Semple was no beauty; a squashed pug-like physiognomy contained round deep-set eyes to echo the canine theme. Broken veins, which age and bitter experience had etched into her cheeks, added to the fine mix.
She reached across and munched into an untouched slice of Dundee cake. Jean said nothing. Hannah munched on.
Neither had noticed a small portly man who had slipped out from a table near the window and followed the Countess as she made her dignified exit. He had not paid his bill but that was not unusual for Alfred Binnie; his function was more a matter of exacting what was due and punitive.
He had paid keen attention to Jean Brash, weighing her up with dispassion as a poulterer would a live chicken.
Calculating which way the feathers would fly.
Upwards usually, as the blade came down.
Binnie left unseen. His speciality.
‘No’ bad cake,’ pronounced Hannah, sending a few crumbs flying to scatter like birdseed on the table. ‘Too dry, though. Lacks moisture.’
She knew her mistress well. Jean Brash had that
‘I am afraid, Hannah,’ said Jean, ‘that the Countess and I did not find a measure of agreement.’
‘Over that wee French trollop?’
‘A bruised and innocent lamb.’
‘She hasnae the pox, right enough,’ replied Hannah, helping herself to another slice. ‘The doctor confirmed same. Clean as a whistle. I meant tae tell you.’
‘I am glad to hear it.’
‘She’ll be useful, no doubt,’ was the stolid summation. ‘Innocence is aye useful.’
‘The Countess wants her back.’
‘Uhuh?’
‘I intend to keep her.’
Hannah shook her head gloomily. She had a bad feeling about all this; mind you she had a bad feeling about most things most mornings.
‘Did ye offer payment?’
‘Did I hell.’
That took care of that then. Trouble would ensue. For certain sure. Sharpen up the cut-throat.
‘The other yin’s a menace.’
‘Jessie?’
‘None other. Lippy. A menace.’
‘She has a deal to say for herself,’ agreed Jean. ‘But we may knock her into shape.’
Jessie Nairn, a pert wee magpie who had found her way over from Paisley to the Countess’s establishment, had also flown the coop. Her reasons were not scored so deep and Jean suspected a restless temperament allied to an eye for the better chance, the Countess being allegedly mean of payment and disposition. Jean had seen many such types as Jessie pass through her hands, but the girl had spirit.
Besides she had arrived with Simone. Justice for all.
‘She stays as well?’ muttered Hannah.
‘She does.’
‘Your decision, mistress.’
‘It is indeed.’
There was a gleam in Jean’s eye Hannah recognised. A fancy name for it would be
Jean’s own nose had been out of joint since the Countess had opened up a rival establishment in Leith and the fact that the boy Cupid had not been hanging round her skirts of late did not help.
She joined her silence to that of her mistress.
They made an odd pairing: a dumpy thickset creature and the refined woman of fashion.
Both were warriors.
However, what was coming would be a cruel reminder that no-one is as strong as they hoodwink themselves to be.
A universal truth. Rarely realised.
For Sophia Adler, across the room, waiting patiently for a slow-witted local lassie to emerge from the depths of the kitchen with a pot of
She had been content to watch her companion wreak havoc amongst the plump pigeons of the tea room with his hawk-like demeanour, but then her attention had been drawn towards the two women sitting diagonally opposite.
One was beautiful, one was not.
Sophia had the fleeting image of a dark shape shifting between them. Death perhaps. It was much on her mind.
Of course – the moment was broken by the thud of the teapot as it landed on the table, spilling some brown liquid out of the spout to stain the white covering like dirty blood on an altar cloth – of course, and her lips twisted in a smile of wry amusement as she watched the scared waitress scuttle back to the safety of the kitchen, it could have just been…a trick of the light.
Now you see it. Now you don’t.
4
I think for my part one half of the nation is mad
– And the other not very sound.
TOBIAS SMOLLETT,
Lieutenant Robert Roach clove easily to moral indignation, long upper lip swirling in ethical distaste as he heaped scorn upon the luckless Constable Ballantyne.
He had found the young man in the small cubbyhole of a room set aside for the lesser beings of the station to store their spare boots, waterproof capes and whatever other paraphernalia made up the office of constable; a room that Roach rarely ventured within, it being subject to the unwholesome odour of a leaky water closet and the fetid smell of discarded footwear; a room that should not have contained the spectacle of a policeman gazing earnestly at his own image in the cracked mirror and waving his hands in what he imagined to be a gamut of spellbinding gestures.
Mulholland watched with some sympathy as the strawberry birthmark that spread from Ballantyne’s neck to at least half way up one side of the face, pulsed with shame.
The constable himself, none other, in his own identity, had once been caught by Roach staring into that very same cracked mirror, but he had been in love at the time and that made it, to his mind, a slightly less heinous misdemeanour.
The fact of that once precious love being now dust in the wind, and his prospects of making sergeant blown
