hadn’t thought to be caught out at it. He tried the dignified card.
‘It appears to me that, for once in your life, sir, you run the chance of mistaking polite agreement for – ’
‘Sookin’ up! Kiss my arse, I’ll bring ye parsley.’
My God, see the man scowling up at him like a frog with the mange. Mulholland wished to be a heron looming over that foul-tempered amphibian. A heron with a long sharp beak. Stab through the belly. Out come the guts.
McLevy smiled thinly. ‘You’re thinking something nasty about me, constable, because I caught ye blowing in his ear. Something nasty.’
‘Farthest thing from my mind, sir.’
McLevy could not explain whence came these fierce squalls of rage which shook him like the aspen tree, but he enjoyed them anyway. Good for the blood.
‘You’ll go far, Mulholland,’ he said ambiguously.
‘That is my intention.’
The inspector took a step back and appraised his constable.
Mulholland stood his ground. He knew that squinty-eyed look and had seen many quail before it, but he was sterner stuff.
The two of them remained like statues as the people brushed past and who knows how long they would have been frozen there had not a woman’s voice interrupted.
‘James McLevy,’ the tone was low, husky; a liking for strong coffee and the best champagne had moulded the melody of her laughter. ‘Can you not pick on someone your own size?’
A splendid private carriage had stopped, and leaning out of the window was a female McLevy knew only too well and for far too long. Jean Brash. Her full lips curved in a smile, hair red as the deepest sin.
Despite her forty-some years, like porcelain was her complexion. Her sea-green eyes with their deep mocking inner light sparkled in the weak rays of the Leith sun. He had almost drowned in these eyes a few times but fear, a dark primitive fear of losing his very soul, had hauled him back from the edge. Just as well. He could not swim.
In sport, she extended a dainty, gloved hand, which he took in his paw and bowed over in equal mockery.
Twenty years ago they’d walked the same streets, whore and constable, then, by various crimes and misdemeanours, Jean raised enough money to emulate the vigorous activity she witnessed below and above her person. She became half-owner in a low dive of a bawdy-hoose, the Happy Land, a place of sliding panels and slippery licentious women where a watch and wallet might disappear in the blink of an eye.
Her partner, Henry Preger, a notorious desperado, died of accumulative poison in mysterious circumstances, and with sorrowful heart she moved up a notch to her next bawdy-hoose, the Holy Land.
Many years passed. She and her girls grasped the staff of righteousness. The place burnt down. It had been insured as a lodging house and the head of the company was a regular client, so with that money and what she had garnered from the sweat of the two-backed beast, Jean moved right up the hill to inhabit a stately mansion that she named the Just Land. She was now the premiere madam in Edinburgh.
Men of the cloth, men of justice, medical men, fellows of the university, all respectable, all with the same itch to scratch, slipped in at the back door.
Safe in the knowledge that the sheets were clean, the champagne decent, the magpies raring to go, wallets and confidentiality guaranteed, they indulged their libidinous, maritally marginalised passions up to the very hilt.
Some of them even brought their own wife’s clothing for the lassies to don.
Some of them even wore it themselves, corsets, drawers and all.
Jean Brash provided a cornucopia of depravity with the one proviso that no violence was visited upon her girls.
On the other hand, the said girls were not averse to dishing it out.
She had invested in a Berkley Horse precisely for that purpose, a device upon which the gentleman might be stretched and flogged from any angle. A particular favourite for those captains of industry who spent their days ruling others with a rod of iron.
Jean had, moreover, within easy reach, a selection of whips, birches, canes and battledores.
Thistles were also very popular. In season. Jean even grew them in her garden.
There was a time McLevy’s desire had been to see her on a transportation ship but that chance had gone.
Now, she was protected by a bullet-proof decorum, and if not legalised most certainly tolerated, since a sizeable proportion of the city council found their way to her abode for various non-municipal satisfactions.
Still, there was always the hope that one day he might view her fair visage through the bars of a cell. Crime had brought Jean to this pretty pass, crime might yet be her undoing. There’s always hope.
She knew what he thought. And he knew that she knew. It was a perfect circle.
They observed each other with a certain bruised affection, like two pugilists who had hammered for many rounds, in many bouts, at each other and found respect in the adversary’s punching power.
‘I haven’t seen you for a while, James. It’s not the same without you … indulging yourself in my wee bower.’
She made the best coffee in Edinburgh. Like her, he was a fiend for coffee. They would sit in her rose-filled garden, sip the brew, and gossip together like a pair of old sweetie-wives.
‘I’ve been busy,’ said he.
‘Aye. Persecuting the innocent,’ rasped a voice from behind and an older woman leaned out from the shelter of Jean’s fashionable back.
Snub nosed, pug-faced. Hannah Semple, keeper of the keys of the Just Land and Jean’s right hand. A squat tough old bird.
McLevy had personally sent her twice to Perth Penitentiary, once for common assault and the other for a cut- throat razor held under the nose of a recipient of her dubious charms who had been reluctant to pay the piper. The fellow flinched convulsively and had a chunk cut out of his neb. Serve him right in McLevy’s opinion but unfortunately he was a magistrate’s son.
Hannah’s life had been on a downward course, a third conviction would have seen her die in prison, but Jean Brash had redeemed the fallen soul; all that practice in the Holy Land had not been in vain. The older woman loved her mistress as well as her caustic nature would allow and would happily kill to keep Jean safe.
‘Poor auld Sadie Gorman,’ Hannah sucked at her teeth and resisted the temptation to spit out of the carriage window, ‘didnae deserve that, eh?’
‘The wages of sin, Hannah,’ was his solemn reply.
‘Stick them up your backside, McLevy. If it wasnae for sin you policemen would have bugger all to do with your life.’
This time she did spit, accurately past Jean out of the carriage window and close enough to McLevy’s foot that he jumped back a little.
‘Now, now, Hannah,’ murmured Jean. ‘The inspector is merely being provocative.’
Her face became grave, the green eyes thoughtful as she thus addressed him. ‘I liked Sadie. She was a wild wee devil. She might have remained in my company but she would go her own way.’
Then her eyes creased up. ‘Though even when I saw her of late, old as the hills, plying her trade, she still could make me laugh.’
‘Aye, she had humour. By the bucket!’
McLevy suddenly let out a harsh whoop of laughter, a strange sound which caused some decent folk in the street to turn and others to avoid the group quite altogether.
‘In Meikle John’s Close, she emptied a full chamber pot from high above, aimed at my poor head. Gardyloo!’
‘Did she hit the mark?’ Hannah asked hopefully.
‘She did not,’ said Mulholland. ‘He jumped sideways and out. I got the full deluge.’
‘He knows better now.’
