Is love material?
The suicide was already hushed up due to the deft hand of the Masonic Brotherhood and now the whole mess could be swept under the carpet.
Respectable houses are full of such cover.
McLevy became aware that Roach was still there, though he had moved to the door and opened it.
‘You were lucky to survive, James. A guardian angel must have been flying on the waves.’
The lieutenant looked across, a wry, baffled twist to his long snout.
For a moment McLevy met his gaze, then both men looked away in some embarrassment.
‘Close your eyes and it might be she will appear,’ said Roach in a rare burst of poetic imagination.
‘Who will?’
‘Your guardian angel. Goodbye,’ was the cryptic response as the lieutenant shut the door to dream of his own heavenly guide who might cure a vicious slice that had appeared lately on the course to plague him.
It might be connected to the fact that Mrs Roach was talking of taking in lodgers. Young men, preferably.
The lieutenant stopped and swung his arms slowly.
A slice was the very devil.
He walked through a swing door; nodded to someone he knew and departed the scene.
McLevy as instructed replaced the tumbler and closed his eyes.
He dozed off into a fragile, broken slumber but mercifully without images thrown up from the deep and later he could have sworn to hear the door click open again.
Surely Lieutenant Roach had not returned to vex him further over protocol?
As he struggled once more back to consciousness he sniffed a vaguely recognised fragrance.
Rosewater maybe?
Did guardian angels use such?
He risked a squint hoping perhaps to see a resplendent being with golden wings, radiance manifesting from every orifice, but instead he saw a woman in a long black coat with what looked like a peacock feather sprouting from her head. It turned out to be stuck upon a fashionable hat.
‘You look a sight,’ said Jean Brash.
McLevy stuck out his lower lip like a little boy.
‘Whit are you doing here?’ he muttered.
‘Lieutenant Roach sent word you were at death’s door. I came to help you through.’
He wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that, but nodded as if it made sense.
Then he remembered something that might take the sour look off her face because they had parted on bad terms last meeting, and Jean, like most women, could hold a grudge till hell froze over.
Behind her, McLevy had just noted, hung up to dry on a stand in the corner, was his greatcoat.
‘Were ye ever a pocket delver?’ he asked.
‘A girl has to live,’ she answered tersely.
He had just about enough strength to raise his arm and point a finger at the coat.
‘Try your skill.’
Jean Brash crossed to the coat and slipped an adroit hand into both outer pockets.
She came up blank but on running her hands like a caress down each side, found a promising bulge, slid her fingers inside, undid the securing flap and the digits emerged holding the pearl necklace; more than a little damp from its ordeal but once carefully dried and lightly caressed with the finest cloth, the delicate greeny black would glow like a panther’s eyes.
Jean’s own green eyes sparkled with delight. This was her treasure beyond all riches; Tahitian pearls she had paid a king’s ransom to own, the seller being a villainous South Sea smuggler who had landed up in Edinburgh because of the number of throats he had cut in exotic climes.
She’d had them certified genuine by no less that the Royal jewellers themselves, cashed in everything she possessed to buy them and sent the smuggler sailing to cut more throats.
The French Empress Eugenie had once owned such a necklace, though the pearls were twice as numerous and twice as big but then she’d had to sell them when the Empire fell.
Twice as big.
But then Eugenie had been an Empress.
Jean was merely a bawdy-hoose keeper.
She had relished wearing the necklace at the Just Land, holding to herself its great value, the subtle unassuming beauty of the gems nuzzling next to her skin.
Her heart had near broken at their loss and now she had them back thanks to this awkward bugger on the bed.
‘Oh James McLevy!’ she exclaimed. ‘You are a wonder of the world!’
He blinked. Women, in his opinion, were often simple creatures. A few wee pearls cheered them up no end.
The peacock plume dipped approvingly as Jean fastened the necklace once more round her neck, safer there than anywhere. Then she came over and sat on the bed facing the inspector who tried to look as if this happened every day.
‘Tell me the story, James?’ she inquired tenderly.
And he did. Keeping it brief for his strength was not great. The salient points, naked backsides glossed over.
She was silent when he concluded but her mind was racing like a blood-horse. Rachel Bryden had obviously worn the necklace because she aped her mistress but luckily the tawdry bitch had not realised the true value or she would have hidden it up the leg of her drawers.
That was to Jean’s good fortune but not quite enough compensation; there was the small matter of Hannah Semple’s injury, now mercifully healed, and Jean’s own humiliation, not healed remotely.
McLevy meanwhile was dying for a cup of coffee but hospitals were not noted for such a remedy.
‘Buenos Aires?’ Jean murmured.
‘Uhuh.’
‘I have a friend there,’ said Jean. ‘She keeps a bordello.’
‘That’s a surprise.’
‘It is a low-class establishment down by the docks, my friend has always enjoyed the rougher end of trade.’
‘Unlike your braw self.’
The inspector must be recovering because he was beginning to look grumpy, but Jean paid it no mind. She would write to her friend who was also in cahoots with some of the most nefarious cut-throats of that lawless community.
The lovers would be found, if not the rest of her jewels. And after that?
‘I shall see about getting Rachel some employment. It is the least I can do.’
Miss Bryden could ply her willowy trade with the scum of the harbour, lascars, pirates, plus the odd slave dealer thrown in.
We’d see how long she kept her looks.
McLevy, exhausted or no, had not been fooled in the slightest by Jean’s apparent philanthropy. There was an evil glint in those green eyes.
‘What about Oliver Garvie, your demon lover?’
‘My friend has another establishment, equally squalid.’
‘For restless women?’
‘For hungry men.’
‘Oh, dear.’
It would seem love’s destination was fraught with woe, and Cupid might count himself lucky not to be in Buenos Aires.
McLevy felt a tide of weariness sweep over him, what was it the bible said?
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
