42
We lay, my love and I,
Beneath the Weeping Willow.
But now alone I lie,
And weep beside the tree.
ENGLISH BALLAD
‘How did you know?’
The golden hair had been pinned back from her face and she wore a drab grey dress whose coarse material fell to the floor like a dead weight.
Joanna Lightfoot had the brand of an institution already laid upon her, but her face was clear, the eyes calm. She had nothing left to lose now except her liberty and, from her demeanour, it would seem she placed little value upon that.
McLevy spoke quietly. A female warder of sorts sat in the corner, apparently paying no heed, but the inspector was not naive enough to think that because the authorities, in their gratitude, had granted him this one favour, they were to be trusted in any other business.
They were going to sweep the whole thing under the carpet and needed his silence.
But that was all they needed.
‘Ye walk like a soldier,’ he said. ‘A person can disguise many things but the walk often gives them away.’
In his mind’s eye, he replayed the moment when he watched her, as Jane Salter, stride up the path with Gladstone and registered a thin slice of intuition.
She smiled at the irony. Throughout the years, the Serpent had often taken her to task for her gait.
‘As if I had just dismounted a horse?’
‘Ye might say that.’ He scratched his ear, oddly discomfited. ‘I wasn’t exactly sure. It was just a moment.’
‘And you follow such moments?’
‘Most of the time.’
She fell silent. McLevy was at a loss. There was an ending to be made between them, but he was damned if he knew what form it might take.
‘But other than that, ye made a fine stab at deception. Led me a merry dance. Twisted me like a fool.’
‘Not at the end,’ she said. ‘At the final reckoning, you had your revenge.’
He remembered in the tomb looking down at his tunic to discover that most of the blood came from another source. As they had fallen to earth the axe blade must have turned so that the Serpent had impaled himself.
McLevy had been underneath. A man on the ground is not necessarily a man defeated.
He was gouged some, but not mortally wounded, so he untied his legs, retrieved his revolver and followed the fellow out to watch him die.
‘Did you have no qualms of conscience?’ he asked. ‘You would ruin a man’s life?’
Though Gladstone was a politician, he was still a human being. Somewhere.
‘No regrets?’
She looked at him in surprise.
‘Not at all. It was a job of work.’
‘A job?’
‘Yes. I joined Sweet William’s staff and made myself indispensable. It was easy to become his little pet because we had researched his … predilections.’
It all seemed logical to Joanna.
‘Then I waited for my instructions.’
‘Which you followed to the letter?’
‘Of course.’
McLevy shook his head. This was worse than being in the fog. She witnessed his confusion and smiled.
‘There is no hatred, or love. Only instruction. It is like a game. The long game, we used to call it.’
She tugged at the neckline of her prison dress. The rough material obviously chafed.
‘Gladstone was just part of the game. It never ends.’
‘But what about the deaths? These poor women?’
‘I did not perform them. He …’ for the first time her voice faltered, not for the committed act but for the lost lover … ‘He provided.’
‘But was not that evil?’
‘I am the operative. As I have said. Good or bad means nothing to me.’
‘That is where we differ.’
It was like being in a fairy tale, lost in a deep forest which made perfect sense unto itself yet for the traveller led nowhere and folded into darkness.
‘Have ye ever killed?’ he asked.
‘That is not my function. I seduce. I entice. I … create illusion.’
‘How long have ye been so?’
‘As long as I can remember.’
She laughed suddenly and, as before, he sensed the bitter pain behind that sound.
‘I have always been in the field. The only difference this time was that … He was with me. A pity. A great loss.’
Another silence. Her gaze had fallen inwards.
‘Was everything you told me about yourself a lie?’
She was jolted out of her introspection by this question and her lips, still that bit on the thin side, screwed into a bitter smile.
‘Not at all. My mother was indeed a whore, a game and brazen one. She had no shame, she loved life and dressed to kill.’
McLevy was put in mind of Sadie Gorman.
Again Joanna spoke in those formal tones which were so much part of her character.
‘She became the mistress of a young man with some measure of nobility, and had a child by him. He provided in some way for her. When she died, he removed the daughter. He lifted her from the slums she and the mother had inhabited, and took on the role of the child’s guardian.’
She stopped.
McLevy now knew why he was here. A twist to the blood he sensed from the moment they had first met.
‘The girl grew up. She had everything money could buy. A good education, pretty clothes. And then one night, at the age of eighteen, she came to him.
‘That night, they broke the law. And thereafter.’
The inspector licked his dry lips. She smiled and passed her hand almost playfully over her face.
For a moment he was looking at the Serpent and then, another pass, and the features had rearranged to Joanna Lightfoot.
‘A trait we both shared. Father and daughter.’
One of McLevy’s legs set off in an uncontrollable shaking as he gazed into the dark blue eyes.
‘I am a damned soul,’ she said. ‘If there is perdition, a future punishment as Mr Gladstone would term it, if there is a hell, I shall meet my lover there.
‘We will burn together.’
She reached deliberately forward, took up McLevy’s hand and kissed it. The imprint of her lips stayed on his skin.
A long silence. Most terrible to bear.
Then he leant forward and blurted out a mundane thought, but anything to break that silence. ‘Why did ye
