The night subsided into gentle sloth as Dunbar’s company worked its gradual charm. Inconsequential talk and the steady flow of beer put just enough of a distance between Quire and his worries to soften them, and blur their outline.
The two men were the last to depart from the tavern. Mrs. Calder permitted Quire a latitude few other of her customers could hope for, so they finished their last tankards at leisurely pace, with empty tables about them. In the close outside, the two of them paused, looking up at the cloud-flattened sky.
“I could see you home, if you like,” Quire said, the words rumpled by drink.
“You’re hardly fit to find your own home, for all that it’s just up the stair,” Dunbar snorted.
“Fair enough.”
“Get yourself some sleep, that’s my advice.”
Quire swayed only a little as he climbed the narrow stair into the body of the tenement. He steadied himself with a hand against the wall. The darkness was absolute, and the steps uneven, but he needed no light for such a familiar journey.
The nebulous contentment that had settled over him did not long outlast his arrival at the door to his rooms. It took him a puzzled moment or two to realise that something was amiss. The door stood fractionally ajar, and as he fumbled at the handle, his fingers encountered splintered wood. It had been broken in.
That realisation sharpened his senses and cleared his mind. He reached instinctively for his baton, but he had left it inside. He pushed the door gingerly, and it scraped open.
He waited on the threshold, squinting into the gloomy apartment, straining to catch the slightest sound. There was none. That someone had been there, though, was undoubted. Quire had few possessions, but they still made an impressive mess, strewn about in disorder as they were now. He advanced cautiously, stepping around and over the clothes scattered across the floor, the shards of broken wash bowl and jug, the toppled chair.
He went to the bed, and knelt beside it. He reached underneath and felt about with splayed fingers. They quickly found what he sought: a hard, smooth box. He withdrew it, set it on the bedding and lifted the heavy lid. Within, two fine pistols were safely nestled in their proper place. He had taken them from the baggage of a French captain, after he had killed the man at a farm in the wilds of Spain. Killed him while he slept, in fact, for it had been that kind of war and Quire had fought it as seemed necessary at the time.
Satisfied, he gently closed the box and returned it to its hiding place. A moment or two more of searching under the bed found the only other item of even modest value he owned. It was a sabre of the type carried by thousands of French soldiers in the late wars—a briquet—and that, Quire had acquired from an anonymous dead musketman on… he no longer even remembered which battlefield.
Puzzled, he rose to his feet and surveyed the shambles. Thieves who left behind the only things that might have repaid their efforts were not a species he had encountered before. It did not take him long to restore at least a semblance of order, and in doing so he discovered his one loss. A shirt was gone. Only that. A humble, old shirt. All else was accounted for.
It was only at the very end, as he dragged a chair across the room, meaning to wedge it against the door to discourage—or at least give him some warning of—any returning visitors, that he noticed the strangest thing of all. Hanging on the inner face of the door was a crudely fashioned star of twigs. They were bound together with thin strips of bark and decorated, at each point of the star, with black feathers.
He stared at that mysterious token with sudden and deep unease. A dark substance encrusted some of the twigs, and though he could not be certain, he guessed that it was blood. Seized by an urgency he could not entirely explain, he tore the star down. As soon as his fingers touched it, a shiver ran through him, rushing up his arms, over his shoulders and crackling down his spine. He made to crush the foul thing in his hands. Some instinct restrained him, and he set it on the table, but turned away quickly and did not look at it again.
Drink usually made Quire sleep deep and sound, but his slumber that night was neither.
Davey Muir had been an occasional digger of graves at Duddingston Kirk for only a few months. It was a way to get a little coin over the winter, just like the digging of ditches and the dry-stone walling he did on the Marquis of Abercorn’s estate east of the village when the work was there to be had. In summer and autumn he worked the harvests on the farms further south. Come spring he would be sowing and maybe helping with the lambing. He turned his hand to whatever there was that would keep him from the poorhouse.
Gravedigging was far from the worst of it—that would be the walling, he reckoned, since he was clumsy and always ended up with bruised, sometimes bloodied, hands—and it paid better than most. He was too young and carefree to concern himself with the gloomy nature of the task: the dead needed burying, to his way of thinking, and it never had bothered him much to be around corpses. Spend any time around farms and you saw plenty of dead animals. Dead people troubled him little more than those.
Now, though, everything had gone very wrong. Now, he was thinking that taking the job at the kirk had been the most foolish thing he had done in all his short life. He had never once regretted leaving his turbulent family behind in Prestonpans, out along the east coast, when he was fifteen, but this might be the time to head back that way, and try to make amends with his brute of a father and slattern of a mother. Just to get a safe roof over his head for a while, in a place where no one would know where he had been, or what he had done.
It had seemed so easy. A man offering better than a month’s wage just for a few words. News of a burial, that was all. A day or two’s notice of any man headed for a grave without broken bones or the taint of sickness upon his corpse. Davey knew what that was about, of course. Everyone knew how the Resurrection Men went about their work. But what harm was there in it? The boy was dead and gone, with no need for what he’d left behind. And none to know, if the grave robbers did their work right: close up the coffin and re-lay the sod once they had lifted out the body. Leave it all neat and tidy.
But there was nothing neat or tidy about the business. Duncan Munro’s head was broken in. Davey had known the man a little; never had anything but kind words from him. Even so, it was not guilt so much as fear of consequence that grievously afflicted him now. Murder was a different thing to the mere theft of the dead. A thing to put a rare vigour into the police, and though they had not caught up with Davey yet, he knew they likely would. He had spent two days and the night between without a roof over his head, mostly up on Arthur’s Seat, shivering, bemoaning his misfortune; sheltering beneath a leaning crag from the drizzle floating in on the westerly breeze, watching the thin covering of snow melting away. He could bear it no longer. He had seen, from his elevated vantage point, the police who had been going from door to door in Duddingston village depart as dusk fell, trudging off back towards the city. So now, in the misty darkness, he crept back down to his lodgings.
He had a single room, cramped and a touch damp, attached as something of an afterthought to a short row of cottages. He lingered behind a concealing hedgerow for a minute or two—which was all his stunted patience and miserable condition would allow him—to make sure there was no one waiting for him. All was quiet. The thin mist and the encroaching twilight seemed to offer shelter enough for what he needed: just time to get stouter footwear, a cape, a few of those apples he’d lifted from the provisioner’s shop near the kirk. It was a long walk to Prestonpans.
Davey slipped inside as quickly as he could, lifting the rusty latch on the door with unaccustomed care, lest its creaking should betray his presence. Once within, he did not light a candle, but relied upon memory and the faint, faint light from the window to find his way about. The oiled cape first, pulled out from under his low bed; apples off the shelf and into a small sack; a candle or two, on impulse, though how he might light them he was not sure.
In reaching for those, his fingers encountered something
unexpected, lying atop the box in which he kept the candles. Something small and strangely shaped. He took it up, and frowned at it, squinting. He could barely make out anything of it, but it seemed to be a figure of some sort; a little carved man, just two or three inches long. Davey shook his head in puzzled alarm and turned towards the window, the better to make it out.
“I’m grateful to you for taking it into your hand of your own free will.”
Davey yelped, dropped figurine and sack and cape alike, and stumbled back a couple of paces until his legs jarred up against the edge of a table.
The door was open, and standing there, framed against the very last watery light of the day, was a man Davey recognised with a lurching, dizzying dismay. It was not the face that told him who had come for him, but the horribly soft black gloves the man was already pulling from his lean hands.
“That will help a little, later,” Blegg said, stepping inside.
He used his heel to push the door closed behind him, never taking his eyes from Davey. The youth folded his arms across his chest, clutching his shoulders as if in pathetic defence of his vitals.
“Good Christ, you frightened me,” he gasped.
“Hush now. You’d not want the good folk of Duddingston hearing that you’re back amongst them, would you?”
“No, no. I’m away, this very night.”
“That you are. That you are, Davey Muir.”
IX
The Holy Land
Superintendent James Robinson was propped up in a chair with a high, curved back of solid oak. Cushions and pillows were packed in behind him, and under his arms. He looked a touch wan, a touch red around the eyes, and as tired as Quire had seen him in a long time. His wife was an intermittent, solicitous presence, drifting in and out of the room and each time casting a surreptitious glance of concern her husband’s way. Quire suspected that she did not entirely approve of his presence in their apartment atop the police house, but it had been Robinson who had asked to see him.
“The gout still afflicting you?” Quire asked.
“That, and a fair herd of other things,” Robinson replied. “Most of them nothing to do with the failings of this carcass of mine. The board find some new petty fault to charge me with every week, it seems. The Provost has never much liked me, truth be told, nor I him. He relishes every chance to prick me. Including that offered by dead kirk elders in Duddingston. And now there’s this complaint.”
“Complaint?” said Quire, and then, realisation dawning: “Against me?”
Robinson gave a curt nod of his head.
“It’s a serious charge. Not one I believe a word of, and I’ve made that clear, but it’ll take a bit of tidying away. A Mr. John Ruthven has reported that you tried to sell back to him some stolen property of his that you recovered. A silver box. Says when he refused to pay, you let him have it only after lengthy dispute, and that you’ve now accused his man of involvement in body snatching by way of revenge.”
Quire snorted in contemptuous disbelief.
“That’s a lie.”
“Of course it is. You’ve your fair share of faults, Quire, but stupidity and venality are not amongst them. But still: when you were drinking and keeping the wrong kind of company, those charges I could quiet easy enough; this is a different sort of thing.”
Quire sprang to his feet and began to pace up and down on the thick rug. These rooms were in sharp contrast to the police house at the summit of which they perched. All carpets and cushions and homely understatement. Soft. The place felt comfortably inhabited, in a way no abode of Quire’s had ever achieved. It was all entirely out of tune with the mood now taking hold of him.
“That bloody bastard,” he growled.
“Sit down, man,” Robinson muttered with a placatory wave of his hand. “It’ll go no further, if I have my way. But you need to keep your wits about you. Ruthven’s not the kind of man you’re used to dealing with. I gather he went straight to the Sheriff Depute with this, favoured him with a lengthy discourse on the shortcomings of the city police. The Sheriff was not best pleased.
“It’s a cosy little fellowship that occupies the heights of our city’s society. They are a collegiate body of men, few of them inclined to think themselves fit subjects for police enquiry. I’m not sure you have ever entirely understood that, but you would do well to give it some thought. Goad one, and that one can make sure plenty of others feel it.”
“I’ve done nothing but what seemed right,” Quire said, still standing.
“I know that. And I know you: you’ve a rare affection for justice—or what you decide is justice, at least—and the stubbornness of an ill-tempered mule. Laudable attributes in many ways, and neither of them as common beneath this roof as they should be; which might be, in part, why you’ve not made yourself quite as many friends and allies here as you could do with now. But if you mean to hold your course on this, you will need to learn discretion.”
“Will you take some tea?” the superintendent’s wife asked from the doorway. “There’s no better poultice for the nerves.”
It was a genteel but pointed suggestion. Quire understood her desire to swaddle her recuperating husband in calm. He shook his head, and forced himself to fold his tense limbs down into a chair.
“No, thank you. No.”
She nodded and retired once more.
“I’m curious, though.” Robinson sniffed, pulling a blanket from the arm of his chair and settling it across his knees. “You must have shaken something loose, to drive Ruthven into making false accusations. This started with that man dead in the Cowgate, did it?”
“Edward Carlyle. Yes. He was in Ruthven’s employ, so there’s been one of his men torn to pieces in the Old Town, and another digging up graves in Duddingston. Whatever’s happening, Ruthven’s at the heart of it.”
“You’re sure of that, are you? That it was this fellow Blegg in the graveyard?”
“As sure as I can be. It was dark, and I only had a glimpse of him. It’s nothing I can prove, though.”
Robinson sniffed again.
“Makes no sense. There’s not enough coin in the corpse trade to interest a man like Ruthven. Still, he’d hardly be trying to pull you down if there was nothing to it.”
“I’ve had someone break into my home, too,” Quire muttered bitterly. “Might not be part of it, but it was like no housebreaking I’ve seen. Nothing taken but a shirt.”
That put a frown on Robinson’s brow. He leaned forward a little.
“You be careful, Adam. Could be that you’ve made yourself some bad enemies here. They’ve already killed at least one man, and that’s not the sort of folk you want knowing where you live.”
“I’ve had the same thought. Bad enough someone trying to kill me out on the ice at Duddingston, without them digging around in my home. And spreading lies about my conduct. I don’t take well to being the hunted.”
“Yet that’s what you are, it would seem.”
“If so, they’ve made themselves a worse enemy in me than they could ever be, and I know fine where Ruthven lives. If he wants to make it a personal matter between him and me, that’s a game I can play.”
“Steady, steady,” Robinson muttered. “This isn’t some street brawl or army grudge you’re mixed up in now. Needs a bit of discretion, as I said. I recommend the cultivation of it to you, one old soldier to another. You need to keep yourself clean and quiet for a bit, or the Police Board’ll have you, no matter what I might say.”
Quire ground his fingers into his temples, staring blankly into the middle distance. There was a rare ire burning in him, unlike anything he had felt for years. It had taken him a long time to get his life on to some sort of steady path, and his eyes clear enough to see it. He despised Ruthven for threatening that, and for making him angry enough that he might even threaten it himself.
“What do you mean to do?” Robinson asked quietly.
“Baird wants me to leave the Duddingston thing to others.”
; “That’s good sense, for now at least. I don’t suppose he’s saying it for your good, but it’ll do you no harm to keep out of sight on that matter.”
“Ruthven told me he’d had some falling-out with the Society of Antiquaries. Might be they know something of his habits. And there’s still Edward Carlyle. I’m not ready to believe there’s nothing more to that.”
“Dogs, I hear.”
Quire gave an unguarded, derisive snort.
“When did dogs ever kill folk in the Old Town? The man breaks with Ruthven and he’s dead inside a few weeks. It’s not coincidence that stinks of. I’ve got the name of the woman he was passing time with before he died. She might be worth the talking to.” He glanced apologetically at the superintendent. “I’ll need to pay a visit to the Holy Land.”
Robinson rolled his eyes.
“Did I not just explain the merits of discretion to you, Quire? Of keeping yourself clean? You and the Holy Land don’t mix well. Was almost losing your job once before not enough for you?”
“I’m not about to start digging myself back into old holes,” Quire said quickly, anxious to reassure his patron. “I’ll be quiet about it. Quiet’s often better in the Holy Land, anyway.”
“Quiet’s always better, Adam,” Robinson grunted. “I’m glad you know as much, though the knowing and the doing seem the most distant of cousins in your case.”
The Holy Land stood shoulder to shoulder with the Happy Land and the Just Land in Leith Wynd, a narrow roadway running north from the High Street. Of the three ill-reputed tenements—each of them named with the dour irony that was the natural tenor of the city’s self-regard—it was the Holy Land that bore the foulest stains upon its character. Before ascending the common stair, Quire spared a moment to check that his baton still hung securely from his belt.
He climbed the spiral stairway, every step of which was bowed by the wear of decades. Even now, with the daylight seeping in from a few infrequent windows, he had to watch his footing. To describe the little square openings as windows was to glorify their ruined state, in truth. The glass was long gone, as were the wooden frames, all stripped out for sale or use elsewhere. Now they were nothing more than holes in the skin of the building, by which weather and a miserly ration of light were given admittance.
The Edinburgh Dead Page 9