Trick of the Light (15 page)

A liar and a buffoon. But still alive.

What a bugger that McLevy was involved.

Muriel came awake with a jolt and looked down at an admittedly naked breast, the nipple of which was like a sentry at attention under his absent-minded caress.

‘
Jezebel
,’ she announced to the ceiling.

‘Who might that be?’ he asked cautiously.

‘A wicked woman who was trampled by horses and eaten by dogs. In the Bible.’

Samuel blinked. His knowledge of scripture was not vast but it sounded like one of those punishments from on high. He was not a follower of that sort of retribution, in fact religion struck him as attracting stiff-necked folk who then dished out God’s will to make up for what they lacked.

He was more for live and let live.

‘She must have been wicked, right enough,’ he offered, transferring his thumb to the other nipple in the interests of equality.

‘Andrew was forever talking about evil women in the Bible. It seemed to fascinate him.’

Muriel shook her head, troubled by pleasure’s close connection to guilt, for instance in the case of papillary stimulation and worried memories.

‘I was called by such a name tonight.’

‘By whom?’ he demanded with indignation. ‘I’ll punch their nose aside!’

Muriel thought of trying to explain that the nose in question might not be materialised, finding its physical expression through a sensitive’s visage behind a veil, but decided to leave things be.

Yet the timbre of the spirit voice had sounded weirdly like her dead husband and
Jezebel
had been his crushing verdict on any woman who wore trace of cosmetic covering or flaunted an improvement upon what nature had provided.

What if he’d been watching them all this time?

What if he were watching them now?

Muriel was not someone who liked to delve into the dark crevices of the mind and regretted most bitterly that she had agreed to accompany Mary Doyle and her son to the Spiritualist Society, but Mary was an old friend, Muriel had welcomed the distraction, and Arthur was…well, shameful to admit such, but in her new-found sense of fragrant release, she was attracted to his courtly manners and massive frame.

Plus vibrant innocence.

Innocence always attracts the opposite.

Was she depraved, or merely
awakened
?

‘What if he’s watching us?’ she whispered.

‘Who?’

‘Andrew. His ghost.’

Samuel glanced around somewhat uneasily but then his essential practicality came to the fore.

‘Well if he is,’ he said, ‘he’ll just have to thole it. We’re alive and he’s departed. Life is hard.’

It was not the only thing.

Muriel had been trying to keep her mind focused on the dark events that seemed to presently lurk in her life but found that her hand, not unlike herself, had strayed into temptation.

And provoked the risen Adam.

A creature of sensation.

She wheeled over suddenly and straddled him, the first time she had performed such an action.

If Andrew was watching he might as well get his money’s worth.

‘Do you think I am wicked?’ she demanded of Samuel.

‘Only when you smile,’ he answered.

And they rolled down the hill into love’s oblivion.

15

’Tis not what once it was, the world,

But a rude heap together hurled.

A
NDREW
M
ARVELL
, ‘Upon Appleton House’

When Jean Brash approached the gates of the Just Land she was astonished to see all the lights ablaze and three extremely drunk young men roaring fit to burst upon the verdant lawn – for Jean had green fingers.

Facing the men was an indignant Jessie Nairn; she seemed to have taken the place of the ex-blacksmith Angus, who doubled as Jean’s coachman, doorman and keeper of order in the Just Land. He was out in the streets with a paper likeness of the acid-pourer clutched in his meaty fist and woe betide the little swine if he was found.

Jean Brash and Hannah Semple had been closeted in a safe house in Laurie Street not far from the Leith Links, one of Jean’s many mansions. There they had met with various street-Arabs and keelies, a substratum of criminality but invaluable for reconnaissance. Her
people
.

It would not be wise to have so many visitors to the bawdy hoose, so therefore the safe house.

Now the hunt was on. But with no success so far. A reported knifing in one of the taverns, two sharpers cut savage deep and a man answering the description of the quarry. But he had disappeared out into the night.

A watch was also being kept on the Countess’s ‘hotel’ but nothing to report except various respectable pillars of the community ducking in for illicit pleasure, one of whom, Gilbert Morrison, had been politely screened from the delights of the Just Land due to a predilection for inflicting punishment and was indeed the very man who had left the welts on the
derrière
of Simone.

Which had provoked her to leave the Countess.

Which was the cause of this war with Jean.

Casus belli
.

Cherchez la femme
.

There had been a violent run-in in the back wynds of the Tolbooth with one Patrick Fraser, who was a bully-boy for the Countess and had gathered a crew of like-minded thugs around him. During the fracas Patrick had received a sharp reminder from wee Donnie Toms that size is not always the point at issue. Donnie had kicked up a storm.

Blood had been spilled, bones broken.

The streets were hotting up. Various
guisers
on a Halloween approach were also on the randan; imps of hell, witches, satanic figures in livid finery roamed the byways, startling the carriage horses with ghostly apparition.

The city was seething with disquiet and everywhere there was a feeling of things breaking apart, as if the earth was moving under the scrabbling feet of Edinburgh gentlefolk.

Nowhere more apparent than within her own grounds, Jean observed. For a moment she was tempted to plunge headlong into the rammy, because it had become so itchy-scratchy in the safe house waiting for news to break that she had left Hannah Semple to run the operation and walked briskly back through the streets praying that she might bump into a man answering the likeness of Lily Baxter’s sketch.

No such luck.

However, she would not take her grievance out on other folk but employ a stately approach.

Like Victoria Regina.

So Jean walked softly.

As for the roaring boys on the lawn?

Logan Galloway was a contemptible young snotter whose father had made a fortune exporting horses to France where they were no doubt cooked and eaten, hooves and all.

He was a skinny runt, nebby by nature, temper not improved by an earlier incident that evening when he and a companion had thought it great high jinks to don Halloween disguise and terrorise a meeting of the Spiritualist Society, in the certain knowledge that none of the impotent attendance would be able to lay a glove upon them.

They had been unpleasantly surprised to find themselves picked up by the scruff of the neck and booted out by a man mountain that Galloway vaguely recognised as a rugby player for the University.

Then they had been pursued through the streets by a madman brandishing a placard.

After giving him the slip, they had met with a similarly inclined young lout, drunk like sand-beds in the tavern, and presented themselves at the door of the Just Land for further recreation.

But something had gone agley.

As Jean slipped up by the shadows, the combatants were well into their stride.

‘You little hure!’ screamed Galloway, face flushed and eyes glazed. ‘You stole my money!’

‘I stole nothing,’ said Jessie. ‘Ye spent it.’

‘You’re a liar!’

‘And you’re mortal fou,’ said Jessie, a hint of insolence creeping into her tone.

A few catcalls from the lighted windows added to the fun and Jessie played up to the watching magpies.

‘Ye spent your money, ye had your pleasure. Now, away an’ cock yer feathers on the dunghill.’

More laughter from the windows.

Galloway’s countenance, which was not unlike some of the wretched horses his father shipped across the Channel, in that it was long, bony, and swivel-eyed, near sundered itself in wrathful umbrage.

‘How dare you address me so, ye little bitch,’ he almost foamed at the mouth. ‘I’ll split your insolent face!’

Galloway unexpectedly, for Jessie had him pegged as a wee bag of wind, threw out a haphazard fist and hit a glancing blow on the shoulder that tumbled her to the ground.

Flushed with this triumph and the sudden silence of the jeering magpies, though this may have been in part due to something else they had just noticed, Galloway lifted his hand to swipe the impudent wee
hure
flat across her mouth.

He then found an odd event to transpire.

As if by unseen force his expensive jacket was sliced open from side pocket all the way up to the armpit.

As he gazed, violent act arrested, at this rent in his fashionable attire, as if by magic a female form appeared before him. The apparition had green eyes and red hair.

‘You may leave us now,’ said Jean Brash, who had abandoned her stately approach through force of necessity.

Galloway staggered back but then recovered his nerve as he realised Jean was on her own. No Hannah Semple, no Angus the enforcer, just a single woman.

With a straight gleaming blade in her hand, but that might be overcome.

He signalled to his cronies and they began to close in. Now there were no more threatening oaths but the danger was more real. Jessie scrambled on her hands and knees further back towards the house and stifled shrieks came from the watching magpies.

Jean remained calm but it was one thing to cut lumps out of a swankie young halfwit’s jacket and another to inflict physical damage. You could get arrested for that.

Especially if you did it in the public eye.

A cruel drunken light in Galloway’s eye; companions, equally aroused, egged him on with grunts of encouragement.

Strong drink and a weak mind are bad company.

Galloway grinned like a rat and feinted to catch at her but before it was possible to see how far this confrontation might progress, a voice from the darkness moved into and across matters.

‘Aye, Jean. Cutting back the weeds, eh?’

James McLevy stood in the semi-darkness on the fringe of the arc where the house lights expired, with Mulholland by his side.

Both men then moved forward unhurriedly; Mulholland’s hornbeam stick hanging loose at his side as he loped forward, the inspector with the deceptively benign air of a man out for an evening constitutional.

The policemen had met up again at the station where the constable reported that he had got nowhere with the Grierson robbery enquiries, and were out on their usual evening saunter round the streets of Leith when word came that, amongst a few other incidents of note, Patrick Fraser had received a severe kicking that involved the bridge of his nose being squashed like a cowpat.

Retributive action was being sworn by his gang.

McLevy had planned to head this off should the vengeful crew have made for the Just Land but found instead another altercation.

Halloween often bred them.

‘Inspector. Well on hand. This witch has attacked me!’ Galloway blustered.

‘Just a wee snip,’ said Jean.

The jacket flapped dismal agreement as Galloway continued his litany of complaint.

‘I have been most foully robbed in this woman’s establishment. My wallet emptied!’

‘While you danced the Reels o’ Bogie?’ McLevy enquired sardonically, this being the poet Robert Burn’s allusion to copulation of a frenzied nature.

A shrewd shaft dismissed by the justified sinner.

‘I deserve and demand satisfaction.’

‘Demand away,’ Jean muttered, wondering how the hell McLevy seemed to manifest all over Leith. Her people had reported him down by the docks the last she had heard and not that long since.

Mulholland had been silent so far but curled his lip at Galloway’s protestations.

‘You don’t deserve a damned thing,’ he pronounced. ‘Look at the odds on hand. Three to one. That’s shameful.’

‘I was here!’ said Jessie, who had reappeared at Jean’s side now that matters were less turbulent.

This was ignored as the two policemen placed themselves directly in front of the sullen malcontents.

‘What would your Aunt Katie say tae these specimens?’ McLevy asked mildly of his constable. To a certain extent things had been a little strained between them and it was nice to get back into an old routine.

‘Get out o’ my sight, you’d give the dry boak to a dead badger,’ was the uncompromising response.

‘What a woman,’ said McLevy admiringly.

He suddenly moved in very close to the young men.

‘You heard the constable, Galloway, absent yourself while you have the chance. I catch you or your friends near these grounds again, I’ll run you in for trespass.’

There was a mean glitter in the inspector’s eyes; it had been a long day and he was in no mood to suffer fools.

The other two had piped down immediately at the sound of his voice but as they slouched off towards the gates Galloway turned round to indicate he had some puff left.

‘I shall complain to your Lieutenant Roach!’ he cried.

‘Do that,’ replied McLevy. ‘He could use some humour in his life. Now – honour us with your departure.’

Mulholland moved threateningly to the loitering Galloway who stepped away to splash his foot into the water in Jean’s fishpond, thus alarming the large piscine inhabitants and causing great amusement to the audience of magpies who hooted further as his fashionable shoe became entangled in some exotic fronds.

As he shook his leg unavailingly to clear it of the weed’s fond embrace, Galloway strived for the last word.