Trick of the Light (14 page)

His friend needed to be taught a lesson. There might even have been the slightest suggestion of envy on Mister Evans’s part as he described the absent micturator having a larger farm, the result of a bovine inheritance from a providential marriage.

A greedy glint in the small ratlike eyes as the first bait was taken.

To begin, Mister Smith, as the mark so named himself, did very well indeed. Then the wagers increased. The bank changed hands as Mister Todd, puffed up with irritation and his own importance insisted that it should, over to him.

But his cards stayed the same, worsened by bad decisions and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the laws of gambling probability.

Mister Todd then demanded a doubling of stakes as was his banker’s lien, and the other two were happy to comply.

But suddenly, as if night had changed to day, the accepted order was reversed and Mister Todd began to enjoy the most incredible run of luck.

He drew five to a count of sixteen;
naturals
and court cards followed him like obedient sheep and as the other two strained to recoup their losses, the stakes were doubled yet again. Good money after bad.

The pocketbook of Mister Smith, a previously bulging receptacle, which clever Mister Evans had noted as he stood beside him at the bar while the little man paid for his beer, complaining that it stood no comparison with good London ale, began to shrink like a punctured bladder.

Mister Todd defied the odds of gambling and gravity as he swayed over the table to collect his winnings, face apparently red with alcohol, clumsy with the cards;
surely it was only a matter of time?

A silent message the apologetic Mister Evans signalled as they pushed their stakes into the middle. All his money in the little man’s case; but this hand he sat proud on twenty, the cards face down, hidden to all but Mister Smith.

Mister Evans went bust.
Squandered
. Sadly.

The
banker
turned over thirteen, an unlucky number. The next card up was four. Seventeen. Not enough to vanquish the two face-down cards. But of course, the
banker
did not know the value of the hidden hand. Twist or stand?

If he stood pat, Mister Smith would win. For a moment the man hesitated and then with a careless sweep of the hand turned over the next card.

It was a four again. Twenty-one. A boozy roar of triumph from the
banker
and an exasperated sigh of annoyance from the nice Mister Evans.

Mister Smith turned away abruptly as if he could not bear to look at the loss and, at that moment, the sharpers made a fatal error.

One winked at the other, confident that the man’s back had no eyes to see. But there was a dirty cracked mirror in the opposite empty booth to reflect this collusion.

Yet when Mister Smith turned back, nothing in his face indicated what, if anything, he had seen.

His hand however, slid down the side of one plump little leg, while his face screwed up in puzzlement as if he could not believe what had just happened with the cards.

Mister Evans opened his mouth to compose words of consolation; he himself had lost as well and who could believe that this uncouth fellow might stumble upon such a change of fortune?

Who could believe?

The words never passed his lips.

The little man made a sweeping gesture under the table and both men seated on the other side froze as if an icy hand had been laid upon them.

The money was scooped swiftly up and then some words were finally uttered.

‘Thank you, gents.’

Having said this, Alfred Binnie turned and made his unhurried way through the swirling smoke and heaving bodies of the Rustie Nail.

The paralysis of their nether abdomens being sliced through by a razor-edged knife that might disembowel an ox, held the two sharpers in suspension for what seemed like an eternity.

Both looked down and saw the blood seeping out of the deep cut in their lower bellies through the thick material of the tweed trousers worn to support the pretence that they were from the outlands of Jedburgh or the like.

Then the pain bit in and their groans mingled with the frenzied whoops of the tavern throng as two of the mariners burst into an impromptu hornpipe.

One of them reeled backwards and crashed into the alcove.

He apologised in Dutch. His native language.

14

And so I lie with her and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,
Sonnets

Muriel’s small bedroom overlooked the side lane and a crack upon her window brought her awake with a start of fear.

The breath caught in her throat – she had been dreaming but of nothing she could easily remember, vague feelings of shame, and accusing voices in her mind.

For a moment she lay quite still. Unable to tell what had disturbed her sleep.

Another crack of pebble on glass solved the mystery.

She shifted eyes to the window, the counterpane pulled up just under her nose like a frightened child or old maid in a country cottage.

But she was neither.

Muriel Grierson was a respectable widow. Or was she?

She slipped out of bed and padded with an oddly feline gait, bare feet upon a lush carpet, to the glass where she looked out into the lane.

He was standing where she knew he would be; silver hair flattened a little by the evening damp, shining wetly in the faint gleam that spilled down the narrow track from the streetlight.

Samuel Grant. Her lover.

The man she had met by chance in the street when a cab driver had splashed her skirts with his carriage wheel and when she taxed him, the fellow had responded in a most impolite fashion. A passer-by then berated the miscreant until the brute apologised.

The passer-by. A well-set man with silver hair.

From this accidental beginning he had courted her but of course most discreetly; it would not be proper for Muriel to be seen enjoying such company.

How could one put it? She was yet, though decked no longer in widow’s weeds, carrying the indefinable marks of grief and he was somewhat…not quite of the same class.

Well mannered to be sure, a trifle flamboyant in his dress, stocky of frame, in age perhaps some years less than her but…how can one put it?

In fact there were more years between them than she realised but ignorance is often bliss as regards age in love. And so Muriel mused on regardless.

He was a little short of grace. Not coarse exactly, just lacking a certain refinement. But she liked that. An uncomplicated, unconfined vitality. She liked that.

They had met, therefore, in secret in areas of the city where she was not known and the clandestine nature had brought a certain spice as if she were having an
affaire de coeur
.

Then one night when her maid Ellen was having her regular evening away with her family, Muriel had permitted Samuel the house. It was dark enough that no-one might notice from the street and so she had allowed him in. And then she had allowed him quite a lot.

She had never enjoyed the act of love, it was something to be endured, like an affliction. Her husband Andrew had approached it as if measuring out a corpse.

A grim undertaking.

But Samuel Grant enjoyed what he termed
rough and tumble
and, to her surprise, she found that the act was not divorced from a certain…pleasure.

Besides Ellen’s regular absences, she encouraged the woman to vacate the premises on other evenings and Muriel was worried that her maid smelled a rat.

Yet she grew more reckless; sexual pleasure does have that effect. Rules the roost.

They pulled the curtains shut and Samuel had the run of the house. The master bedroom where the marital rites had been grindingly performed was abandoned in summary fashion and, pleading melancholic memories, Muriel had shifted to a smaller bouncier mattress in a more compact room. With no family portraits looming above.

This space she decorated in bright, vibrant colours, indulged in feminine frills and boudoir fripperies that would have given her late husband a heart attack had he not been already deceased from exactly that.

And it was from this chamber of guilty excess that she looked down upon the cause.

Samuel waved up cheerily. She had warned him previously that even though Ellen had her evening off, a long-standing social engagement must be fulfilled this night.

No matter, declared bluff Sam. He’d come late or he wouldn’t come at all. This was his style.

And she liked that.

But this time when she opened the front door and he slid in fast to embrace her in manly fashion, she retracted from desire in order to tell him the terrible events of the day.

Samuel’s eyes widened and he let out a small whistle of surprise.

‘That’s a lift tae lose,’ he announced.

‘I want my mother’s brooch. I was fond of the music box. The rest is not important.’

‘What about the money?’

‘I do not mourn it especially.’

Muriel shook her head to emphasise such and stepped back. A light from the hall lamp outlined her body through the thin nightgown and Samuel’s mind, never a strong, fixed point at the best of times, wandered.

But a lustful lunge might be misinterpreted as a cavalier attitude and there was no telling where this conversation might lead.

‘As I told you, I suspected Andrew had kept the money hidden for a reason.’

‘Some things are best paid for in cash.’

‘Such as?’ she asked sharply.

Whores for one, came into his mind but he kept his expression bland and open; it had served him well with many women to act the child in man.

They suffered the flinty exactitudes of matrimony and flowered like cherry blossom at a friendly face and joyful rumpling of the bed sheets.

Muriel was such a woman.

Cherry blossom. But not at the moment. At the moment she regarded him with a wary questioning stare.

‘I showed you where that money was kept.’

‘You did, my dear.’

‘And now it’s gone.’

‘It has. For certain sure.’

‘As if the thieves knew exactly where to find it.’

He nodded as if she had made an irrefutably wise assertion but cursed his big mouth because putting two and two in summation, a boastful whisky speech in the Foul Anchor tavern to a certain Seth Moxey might yet come back to haunt him.

Samuel had a round, pleasant face with a little goatee beard and radiated a kind of damaged innocence, as if life’s tribulations had left a mark but the spirit was undaunted.

He was known to his acquaintances as Silver Sam both because of his hair, which had prematurely attained this hue and gave him a gravitas far beyond his actual age, and the fact that he enjoyed personal artefacts of the precious metal. Watch and chain, silver ring, tiepin, take your pick.

He enjoyed the glitter; however, this was not the time for outward show.

Muriel was not directly accusing but harboured suspicions that she longed to be disproved because women, despite their innate mistrust of men, always hope to meet an improved specimen somewhere along the line.

Yet Samuel knew that protesting innocence too loudly might imply a feeling of guilt. A man’s excuses never quite ring true.

‘I will make enquiries,’ he said.

‘So will Inspector McLevy,’ she replied.

Samuel winced internally. That was not a name he wished to hear. No-one of the fraternity wanted that bugger on his trail.

‘Yet he is a policeman, my love. Certain doors may be closed against him.’

‘Unlike my own, which seems to be open to all comers.’

A bitter riposte. They trembled on the edge of their very first quarrel.

We all begin with such high hopes, do we not?

She knew that he was a dabbler on the fringes of respectable society,
a buyer and seller of this and that
, as he was wont to say, and it added to her relish of cocking a snoot at accepted custom.

But witnessing that unlicensed, licentious freedom was the grim effigy of her husband who looked down from the various portraits in the house that she dared not remove for fear of adverse comment.

Perhaps Andrew was correct. She was cheap. Besmirched. This was no better than she deserved.

A deep breath then out with it.

‘Give me your word,’ she said.

‘For what, Moumou?’

His pet name for her brought no softening to her face.

‘Swear that you are not compromised by this theft.’

He placed his hand solemnly over the heart area, or as near as he could, given that his pocketbook resided there.

‘I swear upon my mother’s grave.’

The mother that had thrown him out as a young boy to make his living on the streets of Leith by whatever his wits might conjure up. Samuel had pimped, lied, stolen, been abused and defiled many times one way or the other but had somehow managed to haul himself out of the mire.

And he was never going back.

Not if he could help it.

Muriel looked into his eyes. They did not flinch. He had learned this at an early stage. Steadfast mendacity.

‘Upon her grave,’ he repeated.

A long silence where he noticed that there were some thin lines from the sides of her eyes as if a crow had walked past in the snow. Age withers us all.

‘I believe you,’ she finally declared.

He bowed his head to hide a relieved smile.

‘And I shall strain every nerve to find your jewels,’ he murmured.

Later in the bouncy bed, having tested the springs with vigorous consummation, they lay side by side.

She was snoring. Lightly. Ladylike. But snoring.

He watched her with some fondness but not enough to alter the train of his thought.

Seth Moxey was a dirty dog. And he, Samuel Grant, was a bletherskite.