Trick of the Light

35

I beheld the wretch – the miserable monster whom I had created.

MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein

Arthur Conan Doyle shivered in the dampness of Halloween night and gazed across at his companion, who seemed totally impervious to the clammy moist air that wraithed around them like a witch’s spell.

Midnight had come and gone; some snatches of smoke from a distant bonfire that had not yet expired also swirled at their feet; and Doyle was reminded of a scene from Hamlet when the ghost appears on the battlements. It had been at the Lyceum in London, he was fifteen years of age and staying a most glorious three weeks over Christmas with his uncles and their families.

The great Henry Irving had played the Dane.

Tall, slim, a handsome brooding presence with a shock of dark hair, quietly spoken but with the impression of a superb intelligence, black glittering eyes and a long nose that sniffed out corruption in the state of Denmark.

And when his father’s ghost appeared, it seemed the prince’s very soul was split in twain.

It had been the happiest time Conan Doyle had enjoyed in England since being sent at the age of nine to the tender mercies of the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College.

His wild, adventurous spirit had collided head-on with the spartan discipline hammered down upon him and though there had been moments of gratification and scholastic success, he had felt, not unlike Prince Hamlet, suffocated and beaten down by an authority he did not at times recognise or respect.

Arthur had felt almost betrayed by his mother but now realised that she had sent him away to protect the young boy from the worsening state of his own father.

An alcoholic ghost.

Still residing in the institution where he moved between sweet clarity and dangerous fits of violence. A madness to be feared lest it travel in the blood.

All this had passed through Doyle’s mind; there was little else to do huddled in a doorway, watching the roof-tops for a murderous beast to take its bow.

A bang on the door of his mother’s house.

Doyle had thought one of the lodgers had forgotten his key but there on the threshold was James McLevy.

‘I’m going hunting, Mister Doyle,’ he said, face white in the dark outside. ‘You were on my way.’

No more needed to be said. Arthur had bolted for his old sailor’s coat, stuck on the cap, shouted upstairs to his puzzled mother that he would be a time or so, and then was off into the misty night for adventure.

Though it did not seem much of an exploit so far.

They had relieved the shivering constables stationed on watch outside the house of Walter Morrison and then McLevy had hunkered down like an animal settling into its den, tipped his hat over his eyes and not uttered a word or moved a muscle since that moment.

Arthur was restless. He took out one of his pipes and thought to light up and puff some comfort but then worried that it might signal occupation and so replaced it.

Once more he scanned the rooftops where he had been instructed to fix his eagle eye.

Nothing. A few seagulls wheeling despondently, pale shapes in the leaden sky.

‘Ye see any fiendish ogres?’ asked the inspector from under the brim.

‘Nary a one,’ replied Doyle.

‘Ah well. Time yet.’

Anxious that McLevy might disappear once more into the land of Nod, Doyle threw a question at him.

‘‘What makes you think this killer will appear tonight, inspector?’

‘Jist a wee intuition.’

And in fact, it was no more than that. But on the way to Doyle’s he had stopped off at the banker’s house. The man, in the midst of Halloween celebrations, a bonfire in the back garden, festooned with overexcited grandchildren, had not welcomed the intrusion but supplied what information he had gleaned on the Morrisons’ finances.

An interesting harvest. It chimed with a picture that was beginning to build up at the back of McLevy’s mind.

And if he was correct, this might be the last night possible for murderous excursion.

If he was wrong, a watch had still been kept according to plan. Though, as opposed to obvious constabulary on the street, he and Doyle were well tucked out of sight.

So to enquiring eyes, it might appear as if the castle were unguarded and the drawbridge down.

Both men were hidden in the crevice of a small wynd running off Henderson Row, a stately street of terraced-houses where fine respectable folk had their dwelling.

McLevy had made himself comfortable against the wall, leaving Doyle to stand guard. Now the inspector, refreshed after a catnap of sorts, levered himself up and glanced at the large form beside him.

Had Mulholland not been indisposed, the man might not be here but McLevy had a feeling that this medical colossus had yet a part to play in the drama.

Time would tell and though Roach would have a blue fit at a member of the public being involved at a potential crime scene, what the lieutenant didn’t know would not hurt.

From Conan Doyle’s point of view, this was the perfect opportunity to delve into the mind of a successful detective.

A character was taking shape in his imagination that he had explored in rough-and-ready fashion in a story delivered by his own hand to Blackwood’s Magazine in Edinburgh and never heard about again.

Perhaps it had been murdered and the body buried in a file marked ‘Too Many Ghosts?’

Doyle frowned. That title wasn’t any better than the original tale.

The Haunted Grange at Goresthorpe. Not good enough by a long shot, and he had one published in an Edinburgh weekly that he had set in South Africa. The Mystery of Sassassa Valley. Another cumbersome title. Rough efforts.

But there was more to come.

Writing is like a fever in the blood cells.

‘D’ye peruse Edgar Allan Poe?’ McLevy asked, as if he knew which way Arthur’s mind was running.

‘I consider him to be a supremely original writer of the short story,’ Doyle replied somewhat stiffly, because the thought of Poe’s genius only threw his own efforts into an unflattering relief.

‘Aye. Every one like an open wound.’

McLevy, having summed up the master of the macabre with this pithy phrase, whistled softly under his breath as he risked a quick glance up and down the thoroughfare.

In the distance he could hear the faint sound of carriage wheels but other than a few bedraggled Halloween revellers making their way home, the streets were empty.

‘How did you know I was thinking of literary matters?’ asked Doyle suddenly.

‘Your fingers were twitching.’

The inspector let out a short bark of laughter and Doyle took this as a sign that communication was in order.

‘At our first meeting, sir,’ he began, as if making formal examination, ‘you deduced certain facts about me that were not noticeable to the untrained eye. What is your method of procedure, if I may so ask?’

McLevy thought to make more mischief in Doyle’s mind but decided that Big Arthur deserved a bit more – at the moment the young man’s intelligence was somewhat tramlined, but the policeman could sense what he would term activity at the back of the hoose. Intuition. The acumen of nerve ends.

However as regards his ‘deduction’ in the station, it had only too mundane a source.

‘I saw ye,’ he said simply.