Shadow of the Serpent

simultaneously prime minister and chancellor, one head being better than two, and a canny recognition that every chancellor’s sweetest desire was to dance on the dead body of his own PM so the only person you may have even the faintest hope of trusting is yourself) into an eight-million-pound deficit during six spurious years of unchecked imperialist annexation, false phantoms of glory.

He then had a passing swipe at Victoria being declared these four years past the Empress of India, theatrical bombast and folly, although he was careful to lay the blame for that at Beaconsfield’s door.

Now he was engaged on raising his audience to an almost mystical communion against the evils of plutocracy.

But if truth be told, the People’s William was far from an egalitarian. The opportunity to make large fortunes did not arouse his moral repugnance, indeed it had his full approval. What he was sore against, however, was the flaunting of it. And his indignation over such display had a practical streak. Don’t shove your wealth in the faces of the poor, it may stir them up to resent their lot. They may rise against you, pitchfork to hand. And stick it in.

His ideal would be for one to live well within one’s modestly acknowledged vast fortune and plough the money back into the land, or nurture the urban wage-slaves by building another factory to enhance their existence.

However, if unable to aspire towards such philanthropy, then at least balance your books, refrain from coveting thy Afghan or Zulu neighbour’s land, don’t pick a fight with foreigners, and, when at home, don’t show off.

Most especially round your wife’s neck.

And yet, almost despite himself, the bain de foule, the adoration of the masses within which he immersed himself with growing addiction, aroused an evangelical fervour which lifted him to address the people directly, over the heads of the aristocracy, landed interest, the established Church and even, most specifically, the Queen.

If Gladstone was aware that Victoria had always regarded direct address to the people as her prerogative and therefore the Royal nose had been put well and truly out of joint, he gave no sign of it.

His oratorical style was at times ponderous, monolithic, but the slow sentences built up, fuelled by a boundless physical energy, till they created the impression of a mighty sea rolling in, wave after wave after wave.

McLevy watched from amongst the crowd. All this oratory was giving him a blinding headache although he was prepared to admit a certain prejudice.

The inspector detested politicians. Scavengers who would sacrifice their own children if they thought it would advance them one small step nearer to kissing the rancid arse of power.

Gladstone, luckily, was unaware of this jaundiced view from at least one of his audience as he launched into a final but still lengthy salvo, on the subject it would seem of ‘the nation against selfish interests’.

‘We have great forces arrayed against us,’ he began, before dismissing out of hand the aforesaid aristocrats, gentry and Church, ‘… wherever there is close corporation, wherever there is a spirit of organised monopoly, wherever there is a sectional and narrow interest apart from that of the country, and desiring to be set up above the interest of the public, there, gentlemen, we, the Liberal Party …’

Aha, thought McLevy, moved from the nation tae the party, have we?

‘… have no friendship and no tolerance to expect.’

Gladstone paused for a moment. Earlier parts of his speech had been somewhat elevated and erudite, littered with Latin, marbled by Greek, but now he was moving in for the kill, the axe raised high.

‘But, above all these, and behind all these, there is something greater than these – there is the nation itself!’

Now, we’re back tae the nation, McLevy reflected, the auld bugger’s faster on his feet than he looks.

A prolonged burst of applause had allowed this seditious thought some room to express itself.

McLevy glanced sideways at Mulholland who was apparently enthralled by this spouting torrent of words, this vast ocean of promises. The inspector, as previously noted, did not trust the ocean because he could not swim.

Gladstone took a deep swallow from a glass of water and returned, refreshed, to the fray.

‘This great trial is now proceeding before the nation. The nation is a power hard to rouse, but when roused, harder still and more hopeless to resist …’

There was a buzzing in McLevy’s ears. It could not be a lack of sustenance, for early afternoon in the Old Ship he had treated Mulholland to the constable’s favourite repast, boiled sheep’s head, though the inspector himself preferred it burnt black with the hot iron.

Strangely enough, the dead body of Frank Brennan had given them both a fierce appetite, and after arranging for the body to be taken back to the mortuary to await examination, they had bolted for the tavern.

Mulholland’s eyes had lit up at the contents of his plate, much the same as Herod’s viewing the head of John the Baptist, while McLevy looked on benignly.

This had been a necessary sop before dragging his unwilling subordinate, by coach, some sixteen miles to West Calder, within whose townhall William Gladstone was making his last election address on the Saturday before the Monday poll. Sunday being the holy Sabbath, where all chicanery ceased under the stern eye of God.

West Calder was not even in Gladstone’s Midlothian constituency but he had tramped the length and breadth of Scotland and, for some reason, this homely venue brought out the best in the People’s William.

The place was packed up to the rafters, near up to fifteen hundred souls, all shapes and sizes, mostly honest working men and women in sober clothes. The town’s economy was based on oil-shale production, not the most romantic of occupations, indeed a grinding prospect, but their faces were alight with a hope and belief which may well have helped cause the painful vibration in McLevy’s head.

Most of the poor buggers were not even franchised to vote, yet here they were being elevated into thinking they had a serious judgemental duty to exercise. A delusion of democracy. Gibble gabble.

He could see Gladstone’s mouth opening and shutting but a curious feeling of numbness and separation came over him. It was as if his eye had become a lens which swept the scene in front of him like a telescope.

This feeling of separation, as if seeing what was ahead like a screen upon which images were projected, had come to him in his life before but each time he contrived to pull shut the curtain of memory because it linked in some way with his mother; a certain gruesome picture at the back of his mind which brought with it a sense of vulnerability and childlike fear.

But what was to fear at this moment? Nothing. So let the lens roam.

Behind Gladstone on the platform various figures were seated and behind them others stood even farther at the back, almost out of the circle of the light.

Beyond them were no doubt more diverse shapes in the darkness, and behind them even other shadows. Going farther and farther back till they lost accountability. Such is the nature of the political animal. One face after another till the mask drops and all that is left is a vacant space where something may have once been. Or stood. Like a ghost.

Seated to the side was a self-composed elegant figure McLevy recognised as the 5th Earl of Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose to be precise. It seemed as if Rosebery had a bad smell under his nose, surely not the proximity of the People’s William? The earl never looked directly towards Gladstone but at a spot some two feet in front of the great man, which was where, according to rumour, one day he would wish to find himself positioned, ruling the roost as cock of the party.

But for the moment Rosebery had to rest content with acting the great Scottish grandee who was hosting and masterminding the campaign. His eyes were half-closed giving a somewhat reptilian cast of feature and it was said he never slept. Too busy plotting perhaps. Spring is a great time for the plotting.

A gaggle of private secretaries swayed to and fro in the background like the fronds of some underwater plant and one in particular caught McLevy’s eye. Tall, silver haired, he was in marked contrast to the stunted jobsworths who scuttled around him. He brought to the inspector’s mind Frank Brennan’s account of the doorway gentry who paid a price for Sadie Gorman that the poor old whore paid later.

Though even Gladstone himself might fit that particular bill. But had not the doorway gentry said … a friend? He was making the purchase on behalf of a friend. And was Brennan killed because he might remember the half-