Nor Will He Sleep (2 page)

‘Let me go!’

The young man wrenched away and Agnes fell onto her backside in a puddle with an unholy splash.

‘See how I am treated, God help me!’ she cried as both youths disappeared into the darkness.

For a moment Alan looked concerned, but Daniel hauled the larger man onwards, shooting back a vindictive glance, and then all that was left was the sound of the rain.

A distant howl indicated a faraway melee as the rival students joined battle.

Agnes sat, feeling the noxious damp spread around her nether regions. It seemed an eternity passed before she gathered the strength to lever her bony form upright.

She once more clutched her handbag and muttering a deal of possibly uncharitable imprecations, moved slowly off into the darkness.

Mistress Agnes Carnegie had lodgings in Salamander Street, where the slaughterhouse welcomed most dumb animals to its bloody bosom; every night she walked the length of Leith Harbour safe in the
arms of the Saviour, but this evening the inner conversation was informed with a certain malicious righteousness.

Despite her damp posterior she considered she had won the joust with the crippled reprobate – had he not fled the battle? Scuttled away like a dirty wee rat?

Agnes laughed aloud in the silence. But what was better was her discovery from an earlier time – an open book had revealed the dark secret that would give her power to use or withhold,
depending upon her Christian conscience.

Oh, the pleasure to be found as fearful haunted eyes begged silently for mercy and her avoiding gaze twisted the sin deeper, like a nail in the flesh.

Then a wetness where her fleshly tissue had rarely if ever known such brought her wandering thoughts back to present circumstance.

Daniel
, the other had called him. A fell disgrace for such a holy name –

The rain had stopped for a moment and something fluttered at her feet. It was the favour she had previously torn, now lying on the moist flagstones.

Agnes looked swiftly around but saw nothing save darkness and shadow. Then a chirruping whistle sounded from behind her and she turned to see a slim figure emerge from one of the wynds that
spread like wormy fissures from the body of the harbour.

Her eyesight was poor but she could see that he held a cane and skipped with an odd halting gait towards her.

Had the old woman not been so wrapped up in her vengeful musings, she might have observed this strange being to have dogged her footsteps for some time.

She peered as he whistled once more like a discordant meadowlark. His face was chalk white, his suit a pale colour, hair plastered flat, eyes dark and hidden as his countenance was averted at an
angle from her sight.

He pranced up merrily like a March hare, struck an attitude with one dainty foot to the fore, then flipped back the tip of his cane to land on the shoulder and smiled, the teeth a little yellow
against the white mask of his face.

Then he deliberately allowed himself to become still and presented his appearance close towards her, as if in invitation.

Finally, her jaw dropped in recognition.

‘You –’ she began as the cane whipped across and took her full in the throat, crushing the windpipe to stanch the flow of air.

Words need air.

As her head lurched forward, the cane cut viciously down in two blows to the sides of her unprotected neck and then welted down upon her pathetic, pious hat to penetrate her cranium.

She fell like a stone and the blows rained down with hideous accuracy and no little brio as the figure danced around the broken-backed doll that had once been a woman of some upright
quality.

With her dying breath Agnes tried to form a word to name what she had recognised, but a swordsmanlike hit cut precisely between her eyes like a sabre and – as it were – she gave up
the ghost.

A dying spasm finally loosened her grip on the bag and amongst its contents, now spilled out onto the slippery stone, was a heavy bible, solemn with usage, but the spine loose and flapping like
a duck’s wing.

The figure riffled through the pages till, coming upon a suitable passage he ripped free the leaf. Having perused then marked a line in it with a thumbnail, he wrapped the white favour within
this holy covering and stuffed the whole inside the old woman’s mouth as if she were a Christmas turkey. He then jammed the jaw shut.

So, like a jack-a-dandy, bible in hand, he danced off into the night, leaving his erstwhile partner a numb, lifeless wallflower.

The rain began to fall again, diluting the trickle of dark blood coming from the ears of the corpse.

A seagull high above let out a screech.

To signal a soul departing, or was it just a bird on the wing?

James McLevy regarded himself in the rust-flaked mirror and came to the conclusion that he resembled a ruined castle.

The cheekbones still held their place but above and below were a scene of near desolation.

Where was the wolf these days?

He leant forward and peered into the slate grey eyes almost concealed in the folds of lidded flesh; a yellow light might still burn in them somewhere but damned if he could see it.

This revelation caused the nostrils to flare in the broad pitted nose. What teeth remained were like tombstone stubs hidden behind the thick, curiously ripe lips.

It aye puzzled the inspector why his lips might appear so lush with promised joy and perhaps to disguise this, he had recently grown a bushy moustache, which was flecked with some grey and an
indeterminate colour like charred ashes that gave him the appearance of, in the opinion of Constable Mulholland, ‘a walrus with the mange’.

Beneath the dimpled, or in more manly terms, cleft chin was where the real trouble lay.

The heart.

Some years before, the inspector, after laying low a brute of a killer by dint of shooting the bugger on top of a roof while receiving a simultaneous battering, had commenced to experience
various shafts of pain in the chest and innards. These shafts were sharp and took the breath away.

After suffering for many years as a man is apt to do with what he does not wish to acknowledge, this thorn in his flesh became more insistent and harder to disguise from such as Mulholland and
Lieutenant Roach at the station.

McLevy began to suspect that Roach, not a man noted for his perception of other’s woes, was giving him the odd little sideways look, so the inspector decided enough was enough and went to
see the doctor.

A doctor in Glasgow of course; Edinburgh was a village for gossip and there’s nothing the Scots enjoy more than the cataloguing of other folk’s ailments.

Alexander Pettigrew was the reconnoitred specialist: an attenuated yet boisterous fellow whose false teeth flew in and out of his mouth with alarming rapidity.

The inspector had grudgingly bared his upper body to be poked and prodded, suffered an interrogation as regards his dietary habits, and even at one point been cross-examined on the subject of
sexual activity.

Pettigrew clacked his teeth happily at the baleful glare this question produced – nothing irritates the male Caledonian more than enquiries into the activity of nether regions.

The doctor finally sat down at his desk while McLevy donned his shirt and jacket, then put his medical fingers together to form a barricade and then beamed.

‘Your heart,’ he pronounced, ‘is like an old carthorse that has been hauling a heavy load up too many braes, its poor hooves striking sparks from the cobblestones, the beast
frothing at the mouth, badly fed and worse treated.’

This created a vivid picture in McLevy’s mind except that it was himself he envisaged, lugging a scaffie cart up Coal Hill while the criminal classes of Leith jeered and threw big dods of
mud at his suffering carcass.

But who was driving the vehicle? When he looked back, he saw a bulky figure silhouetted against the dull sky – the man was wearing a low brimmed bowler and brandishing a whip.

Pettigrew at the desk bore a fixed smile on his face as if it were cemented; in fact the only time the doctor had frowned in any way was when McLevy had described his plethora of tavern
provender augmented by many mugs of coffee, each furnished with four to six large sugars, that he gulped during the day and especially at night.

Having exhausted his carthorse simile, the physician moved in for the kill.

‘Mend your ways,’ he declared with a hint of the Old Testament, ’or the Grim Reaper will mend them for you.’

His patient seemed unimpressed. Pettigrew clarified.

‘Death. Will strike you down.’

‘I deal wi’ death every day,’ muttered McLevy.

‘You are an undertaker by occupation?’

‘Of a kind.’

McLevy had volunteered nothing in terms of his job.

‘It causes you a measure of strain?’

‘More like mortal trepidation – from time to time.’

The healer shook his head in cheerful sorrow. ‘Then you must give up the profession!’

The atmosphere in the consulting room changed suddenly as if an icy ghost had slid in, and the doctor found himself pinned back by the bleak menace in the opposite eyes.

‘My profession is my life.’

The flat statement lay on the desk between them like a fallen angel, until Pettigrew leapt to his feet and pointed an accusing finger from his tall lanky frame.

‘Do you sleep?’ he demanded.

‘Whit?’

‘With such caffeine ingestion – do you
sleep
?’

The inspector considered this.

‘But rarely,’ he replied.

The doctor waved his arms in triumph as if he had diagnosed the disease.

‘Then worry no more about your aforesaid life. Either change your ways my dear sir, or you will attain the longest sleep known to man. An everlasting quiescence. Oblivion!’

On that dramatic note, a sour-faced McLevy had paid the Messenger of Doom, quit the scene and travelled back to Edinburgh as fast as the train could take his newly maligned shell of
humanity.

The present incumbent of this cracked and fissured carapace left a grumpy face plus Glasgow memories in the mirror and crossed to a recessed cupboard, there to unlock the door panel with the
gravity of a parish priest about to delve into the sacraments.

Here he kept mementoes of past cases all related for the most part to homicidal intent; either accomplished or abandoned depending on which way the hangman’s rope had swung.

In pride of place was a narrow red ledger, itself a product of the relatively innocuous crime of embezzlement though it did involve a respectable suicide; this he carefully removed to lay upon
the scratched surface of his battered old table-cum-writing desk.

Above the table was a large window that looked down from a height over the gleaming, mysterious city – this was his family, his keeping and his fate. Auld Reekie.

He sat, pursed his lips solemnly, slugged back some cold coffee from a mug, dipped his pen and began.

Diary of James McLevy.

7th May, 1887.

It has been some years since I ceased to write in this book and my motives for stopping are as puzzling to me now as the reason why I recommence.

The past wreaks vengeance on the present.

These words have been running in my head all day. If I set them down on paper, perhaps they may let me be.

They are accompanied by a dull feeling of dread, nothing you could pin with a finger but lurking as though perceived by someone else who has deposited the pending catastrophe with me for
safe keeping.

Lurking.

And another thing.

Why is it that iniquity reveals nothing in the visage?

Here’s me, a bastion of law and order looking like a demolished edifice compared wi’ Jean Brash who keeps the most notorious bawdy-hoose in Edinburgh, revels in all levels of
corruption and yet has the appearance of a milkmaid at dawn. Well, nearly.

Is there some toothless old harpy in the Just Land to whom she transfers the marks of sin? Who sits sookin’, plook ridden, at some crumbly sugar biscuit in the darkness of the cellar?
I must take scrutiny, next time I visit.

Jean Brash. The woman is untouched. Like a picture in a frame.

But I bear the scars of every murderous crime I have set my seal across. They sear me. Old yapping ghosts.

Scars of body and soul.

A curious innocence in my heart yearns for redemption.

There is a wild energy prowling in the city. Young. Dangerous. A roving, vagabond energy. The devil is on the loose and who knows what flavours he will throw in the pot?

As usual I am in the middle but I feel the ground shaky as if the centre lacks cohesion.

Oh to be young again. What a foolish thought.

McLevy carefully blotted this guddle of half-baked insights and closed the book.

A noise from the streets below brought him to the window and he looked from his attic room over the black slates drenched by the slant rain of May, down at the torches flickering in the distance
by the harbour.

A youthful reckless energy. Hazardous to itself and other folk or was that just the opinion of an old man whose voice echoed in the fumbling darkness?

Ach tae hell with it. He defiantly poured some tarry dregs from his fire-scorched coffee pot into the mug and let the humid tincture trickle through tombstone teeth as the enamel rim brushed
annoyingly against the stalwart bristle of his moustache.

But there was scant doubt. Heart or no heart, pain or no pain – the devil had come to town.

What mask was he wearing?