follow up the stairs and carefully close the study door behind them – the wife of Sir Thomas was also in the house and he had no wish for her to stick her pointy nose into this; since the death of the old servant she had taken up camp in the place and when the news had arrived, had offered to accompany Sir Thomas to Dundee. But the great man had shaken his head; she was too fragile for such affairs.
This refusal had delighted Telfer; the woman could retire to her quarters and sew her eyelids together as far as he was concerned.
He was trusted to hold the fort. Above all people.
A single draughtsman’s lamp illuminated the sloping desk, where the drawings were tidily assembled, and reflected as far as the standing McLevy, giving his features a sinister cast like a villain in the footlights.
He had looked at Alan Telfer and still said nothing. Telfer had looked at the photograph of the bridge.
The silence grew.
McLevy finally spoke.
‘You are guilty of present death,’ he said.
Telfer attempted to twist his mouth into a dismissive smile but under McLevy’s implacable regard it froze as if his lips had been pressed against a block of ice.
‘I assume you refer to the terrible accident?’ he murmured, edging towards a narrow drawer in the filing cabinet where he kept a small revolver; it was a dainty piece, silver-handled, which he had bought in Paris as a curiosity but it could fire and was already loaded.
‘No accident,’ replied McLevy. ‘It was slaughter.’
Telfer was near enough the drawer now that he could wrench it open and open fire in case the man threatened him physically; the inspector was obviously labouring under some powerful delusion and had a dangerous glint in his eye.
The policeman was unkempt, his clothes bearing traces of mud and dirt, a strange feral stink to him as well, eyes bloodshot, chin unshaven; in fact he resembled a wild man of the woods more than an officer of the law. In truth McLevy was close to the point of utter exhaustion.
Word had spread through the city of Dundee like wildfire and the inspector had found himself swept like a cork in a raging torrent of people who gathered at South Union Street, heaving like an animal, filling the road from side to side; women and children were crying not yet sure of a reason but there would be reason soon enough, the men angry and close to violence because the staff of the Tay Bridge Station had prudently barricaded themselves in, not knowing any more than the crowd but, like them, fearing the worst.
A woman lost hold of her child and the throng swallowed it up; she let out a piercing scream of loss and that was enough to start a scuffling panic, fists and voices raised as the crowd swayed to and fro, out of control.
McLevy scooped up the child, a little girl, under his arm and fought his way through to the mother but as he handed the girl over there was a crash of breaking glass as someone in what was now a boiling mob hurtled up against the main door of the station and burst it inwards.
It was an ugly situation; some of the crowd had arrived to meet relatives and loved ones off the train and though the cry that the bridge was down had split the night and window after window had flickered into life as if the city were aflame, not one person knew what was going on.
The bridge was down but where was the train?
For a moment it looked as if the mob was going to break into the station and run amok, but then another cry went up that a boat was going to leave from the harbour to approach the bridge and, like an ebbing flood, the throng melted away heading down towards the harbour and esplanade.
McLevy did not go with them; he had already been on the esplanade and seen enough.
Some other folk had not followed the main crowd, these were the ones who had relatives and loved ones on the train.
They stared at the station door; its structure had been shattered and a great shard of glass pointed up like a finger of ice.
They stared at that door in the dumb suffering hope that it would open and one after the other the passengers would file through, a little shaken by the experience but with tales to tell of how the engine had shuddered to a halt as the bridge fell behind them, then inched its way along to safety while they sang hymns of redemption to raise their spirits.
One after another …
But no one came through the door.
The wind still whistled in the street but quieter now as if satisfied with the night’s work and McLevy whose head had drooped wearily where he was propped up against the station wall, found a sticky sweet being pressed into his hand.
He raised his head to see the child that he had rescued earlier, the donor, her mother smiling anxiously at the inspector as if he held the fate of the world in his hands.
The inspector nodded grave thanks to the little girl and popped the sweet in his mouth. Barley sugar, not one of his favourites and in places covered with the fluff and grit from her coat pocket, but it tasted like manna from heaven.
The strong winds had blown the odour of urine from his clothes and skin but he could still sniff it, and the sweet was fine compensation.
The mother looked across at him where he sucked at the offering with evident relish and felt hope rising irrationally in her breast.
Surely a God who provides barley sugar would have mercy on them all?
The woman smiled and indicated the child who was staring at the inspector to make sure he masticated at the proper time because there was a moment when barley sugar needed to be crunched otherwise it was only half a delight.
‘She’s waiting for her brothers,’ the mother remarked, nodding her head in approval. ‘My husband as well. He’s a schoolmaster. We have friends in Kirkcaldy. Two boys all day, the poor man will be stone tired. Still, all’s well that ends well, eh?’
But her eyes were fearful and the child, looking up at McLevy for confirmation, found something else in his face that suddenly provoked a loud wail of abandonment.
She ran back to her mother and buried her head in the woman’s skirts.
All at once the barley sugar tasted like ashes in his mouth and he spat it out on to the ground.
The mother gazed across at him, tears in her eyes, but McLevy closed his eyelids at the twist of pain in his guts.
He had nothing to offer save contamination.
The others waiting in the street fell silent; the only sound was of the whistling wind and a child’s sobbing.
The station door swung open, but it was only the wind.
No one filled the space.
No one came home.
Somehow the inspector had returned to Edinburgh the next day, sent word to the police station that he was incapacitated by dint of high fever and wandered the streets like one stricken by such, unable to rest or sleep, haunted by the stark images of the previous night, himself like a phantom, without substance as if the very marrow had been sucked from his bones.
He could not eat but managed a series of strong coffees at various stops, which propelled him further on a journey to nowhere.
The ache in his ribs lessened but the pain at the base of his skull, accelerated by the caffeine, intensified till it became like a spike driven upwards through his brain.
