David Ashton - The Painted Lady

“We’ll hae some belly-timber here,” declared James McLevy. “I’m starvin’ hungry.”

As he followed his inspector inside, Mulholland had his own thoughts as to the precise nature to this sudden need for sustenance.

Adam Dunsmore’s opinion of himself had seldom been higher. He pressed his back against the bar, lifted a glass in acknowledgement of the glory to come and saw nothing in the faces of his cronies to contradict this masterful conclusion. He was a small man with a big nose and a loud voice to which he now gave issue.

“Well, gentlemen, there’s nothing like getting your name in the paper and nothing like the prospect of a pretty woman dancing the Perth two-step in the morning air.”

A gale of boozy laughter greeted this callous statement as regards a future hanging but then Dunsmore’s somewhat fishy eyes spotted two newcomers fighting their passage through the smoke, a fair deal of which was caused by the large cigar clenched in his fist.

“McLevy! Whit’re you doing in this neck o’ the woods?”

“I am conducting a wide reconnaissance,” was the stolid response.

“Searching out what?”

“A nostrum salesman,” said Mulholland rather unwisely, but in truth his attention had been taken by a huge slice of goose pie on a plate further down the bar.

“A nostrum salesman?” repeated Dunsmore to universal sniggers. “Ye have to admit, Jamie boy, you’re small fry these days.”

McLevy ignored the provocation. “The Pearson case. Ye have a suspect?”

“And a motive!”

“Such as?”

Dunsmore affected a mysterious air. He relished the knowledge only he possessed, not even passing such to his colleagues apart from the odd insinuation. “Ever hear of Jardine Boothroyd?”

“A painter of sorts, I believe?” Mulholland contributed, stomach growling like a hound on the scent.

“Aye. Handy wi’ a brush.”

More sniggers. McLevy was unimpressed. “I’ve heard the whispers. They mean nothing.”

Dunsmore decided to add some spice to the mix. “The night the judge died, he had a heavy cold. The wife was observed to serve him up a potion .”

“The function of a faithful spouse.”

“Faithful?” Dunsmore drew out the word as he puffed at his cigar. “That remains to be seen.”

McLevy waited further but the little man had vaunted sufficient, kept what he knew up his sleeve, and snapped his mouth shut.

The inspector realised he would get little more at this juncture and signalled to his constable who had leant over the bar and craned his neck to see into the bustling kitchen beyond at the back premises.

“Come away, Mulholland, we’ll leave these birkies tae their important pursuits.”

As they left, Dunsmore, never a man to let well alone, jeered a farewell. “Get after the quack medicine man, Jamie boy. Quack, quack!”

At the laughter McLevy turned and for a moment there was a gleam of animal ferocity in his eyes that stilled the sound and had Mulholland instinctively reaching for his hornbeam stick.

He’d never cracked the skull of a fellow policeman before but there was always a first time. If McLevy went for blood he would follow — that was how they played the game. Both had survived many a vicious battle by holding to that rule. One for the other, no matter what.

“Quack, quack indeed, Adam,” replied the inspector quietly. “You would know. Ye have a face like a duck’s arse.”

And they were out through the tavern door leaving silence behind.

In the street Mulholland took a deep breath — how close he had come to an affray he would never know but one thing was certain. .

“That provender was sore tempting.”

“I lost my appetite,” said James McLevy.

If a passer-by had glanced in the window of Milady à la Mode in Princes Street, they would have glimpsed inside the shop two very contrasting individuals.

One was the squat form of a far from fashionable old biddy who sat grimly upon a chair like some Chinese dragon guarding the gates of hell, and the other a slim female figure who slipped in and out of sight, each time festooned in a different guise of dress.

Jean Brash was in her element, green eyes hectic with choice, red hair ablaze, skin smooth as the silk she wore, not a trace of sin on either covering.

Hannah Semple, the grumpy guardian, loathed shopping in such genteel surroundings. A market stall was more her style: haggle and be damned.

One owned the premier bawdy-hoose in Edinburgh — the Just Land — and the ancient other held position as her right-hand woman, keeper of the keys and indeed a dragon with whom to be reckoned if wielding a cut-throat razor.

“Whit do you think to this?” asked Jean, twirling around in an azure blue gown.

“It’ll cover your nakedness.”

“A different colour — pink maybe?”

“No!” Hannah’s pug-face darkened as she glowered at a nearby assistant who had been dancing attendance. “I’ve been three solid hours in this skittery wee chair. Would madam like this, would madam like that, does madam’s backside stick oot like a coal bunker? ”

“It certainly does not,” was the tart response.

“I know you, Mistress. Ye’re lacking diversion. First ye shop and then ye get up tae mischief.”

“Well, I’m still at the shopping stage.”

Indeed Jean had a diversion in mind that involved looking her best and displaying all possible charms to an admiring male gaze, but that would be her secret.

“I’d even welcome McLevy on the scrounge for coffee,” muttered the old woman.

“The inspector’s in the huff wi’ me.”

Hannah grinned. “That’s because ye took in that big boxing mannie. A fine muckle specimen!”

The man concerned had been the loser at a fighting match Jean attended and his plight touched her heart.

“I was helping him recuperate.”

“Is that whit they call it?”

Though the boxer had departed a while back to punch his weight elsewhere, McLevy’s nose was still well out of joint. Serve him right.

Jean looked at her image in the mirror and frowned to observe two small lines tugging down from each side of a generous mouth.

“I better try the pink,” she murmured. “Nail my colours to the mast.”

Another beautiful woman, Judith Pearson, looked down from her portrait at the two policemen standing like sentries in the judge’s drawing room.

A funereal butler had brought them in and then gone to fetch his mistress but before her advent Mulholland had a word to say.

“This is not a good move, sir.”

“Jist observe the butterflies, Mulholland.”

For want of better to do, the constable cast an eye on the meticulously mounted display around them.

“A fair collection,” he averred. “Swallowtail — we have those in Ireland. Purple Emperor — not easy to catch, spends its life high in the treetops.”

McLevy peered at a specimen with a white bar on the forewing. “Very dainty, this wee thing, eh?”

Mulholland had nodded grudgingly; he had been shown the contents of Judith’s letter but found it poor reason to be out of their parish courting nothing but trouble.

“A Painted Lady,” he identified.

And as if on cue the mistress entered, dressed in muted colours tending towards black but by no means a full widow’s regalia.

Introductions were effected, positions assumed and Judith formally thanked the inspector for his response to her plea. McLevy looked as if he had swallowed a frog.

“Mistress Pearson,” he announced abruptly. “Let us dispense with the politesse.”

“By all means.”

“The judge died of arsenic poisoning.”

“Which might not have been discovered, had I not insisted upon a post-mortem,” she replied calmly.