Indeed there was the bitter truth. If it had not been for Samuel trying to impress Seth Moxey, puffing himself up by telling of the cash discovery in the desk and how he might help himself one night while the mistress lay satiated by his virile charms…a cheap, stupid vaunt that had landed him in this mess of potage.
‘I kennt you would never have the nerve,’ said Seth, a scornful twist to his chapped lips. ‘My Agnes said so and she never has it wrong.’
Samuel bowed his head. It was true. He was not a thief, or particularly violence-prone.
What he had not known was that Seth’s gang had cased Muriel’s house previously through an informant amongst the funeral catering staff, who had noted the jammed window but had not opportunity to copy out the keys in wax.
Seth had therefore not considered it worth the risk till Mister Grant opened his big trap-door.
‘Is the cash not enough for you?’ he asked mournfully.
‘Naething satisfies,’ said Seth. ‘I have many mouths tae feed. It was ane of our own nephews that stood upon my shoulders tae get through the high window. A big family.’
He gestured to the dancing maidens and two villainous young keelies, twin offspring of himself and Agnes, who were sucking on their cheap cigarettes tucked away in one of the corners as they played at cards.
‘Five pun’. Take or leave.’
Seth’s eyes had narrowed, the tone flat, uninterested, and Samuel knew miserably that he did not possess such a sum so he might kiss goodbye to the mother’s brooch.
At that moment the music box ran out of tune and Sadie Shields, herself puffing on a penny cigarette, darted forward to wind the spring once more; things had been quiet and this, for the women, was a sweet diversion.
It is an oddity how in the most estranged of hearts, some crevice of feeling can still maintain existence, and who knows what dreams had been conjured by the movement of their ransacked bodies to the melancholy strain?
But before her fingers touched the winding key, a voice rang through the tavern striking a different note.
‘Hold your hand!’
Arthur Conan Doyle stood in the tavern doorway, a massive figure of due retribution.
‘I have reason to believe that music box is not your property. I respectfully ask you to hand it over and we will find an authority that may pronounce upon this matter.’
A frozen silence followed this highfalutin assertion, for in truth Conan Doyle was not sure how a Knight Errant might address three dancing whores in a Leith tavern.
Seth Moxey rose slowly to his feet, hand sliding to a side pocket where a short thick stub of sharpened iron had its dwelling place. He preferred close quarters and often allowed his opponent to haul him tight before delivering a lethal blow.
The two keelies rose also, taking the parental cue, one fitting a set of knuckledusters, the other unveiling a lead cosh.
Doyle took note of all this and raised his hands in a pugilist’s posture, left extended, right cocked under his chin. His slightly protruding eyes gave the misleading impression of fear but life for six months in a whaler is not a penny arcade and physical terror never would find purchase in his psyche.
He waited. The keelies split ranks so that they were on each side with Seth facing the target straight on.
All in silence.
But this was not a seal cub.
Finally Seth spat onto the floor just beside Doyle’s stout walking shoes.
‘Are you accusing me of theftuous activity?’ he asked, in a parody of Doyle’s high tone.
‘If the cap fits,’ replied Arthur.
Out of the blue, both keelies moving with practised stealth slid into action, attacking simultaneously while Seth weaved this way and that searching out an opening for the iron that had magically appeared in his hand.
The knuckleduster twin received a straight left that smashed him backwards, while the other, cosh upraised, benefited from an upwards right hook as recommended by that expert on pugilism, James McLevy.
This caught the keelie in the throat, sending him spluttering to the floor, and as Doyle whirled round he smacked Seth full in the mouth with a lashed blow that loosened one of the man’s few remaining teeth.
Moxey let out a strangled roar of pain and fury ready to kill the man who had done this.
Doyle moved to grab the music box but as he did so, Agnes, who was wearing a long white crushed gown with a train almost like that that of a bride that trailed over the floor, threw her skirt up in the air and jammed it over Doyle’s head, enveloping him in filmy gauze which smelled of far from exotic female secretions and effectively blinded him. In this state he was wrestled to the floor and when Agnes whisked away her bridal dress, Doyle found himself looking into the bleeding face of Seth Moxey.
It was not a pretty sight.
Moxey spat out some blood, then rested the point of the iron in the soft flesh under Doyle’s chin.
Arthur’s arms were pinioned one on each side by the twins, with Seth kneeling on his chest crushing the breath out of him. Not a promising situation.
‘Where would ye like me tae begin?’ asked Seth digging the point of his iron spike cruelly into the skin.
‘It matters little to me,’ choked Arthur.
‘Mebbye I’ll split your guts, pull them out like a washing line eh?’
‘Go to hell,’ was the defiant response.
A wild light came into Moxey’s eyes; he lifted the spike till it hung directly above Conan Doyle’s face.
Agnes was alarmed; she knew her man well and had no wish to see him kill without profit.
‘Let him be, my bonny boy,’ she advised. ‘Take his money and kick his backside out of here.’
The barman opened his mouth to agree. He had watched all proceedings with a jaundiced eye but had no wish to see murder on his premises. Business was slack enough. Then he observed something behind the gathering that sent him back to wiping at the dirty glasses with an equally dirty cloth.
‘Too late,’ replied Seth, prising the loose molar out with his tongue and spitting it to the floor. ‘I have incurred a loss. Tooth for a tooth.’
He gazed into Doyle’s eyes and lifted the spike higher so that it hung as Excalibur in the tobacco smoke that swirled around like mist hanging over the Dozmary Pool.
But there was no Lady of the Lake on hand and Conan Doyle realised with a sickening thud that this was not some ebullient adventure. This was the real world.
For a moment the face of Sophia Adler flashed into his mind. Would he be a voice in her mind from the dead? Would she close her eyes in the shared experience of a departed soul? Would he reach out to her for comfort?
A trickle of blood ran from the corner of Seth’s mouth, giving him the appearance of a Halloween vampire.
The whores had grouped behind him as if waiting to be fed. White-faced. Innocence fled.
‘Kiss yer life goodbye.’
Whether Moxey intended to plunge downwards or merely meant to terrify the tethered Arthur must be left in the annals of unfinished actions because a hornbeam shaft cut through the fog of nicotine fumes and cracked upon Seth Moxey’s wrist.
A howl of pain, then the circle of whores fell back to reveal behind them like a
Beside him was James McLevy. Hands in his pockets, lips pursed, a cheery glint in his eyes.
‘Aye, Seth…life’s a bugger is it not?’
A somewhat cryptic statement that had its roots in the fact that he and Mulholland had spent all day in the station fielding increasingly urgent demands from Lieutenant Roach – himself a conduit for his own chief constable and many other Masonic worthies – regarding Gilbert Morrison, the murdered man, a member of one of the most powerful lodges in the city.
The demands were that the case be solved at once, the murderer found, order restored, God put back in his heaven and all the rest of it.
Walter Morrison had insisted that his faint was to do with a wave of grief and not the word
