Quire had his pistol in hand now. He cocked the hammer. He might have tried a shot at one or other of the dogs, but the horse succumbed entirely to its terror then, and bolted. It pounded its attacker beneath its hoofs and swept the cart over the fallen hound, crashing off in directionless panic, trailing streamers of blood and mucus and spit from its mangled muzzle.
Merry Andrew and Mowdiewarp, flailing around in the back, trying to free themselves of the smothering canvas, were screaming abuse at the horse, at Quire, and the world in general.
The sudden, violent movement pitched Spune off the cart altogether, and flung Quire against the back of his seat. He tried to steady himself as best he could, one-handed, but would likely have been thrown clear had the horse not found itself under renewed assault. The very dog it had trampled just moments before came racing up to its rear leg, passing dangerously close to the spinning front wheel of the cart, and unhesitatingly leaped up and fixed its teeth into the horse’s hamstring. That was enough to slow it dramatically, and it limped desperately along on three legs as the hound put the whole weight of its body into a violent shaking, intended to tear out a mouthful of muscle.
Quire leaned forward and down from his seat and shot the dog in the head. The flare and roar of the gun startled the horse all over again, and it staggered sideways, but it was lapsing into that state of numb shock Quire had seen in its kind before when they were seriously injured. The pistol spat its ball into the dog’s skull just behind the eye, and blew a hole the size of a half-crown coin in the far side of the animal’s head, sending a portion of its skull and ear spinning away across the yard. The impact was enough to knock loose its grip upon the horse’s hindquarters, though it left deep gouges behind it, and thick rivulets of blood coursing down the horse’s leg.
Quire jumped to the ground, landing on the balls of his feet and dropping into a crouch. He could hear Spune screaming, and began to turn to look for him, but the dog he had shot came at him, its head horribly open and misshapen now.
It leaped at Quire’s face, and he barely got the discharged pistol up in time to block its jaws. A vile, musty stench of dead flesh and rotting fur washed over him. The hound bit down on the gun, and shook it with such terrible strength that it tore it from Quire’s grasp and pushed him on to his backside. The silence of the attack was uncanny and horrible. Quire could hear the faltering snorts of the horse, Merry Andrew shouting something, Spune wailing; but not a sound from the dog that was remorselessly trying to kill him.
Quire made to draw the sabre from its scabbard, trying to rise as he did so. The dog let the pistol fall from its mouth and came at him again. He fell on to his back, letting his own weight take him down, and got his foot into the creature’s chest as it lunged once more for his face.
He folded his knee, taking the hound’s weight and speed into his leg, then kicked out with all his strength. He meant to send it back the way it had come, but his boot slid off its slick, half-rotted fur and it went twisting and tumbling sideways instead. Again, it was quickly on to its feet, but he was ready for it now. He met its charge with the tip of the sabre’s blade, angled in along the line of its throat, punching through the skin of its barrel chest and bursting through the ribcage deep down into the chest cavity.
It was no way to use a sabre, but it had the desired effect. Durand had told him to aim for the heart, and he had been right. The hound fell on to its side. Its legs still shook, and its jaw still worked open and shut, but it could not rise. Quire left the sword buried in the beast and turned towards the farmhouse.
Spune was on the ground, no longer screaming; limp, as the second great dog shook him. Mowdiewarp was bent over the creature, stabbing it again and again in the back and flank with a butcher’s knife. Merry Andrew stood, feet firmly planted in a wide stance, back straight, right arm extended perfectly level, pointing his tiny pistol at the door of the farmhouse. Where Blegg stood, looking directly at Quire.
Quire heard the horse slumping down to the ground behind him.
“Aim for the heart,” he cried out to Merry Andrew, though he doubted the man could aim at much of anything with such a trinket of a gun.
Merrilees was not listening anyway.
“There’s the bastard I want,” he shouted, and fired.
Blegg’s shoulder twitched. That was the only way to tell that the shot had hit him. A tremor went through his face, perhaps; that contemptuous smile faltered for a second, before reasserting itself.
Merry Andrew howled in frustration, and fumbled for his powder pouch. Blegg took a single long step backwards and disappeared into the farmhouse.
Quire set his foot on the still twitching dog he had impaled, and pulled the sabre out. It came grudgingly, rasping against bone. He hurried over to where the other beast was blindly, mindlessly savaging Spune and pushed Mowdiewarp roughly aside. He took a moment or two to steady himself, and choose his spot, then drove the blade in between two ribs and skewered the heart.
“Bastard,” Merry Andrew was saying over and over again. “Bastard. Bastard.”
Quire did not know if it was meant for him, or Blegg, or God for that matter. He glanced down at Spune, who was pale and moaning. One arm of his jacket was entirely soaked through with blood, and he had an ugly wound to his cheek.
Merry Andrew started towards the farmhouse door.
“Wait, Merrilees,” Quire snapped. “You’ll need more than that wee gun if you’re going in there.”
When Merry Andrew glared at him, he nodded towards the cart.
“Bring the lanterns, if they’re still alight, and the oil. We’ll burn the place down.”
Quire retrieved his pistol, and hurried to reload it. If he was to have any chance of finding Wilson Dunbar alive, it would be now, in the next few moments. Nothing mattered but that.
He kicked in the door of the kitchen, and found it bare and damp and cold.
“Dunbar,” he shouted, feeling despair winding itself about his heart. “Blegg!”
There was no answer, but he heard the creak of floorboards above his head. He looked at the ceiling. The sound came again. He ran out into the hall, almost colliding with Merry Andrew as he came loping into the house. In each hand he carried a burning lantern and a bottle of thin oil, tied together with fine rope. Quire hurriedly sheathed his sabre and took one of the cumbersome bundles from Merrilees.
“Up there,” he said to the grave robber, and led the way up the stairs.
When Quire was halfway up, Blegg heaved a linen chest over the railing of the landing above. His timing was off, but only by a fraction. The massive wooden box plummeted down just behind Quire, struck Merry Andrew a glancing blow on the shoulder, shattered the banisters into splinters and cracked the stair upon which it landed. Quire heard the sharp click of Merry Andrew’s collarbone breaking an instant before the man’s yelp of startled pain; and an instant before the sound of glass shattering and the soft whump of flame erupting through the spray of spilled oil.
A surge of fear rushed through Quire, and he scrambled further up the staircase, out of reach of the blooming flames. He twisted, raised his gun and fired just as Blegg darted back out of view. Quire looked back down towards the hall. Merry Andrew was kneeling on the floor down there, head bowed in pain, one hand clamped to his shoulder. Flames were leaping between the two of them, crackling away as they took hold of the staircase. Quire shied away from the memories that sight brought forth.
He stowed his pistol and drew the sabre once more. He climbed the stair with sword in one hand, improvised fire grenade in the other. The doorway through which he thought Blegg had likely retreated was open. He approached it cautiously, trying to shut out the sound of the fire hungrily consuming the old, dry stairs. He could tell just from the roar of it that it was spreading quickly. Already, smoke was thickening all about him, stinging his eyes and his throat.
He looked into the room, and saw Blegg leaning over Dunbar, who was lying quite motionless on a wide bed. Blegg had his hands ove
r Dunbar’s mouth and nose. Quire shouted and rushed at him, sword raised, but Blegg was a good deal too fast for him. He straightened and turned quickly, and caught Quire’s descending arm by the wrist. With his other hand he punched Quire once, solidly, in the chest. Pain lanced through Quire. It felt as though his whole chest was cramping.
Blegg pushed him backwards, towards the open doorway and the landing and the rising flames beyond it, and Quire could not help but go, for the man was terribly strong. His wrist was crushed and bent in Blegg’s grip.
With all his strength, he hit Blegg on the side of the head with the lantern in his left hand. It did not break, but Blegg paused in his determined advance, and looked down at Quire’s hand, and reached to block it with his own. Quire swung again, and this time the oil flask cracked and spilled some of its contents across the lantern with a little flash of flame, and that little flash became a cloud, blinding Quire even as he twisted away, billowing over Blegg’s face and head and shoulders.
The two of them parted, Quire staggering along the landing, dropping what remained of the lantern and his sword, pulling frantically at the collar of his coat to drag it off over his head. The left sleeve and breast of it were burning, and he could feel the awful heat of the flames already in his skin, and with it the panic that he knew would master him completely if he could not free himself of the coat.
He did manage to tear it off, and cast it into a corner. He blinked through the churning smoke as he felt for his sabre. Blegg was a bright, awful beacon of flame, reeling about at the far end of the landing, close by the top of the stairs and the window there. His hair was alight, and his shirt. The stink of burning flesh, which he knew all too well, made Quire gag, and he clamped his hand over his nose and mouth to keep both it and the acrid smoke out as best he could.
Flames were licking up around the railings on the landing. Quire shrank away from them. His hand found the hilt of the sabre and he took a firm grip of it. Blegg was still upright, still pawing at his burning scalp as if impotently trying to pat the flames out. It was difficult to be sure through the obscuring, shifting veils of smoke, but Quire thought Blegg’s face was blackening. Charring.
He moved closer, and hacked at Blegg with the sabre, desperate to put an end to this. The heat coming from the burning man was too much for him to get a great deal of force behind his blows, but they were enough to topple Blegg backwards, and he broke through the window behind him. The sudden gust of wind sucked a great roaring sheet of flame up the staircase and across Blegg’s body. He hung there for a moment, half in and half out of the window, then his legs came up and he tumbled backwards out of the house.
Quire went to Dunbar, who was battered and bruised and pale. But still breathing; not strongly or deeply, but still breathing. Quire called to him, and lifted him from the bed, but Dunbar did not stir.
The room overlooked the farmyard. Merry Andrew was sitting cross-legged by the cart, clutching his shoulder. Mowdiewarp was kneeling beside the unmoving Spune. Quire kicked out the window, and shouted, again and again, at Mowdiewarp until the sheer noise of it penetrated the man’s fug of bewildered disbelief and persuaded him to leave Spune’s side. Quire lowered Dunbar down to him. He lowered himself from the window after, and dropped the last half-dozen feet. He turned his ankle as he landed, and for a moment thought he had broken it, so sharp was the pain. But the bone held.
He hobbled around to the back of the farmhouse, coughing at the smoke that had settled into his lungs, watching great clouds of the stuff spilling out from the building.
Blegg was gone, leaving only a filthy, black, oily smear on the ground where he had fallen.
XXVII
All Hallows’ and All Saints’
All Hallows’ Eve was a night of rude celebration in Edinburgh’s Old Town. The poor and unwashed folk of the city fashioned from that fell night, when the lore of their forefathers told them that the Devil and his spirits stalked the darkness, an excuse for light and merriment and drinking.
In every tenement, no matter how squalid, how impoverished, there would somewhere be dancing and noise late into the night, as if by that commotion the evils lurking without might be held at bay. The Old Town seldom slept deeply, or for long, but on this night more than any other it shrugged off the darkness and busied itself deep into the wee small hours. The whisky shops, strewn in dense profusion along almost every street and wynd, stayed open late, lighting their windows with lamps and drawing in a constant stream of drunken customers, seeking to replenish their dwindling supplies. They brought empty bottles, and the whisky sellers filled them up from tapped barrels and sent them on their way; then, an hour or two later, the same folk would stagger in off the street, with the same bottle, empty once more, to be filled.
There were scuffles in the street, the whisky-fed frustrations and rivalries of the Old Town boiling up. It was in the nature of the place that with the release of celebration came too the release of its darker side, for the one could not be set free without the other. Small violences were done amidst the songs and the jigs; hard words said amidst the laughter. Everywhere, voices were loud, whether in argument or frenzied pleasure.
Some there were who tried to sleep amidst the tumult. They could not escape it, though, not in this layered, crowded place where folk lived as dense as bees in their hives.
Mrs. Conway, in her room in the West Port, tossed and turned uncomfortably in her bed. Her husband slumbered deeply, leadenly, at her side, as he always did. She, whose need for sleep was the more acute, since she must be up at four to make him his breakfast and it was already close on midnight, was kept from it by the Old Town’s restless convulsions. The witching hour drew near, and could be nothing other than restless on All Hallows’ Eve.
With every passing sleepless moment, Mrs. Conway grew more anxious and bitterly resentful of those drunken celebrants robbing her of her rest. Rough sounds added themselves to the mix, grating upon her weary senses. Scuffling, shouting, angry curses. Coming from the Burke house just next door. That was no great strangeness in itself, for it was a turbulent and drunken house on any night, let alone this wild one, but there was a harsh extremity to the clatter and thumps and voices leaking through the wall. Mrs. Conway could hear William Burke’s voice chief amongst those raised in anger, and the noise of it seemed to go on and on. Until at last it faded, and a quiet settled. Mrs. Conway whispered a small thanks to God, and slowly, slowly drifted off to sleep.
Hugh Alston had a grocer’s shop on the West Port, and lived with his wife in the flat above it. The two of them made their way, only a little the worse for drink, towards their stair as the witching hour turned. It had been a long day. They were tired but happy, for trade had been good of late.
The racket that greeted them was out of tune with their contentment. There were men shouting indistinctly at one another, a violent quarrel. Tables or chairs being overturned.
“It’s coming from Burke’s house,” Mrs. Alston said, as they stood together on the street, listening in dismay to the cacophony.
Then, sharp, cutting through the male voices, quite clear, a woman crying out: “For God’s sake, get the police. There’s murder here.”
The Alstons looked at one another in consternation.
“Get yourself upstairs,” Hugh said to his wife, “and lock the door behind you.”
Once sure his wife was safely climbing the stair to their apartment, he ran up the West Port to the watch-house there, and beat upon its door. But the nightwatchmen of the Old Town had many calls upon their attention that night, of all nights, and there was no answer. Its windows were dark, its lock secure.
Troubled, Alston went cautiously back down to his shop and home. All was silence now. Not a whisper escaped the house of William Burke. He sighed, and shook his head, and followed after his wife.
They slept uneasily through what remained of the night. And as they slept, that night turned and the city’s frenzy spent itself, and All Hallows’ Eve became All Saints’ Da
y.
The morning came in bleak and cold and cloudy. Sergeant John Fisher was on duty in the entrance of the police house at Old Stamp Office Close, and looked out through the open doors upon a High Street rousing itself more sluggishly into life than was its wont. The excesses of the night before weighed heavily upon the Old Town, and it had woken with bleary eyes and sore limbs and aching heads.
A man—agitated, fidgety—came in off the street.
“I’ve seen a body in a house on the West Port,” he said without preamble or introduction. “A poor woman, murdered.”
Fisher went with the man—Gray, his name turned out to be—up along the quiet High Street, and down the arc of West Bow on to the Grassmarket. Bottles and rubbish were strewn about there. They walked its length to the West Port, and Gray showed Fisher the house of William Burke.
A dark passage led back into a tenement. At its end, a narrow stair descended into gloom. Gray let Fisher precede him down the stair, and thus it was Fisher who came face to face with another man, climbing up.
“That’s him,” Gray said in alarm. “That’s Burke.”
“Would you let me into your house please, Mr. Burke,” said Fisher, ignoring the ferocious glare Burke was fixing upon Gray.
The room to which Gray guided them was a picture of wretched squalor. Rags and straw were scattered all over the bare floor, and every corner was piled high with disordered heaps of tattered and half-made shoes, and with the tools of the cobbler’s trade. A pot of boiled potatoes stood by the cold ashes of last night’s fire. There was not a single piece of furniture save a crude, low bed stretched out against one wall. It was the humblest of things, a few planks and sticks roughly nailed together. There was no mattress on it save a tightly packed mat of straw and old cloths. A faded, striped nightgown lay on the bed.
The Edinburgh Dead Page 27