‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘I never laid hand on him.’
‘You’re a liar!’
McLevy hauled Dunbar off the chair and upward so that their noses almost touched.
‘Ye broke his skull.’
‘I did not.’
‘Ye did so.’
‘Didnae.’
‘I’ll pee in your boots.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Your gang’s no’ here, now.’
‘I should hae drowned you when I had the chance.’
‘And I should have kicked you harder!’
Mulholland sighed. This was getting them nowhere for the harder McLevy hammered in, the more stubborn became the denials; either the man had lied himself into a corner or the truth lay in a different version of events.
Furthermore the constable was due time off this evening and hoped to attend a choir practice at church, where he would combine hymns of worship with hopeful glances in the direction of some well-brought-up young ladies who lifted their voices and bodices to God; thrilled by the organ’s swelling thunder, a becoming flush upon their faces and discernible pulse beating in their throats, they were ripe for a spiritual plucking.
Presbyterian veneration might never spill over into gay abandon but it had its moments.
Finally McLevy, with an exclamation of disgust, hurled Dunbar back into his chair.
‘Ye can stew in the cells all night and we’ll see how smart you are in the morning,’ he growled running his hands through his hair which was now standing up on end with sheer frustration.
‘The story’ll be the same,’ muttered Dunbar. ‘I left him living.’
‘And I found him dead!’
‘Maybe something happened in between?’ suggested Mulholland somewhat unwisely, his mind having wandered to the daughter of the manse, a fair-haired buxom blue-eyed warbler whose efforts to hit the high notes rendered the confines of her corset somewhat inadequate at times.
‘Nothing happened in between,’ snapped McLevy, glowering at the constable before directing a last malevolent look towards Dunbar.
‘You murdered the man. Pure and simple.’
‘But whit if I didnae?’ Dunbar retorted, having found some kind of courage at the prospect of the cells; at least he wouldn’t have this bastard haunting him and anything could happen in the inspector’s absence.
‘Whit if I didnae?’ he repeated.
McLevy made no response and Dunbar’s words danced in the air like a melody out of tune.
21
Yet still between his Darknesss and his Brightness
There passed a mutual glance of great politeness.
LORD BYRON,
The Vision of Judgment
The inspector closed the door of Bernard Street, the house now lacking a butler, and recalled his last, by no means memorable, rejoinder to Alan Telfer.
‘I’ll see myself out.’
The secretary had inclined his head, a shaft of light from under the study door indicating that Sir Thomas was still hard at work on his design for the Forth Bridge, for which he planned spans of sixteen hundred feet in length, the structure itself like an iron bird of prey swooping one hundred feet above the water.
The Great Man had already answered, admittedly in monosyllables, previous inquiries about the night in question, and was not to be disturbed by further demands.
The inspector had been happy enough to accept that; he found Sir Thomas almost impenetrable, and suspected that the man was pathologically shy and withdrawn, though that could also be the sign of overweening arrogance, internalised to the point where he and God might well be interchangeable.
McLevy knew the feeling well.
That left him with Alan Telfer who, while responding with scrupulous civility, managed to subtly convey this was a complete waste of time for both men.
As regards the night of the murder, the secretary could add nothing more save the reiteration that having worked late into the night, he and Sir Thomas had retired to their respective quarters, Sir Thomas the master bedroom, and himself a small attic room which he occupied when the volume of work and lateness of the hour made it impractical for him to return to his lodgings on the other side of the city.
Both men been roused from their beds in the early morning by the maid, who had now also departed their employ, screaming like a banshee. They had subsequently witnessed the dead body of the butler, Archibald Gourlay, had contacted the relevant authorities and McLevy knew the rest.
Sir Thomas, McLevy recalled, had a faint Northern accent courtesy of his native Cumberland, but the secretary’s was untraceable, the words clipped, precise, contained, the face cold and smooth, eyes blue and lidded, the mouth thin. There was a reptilian quality to Alan Telfer and the inspector would not have been surprised if the man’s tongue were two feet long and slightly forked.
When McLevy sprung the name of Dunbar upon the scene, the secretary indeed remembered the man’s Sabbath intrusion.
He confirmed the relevant facts but from an icily opposite point of view.
The man had been sacked deservedly for being drunk and incapable at the workplace, a condition all the more heinous because of his position of responsibility.
Luckily, it being a Sunday when Dunbar hammered upon the door, Sir Thomas had been at the family house in Moffat when the fellow blundered in with his foolish demands; had he by chance disturbed the Great Man at his desk, Telfer would have called the police at once.
‘But you threatened the law upon him, did you not?’ asked McLevy, as they stood in the main salon which so much resembled the waiting room of a railway station, the room where the inspector had first set his eyes upon Margaret Bouch, the dainty wife of Sir Thomas.
‘Eventually,’ was Telfer’s calm rejoinder.
‘Why?’
‘He would not leave.’
‘But then he did?’
‘Eventually. People do leave, eventually.’
A thin smile indicated that McLevy might well be included in this comprehensive statement.
‘Uhuh?’ replied the inspector, unmoved. ‘So you faced him down?’
