But she still did not get out the door untrammelled.
‘Jist before ye depart, Ellen Girvan, have ye seen this man before?’
The maid turned slowly. So the bugger knew her all the time, otherwise why remember her given name?
In fact it had only come into McLevy’s mind when she’d opened up the door; something in the cast of her features and the way she had glowered at him brought to mind a similar face from childhood.
Looking across the cobbled square at him one day when he had just kicked hell out of a thug who had persecuted him for a deal of his young life.
So he had taken a flyer and was gratified to see the hit; a reputation for omniscience does a policeman no harm.
‘Aye, I’ve seen him,’ Ellen said, staring more at the inspector than Samuel. ‘A wee time ago at the door.’
‘Never before that?’
Ellen could
‘Not to my decent knowledge,’ she responded carefully.
McLevy thought to push it but there was a flinty cast to Ellen’s face that dissuaded him from the effort.
‘Are ye going to make us any hot beverage?’ he asked instead.
‘It wisnae in my mind.’
Ellen looked at her mistress who gazed downwards and the maid took that for a negative.
She left.
Samuel had not said a word.
Conan Doyle for once had nothing to deduct.
McLevy had sent him on to batter at the door and sneaked off round the side with productive results but Arthur had the feeling he had been used as a decoy of sorts.
A disgruntled Constable Mulholland, who was beginning to regard Conan Doyle with jaundiced eye, had been dispatched to the station with a pack of summoned helpers to transport the Moxey gang.
But Seth had lost no time in pointing a dislocated finger towards a certain direction; there being no honour amongst thieves and he being foul indignant at someone stealing his hard-earned lift.
The constable was not best pleased at being left out of the action but McLevy persuaded him that he was essential for safe transport of the gang. Besides Doyle might be useful because of his local knowledge.
It amused McLevy to see the giant so discomfited by personal relationships. That’s why McLevy, in the main, tried very hard not to have them.
Deduction has its drawbacks.
‘Mistress Grierson, can you enlighten us as to your dealings with this fellow?’
A simple enough question, but a nest of vipers. Silver Samuel, according to Seth, had supplied the knowledge for the lift and danced the Reels o’ Bogie with the lusty widow.
Muriel swallowed hard but before she might formulate a response Samuel burst into speech.
‘Easy enough,’ he declared. ‘Moxey made vaunt tae me where he had thieved a brooch.’
Samuel waved his free hand in Doyle’s direction.
‘When that big hooligan started a rammy, I took my chance, thieved it in turn and came here to sell it back.’
‘Is this true?’ asked the inspector.
Muriel closed her eyes and nodded.
‘Where is the brooch now?’
She brought her hand slowly from a pocket in her dress and displayed the cause of all these shenanigans.
‘Did you pay for such?’
‘We were interrupted,’ said Samuel quickly.
McLevy carried on looking at Muriel and was rewarded by a shake of the head.
‘Then why leave it?’ he asked Samuel with a mean glint in his eye. The inspector didn’t need much in the way of deduction to smell a rat up a drainpipe somewhere.
‘As I tellt ye,’ Samuel offered defiantly. ‘We were interrupted. I ran for my life.’
‘And this is the first and only time you have seen this man, Mistress Grierson? You have never met him previous?’
To this query of the inspector’s Muriel, after gazing into the eyes of a person who had hazarded his very existence to preserve her name, shook her head much after the manner of St Peter in the garden.
Conan Doyle, who had been still as a statue during all this, prayed inwardly that McLevy would not repeat what the young man earnestly hoped were the calumnies that Moxey had disgorged.
‘And you, Silver Sam, this is your first visit here?’
‘Aye. And I wish I’d never set foot.’
The inspector let out a sudden bark of laughter.
‘So be it. But ye surprise me, Samuel. You’re more in the mode of turning some daft woman’s head wi’ your charms then living free and easy. This is not your style.’
Samuel flushed and bit his lip.
Muriel’s face drained of colour.
McLevy fished in his pocket and produced the crumpled music box.
‘We found the Moxey gang’s stash but no trace of your other belongings,’ he remarked genially to Muriel, ‘save this wounded soldier.’
He twisted the key and the melody began to play brokenly, notes missing like Moxey’s teeth, the melancholy tune rendered even more heartbreaking by the failure to sustain its rightful pitch.
The inspector put it on a nearby table and stepped back to delve in his pocket for the restrainers that he planned to fit around Samuel’s wrists.
The other three figures, in a strange repeat of the hell-hags in the tavern, shifted slightly while the music traced a crippled path around them, then Conan Doyle stood back and it was only Muriel and Silver Samuel who remained in the dance.
Her eyes were shining with a feeling within and his were full of pain.
Late-discovered love. What a bugger it can be.
‘My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.’
25
Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
thy sorrow is in vain;
For violets plucked, the sweetest showers
Will ne’er make grow again.
ANONYMOUS, ‘
