Shadow of the Serpent im-1 Read online

  The corpse’s arm had fallen down when Jarvis had pulled at the sheet and McLevy carefully placed it back under the covering, the hand, held in his, fingers rigid, still an elegant shape, as he tucked it out of sight.

  ‘Nothing under the nails?’

  ‘Dirt. What she trafficked in. Dirt,’ the surgeon pronounced this word with some satisfaction.

  ‘But the woman deserves justice,’ McLevy said softly.

  ‘Does she? A common whore from the looks. They come and go; their lives, I am afraid, are worthless.’

  ‘They provide a service to the community at large.’

  ‘At large? You mean the desperate cases.’

  ‘I mean respectable men who find the married bed a damp prospect and their breeks round their knees in a deep wynd at midnight. Surely you would agree with that, Dr Jarvis?’

  Damn the man! Jarvis turned away to hide a sudden flush. Two years previous he’d had the misfortune to be caught with a young magpie just off the Royal Mile by a passing night patrol, somewhat in flagrante. A gold coin had solved the matter and no law had been broken, but surely McLevy couldn’t know of this? The Royal Mile was not his parish, they wouldn’t let him cross over the bridges.

  McLevy noted the shaft had gone home and repeated with no particular emphasis, ‘She deserves justice.’

  ‘You find it for her. One of her own kind would do this, molassed with drink, and not even recall such in the morning. You find it. I have better to accomplish!’

  Jarvis, reaching jerkily for his topcoat, knocked his bag of instruments to the floor and had to scrabble around in retrieval. An obscure sense of humiliation caught hold of him and he ached to stick one his sharp blades right up the man’s anus; see now, here he was frenzied inside his head, damn the man, damn him!

  An icy silence. Jarvis searched for the last word, a word that would redeem all.

  McLevy watched him. The inspector had perfected a small secret smile which always daunted his superiors. As if some defect of theirs had amused him but his contemplation was too perfect to share.

  He smiled it now. The silence grew.

  Constable Mulholland reached into his pocket.

  ‘You were right, sir,’ he said. ‘Took a deal of finding, but found it was, in the guttering at the other end of Vinegar Close. The wind blew it, I expect. It was a hands-and-knees job, muck to the elbow. A deal of finding.’

  In fact a few stale buns had bribed a pack of street children to swarm over the close like wasps at a cowpat to search out the God-forsaken thing otherwise he, Mulholland, would have been on his knees for the foreseeable future, running the risk that folks might mistake him for a Papist.

  With his soft country accent and guileless Irish-blue eyes, Mulholland might well have been mistaken for many things.

  A fool, however, was not one of them, not by McLevy at any road. The inspector squinted at the suspiciously clean fingers offering forth … a bedraggled white feather.

  He took it from Mulholland and peered close. ‘The top is lacking,’ he said.

  ‘Not recovered, sir. But it was a correct assumption. The plume was on the scene.’

  ‘It had to be somewhere,’ he muttered. ‘She never was without one.’

  ‘You know the woman then?’ asked Jarvis.

  ‘Sadie Gorman. These many years. She used to be a pretty wee girl.’

  ‘She’s left that far behind. A broken doll.’

  McLevy looked down at the waxy face of the corpse, powder-caked, red mouth open as if to laugh.

  ‘She had spirit,’ he said. ‘She deserves justice.’

  ‘You sound like a parrot, McLevy. Ye’ll end up in a cage, chewing betel nuts and defecating all over the floor!’

  Jarvis, considering this enough of a bon mot to be leaving on, sprang the door with a flourish and cast a last disparaging look at the corpse. ‘I’m away to my club, a glass of claret will restore my faith in the beauty of women and the delicacy of their intentions. I’d invite you along, inspector, but it’s medical men only.’

  The door shut behind him then it suddenly opened again and the doctor stuck his head back inside.

  ‘What is it you often call these creatures, by the way? It has slipped my mind.’

  ‘Nymphs of the pavé,’ was the sardonic response.

  ‘Nymphs! What a treasure you are to me, inspector, that’ll keep me going all through the roast. Nymphs! Oh, and by the way, she doesn’t have the pox so you won’t get cuntbitten.’

  The door closed. There was a long silence. McLevy put his five fingers to his nose, pursed his lips, then made a loud farting noise through them. It was aimed at the door and would seem to indicate his opinion of the departed medical man. Mulholland did not bat an eye.

  Having released this salvo, the inspector returned to the slab, twitched back the sheet again and looked at the gashed body, ribcage broken, bones sticking out like the spars of a ship.

  ‘You noted that the good doctor was about to say something when he looked into this … desecration?’

  ‘I did indeed, sir. But then he thought better. What could it have been, I wonder?’

  ‘These pillars of genteelity, they need their whores but they despise and hate themselves for it. And some of them hate the whores even worse.’

  ‘That’s very profound, sir.’

  McLevy looked sharply at his constable but the face before him seemed smooth and untroubled by irony. The inspector pushed out his lips and took on the air of a child playing at being a portentous adult.

  ‘He may have been about to say, “I might have done this, I might have chopped the sin out of her body.”’

  ‘Just as well he kept it to himself, then. Otherwise he could end up suspect,’ said the constable.

  ‘I’m sure he has an alibi.’

  Mulholland nodded solemnly. ‘Mrs Jarvis. They’d be locked in matrimonial embrace all night.’

  ‘Indeed. Shackled thegither.’

  A glint of mischief between the two. The younger man had walked the conglomerates of Leith these many years now with McLevy. He knew the humours and most especially the rages which burned in the inspector’s breast. Not that it didn’t stop him having a wee provocation now and again, but he tried always to follow his Aunt Katie’s advice. ‘If you’re going to poke the anointed pig, make sure you’re well behind the fence.’

  ‘One more thing.’ McLevy pointed at a smear of blood on the side of the dress, separated from the dark red river which stained the rest of the material. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘Her hand perhaps? Clutched at her wounds and then – ’ Mulholland stopped. The pained look on the inspector’s face did not encourage further speculation.

  ‘Look at the line of blood. Straight. As if, perhaps, something was wiped clean.’

  ‘The murder weapon? A cool customer.’

  ‘Or someone … detached. Who looks down on humanity as if it were just so many insects, crawling under his feet.’

  There was a mystical intuitive side to the inspector which Mulholland found more than a little worrying. An ability to empathise with the criminal mind which one day, if the wind was in the wrong quarter, might lead to demonic possession.

  Don’t turn your hinder parts on the black bull, leave that to the cows.

  One of Aunt Katie’s more cryptic sayings. God knows why it should come into his head at this moment.

  He watched McLevy replace the sheet up to the neck of the corpse and then carefully pack away the broken feather in the top pocket of his tunic. How would he describe the man, now? Average height, heavy set, dainty little trotters, the comical thing being if the inspector ever had to run, which he hated with a vengeance, only the arms and legs moved, the rest of the body was perfectly still, as if in protest.

  The features now, would suet come to mind? But behind that fleshy casing was a substance the like of which you might see down by the Leith shoreline where the east wind over time had stripped the rocks back to their very essence.
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br />   The face at times was that of a pouting child and then again something carved out from the Old Testament.

  Pepper-and-salt hair stood up like a wire brush. And yet the whole, and this irked Mulholland profoundly him not having the physicality for it himself, could become easy invisible. You might pass this by in a crowd. Unless you caught sight of the unguarded eyes, then were you a woolly animal you’d be heading back to the fold praying not to feel the hot breath of the wolf upon your neck.

  The white skin on that big face; if Mulholland was out in the wind for five minutes his cheeks were of the damask rose, but the inspector’s never changed. Like parchment. He might have been Ancient Egyptian.

  ‘What’re you grinning at?’

  ‘Not a thing. It’s a serious business, sir.’

  ‘It is indeed. A ferocious business. Enough force behind that blow to split the Scott Monument. A savage hatred that never leaves the streets.’

  Something in the tone alerted the constable but he contented himself with watching as the inspector shook out a reasonably clean handkerchief, which he laid gently over Sadie’s face.

  ‘She has fallen at my feet. She will have justice, Mulholland.’

  ‘I’m sure she will. Is there … perhaps something you yourself are not revealing at this point in time, sir?’

  ‘Me?’ McLevy spread his hands, his face a parody of hurt innocence. ‘I am an open book, constable. As you well know. An open book.’

  4

  As you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions.

  Don’t leave them on the road.

  NIKOLAI GOGOL, Dead Souls

  Leith, 14 April 1850

  George Cameron watched in grim amusement as the young constable spewed his guts all over the baker’s shop doorway. A nice filling for the cakes.

  That’s the bother with these Lowlanders, no ballast. He glanced over to where the girl’s body lay slumped against the wall; ye could not blame the boy, I suppose, first night on patrol with his big Highland sergeant, excuses himself to go up a back street then finds he’s near relieved himself upon a corpse.

  The constable had nothing else to offer but his shoulders still heaved. Dearie me. The dry boke. Few things are worse.

  Unless you’ve had your brisket mangled. He turned away from the grovelling young buckie, took a deep breath and delicately pulled away the girl’s dress. My God, she’d been split apart.

  Cameron took some eyeglasses out of his pocket, perched them on his nose and looked to his heart’s content.

  His father had worked as a gillie on the laird’s estate; he remembered the first time he saw the auld man gralloch a deer, the gush of entrails followed by a ritual smearing of blood on the son’s forehead. Most unwelcome. Some had dribbled right down his nose. Cameron sniffed. But that was just a drop in the bucket compared to this, a drop in the bucket.

  He gingerly lifted the head of the corpse which had fallen face down on to the ravaged breast. Cameron did not recognise the features, but the clothes proclaimed her profession. A young face, mouth parted, sweet lips, nae scabby gums. She’d be new at the whoring … come from nowhere, gone to the same place.

  A noise by his side, the constable had returned dabbing at his mouth with a big white hankie.

  ‘Now, don’t you be spewing up again,’ said the sergeant. ‘Not over me, not over the corpus. We do not want our evidence obscured by vomit.’

  The young man swallowed hard. He wouldn’t give this big Inverness teuchter the satisfaction. He forced himself to look at the terrible gash in the girl’s body.

  ‘Not be the last cadaver ye see on these streets. I’ve witnessed twelve murders in ten glorious years,’ announced the sergeant. ‘But I have to confess, this one’s a sight all on its own, son. All on its own.’

  The constable nodded. He noticed something in the hand of the corpse and gently teased it out. It was a fragment of thin black cloth which the sergeant took from him and held close to his thick eyeglasses, then sniffed.

  ‘Fine quality, new bought, but torn from what? A cravat, stocking, glove?’ He looked at the constable who made no answer. ‘Are you in the huff because I watched ye cast up?’

  Shake of the head. Cameron was amused, vomit or no, this boy might have the makings. ‘Away tae the station, son, get me the hand cart and we’ll fetch this lassie home, well as near home as she’ll ever find this night.’

  As the young man started off Cameron called after.

  ‘And as ye make your way, review the events of the night. In case something comes to mind. It’s always a good idea. To review events.’

  ‘I’ll do just that,’ said James McLevy.

  5

  I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;

  I woke, and found that life was duty.

  ELLEN STURGIS HOOPER, American poet

  ‘Are you listening to me, inspector?’

  McLevy was hauled back into the present by the querulous tones of Lieutenant Roach, his mandated superior at Leith station.

  Roach was a more or less permanently disappointed man, with the saving grace of a waspish humour some of which he even, at times, directed against himself.

  His disappointment lay in the fact that, despite being vice-president of the golf club and rolling up his trouser leg on a regular basis at the best connected of Masonic lodges, he was stuck to Leith like a fly in a dung pile till retirement laid its fell hand upon his shoulder.

  His predecessor, Lieutenant Moxey, had left somewhat under a cloud and Roach had been swiftly drafted in from Haymarket to fill the gap after almost giving up hope of such promotion.

  He remembered the trembling excitement when he had first viewed the drab exterior of Leith station; never mind, he would change it into a stepping-stone towards greater achievements.

  Now fifteen years later the station was still the same and he could well understand what had driven Moxey to such base acts of deliverance. Understand but not imitate. The Good Lord and Mrs Roach would see to that.

  Why the powers-that-be could not discern the true gold that lay under his careworn exterior and raise him out of this creeping decrepitude to the lofty reaches of a sublime incumbency was a mystery which taxed him into many a shank on the fifth hole.

  His humour was a direct result of having to deal with McLevy for almost a decade and a necessary bulwark against the potential bedlam it involved.

  ‘A murder is the last thing we need.’ Roach shook his head at the injustice of it all. ‘It is most inconvenient.’

  ‘Especially for the corpse, sir.’

  ‘What?’ Roach shot a look at Mulholland but the candid face seemed innocent enough. ‘Yes, of course there is that to consider but … aghh!’

  The lieutenant stood up, flexed his skinny arms and swiped an imaginary ball two hundred odd yards, splitting the middle of the fairway, only to see it disappear down a rabbit burrow.

  ‘We have an election on hand, the streets are infested with liberal incitement and the few decent conservatives left are huddled together in doorways. There is a meeting at the lodge tonight and Chief Constable Grant will be there.’

  In his mind’s eye Roach could see a smooth green and a white ball rolling eternally towards the hole. Never quite getting there. Never quite.

  ‘I had hoped to impress him with the changing face of Leith and how we discharge our onerous duties to keep the streets clean as a whistle; what with the eyes of the country focused on Edinburgh, what with Gladstone landing his great fundament upon Midlothian – ’

  Roach came to a sudden halt. He had made the mistake of looking into the blank, incurious eyes of his inspector and, as a result, had completely lost track of what he was saying.

  ‘What with? Gladstone was landing his fundament?’ prompted McLevy.

  ‘Yes. That is correct. Of course. To impress, and thence to discuss with the chief constable the gravity of the political situation and, desp
ite the fact we both distrust the machinations of Disraeli, nevertheless he is a Conservative and so are we. A parity of belief!’

  This ‘we’ obviously did not include Mulholland and McLevy who sat there, in Roach’s view, like dangerous radicals waiting to sprout. He took another deep breath.

  ‘But instead, Sandy Grant will shake this murder in my face and demand it be solved at once. I shall be reduced from one of equal standing to that of a plague carrier!’

  ‘I’m sure if the woman knew what a nuisance she was going to be, she’d have arranged to be murdered in another parish, sir,’ said McLevy.

  ‘There is no call for impertinence, James.’

  But the interjection did the trick. Roach, who had been winding himself into a whirligig of indignation, sat quietly back at his desk.

  ‘What about her pounce, could he be our man?’

  ‘Frank Brennan? In anger he might crack her rib but not hack her to pieces. He’s a Dublin man, the only blood they like is in their sausage.’

  The inspector shook his head and gazed at the portrait of Queen Victoria which glowered down from the lieutenant’s wall. Her Sovereign Majesty. Putting on the beef.

  ‘Besides, why kill the goose that lays the golden egg?’ he added.

  ‘Raddled egg from all accounts. She may have been holding money back on him, you know what these people are like.’ Roach shook his head in Christian sorrow.

  ‘I know what they’re like,’ said McLevy.

  Roach waited for more but the inspector had his broody look on, might as well converse with a wooden Indian.

  ‘Anything from the scene?’

  ‘One decapitated white feather, property of the deceased,’ offered Mulholland.

  ‘That’s helpful,’ said Roach sourly. ‘Witnesses?’

  ‘Had it been one of the big new streets we might have been in business, sir. But it’s the wynds. In these alleys, every eye is closed to crime, every door is shut to probity,’ sighed the constable, his eyes radiating a holy rectitude. ‘More’s the pity, sir. A lost tribe.’