Shadow of the Serpent (2 page)

McLevy stood in the cold room, watching Dr Jarvis plucking away at the dead body on the slab as if it were a chicken carcass. The police surgeon was a tall cadaverous man, with small watery eyes and long skinny fingers that poked and prodded while he whistled through his teeth.

The surgeon was, not to mince words, an overweening tangle of vanity, a veritable struntie who was passable at his job but not as masterly as his self-esteem would have folk believe.

Once, through his carelessness, he had caused a man’s death. A good man. A bad death. Of course Jarvis would deny it. Medical men, since the beginning of time, have known how to cover their own backsides.

‘Now see here, inspector,’ with his forceps he held a glistening shard up to the light, ‘I have a bone to pick with you.’

The surgeon whinnied at his own wit but it faded like a shaft of sun in Stornoway.

For many years he’d tried to get under McLevy’s skin, but the fellow was impervious. Jarvis sneaked a look from the corner of his eye at the solid immovable presence, bulky body, legs on the short side, hands surprisingly small and delicate at the end of the stubby arms. But the belly, now that was a market pudding.

Cut into that belly with his best slicer, pull out the entrails, and spread them like a deck of cards!

The doctor stopped, a little mortified at his speculations and, truth to tell, the blankness of McLevy’s gaze unnerved him somewhat. Surely he couldn’t know the thoughts, the wicked pulsing thoughts that went through a medical mind?

‘Well,’ he said primly, ‘we have a dead body here. The bones splintered, the force considerable, the instrument a keen blade with a heft of weight to it.’

‘Such as?’

The door behind them opened and the lanky figure of
Constable
Mulholland, McLevy’s right-hand man, slipped in and stood, unobtrusively as he could, at the back.

Even taller than Jarvis he loomed over the scene, with the same watchful deliberation as the inspector. The two of them were enough, as the common herd would put it, to give you the sulphur jaundies.

‘How should I know? You’re the great detective McLevy, the criminal classes of Leith wake in a cold sweat each morning at the thought of you bestriding what remains of their dirty squalid streets like a Colossus. What do
you
think?’

‘I think you might wish to answer my question.’

The surgeon gave vent to an elaborate sigh and tapped one of the exposed ribs as if cracking open a boiled egg.

‘Possibly an axe or cleaver; you might pursue the flesher shops, search out blood on the butcher’s block and arrest the fellow immediately.’

Another dry laugh met with no response; really the fellow was dead to badinage.

‘Right handed, I would surmise,’ the surgeon pursed his lips to indicate a keen intelligence at work.

‘My thought also. Above average height?’

‘From the direction of the blow, possible, possible, hmmm … a
strong
right hand.’

Jarvis glanced down at the gaping wound in the body and his watery eyes became momentarily thoughtful. Then he struck a pose and smiled annoyingly at the inspector.

‘Robert Burns, as I am sure a man of letters like yourself will recognise, McLevy.’

Jarvis, as McLevy well knew, regarded him just above a
Hottentot
in terms of erudition, so he let the quote sail past and contented himself with dry observation.

‘“Holy Willie’s Prayer”, but I don’t think the poet was advocating carnage of womankind, was he?’

‘Only God’s vengeance on the unworthy.’

‘I believe that was meant in satire.’

‘I know how it was meant!’

Mulholland shifted uneasily; there was a sudden edge to the exchange.

‘Do you have anything further to lay before us?’

‘Not a blind bit.’

With that flat statement, the doctor dropped the shard from his forceps to join other fragments of bone and tissue he’d collected in an evidence bag, pulled the sheet over the body, took off his surgeon’s apron, flipped away the forceps and commenced to wash his hands with great vigour.

The cold room was a study in light and shade, the darkness of the police tunics contrasting with the white bare walls. The granite colour of the slab matched the fashionable hue of the doctor’s trousers; he fancied himself as a bit of a dandy, cream shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A necessary precaution for the prudent when sticking their hands into someone else’s exposed and messy guts.

Jarvis wrung out his fingers, dried them on a soft piece of cloth and affected to turn his wedding ring so that it gleamed in the harsh light.

‘When was she found?’ he asked.

‘Two o’clock in the morning.’

‘From the state of her, died not long before; nothing much in the stomach, no evidence of congress, just another wreck washed up on the shoreline.’

The corpse’s arm had fallen down when Jarvis had pulled at the sheet and McLevy carefully placed it back under the covering, the hand, held in his, fingers rigid, still an elegant shape, as he tucked it out of sight.

‘Nothing under the nails?’

‘Dirt. What she trafficked in. Dirt,’ the surgeon pronounced this word with some satisfaction.

‘But the woman deserves justice,’ McLevy said softly.

‘Does she? A common whore from the looks. They come and go; their lives, I am afraid, are worthless.’

‘They provide a service to the community at large.’

‘
At
large
? You mean the desperate cases.’

‘I mean respectable men who find the married bed a damp prospect and their breeks round their knees in a deep wynd at midnight. Surely you would agree with that, Dr Jarvis?’

Damn the man! Jarvis turned away to hide a sudden flush. Two years previous he’d had the misfortune to be caught with a young magpie just off the Royal Mile by a passing night patrol, somewhat
in
flagrante
. A gold coin had solved the matter and no law had been broken, but surely McLevy couldn’t know of this? The Royal Mile was not his parish, they wouldn’t let him cross over the bridges.

McLevy noted the shaft had gone home and repeated with no particular emphasis, ‘She deserves justice.’

‘You find it for her. One of her own kind would do this, molassed with drink, and not even recall such in the morning. You find it. I have better to accomplish!’

Jarvis, reaching jerkily for his topcoat, knocked his bag of instruments to the floor and had to scrabble around in retrieval. An obscure sense of humiliation caught hold of him and he ached to stick one his sharp blades right up the man’s anus; see now, here he was frenzied inside his head, damn the man, damn him!

An icy silence. Jarvis searched for the last word, a word that would redeem all.

McLevy watched him. The inspector had perfected a small secret smile which always daunted his superiors. As if some defect of theirs had amused him but his contemplation was too perfect to share.

He smiled it now. The silence grew.

Constable Mulholland reached into his pocket.

‘You were right, sir,’ he said. ‘Took a deal of finding, but found it was, in the guttering at the other end of Vinegar Close. The wind blew it, I expect. It was a hands-and-knees job, muck to the elbow. A deal of finding.’

In fact a few stale buns had bribed a pack of street children to swarm over the close like wasps at a cowpat to search out the God-forsaken thing otherwise he, Mulholland, would have been on his knees for the foreseeable future, running the risk that folks might mistake him for a Papist.

With his soft country accent and guileless Irish-blue eyes, Mulholland might well have been mistaken for many things.

A fool, however, was not one of them, not by McLevy at any road. The inspector squinted at the suspiciously clean fingers offering forth … a bedraggled white feather.

He took it from Mulholland and peered close. ‘The top is lacking,’ he said.

‘Not recovered, sir. But it was a correct assumption. The plume was on the scene.’

‘It had to be somewhere,’ he muttered. ‘She never was
without
one.’

‘You know the woman then?’ asked Jarvis.

‘Sadie Gorman. These many years. She used to be a pretty wee girl.’

‘She’s left that far behind. A broken doll.’

McLevy looked down at the waxy face of the corpse,
powder-caked
, red mouth open as if to laugh.

‘She had spirit,’ he said. ‘She deserves justice.’

‘You sound like a parrot, McLevy. Ye’ll end up in a cage, chewing betel nuts and defecating all over the floor!’

Jarvis, considering this enough of a
bon mot
to be leaving on, sprang the door with a flourish and cast a last disparaging look at the corpse. ‘I’m away to my club, a glass of claret will restore my faith in the beauty of women and the delicacy of their intentions. I’d invite you along, inspector, but it’s medical men only.’

The door shut behind him then it suddenly opened again and the doctor stuck his head back inside.

‘What is it you often call these creatures, by the way? It has slipped my mind.’

‘Nymphs of the
pavé,’
was the sardonic response.

‘Nymphs! What a treasure you are to me, inspector, that’ll keep me going all through the roast. Nymphs! Oh, and by the way, she doesn’t have the pox so you won’t get cuntbitten.’

The door closed. There was a long silence. McLevy put his five fingers to his nose, pursed his lips, then made a loud farting noise through them. It was aimed at the door and would seem to indicate his opinion of the departed medical man.
Mulholland
did not bat an eye.

Having released this salvo, the inspector returned to the slab, twitched back the sheet again and looked at the gashed body, ribcage broken, bones sticking out like the spars of a ship.

‘You noted that the good doctor was about to say something when he looked into this … desecration?’

‘I did indeed, sir. But then he thought better. What could it have been, I wonder?’

‘These pillars of genteelity, they need their whores but they despise and hate themselves for it. And some of them hate the whores even worse.’

‘That’s very profound, sir.’

McLevy looked sharply at his constable but the face before him seemed smooth and untroubled by irony. The inspector pushed out his lips and took on the air of a child playing at being a portentous adult.

‘He may have been about to say,
“I might have done this, I might have chopped the sin out of her body.”’

‘Just as well he kept it to himself, then. Otherwise he could end up suspect,’ said the constable.

‘I’m sure he has an alibi.’

Mulholland nodded solemnly. ‘Mrs Jarvis. They’d be locked in matrimonial embrace all night.’

‘Indeed.
Shackled
thegither.’

A glint of mischief between the two. The younger man had walked the conglomerates of Leith these many years now with McLevy. He knew the humours and most especially the rages which burned in the inspector’s breast. Not that it didn’t stop him having a wee provocation now and again, but he tried always to follow his Aunt Katie’s advice.
‘If you’re going to poke the anointed pig, make sure you’re well behind the fence.’

‘One more thing.’ McLevy pointed at a smear of blood on the side of the dress, separated from the dark red river which stained the rest of the material. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘Her hand perhaps? Clutched at her wounds and then – ’ Mulholland stopped. The pained look on the inspector’s face did not encourage further speculation.

‘Look at the line of blood. Straight. As if, perhaps, something was wiped clean.’

‘The murder weapon? A cool customer.’

‘Or someone … detached. Who looks down on humanity as if it were just so many insects, crawling under his feet.’

There was a mystical intuitive side to the inspector which Mulholland found more than a little worrying. An ability to empathise with the criminal mind which one day, if the wind was in the wrong quarter, might lead to demonic possession.

Don’t turn your hinder parts on the black bull, leave that to the cows.

One of Aunt Katie’s more cryptic sayings. God knows why it should come into his head at this moment.

He watched McLevy replace the sheet up to the neck of the corpse and then carefully pack away the broken feather in the top pocket of his tunic. How would he describe the man, now? Average height, heavy set, dainty little trotters, the comical thing being if the inspector ever had to run, which he hated with a vengeance, only the arms and legs moved, the rest of the body was perfectly still, as if in protest.

The features now, would suet come to mind? But behind that fleshy casing was a substance the like of which you might see down by the Leith shoreline where the east wind over time had stripped the rocks back to their very essence.

The face at times was that of a pouting child and then again something carved out from the Old Testament.

Pepper-and-salt hair stood up like a wire brush. And yet the whole, and this irked Mulholland profoundly him not having the physicality for it himself, could become easy invisible. You might pass this by in a crowd. Unless you caught sight of the unguarded eyes, then were you a woolly animal you’d be heading back to the fold praying not to feel the hot breath of the wolf upon your neck.

The white skin on that big face; if Mulholland was out in the wind for five minutes his cheeks were of the damask rose, but the inspector’s never changed. Like parchment. He might have been Ancient Egyptian.