suit and anyway he could now see that the beckoning light had its origin from a lantern held by the Red Figure, who had popped up into view once more.
She stood by a small jetty. A rowing boat was moored in the still night-blue water where a spectral oarsman, black garbed and hunched over, rested with his back to the proceedings.
Not a promising sight, but then his attention was usurped by the slender white hand emerging from the folds of the red cloak to move towards the hood that still obscured the figure’s countenance.
For once in his life Inspector James McLevy abandoned the consuming curiosity of his natural bent, because he knew in his bones that once he saw that face the game was over.
He reached down into the depths of his being, where all this turbulence was wreaking havoc, and
Witness him bolt upright, hair aghast, thumb wedged between his lips, with the beginnings of a snottery nose.
He removed the singed digit, wiped the seeping organ with the cuff of his crumpled nightshirt and swung out of bed, feet landing with a thump on the cold floorboards of his attic room.
McLevy flapped his nightshirt over bare calves to create a welcome draught of cold air coursing up and over his clammy skin, then took a deep breath.
He was still alive, conscious of crime before it even stirred in the womb of Iniquity, a renowned thief-taker in his own city, feared by lawbreakers high and low, prone to violence when necessary and sometimes just for the hell of it, a great drinker of coffee, a sharp splinter in the rump of authority. He had survived bullets, knives, strangulation by a servant of the Crown and a drug-crazed thuggee, drowning even though he could not swim a stroke, at least two lethal women and ten times that number of murderous bastard men – one of whom had tried to spatter out his brains with hobnailed boot and viciously executed downward stamp.
The inspector realised he was muttering all this to himself: the sign of a disorderly mind.
A charred and dented coffee pot of discoloured metal stood on a stone ledge beside the hearth, where the dead ashes of last night’s fire lay scattered. He picked it up, shook it gently to and fro with his head cocked to the one side, then poured out the thick sludgy brew into an equally discoloured cup and sifted the mixture through his teeth.
The liquid hit the pit of his stomach like a falling stone and almost at once provoked his bowels into subdued commotion, but it did the trick.
He was himself again. James McLevy. Inspector of police. A solid, save for the bowels, proposition.
With measured tread he retraced his steps to the bed and shoved his feet into a shapeless pair of old socks. This action he followed by solemnly donning a nightcap with a dangling wee toorie – a birthday gift courtesy of his landlady, Mrs MacPherson, who knew well the prevailing chills of her attic rooms – and then made his way towards the large draughty window, which overlooked his beloved Edinburgh.
En route he stopped to regard himself in a mildewed oval mirror, bought from a toothless female hawker in Leith Market who had obviously no interest in further vanity. The glass was laid at an angle against a pile of his literary and scientific books. It reflected McLevy in all his glory.
He saw a distorted version of Wee Willie Winkie.
A man of some bulk. Curiously dainty hands; the one holding the cup raised a pinkie in elegant acknowledgement of his own image. Sturdy enough calves, from being on the saunter so long in the streets of Leith, a barrel-shaped corpus tending to a wee bit too much heft round the stomach, the broad shoulders sloping deceptively.
And then the face. It was on top of the body. That much you could say for certain.
The light from the candle threw a fragile arc round the room that rimmed him at the neck so McLevy craned forward, peering down to confirm what he already knew.
White parchment skin, pitted and creviced, full lips with a curious pout like the ornamental fish of Jean Brash’s new garden pond in the Just Land, a slightly spread nose from keeking hard up against too many windows, tufts of salt-and-pepper hair sticking out from the nightcap, and, below a gloomy brow, the eyes. Slate-grey. Lupine. Not friendly.
Seen too much.
McLevy turned away abruptly. Like the hawker he had no use for further vanity but had bought the damned reflector because of a recent incident at the Leith station.
He had entered full of autumnal relish but became aware of sniggering amongst the morning shift of half- witted young constables. His own right-hand man, Constable Mulholland, hiding the amusement in his blue eyes, stooped down from a great height and informed the inspector that the dishcloth stuffed round the neck that morning to avoid the spilling content of a yolky egg at breakfast upon his whitish shirt, had failed to be removed and was hanging down his front like a dog’s tongue.
McLevy had lost face. To know that folk had laughed behind his back. A childhood memory of similar humiliation had surfaced. It cut him to the bone.
Thank God that Lieutenant Roach, his superior in rank if not in merit, had failed to witness the incident of the overlooked dishcloth.
Ergo the purchase. Every morning, before setting forth, McLevy surveyed his facade in the glass, before twisting over a shoulder to make also sure the back of his thick coat held no trace of a careless repast, or the inadvertent detritus of a solitary life.
This weakness angered him. Why should he give a damn how people thought or what he looked like? It was a recent personal tremor, a self-conscious frailty.
Why should he give a damn? But, he did.
He set his cup down on the spindly-legged table in front of the window, where he read and penned such thoughts as struck him worth the trouble into his diary, pulled back the faded brown curtains and gazed out over his city.
Auld Reekie. The sky was dark as would befit the time of year, trails of street lamps on the main thoroughfares paid homage to the correlated straight lines of planned logic but off all of this mathematical probity ran crooked wynds, narrow deviating slits of passage, and sly conniving side streets – his hunting ground.
The night was silent. But McLevy fancied he could hear the ticking of a thousand clocks, the sighs of a thousand sleepers; men, women and children all sharing the peaceful slumber denied to him.
So be it.
The city was like a huge beast, flanks heaving as it slept in the darkness, and McLevy felt his breath shift in rhythm to that deep motion.
A movement on the roof to the side and he caught from the corner of his eye a slinking form padding with swift sure steps on the oily slates.
Bathsheba. A cat that often visited but not now. She had something in her jaws. He focused his eyes; was that a tail hanging from her mouth?
McLevy’s long sight was exemplary, though from short up the edges blurred with increasing incidence; he tapped upon the window pane and the cat halted and turned, her yellow eyes gleaming in the sooty blackness of an Edinburgh night.
Aye. Right enough. It was a long tail. Even had a vestige of life, looping round with the cat’s swivelling turn of the head. But the rest of the body told a different story. Dead as a doornail, the jaws clamped shut around.
From the feline point of view Bathsheba observed a disembodied bulbous white shape gawking through the window, so she slipped behind a chimney stack to enjoy the fruits of her labour in peace.
A nearby church clock tolled out its verdict on the state of Scotland.
Four o’clock. A distance from dawn. The Witching Hour.
It might have been a trick of the light from the flickering street lamps but it struck the inspector that the holy spires sticking piously up into the sky to remind God that they were aye on parsimonious and pious duty, were listing somewhat to the side; slanted, as if some insidious force were magnetising them from the straight and upright.
