Trick of the Light (2 page)

‘Ulysses?’ The other screwed up his face at the unfamiliar name. ‘That’s foreign.’

Sinclair laughed softly and a glint of animal cunning showed in the boy’s eyes as if he thought there might be some advantage to be taken.

‘I’ve seen you, sir,’ he whispered.

‘Where?’

‘At the Happy Land.’

The man’s own eyes hardened. Lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. It was indeed true that after dark the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow were littered with the poverty-stricken discards of society but some were thieves, some were dishonest whores and many took the guise of helpless victim. And then struck.

Sinclair realised that his fingers were still entwined in the boy’s greasy hair. He spread and released them, then stood back a little to fish in his pocket, producing a coin held up before him. Forbidden fruits.

‘How would you like to earn this?’ he whispered.

‘Whit do I have to do?’

‘Close your eyes – and open your mouth.’

A look of sullen resignation came over Samuel’s face and he swallowed hard before performing as commanded.

Sinclair grasped him by the back of the neck then popped the coin in and jammed the jaws shut as the boy’s eyes shot open in surprise.

‘Now leave and forget me,’ said Sinclair, coldly. ‘Before I cut your throat and feed you to the buzzards.’

The coin was almost gulped down at this but then spat out into the hand and Samuel Grant fled silently into the darkness of the nether wynds as if the hounds of hell were on his trail.

Sinclair took his pocket watch from a high waistcoat pocket where it exchanged beats with his heart, and squinted in the faint light.

Quarter before midnight. His grandfather’s gold timepiece rarely lied.

Rendezvous was the hour itself. Now or never.

He took a deep breath, replaced the watch and sauntered out into the docks like a man without a care in the world.

It only took a dozen steps. Enough for him to observe the sailing ships close by with a few small steamers beyond not at all suitable for blockade running, not enough speed and backbone; the ladies he desired, iron-paddled, schooner-rigged, the Emily, the Charlotte, the Caroline, were already built or being so back in Glasgow.

But that city had become infested with Federal agents of the Union and so he must transact commerce where the power lay. Every lady has her price. And a respectable pimp to boot.

Brothers of the Gusset.

Edinburgh, He had spent a week here in sober negotiation and opposite pursuits. Now, it all must end.

While these thoughts ran through his mind, his senses had been preternaturally tuned to the surroundings. There was a dense, muffled quality to the air as if everything was held in suspension, but nothing behind. No footsteps.

He whistled a tune under his breath. Devil take the blue-tailed fly.

Then a figure detached itself from the shadows up ahead and stood directly in Sinclair’s path.

At least his equal in height, the face hidden, shrouded in a black oilskin cape which fell to ankle length; like a deadly shade the figure waited for a reckoning.

Sinclair had twisted and turned in vain; he knew both the identity and intention of his adversary.

A dull glint of metal showed as the man raised his arm to point directly at the target. Sinclair gazed down with regret at his own hand where all that glinted was a thin gold wedding ring; he would never get to his revolver in time and would die like a dog for a vanquished cause.

The South was doomed. And he was no kind of hero.

A dull explosion and then the bullet smashed into his body. Jonathen Sinclair fell back and then lay still, fair hair spilled over the one hidden eye.

No angels came to take him away to a house on the hill.

For him at least the war was over.

2

Warped and woven there spun we

Arms and legs and flaming hair,

Like a whirlwind on the sea.

W
ILLIAM
B
ELL
S
COTT
, ‘The Witch’s Ballad’

Leith, Edinburgh, 1882

James McLevy awoke with a snort of fear, hair standing on end as he shot bolt upright in his lumpy bed. Of late his dreams had been giving him hell and this was no exception.

Now was he truly out of the Land of Nod? As a policeman he would demand of his senses proof. Pain. Pain is a great indicator of the conscious state. A pin. A pin would be irrefutable, stuck into the back of the hand, but where do you find a pin in the pitch dark?

He scrabbled for a phosphorous match, struck it up and lit a squat dismal candle that had its place by his bed on a small rickety table. As the candle coughed its way towards a feeble luminosity, McLevy regarded the still burning match.

Caught yet by the wild fancy of the dream, what followed made perfect sense to him. He extended his thumb and wafted it over the flame. A howl of pain followed, the match was blown out, and the inspector then stuck the fleshly digit into his mouth to suck upon it like a distraught child.

A foul nightmare. Buried alive.

He had found himself in a cavernous long passage that wriggled ahead like a worm, having been led there by a female form that he might only observe from the back; the presence was shrouded in a long scarlet cloak with the hood pulled up as to obliterate all recognition.

How he’d got there he had no idea but it was surely connected to a previous fantastick episode where he’d been dancing naked round a fire; no, not naked, not him, he was in coat and low-brimmed bowler, in his heavy boots, the rest were naked or damned adjacent –
female
naked.

Was Jean Brash one of them? Surely not. She was a bawdy-hoose keeper with a fine taste in coffee, not one of these loose-lipped, loose-limbed wanton creatures capering round the flames. Their bosoms bounced with no regard for modest gravity and their rounded bellies heaved and shone through the draped shreds of discoloured linen that shook in ribald accompaniment to all this gallivantation.

The inspector should have arrested the sprawl where they pranced but what was he doing dancing in tune?

Then it was as if someone had drawn a curtain and the scene was blacked out.

And he was in the narrow tunnel, following the Red Figure – was it fatal? Had Edgar Allan Poe, a man McLevy found close to his own dark imagination, not penned
The Masque of the Red Death
?

The effigy did not look back and the passage became even more confined, with a glutinous creamy scum hanging from the curved walls.

This doesnae
look good.

He remembered thinking that at the time and then the figure vanished from sight and he was left to stumble alone into the uncharted murky orifice insinuating onwards.

McLevy found himself upon his hands and knees, crawling like a Jerusalem traveller, the roof pressing down, the surface below a dismal brown claylike substance that clogged and sucked as he squelched forward. The creamy scum wasn’t much help either and some instinct told him that if any of that landed upon bare skin, it would scald a hole like hot fat through a stretched membrane.

His lungs were shuddering from lack of air as if a clawed hand were reaching through the wall of his chest and an impulse flashed into his head that he’d better get to hell out of this rat’s nest.

At the end of the passage was a small chink of light where an egg-shaped hole, too meagre for a man of his bulk to negotiate, indicated a possible source of succour. But how was he to squeeze through?

He jammed his arm and head in but that was as far as he could get, no chance of his big backside following suit and anyway he could now see that the beckoning light had its origin from a lantern held by the Red Figure, who had popped up into view once more.

She stood by a small jetty. A rowing boat was moored in the still night-blue water where a spectral oarsman, black garbed and hunched over, rested with his back to the proceedings.

Not a promising sight, but then his attention was usurped by the slender white hand emerging from the folds of the red cloak to move towards the hood that still obscured the figure’s countenance.

For once in his life Inspector James McLevy abandoned the consuming curiosity of his natural bent, because he knew in his bones that once he saw that face the game was over.

He reached down into the depths of his being, where all this turbulence was wreaking havoc, and
wrenched
himself up and out of it into a shocked salvation.

Witness him bolt upright, hair aghast, thumb wedged between his lips, with the beginnings of a snottery nose.

He removed the singed digit, wiped the seeping organ with the cuff of his crumpled nightshirt and swung out of bed, feet landing with a thump on the cold floorboards of his attic room.

McLevy flapped his nightshirt over bare calves to create a welcome draught of cold air coursing up and over his clammy skin, then took a deep breath.

He was still alive, conscious of crime before it even stirred in the womb of Iniquity, a renowned thief-taker in his own city, feared by lawbreakers high and low, prone to violence when necessary and sometimes just for the hell of it, a great drinker of coffee, a sharp splinter in the rump of authority. He had survived bullets, knives, strangulation by a servant of the Crown and a drug-crazed thuggee, drowning even though he could not swim a stroke, at least two lethal women and ten times that number of murderous bastard men – one of whom had tried to spatter out his brains with hobnailed boot and viciously executed downward stamp.

The inspector realised he was muttering all this to himself: the sign of a disorderly mind.

A charred and dented coffee pot of discoloured metal stood on a stone ledge beside the hearth, where the dead ashes of last night’s fire lay scattered. He picked it up, shook it gently to and fro with his head cocked to the one side, then poured out the thick sludgy brew into an equally discoloured cup and sifted the mixture through his teeth.

The liquid hit the pit of his stomach like a falling stone and almost at once provoked his bowels into subdued commotion, but it did the trick.

He was himself again. James McLevy. Inspector of police. A solid, save for the bowels, proposition.

With measured tread he retraced his steps to the bed and shoved his feet into a shapeless pair of old socks. This action he followed by solemnly donning a nightcap with a dangling wee toorie – a birthday gift courtesy of his landlady, Mrs MacPherson, who knew well the prevailing chills of her attic rooms – and then made his way towards the large draughty window, which overlooked his beloved Edinburgh.

En route he stopped to regard himself in a mildewed oval mirror, bought from a toothless female hawker in Leith Market who had obviously no interest in further vanity. The glass was laid at an angle against a pile of his literary and scientific books. It reflected McLevy in all his glory.

He saw a distorted version of Wee Willie Winkie.

A man of some bulk. Curiously dainty hands; the one holding the cup raised a pinkie in elegant acknowledgement of his own image. Sturdy enough calves, from being on the saunter so long in the streets of Leith, a barrel-shaped corpus tending to a wee bit too much heft round the stomach, the broad shoulders sloping deceptively.

And then the face. It was on top of the body. That much you could say for certain.

The light from the candle threw a fragile arc round the room that rimmed him at the neck so McLevy craned forward, peering down to confirm what he already knew.

White parchment skin, pitted and creviced, full lips with a curious pout like the ornamental fish of Jean Brash’s new garden pond in the Just Land, a slightly spread nose from keeking hard up against too many windows, tufts of salt-and-pepper hair sticking out from the nightcap, and, below a gloomy brow, the eyes. Slate-grey. Lupine. Not friendly.

Seen too much.

McLevy turned away abruptly. Like the hawker he had no use for further vanity but had bought the damned reflector because of a recent incident at the Leith station.

He had entered full of autumnal relish but became aware of sniggering amongst the morning shift of half-witted young constables. His own right-hand man, Constable Mulholland, hiding the amusement in his blue eyes, stooped down from a great height and informed the inspector that the dishcloth stuffed round the neck that morning to avoid the spilling content of a yolky egg at breakfast upon his whitish shirt, had failed to be removed and was hanging down his front like a dog’s tongue.

McLevy had lost face. To know that folk had laughed behind his back. A childhood memory of similar humiliation had surfaced. It cut him to the bone.

A gang of boys following him through the wynds, howling names, spittle and stones showering his back.

His mother had cut her throat, mad auld bitch. Jamie McLevy would be next. Mad for certain sure.

Thank God that Lieutenant Roach, his superior in rank if not in merit, had failed to witness the incident of the overlooked dishcloth.

Ergo the purchase. Every morning, before setting forth, McLevy surveyed his façade in the glass, before twisting over a shoulder to make also sure the back of his thick coat held no trace of a careless repast, or the inadvertent detritus of a solitary life.

This weakness angered him. Why should he give a damn how people thought or what he looked like? It was a recent personal tremor, a self-conscious frailty.