Read Shadow of the Serpent Online
Authors: David Ashton
Shadow of the Serpent (3 page)
‘What’re you grinning at?’
‘Not a thing. It’s a serious business, sir.’
‘It is indeed. A
ferocious
business. Enough force behind that blow to split the Scott Monument. A savage hatred that never leaves the streets.’
Something in the tone alerted the constable but he contented himself with watching as the inspector shook out a reasonably clean handkerchief, which he laid gently over Sadie’s face.
‘She has fallen at my feet. She will have justice, Mulholland.’
‘I’m sure she will. Is there … perhaps something you
yourself
are not revealing at this point in time, sir?’
‘Me?’
McLevy spread his hands, his face a parody of hurt innocence. ‘I am an open book, constable. As you well know. An open book.’
As you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions.
Don’t leave them on the road.
NIKOLAI GOGOL,
Dead Souls
Leith
,
14 April 1850
George Cameron watched in grim amusement as the young constable spewed his guts all over the baker’s shop doorway. A nice filling for the cakes.
That’s the bother with these Lowlanders, no ballast. He glanced over to where the girl’s body lay slumped against the wall; ye could not blame the boy, I suppose, first night on patrol with his big Highland sergeant, excuses himself to go up a back street then finds he’s near relieved himself upon a corpse.
The constable had nothing else to offer but his shoulders still heaved. Dearie me. The dry boke. Few things are worse.
Unless you’ve had your brisket mangled. He turned away from the grovelling young buckie, took a deep breath and delicately pulled away the girl’s dress. My God, she’d been split apart.
Cameron took some eyeglasses out of his pocket, perched them on his nose and looked to his heart’s content.
His father had worked as a gillie on the laird’s estate; he remembered the first time he saw the auld man gralloch a deer, the gush of entrails followed by a ritual smearing of blood on the son’s forehead. Most unwelcome. Some had dribbled right down his nose. Cameron sniffed. But that was just a drop in the bucket compared to this, a drop in the bucket.
He gingerly lifted the head of the corpse which had fallen face down on to the ravaged breast. Cameron did not recognise the features, but the clothes proclaimed her profession. A young face, mouth parted, sweet lips, nae scabby gums. She’d be new at the whoring … come from nowhere, gone to the same place.
A noise by his side, the constable had returned dabbing at his mouth with a big white hankie.
‘Now, don’t you be spewing up again,’ said the sergeant. ‘Not over me, not over the corpus. We do not want our evidence obscured by vomit.’
The young man swallowed hard. He wouldn’t give this big Inverness teuchter the satisfaction. He forced himself to look at the terrible gash in the girl’s body.
‘Not be the last cadaver ye see on these streets. I’ve witnessed twelve murders in ten glorious years,’ announced the sergeant. ‘But I have to confess, this one’s a sight all on its own, son. All on its own.’
The constable nodded. He noticed something in the hand of the corpse and gently teased it out. It was a fragment of thin black cloth which the sergeant took from him and held close to his thick eyeglasses, then sniffed.
‘Fine quality, new bought, but torn from what? A cravat, stocking, glove?’ He looked at the constable who made no answer. ‘Are you in the huff because I watched ye cast up?’
Shake of the head. Cameron was amused, vomit or no, this boy might have the makings. ‘Away tae the station, son, get me the hand cart and we’ll fetch this lassie home, well as near home as she’ll ever find this night.’
As the young man started off Cameron called after.
‘And as ye make your way, review the events of the night. In case something comes to mind. It’s always a good idea. To review events.’
‘I’ll do just that,’ said James McLevy.
I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;
I woke, and found that life was duty.
ELLEN STURGIS HOOPER, American poet
‘Are you listening to me, inspector?’
McLevy was hauled back into the present by the querulous tones of Lieutenant Roach, his mandated superior at Leith station.
Roach was a more or less permanently disappointed man, with the saving grace of a waspish humour some of which he even, at times, directed against himself.
His disappointment lay in the fact that, despite being
vice-president
of the golf club and rolling up his trouser leg on a regular basis at the best connected of Masonic lodges, he was stuck to Leith like a fly in a dung pile till retirement laid its fell hand upon his shoulder.
His predecessor, Lieutenant Moxey, had left somewhat under a cloud and Roach had been swiftly drafted in from Haymarket to fill the gap after almost giving up hope of such promotion.
He remembered the trembling excitement when he had first viewed the drab exterior of Leith station; never mind, he would change it into a stepping-stone towards greater achievements.
Now fifteen years later the station was still the same and he could well understand what had driven Moxey to such base acts of deliverance. Understand but not imitate. The Good Lord and Mrs Roach would see to that.
Why the powers-that-be could not discern the true gold that lay under his careworn exterior and raise him out of this creeping decrepitude to the lofty reaches of a sublime incumbency was a mystery which taxed him into many a shank on the fifth hole.
His humour was a direct result of having to deal with McLevy for almost a decade and a necessary bulwark against the potential bedlam it involved.
‘A murder is the last thing we need.’ Roach shook his head at the injustice of it all. ‘It is most inconvenient.’
‘Especially for the corpse, sir.’
‘What?’ Roach shot a look at Mulholland but the candid face seemed innocent enough. ‘Yes, of course there is that to
consider
but … aghh!’
The lieutenant stood up, flexed his skinny arms and swiped an imaginary ball two hundred odd yards, splitting the middle of the fairway, only to see it disappear down a rabbit burrow.
‘We have an election on hand, the streets are infested with liberal incitement and the few decent conservatives left are huddled together in doorways. There is a meeting at the lodge tonight and Chief Constable Grant will be there.’
In his mind’s eye Roach could see a smooth green and a white ball rolling eternally towards the hole. Never quite getting there. Never quite.
‘I had hoped to impress him with the changing face of Leith and how we discharge our onerous duties to keep the streets clean as a whistle; what with the eyes of the country focused on Edinburgh, what with Gladstone landing his great fundament upon Midlothian – ’
Roach came to a sudden halt. He had made the mistake of looking into the blank, incurious eyes of his inspector and, as a result, had completely lost track of what he was saying.
‘What with? Gladstone was landing his fundament?’ prompted McLevy.
‘Yes. That is correct. Of course. To impress, and thence to discuss with the chief constable the gravity of the political situation and, despite the fact we both distrust the
machinations
of Disraeli, nevertheless
he
is a Conservative and so are we. A parity of belief!’
This ‘we’ obviously did not include Mulholland and McLevy who sat there, in Roach’s view, like dangerous radicals waiting to sprout. He took another deep breath.
‘But instead, Sandy Grant will shake this murder in my face and demand it be solved at once. I shall be reduced from one of equal standing to that of a plague carrier!’
‘I’m sure if the woman knew what a nuisance she was going to be, she’d have arranged to be murdered in another parish, sir,’ said McLevy.
‘There is no call for impertinence, James.’
But the interjection did the trick. Roach, who had been winding himself into a whirligig of indignation, sat quietly back at his desk.
‘What about her pounce, could he be our man?’
‘Frank Brennan? In anger he might crack her rib but not hack her to pieces. He’s a Dublin man, the only blood they like is in their sausage.’
The inspector shook his head and gazed at the portrait of Queen Victoria which glowered down from the lieutenant’s wall. Her Sovereign Majesty. Putting on the beef.
‘Besides, why kill the goose that lays the golden egg?’ he added.
‘
Raddled
egg from all accounts. She may have been holding money back on him, you know what these people are like.’ Roach shook his head in Christian sorrow.
‘I know what they’re like,’ said McLevy.
Roach waited for more but the inspector had his
broody
look on, might as well converse with a wooden Indian.
‘Anything from the scene?’
‘One decapitated white feather, property of the deceased,’ offered Mulholland.
‘That’s helpful,’ said Roach sourly. ‘Witnesses?’
‘Had it been one of the big new streets we might have been in business, sir. But it’s the wynds. In these alleys, every eye is closed to crime, every door is shut to probity,’ sighed the
constable
, his eyes radiating a holy rectitude. ‘More’s the pity, sir. A lost tribe.’
The hypocritical, unco guid quality in Mulholland’s tone made McLevy want to spit. Sookin’ up. The constable was sookin’ up to the lieutenant. The bugger was after something. And McLevy knew exactly what it was, the sleekit lang dreep.
He stood suddenly, moved to the door and turned the handle.
‘I’ll go shake Frank Brennan till his teeth rattle, though I doubt we’re wasting our time. Sadie lived hard but she survived. She knew the streets and could look after herself in her chosen profession. The strike was from close by. It would be trade. She wouldnae let rough that near. It would be trade. Respectable. A
clean
blow.’
Then he was gone. Roach sighed.
‘Why is it Inspector McLevy, given the choice in matters of heinous crime, will always seek out culprits from amongst the respectable classes?’
Mulholland, to whom this appeal was directed, made the following response.
‘I have sometime asked the inspector that, and he has given me always the one word in answer, sir.’
Roach waited.
‘Experience,’ said Mulholland. He nodded politely and followed his inspector out of the door.
I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true.
I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, ‘The Revenge’
Benjamin Disraeli followed the erect form of Sir Henry
Ponsonby
, the Queen’s private secretary, down a long corridor of Buckingham Palace towards the Royal reception chamber.
They walked in silence. Disraeli measured the man’s military back and wondered how many daggers he could safely plunge in. Quite a few. It was a broad back.
He did not trust Ponsonby. The secretary belonged to the other camp and who knows how many were the keyholes against which he pressed his Liberal ear?
One of Disraeli’s many talents was insidious character assassination, an invaluable weapon in politics, and he had no scruples about using this talent to poison Victoria’s mind against the man. To a certain extent he had succeeded:
Ponsonby’s
influence had waned and Disraeli gloried in the fact, but not enough, not enough by a long chalk, the fellow was still too close to the Queen.
Close enough, for instance, to look over her shoulder and slide the resultant information of her communications with Disraeli towards the enemy.
Ponsonby stopped at a door and turned.
‘Her Majesty is most anxious to see you, prime minister,’ he said in his usual bluff direct fashion, not that it fooled Disraeli. It was an honest open face and therefore all the more to be suspected.
‘Dear me. And what has caused this anxiety, I wonder?’
murmured
Disraeli, eyes veiled in apparent thought.
‘I am sure she will tell you, sir.’
But then as Ponsonby lifted his hand to knock softly upon the door, Disraeli slid in the knife.
‘The election, Sir Henry, how do you think it will result?’
‘I am sure I do not know,’ was the careful reply.
Disraeli laughed suddenly, eyes creased in amusement, charm personified.
‘But you are of the Liberal faith, Sir Henry. You must wish William Gladstone to prevail, trample us Tories to the ground like so many snakes!’
He laughed again. A high-pitched sound, like steel on stone, and his eyelids batted together in a strangely feminine fashion.
All terribly pleasant. Ponsonby’s back stiffened a notch.
‘My politics have never interfered with my function, sir. I merely wish what is best for the country.’
‘And your Queen, surely?’ responded the prime minister with devious, toxic humour.
‘And my Queen,’ came the stolid reply.
Sir Henry always seemed to play with a straight bat. That was even less to be trusted.
‘Then let us hope,’ said Disraeli with a winning smile, ‘that both are satisfied. Queen and country.’