The key to the Morrison murder was Sophia Adler.
How, he did not yet surmise and her connection might even be innocent and tenuous but she
Spirits or earthbound, she was a key.
Something she had said, in his litany he had named it. A pool of blood. Not on the carpet but on the street, she had said. On the stones.
On the slab?
He had mentioned it to Mulholland, a random slice of the brain but now it had returned with a vengeance.
A case some eighteen years ago, he had been a young constable only fit for investigation of minor criminality but his sergeant George Cameron had brought him into the cold room.
A body on the slab.
‘I’m doing this for your own good, Jamie,’ he said and pulled the sheet aside.
The young constable looked and said nothing.
‘This is violent death,’ Cameron declared. ‘Ye don’t get much worse. We found him down by the docks.’
Where the man’s face should have been was a bloody mess. As if a giant fist had smashed down to obliterate all traces of self.
Just like Gilbert Morrison’s.
The case was never solved and he was a lowly constable only fit for day patrol then with a sergeant who, despite his rough ways, looked after him like a son.
The cold room was as near as he got to that particular investigation.
But he seemed to remember they discovered the man to be American. Was that the body she had seen in her vision?
Was there a connection?
A constable then but now he was inspector. He would examine the records of the case. Might yield nothing but he would look anyway.
On the financial side, a banker, who owed him his son’s reputation, had promised to move heaven and earth to delve deeper into the monetary affairs of the Morrison Brothers.
Hopefully the man would deliver soon.
Walter was the surviving brother, but how long would he last?
McLevy had stationed a watch on the man’s house; part protection, part surveillance. So far there was nothing to report. Walter was lying low.
As regards Jean Brash, he had no doubt now that she had walked into a trap.
The knife. A professional job.
The barman in the pub where the sharpers were sliced remembered the little man complaining about the beer. The London ale was better, he had said. Shoreditch stout put the Scots beer to shame.
McLevy had sent a cable to a good police friend in that dungeon of a city, describing in as much detail as possible the wee acid-pourer and mentioning the Shoreditch connection.
A pity he could not send the sketch itself by wire but science had not yet moved on that far. One day.
The answer should arrive tomorrow, with any luck.
He would also make it his business to catch up with Maisie Powers, who worked for the Countess but might possibly be persuaded despite her profound dislike of McLevy to divulge some titbits. The persuading was the problem.
Oh, and he’d nearly forgot the faint lingering smell of that pomade from Magnus Bannnerman.
He had sniffed at the single filament from the murder scene but the odour had disappeared.
Even if he yanked a hair out of the man’s head and put both under the microscope to find some similarity it would still prove nothing.
But it was something.
A pattern was beginning to form.
Somewhere.
And then his mind shifted back to Conan Doyle. The way the big lump had been gawking at Sophia Adler did not bode well. Where the eyes gaze the heart follows.
Yet there were depths to this fellow that intrigued McLevy.
Arthur was also a talisman in this case; how, the inspector did not precisely know but he was certain that Doyle had a part to play.
Tomorrow.
It was going to be a busy day.
30
Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.
IMMANUEL KANT,
Hannah Semple gazed through the cell bars at Jean Brash. The mistress was tired, bags under the eyes, missing her morning jolt of coffee no doubt.
‘This doesnae look good,’ the old woman announced.
Jean sighed. Hannah would have made a great Job’s comforter all those years ago.
‘Whit did the lawyers say?’ she asked the visage before her, which resembled a bloodhound that had lost the trail.
‘They’re not hopeful.’
Neither was Hannah. She had just spent two hours at the offices of Duncan Paterson, Jean’s expensive and knabbie-faced advocate who had circumlocuted his way round the legal houses before admitting that, as the facts stood, there was not a cat’s chance in hell of Jean getting out before trial.
And after the trial, perhaps even less chance.
‘It would not have been so bad,’ pronounced the supercilious wee runt, who possessed a huge head that made him look as if he had been wrenched out of the womb by pair of cow pliers, ‘if Mistress Brash had not been found with her own knife impaled into the corpse and his blood upon her person.’
‘She was unconscious!’ Hannah had retorted.
‘Unfortunately,’ Paterson had responded with a sideways sniff of a nose that could smell money at least three miles away, ‘the legal process does not recognise that particular condition as valid mitigation.’
Paterson had promised Hannah that he would arrive at the station later to see Jean but for the moment his time would be best served by going through the preliminary evidence with a fine toothcomb.
Give the wee puddock his due, he would accomplish this. He was one of the best advocates in the city, but the message the lawyer sent was not a cheerful one.
‘Ye’re stuck here till hell freezes,’ was Hannah’s pithy summing up, minus the legal jargon.
Jean sighed once more.
‘I would kill for a cup of coffee.’
‘Ye already have,’ said Hannah with graveyard humour, ‘and I tried tae bring ye in a stone flask o’ the stuff but they widnae let me.’
‘How come not?’ Jean sat up a bit straighter, green eyes flashing with indignation.
‘That big stupit bastard of a sergeant at the desk. Murdoch. He said there might be poison in it. Tae help ye escape from justice.’
Jean shook her head. Hannah hesitated, not wanting to pile it, on but events could not be undone.
