He pointed to yet another nursery character that had caught his attention. Fat and egg-shaped.
‘You leave Humpty Dumpty tae me.’
The door closed and he was out of sight.
In the silence, the black outline of a bird flew past the window outside and cast a shadow on the veiled curtains.
‘I’m sorry, mistress,’ Hannah muttered. ‘I didnae know and I didnae see ahent the door. The man’s a bloody menace.’
Jean’s face was thoughtful. She was beginning to map out the lines of strategy.
‘Get Lily to make another drawing,’ she said finally. ‘In fact, if we make use of carbon paper and keep her at it, we may have enough and to spare.’
‘For what?’
‘Handing out to my people. I wish to find this dirty wee gutterblood.’
Hannah nodded. Jean fixed her with a glance.
‘Earlier. You had something to say?’
‘No’ certain sure mind, but…in the teashop. At one of the tables. It might have been him.’
‘And I didn’t notice,’ Jean stated with an edge of annoyance. ‘Because I was too fixed upon the Countess.’
‘She’s a tricky customer.’
‘So is James McLevy,’ said Jean, while a fluted snore from the bed sounded as if in agreement.
Indeed, the man himself was walking through the gardens of the Just Land with much on his deceptive mind.
Despite his warning to the contrary the inspector was convinced that Jean Brash and the Countess would fight tooth and nail until one or other had the last word at the graveside of her rival.
Either woman could kill two roosters in the one second.
For a moment an image from his dream, the cloaked red figure, sprang into his senses and he glanced around swiftly lest the spectre be lurking in the shrubbery, but nothing was manifest. Yet why was his waking thought being harassed by a nightly vision?
He could not answer that, so returned to contemplation.
So be it. Then while they fought like Oberon and Titania over the changeling, he might take them both.
If they broke the law, and there was no doubt they had in the past and would in the future, a habit exacerbated by the coming conflict, if they did, he would get his chance.
A curious melancholy came upon him. For the Countess he did not give a damn but Jean Brash was a different matter.
Where would he find another decent cup of coffee?
He covered a multitude of feeling with that sentence and stopped to look into the big fishpond that Jean had recently caused to be gouged out of the harmless earth.
Women were aye
Great wodges of thick, dark green ornamental leaves moved gently on the surface of the water, with some large lily pads of an uneasy yellow coloration spreading their empire like Victoria Regina.
Beneath all that vegetation lurked some – to his eyes – bloated exotic fish that had never done a hand’s turn in their life.
Sluggish, pale gold, bilious green, scarlet fins like blood in water, they cruised and nudged below the leaves.
The inspector frowned. It would be his advice to put a net of sorts over the pond to guard against the advent of a marauding heron. These fat layabouts were an easy mark.
But good advice is seldom heeded.
Why had the Countess made such a provocative move?
Who was Humpty Dumpty?
A harsh cry overhead came from a passing crow, warning anyone below:
Suffer your fate. Complaint gets you nowhere.
McLevy moved off towards the iron gates of the Just Land and disappeared into the evening mist like a wisp of the imagination.
Now you see him, now you don’t.
11
Behold I shew you a mystery;
We shall not all sleep
but we shall all be changed.
THE BIBLE, Corinthians
In the silence of the darkened room a distant grandfather clock chimed seven times. Possibly in another venue at the modest quarters of the Edinburgh Spiritualist Society, a ghost or two had gathered to witness the whirr of a mechanical universe and the striking result of chronological certainty but in the main salon there was so far only corporeal presence and a hushed silence.
The gas burners had been dimmed to a peep so that a pale sickly light caught the occasional white shirt front or brightly pleated dress collar of the latest fashion, but the rest was subdued garmentation, gloomy and overcast as the sky had been all day.
Lieutenant Roach sat bleakly beside his rapt, attentive wife and regretted for the hundredth time that he had partaken so heartily of onions at supper. He had a weakness for fried liver, bacon and the pungent bulb of the lily family; Mrs Roach had instructed the cook accordingly because she wished to flatter his stomach into accepting what his mind would most certainly reject.
A visit to an otherworld where unseen influence held sway and ethereal spirits did not indulge themselves in offshoots of the
Now he was reaping a digestive whirlwind in the form of repetitive gaseous eruptions that insisted on bursting from whichever conduit might yield to pressure.
The audience, of which he was an unwilling and uncomfortable participant, was seated in rows with a centre aisle facing onto a small stage where a single figure sat in a chair, illuminated from each side by a large honey- coloured candle on a simple holder.
The silence stretched.
The figure did not move.
The lieutenant smothered an inconvenient upsurge and blinked his eyes.
Surely the woman would have some kind of visitation shortly? Not that Roach would believe it for a moment but at least it would get the ball rolling towards the hole.
Three places to the rear, in fact the back row, where his massive frame would incommode no watcher behind, Conan Doyle sat between his mother Mary and Muriel Grierson. The young man was conscious of a certain emanation from Muriel’s direction that seemed somewhat odorously provocative.
A perfume most certainly but not a clean sharp cologne to bring a chap to his senses, more of a musky offering like a delicate crooked finger from a shadowed doorway.
He took a deep breath but kept his eyes fixed on Sophia Adler, whose ash-blonde hair shone behind the white veil in the candlelight like a signal to the spirits.
Magnus Bannerman had spoken first and spoken well of the
