And he knew how to dig up the lode of crime therein, pick and shovel.
There were some scrapes down the stone steps which suggested that the old fellow may well have been struck at the top wee landing where the door led out into the hall and then fallen like a shot crow. Minute examination of these steps in turn had yielded nothing. The servant’s skull had been cracked open, that was obvious enough, but the murder implement was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the murderer. Not a clue. What a pity.
He leant over and looked into the sightless eyes of the corpse; the old man’s skin was stretched tightly over high cheekbones, the sockets above them deep and hollow, lips drawn back over the teeth as if the butler had sucked in death from a silver cup.
‘I don’t suppose, Archie,’ he said, having been reliably informed that the man’s name was Archibald Gourlay, ‘I don’t suppose ye might pass me a description of your assailant?’
No answer was forthcoming, but McLevy persisted.
‘Anything that might help, no matter how small, rack your brains, sir.’
However the aforementioned brains had a chasm bashed into them, leaving the head looking like an indented round of cheese, and, with a sigh, the inspector brought the one-sided conversation to an end by pulling up gently a blanket which had been laid on the body to cover the bewildered frightened face, then made his way up the stairs to search out some live members of the household.
He emerged into the narrow gloomy hall, with a high, pale, consumptive ceiling, which did nothing to dispel the claustrophobia always induced in McLevy by the trappings of middle-class decorum. Queen Victoria would have been proud of this hallway; it was a testament to her glorious reign. The epitome of denied joy.
A little, grudging natural light came through the cold blue and green stained-glass window above the heavy street door, to be absorbed by the brown mottled walls. A dark knobbly umbrella stand was on sentry duty at the entrance, and halfway down the thin corridor jutted a small table, a wooden bare upright chair at each side, and a vase set on a white doily precisely in the middle of the table surface.
The edges of the lace doily were curled up slightly as if retracting from the general murk, and the vase, as far as he could see, was empty, unless it contained the ashes of some ancestor. Could be. It was a bilious pale yellow colour that might possibly indicate the funereal pallor of a long-dead relative.
McLevy hesitated. All the doors were closed and he had but a hazy notion of the geography of the house having been conducted straight to the murder scene.
He could hear the murmur of Mulholland’s voice from somewhere off to the side and a smothered high-pitched response as the girl tried to gulp down her sobs and talk at the same time.
Aye, now he had the situation. The constable and maid were closeted in the small parlour and this door, against which he now pressed his ear, must be for the main drawing room.
There was no getting away from it, the inspector thought, he was a terrible nosy man. Jean Brash, the premier madam of the best bawdy-hoose in Edinburgh, the Just Land, had many times remarked that if you gave McLevy heaven, he would want hell along with it in case he missed out on something.
It was time he should visit Jean Brash. She made the best cup of coffee in Edinburgh. A Lebanese grinding.
Now, was that more sobbing that he heard through the panel? But not a high note, more like a low choked swallow of regret. On an impulse, he did not knock but silently turned the handle and slid into the chamber like a ghost.
5
I had a dove and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,
With a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving.
JOHN KEATS,
I had a dove and the sweet dove died
A woman stood in the centre of the room, her head bowed, a stray shaft of greyish light from the dark curtained window catching at her figure like a child its mother’s skirts.
McLevy observed the scene silently and, after a moment, she sensed his presence and lifted up a smooth white face unstained by tears, the skin almost translucent. Like a pearl.
The lady of the house. He had briefly glimpsed her as the secretary Alan Telfer had ushered him downstairs to make acquaintance with the corpse. Wife of Sir Thomas Bouch. Margaret, by name.
‘Well Maggie,’ he wondered to himself, ‘your eyes are dry enough, but what haunts you this day?’
She was a petite woman, high cheekbones and above them the aforesaid eyes surprisingly dark and slanted, gypsy fashion, with dark eyebrows arching above like lightning conductors. A compact little body, contained and corseted, the feet deft and dainty.
McLevy was a great observer of women’s feet and what covered their nakedness. These small boots, elastic-sided, peeping shyly out from below the dark severe hem of her dress, though in black leather to match her raven hair with its austere middle-parting, were surprisingly possessed of pointed toes.
Not snubbed in rectitude, but pointing. Straight as a die. At him. Now, there’s a thing.
Nothing betrayed character like shoes. His own were solid and serviceable but that was a disguise like the rest of him and he lived in terror of the day that someone would rip the mask away and reveal him in the light.
When she spoke, her voice was musical enough but in a minor key. Muted. Nothing percussive.
‘How may I help you, inspector?’
She seemed in no way perturbed that he had popped up in front of her with no word of warning. Nothing glandular here, and yet he sensed something, what was it? A vixen bites through her own flesh to escape the wire of the snare?
He must stop drinking so much coffee; it provoked his intuition to hallucinatory extremes.
Back to terra firma.
‘I’m hoping that you can, Mistress Bouch.’
‘It is my fervent wish. Fire away.’
McLevy nodded, but his mind was busy with the last two words. Perhaps her father had been a sharpshooter.
‘Archibald Gourlay?’ he ventured.
‘The poor creature.’
‘The corpse. What were his habits?’
‘Habits?’
‘Uhuh. They may have led him to his death, ye see. I need to know them. I need to know his life.’
‘But surely – by accident, he chanced upon a thief. And suffered – death.’
‘I’m not a great believer in accident.’
For a moment her eyes drifted away and McLevy glanced round the chamber. The walls were a drab olive green, hung with various photographs of bridges, ferry boats and trains mostly decked out in the claret and cream colours of the North British Railway Company.
