Trick of the Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

Justice for all.
    ‘She stays as well?’ muttered Hannah.
    ‘She does.’
    ‘Your decision, mistress.’
    ‘It is indeed.’
    There was a gleam in Jean’s eye Hannah recognised. A fancy name for it would be the light of battle . Looking for a face tae punch would be another.
    Jean’s own nose had been out of joint since the Countess had opened up a rival establishment in Leith and the fact that the boy Cupid had not been hanging round her skirts of late did not help.
    Ah well, whit’s fur ye will no’ go by ye , Hannah resolved, even if it’s warfare and violence .
    She joined her silence to that of her mistress.
    They made an odd pairing: a dumpy thickset creature and the refined woman of fashion.
    Both were warriors.
    However, what was coming would be a cruel reminder that no-one is as strong as they hoodwink themselves to be.
    A universal truth. Rarely realised.

    For Sophia Adler, across the room, waiting patiently for a slow-witted local lassie to emerge from the depths of the kitchen with a pot of your finest Scottish brew as Magnus had commanded, it was a different contemplation.
    She had been content to watch her companion wreak havoc amongst the plump pigeons of the tea room with his hawk-like demeanour, but then her attention had been drawn towards the two women sitting diagonally opposite.
    One was beautiful, one was not.
    Sophia had the fleeting image of a dark shape shifting between them. Death perhaps. It was much on her mind.
    Of course – the moment was broken by the thud of the teapot as it landed on the table, spilling some brown liquid out of the spout to stain the white covering like dirty blood on an altar cloth – of course, and her lips twisted in a smile of wry amusement as she watched the scared waitress scuttle back to the safety of the kitchen, it could have just been…a trick of the light.
    Now you see it. Now you don’t.

4

I think for my part one half of the nation is mad
– And the other not very sound.
T OBIAS S MOLLETT , The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves

    Lieutenant Robert Roach clove easily to moral indignation, long upper lip swirling in ethical distaste as he heaped scorn upon the luckless Constable Ballantyne.
    He had found the young man in the small cubbyhole of a room set aside for the lesser beings of the station to store their spare boots, waterproof capes and whatever other paraphernalia made up the office of constable; a room that Roach rarely ventured within, it being subject to the unwholesome odour of a leaky water closet and the fetid smell of discarded footwear; a room that should not have contained the spectacle of a policeman gazing earnestly at his own image in the cracked mirror and waving his hands in what he imagined to be a gamut of spellbinding gestures.
    Mulholland watched with some sympathy as the strawberry birthmark that spread from Ballantyne’s neck to at least half way up one side of the face, pulsed with shame.
    The constable himself, none other, in his own identity, had once been caught by Roach staring into that very same cracked mirror, but he had been in love at the time and that made it, to his mind, a slightly less heinous misdemeanour.
    The fact of that once precious love being now dust in the wind, and his prospects of making sergeant blown to hell along with it, seemed to be of no concern to his superiors.
    Roach had buried the matter like a bad drive in a bunker and McLevy, a man for whom Mulholland had risked life and limb on more than one occasion, had the cheek to look aggrieved when recently informed that he, the inspector, was making an eejit out of himself by reason of hanging a tea towel round his neck like a washing line.
    A bitter residue still lingered in Mulholland’s heart from that unlucky time of lost emotion. He had been unjustly castigated for inadvertently causing the father of his budding beloved, Emily Forbes, to hang himself by the neck with a pulley rope as a by-chance of trying to solve a case all on his own