McGonagall suddenly put a dramatic hand up to his forehead as another shaft from the Muse struck home.
‘I have the last verse,’ he cried. ‘And you shall be the first to hear it, sir.’
And so with aching ribs, a blinding pain at the base of his skull, a murderous bastard fled, and stinking of pee, which the poet seemed not to notice, dying for a coffee or a hooker of whisky to cheer him up, a head full of crime, his heart boiling with vengeance, James McLevy endured these lines of Temperance and goodwill to all men.
‘I beseech ye all to kneel down and pray
And implore God to take the demon drink away,
Then this world would be a heaven, whereas it is a hell,
And the people would have more peace in it to dwell.’
McLevy had closed his eyes to shield himself as far as possible from this maladjusted poetic onslaught but when he opened them again, McGonagall was still there, still the worst poet McLevy had ever heard and still the man who had liberated him from a bone-crushing walnut tree.
McGonagall waited expectantly. McLevy searched for something to contribute.
‘Words fail me,’ he finally managed.
He held out his hand to signal appreciation and incidentally bring a conclusion to this torture by verse.
The poet gripped it fast, once more their eyes met, and for a moment the inspector could have sworn that there was the shadow of a sad self-consciousness in the man’s face as if he truly suffered from the terrible knowledge that what he proclaimed as genius, was in fact dross of the lowest quality. But then the instant passed, though the man’s next words might have intimated such.
‘The Muse is cruel,’ said McGonagall sombrely. ‘She will not let me rest. Night or day, I must put my shoulder to the wheel of creation. And I have a family to feed.’
A hint of a different kind and McLevy took it gratefully, withdrawing from the handshake to find a coin or two in his pocket, which he pressed into the poet’s palm.
‘I would have given this in the tavern,’ he asserted solemnly, ‘were we not interrupted by the peas.’
The coins disappeared magically into the McGonagall pocket and he turned to stride off, aided mightily by the buffet of a following wind.
At the margin of moonlight, he twisted round to raise his stick in farewell.
‘I thank you, James McLevy. Perhaps one day we shall meet again,’ he shouted.
‘I look forward to that,’ was the response of a man lying through his teeth.
A further thought struck the poet.
‘My house is in Paton’s Lane, a far cry from here and a humble dwelling but you are welcome to hunker down for the night upon the floor.’
The thought of rhyming couplets with a bowl of thin gruel in the morning sent a shiver through McLevy’s aching bones.
‘A kind offer but I’ll find my own passage,’ he called back. ‘Yet tell me one thing. In this violent tempest, how do you keep the hat upon your head?’
‘Dignity,’ was the enigmatic answer. ‘A poet is ruined if he is not dignified.’
With that McGonagall departed into the night leaving McLevy to turn and make his way towards the esplanade, that being the general course he imagined Dunbar to have taken.
Though he knew it was a hopeless quest. Who knows how long he had lain there in such sorry circumstance?
The man would be miles away and could have set off in any direction.
He could be anywhere in the city.
The part of the esplanade opposite the park was deserted, the rows of houses starting further along, and as McLevy bent over double, part to ease the pain of his ribs part to present a lesser target for the storm wind, the sand and pebbles were blown in a stinging hail from the shore to blend in with the rain and further add to his discomfort.
After struggling into the teeth of the gale for a fair while and finally realising the pointlessness of his effort, McLevy found refuge where a sturdy brick shelter had been erected so that promenaders might, in better climes, view the River Tay in all its glory.
The inspector sank gratefully down upon the hard stone bench.
In the confines of the shelter, the sour odour of the undesired inflicted micturation rose to greet his nostrils. And now that he had no longer the distraction of battling the elements, the throbbing ache from the back of his head was like a hammer beating on his brain.
To distract himself from this predicament he looked out over the violent river, which was hurling waves against the shore like cannonballs, the clouds scudding across the sky above as if fleeing for their lives.
For a moment the moon was uncovered and by its pale light he could see dimly in the far distance the outline of the Tay Bridge.
The light of a train showed equally dimly as it entered the bridge and crawled across the rails like a child’s toy and McLevy was put in mind of when his Aunt Jean had taken him to a fair on the Leith Links.
In a darkened room he had watched a model engine climb a steep gradient towing carriages behind, find its way along an overpass with a tunnel underneath, shoot down the other side, then wind its way back by snakelike curves of track, through the tunnel and doubling back until it found its course returned to the gradient.
He was fascinated how the wheels of the train clung to the narrow ribbon of track, especially as it inched along the overpass and then hurtled down the gradient.
Each time the descent seemed faster and the audience gasps louder.
Then the young boy realised that the root of their fascination was in the anticipation of disaster; the desire to see the tightrope walker fall, the artist on trapeze miss his grip and plummet to the ground, the lion tamer gripped in the beast’s bloody mouth, all these in some dark way desired by the watcher.
Jamie McLevy observed the little engine make one more steep and safe plunge then let out a wail and dragged his Aunt Jean to safety before calamity struck.
And now the grown man strained his eyes to discern the distant glimmering lights from a train over two hundred feet in length, the willing squat little tank engine pulling five passenger carriages and a brake van.
Had he been near at hand, he would have seen the tank engine to be olive green in colour, number 224, weighing close to thirty-five tons.
A fine proud beast of burden with each passenger coach lit by brass and iron lanterns where men, women and children were to be disclosed, perhaps lost in thought, lost in love, perhaps asleep on a father’s shoulder or looking out with excitement at the violence of the storm.
Safely cradled by the North British line.
But at distance, still a toy train on a toy bridge.
The full moon played hide and seek with the clouds, and the scene flickered before McLevy’s eyes while the engine approached the High Girders.
As it entered the iron fretwork, a heavy cloud caught the moon and abruptly obscured all vision like an ominous dark curtain.
The inspector felt a panic build up inside him as if the darkness would swallow him, as if he were in another universe, a separate reality where shadows ruled and his own black thoughts tormented him.
He had uncovered the secret of the bridge, found its weakness, undermined its integrity. Now he
