Shadow of the Serpent (8 page)

Leith, December 1850

Sergeant George Cameron lay in a hospital bed of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, what a place to end your days.

He had no relatives to gather round and dab their eyes, for which he thanked his Protestant Redeemer. They were all up in the Highlands gutting trout and chasing sheep.

What a scunner. Some drunken fool in a tavern brawl sticks a
penknife
in his leg, the blade snaps off, the young doctor, Jarvis by name, just qualified, full of mince, opens up his flesh but cannae find it.

‘Dropped out,’ he says. ‘It must have dropped out.’

But it hadnae dropped out, the stupid bastard had missed the damn thing entirely. It had lodged just below the back of the knee and by the time inflammation had alerted Cameron, the thing found and removed from its hidey-hole, his blood was evil-poisoned.

Amputation had been suggested – that would be nice, on the saunter with a wooden leg. But even for that, the fever must abate, and it had not abated; it raged through him like a forest fire.

A hand came down with a big white hankie and wiped the sweat off his face. Dabbed the tangled eyebrows. Constable James McLevy. All his damned fault.

He should have been Cameron’s rearguard, what happened though he’d got carried away and had not observed the eleventh commandment. In matters of communal violence, always stay back to back with a fellow bulls-eye.

Somebody’d nipped the helmet from the young man’s head, he’d gone on the chase and while he was thus engaged a drunken sailor had stuck his ’baccy knife into Cameron’s nether limb.

See the big white face staring down, the agony and guilt in his eyes, serve the bugger right. At least he would be alive to feel such agony. A spasm of pain went through Cameron and he reared up in the bed, then collapsed back.

God help him, he was like a gaffed fish.

‘Well now, what have ye got to say for yourself?’ he demanded fiercely. Well he meant it fierce but it came out more like snuffed mutton.

‘I wish it had been me who suffered the blow.’

‘So do I, son. So, do I,’ muttered Cameron. ‘But for some reason the Almighty thought otherwise.’

Another spasm took him and the young man stood helplessly by, like a mourner who didn’t know where to lay the plate of funeral meat.

‘Shall I fetch the nurse?’

‘For God’s sake no! She’s a Paisley woman, what comfort is there in that?’

The constable gently mopped the soaking brow again.

‘I am truly sorry,’ he said.

‘Sorry? Sorry’s not good enough!’ Cameron glowered up, his pupils dark with pain. ‘Now you listen to me, the next time I close these eyes o’ mine, will be the last. I’m not opening them another go.’ His gaze went inwards and his voice lost power.

‘Too much suffering, Jamie. I’ll be giving up the ghost. Now here’s what you must do. You must tell our noble commander Lieutenant Moxey that I am to be buried with full honours and attendance.’

‘I’m not sure the lieutenant will pay much heed to me,’ the constable replied. ‘But I’ll stand in front of his face until he does so.’

Damn the boy, and damn this dying, George would have enjoyed teaching him the craft.

‘Just mention a bawdy-hoose, name of the Happy Land. Then ask after his wife. He’ll do it.’

By God he would, the dirty auld leglifter – ever since his good woman had taken to her bed with a wasting disease he’d been at it like a fornicator reborn.

‘Now, on the day, the burial day, you must pray for rain. Buckets of it.’

Cameron laughed painfully at the look on the boy’s face.

‘Rain?’

‘Aye. The high heid-yins, the powers-that-be, will all be standing there. I would wish a long service, a deep-ribbed minister who loves his own words, and the east wind blowing a sleety lash in their faces so they all may catch their death of cold.’

This time the laughter racked him so deep with pain that he had to stop even his last pleasure. Down to the real business. He beckoned the constable in close and pointed to a small mother-of-pearl box which lay on his bedside table.

The young man brought it to him with due solemnity as if it contained the ashes of his ancestors.

‘That box was a nuptial gift to my own good mother, pity it wasnae a gun tae shoot my father on the wedding night,’ the sergeant announced heavily.

‘Then ye wouldnae be here,’ said the constable.

Damn the boy again. Damn his gallows humour. Damn the tears stinging at his eyes. He didnae wish to disgrace himself, let the boy see strength. Strength was everything.

Cameron fumbled for his eyeglasses, stuck them on his nose, opened the lid with impatient trembling fingers and took out … a fragment of thin black cloth.

‘Ye remember this?’

‘I do. From the murdered girl. In her hand.’

‘That was the bond, Jamie. Between us. We looked at death thegither then. Now, we do so once more.’

He put the fragment back and pressed the box into the constable’s hand.

‘It always irked me, the vicious bastard, I never brought him in to kiss the hangman’s rope. Poor wee lassie, it was her first time a-whoring, did ye know that?’

‘I was there when her brother told you.’

‘So ye were, so ye were,’ the sergeant’s eyes began to droop and with an effort he prised them open again. Behind the thick glasses, magnified, they blinked like an owl.

‘It was in all the papers, you ‘member that?’

‘I do indeed,’ replied the constable.

A silence fell. Cameron stared into space and the young man produced a headline from memory.

‘A Lamb to the Slaughter,’ he quoted solemnly.

Cameron’s head jerked back as a shaft of pain burnt through his body. He looked up at the constable.

‘The case is yours. One day you will solve it. I charge you so. Don’t fail me, now.’

‘I promise I will do everything in my power.’

‘Until the day ye die!’ demanded Cameron.

‘Until the day I die,’ came the pledge.

Cameron leant back exhaustedly on the pillow, his mind was beginning to go, the poison dancing in his veins, what was that air he always enjoyed? Tam Lucas of the Feast, damn me but he could not recall the tune.

‘Can ye sing?’ he demanded hoarsely.

‘I know very few melodies,’ was the response.

The sergeant waved his hand in decree, he could not trust the words to emerge.

Damn it, he was on the verge of weeping buckets, this was not the way to go.

‘Sing!’ he commanded

The constable, with quavering voice, gave issue.

Shock pulled Cameron from death’s door.

‘That’s a Jacobite air!’

‘A friend of my mother, she sang it. Jean Scott. When I was a wee boy. It’s the only tune I can carry.’

‘Was this friend of Jacobite persuasion?’

‘I never asked her.’

The sergeant smiled crookedly.

‘Tell ye the truth, son, I sometimes wished I could have fought by Charlie’s side. I’d rather die from a bayonet than a bastard penknife.’

He motioned for more melody, then a random thought struck and he laughed with a feverish glee.

‘But, it wasnae the knife that did for me, it was the blackness crusted, the tobacco on it that poisoned. A dangerous damned thing. Tobacco.’

He closed his eyes without farewell and James McLevy sang the
Highlander
out, tears dripping down his face.

‘Charlie is my darling
…
the young chevalier
…
’

The thick glasses glinted. But the light was gone.

There was one man who could put fear into Joanna Lightfoot by the blankness of his gaze, now she had found another. She took a pace back as McLevy slowly returned from where her words had transported him.

‘Mae Donnachie,’ he said, voice slurred from a muddy past. ‘Her first night out whoring. She was fifteen years old. She had a family to support.’

He turned away and shook his head as though to rid it of certain images then swung back and reached out his hand towards her, fingers crooked, as if to hold her by the throat. Then he dropped the hand and was perfectly still.

‘How do you know about this?’

She had her nerve back now. A calm reply.

‘Tell me what you found, and I shall respond in kind.’

He moved to the fire and, using the tongs, carefully put individual lumps of coal one on top of the other, building a fortress amid the flames.

‘She’d come down across the bridges from the Royal Mile, the competition would be too savage up there. She didnae know the streets of Leith, she was just a young lassie. Desperate. Her brother’s lungs were shot tae hell, she wanted to get him medicine; the father drank what the mother earned with washing and the like. The mother had six further children. Lived in the one room, eleven feet or so each way. One o’ the wynds off the High Street. A common enough tangle.’

‘What a dreadful life.’

He sensed a distance to that remark, just a wee touch of looking down from on high; so he jumped on it like a dog on a bone. Teeth first, arse to follow.

‘Ye must have seen the same in Liquorpond Street, if what you tell me is true, that you were born there?’

‘I was … removed at an early age.’

‘Lucky you. Mae Donnachie stayed where she was.’

He crossed to a small cupboard, and banged the side of his fist against the wood. The door sprang open and she jumped a little at the unexpected noise. As he scrabbled inside for
something
, he carried on the tale.

‘It wasnae our parish but the City police were a wee touch on the brutal side, so we broke the sad tidings to the Donnachies ourselves.’

‘We?’

‘Sergeant Cameron and me. I was a babe in arms then.’

‘Hard to imagine.’

He ignored the remark, and brought out something wrapped in tissue paper. He held it cupped carefully in his hands, as he made towards the table at the window.

‘The brother was stricken with guilt. He died soon after. A short-lived family.’

‘Terrible times.’

‘They have not changed.’

‘Surely there are civic policies on hand to alter all that? Improvements?’

‘They must have passed me by,’ McLevy said dryly.

‘But surely, Social reform – ’

‘Politicians have no interest in the poor. The poor have no power. They cannot vote. The only choice they have is which bucket to be sick in.’

He had laid a small mother-of-pearl box on the table; it was a pinky-white colour which took on some of the radiance of the moonlight coming in through the window pane.

McLevy blew upon the casing and wiped away a minuscule speck of dirt with the tissue. He concentrated his gaze as if the box contained some deep secret and seemed to have
completely
lost interest in their conversation.

‘Mae Donnachie, how did she die?’ Joanna prompted.

‘Split to the bone.’

‘Did you find the murderer?’

‘Not a trace.’

He straightened up and smiled. ‘But you would know that, surely?’

She avoided his eyes for the moment. She was beginning to catch on to his methods. Always keep the subject off balance, come in from an angle, break up the rhythms, truly the fellow was more devious than appearances warranted.

‘You must have found something?’ she ventured.

‘A man was seen running through St Andrews Street, towards the Kirkgate. Well dressed, a fine head of hair.’

‘Hair?’

‘He was seen from above, through a dirty window by an auld wifie on her last legs.’

He laughed but there was a bitter edge.

‘So far gone, she didnae even mind talking to the police. We knocked on every door, stuck our heads to places a starving dog wouldnae creep in to die. We’d have talked to the very rats themselves, had they but been witness.’

‘It sounds a personal quest.’

‘You might put it that way.’

He was now looking at her with a measure of hostility. That suited Joanna just fine.

‘So the result of your labours, was … nothing?’

‘A drunkart claimed he saw a man o’ that ilk, but the fellow was in delirium with bad whisky, kill-me-deadly, he would have sold his birthright for another drink.’

‘Which you gave him?’

A wolfish grin.

‘The price we had to pay, Miss Lightfoot. The price we had to pay. He claimed the man near jumped over him where he lay on the ground. The man was clad in black, a red stain all down his front. He didnae glimpse the face. The man ran off towards the Maris Chapel on Constitution Street.’

‘But you did not believe him? This … drunkard?’