She sighed and shook her head like a weary animal.
‘I’ll take my licks.’
‘And I’ll put a strong word in for you at trial, see if I don’t.’
He was already moving to the door, the cigar box stuffed into the poacher’s pocket of his long black coat.
Mulholland turned to survey the old woman in the chair, every detail of the room etched into his mind. This was a moment he would never forget, a moment when his life had taken a decisive spin for the better.
‘You’ve helped me something fine,’ he declared grandly.
‘What have I done?’ asked Mary.
But the door had slammed and the constable was gone.
Now Mulholland crashed a heavy brass knocker upon another door in Doune Terrace. The knocker was in the shape of a fish with pouting lips that put the constable in mind of the man himself, though when the door opened, it was not Oliver Garvie but a uniformed supercilious old flunky who appeared, his lip curled slightly at the sight of the wild-eyed lanky figure looming in the half light.
‘I’m a policeman,’ said Mulholland. ‘Where’s the master of the house?’
The old fellow blinked. This was not a customary doorstep greeting.
‘Mister Garvie is not at home,’ he said carefully. ‘His return is unspecified. I would suggest, sir, that you make your way back in the morning.’
‘That’s a grand suggestion,’ said Mulholland, pushing past the fellow, ‘but time and the hour waits for no man.’
The flunky gazed in dismay as the wet from the constable’s large heavy shoes seeped on to the highly polished floorboards of the hall.
He had no option but to close the door and watch as Mulholland took tenancy of a chair in the hall beside an equally highly polished, delicately carved table, where business gentlemen were supposed to deposit their visiting cards in a silver tray.
The constable clenched his hands together tightly, his previous certainty and bravado somewhat mitigated by the surrounding rich furnishings and opulence. And this was only the hall; God knows what the rest of the place was like. No doubt the water closet had a chain of jewels.
‘The matter is urgent,’ he announced loudly, as much to encourage himself as to inform the old man, who was staring at him as if he were a creature from the zoo. ‘It cannot attend tomorrow. I’ll wait my hurry.’
‘What if he doesnae come till late?’ said the old fellow plaintively, knowing Garvie to be a night-owl and also that he could not get to bed while this weird intruder lurked in the hallway.
‘I’ll wait longer,’ was the reply.
‘Is the master expecting you?’
To this almost desperate question, Mulholland closed his hand round the engagement ring box hidden deep in his pocket, and, thus fortified, reverted to his candid, blue-eyed, wouldn’t-harm-a-fly face.
‘To be sure,’ said the constable. ‘I saw him only this very morning and our meeting has been on the cards since then. On the cards.’
20
Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature.
JEAN-BAPTISTE MOLIERE,
Tartuffe
Leith, December 1879
Hercules Dunbar looked at the silver candlestick and then up at the hard intent faces of the two policemen.
One minute he’d been like a pig in straw, five o’clock in the evening, the whole night standing by, two pliant whores in the shape of Big Nosed Kate and Sally Toms arching their backs over him blistering the sheets, and then the locked door to the private boudoir at the back of the Foul Anchor tavern splintered open from a hefty kick and all hell broke loose.
Kate threw an empty bottle of whisky at the tall policeman who avoided it neatly; she then launched herself, naked as a jay, to follow the trajectory of the missile but he sidestepped her as well and she hit the wall with a thud then crumpled to the floor.
Sally, meanwhile, who had been at the opposite end of Hercules and was therefore slower on the uptake, screamed ravishment and blue murder to the heavens, her naked bosom still part covered in Edinburgh Fog, a dessert of whipped cream, sugar and nuts, from an earlier frolic, quivering with fear and indignation. It was a bosom out of proportion to the rest of her slight structure, and all the more impressive for that fact. The policeman’s eyes popped; the last Edinburgh Fog witnessed had been on a dish in a teahouse with a paper doily underneath and the young lady at that moment in his company bore little resemblance to either of these hellcats.
Hercules had taken the opportunity while the man was thus distracted to grab some clothes and squeeze himself out of the rear window of the tavern.
It was a long drop, and as he lay there winded, a pair of boots approached in the early evening murk, until they filled the frame of his vision. His hands were snatched behind his back and the restrainers put on.
He looked up.
Jamie McLevy.
Some things never change.
McLevy, now in the interrogation room of the Leith station, in turn looked down at Hercules Dunbar. The man still had the raw-boned frame of his youth but dissipation and hard living had scored lines into the face and hollowed out the outlines of his body.
Yet the fellow was not without feral humour. What he lacked was a moral compass.
It’s too late now, as Confucius had remarked in one of his books.
‘Well Herkie,’ said the inspector, ‘you left a trail a mile wide.’
‘Is that so?’ Dunbar grinned defiantly. ‘Jist as well. Ye’d never have found it else.’
The policemen had trawled round the half-uncles, the local name for the small pawnshops in the wynds and closes of Leith, until striking gold or rather silver at Ned Hamilton’s lair in Vinegar Close. While Ned had denied any knowledge of stolen goods or the like, his eyes kept flicking to an empty tea chest wedged against the back wall.
McLevy simply walked up and booted it aside to reveal a locked box cut into the brickwork behind where Ned kept his real stash in the hidey-hole.
Hamilton tried to claim rights of property but when McLevy threatened to pick the box up bodily and throw it through the window of the shop out into the street, the man produced a key, opened it up and amongst the tangle of cheap jewellery, garish bangles, rubies of glass, watches and fob chains, was what they sought.
A silver candlestick, luckily not yet melted down, still inscribed to Sir Thomas Bouch, who most certainly had not dropped by Vinegar Close to pawn the object.
The threat of being hauled up before the judge as a fence and resetter of theftuous plunder squeezed out a name from Ned’s unwilling lips, and then it was merely a matter of sifting through the low taverns
