Nor Will He Sleep (40 page)

They swindled her. Like a fool.

And the necklace was beyond price.

‘I near droont myself getting it back for you.’

‘Ye were after him for something else. The pearls were incidental!’

‘I still endit up near droont.’

‘And who brought coffee and sugar biscuits to your sick bed?’

Jean swirled her cup disparagingly.

‘Better brew than this peely-wally rubbish.’

McLevy, now launched, would not turn back.

‘What about when you were in the frame for murder – who got you out of that?’

‘The guilty party had knifed three people and thrown acid over one of my girls.’

‘So?’

‘So you were after him for something else!’

McLevy chewed resolutely on his gingerbread, but she was not finished either.

Women rarely are.

Finished.

‘And what about when you were shot in the belly? Who gave you the wee bit of paper where to find the man?’

‘You did. Inside a rotten apple, though.’

‘It wasnae rotten. Jist soft!’

In her vigorous response, the shawl-neck of her dress had separated and he saw to his surprise that she was wearing the very same pearl necklace. He also noted the lingering scar left by the
silver cane, just above her collarbone.

His healing eye ached all at once.

‘Whit’s the matter wi’ your face?’

‘I was just thinking. One way or another, we’ve been battered tae buggery right enough.’

‘True,’ said Jean thoughtfully. ‘No mercy.’

They looked at each other in silence before he pronounced judgement.

‘Whit a pair of shipwrecks, eh?’

McLevy’s aggrieved expression suddenly struck her as very comical and Jean began to laugh.

He looked even more aggrieved and this provoked a further explosion.

It must be said that her laughter was not at all ladylike. In fact it could have been mistaken for that of a tarry-breeks on the randan.

Whatever, it set McLevy off and he began to whoop in that odd fashion that always had an edge of menace.

The little waitress started to panic at the racket and darted into the kitchen, returning at speed, accompanied by the eponymous Miss Lavinia – a tall bony woman with lantern jaw and sour
disposition.

It put McLevy in mind of someone he knew only too well.

‘God Almighty,’ he muttered. ‘It’s the lieutenant in a bustle and corset.’

Off they went again into howling laughter and the tight-arsed, purse-lipped Edinburgh tearoom was shaken to the core, as if two lions had escaped from the zoo.

Then just as suddenly, they both stopped.

Jean because something had struck her deeply, and McLevy’s reason being that he had spotted Mulholland’s face gazing in through the window like a man staring into a goldfish
bowl.

The inspector muttered some excuse and made his way to the outside street.

‘How did ye know I was here?’ he asked, with no discernible trace of cordiality.

‘I approached your landlady and she said you had enquired of her after a decent tearoom. This was her recommendation.’

McLevy nodded. That made sense. But why was the constable chasing to his lodgings and furthermore looming over him in Princes Street?

‘Daniel Drummond,’ said Mulholland.

‘Whit of him?’

‘Bad blood between himself and Gregor Gillespie – leader of the Scarlets.’

‘A’ that stuff is over now.’

‘Not for them. A duel. Foils. Early this morning.’

‘But Drummond’s a champion!’

‘So it proved. Straight through the lungs. Gillespie’s at the hospital in a bad way.’

McLevy stroked where his moustache used to be.

‘You deal with it,’ he said.

‘I just thought since you’d been involved – ’

‘Is Drummond in the cells?’

‘He knows them well by now.’

‘You and the lieutenant sort the thing. It’s my day off.’

Mulholland looked past him into the tearoom where Jean sat in isolation.

‘Right enough. I’ll be on my way.’

And without more ado, his lanky frame strode like a giraffe down the street and out of sight.

McLevy thought for a moment about the look in Jessica’s eyes as she talked about her brother, and the darkness he had sensed in the young man’s soul.

Darkness will out.

Back he went and sat down.

‘Crime,’ he remarked. ‘Never at peace.’

‘What was it?’

‘Jist the usual. Could ye pour me another of that shilpit coffee?’

She did so.

He added three more sugar lumps and slurped noisily through his teeth.

Jean winced, but at least she was spared that drookit moustache.

‘So,’ she announced. ‘You desired my company?’

‘Uhuh.’

‘Well, you have it on hand.’

‘That I do.’

There was a long silence between the two while the tearoom babbled with exchanged inanities.

Her thoughts went back to when she’d been looking at Cupid in the garden and McLevy had asked her a question that had stopped her dead.

God knows what he’d been going through at the time, but she was buggered if she’d ask him about it now.

However Jean did have another subject in mind.

‘What about us, James?’ she asked quietly.

‘What about what?’

‘You know what I mean!’

He took a deep breath and named the unnamable.

‘Ye mean love, Jeanie?’

The wee dog Hamish lifted a sly leg under the table and urinated on the hem of his mistress’s garment.

‘Love is the very devil,’ said James McLevy.