of the Serpent

by David Ashton

  He was due some time off the following day and though the morrow night was now taken up with McLevy at the Old Ship, the constable still maintained an afternoon assignation with a certain young lady.

  There was a touch of spring in the air. He would lift his voice in song.

  42

  We lay, my love and I,

  Beneath the Weeping Willow.

  But now alone I lie,

  And weep beside the tree.

  ENGLISH BALLAD

  ‘How did you know?’

  The golden hair had been pinned back from her face and she wore a drab grey dress whose coarse material fell to the floor like a dead weight.

  Joanna Lightfoot had the brand of an institution already laid upon her, but her face was clear, the eyes calm. She had nothing left to lose now except her liberty and, from her demeanour, it would seem she placed little value upon that.

  McLevy spoke quietly. A female warder of sorts sat in the corner, apparently paying no heed, but the inspector was not naïve enough to think that because the authorities, in their gratitude, had granted him this one favour, they were to be trusted in any other business.

  They were going to sweep the whole thing under the carpet and needed his silence.

  But that was all they needed.

  ‘Ye walk like a soldier,’ he said. ‘A person can disguise many things but the walk often gives them away.’

  In his mind’s eye, he replayed the moment when he watched her, as Jane Salter, stride up the path with Gladstone and registered a thin slice of intuition.

  She smiled at the irony. Throughout the years, the Serpent had often taken her to task for her gait.

  ‘As if I had just dismounted a horse?’

  ‘Ye might say that.’ He scratched his ear, oddly discomfited. ‘I wasn’t exactly sure. It was just a moment.’

  ‘And you follow such moments?’

  ‘Most of the time.’

  She fell silent. McLevy was at a loss. There was an ending to be made between them, but he was damned if he knew what form it might take.

  ‘But other than that, ye made a fine stab at deception. Led me a merry dance. Twisted me like a fool.’

  ‘Not at the end,’ she said. ‘At the final reckoning, you had your revenge.’

  He remembered in the tomb looking down at his tunic to discover that most of the blood came from another source. As they had fallen to earth the axe blade must have turned so that the Serpent had impaled himself.

  McLevy had been underneath. A man on the ground is not necessarily a man defeated.

  He was gouged some, but not mortally wounded, so he untied his legs, retrieved his revolver and followed the fellow out to watch him die.

  ‘Did you have no qualms of conscience?’ he asked. ‘You would ruin a man’s life?’

  Though Gladstone was a politician, he was still a human being. Somewhere.

  ‘No regrets?’

  She looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Not at all. It was a job of work.’

  ‘A job?’

  ‘Yes. I joined Sweet William’s staff and made myself indispensable. It was easy to become his little pet because we had researched his … predilections.’

  It all seemed logical to Joanna.

  ‘Then I waited for my instructions.’

  ‘Which you followed to the letter?’

  ‘Of course.’

  McLevy shook his head. This was worse than being in the fog. She witnessed his confusion and smiled.

  ‘There is no hatred, or love. Only instruction. It is like a game. The long game, we used to call it.’

  She tugged at the neckline of her prison dress. The rough material obviously chafed.

  ‘Gladstone was just part of the game. It never ends.’

  ‘But what about the deaths? These poor women?’

  ‘I did not perform them. He …’ for the first time her voice faltered, not for the committed act but for the lost lover … ‘He provided.’

  ‘But was not that evil?’

  ‘I am the operative. As I have said. Good or bad means nothing to me.’

  ‘That is where we differ.’

  It was like being in a fairy tale, lost in a deep forest which made perfect sense unto itself yet for the traveller led nowhere and folded into darkness.

  ‘Have ye ever killed?’ he asked.

  ‘That is not my function. I seduce. I entice. I … create illusion.’

  ‘How long have ye been so?’

  ‘As long as I can remember.’

  She laughed suddenly and, as before, he sensed the bitter pain behind that sound.

  ‘I have always been in the field. The only difference this time was that … He was with me. A pity. A great loss.’

  Another silence. Her gaze had fallen inwards.

  ‘Was everything you told me about yourself a lie?’

  She was jolted out of her introspection by this question and her lips, still that bit on the thin side, screwed into a bitter smile.

  ‘Not at all. My mother was indeed a whore, a game and brazen one. She had no shame, she loved life and dressed to kill.’

  McLevy was put in mind of Sadie Gorman.

  Again Joanna spoke in those formal tones which were so much part of her character.

  ‘She became the mistress of a young man with some measure of nobility, and had a child by him. He provided in some way for her. When she died, he removed the daughter. He lifted her from the slums she and the mother had inhabited, and took on the role of the child’s guardian.’

  She stopped.

  McLevy now knew why he was here. A twist to the blood he sensed from the moment they had first met.

  ‘The girl grew up. She had everything money could buy. A good education, pretty clothes. And then one night, at the age of eighteen, she came to him.

  ‘That night, they broke the law. And thereafter.’

  The inspector licked his dry lips. She smiled and passed her hand almost playfully over her face.

  For a moment he was looking at the Serpent and then, another pass, and the features had rearranged to Joanna Lightfoot.

  ‘A trait we both shared. Father and daughter.’

  One of McLevy’s legs set off in an uncontrollable shaking as he gazed into the dark blue eyes.

  ‘I am a damned soul,’ she said. ‘If there is perdition, a future punishment as Mr Gladstone would term it, if there is a hell, I shall meet my lover there.

  ‘We will burn together.’

  She reached deliberately forward, took up McLevy’s hand and kissed it. The imprint of her lips stayed on his skin.

  A long silence. Most terrible to bear.

  Then he leant forward and blurted out a mundane thought, but anything to break that silence. ‘Why did ye dress up for me?’

  ‘In case I was described, there would be nothing to connect the woman with Jane Salter. In any case, you were a hard nut to crack, inspector. I needed every weapon at my disposal.’

  She smiled. He did not respond.

  ‘And I bear you no grudge for his death.’

  ‘He deserved it.’

  McLevy’s eyes were hard and without pity.

  She was glad of that. She whispered close, her own eyes mocking.

  ‘But does not one thing puzzle you, inspector?’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘The scrap of material found on Mae Donnachie’s body. I thought it a great stroke of luck that I could weave it into the story. But what if the story of long ago was true?

  ‘What if the man we led you towards was in fact the man you sought? What if we were God’s agents instead of Satan’s helpers?’

  McLevy felt the barbs going into his flesh.

  ‘Just a scrap. The rest was conjecture and lies.’

  ‘But what if some of it were true? Now, you will never know. You’ve cut your own throat.’

  She laughed softly.

  ‘You have lost as well, inspector.’

  ‘I have lost many times
in life,’ said McLevy. ‘The feeling is not unknown.’

  He stood abruptly and walked to the door where he turned to look back at her. The quality of his gaze was measured and dispassionate. It took Joanna by surprise but she managed a crooked smile lest he sense the emptiness and pain that twisted in her heart.

  ‘You will never hear of me again. I shall disappear. As if I had never been. Burnt at the stake, old boy.’

  The tones of the Serpent.

  McLevy left without goodbye.

  Though, outside the door, he gazed back through the judas hole.

  The woman in the corner stood. She walked over and laid her hand on Joanna’s shoulder. The seated woman shivered a little at the contact.

  He closed the grille. Joanna Lightfoot was gone.

  43

  The warlock men and the weird women,

  And the fays of the wood and the steep,

  And the phantom hunters all were there,

  And the mermaids of the deep.

  BORDER BALLAD

  McLevy sat by his window and watched as dusk fell on his beloved city.

  Behind every window was a potential crime. He would rest content with that observation.

  The events of the last few days filtered through his mind like flakes of quartz which float for a while in the stream then fall to join the sediment of the river.

  A strange thing but it was mostly dead faces that swam in his mind always.

  Sadie Gorman, Mae Donnachie, the wee dollymop, Frank Brennan and, of course, George Cameron, waiting eternally in that hospital bed for the solving of a murder.

  Last but not least, Sir Edward Graham, to give the murderous bastard his proper name, also had his place in the parade. The father.

  And Joanna Lightfoot? The first moment met, he had looked at her bosom instead of her face. Mis-direction. And it had never changed. Yet, those dark-blue eyes would live with him. Empty and damned. The daughter.

  He pulled his diary towards him, opened it at a blank page and took a slug of coffee. It was bitter as a tinker’s curse. Where the hell did Mrs MacPherson get the stuff?

  He must ask Jean Brash for her supplier, though it was probably some Levantine smuggler with an eye-patch and gold tooth to boot. Snaggled no doubt, the tooth.

  He began to write.

  The Diary of James McLevy

  I feel a lowering of spirits which is customary at the conclusion of a case.

  I have found much to surprise me, especially about myself.

  In the personal, to wit … my father is apparently an Italian sailor. If alive, he’d be a good age now, but Tarry Breeks are soaked in brine, he may well yet survive.

  Perhaps he lives in a wee village beside the sea where his grandchildren gather round his knees to hear of his adventures in far-off lands.

  Every Easter I can remember, my mother would take me down to watch the ships come in and then we would go home and she would wait for the knock at the door.

  She told me often enough it was my fault the angel never came and I was too young then to question her, like a proper policeman should, as to how she arrived at that conclusion.

  My real father and mother are wrapped up in the one body. Jeannie Scott. I will admire that woman till the day I die. I regret spilling that beetroot on her best tablecloth. I was overcome by greed, my eyes on the black pudding. I am glad she found it in her heart to grant me absolution.

  In the general, to wit … politics is a dirty business and attracts the lowest type. Now and again an honest man may appear but he will be one light shining in eternal darkness.

  They are addicted to power. It is their opium. Hell mend them. I have lost interest.

  McLevy closed the page. Brevity becomes the soul.

  Darkness had fallen on the streets below. On the coping of the roof, some part to the side, he saw the silhouette of a cat outlined by a stray beam of light.

  It was Bathsheba, he was sure of it, and was not her belly hanging lower than previous?

  He whistled but the cat paid no heed and disappeared into the dark. Never mind. With a bit of luck, she would return.

  With women, you always need a bit of luck.

  And what of the Gladstone affair?

  The mother-of-pearl box lay on the table before him. He laid his hand upon it gently and, in his mind’s eye, he could once more see George Cameron shaking his big Highland head in severe disappointment. What a snowflake, he would be thinking and McLevy had to accept that judgement. One day he would take up the trail again but for now he must accept his impotence, like a dull pain that never leaves the body and irritates the soul.

  A noise brought his attention to the street below. Some kind of torchlit procession, Home Rulers perhaps, part encouraged by the noises the Liberal party was making, but we’d see if they came up trumps.

  Every time the Irish trust the English it ends in grief.

  McLevy finished the dregs of his coffee and looked downwards once more.

  The procession. Another parade of power.

  It was led by one bright torch and the lesser lights snaked out behind it.

  Like a serpent.

  44

  On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined;

  No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet

  To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet.

  LORD BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

  Constable Mulholland and Miss Emily Forbes walked down the hill with a decent enough distance between them. Not hand in hand by any means and if there were a brushing contact of sleeve upon sleeve, the uneven quality of the paving stone would surely stand count for that.

  They had made rendezvous at a teahouse where he watched indulgently as she, a trifle greedily it must be said, munched her way through two large slices of Dundee cake, followed by a marzipan concoction. That was fine by Mulholland; he disliked marzipan intensely.

  After that, their footsteps had led them, as they wandered at random, to the high reaches of Leith, where they were both enjoying the light April breeze and pale spring sunshine. A perfect day to be young and, if not at once in love, Cupid might yet be lurking in the rhododendron bushes, arrow sighted.

  Emily cast a sidelong glance at the tall figure of Martin Mulholland, for such was his Christian name.

  The constable was a fine height, his feet were big which was always a good sign, and his voice was true.

  They were considering a duet, a song of Burns, to wit ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ … not an easy melody but Mrs Roach thought that since Mulholland already had some acquaintance with the tune, it might encourage the young man to rise above himself.

  Emily was all for that.

  She wondered what her father would make of the constable. There was no doubt of his serious mind and steady disposition but policemen were often in contact with the lowest part of humanity, and might this not somewhere, in some osmotic fashion, cause a degree of corruption?

  Mulholland, for his part, had suddenly recognised (his mind wandering with his feet) that the road down which they so happily perambulated, though respectable enough in itself, had within and upon it one house which he hoped to slide past without incident. Gently does it.

  Emily’s young bosom trembled in appreciation of the fresh air and Mulholland was put in mind of a saying of his Aunt Katie’s.

  Never confuse the jam with the jelly.

  ‘I have my eye on you, Mulholland!’

  The constable sighed, his worst fears realised as a harsh, derisive, and most vulgar shout rent the air and Emily grasped on to his arm for protection.

  They both witnessed, through the gates of one of the houses, a large white face leering most inappropriately. The man’s stubby teeth were bared, more than a few gaps visible, and his hair seemed to be standing up on end.

  ‘You owe me a drink this night in the tavern and don’t you forget it!’ the fellow bawled.

  ‘Who is that awful man? He seems to know you, Martin!’ gasped Emily. ‘Is he
insane?’

  ‘No. He is my inspector,’ replied Mulholland grimly. ‘This is his idea of a prank.’

  ‘A prank?’

  ‘Haggghh!’ with this last roar the man then turned and ambled back to where a red-headed woman sat at a table in the middle of a rather splendid rose garden.

  Mulholland knew the house behind that garden only too well and prayed that Emily did not.

  ‘But surely?’ her eyes narrowed. ‘Is that not … a house of ill repute? I have heard it said. A blot on this nice neighbourhood. Is that not so, Martin?’

  ‘There is the odd rumour,’ said Mulholland steering her rapidly down the street, though she would glance back.

  Emily, like many of her sex and breeding, was both fascinated and repelled by the prospect of depravity.

  ‘But what is your inspector doing there?’ she cried.

  ‘It’ll be some sort of official visit,’ muttered the constable. ‘Now let us leave this scene, Emily, for there is nothing to be gained at this juncture.’

  However, she was like a dog with a bone.

  ‘But what goes on in that house, Martin?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never set foot in the place myself.’

  This was not strictly true but now was not the time for explanation.

  He swept her round the corner, pausing only to shoot a vicious look rearwards to where the man in the garden, now seated, waved cheerily in farewell.

  Thus the young couple departed to search out a better world and James McLevy turned to watch contentedly as Jean Brash poured him out his first and freshly brewed cup of best-quality coffee that day.

  ‘You’re an awfy man,’ she observed.

  ‘I like tae keep him on his toes,’ was the blithe response.

  He sniffed the aroma of the coffee and frowned in concentration. ‘I can smell palm trees,’ he said gravely.

  ‘Lebanese. A dark grinding.’