Nor Will He Sleep (3 page)

A more piratical hirsute adornment under a very different nose, long and finely shaped, sifted the fumes of nicotine through its filaments as the owner of both neb and fusker
gazed thoughtfully out at the respectable street below.

Heriot Row was a fine example of rectitude rewarded; it may have led at one end to the slightly suggestive curves of Abercrombie Place but of itself was straight as a die.

His father would have approved, no doubt still did approve, lying himself undeviating in the coffin, hands folded, good book closed for the journey, cold white face arranged so that demonic
senility had left no trail.

An empty space.

Thomas Stevenson, father of the miscreant Robert Louis, was waiting for his burial in some days’ time.

Patience father. It will come. And I shall see to it. A splendid affair. No expense spared. Clouds of glory.

Stevenson sucked a long draft of smoke deep into his waiting lungs, a blessing they still functioned to purpose, and held it close like a lover. It crept into the crevices of his bony
shipwrecked chest, calming the nerves, soothing the feelings, until released with a whoosh.

Leaving behind?

Another empty space, my friend.

He tapped the cigarette ash off into his palm, regarded the tiny mound gravely, then blew it away towards nowhere.

The whole house was asleep, thank God; his wife Fanny no doubt engaged in phantom operatic adventures provoked by her instinctual organs; his mother Margaret hopefully not actually slumbering in
widow’s weeds, though she had taken to mourning like a duck to water, slept the righteous sleep; and Lloyd, Fanny’s son but not his, would be snoring like a log.

Like a log.

Good boy. A consecration if he but knew it. Sleep.

And Robert Louis? The famous Robert Louis? Left with and by himself, which, to tell truth, was no great hardship.

Peace to torture himself with guilty imaginings, amuse same with the observed traits of humankind, or bear witness to the wellspring whence the strange beings that peopled his tales of adventure
and woe issued forth, unbidden, at times most terrifying, but never unwelcome.

From the depths they arose and to the depths they descended.

All grist to the mill.

He sucked once more upon his self-rolled,
Papier Persan
, tobacco conduit to the stars and murmured in the half-light.

Indeed. Different destinies.

They had arrived and for two days the old man had stared at Stevenson as if he had sprouted from the moon.

Then Thomas passed over to that blessed veil where along with the Almighty, various Presbyterian dignitaries would no doubt be waiting to hail him for a life well spent, consult their pocket
watches and congratulate the devout traveller for arriving bang on time.

Pre-destined.

Or an empty space.

Faites vos jeux.

Louis shivered suddenly; someone had walked over his grave. To see that face empty of meaning, eyes dilated, jaw agape, made a brutal mockery of conscious existence.

In many ways he had feared his father, especially the irrational rages that contrasted with the decent generosity and kindness shown to his wayward son.

The dark forces he rode like a rider in the storm, in his father had been buried under pillars of rectitude.

And at the end, had they not taken vengeance?

Put his senses to fire and pillage, destroyed the inner essence, gouged out the soul and left a vacant carcass to rattle and creak like a haunted house.

Ahh!

Tobacco had burnt to the stub and singed the tapered authorial fingers. Stevenson swiftly extracted another cigarette from his case and passed the immortal flame from one to the other.
Cigarettes without intermission, save for when coughing and kissing –
both of these carry sufficient danger by themselves, wouldn’t you say, old chap?

He flipped the stumpy remnant out through the open window and watched with some malicious glee as it sparkled like a sinful firefly upon the respectable flagstone before a drenching rain put
paid to further adventures.

Edinburgh rain was like no other. He had returned but a few days and already his body ached, nose constantly dripping.

How could this hero, creator of
Treasure Island
,
Kidnapped
, and
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
into which it was rumoured that Queen Victoria herself had
inserted royal fingers to ruffle these pages of charted depravity, how could this hero stand before his household gods with a snottery nose?

Louis caught an errant nasal effusion in a large white handkerchief and regarded himself in that part of the window pane not covered by the heavy curtains. It was a ghostly image: pale, long
face like a disappointed donkey; drooping but sly moustache; prominent bony forehead; and dark eyes that darted right and left before settling once more into a fixed perusal of the countenance,
heart-shaped; the hair long and brushed back from the somewhat large ears.

Earlier that day, in his father’s desk, he had come upon some cached photographs, posed formally with Thomas who stared at the camera as if preparing for a life of filial disenchantment
over the doleful creature with an old man’s head on a young body standing there beside him.

Stevenson had felt a sudden piercing to the heart, replaced the images and closed the drawer.

Enough. Enough regrets for this night.

He struck a sudden comical pose, cigarette held aloft like a holy relic, and pranced like one bereft of wits before inhaling once more with bravura.

That’s more like it. That’s the ticket.

A wry smile spread across the other’s face in the window pane – what a fool to behold.

A dolt. And a workhorse.

He ignored the faint sneer that had appeared in the visage opposite and peered past it into the dark night. The young men who had gathered earlier to jostle in Heriot Row for a glimpse of
ghostly legend at the upstairs fenestra, had been driven away by the incessant rain, or perhaps they had better mischief in mind.

As a law student he had prowled the streets in licentious drunken gallivants, but these medical boys would seem to have codified their pursuits into tribal lines.

Somewhere in the house a clock chimed midnight and in the silence each separate sound spread dark vibrations that permeated one after another, into his very being.

A sound of foreboding.

As if something was being cradled and created, an evil likeness in his name.

And then wrenched from him to have another life and spread atrocities in the wet and bitter night.

The man known to one and all as Robert Louis Stevenson pulled himself out of that particular pit to drag some more emollient tobacco into his lungs, let it seep into every possible pore and then
stood quietly in the shrouded room.

Let it come. Whatever it be. Above or below nature. He did not fear the unknown.

It lay within him like a hungry beast.

Let it come.

Four faces were to be observed in the Cold Room at Leith Station.

One belonged to Lieutenant Robert Roach, an elongated snouty affair, not unlike an irritated alligator. His long jaw twitched unhappily as he glanced at his erstwhile subordinate who shook the
raindrops off a heavy coat and sucked thoughtfully at one end of his moustache.

James McLevy. Roach had known him for nigh on fifteen years and still the man was a mystery. There were rumours the inspector was a secret Papist, frequented opium dens, most certainly had a
strange and twisted relationship with Jean Brash who ran the best bawdy-hoose in Edinburgh, and had killed men with his bare hands.

The lieutenant was prepared to discount the opium since he was the one who had sent McLevy in under cover; as regards bare hands the level of violence he had witnessed unleashed, even at a
distance, would always make such a possibility as long as it was directed at the criminal classes Roach was prepared to grant a little leeway – but in his Presbyterian bones he sensed a
strange otherness of religion in the man.

It might be a mere Jacobite leaning but with Pope Leo XIII daring to celebrate his priestly version some months after the oncoming Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, it was as well to be on
guard.

The House of Windsor had been making conciliatory moves in the Vatican’s direction but these moves had not crossed over the border.

Nor would they ever.

As regards Jean Brash – that was a mystery beyond all powers of deduction.

One thing was for sure. The man might look like a midden, scorn authority like a street keelie, ignore the wise advice of his superior officer to the point of blind insolence, but James McLevy
was a Thieftaker. The best in the city, the best Roach had ever witnessed.

A combination of the aforesaid violence, fierce forensic intelligence and weird insight cut through murder and crime like a knife through butter.

Not that Roach would ever admit it. Or deal praise. But nothing pleased him better than seeing his Chief Constable Sandy Robb at the Masonic monthly gathering, to murmur such as . . .
The
Pearson case is closed. The poison the judge used to kill his butterflies was utilised by his own wife. As my inspector observed . . . hoist with his own petard.

Of course this deadly ability was buttressed by the owner of the face on Roach’s other side.

Martin Mulholland towered a good eight inches over the inspector and four over his own lieutenant. He had an open candid countenance that bore no trace of the myriad murders and bloody
adventures through which he had trailed his large boots. The bar-room brawls he had taken part in alongside his inspector with lethal hornbeam stick to hand was part of Leith legend. Still a humble
constable, he had refused promotion many times because he preferred to be on the saunter with McLevy to any other activity.

His Irish blue eyes and soft spoken ways had lulled many a female criminal into an unwise move, though it must be said that his luck with women was just terrible unless arresting them.

Which is why he had recently taken up bee-keeping.

So there were three faces, all with a tale to tell.

The fourth belonged to a female body that lay on the slab. It was waxy as a dead moon, already shrivelled, and covered with a sheet to hide the poor naked form with livid bruises that marked her
at regular intervals.

This face was empty, the eyes staring and the jaw tight shut.

‘Found by the early morning constable down by the docks, brought in with the carry-wagon.’

The lieutenant sniffed in disapproval at the faint musky smell coming from the inspector’s coat – was there a whiff of rodent?

‘I was here to receive it. I arrive on time for my bounden duty.’

McLevy grunted and peered more closely at the corpse; in his experience there was never any hurry to view a dead body, after all they weren’t going to make a run for it.

He had much on his mind and so had taken a circuitous route to the station to mull over a strange and jagged dream that had invaded his few hours of repose.

No sooner arrived than he had been summoned in to gaze upon the latest murderous offering from the parish.

The inspector tossed his low-brimmed bowler onto a little table supposedly reserved for the medical instruments of the police surgeon.

Roach sighed.

‘Well?’ he enquired snappily.

‘I think I know the face,’ Mulholland announced from on high.

‘Ye should,’ McLevy muttered. ‘Some years ago, a wee keelie stole the poor box from St Stephen’s Church.’

‘You’re not wrong there,’ replied the constable, coming over a little Irish as his memory sparked into life. ‘Ran like hell up Forres Street, pursued by the
devout.’

‘Right intae our worshipful arms.’

‘What were you doing in the vicinity?’ the lieutenant asked with a suspicious gleam in his eye. ‘That’s Heriot Row and the environs. Respectable citizenry.’

‘We got lost,’ was McLevy’s stolid response. In truth when he and Mulholland went on the saunter only the devil knew where the journey would end.

‘She was in the van of pursuit, I remember now. Put on a fair turn of speed for her age,’ offered the constable.

‘Not any more,’ said McLevy, lifting aside the sheet to display the inert body.

‘And the poor box was empty,’ Mulholland recalled.

‘A’ that palaver for nothing.’

‘A decent devout soul on the path of righteousness,’ Roach muttered querulously. ‘How does she end up dead as a doornail in Leith Harbour?’

‘God’s mystery, sir.’

McLevy moved to stand at the top of the cold slab behind the head of the corpse; for a moment, to the disconcerted Roach, he took the appearance of a minister at the pulpit, but Mulholland knew
his man better and merely straightened up a little.

Facts were about to unfold.

‘Agnes Carnegie,’ the inspector pronounced. ‘Lodges somewhere in Salamander Street, a deal o’ distance from St Stephen’s but she made the pilgrimage.’

A quirk of black humour twisted McLevy’s lips.

‘Ye’ll know her son, Mulholland. Sim Carnegie. An auld freen of yours.’

The constable’s face tightened as he made the connection.

‘The newspaper man?’ Roach said. ‘That’s all we need.’

The lieutenant took a deep breath within his immaculate uniform and set the official investigation on its way.

‘Now we know who she is –
why did she die?
’

‘Not robbery,’ replied Mulholland crisply, the memory of his last encounter with Sim Carnegie pushed to the side though a vestige of anger lingered. ‘Her handbag still had the
purse. Intact. Not much to send home but intact.’