She laughed at the remark and, as he had anticipated, the shift in emotion spilled out into more words.
‘His … influence is unhealthy. He separates Sir Thomas from the real world.’
‘Perhaps your husband desires that?’
Her lips thinned.
‘It is unhealthy,’ she pronounced flatly.
McLevy had a knack with women. Despite his seeming adherence to all things masculine in the patriarchal society of their glorious queen, he had an instinct for the broken glass of fractured pain that took up more than its fair share of the feminine psyche.
Every morning a woman rises, and then bathes in the Lake of Disappointment.
That was his insight.
However, he wasn’t above abusing that intuition.
So he slid the question in gently, but with a hunter’s gleam in the eye.
‘What form does this … infection take?’
However Margaret Bouch had pirate blood and she could recognise the advent of a grappling iron.
She turned once more to face him.
‘It’s time I went home,’ she said.
McLevy stood abruptly as she rose and donned her hat.
‘I shall escort you.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘It is my duty.’
She nodded somewhat curtly. They began walking down the Shore, a discernible distance between their bodies and a feeling of obscure irritation on both sides.
‘Ye don’t seem all that interested,’ grunted the inspector.
‘In what, may I ask?’
‘In your poor auld butler and who stove in his head.’
There was enough truth in this dour assertion to bring a flush to Margaret’s face and she was glad that the dark hid the reaction. Indeed as soon as she had seen McLevy her thoughts had been not of death but life. Though why should she be ashamed of that?
‘I have helped his family.’
‘With the funeral. Ye told me.’
‘It is not my function to solve criminality, it is yours.’
‘That’s what Alan Telfer informed me.’
Being twinned with the secretary irritated her even further and Margaret almost hissed through her teeth in annoyance.
In stiff silence they walked onwards, there was no crooked elbow, no dainty gloved hand slipping into the provided space to tighten on a muscle at a pretended loss of footing.
Any intimacy was long gone and they would have strode thus in a frozen mutual disdain all the way home, had it not been for an unexpected event.
A giant of a man stepped out from the shadows and confronted them.
Patrick Scullion: a bad sailor, just thrown off his ship for insubordination and general malingering. He had been drowning his sorrows in a low dive of a tavern and was in a most foul temper at what he regarded as the dirty tricks of a dirty life.
This was a soft mark, he thought. A respectable couple out of place in such an isolated, run- down area of the harbourage, the woman tiny, and the man no great menace of a figure with a low-brimmed bowler, bulky and slow moving.
Easy meat for a giant.
He let out a roar and the whisky fumes from his rancid mouth caused Margaret to flinch back, which he mistook for fear whereas it was merely the result of a keen sense of smell.
Patrick reached out and with one huge hand took the man by the lapels of his coat.
‘I’ll have yer money, my darlin’ gentry,’ he growled. ‘Or that pretty little wife will see your face crushed and broken and the blood like a fountain.’
This threat provoked a strange response.
‘She is not my wife,’ said the bulky man.
At that moment the crescent moon, perhaps not wishing to be called as witness in court, hid behind a cloud.
As the light changed and the giant’s eyes took a moment to readjust, two things happened.
Margaret put up a hand as if to steady her bonnet and McLevy exploded into savage action.
Hit them first and hit them hard.
The inspector’s boot thudded in between Patrick’s legs like a Bolt of Retribution and almost in the same movement, as the man keeled over in the most profound agony, McLevy turned away as if to shield himself from a retaliatory blow and swept back his elbow into the man’s face.
Patrick was then brought up to the straight and narrow by the same elbow once more smashing upwards, jerking his head back so that he looked for a moment into the slate-grey expressionless eyes before another hammer blow, this time with the fist into a belly full of cheap whisky, brought him retching on to his hands and knees.
McLevy whipped out a set of handcuffs, quickly and efficiently manacled the giant’s hands behind his back, and then stood away to scrutinise his handiwork.
When he looked over at Margaret, her mouth was slightly parted, and for a moment the tip of a tongue passed lightly over her lips.
‘You are a man of violence,’ she observed.
‘It’s never far away,’ was the reply.
She smiled and cast her eyes over the groaning ogre, apparently unperturbed at what she had witnessed.
‘I am reminded of a saying from Ephesians, “We are all children of Wrath.”’
‘Uhuh,’ said McLevy. ‘We get it from God.’
Margaret laughed then turned to walk away at pace, leaving him caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
‘I cannot haul this behemoth and keep up with you,’ he protested.
She swivelled and for a moment rested her heel on the ground so that one toe pointed up into the air.
‘I am perfectly capable of my own safe conduct.’
Margaret put her hand up to the bonnet once more and drew out a lethal-looking hatpin, at least five inches long.
‘This would have gone into his eye,’ she declared.
‘What about the other eye?’
She made a fencing motion with the hatpin to indicate a skewering of the second orb, replaced the implement with a flourish in her bonnet, and then marched off towards home and hearth.
As she did so, the moon appeared through the clouds directly in front of her vision. She lifted her head to the sky and emitted a soft howl.
Like a wolf. And then she was gone.
McLevy also lifted his head, but he did not howl for fear of enchantment.
He was even less enchanted when he lugged the giant sailor into the station a half-hour later, only to find that there had been a breakout from the cells.
