exiled bridge workers, perhaps pick up the odd piece of labour and be safe from the strong arm of the law.
In the person of James McLevy, inspector of police … who had trailed about the place since mid-morning till his feet ached from the hard pavements, cursing himself for a fool who would use his only day off on a wild goose chase.
It being a Sunday, Roach and Mulholland would be safely ensconced in the house of God, while he traipsed from tavern to tavern and one disreputable lodging house to another; starting off near to the Wormit Foundry where Dunbar had once been employed, then sniffing his way like a mongrel dog towards the docks. At least this was familiar territory, not nearly as large as the Leith equivalent but the scurry of rats chittering under the piers seemed familiar and the run-down waterside taverns had the same depressing similarity.
This was where he was happiest. This is where he belonged. With the dregs of humanity.
On this somewhat sour thought, the inspector watched as McGonagall brought his remarkably cheerful lament for Dublin’s Biddy Brown, the lost love of the Rattling Boy, to an end and assumed a heroic pose as the cheers rang forth.
The inspector had heard of the poet and the sublime horror of his verse, but this was his first live experience of the man and he would be happy enough if it were the last.
It was too late now to return to Edinburgh. The evening was upon them, a heavy wind rattling the thick windows of the tavern; he would have to register in some cheap flea-bitten hotel and take the earliest train back.
Empty-handed. But at least now he knew the composition of Beaumont Egg. The voices slurred that told the tale but enough of them agreed, after a bought drink or two, that it consisted of beeswax, fiddler’s rosin, the finest iron borings, all mixed together with a little lamp black and then used to cure any holes in the iron castings by being melted in with a red-hot bar.
It became hard as a rock and would not melt in the sun but it was not iron. It was grafted on and therefore might be picked out by keen point or shaken loose by great force.
This was from the foundry men but one of the painters of the bridge, a man still in work, daubed with red lead like a savage, boasted of finding at least one hundredweight of fallen iron bolts inside the lower booms of the bridge.
However it was all drunken hearsay. He could just see the contemptuous smile on Alan Telfer’s face if it was brought before the man’s attention.
There was a sudden outburst of noise and McLevy was hit in the face by a shower of hard dried peas.
It wrenched him out of a black study to see that the publican had grown tired of the fact that Poet McGonagall, who had just announced grandly that due to public demand he would repeat ‘The Rattling Boy’ in its entirety, had monopolised the audience’s attention to the extent that they had rapidly slowed down their consumption of drink.
Therefore they were not filling the publican’s coffers to the brim, so he had instructed one of his barmen to throw a wet dirty beer-slopped towel into William’s countenance.
While the poet was still reeling from this insult to his honour, the publican and some of the other barmen had picked up handfuls of dried green peas and were hurling them with malign gusto at the Bard of Bonny Dundee, some of which had sailed past him to sting the inspector.
The poet stood his ground proudly. His sallow well-kippered skin had suffered such painful assaults before and he uttered an immortal couplet in response.
‘Gentlemen if you please,
Stop throwing peas!’
Unfortunately this provoked a howl of laughter from the audience who had cruelly shifted sides; it is ever thus for a creative soul amongst the barbarian hordes.
The publican and his men redoubled their efforts and the supply of missiles seemed never ending because they drove the poet, who was trying to bat the peas away with his stick, backwards towards the door out into the street.
McLevy thought idly to interfere but then froze as a door to a private side room opened and four men emerged to see what was causing the hullabaloo.
One of the men was Hercules Dunbar.
Changed in some ways, but not quite enough.
28
I am poured out like water, and all my
bones are out of joint: my heart also in the
midst of my body is even like melting wax.
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, Psalm 22, v14
From a dead calm and eerie stillness, the heavy gale had roared up like an animal from ambush and was battering at the whole length of the Tayside. The devout worshippers returning from their Sabbath meditations were assailed by flying slates and roof tiles as if the devil himself had decided to punish their piety by a demonstration of what happened when Pandora took the lid off the box.
The elemental force of wind and rain ripped the tiles, laths and plaster from attic roofs exposing the good holy people of the house as if they had been stripped bare of decency, naked to the howling laughter of Satan.
Chimney cairns capered and danced like witches in the road, while a shower of masonry fell like giant hailstones and smashed into the pavements below, splitting into shards so sharp they would have drawn blood had the faithful not clung to the shelter of the walls and edged their way towards the refuge of respectability.
Along the shore, bathing huts were ripped asunder, the roofs departing bodily to join in the dance or fly out into the darkness of the raging river.
Surely evil was abroad? Surely the Storm Fiend had risen from his dark lair in the deep and erupted into a frenzy of farts and belches to shake the holy where they knelt in prayer? Was not that heavy blinding rain the sign of a monster lifting its leg from on high to pass its water, marking out the territory below?
None of these thoughts occurred to Hercules Dunbar as he laughed wildly in the chaos, crossing over a small public park near the Magdalen Green. Having bade goodbye to his friends and watched them stagger off towards the poorer billets of the city, he had turned in the direction of more salubrious quarters. Which is where he now belonged.
He was hurled off his feet by the force of the blast and rolled over in the grass like a scrap of paper, but good whisky had rendered him immortal.
And his luck had turned in the shape of a widow woman, a fine lusty specimen towards whose domicile his footsteps were now directed.
Jenny Wilson, an Inverness lassie, come to the city as a maid of all work, had married above her to an older man, Tom Cathcart, a bank teller from Dundee who keeled over one day face first into the money he was counting. She inherited a fine wee pension from the bank and a small house at the other end of the Green.
And she was greatly enamoured of Hercules Dunbar.
God bless the human heart, which in the banker’s case had completely failed him.
Jenny could put on some airs and graces, enough to get by, however in reality she craved rough
