Nor Will He Sleep (7 page)

A heartfelt tribute or compensation for a meagre internal mourning?

Not an easy question to contemplate or answer.

The reception would be here, hands shook, heads shaken, plenty of manly forbearance and womanly lace handkerchiefs; then it would be on to the New Calton Burying Ground on the other side of the
city, where Thomas would be laid to rest in a manner befitting a man of constructional bent and strong Christian beliefs.

His own father Robert already lay there with the inscription,
there remaineth therefore a rest in the people of God.

Another lighthouse engineer.

It had, on a recent feverish night, occurred to Stevenson that he might propose the erection of a small pharos near the family vault that would act as a warning beacon ’gainst grave
robbers but he had thought better of it when dawn laid her grey, grim fingers in the sky.

This was the problem.

Stevenson had started the task full of vigour and vim, organising, overseeing, full of the traditional ancestral energy that supposedly descends on the son when his father slips the leash of
life, but Messrs Phlegm and Mucus had begun to follow him round like a black dog, so that he felt every breath was like drowning in a catarrhal mud flat.

Now the arrangements were being borne by his mother, wife, and cousin Bob who was remarkably unaffected by the noxious clime and seemed to have taken over the role as man of the house.

He and Louis had been inseparable as young rascals, but as men grow older they do not necessarily improve, and Stevenson could sense a certain tension. It cut him to the core that fame and good
fellowship do not easily walk hand in hand.

Jealousy lies dormant even in the best of friendships.

Yet for the moment, Bob was captain of the ship, with Fanny an extremely reluctant figurehead as baleful mermaid, and his mother a steady hand upon the tiller.

This image comforted Stevenson, but it had to be admitted that though the crew had accepted responsibility that did not mean they liked the charter.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Not at all.

He came out of this reverie to find the gaze of both women firmly fixed upon him; Fanny smouldering like a pre-eruptive volcano and his mother’s regard tinged with worry that there might
be two funerals instead of just the one.

To augment the point he took a deep draught of his cigarette and coughed like a gutter drain.

Margaret closed her eyes and Fanny narrowed hers. She was well aware of the manoeuvrability of her spouse, and while she did not doubt he was indeed internally affected, he was not quite at
death’s door.

Not yet, and she hoped not ever.

For she loved him dearly, in her way.

But he was tricky as Mercury.

‘Louis – you have not said a word?’

‘Haven’t I?’ he murmured. ‘I expect so.’

‘There is much to do.’

Stevenson swallowed along with the phlegm a waspish retort that he could not fail to be aware of this since it was pushed in his face on an hourly basis. He contented himself with a
noncommittal, ‘I expect there is.’

Fanny was not to be deflected.

‘You spend your time looking out of the window.’

‘I’m hoping the weather might change.’

Margaret, who was a decent, sweet soul and in time to come would prove to be as hardy an adventurer as the two in her presence, sensed there might be a storm brewing that had nothing to do with
weather.

She had developed this intuition through near forty years of marriage with Thomas, whose sudden intemperate outbursts of rage often directed at or caused by his wayward son had to be subsumed
and cradled, but, of course, never dealt with directly.

That was not in her marriage vows.

A soft answer turneth away wrath.

‘I wonder if you remember, Louis,’ she remarked gently, ‘a saying of your father’s –
All hands to the pump?
’

‘Maritime, I believe,’ replied her son. ‘He often went to sea. To tame the wild ocean. I myself enjoyed being under the surface. The vasty deep.’

Twenty years before, he had gone diving. In Wick of all places, where half the population spoke Gaelic and the other half didn’t speak much at all.

Despite bone-crushing weights and great bolted helmet he had found the experience exhilarating.

Weightless, womblike.

Like a world of dreams.

All hands to the pump, eh?

Stevenson had a sudden onrush of anger and grief; his father’s face swam before him, slack-jawed in his dying bed like an imbecilic gargoyle, like a gargoyle!

He wrenched away from the women back to the window lest hot tears betray a wounded heart.

From the presented back view they watched a lazy plume of cigarette smoke rise into the velvet curtain while his voice floated, itself like an insubstantial vapour in the air.

‘Where is Lloyd? Where is my bonny boy?’

This was Fanny’s son, who had recently declared he might wish to follow the compromised occupation of story-telling despite, in truth, being somewhat lazy by nature and showing little gift
or talent for the calling.

He adored Stevenson as a father figure and the older man revelled in such adoration, returning a deep affection of rare quality.

The young man was possibly and wisely staying out of the firing line.

‘He is occupied,’ Fanny answered briefly.

‘At what, pray tell?’

‘Writing. Lloyd is writing.’

‘Dear me.’

Stevenson watched the streaks of rain slide grudgingly down the glass and swore inwardly that by hook or by crook, he would be out on the streets tonight.

The darkness might be his disguise.

Enough of the four walls of rectitude.

By hook or by crook.

‘Writing?’ he said with grave intonation. ‘Dear me. What a strange and unrewarding pursuit.’

The operation had been performed with near military precision.

A grimy carriage whose driver wore a shapeless hat pulled down over his eyes, drew up near the immaculate, gold tipped wrought iron gates, which stood sentry over the back garden of the Just
Land.

Some six young men disgorged, all muffled up, two carrying most carefully a small cauldron of tar, the other four each a bulky sack that they bore with ease.

The cauldron was set down on the wet pavement, not fissured, not cracked, for this was an area well kept by the authorities whose officials at the end of weary day’s vigilance over the
heaving city might well enjoy forbidden fruits at a somewhat reduced price. Be that as it may, two heavy brushes were dipped in the mixture and the sticky pitch lathered onto the elegant
ironwork.

This took a matter of moments and, due to the murky weather, there were no witnesses to record the shaking out of the large bags of cheap red feathers, which sailed gracefully through the
damp air to land on and adhere to the tar like stranded leaves in Autumn.

A bare spot had been left in the centre and onto that was firmly pressed a scarlet favour.

Had outside photography reached sufficient development, no doubt a posed group beside their handiwork would have ensued, but the young men had to content themselves with a brief moment of
shared glory then a quick leap back into the carriage, which disappeared down the hill into the lower reaches of Leith.

The operation was over.

Some time later McLevy and Mulholland came upon the scene from the opposite approach. On the saunter, back from St Stephen’s where the kneeling mourners had finally stopped praying for the
departed soul long enough to hand over the address in Salamander Street.

‘So,’ Mulholland said, to break what had been a long silence in the falling rain, ‘according to the Reverend Gibbons’ wife, after the women’s church meeting, as was
her wont, Agnes Carnegie left St Stephen’s around ten thirty in the evening.’

A muffled grunt came in response.

‘That would work out with the time of death by the time she got to the harbour, an old woman not fast on her feet.’

A seagull landed on the opposite side of the street and waddled over to investigate something that had caught its eye. It turned out to be some kind of red feather and not worth the poking of a
beak, so the bird flew off again.

‘The purse still in the handbag,’ continued the constable doggedly. ‘No robbery. Only thing missing is the bible. Why take a bible?’

‘Maybe it had a treasure map inside.’

Not much of a deduction but at least a response.

Mulholland waited for further pieces of eight.

‘One thing I noticed,’ said McLevy as they trudged along. ‘Though much was made of devout and devoted and holy dedication I didnae sense any real affection for the
woman.’

‘Perhaps affection and the Church of Scotland do not go hand in hand,’ was the constable’s thoughtful rejoinder.

The inspector shot him a glance; this was an unexpected remark from a Presbyterian Son of Erin.

‘These bees are having an effect,’ he observed.

They then both went back to their thoughts.

Fragments of that dream from the night before kept surfacing in McLevy’s mind. It was not at all unpleasant in repetition; the fear and dread previously experienced at the wizened
apparition had been replaced by a vague scintilla of guilty pleasure as a picture replayed the naked female forms flitting ghostlike behind the writhing fronds.

Of course he was a young man in the early part of the dream – the wizened apparition had taken a back seat till later – that would explain the pleasure.

Did one of them not now bear a fleeting resemblance to Jessica Drummond?

McLevy wrenched his mind back to the case but the naked carcass of Agnes Carnegie had limited charm.

Mulholland sneaked a look at his inspector and noticed him wincing as if in some pain and rubbing at his arm. The rain had reduced to occasional drops as if the clouds could not squeeze out any
more liquid for a while, but McLevy seemed oblivious, as if caught within some internal strife.

It was a worry to the constable. What was this pain? Was it the same old hurting McLevy had suffered for a while or was this agony new-minted?

The constable wanted the previous persona back to blight his life. Bellowing the odds, terrible shafts of illogical temper, wild humour, weird flights of fancy, blaming all and sundry except
himself for the mess into which he inevitably blundered like a bull at the peat-bog.

In other words, human.

James McLevy.

This withdrawn though insightful creature was no fun; a bit like that skull in Hamlet.

‘Whit’s goin’ on up there?’

Withdrawn or not, the inspector had noted something a little down the road in front of the gates of the Just Land and as they approached what looked like a rammy of sorts, a voice could be heard
like the master on a slave galley.

‘Ye thought it funny hingin’ out the windows, eh? See ye laugh on the other side of your face now!’

Mulholland nodded solemnly. ‘Hannah Semple as I live and breathe,’ he announced.

‘Either that or a warwolf,’ McLevy remarked with a burgeoning glint in his eye; he and Hannah had knocked spots off each other many’s the time.

The melee at the gates was revealed to be the magpies of the Just Land in plain workaday dresses, sleeves rolled up, scrubbing with hot water and rough soap at a sodden but defiant sludge of
feathers and tar that clung to the hallowed portals.

They had started with gusto, thinking it to be quite an adventure, but hard labour and broken fingernails now a burdensome reality, the air was full of lamentation.

This changed with the advent of the policemen, and Mulholland’s fetching stature gave rise to appreciative giggles plus a more graceful movement of stiff brush and slithering lather.

Hannah shook her head at such levity and spoke aside to the inspector.

‘The mistress will want a word wi’ you, McLevy. By God she will!’

McLevy blinked at her. Could this be the toothless harpy who took on Jean’s sins? He had noted the possibility down in his diary but best not speak it aloud to Hannah’s face.

It was common knowledge she carried a cut-throat razor.

Through the gates three figures could be seen approaching. Lily and Maisie lugging a huge washing pan of hot water and behind them a tight-lipped Jean Brash.

The gate was shoved open with a big pole, washing pan laid down, then Jean and McLevy set to it like two actors on a stage with a captive audience at hand.

‘See whit’s happened here!’ said Jean without bothering to greet her fellow thespian by name.

‘Sticking out a mile,’ was the response.

‘The Scarlet Runners!’

‘That would explain the hue.’

‘Hue?’

‘Of the feathers.’

There was no discernible trace of humour in the inspector’s big bap face so Jean had to accept this at local value.

‘Whit’re you going to do about it?’

‘Observe from a distance.’

The green eyes snapped like a dragon’s jaws and she moved in for an exchange at close quarters.

Mulholland slid out of reach and Hannah crooked her arm through his then looked up at him. She aye relished a rammy between the inspector and her mistress.

‘
How’s my big handsome laddie?
’ she whispered.

She enjoyed teasing the constable about his attractive manly qualities including the large feet, which he was now shuffling uneasily. The magpies took advantage, scrubbing less, ears cocked for
the fray.

‘I pay your wages, McLevy!’ Jean opened up.

‘Indirectly, I suppose you do,’ was the mild response.

‘I pay my taxes, my Parish Charge.’

‘Which gives succour unto and supports the Force of Leith, your civic protector and guardian,’ announced the inspector with a pomposity guaranteed to irritate.