Trick of the Light

McLevy closed his diary with a thud.

The trouble with writing is that often more questions are raised than can be decently answered by an author’s limited intelligence.

He carefully stowed away the bulky tome; it was in fact an old office ledger, the cover once red in colour now faded with use, a gift from a grateful banker after the inspector had uncovered a case of embezzlement.

It went into a cupboard by his writing table which was ranged against the wall and contained relics of past crimes solved and unsolved; but he would not delve in there tonight.

A man has too many memories as it is.

The half-drunk mug of coffee lay on his desk and he picked it up before walking to the window.

As usual it was the dark, early hours of morning, the city not altered much from the night before, save perhaps that there was a brooding, heavy feel to the clouds as they almost sat upon the rooftops.

McLevy slurped the brew and pondered about what he had just committed to words.

He had no idea what it all meant but something was coming up from the depths, that was for sure.

A reckoning.

A warped mind.

A secret to be protected.

The inspector peered into his coffee cup as if he might divine this hidden matter or receive a message from a hidden universe but at that moment a coiled shape suddenly unfurled itself from a corner of the room and flew through the air to land with a screech of claws upon his table.

For a moment McLevy, as Mulholland’s Aunt Katie would say, almost jumped out of his skin and left it lying there, but then the inspector realised the fiendish intruder was none other than Bathsheba.

He had let her in earlier to partake of some milk from one of his many chipped saucers and she had promptly lapped her fill then gone to sleep.

On awakening the cat had noticed a fat lazy fly that should have by rights been culled this late autumn but had survived in some cranny of the untidy attic room, lurking between Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and a journal of forensic science.

Thus fortified by literature and research it had droned through the air to descend upon some crumbs where a collection of ginger biscuits had once held sway.

The fly landed, then Bathsheba landed harder.

A quick snap of the jaws and only a fragment of gossamer wing was left to indicate that one of nature’s marvels, evolving from egg to larva, pupa to adult, had once existed. The compound eyes now saw nothing unless the fly presently inhabited the spirit dimension and buzzed around annoying the spectres on their daily round.

McLevy opened the window and the cat, thus nourished, leapt from table to sill, thence to pad cautiously on the slates, disappearing without so much as a backward glance.

Nature has no time for losers.

Kill or be killed, thought McLevy. No matter how much ye wrap it up, that’s what it all comes down to now.

He pulled the window back down and considered risking sleep. Perhaps tonight he would have no dreams, or perhaps a mermaid floating peacefully under water – though the last sea-maiden he had summoned from the depths of slumber had turned out to be his dead mother with maggots and water eels crawling out of her head.

Up from the depths.

As long as it wasn’t the figure in the cloak.

The naked females bouncing round the fire he could just about thole.

But that other put a hitherto unknown feeling into him, a misgiving of dread that had reappeared throughout this whole day.

What was it in the image that had stirred such fear?

Like a heavy weight. Dragging him down to the bottom.

McLevy could sense something out there in his city. A menace that would unleash its power. A deadly presence.

Would it be the death of him?

He softly whistled the Jacobite air of a king lost across the sea, who had carried so many desperate hopes and drowned under such a burden.

‘Charlie is my darling, the young Chevalier.’

The window reflected back McLevy’s face like a ghost. Kill or be killed.

In another part of Leith, Alfred Binnie slept like a child, the razor-sharp knife close to his hand by the pillow. There was a secret entrance to the Countess’s hotel from the back lane and he had used it to slip back inside and up the rear stairs to the room at the top where she had stationed him. Not long now. As he slumbered, his podgy little body twitched like a piglet in the sty. Whee, whee, whee, all the way home.

The Countess prepared for sleep, eyeing herself in the mirror. It was not, in fact, a very attractive face but she could live with that. She bared her teeth to reveal a pair of small incisors, pointed on each side of the mouth like a predatory animal. She had received from certain quarters this night information that she would put to good use. Or bad. The good for her. The bad for Jean Brash. Such thought was amusing. She laughed aloud. A pity about poor Patrick but his nose would still function and she had warned him to take no more action. It might spoil a plan that was forming in her mind. A sweet surprise. She could almost taste it.

All she had to do was convince a young fool that he could take revenge and be rewarded.

The sins of the flesh were useful to that end.

Jean Brash slept fitfully. Her bedroom was bedecked with delicate filmy curtains that rustled a little in a damp breeze coming through the part-opened window. An oil lamp burned by her bed that Hannah Semple forever worried might overturn and set the whole place aflame. The mistress of the Just Land, however, did not like the dark.

Bad things had happened to her in the absence of light. She had lost her childhood. Taken from her. No way back. She surrounded herself with beauty, pretty favours, pampered her body with oils and perfume, but there was no way back. Burn a light, but the dark is always waiting.

Sophia Adler loved the night. Lying in the pitch black, still as a corpse, eyes half closed, she listened to the voices take shape in her mind. Fragments of speech, echoes of disembodied plaintive cries, a force field of garbled sound that she floated through almost like a ghost herself. But never the voice she waited for. It would come. One day. And her life would have meaning. All would be at peace. One day. Or night.

In the Sweet By and By. On the boat to San Francisco, there had been a gospel choir who sang hymns. For the Father waits over the way, to prepare us a dwelling place there. Their simple faith had touched her. But that was not her fate.

Arthur Conan Doyle rarely knew serenity in sleep. His dreams were often peopled with malignant vampire women who sought to chain him to their bodies, and then twist the iron till they drained him of lifeblood. They bore no resemblance to the fair ladies of beauty and grace that he witnessed in daylight. His giant form twitched uneasily as dark tales unravelled in his mind. He feared a father’s genetic demon in the blood and marshalled his mind to resist by holding logic like a sword before him. Raised high, crashed down.

But the dismembered monsters crawled back into his mind to burrow and feast upon the cells of sanity.

From the evidence presented, it would be safe to assume that there was a difference between the outer and inner man.

Conan Doyle’s life would always be a struggle between what he presented to the world and the intensity of an inner vision that would not let him rest in peace. Art in the blood gives no quarter.

Samuel and Muriel slumbered together as if children, she cuddled against his broad back. Her breath fluttered upon his neck and he marvelled that she put her trust in him. It made what he had committed all the more regrettable.

Magnus Bannerman’s body smelled of soap and cologne. Sophia had bathed him like a baby then put him to bed. The blinding headache had gone and now he slept the sleep of the righteous.

And James McLevy still hadn’t made it into the Arms of Morpheus. Too much on his plate.

The unconscious could wait its hurry.