Nor Will He Sleep (33 page)

Damned if he knew.

Damned if he did not.

Time would tell.

Who was the figure?

Life – or death?

And what was it searching out?

Stevenson shrugged on a burgundy velvet jacket, though his feet were encased in rather large, shapeless slippers that had once belonged to the man of the house, borrowed by nature of the sudden
infirmity, that flapped side to side to render him a duck waddling to market.

That was, however, better. He had caught sight of himself in a long mirror. Skin and bones but upright.

To celebrate he pulled out a thin cigarette he had rolled just before catastrophe struck, and as he wandered to the window, he lit up, luxuriating in the silence of the house.

And the pure emptiness.

A drag of scented tobacco, though not too deep, just enough to tickle the innards.

And yes – he was still standing. Wavering, but ready for a very small adventure.

Such as staying upright.

Robert Louis smiled at that idea, drew in a deeper drag, coughed just to restore further normality, and gazed from the window at the infidel sunshine that dared to lay a faithless sheen upon
Heriot Row.

Where was the rain?

Where was the dark cloud?

The tombstones of New Calton surely would resent being so presented – naked to the light.

But the family vault would shroud his father’s coffin, lest the sun stripe a natural pattern through the blossoming trees. A gloomy but righteous cradle.

Just then a covered carriage came into view, with a single horse clip-clopping quietly in the vacant street.

The driver looked up to the window and seemed not at all surprised to see the ghostly apparition staring back.

He waved something in the air. It was a book, quite large, and olive green with fine ribbed cloth.

Robert Louis recognised not only the tome, but a promise made. The coachman was also familiar and equally welcome to the eye, as he smiled an invitation.

Stevenson nodded eagerly and walked away from the window, most carefully down the stairs, along the narrow hall, opened the front door and stepped into the unknown.

In his father’s slippers.

The story Mrs McWhirter had told Ballantyne’s mother, who had told Ballantyne, who told Mulholland, was as follows.

The auld woman had some days before come across Agnes Carnegie sitting in one of the side vestries of the church, with a satisfied smile upon her face.

It shamed McWhirter to confess to the nurse that she did not like the woman, aye sneaking her fingers into every wee nook and cranny.

Agnes had obviously discovered something that had given her great pleasure, but she would not share the secret, content to say that a book once found, cannot be put aside should sin have been
revealed.

But then, as if the pleasure had spilled into other hidden crevices, she confided at length to McWhirter that she no longer believed in the Christian redemption of her errant son, and knew that
Sim only waited for her to die so that he could lay his greedy hands on her hard-earned money.

Sons were not to be trusted.

Agnes had taken precautions that this would not happen, and her deceitful offspring would get what he deserved.

That very night, however, Agnes herself received, if not what she deserved, then perhaps an enactment of the Scots saying,

Ye can never see whit’s comin’ roon the corner.

This pithy adage was meant to indicate the unexpected and inexorable working of Fate, though in the Carnegie case what came round the corner was a vicious and violent murder.

Ballantyne’s earnest but laborious rendition was attended with mounting impatience by Mulholland, but the young man had the last word, or rather his mother had, or rather auld Mrs
McWhirter had, when she repeated the final statement of Agnes.

The young constable delivered the words, sitting at his desk in the station, birth-mark radiating as if to defy contradiction.

The voice of God has warnt me no’ tae hesitate or scruple. And I aye listen tae the voice of God. Whit I have done, I have hidden well.

And now Mulholland was back in the grim little lodging of Agnes Carnegie, this time searching with more attention and a fierce resolve.

‘Whit are we looking for, exactly?’ questioned Ballantyne, who had been brought along for luck.

‘Paper. A sheet probably. Folded, I have no doubt. Concealed until she could get it to the lawyer.’

‘Lawyer?’

Mulholland did not yet reply directly, muttering to himself as he took each drawer from the rickety chest, brusquely emptied it of clothing, then turned it over to make certain nothing was taped
beneath.

‘When the inspector and I first saw this room, we thought it might well have been searched, but for what? And then, though Carnegie has been boasting about his inheritance, I felt in my
bones he was making noise to pump up his own balloon. Now I know the reason.’

He moved to a little wooden box where the lock had been slightly skewed and began to leaf through the church papers one by one, shaking each as if some revelation might fall to the floor.

‘The reason? A will. If Agnes made a new will and cut the legs from under him – Jean Brash left a note that Sim is in a fathom deep to the moneylenders – Mister Carnegie would
have a different headline to write.’

There was one threadbare rug in the middle of the floor, which Mulholland pulled aside and turned over, but nothing was attached to the backing side.

Ballantyne watched. He had never been on an official search before and did not wish to miss a thing.

There was much to observe, as Mulholland painstakingly examined the floorboards uncovered by the rug. None seemed loose, even when levered at by his trusty penknife.

He looked at Ballantyne’s solemn face.

‘If you were an old woman,’ he asked suddenly. ‘Where would you hide something?’

The young constable gave this great thought and, just before Mulholland despaired of hearing an answer this side of Christmas, responded as follows.

‘My granny went funny in the head.’

It was no wonder
, was the unkind thought.

But Ballantyne had more to relate.

‘She hid things. It was aye in a place that meant something to her. That she took tae heart.’

The voice of God has warnt me no’ tae hesitate or scruple. And I aye listen tae the voice of God. Whit I have done, I have hidden well.

Mulholland brought these words of Agnes to mind as he looked at the two holy pictures; one of the sorrowful, kind Redeemer, the other of God Almighty casting those unredeemed into hell.

Father and son.

He indicated both to Ballantyne.

‘Take your pick.’

The constable creased his eyes in deep thought.

‘From whit ye hear, Mistress Carnegie wasnae much in the way of forgiveness.’

God it was then.

Mulholland, with due reverence, removed the Creator of All Things from the wall and turned the picture over, as the younger man came over to join him.

It did not look promising.

The back was dusty, with a brown paper wrapping gnarled and warped by time.

‘My Granny was dead cunning,’ said Ballantyne. ‘She’d never leave a new sign. Aye stick things back by spit and detritus. Wait!’

His sharp eyes had detected the merest flicker of movement under the brown paper.

They both waited until the curled edge of one corner lifted infinitesimally and a very small cockroach crawled out into the light.

‘It might be an omen,’ said Ballantyne. ‘Cockroaches are curious creatures. The Egypts swore by them.’

Mulholland once more unsheathed his penknife and carefully scraped the insect to safety, while the young constable nodded approval, hoping he’d found another convert to the cause.

Then the knife was inserted down the edge of the wrapping and gentle pressure applied, causing the whole side to lift back.

Behind it, and also, incidentally, behind the wrathful face of God who guarded the other vantage, was a sheet of carefully folded good quality vellum pepper.

As Mulholland shook it, a few more cockroaches tumbled out to scurry for safer refuge.

Ballantyne whistled.

‘Lucky it wasnae beetles. They eat paper. Not out of badness, mind you – jist the mandibles.’

This piece of arthropodal folklore slipped past Mulholland as he carefully opened the paper to read therein.

Little could be gauged from his countenance and the young man, worried it had all been in vain, cast a glance at the merciful face of Jesus.

‘We’ve still got the Son,’ he said. ‘If all else fails.’

It had been an exhilarating ride, short and circular, that brought them back not far from where they’d started.

Stevenson loved carriages. He loved being safely enclosed, yet with an open window on the world, puffing tobacco smoke that trailed behind like that of a steam train and occasionally waving a
lordly hand at pedestrians.

Indeed, as they had sped past the Queen Street Gardens, he had been amused at the sight of a man in some kind of hurry, tripping over the lead of a fashionable lady’s dog and sprawling
headlong on the pavement.

Accidents will happen.

He had been conducted from a small, hidden entrance at the back door to the catacombs of a place he knew only too well, and deposited, after the door was unlocked, with the utmost courtesy in a
cell-like, windowless room that might have served a monk for existence.

He had, thereafter, been seated at a small table where, ceremoniously, the olive green edition was presented.

Stevenson signed his name with a flourish.

During all this, his driver, guide to the underworld, had uttered not a word and Robert Louis had been delighted to join in the silence.

This elaborate healing ritual of mime was to be welcomed after the lethal images of his dream.

The signed book was removed and his guide then moved to some concealed corner shelving to bring back a gold embossed volume, which he laid in front of the writer.

It was large, heavy, the front cover engraved and scrolled with elegant designs, but what immediately caught Stevenson’s attention were his initials, elaborately worked into the centre of
the piece.

R. L. S.

The silent conductor pulled back a curtain, laid some vestments over his arm, fetched something from the corner, withdrew and exited, closing the door behind him to lock it with a quiet metallic
sound.

More silence.

R. L. S.

The writer ran his fingers over the cover to trace the raised letters that depicted his identity; the whole episode had taken on a mysterious, dreamlike quality, but when he glanced at the
misshapen slippers at the end of his skinny ankles, reality reasserted itself.

Therefore he opened the book.

And perused with growing amazement.

A collection of press cuttings, writings, excerpts from the earliest days when the young Robert Louis was making his way in the world, hand-written copies of his qualification to the bar, even
election to the Speculative Society, each meticulously noted with time and place. And then, as his craft took root, a list of every publication up to the present day. Fascinating in a forensic
fashion. Stevenson laid out, stripped of flesh, bones arranged in an orderly structure.

As if the skeleton had meaning.

An obscure resentment began to fester within him – the writer does not necessarily wish himself to be the subject of dissection.

He is the one who looks over the shoulder, like Long John’s parrot.

And yet who could resist the care and scholarship that had gone into the labour?

So, turn the page.

Photographs from the papers, drawings, articles as fame slid round him like a serpent, especially when
Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde
danced the Paddington Two-step.

All of it seemed so consequential and to some plan compared to the chaos and maelstrom of his life.

How absurd it is to try to impose order upon chaos.

Chaos is natural.

As these and other thoughts flooded his mind, Stevenson was aware of a growing unease.

Was he being manipulated? An unwilling player as he himself, the impatient youthful creator, had once pulled and pushed the paper puppets from Skelt’s Juvenile Drama?

Dead and rotten. That’s the ticket.

He continued to leaf through the Great Book in the monk’s cell, only halting progress to light an accompanying cigarette.

The very last page had but one photograph.

A strange and sulky boy gawped out past the camera, his hand resting awkwardly on another’s shoulder, but this person had been cut out, so that only the lad remained.

Himself at nine years.

The excised human other, his father Thomas.

‘I stole it, I’m afraid.’

First words spoken. An affected drawl.

The guide had returned, the click of the opening lock lost upon Stevenson, rapt in study.

The figure had not yet entered fully, staying in the shadow of the doorway, his voice his presence so far.

‘I was in your house. Official business. No-one was watching and I could not resist.’

Yes, now Robert Louis remembered. That image in a small stand-up frame had always rested upon the piano.

Not any more.

His mother would have missed it no doubt, but would have blamed a careless maid.

‘Why did you – sunder the photograph?’

‘Because the man concerned was not you.’

Silence.

The guide’s tone changed.

‘If you please – look inside the front cover. Behind the facing page.’