‘The inspector thinks it might be murder.’
‘Murder? By what cause?’
‘He may be better telling you himself, sir. In the morning. At the station. It’s to do with opium dens and thumbmarks, and a goddess from India,’ the constable offered with a straight face.
Roach held up his hand in reflex.
‘Stop where you are. You’re right. In the morning. After church. I’ll get it from the cannon’s mouth. I don’t have the strength for an account of McLevy’s meanderings. Not this particular night.’
If you knew what was going through his mind, the constable thought bleakly, ye’d die with your leg up.
‘Gentlemen,’ a voice broke into their exchange, ‘I trust you have not descended to police business!’
Mulholland was relieved to see Mrs Roach bearing down on them with the smile of a born hostess. She was a small woman with a pretty face, like a doll, dainty and pleasant enough, but
God help him for the cruel callous swine he had become and it was all to do with spending so much time with McLevy, but Mulholland could not rid himself of the thought that she must be a truly terrible person to live with; always smiling, always busy, always fixing the woes of the world, not a shadow to be seen on her unremittingly cheerful face, no wonder Roach headed for the fairways. Ye needed a bit of grimness in a woman, not too much but just enough to prove that she was seriously worth the effort.
However, she was welcome enough now because not only did Mrs Roach extricate him from his lieutenant, she pointed the constable in the direction of Emily Forbes.
‘That young lady,’ she pulled Mulholland down so that his large pink ear was in whispering range, ‘is possessed of a beautiful contralto voice. Together you may grace our recitals with the most exquisite renderings.’
‘But I don’t read music,’ said Mulholland plaintively. ‘I missed it growing up.’
Mrs Roach fixed him with a bright stare, like a bird with its beady eye on an emergent larva.
‘There is nothing that cannot be solved by hard work and perseverance. The good Lord took seven days to create the world, musical notation is nothing to that.’
With this pithy homily, she ushered Mulholland away, without so much as a by-your-leave to her husband.
Roach watched his constable bow stiffly over Emily’s hand, and even more stiffly greet the man with her, Oliver Garvie, who bore the unmistakable mark of his father’s profession. A butcher’s son. He had a certain beefy charm and a finger in many pies. An entrepreneur. Mulholland had his work cut out there.
Robert Forbes, Roach noted, was watching the foursome but nothing could be gleaned from his face, what else could you expect from an insurance adjuster?
The lieutenant watched his wife with a strange, puzzled affection. He had joined the force late, and married even later. Roach had been marked down to inherit the family undertaking business, but the customers were uncomforted by his brooding presence.
Roach’s nature and looks precluded an easy belief in the hereafter. His brother Archie, round faced, moist- eyed and sympathetically solemn, at least provided some hope.
Thus the worm of life tries to wriggle off the hook before death bites.
The day after he laid out his own father, Roach left the business to Archie and joined the police force.
He had at first been welcomed with open arms, education and breeding to the fore, but somehow had never quite attained his cherished desire. He blamed his mother’s soft nature. To be successful in the force, you needed a heart of stone. His had cracks somewhere.
They were childless. The act of procreation, despite Mrs Roach’s chirps of encouragement and his banging away grimly like a man with his ball caught in a gorse bush, had produced nothing. No justice.
The lieutenant came out of these musings with a start.
It was worrying how he sometimes saw events through McLevy’s eyes, the man was a pernicious influence.
All was well with the world. Keep it that way.
One of the young ladies of the soiree approached him, full of the joys of culture.
‘All this must make you very happy, Mr Roach,’ she informed him.
‘Happiness,’ said Roach. ‘What is that?’
30
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ‘Ozymandias’
The haar had settled on Edinburgh. Even the castle citadel, the king’s bastion, 384 proud feet above sea level, was wreathed in a dense fog.
A large white gull waddled along the length of Mons Meg, the monster gun, four yards end to end, twenty inches diameter, but no longer fearsome since it had been fired and had burst in the year 1682 in an excess of joy at the greeting of the future King James II.
Such monarchical fervour had little interest for the gull, which deposited a large unpatriotic spatter of dung from its rear end on to the cannon before launching itself into the mist and disappearing like a carrier of ill intentions.
It left behind a curious sight. That which was meant to inspire fear in the enemy, covered in birdshit.
McLevy, meanwhile, was cursing under his breath in George Street as the raw, freezing sea fog swirled around, seeping into his very pores. This was a fool’s errand.
He had stationed himself opposite the house which the Earl of Rosebery had so thoughtfully provided for William Gladstone, a house easily identified by the Liberal colours hanging from each window.
The front door was resolutely shut, and when the inspector had reconnoitred the place, he found a side exit which Mulholland would have been the one to cover if he wasn’t so damned busy warbling like a canary. Cheep, cheep.
The inspector had tried to position himself so that he might cover both exits but it was increasingly difficult as the fog built up.
Add that to the dark of the night and it was just perfect conditions for surveillance – if, like the devil, ye had red eyes and could see through the smoke of hell.
What a foul pit-mirk. To match his mood. What was he doing here? Two hours he’d been breathing in the damp, rank vapour of the sea-fret. It caught at his throat and stung his eyes. What was driving him to make such a fool of himself? It certainly was not a tissue of stories from some woman in purple, no, and of course he had made the promise to George Cameron but … behind that?
There was something else. In his mind’s eye, he saw a statue of overwhelming grandeur. And with a rope pull it down. And with a hammer break it apart.
A seagull let out a shrill skraich overhead, it would be seeing more than him that’s for sure. The visibility was getting worse, as if a million incense burners had been let loose on the Protestant streets to drive the tight-lipped reforming faithful indoors. Must be working a treat because he’d not seen a soul this last hour.
Wait. He strained to listen in the dank muffled silence. Footsteps. Faint. From the side. Damnation!
He moved swiftly to the corner and looked down Hanover Street which cut through near to where he was standing sentry.
It was a well-lit thoroughfare usually but now seemed like an empty graveyard, the rays from a few street
