of other faults. Bolts and ties shaken free and found scattered like dead rats. There will be an official inquiry. The truth will emerge and you will be brought down, Sir Thomas as well.’
‘He knows nothing!’ Telfer cried.
‘He was responsible for that bridge. He designed and built it. It is his creation.’
Alan Telfer saw suddenly a bleak and terrible future staring him in the face. His actions would destroy the only person he had ever loved.
There would be an inquiry. Everything would be revealed. Everything.
And if there was the smallest shred of hope existing, McLevy wrecked it with his next words.
‘And now we come to past murder,’ he said.
On that nightmare walk through the city, his brain had teemed with strange visions, hallucinations almost, as his unconscious mind put together the events of the night when Archibald Gourlay had died.
And now it was laid out before him like a map of destruction.
‘Dunbar saw you that night,’ he said hoarsely, swallowing hard to get enough saliva to form the words.
Words are slippery creatures.
Telfer sensed a killer blow and felt like spitting in the man’s face. How dare he come here with his slime and dirt, how dare he bring death to the Lords of Creation?
‘In the bed together,’ McLevy continued. ‘You were both asleep, you cradling Sir Thomas in your arms.’
The secretary opened his mouth to deny this, and then closed it again. There was more to come.
‘This is how it happened,’ said McLevy, putting out one hand against the edge of the desk to steady himself. ‘Dunbar pushed the old man to the floor as he related and then made his escape with the candlestick. Gourlay was confused, all at sea, a good servant though, whose first thought would be to acquaint his master of these dastardly deeds.’
The inspector laughed suddenly at his choice of words.
‘Dastardly deeds!’
The laughter turned into a gasp as a shaft of pain near split his skull and Telfer, observing the sudden appearance of agony on McLevy’s face, could only hope for more of the same. From whatever cause perhaps the man would die, the secretary thought; perhaps his head would explode into a thousand pieces and no one would put them together again.
But McLevy did put them back together. He was a policeman after all. That was his job.
‘So in the dark, frightened out of his wits, the poor old bugger throws open the bedroom door without knocking and there before his very eyes is what Hercules Dunbar had previously witnessed.
‘Perhaps he called out, “Maister, Maister, thieves abroad!” or some such thing as he rushed into the room. Sir Thomas slept on like the dead but it woke you up from your slumbers and you remarked on Gourlay’s face the knowledge of what he had that moment observed.
‘Bedfellows. A flagrant breach of custom. Brethren of the Fly as they are known in some circles.
‘Before his very eyes.
‘And Archibald Gourlay was a terrible old sweetie wife who loved to gossip, he would not be able to keep this to himself, he might even tell the mistress of the house.
‘That could not be allowed.
‘So you got out of bed and talked softly, calmly, moving towards him as he retreated, his eyes popping as he told you about the theft, perhaps even that he had recognised the man as Dunbar, eh?’
A tired smile spread across McLevy’s face as Telfer’s reaction betrayed the accuracy of that remark.
‘Then you saw your chance. Behind the old man a steep flight of stairs with stone flags below. One push. Blame it on the burglar. One push and you were safe.’
Although the other’s face gave nothing away, it was uncanny how close to the truth McLevy had come, as if he had somehow wormed his way inside Telfer’s mind.
Indeed that is what the secretary had done, stretched his hand forward, hardly touched the terrified old man who lurched back and fell to crack his skull open like an egg, the blood spilling out like soft yolk.
Telfer had watched the body twitch like a person under sufferance of a nightmare, and then grow ominously still.
Satisfied then, that all was protected once more, the secretary had returned to look at Sir Thomas as he lay securely stupefied upon the bed: the great man was addicted to sleeping draughts, which Telfer administered each night.
Without them Sir Thomas could not rest.
And Telfer lay beside him each night, in all innocence, holding him close, protecting his genius, stroking the side of his face as you would a child.
He would lie beside his love till the morning light and then return to his own bed in the attic room.
Innocent. Only an ugly brutal world would see it otherwise or that pigmy of a wife who would arrive out of the blue with her sharp suspicious eyes, prying, eager to destroy the harmony of fellows together.
Each weekend Sir Thomas would depart for the country and Telfer was free to pursue his own predilections in some specially selected taverns by the docks where the sailors all came in.
And thus refreshed, the secretary came back to Bernard Street and harmony.
He had killed to preserve the peace. A peace that now could no longer exist.
Telfer emerged from these thoughts of dark destruction to find McLevy still before him, the man’s eyes like glowing cinders in the parchment-white face.
‘You have no proof,’ he said. ‘It is Dunbar’s word against mine.’
‘After the inquiry,’ said McLevy, a savage grin on his face, ‘you and Sir Thomas will both be fair game. Disgraced. And the murder trial will follow. The mud will stick.’
He suddenly roared with laughter, a wild berserk note in the sound.
‘Your name is mud!’
This phrase had been once thrown at McLevy and it came back into his head with a vengeance.
The sound he produced was more like the snarl of an animal than human laughter; it filled the study with a mocking, gleeful contemptuous wall of noise that quite unhinged any scraps of composure Alan Telfer had managed to retain.
He lunged for the gun but the inspector, despite his fatigue, had earlier noted the secretary to be enamoured of the sliding area of that part of the desk and was across in a fierce swift movement to wrest the revolver from the man’s nerveless fingers.
McLevy looked down at the implement with a deal of disdain.
‘More like a lady’s gun,’ he remarked. ‘Still, I suppose it might do the trick.’
He laid it on the desk on top of the drawings.
‘Jist in case they blow away when the storm winds arrive. I believe they’re on the way.’
Alan Telfer stood before him like a man stripped naked and for a moment there appeared on McLevy’s face what might almost have passed for a look of compassion.
