of Leith until they found out where Dunbar had holed up to spend his ill-gotten gains.
Ill-gotten, indeed and much good it had done him, two ascendant whores and an Edinburgh Fog.
All present regarded the silver tribute from Dundee, as outside the interrogation room Constable Ballantyne sat quietly at his post and dreamed of being a hero.
‘You pawned that candlestick,’ McLevy said quietly enough.
‘I found it in the street,’ came the ready response.
‘That was lucky,’ offered Mulholland mildly, taking his tone from the inspector.
‘Luck is often on my side.’
‘Good. You’ll need it,’ McLevy smiled, his wolf-grey eyes fixed upon the prey. ‘The charge is murder. The judge will be waiting. Judge MacGregor. His family own a hemp company. Hangman’s rope is made of such.’
‘Murder?’ Dunbar’s jaw dropped and his face expressed what seemed like honest amazement. ‘I dinnae do murder.’
‘You broke into the house of Sir Thomas Bouch in Bernard Street, a night previous. You stole that silver. An old servant tried to stop you in your tracks.’
‘You killed him where he stood. Smashed his head. Probably with that candlestick,’ Mulholland chimed in helpfully though he knew unfortunately the silver stand had been given a good wipe and no trace of death remained.
‘I never touched him!’ Dunbar realised his mistake and tried to retract at once. ‘I wisnae there. Ye cannae kill a man if you’re no’ there. That’s impossible.’
‘Kate and Sally don’t think so,’ replied the inspector evenly. ‘Ye boasted your prowess of thievery to them. And they were only too pleased to pass it on.’
‘They’re good girls, they wouldnae do that.’
‘Oh yes they would,’ Mulholland shook his head benignly. ‘Especially after we put a charge of accessory before them.’
McLevy smiled grimly. ‘It’s amazing how murder can leave you dancing on your lonesome, Herkie.’
A wild desperate light came into Dunbar’s eyes though, had he but realised, Kate and Sally, even under threat, had stuck to the code of the Fraternity and refused to betray the man they had straddled to such good effect.
McLevy was relying on the proven fact that there was not a criminal born whose tongue would not loosen with whisky and lewd cavorting.
It was a bluff, but by the look on Dunbar’s face, thought Mulholland, the bluff would not be called.
‘And then there’s the matter of the footprint,’ said the inspector.
The constable blinked. Footprint?
‘In the garden. Where you jemmied at the window. Your left boot sunk a deep mark. Mulholland here took a cast and I’ll wager, we’ll match you up to perfection.’
At McLevy’s words Dunbar glanced down with some dismay at his treacherous foot sinister, then up at Mulholland who, behind a knowing smile, concealed the fact that the heavy overnight rain had obliterated any imprints below the window to a unidentifiable sludge.
Another bluff. Life is full of them.
‘Dancing on that rope, eh Herkie?’
The inspector let out a roar of laughter. He had switched to outright provocation, this was his technique of interrogation, always switch the ground, never leave a certainty beneath the feet, not unlike the hangman.
Dunbar lunged forward in the chair where he had been deposited, hands still manacled behind.
There were two chairs and one bare table in the interrogation room. The walls were a dirty white with various smears of what might well have been some bodily discharge; McLevy had locked the door and pocketed the key.
It was a long narrow space with no windows, claustrophobic, insulated, like being confined within the pod of a vegetable; tailor-made for confession.
‘If I wasnae cuffed, we’d see who the man was here!’
This howled threat brought a response.
McLevy stepped behind Dunbar and unlocked the manacles.
‘There ye are, my mannie,’ he said. ‘How’s that?’
Dunbar rubbed at his chafed wrists. Now that he was free, he was curiously bereft of action. McLevy stood in front of him, arms hanging slack by his side, Mulholland was to the side, lounging back against the wall but not quite touching the surface.
‘Two against one, eh?’ Dunbar’s throat was dry and what was meant to sound like a jeer came out in a wheeze.
‘Not at all.’ McLevy spread his hands as if to show that he carried no weapon. ‘The constable is merely an observer, and will do what I command him. He is far below me in rank and must perform accordingly.’
Then turning to the aforesaid constable, McLevy pointed an index finger as if addressing a dog and ordered.
‘Stay there!’
Dunbar laughed and Mulholland’s backbone stiffened. No doubt the inspector was up to something as usual, but sometimes he came too near the knuckle.
‘So I’ll make a wee bargain with you, Herkie.’ The lupine eyes gleamed in a friendly fashion. ‘If you can lay me out upon the ground, I’ll promise you a good hour’s start from this station before we hunt you down, but if I prevail, you’ll tell me the truth of last night.’
Although Mulholland’s face remained impassive, he whistled silently to himself inside. This was a new one, and a wild assurance, even for McLevy. There was a history here of sorts, you could almost smell the blood of the past.
‘Whit have I got tae lose, eh?’ said Dunbar, the wildness in his eyes matched by a savage grin.
‘Only a tooth or two,’ was the serene response.
And so they began, not for the first time, to engage in warfare.
Had it been in water Hercules might have stood a chance; the inspector feared that element, a primitive terror of being dragged under in an embrace that filled the lungs, washed out the eyes then swallowed you into a gaping mouth like a mother animal gulping down her own young. Like his own mother drowning him in her madness.
But it was earth. And McLevy loved the earth.
Dunbar stood up and flexed his fingers then suddenly made a rush, head down, intending to pin his opponent against the table and get to work at close quarters.
But the inspector was no longer where he had been, an attribute Mulholland had noticed before in that for someone of such stocky build, he could skip like a mountain goat.
Which he did, to the side and then as Dunbar crashed into the sharp edge of the table, McLevy erupted into a fury of cold violence that made the constable quite content with his role of observer.
Stay put. As commanded. It was the inspector’s show.
McLevy lifted up the fellow by the scruff of the neck and planted four ferocious punches into the belly. At each one, the man doubled over and each time he was hauled back to face the music.
On the fourth, the inspector let him hang there, hunched over, paralysed by the most profound pain.
