Read Shadow of the Serpent Online
Authors: David Ashton
Shadow of the Serpent (14 page)
When boys go first to bed,
They step into their voluntary graves.
GEORGE HERBERT, ‘Mortification’
And looking down at the dead body of Frank Brennan, this one hour later, he had to acknowledge the accuracy of the constable’s observation.
It was common knowledge, even the lieutenant would have heard, that McLevy had fingered the big Irishman as being morally if not physically responsible for Sadie Gorman’s death. Roach must have enjoyed the thought of the inspector suffering, he would most earnestly hope, terrible qualms of guilt over the result of his machinations.
McLevy did indeed feel a certain queasiness in the pit of his stomach but rather than pangs of conscience he would more put the attribution down to the stench in this grimy box of a room.
There was the memory, however, of the appeal in the big man’s eyes, when he had tried to make amends by revealing that someone, so Sadie told him, had been watching at her and Brennan had paid no mind.
As McLevy, in turn, had paid no mind to that pathetic effort of atonement.
Frank Brennan had died unshriven. The inspector would have to live with it.
He brought his mind round to the present. One question only. Was the death natural?
He gazed down at the pasty white face of the corpse, still dressed in shirt and trousers and lying where the man had, no doubt drunkenly, fallen on to the mattress. At least he’d managed to kick off his shoes; the Irishman’s big toe stuck comically out of the frayed and holed sock.
Was the death natural, accidental as it were? Was it suicide? Was it murder? From his examination, he thought he knew the answer. Brennan’s eyes stared open. He reached forward with his fingers and gently closed them.
The door opened and Mulholland entered, his head near touching the ceiling of the narrow room.
‘I’ve seen more space in a prison cell,’ he announced.
The constable then fell silent. He was still in the huff. McLevy took note and sighed.
‘I realise I have caused offence with my accusation of
yourself
being a clipe. I now take it back. You may be many things, constable, and undoubtedly are, but a clipe is not one of them.’
This, from the inspector, was the equivalent of the legendary Ashes of Contrition, and Mulholland, realising such, bowed his head in dignified acceptance then delivered.
‘I spoke to everyone in the house, never met such a
disreputable
assembly in my whole life, ye could not believe one single word spoken. And Biddy wants the room back.’
‘She told me that earlier.’
To Mulholland’s previous annoyance he had been dispatched to question the rag-bag collection of labourers, sailors and
one-eyed
trollops that made up the lodging-house inhabitants.
McLevy had meanwhile closeted himself to interview Biddy before chasing her out to annoy the constable. She had followed Mulholland from room to room, complaining loudly of the inspector’s lack of esteem for a decent respectable woman, the like of which she fondly imagined herself to be.
‘Still on about that, eh? Is she going tae fumigate the place?’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’
‘Well, she’ll have to wait,’ grunted McLevy. ‘This may be the scene of a murder.’
‘Murder? There’s not a mark on the man, he died natural, unless you think poison?’
‘No. I do not think poison. See the lock on the door over there?’
Mulholland shook his head. ‘But the door was ajar late this morning, the reason Biddy stuck her head in to discover the dead body. And let out a fearful scream she told me.’
‘Aye, so she did. That must have been something tae hear.’
Mulholland still didn’t move to the door, so McLevy indicated to the only other piece of furniture in the place, a spindly
three-legged
chair drawn up near to the dirty mattress, which lay on the floor, acting this moment as bed and bier. On the seat of the chair lay a large key.
‘What does that tell you?’
‘Brennan came in drunk, fell to bed and forgot to secure the lock,’ said the constable.
‘Yet Biddy said he was fierce particular about that, she was surprised tae find the door pushing open.’
‘That’s true enough,’ said Mulholland rather snidely. ‘He’d be in fear of his life what with you telling the criminal fraternity of how he betrayed one of their own.’
McLevy ignored the barb. ‘He kept the key by his bed, close to hand. Drunk or not, I don’t see him forgetting.’
He pointed silently at the door and Mulholland crossed
without
further comment to crouch down and examine the lock.
‘Well?’ demanded the inspector.
The mechanism was black-encrusted, a wonder the thing worked at all, but there were two fine scratches, just newly made by the looks of it, of a type the constable had seen before in his travels. He looked over at the other.
‘Lockpicks, d’ye think?’ said McLevy.
‘Could be,’ replied the constable slowly. ‘Hard to tell, but … could be.’
He thought further. ‘However, if crack open and enter why not secure when leaving, unless …?’
Something one of the lodgers had told him, Archie Galbraith, a retired cooper who still held on to some vestige of dignity while drinking himself to death on what he used to watch being put inside the barrel.
‘I got up in the middle of the night, tae answer the call of nature, ye
ken? Dark. But my aim was good, right in the middle of the bucket. I heard a door creak, shouted out my name, “Archie Galbraith here!”in case it was somebody with drink looking for good company. Went and looked, near knocked the damn bucket arse-over. The hall was empty, naebody on hand, but I could have sworn the door tae the outside close had just shut. A draught of cauld air. Gives ye a terrible thirst, man. Cauld air.’
‘It was in my mind to tell you, sir,’ he said as McLevy gave him a basilisk stare after this was related. ‘But the old fellow’s so far gone, you couldn’t put credence on his words.’
‘Yet his call would interrupt, ye’d have to get out the door quick. Intae the close. That would explain why there was not the time to use the skeleton keys to lock it up again, after the deed was done.’
‘What deed?’ asked the constable in some exasperation. McLevy had his
I know a secret
face on, a most irritating sight to behold. ‘There’s not a mark on the fellow!’
‘Oh yes there is,’ said McLevy.
He signalled the constable over and they both knelt down by the body as if in prayer.
McLevy tilted the man’s head back with some difficulty, to reveal the neck. On each side, just under the jawbone, was a small bruise.
‘I near missed it myself,’ he muttered, ‘though I expect the eagle eye of Dr Jarvis would have brought it to our notice.’
Mulholland peered closer, in truth he wasn’t sure why the inspector was putting such weight upon what looked, to his eyes, innocuous enough.
‘It’s hardly a death wound, sir. Could be the result of a fall or anything really. Louse bites even, and the man scratching.’
McLevy looked at him as if perplexed by such monumental ignorance, then remembering that the two had but presently repaired the rent in their professional rapport, heaved a
magnanimous
sigh and, in the manner of Moses on the Mount, revealed what he considered to be the imprint of God’s incontrovertible evidence.
‘Thumb marks,’ he said. ‘Pressing each side on the carotid artery. Unconsciousness is instant. An eastern practice, attributed to the Thuggee system. Assassins. Indian, by nature. Followers of Kali, the Goddess of Destruction.’
‘How would you know all that, inspector?’
The constable seemed unaware of the implied insult in his question, so McLevy, not for the first time, decided to give him benefit of doubt.
‘The aforesaid practice was almost inflicted upon me by an opium runner who had a den by the dockside and specialised in getting his customers doped to the eyeballs, practising his black art to knock them out, then killing them, robbing the bodies and dumping the cadavers weighted down with rocks through a trap-door at the back into the sea where they nourished the denizens of the deep. Coal-fish and crabs mostly. Bottom feeders.’
McLevy had a sudden vivid memory of the man leaning over him, face contorted in a hideous delight, sliding his thumbs up each side of the neck.
‘I had been sent in under guise of an opium user, by dint of my complexion. I think Lieutenant Moxey, my superior officer at the time, was trying to get rid of me.’
‘Did you have to puff the pipe?’ Mulholland asked eagerly, fascinated by this racy anecdote.
‘I did not inhale,’ was the stern response.
Although, mind you, there was a certain heightened aspect to his recollection. McLevy could have sworn the man had a tattooed serpent on his face, but at the trial it had mysteriously vanished.
‘And did he kill you, sir?’
‘Obviously not.’
‘No. I mean. Sir. How did you effect escape?’
Again the memory, the thumbs tightened, the yellow teeth bared in a murderous smile, then the man shot up over McLevy’s head like a cork out of a bottle and landed with a crash on two far-gone addicts who lay peacefully behind them in the smoke-filled, opium-scented den of iniquity.
Case concluded. Of course Moxey took the credit.
‘I used a technique,’ said the inspector gravely, ‘called Kissing the Clouds.’
‘Is that Chinese?’
‘No. It comes from Leith. It is adapted from the leg
movement
of a hanged felon. I’ll show it you sometime.’
Back tae business. He looked down at the body.
‘Once Brennan was safely insensible, the killer finished off the job.’
McLevy anticipated Mulholland’s next question by picking up the dirty, ripped pillow from the mattress and displaying a reddish stain which lay in the centre of the cloth.
‘This mark is recent, even still a wee touch damp. If you examine Brennan’s mouth … well go ahead, examine the damned thing!’
This sudden flash of temper indicated to Mulholland that all was back to normal. He peeled the lips of the corpse apart, peered inside and winced at the rotting stench.
‘Worse than a dead badger,’ he muttered.
The inspector smiled happily. ‘The by-product of gingivitis; observe the gums and you will see another result of the inflammation.’
The whole mouth was in a terrible state but the gums were especially caked with smears of dried blood where the irritation had wreaked havoc.
Mulholland nodded. It made a sense of sorts. He let the mouth fall shut with a hollow clack.
‘The man was potentially smothered,’ he said.
‘Exactly! And the blood in his mouth left marks where the pad was pressed.’ McLevy’s eyes gleamed.
‘And I’ll tell you one more on top of that. It was not a member of the fraternity, they’d just cut his throat and to hell with it. This is professional. High class.’
‘There’s not much in the way of actual proof, sir. A wee bit scratch, a couple of bruises and a stain.’
‘Uhuh. So, you say,’ replied the inspector.
The unspoken question in McLevy’s mind was, of course, why kill the man anyway? Was it some sort of … clean sweep?
The door abruptly flew open and the squat form of Biddy Lapsley stood framed, arms folded. She opened a mouth like the gates of hell.
‘I want my room back,’ she bellowed. ‘This man’s been dead long enough.’
Then. Astonishingly. Tears started to flow down the veined and mottled face.
‘I had hopes for him,’ she muttered brokenly. ‘He was such a fine big specimen. Meat on the bone. He put his lips upon my hand in the hall. A real gentleman. I could have raised him high.’
The policemen looked back at the corpse. It showed no sign of resurrection.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
WILLIAM BLAKE,
Songs of Experience
Sir Henry Ponsonby had been in the Queen’s service these nineteen years. He’d arrived as an equerry to the Prince Consort but his exuberance, intelligence and good nature had quickly endeared him to Victoria so much that she almost at once took him over.
For the last ten years he’d been her private secretary; he’d heard the bell of St Paul’s toll the death of her Prince Albert and listened through a door as the Queen cried like a soul bereft. He had seen her through the John Brown scandal, various illnesses, various wars and various threats of abdication if she did not get her own way.
When Victoria became interested in spiritualism after the death of her beloved husband, Ponsonby had even taken part in the darkness, but at a mock Household séance had disgraced himself by laughing so hard that the tears came through the obituary section of
The Times
, it being part of a newspaper blindfold he had been obliged to wear at the occasion.
Risen through the ranks. First a colonel, then hailed as general and now knighted. But, in his mind somewhere, he was still a decent soldier. Loyal to the bone.
Eliza, as he irreverently called the Queen to others, had valued him as a friend, confidant, and rock upon which impetuous seas might break in vain, most of them being the seas of her own temper when thwarted. But value him, she had most dearly. Until now.
Now he was outside a ring of iron. For he possessed a grievous fault, a terrible sin which had been raised to confront him like a spectre. He was a Liberal.
Of course, he’d always been of that persuasion, proud to be so, pepper the court with the cannon fire of some common sense and a smidgeon of humour. But what had once been regarded with affection, indulgence and, God help him,
sometimes
even acted upon, was now viewed in the words of one of the Queen’s own telegrams to no less than the Dean of
Westminster
as ‘opposition proclivities’ to be
corrected
.
His own wife Mary was also under suspicion but she, God bless her, threatened to go around with a mysterious look on her face as if in hourly communication with the forces of darkness.
Ponsonby could not afford that luxury. He was a servant of Her Majesty, once a most intimate servant, now excluded and distrusted. The Queen had been poisoned against him and he knew the man responsible. As Ponsonby fell, so the other rose in her affections, higher and higher.
Insinuations smeared his good name. That he had carried messages to the enemy, not true, not true, in the midst of Tory plots and opposition counter-plots he took no sides, he steered the middle course.
Much good it did him. He was no longer trusted. It was like a witch hunt. The court of Elizabeth Regina had set the treacherous template for the present one.
Well, mustn’t bleat and moan, one would battle on
somehow
but it was a damned hard grind.
He looked out of the windows of Osborne House. As happened quite often in the Isle of Wight, there was a fine mist of rain swirling and falling. It was the kind of drizzle that could soak you to the skin. Sly. Insinuating.
Two figures were in the garden. One, tall, emaciated, like a funeral director, by God, held a large black umbrella to protect both himself and the other who sat on a small garden chair and worked busily at a border of flowers.
Yes, he had her under protection all right, humbugged to such an extreme that she detested and feared anyone with connection to the Liberal cause. The very word Liberal, in its essence generous and noble-minded, had been turned into a leprous epithet.
Gladstone in particular was to be reviled and shunned as if he carried that deadly plague. The mere mention of his name caused the Queen to shudder as if someone had walked across her grave.
Ponsonby’s pale, rather protruberant eyes creased in pain at his predicament as he gazed down at the instrument of his fall from favour. The funeral director. Blast and damn the man.
What was that play? His wife had dragged him to it,
Hamlet
, that was it, lasted an eternity, but there was a moment when the player king fellow had poured poison into someone’s ear. Fatal. Yes. Shakespeare was nobody’s fool.
As the rain smudged its way down the window pane not quite blotting out the view below, the secretary’s lips moved in what was either imprecation or prayer.
In the garden, Benjamin Disraeli swivelled his head to see the pale face jerk back at the upstairs window.
Yes, the fellow was still spying, but Ponsonby could not discern the words exchanged, not unless he had left his ears under the rhododendron bushes.
Normally this observation would have a tinge of humour, but the prime minister did not feel humorous today. He felt like a hunted animal.
His umbrella twitched. Benjamin Disraeli hated the damp. He yearned for a perfect climate and never attained such.
He could almost feel the lining of his bronchial tubes thickening by the second. Another coating of moist slime, courtesy of the English weather.
A drop of water trickled down the hook of his nose and dripped off the end. Prospects indeed were dismal in all senses, marooned on this benighted island.
Yet, if he was being candid with himself, although he only usually used honesty as a façade to confuse his enemies, he had somewhere welcomed her summons to Osborne.
Ostensibly it was to consult him on various matters of state before she left for Germany to attend the confirmation of her motherless granddaughters, diphtheria having removed her beloved Princess Alice some two years before, but really she wished to be reassured by his company.
The nation was voting. In England they were now at the polls and Scotland would follow some days later. A strange and staggered system but God guide their hand and, if not, Disraeli, his representative upon earth, was her man in a crisis. He would bring the ship home.
Disraeli’s lips quirked a mixture of chagrin and bitter amusement. Yes, what a colossus he was to be sure. Had Count Bismarck not hailed him at the Congress of Berlin
as der alte Jude, das ist der Mann?
Of course the Iron Chancellor was somewhat in his cups at the time and ballooned with flatulence, but it was a
compliment
to be savoured, was it not?
He remembered the scene well. Bismarck awash with champagne and black beer, stuffing himself with seven different kinds of sausage, and Disraeli himself wreathed in cigar smoke as a measure of protection against the flood of indelicate stories being poured by the chancellor into his isolated ears.
‘
Put not your trust in Princes,
’ Bismarck had also told him.
Ah, where would we be without the irony of God?
Another drip fell from his nose to earth. Back to the present. The election. Yes. The election. Well, well.
As for himself, he could do no more. The game was over. It was up to the country. Already, in England, they had begun to vote. The game was over.
In a strange way, at this very moment, he needed Victoria as much as she him.
They trusted each other as much as either of them could ever trust anyone. Lord Beaconsfield and the Queen.
He had arrived to find her flitting around in a state of almost hectic gaiety. She had immediately dragged him out to the garden and, wrapped in waterproofing, thick gloves to hand, was engaged in digging up some of his favourite flower, the wild primrose, which grew in abundance here.
For him to take home. To enjoy. In triumph.
Victoria struggled with some difficulty to rise from the low chair; between her growing plumpness and the myriad layers of clothing which encased the Royal person, to lever oneself up these days was a daunting endeavour.
Disraeli had the same problem. In their earlier days he thought nothing of throwing himself upon his knees and proclaiming his eternal loyalty to his Queen but now it would take a hoist to get him back on his feet.
He offered a spindly but chivalrous arm for her to lean on and, umbrella hovering overhead, escorted her to a garden table where she carefully packed the primroses and their earth into a shallow basket.
She looked up at him and smiled. Her small stolid form was in odd contrast to his attenuated frame.
‘I am so glad you prefer the primrose,’ she said.
‘It is all the better for being a touch wild, and so retains its beauty for a longer time,’ he replied.
As he smiled the skin stretched tight across his cheekbones like papyrus.
She worried over his health. ‘You smoke too many cigars, Mr Disraeli,’ she admonished.
‘All men have their vices.’ A cynical droop to the eyelids provoked her to laughter.
She spun, surprisingly nimble-footed, away from the sheltering umbrella into the lush perfection of Osborne’s immaculate lawn.
‘Your Majesty is unprotected, and runs the risk of saturation,’ he called as she whirled farther off.
‘Nonsense! It is only God’s rain,’ she replied sharply.
‘God rains on earth and the Queen in England,’ he punned a little riskily.
Her frown vanished and she laughed once more, trailing her heavy skirt through the wet grass like a child at play.
‘When I return from Baden-Baden, you will be once more prime minister, and we shall have a celebration. A masked ball perhaps, I shall arrive as Titania and you as Oberon.’
Disraeli regarded her fondly, but he understood the root cause of these extremities of spirit. Fear of the unknown. Ah well, adopt an earnest tone. Though what is earnest is not always true.
‘Indeed, ma’am, to the confusion of our enemies, we hope to have much cause for celebration.’
Reassured somewhat, she smiled, then looked upwards and clasped her hands together in supplication.
‘Observe, prime minister. The rain has stopped. It is an omen! Our diligence must be blessed!’
Disraeli peered out cautiously from under the still dripping shade. He was dressed in black and his resemblance to a crow was unmistakable.
He furled the umbrella, struck a pose as if it were a walking stick to hand, and responded to her fervour.
‘We shall prevail, ma’am. And I am reminded of something Your Majesty was gracious enough to confide in me in her letters. We must adopt a
high tone
at all times. William Gladstone will never be a man of the world.’
There was a element of self-parody in this bombast but the Queen seized upon the literal meaning.
‘There are tales he is a secret Papist and a … libertine!’ she exclaimed.
Disraeli smiled inwardly. Indeed Gladstone’s ‘rescue’ work amongst prostitutes had long been the most fertile source of innuendo, and if Beaconsfield had not actually given birth to these rumours, he, when they reached her ears, had certainly never contradicted them.
Over the years, he had made it his business to lace her thoughts with poison, wherever possible, as regards his bitter rival and, though he said it himself, he had made a splendid fist of it.
Fear gives rise to anger. Both can be manipulated. The art of politics.
Victoria brooded upon Gladstone’s faults.
‘He would
reduce
the empire. We must be prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other,
continually
. He would deny this. Moreover, he treats me like a public
function
! He is
worse
than the Russians!’
Her own words triggered off an alarm close to hysteria and she gazed at him with near-naked entreaty in her eyes, the previous comfort she had found in his assurances gone as if it had never been. Like the rain.
‘You must be my chief minister for ever. I demand it!’
He could not look her in the eyes. He felt he did not have the strength.
‘I am sure the people will choose wisely.’
‘But if they do not?’ she almost shrieked, then walked off abruptly to compose herself in a corner of the garden.
Indeed, thought Disraeli, if they do not, what could he offer her? His mind shifted to a conversation, held in a private club near St James’s Park. A private room, wreathed in cigar smoke, where he had sat with a man he had met barely half a dozen times. A man who moved in the higher, more secret, circles of power. Not yet at the top, but ambitious to be so. A man recommended.
It was not long after he had declared the election, and Disraeli was wondering if he had made a mistake.
They had spoken for near an hour and, at the end of it, the man had leant forward and said,
‘And how may I best serve the Queen?’
‘In whatever way you see fit,’
was Disraeli’s response.
No. He could not offer that. Best take refuge in whatever wit he might dredge up.
He walked across the grass, leant over, and confided.
‘With any luck, Your Majesty, after a resounding defeat,
Gladstone
will emigrate to Siberia and remain there like an extinct volcano. Forgotten and fossilised.’
Not very good and part-pilfered from a much wittier phrase he had once coined, but it was the best he could manage at short notice and it had the desired effect.
She nodded happily at such a prospect and seemed to have fully recovered her spirits.
Disraeli was anxious to repair inside. He was rather exhausted, his very bones were aching in this damp,
God-forsaken
universe and a glass of port wouldn’t go amiss.
But Victoria had one more surprise in store.
‘Can you command a waltz, Mr Disraeli?’ she asked.
For once the silver tongue was tied.
‘I – I – have done so at one time without causing offence or accident,’ he finally murmured.