Fall From Grace (34 page)

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
The Tempest

Leith, 29 December 1879

The Tay Bridge had been miraculously translated back to its former glory. The High Girders were no longer snapped off like matchsticks and stood proudly against the skyline; the men, women and children so dismally drowned, had been sucked back out of the water and carefully returned into place in their carriages as a mother would tuck her child safely in the bed at night.

The train itself, a cheerful puff of smoke from its stack signalling a busy stoker, was in position on the rails high above a calm river, the sky above almost cloudless and the whole aspect depicted a harmony between nature and the machinery of men.

All was peace and stillness.

It was a photograph however, and Alan Telfer looked from it to the baleful figure of James McLevy.

The secretary had answered a loud midnight knock upon the door in the vain hope that it was Sir Thomas Bouch returned from Dundee to relate that the whole thing had been grossly exaggerated, there was no disaster, no deaths, and so everything could return to normal and once more they might incline their heads over the sacred drawings.

But Sir Thomas was in the Royal Hotel in Dundee avoiding the other occupants, mostly comprising the English and Scottish journalists who were at this moment filing telegraph reports to their own papers and the world press, informing them that the first body had been found.

A woman dressed in black, her face white and the skirts floating round her as if she was some sort of sea creature, a jellyfish perhaps.

The name was not yet known but a mussel-dredger had discovered her sliding on her back between two sandbanks in the water.

He had only a long hook to pull her into his rowing boat and, despite being a man who was hardened by the cruel ways of the sea, sobbed and cursed like a madman as he hauled the sodden corpse aboard.

She was the first of sixty eventually found. Another fifteen were never recovered, only the fish knew their whereabouts.

Therefore when the secretary, who had remained behind to hold the fort to deal with the expected deluge of inquiries, opened the street door, it was James McLevy he beheld.

Like a spectre on the doorstep … risen from the deep.

The man had pushed silently past and made directly for the study and Telfer had no option but to follow up the stairs and carefully close the study door behind them – the wife of Sir Thomas was also in the house and he had no wish for her to stick her pointy nose into this; since the death of the old servant she had taken up camp in the place and when the news had arrived, had offered to accompany Sir Thomas to Dundee. But the great man had shaken his head; she was too fragile for such affairs.

This refusal had delighted Telfer; the woman could retire to her quarters and sew her eyelids together as far as he was concerned.

He was trusted to hold the fort. Above all people.

A single draughtsman’s lamp illuminated the sloping desk, where the drawings were tidily assembled, and reflected as far as the standing McLevy, giving his features a sinister cast like a villain in the footlights.

He had looked at Alan Telfer and still said nothing. Telfer had looked at the photograph of the bridge.

The silence grew.

McLevy finally spoke.

‘You are guilty of present death,’ he said.

Telfer attempted to twist his mouth into a dismissive smile but under McLevy’s implacable regard it froze as if his lips had been pressed against a block of ice.

‘I assume you refer to the terrible accident?’ he murmured, edging towards a narrow drawer in the filing cabinet where he kept a small 
revolver; it was a dainty piece, silver-handled, which he had bought in Paris as a curiosity but it could fire and was already loaded.

‘No accident,’ replied McLevy. ‘It was slaughter.’

Telfer was near enough the drawer now that he could wrench it open and open fire in case the man threatened him physically; the inspector was obviously labouring under some powerful delusion and had a dangerous glint in his eye.

The policeman was unkempt, his clothes bearing traces of mud and dirt, a strange feral stink to him as well, eyes bloodshot, chin unshaven; in fact he resembled a wild man of the woods more than an officer of the law. In truth McLevy was close to the point of utter exhaustion.

Word had spread through the city of Dundee like wildfire and the inspector had found himself swept like a cork in a raging torrent of people who gathered at South Union Street, heaving like an animal, filling the road from side to side; women and children were crying not yet sure of a reason but there would be reason soon enough, the men angry and close to violence because the staff of the Tay Bridge Station had prudently barricaded themselves in, not knowing any more than the crowd but, like them, fearing the worst.

A woman lost hold of her child and the throng swallowed it up; she let out a piercing scream of loss and that was enough to start a scuffling panic, fists and voices raised as the crowd swayed to and fro, out of control.

McLevy scooped up the child, a little girl, under his arm and fought his way through to the mother but as he handed the girl over there was a crash of breaking glass as someone in what was now a boiling mob hurtled up against the main door of the station and burst it inwards.

It was an ugly situation; some of the crowd had arrived to meet relatives and loved ones off the train and though the cry that the bridge was down had split the night and window after window had flickered into life as if the city were aflame, not one person knew what was going on.

The bridge was down but where was the train?

For a moment it looked as if the mob was going to break into the station and run amok, but then another cry went up that a boat was going to leave from the harbour to approach the bridge and, like an ebbing flood, the throng melted away heading down towards the harbour and esplanade.

McLevy did not go with them; he had already been on the esplanade and seen enough.

Some other folk had not followed the main crowd, these were the ones who had relatives and loved ones on the train.

They stared at the station door; its structure had been shattered and a great shard of glass pointed up like a finger of ice.

They stared at that door in the dumb suffering hope that it would open and one after the other the passengers would file through, a little shaken by the experience but with tales to tell of how the engine had shuddered to a halt as the bridge fell behind them, then inched its way along to safety while they sang hymns of redemption to raise their spirits.

One after another …

But no one came through the door.

The wind still whistled in the street but quieter now as if satisfied with the night’s work and McLevy whose head had drooped wearily where he was propped up against the station wall, found a sticky sweet being pressed into his hand.

He raised his head to see the child that he had rescued earlier, the donor, her mother smiling anxiously at the inspector as if he held the fate of the world in his hands.

The inspector nodded grave thanks to the little girl and popped the sweet in his mouth. Barley sugar, not one of his favourites and in places covered with the fluff and grit from her coat pocket, but it tasted like manna from heaven.

The strong winds had blown the odour of urine from his clothes and skin but he could still sniff it, and the sweet was fine compensation.

The mother looked across at him where he sucked at the offering with evident relish and felt hope rising irrationally in her breast.

Surely a God who provides barley sugar would have mercy on them all?

The woman smiled and indicated the child who was staring at the inspector to make sure he masticated at the proper time because there was a moment when barley sugar needed to be crunched otherwise it was only half a delight.

‘She’s waiting for her brothers,’ the mother remarked, nodding her head in approval. ‘My husband as well. He’s a schoolmaster. We have friends in Kirkcaldy. Two boys all day, the poor man will be stone tired. Still, all’s well that ends well, eh?’

But her eyes were fearful and the child, looking up at McLevy for confirmation, found something else in his face that suddenly provoked a loud wail of abandonment.

She ran back to her mother and buried her head in the woman’s skirts.

All at once the barley sugar tasted like ashes in his mouth and he spat it out on to the ground.

The mother gazed across at him, tears in her eyes, but McLevy closed his eyelids at the twist of pain in his guts.

He had nothing to offer save contamination.

The others waiting in the street fell silent; the only sound was of the whistling wind and a child’s sobbing.

The station door swung open, but it was only the wind.

No one filled the space.

No one came home.

Somehow the inspector had returned to Edinburgh the next day, sent word to the police station that he was incapacitated by dint of high fever and wandered the streets like one stricken by such, unable to rest or sleep, haunted by the stark images of the previous night, himself like a phantom, without substance as if the very marrow had been sucked from his bones.

He could not eat but managed a series of strong coffees at various stops, which propelled him further on a journey to nowhere.

The ache in his ribs lessened but the pain at the base of his skull, accelerated by the caffeine, intensified till it became like a spike driven upwards through his brain.

The faces he saw on the streets were like grotesques, the features twisted out of shape; sly malignant goblins, witches and warlocks stalked the city, eyes sliding sideways as they passed him by.

A street vendor selling hot chestnuts had, to drum up trade, a small female monkey dressed in a gingham gown chained to a stand beside the brazier.

Children were encouraged to throw nuts at the animal, ostensibly to feed it but it seemed to McLevy that, with evil intent, they hurled the missiles so that the poor beast was struck time and time again.

The monkey chattered its teeth together lethargically, the yellow eyes with strangely slit pupils looking out at a world inescapably alien and terrifying.

It screeched forlornly and the children began to imitate the sound, the high-pitched shrieks drilling into McLevy’s head till he could stand it no longer and quit the scene leaving the animal to its simian fate.

What after all could he have done to save the beast?

Bought the monkey?

How could an investigating officer arrive at the scene of a crime with a monkey on his shoulder?

Lieutenant Roach was of crocodile persuasion; he would want to eat the prey. Ballantyne would feed it bluebottles and Mulholland would wish to marry the poor beast. Jean Brash would have it labour in the Just Land. Perhaps Margaret Bouch could care for the lost soul; she would take it to the docks where they might watch the ships together and dream of freedom.

Night had fallen long since as he wandered plagued and haunted, driven to distraction by thoughts that hung before him like flies swarming round the liquid amber eyes of a cow in high summer.

But a cow was not a monkey.

That way madness lies.

As midnight chimed from the nearby church tower of Saint Thomas, James McLevy found himself before a door that seemed familiar.

He knocked upon it and when he saw the face of the man within, he knew why he had come and what his mission was on earth.

Retribution.

Now, in this study with the cold pale eyes of Alan Telfer upon him, McLevy was about to deliver it.

Retribution.

‘You cut corners in the making of that bridge,’ he said.

‘Who tells you that?’ Telfer responded calmly though there was the slightest twitch at the side of his mouth.

‘Hercules Dunbar.’

Telfer laughed, but there was no humour in his cold intent eyes.

‘As I have said before, a drunkard, a thief and a murderer.’

‘I shall grant you the first two but not necessarily the last,’ the inspector replied.

Telfer’s hand rested on top of the filing cabinet and he drummed his fingers upon the surface as if impatient to be done with the tiresome subject of homicide.

‘Then who was responsible for Mister Gourlay’s demise?’

‘That arrives later,’ was McLevy’s flat retort. ‘Let us stick to present death.’