Fall From Grace (29 page)

Now it was his turn for silence; he stuck out his lower lip and shook his dripping head as if to imply, ‘What could the likes of you know? What secret could you hug close that could possibly discomfit the great Sir Thomas Bouch and Alan Telfer?’

Hercules took up the invitation.

‘Before I robbed the stick, on the way through, I keeked in the bedroom, maybe a purse lying free. I saw them. Thegither. Telfer was lying on the bed in his shirt and trousers. Sir Thomas was in his nightgown, under the sheets. His head was on Telfer’s chest. They were both asleep. Babes in the wood. Dirty bastards.’

Dunbar sniggered then looked down at McLevy to see the effect of his words.

‘So,’ said the inspector slowly, ‘you closed the door, went to the study, thieved your due, were about to leave and then that was when the auld fellow came in?’

‘That was when.’

An ice-cold blast of wind hit Dunbar full in the face and froze the disappointment on his features.

McLevy seemed unimpressed. To hell with him then.

‘A long night,’ said Hercules. ‘And cold as the grave. I doubt you will not survive. I’ll be sitting by a warm fire wi’ a good woman dishing out 
the hot meal. Black pudding, chappit tatties and kale. Every mouthful I’ll think of ye. And I’ll wish for your death.’

Then he was gone into the darkness without another word, leaving the inspector soaked in urine and burning with a fierce indignation.

There would be a reckoning for this. Only nature may pass water on inspectors of crime.

But at least he was alive to smell the piddle.

His mind was racing with what Dunbar had told him; if he got out of this alive, the shape of what was forming in his head would have its day.

If he got out of this alive.

29

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A hero perish or a sparrow fall,

Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

ALEXANDER POPE,
An Essay on Man, Epistle 1

The rat had been flushed from its den by the rushing water and scuttled along the side of the park pond, which was like a miniature version of the writhing distant river.

The rodent had no fear of water; its sleek coat repelled the hail of rain as it scurried across the grass towards the underbrush where it might find a ratty haven.

In the tangle of broken branches it glimpsed white flesh and thought, like a good policeman, to investigate, but the flesh moved, a low growl emitted from direction of the white mass and so the rat passed on.

It could always come back later.

McLevy watched it depart with a fierce eye and wondered for the umpteenth occasion how he might remove himself from these desperate straits.

Time had passed and the rain beaten down, with the storm, if anything, increasing in ferocity.

The inspector was part protected by the foliage but it also might conceal him from any passers-by though, as far as he could observe, they were non-existent.

No one but a mad person would be out in such a night.

He averted his face as much as possible but large drips from the broken branches spattered and ran down his skin so that he had to keep his eyes shut, blow out his nostrils like a hog, and keep his mouth tight closed because his head was over an indent in the ground and if he leant it back, water coursed into every orifice.

And yet to keep it upright was a hellish strain, the difficulty compounded by his aching ribs. In addition a sharp pain cut like a knife at the back of his head.

It was a most unpleasant sensation and growing worse by the minute in a darkness that seemed without relief; perhaps Hercules Dunbar had postulated correctly when he thought that nature might do the job.

The inspector’s own thoughts were of a grim cast; this was a slow torture and might last till, consciousness lost, the process could proceed unchecked.

If he didn’t freeze to death, he would drown. A fine prospect.

Then he heard a voice shouting above the percussive beat of the wind. It had an oddly familiar ring and he strained to discern the figure and make out the words.

‘Strong drink will cause the gambler to rob and kill his brother,

Aye! Also his father and his mother,

All for the sake of getting money to gamble,

Likewise to drink, cheat and wrangle.’

Only one person in the universe could write such execrable drivel but it was music to McLevy’s ears as the full moon made an opportune appearance to disclose the poet McGonagall in full flow, long coat flapping like the wings of a bat as he bawled out a rhyming diatribe against the evils of alcohol.

McLevy tried to call forth but received an inopportune mouthful of wind and rain and as he coughed this out, further inflaming the jagged pain in his ribcage, the poet continued his bellowing lay.

‘And when the burglar wants to do his work very handy,

He plies himself with a glass of Whisky, Rum or Brandy,

To give himself courage to rob and kill,

And innocent people’s blood to spill!’

Finally McLevy managed to croak out the man’s name, before he passed by and was gone into the night.

‘William McGonagall!’

The poet stopped abruptly and a look of fear came on his face; was that Satan on the prowl?

Again the call.

‘McGonagall!’

‘Who summons me?’ he cried, taking up a defiant stance, his stick raised high to combat evil.

‘I am an Edinburgh policeman,’ came the response. ‘And I am under this fallen walnut tree.’

McGonagall cautiously approached the source of this assertion and found at least part of it to be so. The man was definitely under a tree.

‘How do I know you are a police officer?’ he asked, lest the fellow be a footpad in disguise.

McLevy bit back a vitriolic rejoinder; this numskull was all he had.

‘My restrainers will be lying near,’ he grunted.

Luckily William found them where they had fallen when the tree made its entrance in the drama, held them up in the blowy moonlight to verify McLevy’s profession, then produced his next inquiry.

‘Are you in pain, good sir?’

‘What does it look like?’ was the aggrieved retort.

These things established, the poet proved surprisingly adept and practical at prising the inspector from under the heavy branches of his captor.

He found a broken but still strong enough part of the trunk from the slender tree that had snapped earlier, jammed it under and bore down upon the lever with sufficient force to raise the dead weight so that McLevy could roll painfully free.

It took no time at all. One moment a man looks death in the face, then a second later he is free as a bird.

Until the next occasion.

As the inspector got slowly to his feet he noticed that McGonagall’s wide-brimmed hat was, despite the vicious wind, still fixed upon his head.

How did he manage that?

‘I am Inspector James McLevy and I thank you, Poet McGonagall,’ he uttered formally.

The man’s face lit up and he struck a pose, leg extended before, and his walking stick over the shoulder.

‘You know of me, sir? My fame has spread to many parts, I believe this cannot be contradicted.’

‘I saw you in the tavern. With the peas.’

‘I am a Good Templar,’ came the oblique rejoinder. ‘Only circumstance forces the Muse into such sorrowful surroundings. I have a family to feed.’

McLevy winced at the pain from his ribs and, as he gazed into his rescuer’s solemn eyes, felt an obscure pity that would not be denied.

Did the man not know how absurd was the versification he produced?

Obviously not, for William gestured around at the whirling elements as if they were boon companions in the search for truth and purity of vision.

‘It is your good fortune sir, that I came this way to seek out inspiration. I am composing a poem against the snares and pitfalls of the demon drink.’

‘I heard you,’ muttered McLevy. ‘The sentiments were to be applauded.’

McGonagall suddenly put a dramatic hand up to his forehead as another shaft from the Muse struck home.

‘I have the last verse,’ he cried. ‘And you shall be the first to hear it, sir.’

And so with aching ribs, a blinding pain at the base of his skull, a murderous bastard fled, and stinking of pee, which the poet seemed not to notice, dying for a coffee or a hooker of whisky to cheer him up, a head full of crime, his heart boiling with vengeance, James McLevy endured these lines of Temperance and goodwill to all men.

‘I beseech ye all to kneel down and pray

And implore God to take the demon drink away,

Then this world would be a heaven, whereas it is a hell,

And the people would have more peace in it to dwell.’

McLevy had closed his eyes to shield himself as far as possible from this maladjusted poetic onslaught but when he opened them again, McGonagall was still there, still the worst poet McLevy had ever heard 
and still the man who had liberated him from a bone-crushing walnut tree.

McGonagall waited expectantly. McLevy searched for something to contribute.

‘Words fail me,’ he finally managed.

He held out his hand to signal appreciation and incidentally bring a conclusion to this torture by verse.

The poet gripped it fast, once more their eyes met, and for a moment the inspector could have sworn that there was the shadow of a sad self-consciousness in the man’s face as if he truly suffered from the terrible knowledge that what he proclaimed as genius, was in fact dross of the lowest quality. But then the instant passed, though the man’s next words might have intimated such.

‘The Muse is cruel,’ said McGonagall sombrely. ‘She will not let me rest. Night or day, I must put my shoulder to the wheel of creation. And I have a family to feed.’

A hint of a different kind and McLevy took it gratefully, withdrawing from the handshake to find a coin or two in his pocket, which he pressed into the poet’s palm.

‘I would have given this in the tavern,’ he asserted solemnly, ‘were we not interrupted by the peas.’

The coins disappeared magically into the McGonagall pocket and he turned to stride off, aided mightily by the buffet of a following wind.

At the margin of moonlight, he twisted round to raise his stick in farewell.

‘I thank you, James McLevy. Perhaps one day we shall meet again,’ he shouted.

‘I look forward to that,’ was the response of a man lying through his teeth.

A further thought struck the poet.

‘My house is in Paton’s Lane, a far cry from here and a humble dwelling but you are welcome to hunker down for the night upon the floor.’

The thought of rhyming couplets with a bowl of thin gruel in the morning sent a shiver through McLevy’s aching bones.

‘A kind offer but I’ll find my own passage,’ he called back. ‘Yet tell me one thing. In this violent tempest, how do you keep the hat upon your head?’

‘Dignity,’ was the enigmatic answer. ‘A poet is ruined if he is not dignified.’

With that McGonagall departed into the night leaving McLevy to turn and make his way towards the esplanade, that being the general course he imagined Dunbar to have taken.

Though he knew it was a hopeless quest. Who knows how long he had lain there in such sorry circumstance?

The man would be miles away and could have set off in any direction.

He could be anywhere in the city.

The part of the esplanade opposite the park was deserted, the rows of houses starting further along, and as McLevy bent over double, part to ease the pain of his ribs part to present a lesser target for the storm wind, the sand and pebbles were blown in a stinging hail from the shore to blend in with the rain and further add to his discomfort.