Nor Will He Sleep (12 page)

McLevy and Mulholland, Daniel and Alan Grant.

Of course the policemen might have remained on the other side of the bars to post their questions through like letters, but they had preferred to squeeze inside and, as far as Mulholland was
concerned, literally, for his head, minus helmet, scraped against the knobbly roughcast ceiling.

But he bore the unwelcome friction manfully, because it brought himself and the inspector into the very air the suspects breathed.

Nose to nose.

McLevy loomed in the centre, an immovable object, even with what might be the faintest odour of whisky fumes detected by the sensitive nose of Mulholland. The two young men, still with traces of
white smears on their faces, sat on a crudely formed bench, pinned in the corner.

The policemen had been questioning the pair for near an hour, not yet getting to the nub, more concentrating on the petty acts of vandalism whilst cocking a snook at the law.

But imperceptibly, because the questioners were skilled in the black arts, the tension was growing.

Daniel was sweating like a Turkish Bath attendant, his voice more high-pitched by the minute; Alan Grant seemed a touch more in control, but he had his hands clenched between his knees, like a
truant schoolboy.

Both were bruised, Daniel with a mouse under the eye where Roach’s bony elbow had made contact, and Alan Grant with a sore and stiff neck where an enthusiastic constable had hammered down
his baton.

McLevy shook his head solemnly, a sardonic light in the eye. Time to raise the stakes.

‘Assault of a police officer, Mister Drummond.’

‘I didn’t know that!’

‘Well, ye know now.’

‘Twice as a matter of fact,’ Mulholland chimed in helpfully. ‘You also, Mister Grant. Naughty boys.’

‘I was trying to help Daniel get free – ’

‘Freedom is something ye will not contemplate for a good wee while,’ the inspector interrupted. ‘Ye face charges of vicious and premeditated assault with worse tae
come.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me!’

This sudden roar from McLevy straight into Daniel’s face brought Alan off the bench. Mulholland was swift to shift also, the hornbeam stick out in a flash.

‘No physical violence, if you please, sir!’

Of course the constable knew there was little or no danger to McLevy, and he had no intention of unleashing the mighty power of the weapon on such insubstantial sprats, but the very fact of the
movement ratcheted up the pressure.

He had also enjoyed the bellow, more like the old McLevy.

‘I – had no intention,’ Alan protested.

‘Then sit down,’ Mulholland said evenly.

Grant did so meekly enough, but Daniel was made of sterner stuff, at least in his own eyes.

‘All this will be resolved,‘ he protested. ‘No harm done.’

McLevy moved so quickly it was as if he had appeared like an ogre in the fairy tales, towering above the seated pair with hardly a span between himself and them.

‘Worse tae come,’ he repeated in a quiet controlled tone that was somehow more threatening than any roar.

The inspector dragged over a chair and sat so that he was on the same level as the other two.

‘Agnes Carnegie. Yester-night,’ he said gravely. ‘Whit really happened?’

‘Nothing,’ said Daniel quickly.

‘You’re a liar, sir.’

A simple enough statement, but the enormity seemed to take Daniel’s breath away. His face whitened under its layer of that same colour and his mouth opened and closed without sound.

At that moment he bore no resemblance whatsoever to his sister, and the inspector was grateful for that as he went in for the kill.

‘Beaten tae death. Her body – battered and bruised frae the blows. Lying there like a bag o’ bones.’

In the silence created by this macabre image, Daniel shook his head in denial, not, it would seem, trusting himself to speak.

McLevy suddenly turned on Alan Grant with a direct gaze, almost impersonal, that pierced into the fraught conscience of the young man.

‘Whit about you, Mister Grant? Do you still deny crossing paths with this poor woman?’

Alan replayed the moment when, pushed by Daniel, the old lady had toppled backwards into the dirty puddle – but that would not harm her surely? They had left her sitting, a crabbit old
biddy but alive. Yet soon afterwards he and Daniel had become separated. But that was just happenstance. There was no way his friend could commit a gruesome murder ...

Yet they had not told the truth.

What was it Daniel had said?

More trouble than it’s worth.

But was it?

He glanced sideways at his companion in arms. Would it be classed as betrayal? Surely innocence can reveal itself just as readily as guilt?

Alan became aware that while these thoughts had passed swiftly through his mind, he was still under the scrutiny of the inspector’s gaze.

A moth trapped by candle flame.

How could the man know in any case?

But he did. He knew something was not being told.

‘I am waiting, Mister Grant,’ said James McLevy.

To the watching Mulholland, this was the moment; a moment he had witnessed many a time.

It teetered in the balance as the young man hesitated, the inspector held silence, the companion glanced sideways as if to counsel against revelation. And from his great height, at the three
seated figures, the constable looked down like a judge in court.

Or were he inclined to grandiose speculation, like Zeus from the heavens.

A voice broke the silence – however it was none of the aforementioned.

‘May I have a word, inspector?’

A sour-faced Lieutenant Roach had approached quietly up the corridor. Bad news often comes in silence.

McLevy almost growled in frustration, and snapped his head round as if to dismiss his superior officer, but one look at the lieutenant’s countenance put paid to that idea.

The inspector swung out of the cell, followed closely by Mulholland, who slammed the door shut with a clatter as if to promise that this was only a temporary respite.

But it was, in fact, a cessation.

Roach drew them both far enough away so that their voices could not be heard, and spoke in low, bitter tones.

Unlike the look of triumph with which he had greeted McLevy on his return to the station, jubilant that he had hooked his quarry while the inspector had come back empty handed, and commenting
gleefully that McLevy had lost his touch compared to the street expertise of one Robert Roach, the lieutenant’s face now bore the appearance of a man who had swallowed a slug with his curly
kale.

‘I have two of Edinburgh’s most notable lawyers in my office,’ he muttered bleakly. ‘And they have served me with judge’s papers demanding the release of all who
were connected to the recent affray, most especially a certain Daniel Drummond and Alan Grant.’

‘Judge’s papers?’ said Mulholland incredulously.

‘One of the students has turned out to be the offspring of Judge Bennett,’ was the acid response. ‘He dotes upon the boy. And to save you further query, the lawyers have been
retained by the Drummond family.’

‘How did they know we had them here?’ asked Mulholland like a dog worrying at a bone. ‘Hardly three hours gone.’

‘That,’ Roach replied, ‘as the inspector is often wont to remark, may be one of God’s little mysteries.’

The lieutenant noted that the man himself had become curiously silent and mistook this for disgruntlement.

‘Not my fault, McLevy,’ he admonished what he imagined to be a sulking subordinate. ‘It would always have been hard to hold these students for an affray, but I hoped if we kept
them in the cells overnight it might at least have put the fear of God into them.’

The inspector still did not say a word, and now it was Mulholland’s turn to misinterpret the lack of response.

He and the inspector, of course, had been angling for bigger fish, and who knows what Alan Grant might have said if they’d kept the pressure on?

Everything or nothing – who knows?

Too late now.

‘Well,’ opined Roach, turning away, ‘I have to deal with my learned friends. You, Mulholland, can help organise release of these upstarts – take Ballantyne and tell him
to imagine that he is unleashing a nest of dung beetles.’

He signalled Mulholland to follow to the door and had a last word for the entity they had left behind.

‘McLevy, once you have finished standing there like Patience on a monument, perhaps you might join us lesser mortals in the humdrum life of Leith Station.’

Then he had another thought.

‘Oh by the way – my top hat has a large dent. Who is going to pay for that, I wonder?’

The door closed and both men were gone.

Of course Patience did not stand in the various memorials, she was on her backside and struggling to get away from a confining bond.

Not unlike Jessica Drummond in McLevy’s grip.

And the inspector had let her go. To trump himself.

Hoist by his own petard, to bring in another fanciful and unwelcome figure of speech.

The girl had moved fast. Roust the lawyers, get them to the judge, serve the papers, don’t look back.

Move fast. It helps when you’re young.

Betrayal is like ashes in the mouth.

Under an impugned moustache.

He felt such a pain inside – a sudden shaft, as if he had been pierced to the bone.

Was this love or some illness in the marrow?

Or is it much the same thing?

The inspector moved slowly to the door and slipped through it into another life.

The corridor was once more silent.

Inside the confines of the cell Daniel and Alan waited, not realising what was happening beyond their sphere and for the moment, it seemed, forgotten by the forces of justice.

Both had a jumble of thoughts running in their minds.

Daniel finally rose and dragged his twisted leg, which pained considerably after the night’s exertions, across the floor to peer up the now vacant corridor.

‘Thank God my sister was not taken,’ he said finally, his face hidden in shadow. ‘Think of the disgrace.’

‘Yes,’ came Alan’s voice in the dim uncertain light of the cell. ‘Think of the disgrace.’

The Old Ship tavern divides into two dominions separated by a small door, the bar itself in a horseshoe shape where the publicans ply their trade.

One kingdom is that of the rougher element, where the young street keelies and their fancy girls with bright ribbons huddle thegither to pledge undying love, and plot mischief against a society
for which they have nothing but contempt; where washed up nymphs of the pavé watch this youthful parade, envy the gay sparkle of eyes and avoid such mirrors where they might contrast what
once they were and have now become.

Ghosts at a feast.

Sim Carnegie was in his glory in such a world; he trawled the various dives to pick up from informers what tit-bits of scurrilous gossip and petty crime had floated like scum to the surface,
often ending up at the Old Ship where he entertained his cronies with such tales.

It was noticeable that he rarely bought a drink, perhaps thinking his adept company and fine stories were payment enough, but this night his companions were well nigh astonished to find
Sim’s hand disappearing into his pocket and emerging, not with a grubby handkerchief, but coin of the realm with which he proceeded to buy not one but two rounds.

When twitted about this sudden largesse Carnegie tapped the side of his nose in a self-mocking gesture and mentioned a certain Mister Herbert Lawson whose letter had arrived at his office
address with welcome news.

His mother’s lawyer and a dried up wee specimen, but honest enough considering the profession.

The news? Ah, that would be telling, but welcome enough that he had borrowed a sum to augment the miserable pittance he received at the
Leith Herald
!

Sycophantic laughter greeted that remark and as Sim turned to survey his empire from the top of the horseshoe bend his attention was caught by two figures sitting at a table through in the other
room.

This was where the more respectable visitors to the tavern sat, occasionally sipping their tippeny ale and cocking their wee finger in the air.

Nonsense, of course; the other bar was marginally less noisy and had private booths where business might be secretly transacted, but the tobacco fumes were just as thick and the faces just as
flushed with strong drink; perhaps a better brand, peat-whisky as opposed to spiel-the-wa’.

Such distinctions meant little to Sim; at this moment he was monarch of all he surveyed.

He swaggered through the connecting door and with a grin like a tipsy shark stood before the two figures.

They had seen him coming, but continued their deliberate ingestion of some much needed belly timber.

‘
Leith Herald
. The Monday edition,’ Carnegie said. ‘It will make bonny reading.’

From his salt herring and tatties, the poor man’s supper, Mulholland preferring a dish of sheep’s heid broth, James McLevy looked up at the puddock before them.

Both policemen had for the most part been silent since arrival, ordered, drank, ate; it had been a tiring and for the most part, unsuccessful day.

They had sadly been unable to procure a booth, which might have spared them this unsavoury invasion.

Since the inspector had continued masticating, while removing the odd small fish bone from his moustache, Sim put one hand in familiar style upon their table and leant in.

‘So, sir,’ he remarked, with the solemn timbre of someone who has imbibed well but not, in his opinion, too much. ‘How proceeds the investigation?’

‘It proceeds.’

The inspector went back to his meal. Mulholland had never left his, but Carnegie was not to be ignored.

Headlines were running in his mind.