Then it passed when he remembered the frightened pitiful countenance of Archibald Gourlay and the mother at the Tay Bridge station, terror in her eyes, beseeching him for a certainty he could not provide.
‘I’ll see you in court,’ he said, turned abruptly and made to go. But when he got to the closed door, comically enough, he twisted the handle the wrong way round and had to struggle before wrenching the thing open.
At the doorway he paused for a last word to Telfer.
‘Ye look like a ghost,’ he remarked, and then was gone.
Telfer waited till he heard the outside door slam shut and then moved to the desk and sat down on one of the high stools. This was his. He always sat here and Sir Thomas on the other. Always.
He reached across to the gun, picked it up and peered into the muzzle.
It was clean, as it should be for he, Alan Telfer, was a meticulous man.
He shot from the gun on a regular basis. There was a spot on the remote Leith shoreline where he would go, place a rusty can or whatever he could find in the washed-up debris upon a rock and sight carefully along the barrel.
And then he would press the trigger.
It was a solitary almost childlike occupation where each hit on target was greeted with a suppressed exclamation of pleasure.
His father had been an army man as well as an enthusiastic sadist. His mother had died in the line of duty. Perhaps it was his father’s head he was lining up in his sights.
Now he had a different objective in mind.
Even if Sir Thomas survived the inquiry, and Telfer knew the faults in manufacture and construction that the great man had overlooked in the progress towards grandeur; even if he came out with some reputation intact, his unwitting involvement in a murder trial and the squalid revelations that would be implied in the popular press would completely destroy the name and reputation of Sir Thomas Bouch.
That must not happen.
He, Alan Telfer, would remove the cause.
And a further benefit: people would assume he had committed the act from guilt; the Beaumont’s Egg factor would deflect much of the blame on to him.
It was a pity Sir Thomas would not know of his sacrifice but he could not risk leaving any written letter in case it fell into the wrong hands.
Besides he must do this quickly while his nerve held.
All this had flashed through his mind as he turned the revolver and pressed it into his open mouth.
He remembered as a small boy, a tale in the regiment when a captain who had embezzled the mess funds had blown his head to pieces. But that was with a rifle and a terrible bloody mess.
This would be neat as a cabin boy.
And yet he hesitated. What if the discharge lacked sufficient power? What if the bullet did not reach the brain but lodged somewhere else on the journey?
As a train delayed for a station.
‘Do it,’ said a voice.
Margaret Bouch stood in the doorway her gypsy eyes filled with cold hatred.
Alan Telfer gazed back at her with the same icy loathing. The bitch must have listened at the door, he thought, and for a moment was tempted to spend a bullet and shoot her where she stood.
But there had been enough damage done and she would not reveal the secret to preserve her own name.
Though when he was gone, she would rule.
However there was one consolation.
The innocent comfort he had provided for her sleeping husband she would turn in her mind into something sordid and with any luck the loathing would lodge there and torture the woman to the end of her days.
With any luck.
Once more he lifted the gun and stuck the barrel hard against the roof of his mouth, his eyes unblinking upon her.
Sir Thomas Bouch looked down upon them both; the third player in a twisted triangle.
‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Do it, or I will.’
Outside in the street James McLevy levered himself away from the street door; he had collapsed back against it after banging the portal shut; the resultant noise rang through his head and near shattered his skull in two.
‘Never slam other folk’s doors, Jamie McLevy. It shows a lack of good breeding and impresses not one soul!’
That’s what Jean Scott had often counselled him and she, as in all things, was correct and proper.
Like a sailor in a heavy swell, he lurched from side to side as he moved away from the door heading for the docks where he knew of a tavern that rarely closed.
He would knock at the rearwards door, be recognised, admitted, a hooker of peat whisky would be laid before him in a small back room with perhaps a slice of black pudding or the poor man’s meal of salt herring and potatoes.
And for a moment in his miserable life, he might find some rest.
It was a still night, so the shot when it came from above, sounded like the crack of doom.
McLevy looked up at the lighted window of the study and nodded approval.
Of course he might never find Hercules Dunbar and without the man’s testimony there would be no trial for the murder of Archibald Gourlay, the whole thing being surmise on his part.
In fact he doubted, even with Dunbar, that Lieutenant Roach would consider moving to trial against one of his own kind, disgraced or not.
But best not to mention all this to Alan Telfer, just pile on the guilt and leave the gun in plain view.
Retribution.
It made perfect sense.
Said the madman.
This night he had no more thoughts to think, feelings to feel, or death to bring.
Tomorrow he would lay some flowers on Jean Scott’s grave. Winter roses. Incarnadine.
As he walked off into the darkness Margaret Bouch watched from a corner of the window, ignoring the smell of cordite and the corpse slumped over the desk behind her.
There had been a little blood but the bullet had performed manfully; the man was dead no doubt about it.
She had gazed into his baleful eyes before closing them with two delicate fingers.
There was no doubt that the man deserved to die. She and the inspector had delivered Telfer
