He glanced doubtfully back into the recess of his room.
It wasn’t exactly a midden but, not unlike his own mind, nothing seemed to know its place.
Seeing his hesitation, she took another deep breath, then her eyes closed and she slumped forward.
He grasped her by the elbow. They were stuck mid-portal. The indignant cat started scratching at his bedroom door.
Between women. A fine predicament.
12
Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot.
JOHN DONNE, ‘Song’, op. cit.
The cat cast a final, baleful, slant-eyed glance at the female sitting in the cracked leather armchair by the fire, slid out of the open window then ghosted off into the moonlight.
McLevy closed the frame and remained gazing out over the rooftops. He could feel the heat of the woman’s gaze on his back but resisted the urge to turn round immediately.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I am not in the habit of giving in to weakness.’
‘Neither am I,’ he muttered.
Now he did turn and gave her a long hard scrutiny, making no attempt to hide the fact.
‘What is the name of your cat?’
She was not ready to begin. Not yet. He could wait.
‘Bathsheba, I call her. But she’s not mine. She just visits. Like yourself.’
She looked away into the flames of the coal fire. He was not deflected and redoubled his examination.
‘Ye’re not as young as you first appear.’
The blunt statement seemed to amuse her.
‘Appearances can be deceptive.’
‘I’ve often found that so. In my profession.’
She had taken off the bonnet. Her hair was done up in a chignon of sorts, with stray golden tendrils escaping from the general confinement. Under the outdoor coat that now lay open, her gown was of a crushed silk material, the bodice a darker purple than the rest.
It was quality. Expensive. The style promised freedom to the body, not yet delivered but … a certain yield to the swelling pressure. Very fetching. A bonny picture. The itemised Eve.
‘I am approaching thirty years of age.’
‘I can believe that.’
She sat at once upright and there might have been the slightest narrowing of the eyes.
McLevy whistled cheerfully under his breath as he retrieved his coffee, making no effort to offer her a cup.
He could not to himself say why he was acting in such a boorish manner, though, to be truthful, he didn’t ever have to stretch too far to attain such an attitude.
Perfection often annoyed him and he loved to give it a wee dig in the ribs but that wasn’t the whole cause.
Anyhow, a swooning woman was grounds for deep distrust, as was the rare and perplexing sight of a female by his fireside. He could sense complication. A feminine psyche going back right tae the very caves themselves. A psyche whose ruthless inner certainty it was his bounden duty to disrupt.
He sniffed. She was wearing perfume. A rose fragrance. Reminded him of Jean Brash. Females and their odours.
‘Or is it just because I possess beauty?’ she said.
His turn to narrow eyes.
‘What was that? I must confess I was lost in thought.’
‘The reason for your lack of manners.’
‘Oh that? No, that’s nothing to do with beauty. That’s just … part and parcel.’
‘I am glad to hear it. Most men take me at face value. It is so … inevitable, I suppose, given their limitations.’
One in the gut for him and nothing he did not deserve but why did he feel an obscure danger threatening?
Maybe she was right. Just beauty. In pale purple. That would be threatening enough. Ah well, cheat fair.
‘What is your preference in coffee?’ he ventured.
‘Black.’
‘Sugar?’
‘A small plantation.’
McLevy smiled suddenly, a beguiling glint in his eye. It was rather alarming. Like the wolf in Red Riding- Hood.
He brought her the coffee as directed, put it almost meekly into her hand, then retreated to regard her from a secure distance at the other side of the fire. She took a gulp. It was like bitumen.
‘Joanna Lightfoot. Mistress or Miss?’ he asked.
‘Miss.’
The merest flicker of an eye but she caught it.
‘I know. At the prime of my life and still not married. Such a waste. I am tortured night and day, waiting for my Prince Charming.’
McLevy sensed some twisted truth in her words and a hidden barb. Perhaps directed against herself. Women were the very devil to read. Like the Sargasso Sea.
‘I wouldnae place ye from round here.’
‘You may place me from Liquorpond Street, in London. That is where I was born,’ she said quietly.
‘I’ve heard tell of that location.’ It was a notorious slum quarter, mind you nothing to the Via Dolorosas of his own fair city. ‘You’ve come up in the world.’
For a moment it appeared as if she thought to say something then she lowered her eyes.
‘Ye remarked you had need of my assistance?’
Her fingers plucked at the bodice, which gently constrained the soft, no doubt sweet, flesh that poets eulogised and McLevy kept his mind resolutely free from contemplating.
‘I read in the evening newspaper,’ she stopped fiddling for which he was most grateful, ‘about a murder in Leith. Yourself, the investigating officer.’
‘I am indeed,’ he replied. And waited.
‘The death blow was most … singular?’
‘That’s one description. Sadie Gorman was split like an old apple tree, but she did not bring forth sweet scent.’
He chuckled to himself in a macabre fashion but his eyes never left her.
She rose from the chair, walked restlessly away from him into the centre of the room and looked around. The wallpaper seemed to be composed of brown flowers. She’d never seen
‘This lacks a woman’s touch,’ she said.
