‘I have suspects in mind, sir. When I am more certain, I shall acquaint you.’ Mulholland sniffed audibly. ‘And now if you will excuse me?’
He badly needed to sit down, dizzy spells were a bad sign, too much coffee the night before, a fractured sleep, his fast not broken, the portents of a gathering obsession.
‘You will not be excused,’ said Roach with a certain grim relish. ‘D’you know of a woman … Bridget Lapsley?’
‘Keeps an auld hoose in Meikle John’s close,’ replied McLevy promptly, glad to get back on even ground. ‘Rents the rooms tae all and sundry. When in drink, is prone tae caterwaul all night. Hence her familiar – Biddie Yammerlugs.’
‘Your knowledge of Leith’s depraved and lost souls never ceases to amaze me,’ said Roach bleakly. ‘She sent in word not half an hour ago. I was almost on the desperate point of rousing Sergeant Murdoch, when into the station you fortuitously march.’
‘What word did she send?’ McLevy muttered.
‘One of her lodgers has died in bed.’
‘I’m surprised she didnae throw the body out the window, rent and be damned.’
‘Well, she did not. You are to inspect the corpse.’
‘Are the circumstances doubtful, sir?’ Mulholland attempted to supply an interest singularly lacking in his inspector.
‘McLevy will tell us that.’
Roach turned to go back into his room. The inspector was still a little shaky; what he wouldn’t give for an aromatic cup of Arabian best in Jean Brash’s garden, the early roses matching her red hair, listening to the fluting calls of the whores as they hung out the morning-washed bed linen.
‘Could one of the constables not pay a visit?’ he said with a hopeful glance at Mulholland.
‘It is your concern,’ said Roach. ‘It is connected. As you are so fond of telling me, everything in Leith is connected.’
On that cryptic remark, the door closed, leaving the inspector hanging out to dry like the whorehouse sheets.
‘You’re not the only one keeps things up the sleeve, eh?’ said Mulholland.
24
When boys go first to bed,
They step into their voluntary graves.
GEORGE HERBERT, ‘Mortification’
And looking down at the dead body of Frank Brennan, this one hour later, he had to acknowledge the accuracy of the constable’s observation.
It was common knowledge, even the lieutenant would have heard, that McLevy had fingered the big Irishman as being morally if not physically responsible for Sadie Gorman’s death. Roach must have enjoyed the thought of the inspector suffering, he would most earnestly hope, terrible qualms of guilt over the result of his machinations.
McLevy did indeed feel a certain queasiness in the pit of his stomach but rather than pangs of conscience he would more put the attribution down to the stench in this grimy box of a room.
There was the memory, however, of the appeal in the big man’s eyes, when he had tried to make amends by revealing that someone, so Sadie told him, had been watching at her and Brennan had paid no mind.
As McLevy, in turn, had paid no mind to that pathetic effort of atonement.
Frank Brennan had died unshriven. The inspector would have to live with it.
He brought his mind round to the present. One question only. Was the death natural?
He gazed down at the pasty white face of the corpse, still dressed in shirt and trousers and lying where the man had, no doubt drunkenly, fallen on to the mattress. At least he’d managed to kick off his shoes; the Irishman’s big toe stuck comically out of the frayed and holed sock.
Was the death natural, accidental as it were? Was it suicide? Was it murder? From his examination, he thought he knew the answer. Brennan’s eyes stared open. He reached forward with his fingers and gently closed them.
The door opened and Mulholland entered, his head near touching the ceiling of the narrow room.
‘I’ve seen more space in a prison cell,’ he announced.
The constable then fell silent. He was still in the huff. McLevy took note and sighed.
‘I realise I have caused offence with my accusation of yourself being a clipe. I now take it back. You may be many things, constable, and undoubtedly are, but a clipe is not one of them.’
This, from the inspector, was the equivalent of the legendary Ashes of Contrition, and Mulholland, realising such, bowed his head in dignified acceptance then delivered.
‘I spoke to everyone in the house, never met such a disreputable assembly in my whole life, ye could not believe one single word spoken. And Biddy wants the room back.’
‘She told me that earlier.’
To Mulholland’s previous annoyance he had been dispatched to question the rag-bag collection of labourers, sailors and one-eyed trollops that made up the lodging-house inhabitants.
McLevy had meanwhile closeted himself to interview Biddy before chasing her out to annoy the constable. She had followed Mulholland from room to room, complaining loudly of the inspector’s lack of esteem for a decent respectable woman, the like of which she fondly imagined herself to be.
‘Still on about that, eh? Is she going tae fumigate the place?’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’
‘Well, she’ll have to wait,’ grunted McLevy. ‘This may be the scene of a murder.’
‘Murder? There’s not a mark on the man, he died natural, unless you think poison?’
‘No. I do not think poison. See the lock on the door over there?’
Mulholland shook his head. ‘But the door was ajar late this morning, the reason Biddy stuck her head in to discover the dead body. And let out a fearful scream she told me.’
‘Aye, so she did. That must have been something tae hear.’
Mulholland still didn’t move to the door, so McLevy indicated to the only other piece of furniture in the place, a spindly three-legged chair drawn up near to the dirty mattress, which lay on the floor, acting this moment as bed and bier. On the seat of the chair lay a large key.
‘What does that tell you?’
‘Brennan came in drunk, fell to bed and forgot to secure the lock,’ said the constable.
‘Yet Biddy said he was fierce particular about that, she was surprised tae find the door pushing open.’
‘That’s true enough,’ said Mulholland rather snidely. ‘He’d be in fear of his life what with you telling the criminal fraternity of how he betrayed one of their own.’
McLevy ignored the barb. ‘He kept the key by his bed, close to hand. Drunk or not, I don’t see him forgetting.’
He pointed silently at the door and Mulholland crossed without further comment to crouch down and examine the lock.
‘Well?’ demanded the inspector.
The mechanism was black-encrusted, a wonder the thing worked at all, but there were two fine scratches, just newly made by the looks of it, of a type the constable had seen before in his travels. He looked over at the other.
‘Lockpicks, d’ye think?’ said McLevy.
‘Could be,’ replied the constable slowly. ‘Hard to tell, but … could be.’
He thought further. ‘However, if crack open and enter why not secure when leaving, unless …?’
