Fall From Grace (17 page)

It was a bluff, but by the look on Dunbar’s face, thought Mulholland, the bluff would not be called.

‘And then there’s the matter of the footprint,’ said the inspector.

The constable blinked. Footprint?

‘In the garden. Where you jemmied at the window. Your left boot sunk a deep mark. Mulholland here took a cast and I’ll wager, we’ll match you up to perfection.’

At McLevy’s words Dunbar glanced down with some dismay at his treacherous foot sinister, then up at Mulholland who, behind a knowing smile, concealed the fact that the heavy overnight rain had obliterated any imprints below the window to a unidentifiable sludge.

Another bluff. Life is full of them.

‘Dancing on that rope, eh Herkie?’

The inspector let out a roar of laughter. He had switched to outright provocation, this was his technique of interrogation, always switch the ground, never leave a certainty beneath the feet, not unlike the hangman.

Dunbar lunged forward in the chair where he had been deposited, hands still manacled behind.

There were two chairs and one bare table in the interrogation room. The walls were a dirty white with various smears of what might well have been some bodily discharge; McLevy had locked the door and pocketed the key.

It was a long narrow space with no windows, claustrophobic, insulated, like being confined within the pod of a vegetable; tailor-made for confession.

‘If I wasnae cuffed, we’d see who the man was here!’

This howled threat brought a response.

McLevy stepped behind Dunbar and unlocked the manacles.

‘There ye are, my mannie,’ he said. ‘How’s that?’

Dunbar rubbed at his chafed wrists. Now that he was free, he was curiously bereft of action. McLevy stood in front of him, arms hanging slack by his side, Mulholland was to the side, lounging back against the wall but not quite touching the surface.

‘Two against one, eh?’ Dunbar’s throat was dry and what was meant to sound like a jeer came out in a wheeze.

‘Not at all.’ McLevy spread his hands as if to show that he carried no weapon. ‘The constable is merely an observer, and will do what I command him. He is far below me in rank and must perform accordingly.’

Then turning to the aforesaid constable, McLevy pointed an index finger as if addressing a dog and ordered.

‘Stay there!’

Dunbar laughed and Mulholland’s backbone stiffened. No doubt the inspector was up to something as usual, but sometimes he came too near the knuckle.

‘So I’ll make a wee bargain with you, Herkie.’ The lupine eyes gleamed in a friendly fashion. ‘If you can lay me out upon the ground, I’ll promise you a good hour’s start from this station before we hunt you down, but if I prevail, you’ll tell me the truth of last night.’

Although Mulholland’s face remained impassive, he whistled silently to himself inside. This was a new one, and a wild assurance, even for McLevy. There was a history here of sorts, you could almost smell the blood of the past.

‘Whit have I got tae lose, eh?’ said Dunbar, the wildness in his eyes matched by a savage grin.

‘Only a tooth or two,’ was the serene response.

And so they began, not for the first time, to engage in warfare.

Had it been in water Hercules might have stood a chance; the inspector feared that element, a primitive terror of being dragged under in an embrace that filled the lungs, washed out the eyes then swallowed you into a gaping mouth like a mother animal gulping down her own young. Like his own mother drowning him in her madness.

But it was earth. And McLevy loved the earth.

Dunbar stood up and flexed his fingers then suddenly made a rush, head down, intending to pin his opponent against the table and get to work at close quarters.

But the inspector was no longer where he had been, an attribute Mulholland had noticed before in that for someone of such stocky build, he could skip like a mountain goat.

Which he did, to the side and then as Dunbar crashed into the sharp edge of the table, McLevy erupted into a fury of cold violence that made the constable quite content with his role of observer.

Stay put. As commanded. It was the inspector’s show.

McLevy lifted up the fellow by the scruff of the neck and planted four ferocious punches into the belly. At each one, the man doubled over and each time he was hauled back to face the music.

On the fourth, the inspector let him hang there, hunched over, paralysed by the most profound pain.

As the fury drained from McLevy’s eyes, Mulholland stepped up and slid the man’s chair under him so that he collapsed back, still doubled over but at least with something to rest his backside upon.

McLevy perched himself on the edge of the table and waited, his hands primly folded like a priest about to hear a penitent.

There was room enough for Mulholland so he perched upon the edge as well, though while the inspector’s surprisingly small feet swung in the air, the constable’s were planted squarely upon the floor.

The silver candlestick was placed between them as if for the enactment of some ritual.

McLevy sung a song under his breath to keep time with his feet.

‘Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling.

Charlie is my darling, the young Chevalier.’

A Jacobite air, seditious in origin. Mulholland was not tempted to harmonise.

Finally Dunbar raised his head to see this strange pair then slowly, painfully, straightened up.

Give the man his due; he kept to his side of the bargain.

‘The bastards owed me,’ he said.

‘Elucidate,’ replied James McLevy.

The story Dunbar told was a long and rambling one full of grievances, imagined or otherwise, betrayal, treachery, the loss of a dear friend, bad practice, and most heinously, the contemptible treatment of a faithful employee. The list was apparently endless but might be summed up thus.

This, of course, was Dunbar’s version.

Like his father before him, he had become an expert in the forging of iron but work in Edinburgh being scarce had quit the city to be employed at the Wormit Foundry in Dundee, eventually working his way up to the job of foreman moulder in charge of all under the roof save the turners whose craft was beyond mortal comprehension.

In that foundry, while the smoke rose and the sparks flew day and night, the fires glowing like volcanic lava in the dark, they had constructed the High Girders, then the cast-iron columns strutted and cross-braced, bolted vertically through flanges which would support these girders to a span of near 250 feet, thirteen of them, that would knit a strand of iron from pier to pier, shore to shore, to form the central structure of a series of black rainbows from the trap rocks of Wormit to the sandy shelves of Magdalen Green.

To span the river below, in all its moods.

The Tay Bridge.

Two and a quarter miles long.

A lattice-grid of cast and wrought iron. Like a spider’s web across the River Tay.

The result and solution to a war between two railway companies, separated by the river. The North British on one side, the Caledonian on the other.

These two enemies had fought for untold years over Scotland like dogs over a bone.

And to put the matter simply, in order for the North British to prevail, it would have to run its trains straight through from Edinburgh to Dundee and onwards.

Before the bridge, a journey of forty-six miles took an inexorable three hours twelve minutes and that was the fast train. It involved starting from Waverley station at 6.25 a.m. in a freezing carriage with two smelly fish trucks in the rear, then a ferry from Granton where the fish smell got worse, another train from Bruntisland to Tayport on the south side of the Tay estuary, yet another boat across to Broughty Ferry, and a third train which limped into Dundee carrying the miserable, hungry, disconsolate passengers to their journey’s end.

And if the weather was disagreeable, as it often was, then the journey was longer than the descent into hell.

Of course the Caledonian fought the bridge tooth and nail but, at last, after a conflict that almost bankrupted both companies, the North British proved more than equal to its opponent in negotiating the treacherous sands and eddies of disturbed capitalism, and won the day.

The money was raised, Parliament nodded, Royal Assent was given and then, as the song would say,

‘Way hay and up she rises,

Earl-aye in the morning.’

Designed by the great Victorian engineer, Sir Thomas Bouch, dubbed so at Windsor Castle by the Queen who had herself on the North British engine, ‘Netherby’, in fine weather with the waters below lit by the evening sun like a picture postcard, crossed the completed bridge in the late June of 1879, and pronounced to all and sundry that she was pleased to confer upon the originator of this grand edifice, a knighthood.

The Tay Bridge.

It had been his dream for twenty years.

Sir Thomas had the most profound faith in himself. It had never occurred to him to think otherwise.

But that bugger of a bridge took six years to build, ten million bricks, two million rivets, eighty-seven thousand cubic feet of timber, fifteen thousand casks of cement and employed over the years six hundred men, nearly all of whom were paid the princely sum of eight pence an hour.

What of these men? They broke their bones and gave their lives to 
build a monster of iron and stone, which had neither mercy nor compassion for the insects that swarmed over its great body like termites building a tower to the heavens.

The bridge, like a savage god, crushed them as they strove to give it life and form.

Christ Jesus knows how many were badly injured, but for sure twenty men died, the wind picking them off a girder-span and hurling the body eighty feet down to the waters below, the impact splitting them apart like rotten apples. Or, as a cylinder collapsed, two men sucked into the mud and held in its treacherous embrace till they were drowned like rats.

An August explosion killed six more, a digging gang on Pier 54, down in the depths, an air bell above, the pumps sucking out the water, then the blast turned their bones to sawdust and cruciformed their limbs.

The cause of the explosion was never found.

Meanwhile Thomas Bouch sat at his desk and thought his great thoughts.

As a result of these deaths, the wages were raised from eight to ten pence.

Some of this McLevy gleaned from Dunbar’s own words, some he discovered later, most of the stories and facts were, after all, in the public domain.

Most, but not all. Not by a long shot.

And Dunbar had lost his best friend, Tommy Loughran, a nice wee man for a riveter, not three years before, to a wild February storm. Spans twelve and thirteen of the high girders had not yet been made secure to the main structure and down they went, taking Tommy with them. He left a wife heavy with child and two others hanging round her skirts.

This was not unusual; the life of a working man is cheap. And after all, who was at fault? Surely Nature must take the blame. According to official version, the howling gale battered upon the unsecured girders for three hours till they lost their state of equilibrium on the lifting apparatus and toppled like the Giant’s beanstalk after Jack got to work with the axe.

So Tommy Loughran died for the greater good of the powers that be and would receive his reward in glory helping Saint Peter instal rivets to fortify the heavenly gates.

And yet McLevy sensed in Dunbar as regards his friend’s death, a personal guilt as if something was gnawing away at him inside. It would not be an issue of morality, the man possessed no such thing, therefore what was causing unease in a psyche not inclined towards the fine-tuning of conscience?

As if to confirm his somewhat coarse disposition, the fellow hawked up a wodge of phlegm from his lungs and spat it out on to the floor of the interrogation room where it bounced like a rubber ball.

‘The bastards owed me,’ he repeated.

‘For what?’ asked Mulholland.

‘Whit I did. Whit I did not. The blind eye.’

McLevy was silent thus far, his eyes fixed upon Dunbar as if trying to see behind the mask the man presented, so the constable was honour bound to continue.

‘The blind eye?’

‘Whit I turned.’

‘To what?’

Dunbar laughed harshly. He was beginning to enjoy himself with Mulholland but, in so doing, ignored McLevy at his peril. His aching belly could have reminded him of this but physical pain was so much part of his life that he kept it at distance and bore it like an animal.

‘Ye ever hear o’ Beaumont Egg?’

‘I have not,’ replied Mulholland after a moment of thought.