Nor Will He Sleep (22 page)

For Robert Louis was on the prowl. The dark insights he lived by had forewarned him of a beast of sorts on his trail and it seemed to have moved from the realms of imagination into a grim
reality.

It was not his nature to be passive unless stricken with illness or faced with a funeral.

The demise of the father? Had that delivered some malignant shambling fate?

‘Death they say is a great release,’ he announced with as much gravity as a sugar biscuit might allow. ‘For instance, Henry Preger was an evil God. James McLevy brought him
crashing down to earth. You were thus released from a dire and hateful bondage.’

‘McLevy certainly started the process,’ Jean replied, intrigued to see where all this was leading. ‘But he’s scrounged enough cups of coffee on it – another
biscuit?’

‘Thank you.’

They were both disturbed when one of the peacocks let out a mournful wail as the oscillations of his plumage had proven an abject failure; the female seemed to have discovered a long, yellowish
worm more to her taste.

Yet again the call of Madame Nicotine was too strong to resist. Thank God he had rolled a day’s supply, for his fingers were covered in a fine sugar dusting and trembling to boot.

Stevenson lit the Lucifer and drew in a soothing draught of high-grade tobacco leaf.

For a moment he created a cloud in front of his face, but when it cleared he found himself under scrutiny from those beautiful but piercing green eyes.

The question to ask of course was, what was
his
own thrall-dom, but the woman was too intelligent for such an obvious response.

‘Mary Dougan,’ he said. ‘Do you remember her?’

‘I do. Well.’

‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘If necessity demands.’

She poured out more coffee for both. It was still warm and faint wispy steam rose from the surface.

‘Mary is dead. Murdered.’

The green eyes did not change.

‘I had heard. Another body at Leith Station. But not the name. Poor Mary. A decent soul for all that.’

Stevenson resolved to keep the doorstep discovery to himself; the less divulged the better, with women.

‘McLevy seems convinced that part of the answer may lie in my past.’

‘Then I would pay attention,’ replied Jean. ‘He’s seldom wrong.’

Though she was drawn by this turn in the conversation, Jean was also conscious of a prickle of annoyance. Could a man not come to visit without an ulterior motive?

Or was that all they were good for?

Blissfully unaware that he was, for once, conforming to a stereotype, the writer continued his line of enquiry.

‘I have been away so long. Mary. What happened to her?’

‘The usual,’ responded Jean with a shake of the head. ‘I offered her a wee place here, looking after the girls, for she was kindly by heart and would have been a good balance
to Hannah, but – she was too set in her ways. The damned circle had closed. No way out.’

Then she smiled suddenly, for she had been struck by a memory of a time before the arsenic had worked its wonders and Henry Preger went floating somewhere in Leith Harbour, when the fiddler had
sawed a slow air in the tavern and a young Mary Dougan had danced with a gawky, coltish man.

For a moment it was just the two moving somehow in time to the tune, as if magic had descended on the rough planking, Mary looking up with a shining light in her eyes and the tall youth gazing
into a different future.

Robert Louis had been the favourite of all the threepenny whores, due to deferential manners and assiduous provision of pleasure. Give and take.

‘You were her poutie,’ said Jean slowly. ‘I don’t believe she cared for any other man.’

Stevenson bowed his head.

‘I went into business,’ said Jean. ‘And lost touch with her. Years later I saw Mary in the streets. A shipwreck.’

He blew out a long trail of smoke and hunched his shoulders, lost in a distant recollection.

‘It was not your fault,’ Jean continued. ‘A different fate before you. But you were her poutie.’

That was the trouble
, thought he,
with returning home. All the ghosts come back to life.

His silence lengthened and though Jean felt no real wish to comfort, she considered it only fair to stitch a different button upon the garment of regret.

Besides, out of the corner of her eye she could see Hannah Semple hanging her head out of an upstairs window to signal that time was flying and the looming evening lechery must not be
neglected.

Supply and demand.

‘It happens sometimes, with unlucky women, that they fix upon one man. A lifetime obsession.’

His agile mind switched to his own Fanny Osbourne.

‘And men?’

‘Oh, they can get obsessed. But it doesnae last.’

‘What if it happened to you, Jean Brash?’

For a moment, a certain unlovable face swam into her mind, but she shook her head like a horse getting rid of an annoying fly.

‘If it did. I would bring the mannie before me, and shoot him right between the eyes.’

The watcher across the street, hidden by the heavy, low-hanging branches of a late blossoming cherry tree, hissed like a snake, as the man threw back his head in laughter, while the woman laid a
lascivious hand upon his sleeve.

She had no right. She was a whore. Flaunting herself like a painted doll. He imagined the cane beating down on that face, the mouth twisted in pain as she sought for mercy but no – there
would be no mercy.

See there! Her head was close to his – what secrets were they murmuring?

He had followed Stevenson from his house to this palace of whoredom, this Babylon.

He must leave this scene because he had many other deeds to perform in another life.

But now he knew where to burn the roots of sin.

A page would be found in the tattered and crumpled book.

Then a price would be paid.

And the harlot would squeal like a pig.

Now was the moment of truth. The Judas Hole was too high up for George Dunwoody to reach, so a stool had to be brought for the old man to perch upon.

He had waited patiently in the station for many hours until the suspects had been rounded up.

Now they had. Now was the moment.

Inside the cell off the corridor two young fellows, not for the first time, sat disconsolately on narrow beds.

But they were not yet unveiled to George. At the moment all he could see was a panel of wood with a knob of sorts, upon which rested the long fingers of Constable Mulholland.

On George’s other side was a fell-faced McLevy, his pepper-and-salt hair tangled like seaweed from a recent stramash with the students.

‘I envy ye the growth,’ said George out of nowhere.

‘Whit?’

The old man pointed to his own sparse locks.

‘The cauld in winter. Straight through the cranium.’

McLevy fixed the man with a bleak stare.

‘This is a matter of identification, Mister Dunwoody. Craniums have bugger all to do with it.’

‘Fix your mind, sir,’ Mulholland interjected calmly, though his finders tapped impatiently at the knob, ‘on the murder night. Fix the face of the man you saw and tell us, if
you please, whether you see it inside.’

George nodded and squinted his pale eyes.

‘Are you ready?’

The old man inclined his head.

Mulholland looked at his inspector, who tugged once at his moustache, which was now sprouting in many directions, perhaps suggestive of the twists and turns of their investigation, and then
McLevy also nodded.

The panel of the Judas Hole was snapped back and the noise caused both young men in the room to jerk their heads up. What they saw was a slit of light and what George saw was like a framed
picture of two distinct faces.

‘The rain was battering in my coontenance, mind ye,’ he muttered, squinting the whiles.

‘Well it’s dry now.’

‘And there he is!’

The old man’s teeth jutted out in triumphant confirmation, as he pointed a cautious finger towards one of the seated men.

‘Him. Large as life. See. No’ a pick on him. A Jack o’ Dandy!’

The other two crammed their heads in from each side to follow the direction of the accusatory digit.

It was pointed at the drawn but defiant countenance of Daniel Drummond.

*

And yet they began the hammer at Alan Grant, once Roach had given his reluctant permission.

The lieutenant had interviewed Dunwoody himself and been grudgingly impressed by the old man’s mental alertness, even if it was allied at times to a slightly askew slant at the world.

But the witness was sharp as a tack, and now insistent that the man he witnessed on the murder night and then in the cell was as claimed.

The Jack o’ Dandy.

He had earlier given an accurate description of the man, including the dragging leg, and made his present case by holding up a single forefinger of each hand.

‘One like the other. Peas in a pod!’

The old fellow had signed his statement and been packed off home with Ballantyne for company to guarantee a supposed safe passage, and then Roach, before the lawyers descended, though this time
they would not be so mysteriously forewarned, took a deep breath and set the dogs loose.

Or was it, in McLevy’s case, more the wolf?

Regarding Alan Grant, he was once more pitchforked into a strange jagged world.

He had been at the forefront of the motley crowd of students, more to keep an eye as promised to Jessica on her wild and wilful brother who yelled encouragement beside him as one of the tribe
was climbing up the spiral staircase of the Scott Monument in Princes Street to plant a white favour on top of one of the many turrets that festooned this strange Gothic tribute to the Great
Man.

Sir Walter himself had been awarded another white favour, on his quill of stone, and the writer’s dog Maida had a collar fastened round his neck with more offerings.

It was a matter of some speed before the public show of such derring-do attracted the forces of repression, and once the squad of police had arrived a reasonably good-natured scuffle took place
before the students scattered to the four winds.

That is except for Daniel and Alan. Just as they sneaked round the side, it seemed the crowd parted like the Red Sea, and there before them were the implacable figures of James McLevy and
Constable Mulholland.

The inspector had lost his low-brimmed bowler for a moment as somebody careered into him, but he jammed it back on his head with a degree of force.

Both young men had the light of adventure in their eyes, no harm done, a cheeky foray up a well-known landmark. Surely such mischief was permissible as the day of reckoning approached for the
Scarlet Runners and themselves?

Yet the policemen had solemn faces like unto Wattie Scott himself as he contemplated a graven eternity.

As the whooping students and pursuing policemen left the scene, it was only the four of them in mutual regard.

‘Aye, gentlemen,’ said McLevy with grim relish. ‘A wee caper awaits ye at the station. Ye’ll know the way.’

And now Alan sat in the cold, bare interrogation room, the walls of which were covered in liverish yellow stains, and what seemed like scratch marks, where unavailing nails might have clawed
desperately for freedom.

He sat in the middle on a small chair more appropriate for a schoolboy. Or the dunce of the class.

McLevy loomed over him while Mulholland leant nonchalantly against the locked door.

The inspector had decided to invoke the Old Testament and assume the persona of Moses on the Mount.

‘You have lied to me once, sir,’ he proceeded with a sombre magisterial air. ‘Kindly do not do so again.’

Grant swallowed hard.

‘I must confess I do not understand the import of your words, inspector – ’

‘I said, not again!’

This sudden roar from McLevy, which would have set the followers of the Golden Calf running for the hills, startled the young man out of his wits, but was precisely calculated, as Mulholland
knew well.

The constable unfolded his long form from the door and pointed an admonitory finger at the young man.

‘Don’t try a move, sir,’ said he, as if Grant was about either to flee or make some aggressive motion.

‘I shall give you the benefit of a mistaken impulse of loyalty, Mister Grant,’ McLevy announced gravely. ‘But take it no further, lest you yourself become
accomplice.’

‘Accomplice?’

‘To murder.’

In the silence that followed these words, a seagull somewhere in distance let loose a series of high muffled screeches, as if mocking Alan Grant’s efforts to hold firm to his
resolution.

‘To conceal the truth is to deliver the blow yourself, as Cain tae Abel from the beginning of time. One falsehood – and you ally yourself to the slaughter of the
innocents.’

McLevy was pitching it high
, thought Mulholland,
but Grant came from good stock and that can often be a weakness.

‘Agnes Carnegie. Whit really happened?’

The inspector pulled another small chair over and straddled it somewhat comically, as if they were twa auld gadgies sittin’ thegither in the park.

Grant thought to deny once more that they had at all come across the woman, but somehow it seemed simpler to tell the truth.

Or at least – part of it.

‘Nothing. We – had words. And parted company.’

Not by a flicker did the inspector’s face give away the fact that this might be a floodgate.

‘But ye did – cross her path?’

‘We did. As I said – we – exchanged words.’

‘Whit kind o’ words? Insults?’

‘She – upbraided us.’

‘And you replied in kind?’

‘Daniel did.’

‘You were the peacekeeper?’

‘I suppose so.’

McLevy addressed Mulholland out of the blue.