the ground.
A somewhat comical assemblage until encountering the face. The lupine slate-grey eyes pierced a hole through to find the most secret, shameful thoughts, and behind the flesh of his cheeks, hard bone, chiselled by the east wind.
The mouth was curiously shaped, pouting almost. He wore a dark blue topcoat, collar turned up against the rain and a low-brimmed bowler, which sat somewhat uneasily on the wiry, pepper and salt hair.
His skin was parchment white, as if the sun had never troubled its surface.
‘You look like an undertaker,’ she concluded.
‘I’m in the right place, then.’
A sudden blast of wind and rain swept in upon them and she seemed to lose her balance, toppling towards him.
His hands reached out to take her by the elbows, then arrested their motion. She regained her equilibrium close to his chest and lifted her face. The drips from the brim of his bowler fell on to her cheeks and chin. Her tongue reached out to savour one.
She let the liquid linger upon that fleshly organ, and then swallowed.
‘I have come to say goodbye,’ McLevy announced, his voice somewhat hoarse but he blamed it on the weather.
‘Then say it.’
‘Goodbye Mistress Bouch. The case is over.’
She laughed into the teeth of the wind, turned abruptly, pulled down her veil and marched off and back up the hill to where the Furies still stood and waited, under the umbrella.
McLevy felt an emptiness inside, but he could fill that up with coffee.
7
If with me you’d fondly stray
Over the hills and far away.
JOHN GAY,
Mulholland gazed with some admiration at his reflection in the cracked mirror. It was a trifle distorted but beauty is forever in the eye of the beholder.
Love makes a fool of us all and the constable was no exception to that rule.
Therefore he gazed fondly at his own image.
Who could not fail but be impressed by the sincerity in his clear blue eyes, light brown hair neatly parted to the side, and skin like a milk cow?
Profile, now. He turned to observe same; a trifle sharp in feature but had his own Aunt Katie not often remarked that her nephew had the sideways apparition of a Roman emperor? Mind you, Mulholland wasn’t so sure about that assertion. The ones he had witnessed in the Museum of Antiquities seemed to have badly broken noses and his own was straight as a Presbyterian pew.
There was also, of course, the Romanish aspect to be taken into consideration; to be sure he knew Aunt Katie was referring to the ancient empire rather than the Pope’s Tiara, but still, it left an uneasy swampy feeling like a cloud of incense.
Back to the nose.
A bit long maybe, but was there not a saying amongst the vulgar sorts that a man with a long neb and big feet had much to offer in other departments?
Not that he would ever dream of boasting about the primal parts but he was satisfied from boyhood comparisons with some pig farmer’s sons at the back of the barn, that he could more than hold his own.
His eyes glazed over as he dreamed of a divine consummation. He and his beloved like swans on the river; above them, blue skies and below, clear water.
However, into these sacred visions of the fragrant Emily, slid a depiction that, if not downright voluptuous, brought a definite tingle to the constable’s loins.
She lay on the marital bed, a four-poster with dark velvet curtains and lashings of moonlight. Her nightgown was chaste enough, white as purity with frilly bits, but her lips were moist and parted, breath on the short side, the pupils of the eyes dilated with anticipation.
He was standing beside the plumped-up pillows, also in a nightgown, not quite as white, smiling down at her, any manifestation of desire well hidden by the burgeoning folds of flannel, but manly as a bull in the heat of summer.
Emily’s bosom had found itself, perched above the level of the sheets. They were neat and starched but not the bosom. It was in motion trembling. Like the sea. Up and down. Up and down. A heavy swell.
There was a candle burning by the bed. He licked his forefinger and thumb, reached over, and put out the light.
Now they were free to wallow in the darkness.
Mulholland screwed up his face in sudden consternation. Wallow? That couldn’t be right, hogs did such in mud. No, wallow was out of the question. And there couldn’t be darkness, not with the lashings of moonlight.
He shut his eyes tightly and brought his hands, palms together, up to touch his lips as if in meditation.
No. Wallow and darkness were not permissible; best concentrate on the moister, swelling aspects.
‘What in god’s name are you doing, constable?’
The young man spun round, eyes opened, face flushed, to meet the baleful scrutiny of his own and everyone else’s appointed superior in Leith police station, Lieutenant Roach. No one would want him leaning over their bedside, not unless they were dead.
The lieutenant’s resemblance to a crocodile was nigh uncanny, hooded membrane eyes slightly bloodshot, a jaw full of large teeth that he often jerked from side to side, and a long snout, which at this moment he was twitching in Mulholland’s direction.
‘And where is Inspector McLevy, if I may be so bold?’ Roach asked, his brooding gaze flitting round the room.
He had in truth been rather perturbed to open the door and find his constable in commune, apparently, with the occult. He knew Mulholland for a staunch Protestant, if Irish, and hoped the young man was not being religiously undermined by the wave of mesmerism, spiritualism, psychic phenomena and the like, sweeping the country. Had the Queen herself not been rumoured to have once taken part in a seance in order to contact her dearly beloved Albert?
In Roach’s view the whole thing was nothing more than Catholicism in one of its many guises, such superstitious drivel concealing the sly tendrils of ultramontanism.
Therefore his eyes bore into Mulholland’s searching out a shift in belief.
‘The inspector,’ replied the constable carefully, ‘mentioned to me that he may be a little on the late side this morning. A personal matter, sir.’
‘Indeed? It must have slipped his mind to inform me.’
‘That’s a mystery, sir. I know you are always foremost in his thoughts.’
What Mulholland did not add was that McLevy’s aforesaid foremost thought was how to keep Roach from meddling in his investigations, but there was not a trace of this privy information on his candid countenance.
The wave of love and desire that had swept through his vibrant organic parts was placed in restrainers for the moment. He was back to pragmatic self because he needed to have the lieutenant firmly in his corner. Just behind Cupid.
Roach sniffed in disbelief at the constable’s response and his eyes passed disdainfully over the station cubby-hole where the rank and file hung their uniforms and left spare boots strewn in disarray.
A smell of sweat hung in the air, mingling with the odours from the oft-used water closet next door.
The mirror, now mercifully free from the image of the love-sick Mulholland, was set into the wall by the door
