Nor Will He Sleep (17 page)

‘Does that ring a bell, sir?’

‘Other than the anatomical accuracy. Not remotely.’

‘It seems to have a religious bent.’

‘Unless it is meant ironically.’

McLevy grunted what might have been an agreement to this, but then fixed Stevenson with a direct stare.

‘There is, however, one question that must be answered.’

‘And what is that?’ asked the writer, before suddenly erupting into a racking cough, which he finally stifled with the aid of a large white handkerchief.

‘My lungs crave the blessed weed,’ he murmured.

‘Well, they’ll have tae wait.’

No hint of any former intimacy, no matter how fleeting, was displayed on the inspector’s face, and it stirred the steel of Stevenson’s nature.

He cocked his head to the slant and Mulholland realised that he’d got the animals wrong. Neither dog nor horse – but a bird.

Magpie, jackdaw or crow. Bright, glittering eyes and always a deceptive move ahead.

‘What is the question, prithee, kind sir?’

To this gently mocking repetition, McLevy’s face changed not a jot, and Mulholland grasped that there was another conversation taking place, one that with all his experience and knowledge
of the inspector might still be a mystery.

‘Why was the corpse left at your door?’

Now it was the writer’s turn to stop in his tracks while McLevy pressed forward.

‘You admit that you knew her from the past?’

‘A long time ago.’

‘Time is a creature wi’ its own rules. And the other woman, Agnes Carnegie, murdered in exactly the same fashion, a piece o’ bible page stuffed in her gob, she worshipped at St
Stephen’s Church where your own mother kneels to pray.’

Robert Louis desired a cigarette most fervently, but he could not refuse the challenge.

‘You see a connection between the two?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘And you think I may be the bridge between – the bridge this murderer walks upon?’

Mulholland looked up at Queen Victoria – like himself she was listening intently.

‘Again, it’s possible. Is there nothing more you can tell us of Mary Dougan?’ asked the inspector.

‘Only what I have said before. She was part of a different life.’

Both men sat perfectly still.

‘Of course it might all be coincidence,’ remarked the writer finally. ‘In the long process of time.’

‘I’m not a great believer in coincidence.’

‘Neither am I. Unless it suits me.’

Stevenson smiled wryly. McLevy nodded assent to that.

A soft knock at the door and on the inspector’s call, Ballantyne entered. He kept his eyes carefully averted from their famous guest, and in fact was one of the few at the station who had
noticed him being sneaked in at the back.

A man who tracks the movement of scuttling insects is hard to sidle past. Also he had been given a task suited to a particular talent for discrimination.

‘Ye told me tae report anything of import amongst the sick bits, sir?’

Indeed Ballantyne had been handed the evidence bag and told to exercise his forensic capabilities.

‘I found this.’

He proudly unwrapped a piece of tissue paper to display a small fragment of material.

It was scarlet in colour.

Mulholland leant over from his great height and made an educated guess.

‘Could be a piece of . . . a favour.’

‘The students?’ queried Stevenson alertly.

‘They . . . may have a hand in it somewhere,’ muttered the inspector. ‘Hard tae tell. All things are possible.’

This had brought McLevy’s thoughts back to an uneasy terrain, so he laid them aside for the moment.

‘Ye’ve done well, Ballantyne. Away ye go now.’

But as the constable reached the door, another call.

‘Ballantyne!’

McLevy nodded towards Stevenson and then to the fragment on the desk.

‘Silence is golden, eh?’

The young man stiffened with pride or outrage, his birthmark pulsing in the throat.

‘Not a word will pass my lips, sir.’

However, he could not then resist, since he had earned a modicum of praise, taking part in what he perceived to be the grander scheme of things.

He turned back and addressed Stevenson as if on equal footing.

‘I liked
Treasure Island.
We don’t have any pirates in Leith, though. Not any more.’

Robert Louis nodded sagely. ‘And which is your favourite passage, sir?’

‘When the boy was in the barrel.’

‘What kind of barrel?’ asked Stevenson, to test the mettle of this admirer.

‘Apple. Jist as well it wasnae herring.’

One of the constable’s oddly placed remarks, where a man was none too sure whether to take literal or ironic import.

Having delivered his plaudit, Ballantyne finally found the way out.

Stevenson caught a moment of humour between the other two policemen as the door closed.

‘A valuable helper,’ he remarked.

‘He has his moments,’ Mulholland replied.

The writer suddenly experienced a shaft of pure addiction that sent him bolt upright; a wrench of desire that took him out of this world into another.

It is often so with smokers. As if part of their body is elsewhere. In thrall to Madame Nicotine.

‘If there is nothing more at present, then I shall bid you farewell, gentlemen,’ he announced with some force.

‘Aye. Ye need your wee indulgence, eh my mannie?’

‘Indulgences are what the Pope sells,’ snapped back Stevenson.

He rose, strode to the door and then, struck by a thought, turned to face the inspector.

‘This killer – is a picture forming in your mind?’

Mulholland was impressed by the tenor of that question; it was a side of McLevy not many perceived, but Stevenson had instinctively grasped the workings of that odd intelligence.

The inspector gave this query serious consideration.

‘He is a man – obsessed. But concealed. And cunning. His obsession may be yourself. What you represent. Or some-thing else completely, I do not yet know.’

The words touched a vein of thought that had been plaguing Robert Louis regarding those he had once considered close to him but who now were not so.

‘Might it be . . . a jealousy of fame?’

‘All things are possible,’ was again the response. ‘But he is – separated. Apart from himself, even. You will never know to look at him. Such killers are hard tae
fathom.’

‘Like Jekyll and Hyde?’ Mulholland threw in suddenly.

‘Marcus Aurelius,’ the writer replied, ‘held that the arts merely imitate natural forms. Not the opposite.’

McLevy grinned and abruptly banged the desk, throwing Roach’s immaculately assembled inkwells out of true.

‘Aye. You pair are far too langheidit for me!’

He let out a whoop of laughter, as if some tension had been released and pointed at Stevenson.

‘We’ll try tae keep our own secret and get you out of here without a soul seeing save Ballantyne.’

‘I thank you for that.’

‘And you – Mister Stevenson – must make sure that not one of your household breathes a word.’

‘It will be done.’

‘It had better be. If this case breaks, we’ll have the press delving intae every orifice.’

The inspector scowled at that notion and looked down, as if Sim Carnegie might yet shelter in some intestinal duct.

‘I would appreciate the privacy,’ said Stevenson soberly. ‘I have a father to bury.’

‘We all have our duties,’ McLevy retorted dryly. ‘Now – there’s a hansom cab rank at the back of the station. Ye can puff yoursel’ tae death all the way
home.’

Robert Louis nodded meekly enough and made for the door, but the inspector had not quite called it a day.

‘One thing more. The bible page. It was ripped from a holy tome that Agnes Carnegie was taking home tae repair before she met up wi’ the devil. Guess the owner of that Good
Book?’

‘Someone of a religious bent?’

‘The minister of St Stephen’s church. Just round the corner, eh?’

Stevenson frowned in thought. Indeed it would seem there was a malevolent convergence – was he the centre where all roads met, or was it just the writer trying to pull all threads
together?

As he made finally to leave, the inspector had yet one more straw to lay upon the camel’s back.

‘And you, my mannie – you being such a clever bugger wi’ your Roman emperors – see if ye might delve back and find something that might help wi’ this
investigation.’

Stevenson turned to grin.

‘All things are possible.’

But then his face changed in memory.

‘Mary Dougan. She was a bonny girl.’

With that he was out the door to follow Mulholland.

For a moment McLevy pondered deeply.

If there were an informer at the station, as had happened when Sim Carnegie finessed them with finding out about the white favour on his own mother’s corpse, keeping the enquiry in
hugger-mugger would be a hard task.

But he had his own thoughts on that.

The inspector glowered up at Queen Victoria as if she were personally responsible for all this, and then swept out of Roach’s office to march through the main body of the station, paying
no heed to the respectful silence greeting his entrance. He then disappeared into the cold room.

Mary Dougan was still dead.

Her face did not seem so bonny now.

She was a good-natured soul and, as far as he knew, had never wittingly done a single person harm.

See where it gets you.

Jean Brash leant back and let an envious wind blow through her hair so that it flew like a standard trailing behind as the coach clattered noisily in the Sabbath silence.

They had gone hell for leather through Leith Links, found their way to Bonnington Road, and then hammered along Henderson Row, as she revelled in the freedom a wee blink of sun could grant a
woman in sore need.

Angus had been instructed to haul back the top of the carriage, give the cuddies a good skelp, and off they went.

‘Whee-hee!’ shouted the owner of the Just Land in a most unladylike fashion, causing her companion Hannah Semple to shake her head in a
nae good will come of this
manner, a
phrase she often thought might look well on her tombstone.

In contrast to Jean’s vivid lavender dress ensconced inside a cream coat, Hannah was dressed in dowdy hues, with a hat shaped not unlike a dropped scone, that she clung onto grimly as the
wind pegged wickedly at her body. On the Links, Jean’s own hat, which took after a French cake, near whipped off her head and she had taken advantage to pull out the pins, loose it from her
head and give best to nature.

In truth she knew not why her spirits were so high – perhaps it was the success of repelling boarders at the bawdy-hoose – those cries of pain echoed yet in her joyful ears –
or just the fact that the sun had managed to fight its way through the clouds to bring a moment of luminosity to the browbeaten stone of the city, but she felt a rush of elation not even the
thought of McLevy’s boiled dumpling of a face could spoil.

Even Angus sneakily extracted from his pocket one of the sugar lumps he kept for the horses and crunched it in his teeth with what passed for Aberdonian abandon.

They had swung up sharp left from Henderson Row, heading for Queen Street, where Jean planned to veer to the right and confront the Castle.

She never failed to thrill at the mass of rock that looked as if it had been deposited there by a giant hand, and nursed a secret childlike fear that one night it would take off like a rocket
firework and speed off into darkness, never to be seen again.

But not today!

‘Faster, Angus! Pit some beef intae it,’ she called loudly, as Hannah winced.

Sometimes Jean went back to the good old days, which as far as Hannah was concerned were the bad old days where murder and mayhem broke out before your eyes if not under your very feet. That
stramash wi’ the Scarlet Runners had got the mistress’s blood boiling – God knows where it would all end up, but the woman was
steamin’
wi’ tomfoolery.

It didnae help that she had no-one in her bed at this minute. Her last lover, a handsome and eminent surgeon, had been in the habit of describing in grisly detail the workings of his latest
operations upon the gall bladder. This, as Jean told Hannah, may have set the man’s corpuscles moving, but did very little for hers.

It had been a clean cut.

He might return to his wife and gall bladders.

The coach suddenly jolted to a halt, as Angus pulled hard on the reins. They had encountered a crowd of folk newly out of St Stephen’s Church; not an uncovered head to be seen, even
amongst the weans. The scene was like something out of a moral tract, as the congregation gazed at Jean and she looked back at them.

A shaft of bright sun played lasciviously with the tousled locks of her red hair, her white skin shone like a beacon of temptation, and the green eyes sparkled with a fire that few loins in that
gathering had ever experienced.

As the shut faces of the women froze to a rigid righteousness and some of their husbands, who may have known Jean’s bill of fare a little more closely than they might concede, shuffled
behind to avoid scrutiny, the imp of mischief possessed her and she called out a name to a face in the crowd, known from previous exploits.

‘Lieutenant Roach – isn’t it a beautiful day?’

A hiss escaped the lips of Jonas Gibbons.
Harlot!

Roach’s face at first went puce then drained to a putty white. He seemed to be the object of all eyes, especially the uxorial pair on his immediate left.

Jonas Gibbons’s strong hand gripped Roach’s upper arm as if to restrain him from leaping into the carriage and driving off in answer to Jean’s daemonic sexual invitation.

For indeed the woman was the embodiment of the siren song, and the minister’s face registered anger and disgust that she should thus profane the Sabbath Day.