Trick of the Light (31 page)

Finally Maisie spoke slowly, softly, unlike her usual strident tone; so quietly that he had to lean in at the table where they sat.

‘The top room. A man stays up there. Since a wee while ago. We never see. He comes and goes by the back.’

‘Whit about the dogs?’

‘They must like him.’

‘Ye
never
see? Tell me a wee bit more.’

She took a breath.

‘Thank God it wisnae myself.’

‘Tell me, if you please.’

‘Lizzie Jessock. Big lump o’ a girl. She didnae last.’

McLevy raised his eyebrows enquiringly; not another murder surely?

‘She was sent up. Tae service him. Keep her mouth shut. But she tellt me only. Frae the same street ye know?’

‘Uhuh.’

The door to the tavern swung open and McLevy cursed under his breath lest it might be Molly, the once-arrested shoplifter, but it was just a chimney-sweep, covered in soot and thirsty for beer.

For a laugh to celebrate the Halloween, which had finally arrived, he had gouged off the soot round his eyes and the white skin made him look like a daylight demon.

‘A horrible wee pot-belly man,’ Maisie continued. ‘Wi’ a whiney kind of voice and he –’

Her voice almost trailed away. The inspector waited, trying to make himself inconspicuous as if she might be talking to herself.

‘– he pits a knife against her bare breast.’

‘Whit happened?’

‘She started tae howl tears and he kicked her out.’

‘Top room, you say?’

‘Ye cannae get higher.’

McLevy fumbled in his pocket.

‘I have a likeness of this man, I want Lizzie to –’

‘No!’

The word came out with enough vehemence to turn the sweep back from the bar and he wondered for a moment what the man had said to cause the woman such distress.

His white-rimmed eyes blinked comically at them for a second before he went back to his beer.

‘No,’ Maisie repeated less loudly, but with gritty resolve. ‘I’ve taken my life in my hands enough and if my mother sees me sitting wi’ you, she’ll hae a convulsion.’

She pointed to the door.

‘You get tae hell out of here, McLevy. I don’t wish to be seen in your company. I have a reputation tae keep.’

And so he took her advice, nodding politely to the sweep, who grinned, broken teeth in the black face.

‘It’s my birthday,’ the man announced. ‘Born on Halloween. Whit a nonsense, eh?’

But he was talking to a closed door. The man had vanished. So he turned back and smiled at the woman.

A fine big specimen.
Happy Birthday
.

Meantime, Constable Ballantyne sat in the records room and counted the number of dead beetles he had found inside the folder pages like so many bookmarks. He had arranged the insects in a neat echelon all along the dusty surface.

Fourteen. Most the same kind as far as he could see, with a little yellowish marking on their back shell.

A tribe perhaps on their way to the Promised Land when they got sidetracked into the annals of crime.

Larder or Bacon Beetle –
Dermestes lardarius
– unless Ballantyne missed his guess. He had been reading up on the targets of his merciful interventions and these fitted the book description.

Very destructive to paper. But one bite of Leith’s past criminality seemed to have put paid to the whole clan.

Ballantyne sighed. He had found it oddly peaceful in the records room, no-one to bother him, a line-up of dead insects for company and he, like the curator of a museum, lost in the dusty tomes of ancient homicidal lore.

To wit, approximately eighteen years ago when a brutally shot body was discovered in the Leith Docks.

Inspector McLevy had set him the task of finding the relevant dossier and this had taken most of the morning.

But here it was. The gist of it anyway.

The writing was in large block capitals by a certain Inspector Brunswick who had retired not long after and returned to his native Stirling.

Name of corpse: Jonathen Sinclair, identified from papers as American citizen. No trace of address in Edinburgh.

Cause of death: Two bullets. One to the body. The other from close range to the face, causing great damage.

Motive for killing: Undiscovered. Lack of evidence.

Case closed: Three months later. Lack of evidence.

Further notes: the American Consul in Glasgow, Warner L. Underwood, disclaims all knowledge of the man save that he was suspected of being a Confederate agent who may have been attempting to buy ships for the South and who deserved what he got. We have enough troubles in Leith without other folk bringing their mess here.

On that somewhat personal note, Inspector Brunswick ended his report.

There were a few other additions but Ballantyne reckoned he had absorbed the substance and anyway it was for McLevy to peruse and cogitate upon.

Accordingly he swept the defunct insects into a small piece of paper, which he wrapped around neatly to be shaken out with due ceremony from the back window of the station at a later juncture, tucked the folder under his triumphant arm, and walked off with mission accomplished.

In Roach’s office, however, little was consummated and tempers were rising.

The lieutenant was sitting at his desk, McLevy leaning over, Mulholland at the door; again not unlike their usual automatically assumed interrogation positions but this was more the other way round.

McLevy had laid out his whole case but his superior was unconvinced.

‘It is not enough,’ Roach remarked. ‘Not by a long swipe, McLevy. You are at least two clubs lengths short.’

This golfing reference sailed over the inspector’s head as he tried to rein in his frustration.

He took a deep breath and drove in again to restate the case for the defence.

‘Doctor Jarvis agreed wi’ me, sir –’

‘A wonder in itself, I know, but still not enough –’

‘A professional job, atween the third and fourth ribs, straight into the heart, one thrust.’

‘Scientific, almost,’ Mulholland offered.

‘A practised killer.
Too professional
. Even for Jean Brash.’

‘You think so?’ Roach looked across at Queen Victoria who seemed doubtful as well.

The monarch had been on that wall for a while. Stasis breeds doubt, no denying that.

‘Jarvis remarked the wound to be a touch wider than Jean’s blade.’

‘She may have sawed it back and forth to extract the weapon she had just used for murder. Not very professional, of course, which destroys your previous argument.’

Roach was pleased with this and glanced to see if Mulholland had appreciated the subtle riposte but for some reason the constable’s face registered a blank.

‘Again,’ McLevy hammered out, undeterred, ‘Jarvis agreed with what both Mulholland and I had previously noted; Galloway was stabbed from the left. “
Sinister
”, said he.’

‘Jean Brash is right-handed,’ Mulholland added.

‘Her only orthodoxy,’ said Roach dryly, however it did make some impression on him; left-handers were the bane of his life, he had lost in the President’s Cup to one not two months ago.

However it was still not enough.

‘All very circumstantial and does not justify an official search warrant to enter the property.’

This was the rub.

To apply successfully for such a warrant through official channels needed a lieutenant’s approval.

Of course McLevy could barge in unofficially and rampage through the Countess’s hotel but if resisted, if there were problems, he would need a force of men.

Without endorsement he could only rely on Mulholland at best and even that was not sure; and if by any chance the raid was unsuccessful the inspector ran the risk of the instant discipline of demotion.

McLevy had too many black marks on his record as it stood. A series of heavy scores. He had once got across the present prime minister, Gladstone, and was only rescued by the fact that he saved the man’s life.

The inspector indicated the cable that lay on Roach’s desk, read by the lieutenant but not, McLevy was certain, appreciated to full extent.

‘The knifeman frae the Rustie Nail, the acid-pourer at the market –’

The likeness of Lily’s was beside the cable and McLevy gestured again to make sure Roach realised the burgeoning significance of it all.

‘I sent the description to a colleague of mine in London…
a professional killer, plump, left-handed, looks like a squashed toad
, and he came back with a name. Alfred Binnie. A hired assassin. Apprentice at one time to Tom Partridge of Shoreditch, who was top of his trade. Binnie took over the mantle. Some say he killed his master to be the only one on hand.’

‘This colleague has done you proud,’ Roach muttered, skimming the contents once more.

‘Binnie has not been seen around his usual haunts in Shoreditch for a wee while. I believe he is in Edinburgh.’ 

‘And where does that get us exactly?’

This from Roach was quite hopeful in that he had not dismissed the cable out of hand.

Mulholland had been well briefed by McLevy before they entered and though he may have had lingering doubts himself, he took a deep breath as they went for broke.

‘Jean Brash may have walked into a trap, sir,’ he opined, moving off the door to the side so that they flanked Roach as if he indeed were a suspect.

‘Binnie made the kill. Laid it on Jean,’ McLevy said.

‘The Countess is behind it. A war between them, sir.’

‘I have a witness who has seen Binnie in the lair of the Countess,’ McLevy added, his eyes gleaming with hunting fever. ‘I know his hiding place. Take him and we crack the case but I need to get in the front door!’

‘We’ll cover the back with a few men,’ Mulholland said hopefully. ‘Diversion and deception, sir.’

Which might well describe what the two were about with their own superior officer.

‘Who is this witness?’ asked Roach, unmoved by all this diversification.

‘Her identity must be secret. For the moment. But I guarantee her veracity.’

The lieutenant sniffed at that unsatisfactory reply from his inspector and then asked the question that had been in his mind since the two had entered his office.

‘Inspector. Are you sure your feelings are not personally involved and that you are therefore indulging in what I can only describe as…wishful thinking?’

McLevy froze like a statue and Mulholland tensed, wondering if, as his Aunt Katie would have put it,
the fox has bit the hen and watch the feathers flying.

‘I have no personal feeling where justice is concerned,’ the inspector said quietly. ‘But I believe there is a danger we may fail innocence in this case no matter how unlikely the accused is to deserve such designation.’

‘
Belief
?’ said Roach seizing on the word. ‘I need more than that. I need proof. Facts. Indisputable facts.’

‘Then you may have to take my word for it, sir. That we will find proof. Behind the door of the Countess.’

Roach said nothing.

Over the years he had borne witness to the fact that McLevy’s instincts had their own truth to tell. But they also invariably got the lieutenant into hot water.

Scalding, on occasions.

This could be one of those times.

Mulholland thought to say something more but a slight movement of his inspector’s hand stilled the voice within.

In the stretched silence there was a timid knock at the door and it sprang open, breaking the tension, to reveal the figure of Ballantyne who held out a dusty folder like some sort of sacrificial offering.

‘I found it, sir,’ he said. ‘It was gey well hidden.’

‘My thanks, Ballantyne,’ replied McLevy accepting the folder with due gravity. ‘We are lost without you.’

He turned to the questioning look of his lieutenant.

‘The Morrison case,’ he said. ‘Key information.’

‘Oh? You haven’t forgotten it then?’

To this waspish retort the inspector inclined a dignified nod. Dignity, as a poet had once told him, is a good way to keep your hat on your head in a howling gale.

‘My mind is full of many things, sir. Many of them awaiting action.’

Back to Roach.

His long jaw twitched from side to side, a sign of intense cogitation.

McLevy, a man who was rarely still, once more resembled a statue.

Ballantyne looked at Mulholland, who was taller than everyone else and could therefore stare off into space without being interrupted.

The young constable apprehended something was going on but he was buggered if he knew how it was constituted.

Then he saw to his dismay that just past Mulholland’s lanky figure, on the wall, a small insect was making its way up the portrait of Queen Victoria.

It looked like a churchyard beetle, which had the habit, when disturbed, of squirting a smelly, yellowish-brown fluid from the raised tip of the abdomen.

What if it did so over Queen Victoria?

However if Ballantyne raised the alarm, either one of these three merciless men, in defence of the realm, would spatter the insect where it strived.

But could he stand by and let such a creature crawl over the face of the monarch?

Decision, decisions.

32

Three merry boys, and three merry boys,

And three merry boys are we,

As ever did sing in a hempen string

Under the Gallows-Tree.