The inspector finished the last hook and eye then adjusted the hard upright collar of his tunic. Useful that collar in case somebody ever wanted to garrotte you from behind.
‘Forgiveness?’ he said. ‘Tell that to the corpse.’
11
Go, and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root.
JOHN DONNE,
‘Song’ (‘Go, and catch a falling star’)
from
The black cat hesitated in the moonlight; it was a neat decision. Behind the lighted window of the attic room was the possibility of succour, but she was a cautious female.
She padded across the oily slates of the roof. The dampness of a late March evening had filmed them to a disagreeable slickness, not at all to her liking.
A fastidious creature, she. Let other females, a lesser breed, fall into disrepair, fur matted, ears chewed, necks an easy target for the tomcat’s teeth. She was above such careless rapture. She was a special case.
The cat reached her destination and yowled. After a moment the window opened just wide enough for her to pass through with dignity intact, and in she hopped. The frame came down smartly and it was as if she had never been.
Now, you see it, now you don’t. Moonlight is deceptive.
On the other side of the glass, not long after, McLevy wolfed his poor man’s supper, salt herring and potatoes, while the cat lapped daintily at a saucer of milk a discreet distance away.
They both finished almost at the same time. The inspector belched gently. Herring did repeat upon the breath but when a lowly constable he’d lived on that provender. Now and again he must return to the past.
He crossed to the fire where a coffee pot had been left to keep warm on the hob, poured some out into his cup, heaped in many spoonfuls of sugar – having a reprehensibly sweet tooth – then returned to his table at the window and sat to look out over his city.
McLevy stirred the black tarry mixture and reviewed events.
They had checked back at the tavern to find that Brennan’s story held water. The man had indeed spent like a sailor and caroused until way past the time of Sadie’s death. Under guise of questioning to find out if anyone had seen the supplier of Brennan’s windfall, McLevy had let out what the big man had sold to gain such a fine recompense.
To judge by the reaction from some of the old biddies in the tavern, Brennan, once released, would be fortunate to survive with his chuckies intact. Bad luck.
Which left this mystery man.
Roach, on being given the report, had counselled against too much supposition on that score – nothing was known, only a payment. The lieutenant would still prefer a drunken navvy on his way home with a sharp blade to his shovel.
Mulholland nodded both ways. The boy would go far.
But McLevy did not approve of shadowy figures in doorways. That was his domain.
Had the man been stalking Sadie? Given Brennan his thirty pieces of silver to make sure the pimp was safely out of the way?
Was there something in her past life which might be the cause of her death or was it possible that she was just a target of a vengeful killing lust against all whores?
McLevy felt in his bones that the latter might be the true path. In his mind’s eye he could see, as he had done in reality many a time, the proud stance of her on the corner.
That daft feather dancing in her stringy hair. Her unashamed proclamation, here I am, bugger the lot of you, ye’ve been in and out of me all my life, here I set myself, come and get it. The very swagger was a reproach to probity, sin laughing at virtue. Come and get it.
What darkness in the heart had been unleashed by that sight, a torrent so strong that it swept all before?
He closed his eyes and he was walking towards her, the weapon in his hand.
Mouth smiling, her eyes full of mischief, his heart seared with hatred, kill the harlot, kill the disease where it spreads. Hot blood.
Or was it a cold act? Detached. Watch her fall. Lie in the gutter like a dead animal. Just an animal.
The cat suddenly shot bolt upright, fur rising like a hairy nimbus from the back of her neck. A creaking board on the stairs outside. Gardyloo!
Mrs MacPherson, his landlady, up to get his dirty plate, though God knows she was always complaining about the stairs and hated the fact he had his meal brought up from the dining room.
He hoped most earnestly she wasn’t accompanied by her West Highland terrier, Fergus, a decent enough wee tyke but representative of what McLevy considered a vastly overrated breed rejoicing in the name of man’s best friend.
Fergus loathed the feline species and so, for his sake, did Mrs MacPherson, though she did not possess the dog’s olfactory abilities.
McLevy quickly shooed the cat into his small bedroom, shoved the saucer of milk inside to keep company, and shut them both in just as a knock sounded at the landing door.
As he made his way to answer, something nagged at the back of his mind. Mrs MacPherson was a rap-a-tap- tap, that was just a rap-a-tap, what was going on here, surely the woman wasn’t adjusting her habits?
He threw open the door, gaze automatically adjusted to the eye-level of the dumpy Dundonian frame of his landlady, only to find that he was, in fact, staring at a female bosom. Safely ensconced in material right enough, pale purple, deep collar, glimpsed behind the dark outdoor coat, but a not inconsiderable statement of undoubted femininity.
A polite cough brought him swiftly up to the face. The light from his room shone past his shoulder and illuminated her in the shadows of the hallway; the countenance was part hidden by her bonnet but the skin was clear, apparently unlined by travail, peaches and cream, and yet it had a tight stretch. Blue eyes, but there was a darkness to the colour. A troubled sky.
The mouth was firm, lips a touch on the thin side. A very beautiful face though. The kind you’d see in the old paintings, damsel in distress with young men dying all around her; fatalities of a misplaced desire to rescue what was perfectly capable of looking after itself.
McLevy’s sympathy was always with the dragon lurking at the back.
As they stared at each other, the landlady’s voice floated up from under.
‘I hope ye don’t mind, Mr McLevy,’ she called. ‘But the young lady says she knows of ye and I am covered all over in flour.’
‘That’s all right, Mrs MacPherson,’ he shouted back. ‘Tend tae your oven, that’s the important matter.’
Sure enough, the enticing smell of newly baked bread could be discerned wafting up the stairway.
The dog barked below, perhaps it sensed the cat. The woman took a deep breath.
‘Are you James McLevy?’
‘You have heard me so identified.’
‘I must apologise for disturbing your supper.’
He quickly wiped at his mouth with the back of a hand. Damn herring that left an oily spume.
‘My name is Joanna Lightfoot. I … have great need of your assistance.’
