fellow, the Tory lickspittle, and then the man above him, and so on and so on as far up the chain of command as I can spread the word.
‘I intend to make sure that you regret your blundering idiocy for as long as is humanly possible. How does that appeal to you?’
Again the inspector had nothing to say. The hunched woman came out of the house again and moved quickly down the path to meet Gladstone. They conversed for a moment then turned to go back inside, her strides matching his with some ease.
‘Who is that woman?’ McLevy asked as if trying to delay the inevitable.
‘Jane Salter,’ broke in the voice of little George Ballard who had been dying to join in the fun. ‘Plain Jane, that’s her name to all the boys. But,
He roared with laughter at his own joke and slapped Prescott hard on the back. The secretary’s face whitened and, for a moment, he almost keeled over.
But then he recovered and pointed silently towards and beyond the iron gates of Dalmeny House where the crest of the Earl of Rosebery was wrought for all to see.
‘Get back to where you belong,’ he said.
McLevy was escorted to the gates and put out like a dog that had performed its business on the carpet.
They watched him walk down the carriage drive that led to the main road, the ground already chewed up by many wheels and sticky going.
Ballard glanced up at the sky darkening above and then at Prescott whose face was clenched and cold, an evil twist to the lips.
‘With a bit of luck,’ the little man pronounced with glee, ‘it’ll rain on the bastard all the way home.’
McLevy was thinking much the same thing as he saw the black clouds gather.
He supposed it was too much to hope that they might ask him back in for coffee and it was a long, long way to Leith.
He had begged a lift from a coachman he knew delivered in this area but he had no great hopes for the way back, and it was six long miles.
The first spits of rain started to fall and soon it would be a black downpour which would soak him to the skin.
He had much to ponder and the words of Horace Prescott echoed in his mind.
Back to where you belong, but where was that? All his life he had been outside the gates.
34
Alas! for the rarity,
Of Christian charity,
Under the sun!
THOMAS HOOD,
The body in the cold room once belonged to a young woman called Jennie Duncan. She had worked as a chambermaid for a tobacco merchant and sought to augment her miserable wages by nightly forays on the streets. Such girls were known as dollymops. Amateur whores. Easy marks.
Mulholland looked down at her and sighed. This was a mess in all senses. Lieutenant Roach had arrived in the morning to discover a new corpse on the slab and his inspector, who had found the damned thing and had it lugged to the station, missing from the scene.
The police surgeon Dr Jarvis had come, whistling through his teeth. He had cut further open and found a foetus. A rough guess, from the size, would be two or three months. It would grow no more.
Jarvis informed Lieutenant Roach of such and the lieutenant bowed his head as if in prayer.
Jarvis left.
Roach raised his head.
‘Where is McLevy?’ he asked grimly.
The constable could not help the lieutenant find the inspector because the constable was none the wiser although he had an awful premonition that the inspector was up to absolutely no good at all.
Time passed. The tobacco merchant came in, identified the body but disclaimed the dollymop activity. He also disclaimed knowledge of the girl being pregnant.
The merchant left. Time passed.
Chief Constable Grant arrived as if he had a fire burning up his backside. He had been sitting peacefully at home contemplating the minister’s Sabbath message when one of Prescott’s men had barged over the threshold and delivered a very different communication. Grant took the lieutenant into his own room, the room with the only shiny door, and for a full hour all that could be heard was the sound of his voice, like a hand-saw cutting through a metal bar.
The chief constable left. The lieutenant emerged white with anger and humiliation. He looked around for someone to vent his spleen upon.
Mulholland had secreted himself in the water closet, snibbed the door shut and put faith in his bowel movements.
Sergeant Murdoch was in the Land of Nod and Ballantyne had pulled his head so far back into his shoulders that he resembled a turtle.
But then through the station door, a drowned man walking, leaving wet footprints with every step, came the drookit, sodden figure of James McLevy.
The crocodile jaws of Roach snapped shut. He crooked his finger, not trusting words in a public place, and the bedraggled inspector, looking neither left nor right, took up the invitation and followed him back into the office.
That had been a fair time ago. Mulholland had crept out of the closet into the cold room to rehearse his excuses and get used to the temperature, the anticipated icy blast.
He was implicated by proxy, guilty by association, all his sookin’ up was to be in vain. Leave to attend the third wedding of his Aunt Katie would not be forthcoming. Indeed, he would be lucky to emerge with his testicles intact.
Pulling up the sheet, he covered the face of the corpse which appeared to be looking down in some dismay at its disarrayed rib cage.
The door opened and Ballantyne stuck his head in.
‘The lieutenant wants tae see you.’
Ballantyne searched for something hopeful to say, he was a kind-hearted soul and wouldn’t last long. A red tide showed just above the line of his collar, a birthmark about which he had been teased unmercifully by some of the other men at the station before McLevy announced one day that he had similar on his backside and would personally eviscerate the next person who mentioned same.
Mulholland had stood behind the inspector that day, as he now stood in front of Ballantyne.
‘I think the lieutenant might be getting sore-throatit, he’s been leathering his tonsils a decent time now. Don’t worry what he says, ye cannae hear the words through the door and I’m not listening anyway.’
It was a somewhat confused benison but Mulholland nodded gratefully enough and crossed the greasy floor of the station to the office door which had been left ajar.
He knocked upon it anyway, just to be on the safe side, and entered.
The inspector was standing up against the wall as if pinned there by the force of Roach’s invective. His hair was plastered flat to his head and he looked for all the world like a little boy who’d been caught out in the rain.
The lieutenant had his back to both of them and was staring up at the portrait of Queen Victoria as if seeking a source of strength.
McLevy drooped the one eyelid in a conspiratorial wink at Mulholland who rejected all reception of same and
