Shadow of the Serpent

He put the fragment back and pressed the box into the constable’s hand.

‘It always irked me, the vicious bastard, I never brought him in to kiss the hangman’s rope. Poor wee lassie, it was her first time a-whoring, did ye know that?’

‘I was there when her brother told you.’

‘So ye were, so ye were,’ the sergeant’s eyes began to droop and with an effort he prised them open again. Behind the thick glasses, magnified, they blinked like an owl.

‘It was in all the papers, you ‘member that?’

‘I do indeed,’ replied the constable.

A silence fell. Cameron stared into space and the young man produced a headline from memory.

‘A Lamb to the Slaughter,’ he quoted solemnly.

Cameron’s head jerked back as a shaft of pain burnt through his body. He looked up at the constable.

‘The case is yours. One day you will solve it. I charge you so. Don’t fail me, now.’

‘I promise I will do everything in my power.’

‘Until the day ye die!’ demanded Cameron.

‘Until the day I die,’ came the pledge.

Cameron leant back exhaustedly on the pillow, his mind was beginning to go, the poison dancing in his veins, what was that air he always enjoyed? Tam Lucas of the Feast, damn me but he could not recall the tune.

‘Can ye sing?’ he demanded hoarsely.

‘I know very few melodies,’ was the response.

The sergeant waved his hand in decree, he could not trust the words to emerge.

Damn it, he was on the verge of weeping buckets, this was not the way to go.

‘Sing!’ he commanded

The constable, with quavering voice, gave issue.

Shock pulled Cameron from death’s door.

‘That’s a Jacobite air!’

‘A friend of my mother, she sang it. Jean Scott. When I was a wee boy. It’s the only tune I can carry.’

‘Was this friend of Jacobite persuasion?’

‘I never asked her.’

The sergeant smiled crookedly.

‘Tell ye the truth, son, I sometimes wished I could have fought by Charlie’s side. I’d rather die from a bayonet than a bastard penknife.’

He motioned for more melody, then a random thought struck and he laughed with a feverish glee.

‘But, it wasnae the knife that did for me, it was the blackness crusted, the tobacco on it that poisoned. A dangerous damned thing. Tobacco.’

He closed his eyes without farewell and James McLevy sang the Highlander out, tears dripping down his face.

‘Charlie is my darling … the young chevalier…’

The thick glasses glinted. But the light was gone.

14

And find

What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

JOHN DONNE, ‘Song’, op. cit.

There was one man who could put fear into Joanna Lightfoot by the blankness of his gaze, now she had found another. She took a pace back as McLevy slowly returned from where her words had transported him.

‘Mae Donnachie,’ he said, voice slurred from a muddy past. ‘Her first night out whoring. She was fifteen years old. She had a family to support.’

He turned away and shook his head as though to rid it of certain images then swung back and reached out his hand towards her, fingers crooked, as if to hold her by the throat. Then he dropped the hand and was perfectly still.

‘How do you know about this?’

She had her nerve back now. A calm reply.

‘Tell me what you found, and I shall respond in kind.’

He moved to the fire and, using the tongs, carefully put individual lumps of coal one on top of the other, building a fortress amid the flames.

‘She’d come down across the bridges from the Royal Mile, the competition would be too savage up there. She didnae know the streets of Leith, she was just a young lassie. Desperate. Her brother’s lungs were shot tae hell, she wanted to get him medicine; the father drank what the mother earned with washing and the like. The mother had six further children. Lived in the one room, eleven feet or so each way. One o’ the wynds off the High Street. A common enough tangle.’

‘What a dreadful life.’

He sensed a distance to that remark, just a wee touch of looking down from on high; so he jumped on it like a dog on a bone. Teeth first, arse to follow.

‘Ye must have seen the same in Liquorpond Street, if what you tell me is true, that you were born there?’

‘I was … removed at an early age.’

‘Lucky you. Mae Donnachie stayed where she was.’

He crossed to a small cupboard, and banged the side of his fist against the wood. The door sprang open and she jumped a little at the unexpected noise. As he scrabbled inside for something, he carried on the tale.

‘It wasnae our parish but the City police were a wee touch on the brutal side, so we broke the sad tidings to the Donnachies ourselves.’

‘We?’

‘Sergeant Cameron and me. I was a babe in arms then.’

‘Hard to imagine.’

He ignored the remark, and brought out something wrapped in tissue paper. He held it cupped carefully in his hands, as he made towards the table at the window.

‘The brother was stricken with guilt. He died soon after. A short-lived family.’

‘Terrible times.’

‘They have not changed.’

‘Surely there are civic policies on hand to alter all that? Improvements?’

‘They must have passed me by,’ McLevy said dryly.

‘But surely, Social reform – ’

‘Politicians have no interest in the poor. The poor have no power. They cannot vote. The only choice they