Fall From Grace (5 page)

His eyes glazed over as he dreamed of a divine consummation. He and his beloved like swans on the river; above them, blue skies and below, clear water.

However, into these sacred visions of the fragrant Emily, slid a depiction that, if not downright voluptuous, brought a definite tingle to the constable’s loins.

She lay on the marital bed, a four-poster with dark velvet curtains and lashings of moonlight. Her nightgown was chaste enough, white as purity with frilly bits, but her lips were moist and parted, breath on the short side, the pupils of the eyes dilated with anticipation.

He was standing beside the plumped-up pillows, also in a nightgown, not quite as white, smiling down at her, any manifestation of desire well hidden by the burgeoning folds of flannel, but manly as a bull in the heat of summer.

Emily’s bosom had found itself, perched above the level of the sheets. They were neat and starched but not the bosom. It was in motion trembling. Like the sea. Up and down. Up and down. A heavy swell.

There was a candle burning by the bed. He licked his forefinger and thumb, reached over, and put out the light.

Now they were free to wallow in the darkness.

Mulholland screwed up his face in sudden consternation. Wallow? That couldn’t be right, hogs did such in mud. No, wallow was out of the question. And there couldn’t be darkness, not with the lashings of moonlight.

He shut his eyes tightly and brought his hands, palms together, up to touch his lips as if in meditation.

No. Wallow and darkness were not permissible; best concentrate on the moister, swelling aspects.

‘What in god’s name are you doing, constable?’

The young man spun round, eyes opened, face flushed, to meet the baleful scrutiny of his own and everyone else’s appointed superior in Leith police station, Lieutenant Roach. No one would want him leaning over their bedside, not unless they were dead.

The lieutenant’s resemblance to a crocodile was nigh uncanny, hooded membrane eyes slightly bloodshot, a jaw full of large teeth that he often jerked from side to side, and a long snout, which at this moment he was twitching in Mulholland’s direction.

‘And where is Inspector McLevy, if I may be so bold?’ Roach asked, his brooding gaze flitting round the room.

He had in truth been rather perturbed to open the door and find his constable in commune, apparently, with the occult. He knew Mulholland for a staunch Protestant, if Irish, and hoped the young man was not being religiously undermined by the wave of mesmerism, spiritualism, psychic phenomena and the like, sweeping the country. Had the Queen herself not been rumoured to have once taken part in a séance in order to contact her dearly beloved Albert?

In Roach’s view the whole thing was nothing more than Catholicism in one of its many guises, such superstitious drivel concealing the sly tendrils of ultramontanism.

Therefore his eyes bore into Mulholland’s searching out a shift in belief.

‘The inspector,’ replied the constable carefully, ‘mentioned to me that he may be a little on the late side this morning. A personal matter, sir.’

‘Indeed? It must have slipped his mind to inform me.’

‘That’s a mystery, sir. I know you are always foremost in his thoughts.’

What Mulholland did not add was that McLevy’s aforesaid foremost thought was how to keep Roach from meddling in his investigations, but there was not a trace of this privy information on his candid countenance.

The wave of love and desire that had swept through his vibrant organic parts was placed in restrainers for the moment. He was back to pragmatic self because he needed to have the lieutenant firmly in his corner. Just behind Cupid.

Roach sniffed in disbelief at the constable’s response and his eyes passed disdainfully over the station cubby-hole where the rank and file hung their uniforms and left spare boots strewn in disarray.

A smell of sweat hung in the air, mingling with the odours from the oft-used water closet next door.

The mirror, now mercifully free from the image of the love-sick Mulholland, was set into the wall by the door and intended for the inspection of both uniform and boots before the Leith constabulary launched themselves upon the grateful populace to protect the righteous and hammer down upon the criminal classes. It had a large crack running haphazardly down its full length with a spider’s web of smaller cracks off to the one side. This side was also discoloured with what looked like a lime-green mould, and for anyone who was not in love as they gazed into the glass, the resultant image reflected was that of a personality lividly split in twain.

Roach looked upon this duality and repressed a shudder. The one was bad enough to regard; unlike most men he was not fond of his appearance.

God knows what Constable Ballantyne thought, the poor fellow being possessed of a birthmark, strawberry in colour that melted down half the span of his face.

Mulholland stood by patiently, and Roach remembered he had come in to complain.

‘I emerged from my office,’ he said querulously, ‘to find the morning shift departed, Constable Ballantyne lost in admiration of the seagull droppings upon our window panes and Sergeant Murdoch apparently in deep contemplation at the station register but, in fact, resting fast asleep on the one elbow.’

‘I don’t know how he does that,’ said Mulholland.

‘The reward of inertia is inertia,’ Roach snapped, misquoting perversely the dictum of Saint Augustine on patience. ‘The place was empty. Empty of you, empty of McLevy, of direction, meaning, empty of life itself!’

This seemed a bit dramatic to Mulholland but Monday mornings can often appear so. Vacant of purpose.

‘I’m sure it will fill up again, sir. Crime never sleeps. That’s what the inspector always says.’

Roach grunted morosely at the proffered saw of consolation and seemed lost in gloom. He hunched over his clasped hands and moved them slowly back, then forward.

Perhaps, in that emptiness, he had seen existence stretching uselessly out before him like the Dead Sea.

Or perhaps the root of his despond had a more prosaic origin.

Mulholland considered the facts before him.

The lieutenant had been playing a four ball on Musselburgh links this Saturday past. A President’s Cup match against one of his own superiors, and the constable deduced that all might have not gone according to plan.

A toss up, in that case, whether to lance the wound or let the man suppurate in silence.

Ah well, Mulholland decided. Better out than in.

‘How did the golf proceed at the weekend, sir?’

The floodgates of grievance burst asunder and spilled out a veritable deluge.

‘I had a five-foot putt on the last green to win the match for myself and partner. Just as I was about to strike the ball, just at that moment, mind you, just then, not at any other moment, Sandy Grant, my own chief constable and a fellow mason to boot,
jingled
the coin in his pocket. A deliberate
jingle
!’

Mulholland bowed his head in sorrow and spoke.

‘My Aunt Katie always says, “There’s no limit to the darkness in man. To win the prize, he’d murder the world.”’

This bucolic profundity lumbered past Roach, who was still seething with dejection.

The lieutenant seemed locked in a private misery of a memory too painful to further relate. His gaze was inward, lost in bleak contemplation.

Mulholland took a deep breath. Now or never.

He produced from his pocket a small jewellery box, opened the lid and waved it gently under Roach’s nose as if trying to bring the man back to consciousness with smelling salts.

‘What do you think, sir?’

The lieutenant wrenched himself from the dreadful memory of a putt sailing beyond the hole and brought his investigative instincts to bear.

‘It is a ring,’ he said.

‘An engagement ring, sir. Well bought. Hard earned.’

Mulholland delicately removed the circle from its setting and held it in fingers which had grasped many a criminal collar, but now offered up the object as if it were the Holy Grail.

Roach groaned under his breath. He had been rash enough, prompted mightily by Mrs Roach who had more than a passing interest in all this, to promise the constable some assistance in his suit for Emily Forbes.

He gazed gloomily at the golden hoop of potential matrimony; a hoop he had jumped through with initial enthusiasm and now would continue to do so, like an ageing lion a ring of fire, till the end of his days.

Mrs Roach, like many another female of a certain age and social standing, was obsessed by the memory of a romance she had never experienced and, as blood from a stone, would squeeze it vicariously from any promising situation.

This one was tailor-made. Young love.

‘You were kind enough to suggest, sir,’ Mulholland almost batted his eyelids in an attempt to portray bashful appreciation, an attempt which sat strangely on a face which though blessed with a clear skin, blue eyes and an open countenance, had seen more than its share of murder and mayhem, ‘that, in the fullness of time, you might find your way towards approaching the father of my intended Emily, and, on my behalf, notwithstanding, and without troubling yourself in any way –’

‘I shall speak to Robert Forbes,’ Roach interrupted. ‘But I vouch for nothing. He is an insurance adjuster and therefore not easily impressed.’

‘I shall accept his valuation.’

Mulholland stood before his superior; arms aloft, holding the box up in one hand and ring in another, like some sort of religious icon.

‘Put that miscellany out of sight,’ Roach commanded and, as the constable replaced the ring and carefully secreted the box on his person, the lieutenant wondered how to introduce a note of reality into the conversation.

‘Emily Forbes is a young woman.
Very
young.’

‘I’m not in a tearing hurry, sir.’

‘There may be other suitors.’

‘I believe I have the inside track.’

‘Then don’t rush the fence.’

‘It’s the only way to get the horse over.’

A stubborn look had appeared on the constable’s face and Roach sighed. He should have known better than bandy equine metaphors with an Irishman.

‘I shall speak to Mister Forbes and see how the land lies for this galloping beast, but in the meantime –’

The lieutenant took a deep breath to indicate the importance of what was to follow.

‘You will make no mention of my part in this to anyone,
especially
Inspector McLevy. He and romance do not walk hand in hand.’

Mulholland nodded but he could not keep hope from shining in his eyes and Roach felt duty bound to dull the expectation.

‘You must keep in mind also, that Robert Forbes has attained a certain level of society, constable. Levels are … everything.’

The constable’s hand clenched into a fist. This was undeniably true. He had experienced it from some of the young men at the musical soirées where he had first met Emily. Amused condescension. A barely concealed contempt for a social status of inverse proportion to his great height. Very low, indeed. Creeping on its belly, as far as these arrogant chancers were concerned.

Mulholland also took a deep breath.

‘I shall try to rise above myself, sir.’

Roach decided to accept this flat statement at face value and signalled an end to the exchange by returning to his putting stroke and grievance.

‘By rights I should have won that game. Sandy Grant did not play fair. He
jingled
. A fellow lodge member! And I lost the hole.’

‘There’s nae justice,’ said a voice.

McLevy stood in the doorway. He had arrived silently and there was no telling how long he had been there.

Both others fell into a cold sweat.

Mulholland’s hand closed protectively over the pocket where he’d put the ring and Roach prayed silently that the inspector had not overheard too much.

If McLevy knew that the lieutenant was acting as love’s emissary, the future would contain more barbs than Cupid’s quill could muster.

‘Where have you been hiding, McLevy?’ Roach demanded, trying to read his fate in the inspector’s face, but the countenance in front of him was blank. The Sphinx would have supplied more indication.

‘I attended a funeral,’ came the eventual answer.

‘Of your own making?’

‘Not directly.’

‘That’s a nice change.’

For a moment McLevy darted a ruminative look towards his superior, then he turned to his constable.

‘We have work before us, Mulholland,’ he said.

‘And what is that, sir?’

‘The fire at the bonded warehouse.’

‘I sniffed it on the wind this morning,’ Roach interposed. ‘But that is a concern primarily for the port authorities and official fire investigation.’

‘Not any more.’ McLevy shook himself as if in anticipation, and drops of water sprayed from his overcoat perilously near to Roach’s highly polished shoes.

The lieutenant cut an immaculate figure as always.

The inspector, as usual, resembled a dog that had just run through a puddle.

‘A report just in at the desk as I arrived. It seems that a body has been newly found amongst the debris,’ said McLevy. ‘That makes it our concern.’

‘What kind of body?’ asked Roach suspiciously.

The ghost of a smile touched McLevy’s lips as he watched Mulholland struggle into his police cape and carefully place the helmet upon his head. With his great height and beanpole figure, it never failed to amuse the simpler side of his inspector.

‘I havenae yet made acquaintance, sir,’ he replied with due deference. ‘But I am willing to wager that it is burnt to a crisp, and dead as a dodo.’

8

O Comforter, draw near,

Within my heart appear,

And kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.

RICHARD LITTLEDALE,
Come down, O love divine