Fall From Grace (37 page)

So with his mighty right hand He had thrown a storm to punish the 
sinners for He was, as they never tired of telling you in the bible, a Jealous God who guarded the Sabbath like a roaring lion.

Therefore rather than bringing deliverance, God might well be a number-one suspect.

As the people hurried past, McGonagall offered the sheets of his poetry in vain except for the one woman, Troll Barbara, a squat powerful figure and the only female welder in Dundee, who pressed a coin into his hand, crunched the paper up in one massive paw and disappeared through the door that led to the Inquiry Court.

The poet wondered about starting all over.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say, etc. etc.

But somehow this morning he lacked the strength to launch off once more into the epic lay and merely stood with his arm outstretched like a statue in long coat skirts and a wide-brimmed hat; the folk bustling past were content enough to treat him as such, ignoring the still figure in their rush to find a decent seat to view the spectacle, for it was the third day of proceedings and the revelations were coming thick and fast.

A stocky figure approached the poet who perhaps resembled more a scarecrow than a statue. The man also put forward a coin but this was of some value, in McGonagall’s opinion, approaching the worth of the verse inscribed in the pamphlet that he gravely offered forth.

The fellow accepted it equally gravely and stashed it into his pocket.

The light of recognition flashed in the poet’s mind.

‘You are the man from the walnut tree!’ he exclaimed.

‘I am Inspector James McLevy,’ the officer himself replied, ‘and I have to thank you for your labour that night.’

McGonagall struck a proud attitude.

‘As well as a poet,’ he declared, ‘I am also a Tragedian. I have often essayed Othello on stage. It gives a man great strength in crucial predicaments.’

McLevy wasn’t sure how smothering Desdemona with a pillow equated to hauling out a sodden officer of the law from under an ancient nut tree, but he contented himself with bowing solemnly to the 
poet, who replied in kind, and then without another word, both men went their separate ways.

The inspector to the inquiry, and McGonagall to roam the streets with the beginning of another masterpiece beginning to form in his teeming mentality.

He had suffered much on the stage; eggs are wonderful and yolky to eat but not flying through the air towards you, yet nevertheless the fact that the clergy ranted against the theatre had brought his blood to boiling point.

For did not the best plays see vice punished and virtue rewarded?

Some versical fragments began to run in McGonagall’s mind as the Muse sped round the wide rim of his hat.

We see in Shakespeare’s tragedy of Othello, which is sublime,

Cassio losing his lieutenancy through drinking wine;

And, in delirium and grief, he exclaims – ‘Oh, that men should put

an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!’

Thus uttering these lines aloud, the last one of which was the best he would ever write, the poet passed out of sight and for this moment left the stage.

At the same time, the inspector stood at the back of the inquiry room behind one of the pillars, watching as the final witnesses from a succession of workers from the Wormit Foundry, faces so pitted with iron dust that it seemed as if they were composed of the element itself, gave evidence in halting bewildered tones as if they had been hauled bodily from their place of work and then bolted into place in front of the examining board, council and gentlemen of the press.

The Wreck Commissioner, Henry Cadogan Rothery treated them gently enough, because these were not fellows who understood the rights and wrongs of the situation; they did what they were told. No more no less than that.

But from their words, and the testimony of the previous, a depressing and calamitous picture had begun to emerge.

Beaumont Egg. That very name which they mentioned time and time again started to assume the magical dimensions of an iron-clad panacea; it had been used to plug faults in the castings, the blown-holes, 
cracks and fissures of all shapes and sizes, the remedy was always at hand to be melted in, left to harden, smoothed over, painted, then waved goodbye
.

Available at all times from the foreman’s office.

Black magic.

Unfortunately the purveyor of this sorcery, Hercules Dunbar and the supplier of same, Alan Telfer, were unable to give statements. The former had disappeared from sight and the latter had died by his very own hand.

But other foremen testified that Telfer had brought the substance and its use was common practice.

While all this was in motion, Sir Thomas Bouch sat at the very front so that the audience were treated to a view of his broad back. His son was adjacent to him and on the other side the diminutive figure of his wife.

McLevy had pondered whether to offer evidence to the inquiry but since Dunbar had vanished there seemed little point in offering the testimony of a man who wasn’t there.

And as regards the events of the night of Telfer’s suicide, he awoke the next morning refreshed, headache miraculously gone, but with a hazy fragmentary memory of what had passed between them.

And he preferred to keep it that way.

At the back.

Meanwhile, at the front, Margaret Bouch glanced sideways at the impassive face of her spouse and wondered what was going through his mind.

The image of her husband and Alan Telfer in embrace whether innocent or lascivious had initially disgusted her but now it merely provoked curiosity.

Had Telfer put a bullet in his brain from guilt or to protect the one he loved?

If the latter then this was love indeed.

The kind that kills.

In the late morning and all through the afternoon, the court, having heard evidence from lesser beings, summoned before them the professional classes who had taken part in the construction of the bridge.

One after another they were revealed to be lacking in the basic requirements for their proper function, ranging from honestly incompetent as in 
the case of Henry Noble the supposed Inspector of the Tay Bridge, an assistant to Sir Thomas whose only practical experience was that of an apprentice bricklayer, to Albert Groethe, Manager of Works, a confident Christian and decent to the core who had to admit nevertheless, ‘I am not a practical iron man.’

Thus the Wormit Foundry had been left unsupervised and the bridge itself neglected and uninspected from May 1878 to December 1879.

Then there was much talk of wind and pressure, though none of the esteemed gentlemen had been on the doomed train to experience the reality of same, but finally Sir Thomas Bouch himself had been brought to the stand.

His blank face hid a growing numbness and the wall he had built round himself for protection proved no stronger than the bridge in contention, as question after question cracked the façade to reveal the bewildered soul behind the great man.

His refrain became, ‘I cannot answer that question for my memory does not serve me well.’

Already there had been savage attacks upon the very design of the bridge itself but to that query he shook his head like an animal besieged on all sides by predators.

No, he insisted, the train must have been lifted off the rails by the force of the wind and crashed into the High Girders.

Nothing could withstand that blow.

The fault was not his design but a flying train.

He seemed oblivious of the catalogue of failure that had been laid bare, and the gathering storm of public opinion.

So when he was asked the fatal question by Rothery, the Wreck Commissioner, ‘Sir Thomas, did you in designing this bridge make any allowance at all for wind pressure?’

‘Not specially,’ came the reply that damned him for ever.

Henry Cadogan Rothery blinked for a moment as if someone had smashed a fist in his face.

‘You made no allowance?’

Sir Thomas Bouch shook his head as if mystified by the repeated question.

‘Not specially.’

‘Ye dirty murdering bastard!’

Troll Barbara had drunk three hookers of whisky washed down by the same number of draughts of ram-stam beer that morning early, and though her constitution was not unused to such intake, the mixture swilled around in her brain to fuel a furious anger and resentment at the dry proceedings of the inquiry.

She had worked on the bridge for a short while and had heard the stories of retaining bolts shaken loose by the vibrations from the speeding trains as they exceeded the lawful limit on the bridge while they raced the morning ferry boats across the river.

Although Barbara could testify well and good to the work she had accomplished, a terrible feeling of guilt coursed through her at the thought of all these dead souls, innocent and unavenged.

And that she somehow was a part of it.

So she rose in her anger and howled an accusation at the man she considered responsible for the poor bloated bodies that were still coming to the surface after all this time.

One had even been washed up on the Caithness shore.

It had travelled further than the train.

‘Sir Thomas Bouch, I call ye out!’ she cried in her grief and fury. ‘I name ye as a murderous swine with not a decent bone in your body!’

Uproar ensued as the court officers and attendants tried to haul the berserk woman from her place; others took her part and McLevy noticed amongst them, the wife of the schoolmaster, her face flushed with rage and pain as she joined in the wall of abuse directed at the bridge builder.

Missiles were thrown and Sir Thomas was hustled away to the side for protection; he looked up at his accusers who were now losing momentum as Troll Barbara was manhandled out of the court, his face impassive, head slightly cocked to the one side as if observing from on high.

Not all of the spectators had entered the mêlée and, as order was being restored, McLevy, who had noted with some relief that the little girl who had given him the barley sugar was not accompanying her distraught mother, became aware of another’s scrutiny.

Sir Thomas’s son had followed after his father so the faithful little wife had been left to fend on her own.

Margaret Bouch, unattended and out of the spotlight, had also turned 
to observe the chaos, and spotted McLevy standing at the back behind the pillar.

He withdrew slightly at her regard, and then peeked round again like a schoolboy.

The ghost of a smile touched her lips and she raised one gloved hand, forefinger pointed, thumb upright like the raised hammer of a gun and shot him where he stood.

Luckily no one except the inspector saw this gesture of impropriety.

It was not often a woman got the drop upon McLevy and he wondered what it meant.
 

36

Every man loves what he is good at.

THOMAS SHADWELL,
A True Widow

Now he watched her in the Old Ship tavern and still wondered about the moment. That and many others.

It might be concluded that he had the advantage now because she was not aware of his regard as she reached forward to lay her hand upon the sleeve of a man sitting opposite her with his back to the inspector.

Naval fellow by the looks of it, a captain’s hat on the table beside him, sandy hair tinged with grey, bit of a sea dog perhaps.

McLevy had come to the tavern for a strong dram of whisky before embarking on what might well be a lamentable fool’s errand and should he happen to have guessed correctly then he might also lament the fact that Constable Mulholland was nursing a broken heart in the bogs of Ireland and therefore not available to be a good right hand.

He could, of course, have brought other constables for reinforcement or even broken the rule of a lifetime and informed Lieutenant Roach of his proposed action, but somehow it had seemed better to be on his own.

Better the devil you know.

And indeed, in official company, he would never have ventured into the Old Ship, swiftly drained his tumbler, been about to leave, and then heard her unmistakable laughter wafting through the tobacco smoke from the tavern dining room.

There were windows in the shape of portholes in the wooden wall and he gazed through one into the dining room like a sea creature that had somehow squelched its way up on to the timbers of the vessel.