Fall From Grace (36 page)

But there had been enough damage done and she would not reveal the secret to preserve her own name.

Though when he was gone, she would rule.

However there was one consolation.

The innocent comfort he had provided for her sleeping husband she would turn in her mind into something sordid and with any luck the loathing would lodge there and torture the woman to the end of her days.

With any luck.

Once more he lifted the gun and stuck the barrel hard against the roof of his mouth, his eyes unblinking upon her.

Sir Thomas Bouch looked down upon them both; the third player in a twisted triangle.

‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Do it, or I will.’

Outside in the street James McLevy levered himself away from the street door; he had collapsed back against it after banging the portal shut; the resultant noise rang through his head and near shattered his skull in two.

‘Never slam other folk’s doors, Jamie McLevy. It shows a lack of good breeding and impresses not one soul!’

That’s what Jean Scott had often counselled him and she, as in all things, was correct and proper.

Like a sailor in a heavy swell, he lurched from side to side as he moved away from the door heading for the docks where he knew of a tavern that rarely closed.

He would knock at the rearwards door, be recognised, admitted, a hooker of peat whisky would be laid before him in a small back room with perhaps a slice of black pudding or the poor man’s meal of salt herring and potatoes.

And for a moment in his miserable life, he might find some rest.

It was a still night, so the shot when it came from above, sounded like the crack of doom.

McLevy looked up at the lighted window of the study and nodded approval.

Of course he might never find Hercules Dunbar and without the man’s testimony there would be no trial for the murder of Archibald Gourlay, the whole thing being surmise on his part.

In fact he doubted, even with Dunbar, that Lieutenant Roach would consider moving to trial against one of his own kind, disgraced or not.

But best not to mention all this to Alan Telfer, just pile on the guilt and leave the gun in plain view.

Retribution.

It made perfect sense.

Said the madman.

This night he had no more thoughts to think, feelings to feel, or death to bring.

Tomorrow he would lay some flowers on Jean Scott’s grave. Winter roses. Incarnadine.

As he walked off into the darkness Margaret Bouch watched from a corner of the window, ignoring the smell of cordite and the corpse slumped over the desk behind her.

There had been a little blood but the bullet had performed manfully; the man was dead no doubt about it.

She had gazed into his baleful eyes before closing them with two delicate fingers.

There was no doubt that the man deserved to die. She and the inspector had delivered Telfer from his own evil.

It would be their secret. Never told. Inside their minds, for ever.

And so she sang, as she watched the figure in the street below.

‘Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter,

Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter,

Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter,

Earl-aye in the morning.’

Of course the captain’s daughter was another name for the lash of a cat o’ nine tails and the drunken sailor would suffer horribly for his misdeeds but, as she sang, a single tear for some obscure reason, trickled down her face.

Though she was not the crying kind
…

34

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error,

and another to put him in possession of truth.

JOHN LOCKE,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

McLevy slurped at his coffee and perused what he had just written in his diary.

Some days had passed since that stramash with the mistress of the Just Land but it had got the blood moving that night and, having returned to the station to agree with Lieutenant Roach a certain course of action for curing the love-sickened Constable Mulholland, he had come back to his lodgings to clarify some details in his case notes as regards the warehouse fire.

He had then checked the seagoing time of a certain ship, the
Dorabella
in Leith docks, which was bound for Argentina in a few days’ time, and had formulated a plan of campaign.

This involved waiting.

In the meantime both his forces and Jean Brash’s spies had fine combed the city for three days and nights to no avail. The fugitives were not to be found.

McLevy had not been surprised.

Tonight the wait was over. A long shot but worth a try.

There was time to spare yet and so he had put pencil to paper. The first in a long time. A good omen.

He peered down; there was no doubt that eyesight was playing tricks upon him and he might have to consider the purchase of reading glasses.

His two latest book purchases, the Arab legends and Poe’s short stories were squared neatly at the right-hand corner of the table. The Eastern typeface was generous though slanting but Poe’s was crabbed and narrow, and the inspector wondered if this had damaged his optics somewhat, to say nothing of the content as regards his mind.

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ for instance … a madman kills an old man because of a supposed evil eye, buries him under the floorboards and then is betrayed by the louder and louder beating of the dead man’s heart.

The strange fancies of the author’s mind stirred McLevy’s own uneasy imagination. Sometimes he felt haunted by his own history as it beat louder and louder in the confines of his soul.

He took a deep breath to still this shivering within and muttered his own written words as an incantation against the guilt that followed him like a black dog.

The Diary of James McLevy, 13 November 1880

The past and present collide like two bulls in a field and so it is in my thoughts this evening.

Robert Forbes and Sir Thomas Bouch, two men far apart in temperament and standing yet inextricably linked by their fall.

They had built an image of themselves in their psyche that could not endure the cold blast of reality.

In Forbes’ case it was a slippery whore who roused him from his widowhood to an ardent desire that had lain dormant in him, no doubt since birth.

He found himself not what he thought himself to be and as his penis blossomed, so his common sense dwindled.

If we ever find the letters he wrote to Rachel Bryden, I expect they will be filled with protestations of love.

Nae foule like an auld foule.

But are we not all fools in the end?

Over love especial.

And now the other case.

Sir Thomas thought himself to be a giant and in that iron certainty lay the seeds of his own destruction.

According to the late Alan Telfer, the bridge builder towered above us all like a Colossus but there’s only one God and he does not take kindly to competition.

Heat did for Icarus, and the howling wind blew Sir Thomas Bouch away like a shrivelled leaf.

On a more practical note, Mulholland, another soaring specimen, has been, some days ago, sent back to Ireland to recompose himself and his Aunt Katie will hopefully fill him with barnyard saws and Irish stew so that he will return to Edinburgh a sadder but wiser man.

But time is a great healer and an engagement ring may fit on many fingers.

After the speedy and very private funeral of her father, Emily has fled to the country with the maiden aunts. I believe somewhere in Stirlingshire, where pulley ropes perform their proper function.

As for myself I have no place to fall and business on hand. So I shall close this ledger and return to it when occasion allows.

While he did so, an indignant scrape upon the window announced the arrival of Bathsheba and McLevy sighed.

He would have to feed the cat and pour out her milk but then there was the rest of the ritual. She had to retire to her little niche by the fireplace and groom herself from head to toe before embarking on to the moonlit slates of Leith.

Still there was yet enough duration.

On the desk beside the diary where it lay, was an oilskin pouch, which McLevy gently parted to reveal the outline of a heavy black revolver.

He crossed to slide the oilskin into the side pocket of his heavy outdoor coat.

Time enough.

While the cat tucked into her provender he walked over to the narrow cupboard where he kept his hidden treasures, opened it up and carefully laid the diary back to its provided place beside a mother-of-pearl box that had been given to him by a dying man more than twenty years ago.

He carefully prised up the lid and looked in. It was somewhat gloomy in the cupboard but sufficient for him to discern amongst other things, a broken grubby scrap of white feather, a lock of golden hair, and a fragment of black material.

Mementoes of past crimes.

One of which he had promised the dying man to solve but had yet to deliver.

He closed the lid again and noticed a rolled-up pamphlet of paper stuck into the corner of the cupboard.

McLevy frowned. An interloper.

He pulled the paper out, closed the cupboard door and walked to the small table by the window where he penned his most profound ruminations.

He spread out the paper to read and the words of Poet McGonagall thus thundered in his mind.

Oh, ill-fated bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,

I must now conclude my lay

By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay

That your central girders would not have given way,

At least many sensible men do say,

Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,

At least many sensible men confesses,

For the stronger we our houses do build

The less chance we have of being killed.

Bathsheba finished up her milk and with natural grace, jumped up to her appointed spot by the fire. She licked her paw, dabbed daintily at her whiskers and looked over where McLevy stood like a statue, paper in hand.

Then she licked again and began to groom behind her ears, a hive of activity compared to the still figure at the window, marooned in the moonlight.

But animals have not time for memory; they live in the present.

The past is a uniquely human predicament.

35

I can endure my own despair,

But not another’s hope.

WILLIAM WALSH,
Song, Of all the torments

Dundee, 28 February 1880

As the crowd filed into the building that housed the Board of Trade Inquiry, they were regaled by a poem, in its own way almost as disastrous as the event itself.

William McGonagall had begun composition the day after the bridge fell, that is the Monday, and ended with a sorrowful sweep of the pen on the following Tuesday evening.

Even by his standards it plumbed the depths, although the poet might offer as excuse the fact that having rescued an officer of the law that fateful night, he had returned to his home and attempted to pacify with the monetary contents of his collection a long-suffering wife.

The poor woman was driven to distraction by the transformation of what she had thought to be an ordinary weaver catapulted into the grinding jaws of the Muse, then chewed up and spat out to emerge as a fully fledged poet before her very eyes.

McGonagall gave her the coins, went to his bed and slept soundly through till morning.

Thus he missed first-hand experience of the searing catastrophe and the howl of collective grief when it finally became known that the train was lodged at the bottom of the river with survival an impossibility, unless a beneficent God reached down his kindly hand.

But, as the Sabbatarian ministers so piously pointed out later, travelling on a Sunday was a profane act of the North British Railway Company and its passengers, transgressing the Law of God and desecrating the day he had lain aside for drawing breath.