Fall From Grace

he was on his own and something in his opponent’s stillness should have warned that the outcome might not be like past encounters.

He moved forward, bare toes gripping at the cobbles.

‘Yer mammy cut her throat, they hung her on a hook like a pig and a’ body laughed. Mad auld Papish bitch.’

The insult did not achieve the hoped-for loss of reason, cause the boy to run headlong for vengeance and give Herkie a chance to get his powerful arms wrapped round. Once he got to close quarters he could crush and gouge. The fight was his.

But no. The other was still out of reach; he had not budged an inch, neither back nor forward.

Herkie let out a howl and made his move, hurling himself towards his target but he should have looked down.

The right tackety boot of Jamie McLevy crashed in just below the kneecap, paralysing the bigger boy to the spot with the most hellish pain as if his bone was splintered.

The other kneecap suffered the same fate from the same tackety boot.

He fell to the ground, mouth open, almost retching with agony. A foot came down on his outstretched hand, crunching the fingers to the stone beneath. The other hand went the same way. No favourites played.

The bigger boy might as well have been crucified.

He lifted his head and watched as the other solemnly unbuttoned himself and carefully urinated, first into one of Herkie’s boots, then the other. No favourites.

‘Ye can have them back,’ said Jamie.

There was not a trace of feeling on his face. The eyes were blank, impersonal almost and all the more petrifying because of it.

Only a small boy but he carried a wilderness of anguish and the terrible fear that one day his mother’s madness might infect and drown him if it had not already done so.

He walked out of the passage into the sunlight and was gone without a backward glance.

After a long time, Herkie Dunbar crawled painfully towards his boots and when he got there, sniffed cautiously.

Not too bad a smell, all that Holy Water must purify the pish, with a bit of luck he could rinse them out and no one would ever know.

That he had lost the fight.

When McLevy’s eyes came back to focus, he found he was once more looking at the blank page of his diary. He had sat at the table with best intentions, then not written a word and instead slid off into memory.

The cemetery meeting with Margaret Bouch this very morning had no doubt triggered that particular recollection, because Dunbar, the grown man, had played a part in the history of Sir Thomas and his tragic fall.

More and more McLevy drifted in and out of the past these days, a sign of age no doubt but in this case also, a wish to avoid some uncomfortable aspects of his present situation.

Aspects and images.

Margaret Bouch, her tongue outstretched to catch the falling drip. And swallow it down.

Jean Brash at the window, red hair against the white skin of her naked shoulders as Oliver Garvie delved in.

How long had McLevy sat on that wall looking at the finally closed curtain?

Not long. His backside had become too damp and he hoped the result would not be investigational haemorrhoids.

If an entanglement it was none of his business but what if there was more to it than that?

There was certainly not less. It was obviously a full-blooded affair, red in tooth and claw.

He reviewed the case so far, but was conscious that there was an element of avoidance in the process; two women, one close to hand, the other through a glass. McLevy did not delude himself that he was unaware of how love could rage.

He was by no means an innocent but had always taken his satisfaction in other cities, never close to hand.

And as regards love, he had never brought it home.

The prospect was terrifying. To lose yourself in another person. To lose yourself. Like madness.

Perhaps he would write of this later in his diary. A confidence, between himself and the page.

Meanwhile, back to the certainty of crime.

The night of the fire, the watchman had been absent and when he and Mulholland went a’ visiting, the man’s wife informed them that he had a fever. Sure enough the fellow lay in bed sweating and pallid but that could have been downright fear.

While Mulholland distracted the woman, McLevy ducked in to the scullery for a quick snoop, and spotted, shoved to the back of a shelf, a near-full bottle of whisky. Fine quality at that.

Medicinal, the wife said when challenged, and she aye bought fine quality.

Her clothes and the furnishings of the two cramped rooms, three children sleeping next door, would seem to contradict that but short of dragging the man from his sickbed and hauling him to the station, an act that though tempting might be hard to justify to his Lieutenant Roach should the accused collapse and die leaving his snottery offspring fatherless, McLevy had to leave it there.

He would be back though, he said, and fixed the trembling man with a baleful stare but the wife was unimpressed.

They had nothing to hide. Why pick on poor folk?

But she was wrong there; McLevy would pick on anybody plus, if they were that impoverished, how afford the whisky?

And the watchman’s absence was very convenient. The inspector did not cleave to convenience. Or coincidence.

He wondered for a moment how Mulholland was faring with old Mary Rough. The constable had probably given up long ago and was standing underneath Emily Forbes’ window serenading her like a smitten Sicilian.

The inspector moved towards the faint-glowing fireplace where his coffee pot stood on the hearth. As he poured out into his stone mug, he glanced in and frowned to see the network of cracks running along the interior; he’d be losing precious coffee to those cracks.

He’d arrived too late for supper so had to make do with his own bread, cheese and pickle. The bread was three days old, the cheese ten, and the pickle time out of mind.

This was his second cup of bituminous coffee, reduced to what looked like a black sludge. It would go well with the pickle.

McLevy looked around his room and sighed contentedly. Save for the books, it bore little trace of the person within and that was just how he liked it.

Two battered armchairs, one with a broken spring for guests who never arrived, a couple of thin stringy carpets that had seen better days and the spindly-legged table which served for meals and scribbling.

The whole place maintained clean as a whistle by his landlady, Mrs MacPherson.

Not a mirror, not a photograph to mar the looping whorls of brown flowers on the faded wallpaper.

Of late he had, to his surprise, become increasingly shipshape, not that it reflected in how he presented himself to the outside world, but in this room everything was kept in its place.

Even his beloved books were arranged in neat piles, the spines facing outwards for easy identification, stacked up against the brown wallpaper, some of the towers reaching up to almost waist height. He played a childlike game where he imagined them to be like columns of a temple and took great pleasure in favouring one then another in terms of how high they might aspire.

His reading was voracious, eclectic, and he relished the retention of obscure facts and strange turns of phrase from literature or poetry.