Shadow of the Serpent (17 page)

One slender white foot, on a red carpet.

And then it moved. Towards him. And all else followed. Foot, ankle, calf and thigh. Then perdition.

He’d tried to resist, to protest, but such speech is difficult when the mouth is so otherwise occupied.

From far below the castle walls, there came the sound of laughter. Harsh, jeering laughter from an unknown source.

The Serpent found his lips dry. Surely a cigar was called for? His case was on the table. He crossed, took one out, Dutch, can’t beat the Dutch, lit it up, and found he was calm again.

The operative had her part to play. And so had he. Flesh could wait.

Somewhere a church bell struck nine hours. Not long, now. Not long, now. Action. 

The Old Ship was one of the finest taverns of the Leith port, not like some of the other dives in and out of which McLevy had fought his way, hauling to a reckoning many a thief, while the man’s
lava Venus
hung on to the back of the police uniform trying to scratch his arresting eyes out.

Indeed there were drinking dens in the harbour area which fell silent and lost half their customers at the sight of himself and Mulholland walking through the door.

The constable was feared for his hornbeam stick plus the skill with which he wielded the implement and McLevy for his fury of response should violence threaten.

The story still did the rounds of the night he, as a young constable, and Henry Preger, a notorious lifetaker and
close-quarter
mangler whose massive fists had smashed many a policeman to his knees, battered hell out of one another in the Foul Anchor tavern while Preger’s wee pillow-wanton, Jean Brash, looked on in pure amazement.

Preger had made a sneering comment about the death of Sergeant George Cameron, and his hope that the worms were crawling up a certain orifice to enjoy a fine Highland feast. Teuchter pudding.

Then, as Milton put it so poetically, all hell broke loose.

Some say the fight lasted near one hour and a half, some say longer. But, at the end of it, Preger lay bruised and writhing on the sawdust planks while Jamie McLevy walked out of the door into the night without a backward glance.

That night, he made his name. He had taken everything Preger could throw at him, and, at the end, danced a wild jig round the body of his foe, howling out a Jacobite song, and putting the fear of God into all who watched.

McLevy was not so sure he could do it now. He was carrying a bit of weight these days, but that could work in his favour. Ye might assume the bulk would slow the motion, but he still possessed fast hands. And feet.

McLevy had a dram of peat reek whisky set out before him. He lifted it and drank. A dark thought came. It is often so with whisky.

Fast hands, but they hadnae been fast enough to save George Cameron. His vanity had seen to that. Perhaps one day he would forgive himself, perhaps one day, when the promise was fulfilled.

The inspector sighed and looked around the tavern.

The Old Ship. He felt at home here, well as much home as anywhere. The place had a generous size to it, great staircases, thick walls and the cosy rooms panelled with moulded wainscot. He loved the big stone fireplaces that had witnessed many a deep carouse, and appreciated most keenly the wooden cubicles where a lone man might be private unto himself.

On return from West Calder, Mulholland had sprung a surprise on him. Often it was their custom to share a glass at the end of a week and chew the fat till closing time, but it would seem that your man had begun to develop social pretensions to go with his general sookin’ up, and he was away to a musical recital in a respectable house. The Roach house no less. This very night.

Seemingly the constable had a fine tenor voice and Mrs Roach, the good lieutenant’s wife, had noted his prowess in their church, which Mulholland had chosen to attend, no doubt to ingratiate himself even further.

Despite the constable’s lowly office, she had roped him in with a view to future duets amidst some of the young ladies of her artistic circle. Tenors being in short supply.

McLevy had been firmly discouraged from any possible attendance in case he brought down the tone, an element of revenge for Mulholland after his being made to look like an imbecile at the Gladstone meeting. The inspector told himself he did not mind because he hated that tight-arsed cultural genteelity which had no connection to any kind of life he had ever come across.

Though, truth to tell, he was a bit sore nevertheless at the exclusion. McLevy disapproved people keeping secrets except, of course, for himself.

He had wrung from the constable at least that Mulholland would make no mention of their tiptoeing to West Calder should he be offered a shortbread biscuit by the man of the house, but say merely that the investigation was continuing its course.

It comforted the inspector somewhat that Lieutenant Roach would have to sit through the entire programme of high-flown musical tributes to the sensitivity of human nature, because one thing that he and Roach shared was a profound distaste for such functions.

The lieutenant’s wife was one of these women who were always doing good or something approaching it, and spent her life wrenching the poor bugger from one committee meeting to another when the man would rather have been at home reading his golfing periodicals or out on the course.

Doing good. The unco guid. What they preach, they do not practise. McLevy’s lip curled. The dirty squalid world they sought to alleviate was created almost entirely by a financial system and usage that they themselves supported with great enthusiasm.

If you scratched these good folk hard enough, you would find nothing but a fear of contamination. They would seek to forget the painful, suppress the disagreeable and banish the ugly. The city council was even now, under the Chambers Improvement Act, engaged on pulling down the slum buildings and erecting in their place so very little and, such as it was, laid aside for those they considered honest hard-working artisans and the like, so that the poor were more and more crushed together like rats in a cage.

And the respectable citizens of the New Town who had left so much of the Old Town to rot, walked on the maze of small bridges and pathways above, making sure that no one was keeking up their skirts.

They looked down on the seething mass below, pitied their lack of religion and morality, which was surely the cause of this misfortune, and met in committees to shake their heads and consider guidance.

McLevy took another dram of whisky and shivered slightly as the raw spirit hit his throat as hard as Preger had done, all these years ago.

Twice, in the fight, he had almost given up the ghost, the once especially when he had found himself face down on the dirty floor of the tavern spitting out blood, with the crowd howling and the man’s boots planted in front of him, one drawn back to finish the job. Then the memory of George Cameron on that hospital bed and strangely enough a wink from Preger’s wee whore, glimpsed through the V in the man’s legs, drove him on. He slipped the kick and punched up into the bastard’s groin. A hammer blow.

A man on the ground is not necessarily a man defeated. McLevy looked down to find that his hand was clenched into a fist. A woman’s shadow fell across it.

‘How the hell did you know I was here?’ he demanded.

Joanna Lightfoot managed a faint smile but the haunted look he had noticed on their first meeting seemed more pronounced.

‘Your landlady said I might find you in this place. It being your custom of a Saturday night,’ she replied.

‘That is private information she had no right tae divulge!’

He looked at her indignantly and made no move to invite her to sit, but she did that anyway, feeling the heat of some curious glances from the tavern regulars. She’d had to gather up her nerve in order to enter in the first instance. Women of her class were simply not seen in such an establishment.

She slid into the cubicle seat opposite him, taking off her bonnet, and put her small bag upon the table. He glared at her as if she was the last person in the world he wanted to see but Joanna had some knowledge of him by now.

Enough to discern that his first impulse would be to put her at disadvantage.

‘Is that whisky?’ she questioned of the glass.

‘It most certainly is.’

She reached forward and drained the contents in one gulp. McLevy’s eyes popped. She sat back.

‘There is no time for such nonsense,’ she said firmly.

‘What nonsense?’

‘You know very well.’ Joanna closed her eyes as the aftertaste of the whisky hit home.

‘I am being followed. I am certain of it,’ she said.

‘Who by?’

‘The protectors of those in power.’

‘Such as William Gladstone?’

‘That, I do not know.’

She shrank back as a burst of noise from one of the upstairs rooms indicated some revelry afoot. McLevy watched her keenly; this had better be worth his purloined drink.

But by God she was beautiful, a hectic colour to the cheeks, the dark blue eyes almost purple or was that reflection from the high collar of her dress? She wore the same outdoor coat as last time but, as she loosened it at the neck to take a long shuddering breath, he could see beneath a different colour where the white of her throat met a dark reddish blue, the crushed silk material rustling as her bosom heaved.

Bosoms, thought McLevy. Just a menace.

‘Ye dress a treat,’ he said. ‘Who buys for ye?’

‘What?’

He watched as she tried to repress a belch brought on by the harsh liquor. Eructate. Ladies do not belch they eructate.

‘You heard. All done up like gingerbreid. Ye didnae get that at the Grassmarket. Not married, one of Jenkin’s hens, a spinster, howtowdie, that was your proud assertion. Are you
somebody’s
fancy keep then?’

This time she did belch. Eructate. While she brought out a dainty lace handkerchief and dabbed at her lips, McLevy checked out the tavern. Mostly regulars; no strangers to his sight. There was one fellow worth the noting, wee Johnnie Martin, who had just sidled in from the other bar, but no one seemed to have followed her inside, no one was watching them.

Joanna finally found a response.

‘It is none of your business, but … if you must know, if you feel it is of such importance, may I inform you that I have a private income!’

It was a lie somewhere. McLevy knew it. Never mind, he had her on the hop. That’s the main thing.

‘What d’ye want with me, Miss Lightfoot? Other than a free whisky?’

‘Did you do as I asked?’ she countered.

‘I did. And found more of the same from the big nurse with the terrible tea. Stories, weird and wonderful, not a shred of proof. In–substantial.’

He leant over and peered into his empty glass in a
disappointed
fashion then shot out a question.

‘How did ye know about this woman?’

‘I was given her name.’

‘Who by?’

‘I cannot tell.’

‘There’s a lot you cannot tell.’

In the silence that followed, they appraised each other. It was a matter of trust. Or, more likely, an absence of same. Her fingers rested on her bag for a moment, and then she withdrew them. What was she going to conjure up this time?

‘I saw your cat in the street. She hissed at me,’ Joanna said as if it was of great importance.

‘Bathsheba’s in a bad mood these days.’

‘Do you comprehend the cause?’

‘Another cat. I have a presentiment that her neck has been gripped. There’s a soft fold o’ flesh. Once the teeth are in, she cannot move. Often two males are privy to the act. One bites deep, the other performs. She may howl, but she is at their mercy. Then they change places.’

McLevy’s eyes had a sardonic gleam and she sensed a depth to his being that he rarely revealed. What he had just delivered was not merely a zoological footnote and it seared her like a hot poker.

‘But does she not invite that?’ she asked. ‘By her very nature. Who can resist their own nature?’

The door to the tavern banged shut and they both whipped round but it was only an old fellow, well enough dressed and a little the worse for wear, who was greeted in familiar terms by the barman.

‘Aye, Andra – what is tae be your pleasure?’

As the old fellow made that known, McLevy turned back to Joanna.

‘And so, Miss Lightfoot,’ he said. ‘What is to be your pleasure?’

There was a mocking glint in the slate-grey eyes and for a moment she felt an obscure stirring of desire in a place she would not care to mention. Damn her predilection for the older man. Deep breath.

‘I need you to promise,’ she said, ‘that what I show you will be returned to me.’

He said nothing. Joanna took that for yes.

She pulled a couple of dog-eared vellum pages from within her bag and laid them carefully on the table.

‘These are indications,’ she almost whispered. ‘No more than that.’

McLevy squinted at the pages; the light in the tavern was poor and he was beginning to wonder if he might not need reading glasses. He tilted the paper towards the light and perused the words as best he could.

The two pages, though loose, seemed to be in diary form, the entries dated by day and month but not by year. There was a strange marking by some of them and the words used were cryptic, cut-off, with some Latin and Greek thrown in by the looks of it, as if something was to be hidden from the reader.

Her finger tapped at one entry and, as he muttered the words under his breath, Joanna Lightfoot spoke over this.

‘In 1850, the year that the first murder was committed, William Gladstone had been visiting prostitutes in London.

‘Often he saw them in the streets, late at night, and went to their rooms, his wife away in the country, and he stayed there, in their rooms, for many hours.’