Shadow of the Serpent (22 page)

‘How dare you!’

‘It is only a question.’

‘It is an insult!’

‘I am sorry you perceive it so.’

Gladstone looked into the cold, slate-grey eyes of the inspector and struggled to contain a mounting fury.

‘I trust these insinuations are not what I perceive them to be, inspector. There is, however, a limit to my patience and you have gone far beyond it. Far beyond!’

As if in response to his outburst, there was a call from the house as the figure of Horace Prescott emerged followed by three other men.

McLevy knew he had but little time.

‘That aroma from you, sir. Is it identifiable?’

‘What?
What
?’ The People’s William almost jumped up and down in exasperation.

The inspector sniffed. ‘It has a sort of tarry redolence. I was trying to place it.’

‘It is carbolic soap. I use it every morning. For sanitary purposes!’ Gladstone almost snarled.

‘Very healthy,’ agreed McLevy as Prescott, hastily dressed and moving it must be said somewhat stiffly, arrived with his bully boys.

One of them, a small podgy specimen, put his hand on the inspector’s shoulder only to be shaken off, but any further confusion was stilled when William Gladstone raised a
controlling
hand aloft.

It was an orator’s gesture but there was enough power in it to stop them all where they stood, including McLevy.

Horace was addressed in a voice which brooked nothing but complete obedience. Gladstone in command once more.

‘I shall explain the circumstances later, Mr Prescott, but for the moment, be so good as to escort this man from the estate and make sure that he does not return. Good-day, Mr McLevy.’

Gladstone then spun on his heel and marched off without a backward glance, dismissing past events and exchanges out of hand.

The hoodie crows returned to the field, their squawks filling the silence.

‘Well, well, inspector, it would seem as if you have strayed into the most severe reprimand it is within my power to arrange. Your stupidity demands no less,’ said Prescott, a cruel glint in his pale-blue eyes.

McLevy had fallen quiet, his eyes on the departing Gladstone as he walked rather jerkily towards the house.

‘I shall make it my business to inform your superior officer, the fellow with the fishy name, Roach, that’s the fellow, the Tory lickspittle, and then the man above him, and so on and so on as far up the chain of command as I can spread the word.

‘I intend to make sure that you regret your blundering idiocy for as long as is humanly possible. How does that appeal to you?’

Again the inspector had nothing to say. The hunched woman came out of the house again and moved quickly down the path to meet Gladstone. They conversed for a moment then turned to go back inside, her strides matching his with some ease.

‘Who is that woman?’ McLevy asked as if trying to delay the inevitable.

‘Jane Salter,’ broke in the voice of little George Ballard who had been dying to join in the fun. ‘Plain Jane, that’s her name to all the boys. But,
your
name, inspector. Your name … is mud!’

He roared with laughter at his own joke and slapped Prescott hard on the back. The secretary’s face whitened and, for a moment, he almost keeled over.

But then he recovered and pointed silently towards and beyond the iron gates of Dalmeny House where the crest of the Earl of Rosebery was wrought for all to see.

‘Get back to where you belong,’ he said.

McLevy was escorted to the gates and put out like a dog that had performed its business on the carpet.

They watched him walk down the carriage drive that led to the main road, the ground already chewed up by many wheels and sticky going.

Ballard glanced up at the sky darkening above and then at Prescott whose face was clenched and cold, an evil twist to the lips.

‘With a bit of luck,’ the little man pronounced with glee, ‘it’ll rain on the bastard all the way home.’

McLevy was thinking much the same thing as he saw the black clouds gather.

He supposed it was too much to hope that they might ask him back in for coffee and it was a long, long way to Leith.

He had begged a lift from a coachman he knew delivered in this area but he had no great hopes for the way back, and it was six long miles.

The first spits of rain started to fall and soon it would be a black downpour which would soak him to the skin.

He had much to ponder and the words of Horace Prescott echoed in his mind.

Back to where you belong, but where was that? All his life he had been outside the gates.

The body in the cold room once belonged to a young woman called Jennie Duncan. She had worked as a chambermaid for a tobacco merchant and sought to augment her miserable wages by nightly forays on the streets. Such girls were known as dollymops. Amateur whores. Easy marks.

Mulholland looked down at her and sighed. This was a mess in all senses. Lieutenant Roach had arrived in the morning to discover a new corpse on the slab and his inspector, who had found the damned thing and had it lugged to the station, missing from the scene.

The police surgeon Dr Jarvis had come, whistling through his teeth. He had cut further open and found a foetus. A rough guess, from the size, would be two or three months. It would grow no more.

Jarvis informed Lieutenant Roach of such and the lieutenant bowed his head as if in prayer.

Jarvis left.

Roach raised his head.

‘Where is McLevy?’ he asked grimly.

The constable could not help the lieutenant find the inspector because the constable was none the wiser although he had an awful premonition that the inspector was up to absolutely no good at all.

Time passed. The tobacco merchant came in, identified the body but disclaimed the dollymop activity. He also disclaimed knowledge of the girl being pregnant.

The merchant left. Time passed.

Chief Constable Grant arrived as if he had a fire burning up his backside. He had been sitting peacefully at home
contemplating
the minister’s Sabbath message when one of Prescott’s men had barged over the threshold and delivered a very different communication. Grant took the lieutenant into his own room, the room with the only shiny door, and for a full hour all that could be heard was the sound of his voice, like a hand-saw cutting through a metal bar.

The chief constable left. The lieutenant emerged white with anger and humiliation. He looked around for someone to vent his spleen upon.

Mulholland had secreted himself in the water closet, snibbed the door shut and put faith in his bowel movements.

Sergeant Murdoch was in the Land of Nod and Ballantyne had pulled his head so far back into his shoulders that he resembled a turtle.

But then through the station door, a drowned man walking, leaving wet footprints with every step, came the drookit, sodden figure of James McLevy.

The crocodile jaws of Roach snapped shut. He crooked his finger, not trusting words in a public place, and the bedraggled inspector, looking neither left nor right, took up the invitation and followed him back into the office.

That had been a fair time ago. Mulholland had crept out of the closet into the cold room to rehearse his excuses and get used to the temperature, the anticipated icy blast.

He was implicated by proxy, guilty by association, all his sookin’ up was to be in vain. Leave to attend the third wedding of his Aunt Katie would not be forthcoming. Indeed, he would be lucky to emerge with his testicles intact.

Pulling up the sheet, he covered the face of the corpse which appeared to be looking down in some dismay at its disarrayed rib cage.

The door opened and Ballantyne stuck his head in.

‘The lieutenant wants tae see you.’

Ballantyne searched for something hopeful to say, he was a kind-hearted soul and wouldn’t last long. A red tide showed just above the line of his collar, a birthmark about which he had been teased unmercifully by some of the other men at the station before McLevy announced one day that he had similar on his backside and would personally eviscerate the next person who mentioned same.

Mulholland had stood behind the inspector that day, as he now stood in front of Ballantyne.

‘I think the lieutenant might be getting sore-throatit, he’s been leathering his tonsils a decent time now. Don’t worry what he says, ye cannae hear the words through the door and I’m not listening anyway.’

It was a somewhat confused benison but Mulholland nodded gratefully enough and crossed the greasy floor of the station to the office door which had been left ajar.

He knocked upon it anyway, just to be on the safe side, and entered.

The inspector was standing up against the wall as if pinned there by the force of Roach’s invective. His hair was plastered flat to his head and he looked for all the world like a little boy who’d been caught out in the rain.

The lieutenant had his back to both of them and was staring up at the portrait of Queen Victoria as if seeking a source of strength.

McLevy drooped the one eyelid in a conspiratorial wink at Mulholland who rejected all reception of same and stood rigidly to attention. The constable knew there was a bucket of urine coming his way. From on high.

For his part, McLevy was not offended by the rejection and turned his attention back to Roach. You had to commend the stamina of the man. He been ranting for near thirty minutes and scarce repeated the same insult twice.

The inspector had been battered by authority ere now, and though his recitation of the salient facts had sent Roach into a fit of the vapours, he still felt he had a case to put forward.

But it was not much of a case and though McLevy had sailed his wee boat through the Storms of Reprimand before, this one was different. A great deal different.

Roach finally turned round and fixed his pitiless gaze upon the squirming constable.

‘What have you got to say for yourself?’ he asked.

Mulholland’s mouth opened and closed but nothing much emerged except for a dry croak. All the rehearsed excuses had just dribbled out the back of his head.

‘What did you think you were doing, if it’s not too much to demand? I am intrigued as to your explanation. Just
exactly
what did you think you were doing?’ enquired the lieutenant with enough ice in his voice to freeze an Aberdeen Angus where it stood munching.

‘I … I … was keeping the inspector company,’ came the stutter of a response.

‘Company?
Company?’
Roach’s voice rose in pitch and, with difficulty, he hauled it back to earth like a flag down a pole. ‘You are not a chaperon, you are not some sort of Spanish duenna, you are a police constable! And as such, you are responsible to your station superior officer, none other, namely, than me!’

The lieutenant let out a baffled snarl and almost tore at his stiff collar as he once more addressed Mulholland.

‘Why did you not tell me this madness, this … wild gallivant was in progress?’

McLevy judged it time to take a hand. ‘It was my fault, sir,’ he stated, face solemn, tone sober, as befits the repentant sinner.

Roach’s head swivelled in his direction.

‘Everything
is your fault,’ he muttered. ‘Explain.’

‘I prevailed upon the constable not to divulge the … direction of the investigation, until I had extended it to my complete satisfaction.’

‘Extended?’
Roach near howled. ‘By God you extended it. Right up to one of the most important people in this country!’

But a dour nod from the lieutenant to Mulholland indicated some acceptance of his innocence in the affair.

Roach knew to his cost what a devious bugger his inspector could be. He turned a cold unforgiving eye back to McLevy. That which ye sow, so shall ye reap, and this was going to be a bitter harvest.

‘Extended without a shred of proof,’ he spat out the words like sour pips. ‘A tissue of stories concocted by some female who sends you on a goose chase with madwomen, nurses, murders from thirty years ago, all tangled up like a whore’s drawers!’

It was a measure of the heated indignation in Roach’s breast that he had expressed himself so indelicately, but he wasn’t done yet, not by a long chalk.

‘And who is this woman? This … Joanna Lightfoot? Is she a figment of your imagination, McLevy?’

‘She is real enough. And I shall find her out.’

‘You have done enough damage,’ said Roach. ‘Acting on your own half-baked assumptions, you have tried to link these murders to William Gladstone. You have bothered and bearded the lion in its den and, as I could have warned you had you the decency to keep me up to scratch, you have provoked the most implacable and punishing rebuttal.

‘You are out of your league, inspector. I may not like the man’s politics but he is one of the most powerful men in the country and a
beacon
of moral probity.

‘Yet, you have sought to draw him in. Without a shred, an iota of proof. Not a shred!’

The lieutenant threw up his hands as if he had just seen a decent iron shot take a bad hop into a deep bunker.

He shook his head and fell silent. Righteous wrath was an exhausting process.

McLevy judged it time to try his luck.

‘Did Dr Jarvis examine the fingernails of the corpse?’ asked the inspector.

‘He did, sir,’ interposed Mulholland who thought he might make this remark without taking sides, ‘and found remnants of human skin under the first and second digits.’

‘No more than I noticed myself.’

‘And what was your deduction, sir?’

Mulholland was trying to help, it was the least he could do after McLevy had rescued him from the bottomless pit; mind you, it was the inspector who had landed him there in the first place.