Nor Will He Sleep (16 page)

Be that as it may, the possibly eternally damned Robert Louis had other business on hand, not completely disconnected to the man who now sat more comfortably upon a cushion.

Police business.

Margaret caught Roach’s stare upon her and returned it placidly, before fixing her attention once more in a heavenly direction.

The lieutenant had walked them all down to the church, thinking it was the least he could do, then was astonished to find his own wife waiting for him by the bleak vertiginous steps of St
Stephen’s.

In all the stramash he had completely forgotten that she had persuaded him to come and hear this preacher who had inspired such pious admiration throughout the city.

But there she was. And here he was also.

As far as Mrs Roach was concerned, he had left early on some police errand and would turn up on time.

Her husband was never late.

Which he was not, and since his inspector was taking care of business at the station, it was as well to carry on in the direction of Sabbath travel.

And so, in they all went together.

And here they all were.

Within the fold.

John Gibbons emerged from the shadows to kneel, accepting silently Roach’s nod of thanks for posterial deliverance, as Jonas Gibbons, having at length praised the late Agnes and commended
her to a guaranteed deliverance, raised both arms in the air.

An unexpected, pallid streak of sunlight burrowed through one of the church windows and illuminated him like an angel, as his strong voice rang amongst the flock.

After all, he was their Shepherd.

‘Let us pray,’ he said simply. ‘Let us pray for the departed soul.’

He began the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer and the congregation joined in the swell of heavenly tribute.

Here endeth the lesson.

He had slept badly. Dreamt a wasteland of dead trees where he, as shivering young man, fled for his life, pursued by yelping hounds. His father appeared and promised to
help but only if the youth gave God a barley-bannock as payment. This he refused to do and the old man shook his hoary locks, tears of grief running down his face.

He took the young man to the edge of a grey stone stairway that led to an iron-studded door dripping with candle grease and gobbets of red melted wax. The old man then vanished with a
sorrowful prophecy that the barley-bannock sin and other such iniquitous transgressions would return in the form of a beast with two heads.

The young man opened the door to find a dark void, and when he peered far below, saw a white slab, luminous in the surrounding shadows.

There seemed to be a body on the slab, but he failed to construe the features.

Then he heard the beast. Heavy in tread, smelling like an addled midden, grunting as it lumbered upwards.

He could see its shape, but not yet clearly if it had two heads. And if so, which to cut off first? For the hero had suddenly been granted a sword in hand, rusty and mottled with age, but
sharp enough surely to hack through a throat.

The beast let out a terrifying roar. It had smelt the prey. Its breath was like a poisonous gas and the young man was now pinned to the very last step that led to nowhere.

He raised the sword, but it melted in the heat.

Stevenson woke in a fierce sweat, which rapidly cooled, leaving his night-clothes wrapped clammily around his thin body like a shroud.

He reached out for his tobacco pouch and muttered an oath on finding it empty.

Were dreams of such nature from bad conscience as the preachers would prate, or a darker, deeper place that took no account of such paltry concepts?

One way or another, they were his constant companions.

By the night-light Robert Louis could make out Fanny’s outline buried under blankets in the other bed, safe in the arms of Morpheus. So he slid out quietly, donned dressing gown and
slippers, then padded off to find his mistress.

Madame Nicotine was in the hall within his jacket pocket, sheathed in leather and waiting with open arms.

He quickly rolled a life-saving cylinder, lit a Lucifer and smoked at once where he stood.

An addict knows not time or place.

A clock somewhere chimed a muffled tribute to five o’clock, beyond the witching hour but according to some smack dab in the middle of Auld Clootie’s temporal reign.

The front door rattled in a gust of wind and Stevenson regarded it thoughtfully.

It lacked a flight of stone stairs but what was behind?

The void?

Eternity?

Or just a wee, wet street?

With cigarette in lips like a Mexican bandit, Stevenson turned the heavy key that secured the house against Satan’s legions and threw open the door.

He had hoped to find the void, the unimaginable inchoate darkness, where all possibilities branch off in disparate directions like so many shooting stars, giving rise to other possibilities,
other worlds, where anything might happen at any moment, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of shapes and events that might change in Protean splendour.

But no. It was a wee, wet street.

The rain had stopped and the wind blew a sour fetid odour through the tobacco smoke.

Was it the Monster?

Nothing so outlandish.

His eye fell upon a spattering of vomit upon the path that the rain and wind had failed to clear. Some drunken juggie no doubt, for Stevenson’s sensitive long nose could detect the lurking
dregs of John Barleycorn in the smell.

For a moment he felt a childish disappointment: no adventure, no treasure, no malevolent figures in the fog – just a dreich Edinburgh morning, where the only battle was between lamplight
and the grey tinge of looming cloud.

And then he saw the Beast.

Almost at his feet, huddled to the side, wrapped in a blanket like some obscene cocoon, the face washed clean by the air, white and staring.

Not at him, the neck jerked askew, livid brand on the flesh, eyes averted, staring wide at death’s door.

For a moment, the sight so unexpected, Robert Louis forgot to inhale.

Then he let out a stifled shriek. Not of terror, more as if something he had expected in the depths of his psyche had arrived to greet the wanderer.

A visitor at the gate.

Stevenson smiled a little wearily. He had recited the more prosaic version of
the finding of a corpse upon my doorstep
and wondered whether Queen Victoria, from her
high vantage on the wall, was entertained and believed the story.

Or did Her Majesty harbour secret doubts?

He shifted to another pair of eyes that had probably witnessed more lying than a politician’s mistress.

‘My first thought was to lug the cadaver away from the house and disclaim all knowledge,’ the writer admitted with disarming honesty. ‘But then – I thought – what
if it were me lying there? Would I not wish a more ethical observance?’

‘On the other hand,’ replied James McLevy. ‘Being dead, you might not give a damn.’

‘True,’ came a somewhat florid response. ‘But, taking my first assertion as proven, I suppose there are scraps of conscience not yet pulverised by the grinding hypocrisy of our
civilised world and so – I thought of you, inspector.’

Indeed McLevy, sleepless at his attic window, chewing hard upon his moustache, had heard his name called from the streets below.

He gazed down to see Robert Louis who had battled through the city in the biting cold, bare-headed, his hastily donned clothes and velvet jacket a poor protection against the knife-edge cut of
an East wind, clutching the scrap of paper with the inspector’s address given in the tavern under very different circumstances.

Stevenson resembled nothing so much as a character in a threadbare adventure tale, beckoning urgently as if to invite the watcher to join in some dubious enterprise.

They had knocked up Mulholland on the way back, and everything had followed on.

Now all were cosily tucked away in Roach’s office, the interrogation room being deemed a touch brutal for the frail personage of such a world-famous creator, and the cold slab, now in
possession of the corpse, an equally grim prospect.

From the inspector’s view, Stevenson was holding up fairly well after what must have been an exhausting time, but was there a tremor that might be exploited?

Just in case ought was hidden.

For the writer and the policeman are aye on the look-out for something hidden.

It might even be concealed from the subject himself; that makes no difference.

Kick over the stone – see what crawls below.

‘The vomit is not that of the corpse,’ said James McLevy. ‘No marks on the clothing, no traces of sick in the mouth.’

He did not mention the other contents of the mouth. Keep that up the sleeve.

‘Clean as a whistle,’ said Mulholland cheerfully, well aware of his inspector’s intent.

‘Might it have been from the killer – the vomit?’

A reasonable question, as Stevenson fidgeted somewhat having been told that Lieutenant Roach frowned mightily upon the smell of tobacco in his quarters.

‘I doubt it, ’ said McLevy. ‘The murder too precise.’

‘Precise?’

‘The blows, sir,’ chimed in Mulholland. ‘On the nail. The distance between them. Exact. A cold measure. Even the Police Surgeon couldn’t miss it.’

‘Precise folk don’t tend tae vomit.’

Having delivered this judgement, McLevy sat back in Roach’s leather chair and folded hands over a corporation that grew a little rounder with every passing year.

It was a comfy chair; he could get used to being a lieutenant. Stevenson sat across the desk from him and the constable, as usual, stood like a giraffe in the corner.

Mulholland looked at the writer with a curiosity that he made no effort to conceal.

The Irish have always admired writers, unlike the Scots, who regard them with deep suspicion, and the English who try to pretend they don’t exist.

The fellow was thin as a rake, but had darting, lively eyes and a turn of mind that seemed never still – now what kind of animal would Mulholland place him to be? Some kind of thoroughbred
that’s for sure. Greyhound or horse.

Unaware he was being thus translated, Stevenson offered another contribution to the debate.

‘A drunkart blown in by the wind?’

‘Time will tell.’

McLevy leant forward. Kick over the stone.

‘The woman – do you know her?’

The writer frowned.

‘I am not sure. Something in the face. I glimpsed it but briefly.’

‘We can go back tae the cold slab. She’s laid out like a dish o’ fish.’

The inspector laughed coarsely and Mulholland knew well the technique: innocent or guilty, stir the pot.

Stevenson’s fingers twitched. He was gasping for a cigarette, and feeling oddly under siege.

He had been delighted to accompany the police; it avoided the inevitable wrangle over his refusal to toe the line of God even with his father due to be interred,

Also he had been intrigued, and revelled in the chance to observe the mechanics of a real investigation.

What he had not reckoned on was being the centre of it.

‘Something in the face,’ he repeated slowly, and indeed in his mind a tantalising elusive recognition was swirling.

‘Mary Dougan.’

To this flat statement Mulholland nodded accord. They had both known the woman at first sight, though the face was drawn by death and the mouth no longer smiling – in spite of the blows
fate had dealt, Mary had always found a smile.

‘She was a good-natured soul, but a little on the weak side,’ offered the constable.

‘A whisky diver,’ said McLevy bluntly.

At the name, Robert Louis had flinched, his worst fears realised. What he did not wish to see in the ruined features came rushing back into his mind.

‘I knew her in that case,’ he stated simply. ‘My God, how she has changed.’

‘Life and death. Mark ye deep.’

McLevy’s sardonic comment struck a flicker of light in Stevenson’s eyes, but then the inspector signalled that the floor was his and the writer, in a strange gesture, raised an
imaginary cigarette to his lips, took a deep drag, and then blew out as if to release memory.

‘A threepenny whore. I was a young man. Her regular. She was modest and decent for all that. The other girls were . . . wild. I knew them all.’

A dispassionate tone, but the sigh that followed told a different tale.

‘I had to leave Edinburgh.
Ae fond kiss and then we sever.
She clung to me. That bonny face. Awash with tears.’

‘Did she love ye then?’

‘Who knows?’ Stevenson hesitated for a moment. ‘Love is a mystery, is it not?’

He gazed down at his long fingers, stained yellow at the ends from tobacco smoke, as if they were either to blame or might provide an answer.

‘I was desperately ill. And had to leave the city. I never saw her again until this sorry day.’

This rendition of lost affection, even with a three-penny whore, had silenced McLevy strangely, and the constable hastened to fill the gap.

‘How long ago was this, sir?’

‘Eighteen years or so, I would estimate.’

Mulholland looked at McLevy, who roused himself from some inner contemplation and waved his hand.

The constable produced a crumpled, damp piece of paper, which he then smoothed out.

‘This was found inside the mouth of the corpse.’

He carefully read the text; again it seemed as if underscored by a nail.

Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return hither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.