Fall From Grace

‘That’s because you’re the smallest, they’re all older than you and there’s a whole gang!’

‘I never win.’

‘That Dunbar boy is an evil swine, he’ll come tae a bad end you mark my words!’

She finished cleaning him up, grasped him firmly by the hand and he limped beside her as they walked back through the wynd towards the entrance to their close.

One of the windows above opened and a woman leaned out.

‘Is he a’ right, Jean?’

‘He’s fine.’

‘I heard the rammy but I wasnae certain. These rascals are aye up tae something, eh?’

‘Uhuh.’

The window closed again and Jean became aware that the boy was looking up at her. Solemn- faced.

‘What is it?’

‘They said my mammy cut her throat. A’body knows.’

Jean sighed again. Would it never end?

‘Your mammy was a good soul, son.’

‘But it’s true. I saw her.’

Indeed he had. Jean had lived across the hall from them and found him keeping vigil at the kitchen table while his mother lay in the bed recess like a rag doll.

God knows why the woman had done that but Maria McLevy was a Catholic and the workings of such a mind would always be a mystery from Jean’s staunch Protestant viewpoint.

However, she had taken the boy in and now he was her life and she his family, their bond was stronger than blood.

‘Your mother was a good soul,’ she said quietly.

‘I’ve been saving my pocket money,’ he replied as if in answer. Jean smiled; his shifts of thought were commonplace to her by this time.

‘Have ye now?’

‘But I don’t know if it’s enough.’

‘I’ll make it up. What is it ye want to buy, the Edinburgh Castle maybe?’

He shook his head gravely.

‘No. A pair o’ tackety boots.’

‘Big heavy boots? And why is that?’

He made no response but a look passed over his face, which many a criminal in years to come would recognise and then worry over.

‘Will we get a size up, so’s ye can grow into them?’

‘The bigger the better,’ said the boy.

‘McLevy, if it’s not too much of a burden, could you bring yourself back to earth?’

The inspector wrenched himself from memory; God knows why such a recollection should have come into his mind and perhaps it was an offshoot of the personnel connected to the morning funeral, but then again McLevy’s thoughts did tend to drift when his superior was summing up the salient facts of a case.

He looked at Lieutenant Roach and wondered if, like the crocodile, he ate his meat alive and kicking.

‘Your servant aye, sir.’

‘That provides great comfort,’ muttered Roach.

The two of them plus Mulholland were ensconced in the lieutenant’s office with various chief constables, a Masonic lodge or two, a man with his foot on a dead stag, and Queen Victoria, looking down from the walls.

There was also a picture of Roach in plus fours leaning upon his driver in front of the clubhouse of the Royal Musselburgh golf course. He had yet to hit the ball and perhaps never would.

‘So,’ resumed the lieutenant, ‘it would seem that we have a break-in, an accident of fire, the sinner unrecognisable and burnt to hell which is where he was bound for in any case, an unfortunate loss of good cigars which will leave Sandy Grant nothing to stuff in his face for a while, but, other than that, all neat and tidy.’

‘All neat and tidy,’ said McLevy.

Something in his tone caused Roach’s eyes to narrow in historical reflex but then he dismissed it from his mind; there was a lodge meeting later and he needed time to ponder how to disseminate the details of his own chief constable’s perfidy on the putting green amongst his Masonic brothers without sounding like a bad loser.

He waved his hand and shuffled some papers.

‘Go therefore and do something useful,’ he commanded.

McLevy was out like a shot and that should have sent a warning signal flying Roach’s way but the good lieutenant had his attention taken by the tall figure of Mulholland, looming over him like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

‘I shall speak to Robert Forbes when the time is appropriate, constable,’ he said without looking up from his papers. ‘Go away.’

Mulholland resisted the temptation to rattle the engagement ring in its box in his pocket, nodded somewhat jerkily and moved off with only one backward beseeching glance from the door, which was resolutely ignored.

And yet he did not leave. Completely.

‘There’s one thing I would like to venture, sir.’

The lieutenant froze at his desk. He had a horrible feeling that this would concern his wife.

‘Mrs Roach has assured me that you will be my champion.’

‘Champion?’ repeated Roach in a somewhat strangled voice.

‘But I told her not to worry. We are all pushing in the same direction. Shoulders to the wheel.’

There was just the slightest tinge of bumptiousness in the remark, love indeed recognises little but its own importance.

The lieutenant waved his hand in a circular motion, not trusting himself to speak, and, finally, the door closed

Roach sighed. Five feet. Somewhere close to the height of Napoleon. And he’d missed the damned putt.

He looked up at the wall to his sovereign and wondered if Victoria had ever considered a game of golf.

She would never jingle.

When Mulholland emerged, he found the inspector watching Constable Ballantyne trying to catch a winter bluebottle against the window glass with a tumbler, so that he could slide some paper underneath then release the insect into the November air.

‘That boy is too kind to be a policeman,’ McLevy muttered. ‘You, however, will do fine.’

‘Where are we going then?’ asked Mulholland.

‘What?’

‘I know you by now and you’ve had something on your mind since you poked at that corpse. Not only that, the only time you’re polite to Doctor Jarvis is when he has observed and ratified what you have already noticed.’

The inspector grunted acknowledgement of the remark.

‘Our esteemed police surgeon confirmed what I had remarked about the burnt offering while you were using big words and being scientific. The corpse’s left foot was twisted but not from an accident of fire. A birth defect.’

‘I heard him say so.’

‘And it rang no bells?’

‘Not yet.’

Disappointment clouded McLevy’s eyes, there were times when he was abruptly reminded that the young