Trick of the Light (19 page)

Intrusive, however, was exactly the word for McLevy.

‘The morning had hardly started,’ Roach declared, ‘and I already received a complaint about you, inspector.’

‘Logan Galloway?’

‘The same. He claims you took Jean Brash’s part against him, his wallet rifled at the Just Land, his own well-being insulted and physically threatened by the police who are for the protection of respectable citizens –’

‘If he’s all that winsome, whit’s he doing at a bawdy-hoose?’

‘Exactly the point I made before I sent him packing,’ said Roach, surprising McLevy by a change of direction; now and again the lieutenant was capable of something that suggested his mind did not entirely run with the Masonic pack. Not often, but now and again.

‘I don’t like the stupid wee gomeril and I like his father even less,’ Roach continued, ‘but if you must side with a bawdy-hoose keeper can you do it in a way that doesn’t threaten the bedrock of society?’

Now the lieutenant was back on track. He disapproved mightily of McLevy’s close entanglement with Jean Brash, believing there might be more to it than a love of coffee.

But McLevy could deal with this in his sleep.

‘Galloway was rantin’ fou,’ he replied. ‘And I didnae lift a pinkie. It was Mulholland and some fish.’

Roach knew better than to follow that trail.

‘What, I repeat, do you want in my presence?’

‘Morning report, sir!’

McLevy straightened up in a parody of eager, soldier-like attention. In truth he was feeling spry as a mountain goat this day; he’d had five hours uninterrupted sleep and not one visitation from the weird sisters.

‘Report away,’ said Roach, also straightening up; business was business after all and he’d make a propitious offering to the gods of golf by deliberately missing a five yard putt the next time he played his chief constable.

‘Two sharpers sliced deep in the Rustie Nail.’

‘By the throat?’

‘Belly. They’ll live.’

‘God’s mercy knows no bounds,’ said Roach, a trifle enigmatically.

‘The perpetrator answers the description of the acid-pourer of Leith Market.’

‘A busy man.’

‘And elusive,’ said McLevy. ‘I may pay a visit to the Countess.’

‘You seem at home in these establishments.’

McLevy ignored the caustic tone of his superior.

‘Also we had a few rammies on the streets between the rival clans.’

Roach had been put in the picture as regards the conflict betwixt the Queens of Procurement, and nodded sagely. Then he put the knife in.

‘If all this escalates to proven violence, will you be able to discharge your duties?’

The only indicator of a hit was that the slate-grey eyes darkened slightly.

‘The guilty will not evade me.’

‘Even Jean Brash?’

‘Justice has no favourites.’

‘I am glad to hear that. What about the Grierson robbery?’

‘An inside job, I believe. The widow woman has a secret she keeps close.’

‘I am sure you will find it out.’

Roach was content to leave it there, because he knew McLevy would have covered all other avenues such as domestic staff with lovers and flapping tongues. He had a prurient curiosity as regards Muriel Grierson; perhaps his wife was correct, widows excite a strange inquisitory bent.

In any case, let McLevy hunt it down.

And then tell him about it.

Roach folded his hands together indicating dismissal but the inspector had yet more to contribute.

‘Ballantyne tells me ye want him out on patrol.’

The lieutenant was about to deny this indignantly when, on impulse, he decided to content himself with a nod of the head. If the constable was playing one off against the other then there was more to that boy than met the eye.

‘I don’t know if the parish is ready for Ballantyne,’ McLevy muttered dubiously.

‘How is the constable to develop else?’

Now it was McLevy’s turn to leave it be. Far be it from him to mention that other than staring into cracked mirrors and waving his hands about, Ballantyne’s other pastime was collecting live insects from the busy horde that crept around the station, carefully depositing them outside lest a hobnailed boot curtail their existence.

He nodded and turned to go but Roach had a question that suddenly popped into his mind.

It had been bothering him since yesterday morning; the passing reference to widows with things to hide and the memory of last night when a giant form rose to apprehend the two capering demons brought it back into his mind.

‘Arthur Conan Doyle?’

‘Uhuh?’ McLevy stood by the open door, his face not easy to read.

‘How did you know all that…medical boxing palaver about him?’

‘Deduction.’

Not easy to read had now become sphinx-like.

‘
Deduction
?’ Roach shook his head, obscurely annoyed as he often was at the outcome of certain conversations with his inspector. ‘I don’t remember you indulging yourself in that particular pastime before.’

‘Whit I do all the time. Scientific.’

‘
You
?’

Here the lieutenant was being unfair because he knew fine well that McLevy kept surprisingly up to scratch with forensic developments, though he tended to hide that particular light under a large bushel basket.

It is ever the Scots trait not to flaunt learning and give aye the appearance of someone who has stumbled upon erudition by accident, if at all.

‘Just got a fancy name, now.’

But Roach was not completely accepting this; he had never heard McLevy launch forth in such flowery style to such devastating effect.

‘But how did you come upon all this
deduction
?’

McLevy frowned for a moment, then his face lit up.

‘That’s my secret,’ he said.

In the silence following that unhelpful comment, a strangled scream came from the direction of the main station room outside.

McLevy wheeled; Roach, showing a surprising turn of speed, followed after, and when they emerged it was to find a macabre scene being re-enacted before them.

An old man staggered around in the main hall, his hands covered in blood, streaks of the same in his white hair that then ran down his face.

King Lear in Leith.

His mouth opened and closed without a sound, the previous shriek having drained his vocal cords.

The young constables who were just about to depart on the morning shift stood frozen at the sight. Sergeant Murdoch, who had not even noticed the man pass like a ghost beyond the reception counter, was also fixed in time and space; Ballantyne had risen from his untidy desk, a blotting paper that had held a large beetle falling limply from his hand to let the insect scuttle off towards its own fate.

Mulholland who had been gazing glumly at his face in the cracked mirror emerged from the cubby-hole and swiftly moved to catch the old man before he came to harm on one of the stone pillars that held the very building in place.

He helped the old fellow gently down onto one of the chairs as McLevy moved to join them.

Fergus MacLean was the old man’s name. He was a servant who did not live in with his master but arrived each morning to light the fire and heat the house.

He was badly paid, his diligence unappreciated by his sovereign lord but, as is the manner of those who serve, regarded it as part of his drudgery.

No longer. No more. The kindling and the coal were in the bunker but they would not be utilised this day.

McLevy and Mulholland stood looking down at him till Fergus finally found some words.

‘The maister…’ he croaked. ‘He lies. In blood. I could not raise him.’

So the streaks of gore were not his own, though the man’s face was full of sorrow and fear as if life would never be the same.

Death is enough to give any man doubts.

20

The smyler with the knyf under the cloke.

G
EOFFREY
C
HAUCER
,
The Knight’s Tale

When Alfred Binnie was born there were no celebrations of fireworks or grateful peasants gathering under the castle windows to shower the newborn infant with gifts from the harvest table.

His mother dropped him like a crouching animal to grow as best he might manage and join the brood of children that swarmed onto the streets of Shoreditch like maggots.

Cholera had come and gone but the stench remained, safely ensconced in the dead bodies of the dogs, cats, and rats that littered the highways.

The mudlarks went to scour the mud of the Thames for coal dropped by the cargo boats but Binnie stayed in the crevices of alley and side-streets, his cunning round face disguising the predatory purpose within.

He was apprenticed by his kidsman to a pocket delver and learned the trade well. Alfred had swift, dexterous hands – lightning swift, despite his mole-like appearance.

He also learned the gift of invisibility, how to mingle with the crowd, become non-existent almost until the moment when he struck for the pocket or razor-slit the handbag.

The young Alfred developed apace but few found him appealing, girls especially; the little ladybirds who gave their favours with carefree abandon to other young keelies found him oddly repellent, part to do with his appearance which was, as one sharp dollymop accurately described,
like something crawled out of a rat’s arse.

The other part was not so easily defined and in fact puzzled Alfred himself.

It was as if he starved for something, a hunger that came out of his pores like a sweat and it put an aura around him that even the most hard-bitten of street dwellers found to provoke an uneasy feeling.

His hungry little heart could only suffer, not name its desire, only the empty yearning.

Then one day he found it.

Death.

His mobsman mentor, flushed with gin, a drink that encourages the careless rapture that no harm will befall a man soused and saturated with its cloying alcoholic charm, overreached himself in a flash house, a tavern where the cream of London’s reprobates mixed with the lowest of the low. All equal under the blanket of crime.

It was a given rule that no pocket delving was done, no sharping, no find-the-lady. Not in this tavern.

Good behaviour between thieves.

However the tooler could not resist the temptation of a heavy pocketbook in the side coat of a quietly dressed mark at the bar.

He signalled Alfred to supply distraction, a clumsy trip and spilling of a beer glass that would fit in so well with the boy’s oafish demeanour.

But Alfred hung back.

He had noticed that there was space around this man, no-one slapped him on the back or attempted familiarity. He had been drinking alone, steadily, the best rum, not making a show or unnecessary move.

Which was what the mobsman did.

Bumped in, fixed apologetic smile already upon his face, fingers upon the leather of the pocketbook, then a sharp pain under his ribcage as the knife punctured his skin and pierced the heart like a blackbird’s beak.

The executioner then placed the tooler’s hands upon the bar as if to steady him, laid down the empty glass of rum, then turned and walked unhurriedly out of the place.

Tom Partridge, for that was the mark’s name, walked carefully through the dirty streets of Shoreditch until he became aware that someone was dogging his steps.

When he turned, he saw a strange lumpen creature neither man nor child.

‘How did you do that?’ asked Alfred Binnie.

‘Practice,’ said Tom.

‘Will you teach me?’

Partridge looked into the boy’s eyes and saw the same emptiness that met his own gaze in the mirror every morning.

The blank, dispassionate stare of an assassin.

He said nothing. A sudden uproar in the distance signalled the discovery of a dead man slumped over the bar with a smile fixed upon his face.

‘Why did you stick him through?’

‘He broke the rules.’

Alfred smiled. That made sense.

‘What did you see?’ asked Tom quietly.

‘I saw your hand. The steel. But not where you kept it. That’s a mystery.’

Partridge sighed. He had no wish to take on an acolyte but the alternative was to kill the witness.

Any witness runs that risk.

He turned and walked away, with Alfred taking this as acceptance, following like a dog its master.

The boy had learned and learned well.

Alfred Binnie allowed himself a smile of satisfaction as he thought of the pleasure in that sweep under the table when his knife cut through the thick material to find the soft flesh beneath.

The Countess, however, who was sitting opposite him, was anything but pleased.

She had been informed at first light as to the events in the Rustie Nail and it did not fit with her plans so carefully constructed while the city slept.

‘How could you do this?’ she asked.

Alfred laughed, a strange sound.

‘My hand slipped,’ he replied.

‘You might have ruined everything.’

‘I don’t like being bilked.’

The Countess fixed him with a cold stare and the pleasure drained from his face.

‘You were to stay here,’ she said.

‘I was confined to no purpose! This poky little room offends me and that woman you sent up was no such thing.’

‘What?’

‘All bones and elbows.’

His face was now like that of a sulky boy and her thin eyebrows rose in some surprise. Binnie’s taste ran to large women and she had provided him with the fleshiest specimen in the hotel.

‘Not many would describe her so,’ she murmured.

He laughed scornfully.

‘She wouldn’t play any games. I like games. That’s why I defenestrated.’

Indeed after realising that what he thought of as a bit of fun had produced a look of repugnance in the woman’s eyes, Binnie had dismissed her and then suspecting that the Countess might have a watch kept on his door, swung out of the window and down the drainpipe.

It was no strain, either for him or the pipe. Binnie was surprisingly agile despite his appearance and though plump was small enough not to weigh a great deal.