Trick of the Light

7

Swerve to the left, son Roger, he said,

When you catch his eyes through the helmet-slit,

Swerve to the left, then out at his head,

And the Lord God give you joy of it.

WILLIAM MORRIS, ‘The Judgement of God’

The inspector was out in the garden looking at the back wall of the house by the time Doyle and Muriel caught up with him and he gestured all around as if to say, whit do you make of this?

Truth to tell the place was not a verdant proposition; a despondent lawn of sorts, some wilting blooms that had shot their autumnal bolt and various gorse bushes that no doubt longed for a wild highland hillside.

Perhaps this emaciated Eden might have served as metaphor to the state of joyless marital rectitude within, as the vibrant growth of Jean Brash’s fauna and flora at the Just Land testified to the luxuriant and fertile nature of sin, but the inspector’s attention was fixed upon an area of earth just below a small high window.

The large leaves of some yellowed ornamental brassica of sorts obscured the patch but when McLevy knelt to separate the leaves, the part print of a shoe was revealed.

‘Whit d’ye make of that?’ he asked of Doyle.

‘It is very small.’

‘Uhuh? A dwarf maybe?’

This was unfair to a certain extent, since McLevy and Mulholland had already more or less worked out the modus operandi of the break-in before the inspector had decided to wreak further havoc in the despoiled household.

A normal tactic for McLevy, who considered that in burglarious activity the crime from outside usually had its counterpart within.

Yet why he chose to involve Conan Doyle in the process was a mystery, except that there was something about the young man; his mixture of bumptiousness and sensitivity, arrogant belief in his own acuity allied to a vulnerable awkwardness that irritated and intrigued McLevy at one and the same moment.

Who else could he possibly know that might fit such a description?

Having displayed the dwarfish concavity, the inspector then indicated a part of the wall below the small window.

Doyle peered keenly at the house bricks and noticed some faint scrapes on the stone. This he reported to his mentor, who then asked for a conclusion.

‘An animal of sorts?’ Doyle responded somewhat weakly.

‘I’ll show ye a trick,’ said McLevy. ‘Mulholland!’

In answer to this bellow, the small window high above suddenly flew open with a wrenching shove and Mulholland’s long nose poked out, followed by the rest of his face.

‘It is a simple matter,’ McLevy declared to the bemused Muriel and the young deductor. ‘If you examine the wood of the window frame you will see it bears the mark of a thin forcing tool, low down. I would imagine it has aye been hard to shove open and pull shut, swollen wi’ weather nae doubt.’

‘Yes,’ offered Muriel, anxious to make a contribution. ‘It has never functioned to proper office, I was forever saying to Andrew –’

‘Aye, well, Andrew is no longer extant,’ said McLevy callously. ‘I take it to have been jammed shut but not fastened secure. Neither flesh nor fowl.’

‘Yes.’

Muriel swayed slightly but Arthur did not offer the steadying arm she desired. He was on the case.

McLevy now spoke quietly, almost disinterested.

‘Your movements are watched. There is a side lane runs along where ye leave your bins out for the scaffie men and as soon as you depart, two of the thieves scale the wall into your garden. Quick tae the back part of the house, one on the other’s shoulders, lever open the window and then –’

‘But the size of the aperture!’ Doyle could not forbear interrupting.

‘No’ for the likes of you and me Mister Doyle.’

‘A dwarf?’

‘A snakesman,’ said McLevy.

Conan Doyle’s mind entertained the sudden picture of a creature, half man, half reptile, slithering up the wall.

‘A small boy,’ Mulholland said loftily, ‘on the back of an accomplice, wriggles in at the window.’

McLevy resumed the tale.

‘To the front door, keys from the nail, unlocks. The accomplice, dressed perhaps as an honest tradesman, has knocked upon the front door, it is opened as if by the maid, he steps inside. To any onlooker a normal procedure. The criminals make a heavy lift, wedge the high window back shut, keys replaced on the nail, out the door, close it fast, spring lock jumps into place. All is – as was.’

Mulholland watched from the aforementioned window as his inspector spread his arms like a man about to perform an illusion.

‘Hey presto: the mystery of the locked room!’

After a short squeezed bark of laughter, McLevy dropped his arms to scrutinise the man and woman before him.

‘All this jiggery-pokery is not unusual for the criminal fraternity; they are a devious crew, indeed it has aye struck me that if they applied such intelligence to lawful pursuits they would rule the Empire – no that is not unusual – but it leaves some questions hangin’ in the breeze.’

He ignored Conan Doyle and fixed his gaze upon Muriel.

‘Assuming, as I think it just to do so, that the money found was the felonious motive, how did the criminals know this? How did they know about the jammed window? How did they know the location of the keys?’

The mistress of the house made no reply; her fingers which, like her mind, had not been still this whole time, curled into her palms to make two small fists.

At this moment, Ellen the maid, a stoical wee soul, born and bred in the locality, came wandering out the back door from the kitchen, her demeanour showing no trace that she had witnessed a police constable attempt to skewer two of his superiors where they stood.

‘I’ve made a pot o’ tea, mistress,’ she announced. ‘Can I tidy the drawing room and lay out the cups and saucers?’

Muriel looked at McLevy, who nodded permission; he had made severe examination and gleaned all there was to hand.

‘I shall now make some enquiries amongst your neighbours as regards tradesmen at your entrance,’ he announced to Muriel. ‘But respectable folk are remarkably unobservant and I’m not hopeful.’

‘I’ll wedge the window tight,’ Mulholland said helpfully. ‘But you need to get a decent joiner in and a strong catch new-fixed.’

So saying, he popped back out of sight like a jack-in-the box and the window was duly pulled shut.

There was another moment’s silence. McLevy stood completely immobile, as a stone statue.

A bird sang. Short, staccato notes, like a warning.

‘Would ye no’ have a wee cup of tea, inspector?’ asked Ellen out of the blue. She might indeed be dumpy but showed no sign of fear.

He looked into her eyes. They reminded him of his Aunt Jean’s, brown, steadfast under scrutiny, and it was to