The Edinburgh Dead

by Brian Ruckley

  Hare looked at her.

  “Always me,” he said with a wolfish grin. “Always me.”

  He held up his hands and splayed them, examining the inscriptions straggling across the back of them.

  “It will have to do,” he said. “Needed more time, more tools to really make it hold and work, but this will do, for a while. Give me those gloves.”

  Isabel brought them to him and he pulled them over his hands.

  “I hardly dared to believe,” she said, almost breathless with excitement.

  “You should have,” Hare scolded her lightly. “I told you I was not done yet. You should have believed me. Just needed the right place to do it—a place that remembered me well—and the right kind of man to host me, the right blackness of heart to open up the way as he departed. I knew Hare would be what we needed. I like to think I played my small part in making him what he was, so it seems only fair I should be repaid with the use of him.”

  She embraced him, and he held her for a moment or two before easing her away.

  “What now?” she asked. “You won’t leave me here, surely, whatever you said to Rutherford? I came to find you, didn’t I? Out at the farm. You couldn’t ask more of me than that.”

  Hare ignored her.

  “Is there any sign?” he asked, turning his face this way and that to show her his cheeks. “Any bruising, or scarring?”

  “No, no.” She shook her head. “But listen, what comes now?”

  “Turn that lamp down. No point taking even the smallest risk of discovery, now that the hard part’s done.”

  She groaned in frustration, but bent down to quench the flame and return Weir’s house to its natural state of gloom. She straightened, and turned, and found Hare right in front of her, very close. He put his gloved hands about her throat, and pushed her roughly back against the wall.

  “All good things come to an end, Isabel,” he whispered as his fingers tightened. “This city’s done for me now. I’ve known that for a long time now, even if your husband could never see it. So I’m away, I don’t know where. But I do know I’ll be going alone, and I’ll not be leaving behind anyone who knows what face I’m wearing.”

  He held her there for long minutes, squeezing ever more tightly, until she breathed no more, and hung limp in his grip.

  Hare strode out on to the West Bow with a confident gait, tugging the black gloves tight on his hands. Rutherford, taken somewhat unawares by his abrupt reappearance, hurriedly tapped out the pipe he had been smoking on the heel of his boot. He frowned at Hare.

  “Did they not give you the lamp to bring back?” he asked irritably. “It’s police property, this carriage. I’ll have to answer if it doesn’t go back just as it came out.”

  “You got paid, didn’t you?” Hare snapped.

  “Indeed I did, Mr. Hare. Just like you did, I’d imagine, so have a care with that tongue of yours.”

  “Don’t call me Hare. That’s a dangerous name these days.”

  “Oh, aye? What would you have me call you?”

  “It doesn’t much matter to me. Why not Mr. Black? That’s simple enough for you to remember, I should think.”

  Rutherford curled his lip in loathing. He might have pursued the discussion, and pushed on into argument perhaps, but Hare brushed past him and clambered into the carriage, sinking back into its concealing shadows.

  “The southern mail coach, isn’t it?” he said from inside there. “We’ll need to make good time now, if we’re not to miss it.”

  Rutherford vaulted up to his station at the front of the carriage, muttering invective under his breath. He fell silent, though, as they moved off and the horse broke into a trot under the encouragement of the whip. A puzzled frown etched itself upon his face. Hare, he was thinking, no longer seemed to talk with quite the same strong Irish accent he had before.

  They caught the mail coach by only a matter of minutes. There was but a single space remaining, on the high seat on the back of it, when they found it waiting by the roadside in Newington, south of the Old Town.

  Hare climbed up there nimbly enough and settled himself in. He had the collar of his coat pulled high, and his soft cap tugged down over his brow, as if a man dreadfully troubled by the cold. Rutherford looked up at him. It seemed fitting, and prudent, to say something innocent of the sort that might pass between two men parting.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Black,” he said. “I wish you well home.”

  Hare glanced down at him, and Rutherford caught the momentary contemptuous sneer, if no one else did. He stalked back to the carriage, reflecting bitterly upon the ingratitude of murderers.

  Rutherford lived with his wife and daughter in a flat at the back of a court along Nicolson Street. It was a good place to live. Edinburgh had not expanded southwards with the same grand visionary rigour that had been applied to the northward growth of the New Town. Its advance here had been, instead, incremental, one new building or development outside the city wall following another as inclination and opportunity arose. Nor had it matched the stately grandeur of the New Town’s long terraces and garden squares, but there were corners of elegance and a general mood of prosperity. For a police sergeant, spending his days scouring the streets and closes of the Old Town, it was a pleasing release to return there each night.

  Rutherford walked down Nicolson Street with a weary tread. It had been about as long a day as he had suffered in months. By the time he had left Hare on the mail coach, and got the carriage back to the police stables, and endured the inevitable barrage of questions from his fellow officers in the police house, it was closing on midnight. He would have left without answering a single one of those eager enquiries if he thought he could manage it without causing indignant offence and disappointment, but instead he dutifully recited the tale of how William Hare had left Edinburgh. He made no mention of Isabel Ruthven, or of the delay in the West Bow.

  He wondered absently about those things as he trudged homeward through the emptying streets, though. He did not know, nor want to know, what grubby transaction had been enacted while he waited and smoked his pipe with the carriage. With luck, his connection with the Ruthven family was entirely at an end now, and he would never have to spare another moment’s fretting over it all. The money had been good, of course—there was never enough of that, no matter how a man scrimped and saved—but it was not, Rutherford had come to feel, worth the worries that attended upon it.

  He nodded to one or two people he knew as he drew near to his home. Were he less tired, he would have stopped to talk with them. It paid a man to keep in good standing with his neighbours. But his exhaustion was heavy upon him, and he walked on and turned empty-handed into the court where his family and, more importantly he felt, his bed awaited.

  “Jack Rutherford.”

  Rutherford turned, startled. Adam Quire stepped out from the darkness beneath the arch of a stairwell’s entrance. Rutherford hung his head and gave a nervous laugh.

  “You gave me a turn there, Adam,” he said, knowing by his gut and by some indefinable quality in the way Quire held himself that here was a problem, and perhaps a grave one.

  His weariness fell from him in an instant, dispelled by the shiver of alarm that went up his spine.

  “Are you keeping well, Adam?” he asked, with a broad smile.

  “That’s a good question,” Quire said. “You know, it took me a while to find out where you lived. I didn’t remember us ever talking of it, when we shared the same employment, so I suppose we can never have been great friends.”

  “Friends?” Rutherford repeated, feigning bewilderment at the course of the conversation, and taking a step closer to his own stair, at the far end of the court. “I’d like to think so, aye.”

  “How much did Ruthven pay you to break that bond?”

  Rutherford frowned, shrugged.

  “I’m not understanding you, Adam.”

  The smallest tightening around Quire’s eyes told him that his acting skills had failed him. Qu
ire had always been good at reading men. Good at breaking them, too. Rutherford began to grow seriously afraid then.

  “That your stair over there, is it?” Quire asked, tipping his chin up to indicate the dark opening in the furthest tenement.

  “Aye,” Rutherford said, looking that way, “that’s…”

  Quire’s hand was over his mouth, his arm about his chest, dragging him violently backwards. Rutherford kicked and scrabbled to get his feet back under him, but Quire was the bigger and stronger of them by some distance. He hauled Rutherford into the nearest stair, and threw him down on to the first few steps. Rutherford turned on to his back, but did not rise.

  Quire loomed over him, blocking out what little light there was in the courtyard. He held a pistol in his upraised hand, brandishing it like a cudgel.

  “I’ll beat your head in if you give me the reason,” Quire hissed.

  Rutherford lifted his hands, set them between him and Quire as if to fend him off.

  “You’ve gone mad,” he said, as loudly as he dared.

  Quire gave the pistol a warning shake.

  “You keep your voice down, or that’ll be the reason for breaking your head,” he said quietly.

  “All right, all right.”

  The only thing Rutherford could think to do was delay matters, stretch them out, until some passer-by should disturb them and save him from Quire’s wrath. Quire, unfortunately, had always been a man inclined to hurry right to the meat of any talk.

  “You’re the one told them I was going to the Assembly Rooms. You tricked it out of the boy bringing the message, somehow. If you lie, I’ll know it.”

  Rutherford believed that to be true, so he chose to say nothing at all, merely giving out a faint whimper that he hoped would sound at least as piteous and frightened as he felt.

  “Told Baird, too, that I’d been talking to Cath, maybe? Lost me my wage and my calling, in that case. Were you watching me, Rutherford? Spying on me for Ruthven and Blegg? Baird, too?”

  Rutherford snorted.

  “Baird’s a prancing prig.”

  Quire suddenly hit him in the face with his free hand, looping it around outside the shield Rutherford had made of his arms. The blow broke open the corner of his lip, and punched his head back against the sharp edge of one of the stone steps. He moaned, and blinked in surprise and pain.

  “For God’s sake, man,” he gasped.

  “Hold your tongue.”

  Rutherford had never heard quite such steady contempt and threat in a man’s voice. Quire had always carried a rather intimidating presence about him, but this was something different. This was cold, purposeful determination undiluted by any pretence at fellow feeling or human concern.

  “Just tell me this, and I’ll leave you be,” Quire said. “It’s not you I’m after, Rutherford. You’re just the rat running around the edges. But tell me this: you’ve taken Ruthven money, and you told them I was going to the Assembly Rooms.”

  Rutherford tasted blood in his mouth. He licked at the wound with his tongue, buying a fragment of time in which to think. This was not entirely the Quire he had known; he did not know precisely by what rules he now worked.

  “Listen,” Rutherford murmured, making his choice and praying for a bit of good fortune. “You’re not wrong. I’ve a family, and I needed the money. Nothing more to it than that, Quire. You know how it is. It was nothing much they wanted of me, just a word now and again of what got talked about in the police house. Letting them know if any name they might be interested in ever came up, their own most of all.

  “But that business with you getting turned off the force, and then the Assembly Rooms… aye, I might have played a wee part in all of that, but I broke with them after, Quire. I swear to you, I wanted nothing more to do with them after that. It was all getting too rich for my blood, and I never thought it would come to such a pitch. Taking a man’s profession and living away from him, that’s not right, not right at all.”

  He waited with held breath to see the effect of his confession upon Quire. The result was not precisely what he had hoped for.

  “Except you didn’t, did you? Break with them. You’ve been taking Isabel Ruthven to see William Hare in the Calton Jail, haven’t you?”

  Quire made to bring that cruel-looking pistol down, and Rutherford flung up his arms to protect himself against what proved to be a feint. Instead, Quire bent down and punched him hard in the stomach. Rutherford coughed, and curled himself over, clutching his midriff.

  “You were there tonight,” Quire said, calm and level. “I know it, so don’t deny it. All you need to do is tell me what she wants with Hare, and what you’ve been up to tonight. Tell me that, and we’re done.”

  Rutherford recounted to him in great detail the events of the evening. He could see nothing in the business with Hare that could outrage Quire any more than the injuries that had been directed against his own person, so there seemed only gain to be had from trying to keep the brute happy.

  “In the West Bow,” Quire said with unusual precision and clarity. “Through a short arched passage into a yard that looks like it’s not had a scavenger go through it in years. An empty apartment, at the back of the yard, foul and falling down. You’re sure of all that?”

  Rutherford nodded.

  “And someone waiting in there, for you and her to bring Hare?”

  “Aye. Never saw who it was, and it was only Hare came out, like I said. He was acting a wee bit odd, right enough, but he’s not exactly what you’d call an ordinary man, is he? Can’t be, to have done the things he done. Look, can you let me up off these steps, Adam? It’s a damned uncomfortable bed you’ve got me lying on.”

  “How do you mean, odd?” Quire asked. “What was odd about Hare?”

  “I don’t know,” muttered Rutherford, almost as much irritated as afraid, now that the ardour of Quire’s violent passion seemed to have cooled somewhat, to be supplanted by a thoughtful intensity. “He was fiddling about with strange gloves he’d got from somewhere. Talking a bit different. Still a cocky bastard, mind. He just sounded different, like he’d changed his accent or something. All right?”

  Quire at last tucked that pistol into his belt, and Rutherford felt a wave of relief washing through him. If he got out of this with a split lip and a bruise on his belly, he would count himself blessed.

  “And you put him on the coach,” Quire said.

  It did not sound like a question, but Rutherford chose to make it such, eager to display his compliance.

  “Dumfries, that’s right. He’s gone to Dumfries, on the mail. I put him on the coach, in Newington.”

  And then suddenly Quire’s fists were darting in again, both of them one after the other, battering Rutherford on either side of the jaw. Quire took hold of his hair, and lifted his head by it, pulling so hard that Rutherford feared a handful of it would be torn from his scalp.

  “The thing of it is,” Quire murmured with chill contempt, “you’ve cost me more than I can easily pardon, Sergeant Rutherford. My employment’s bad enough, but it’s not the worst of it. You told them I was going to the Assembly Rooms, and by that telling you put a good friend of mine in a great trouble of deal. Trouble that’s still got him walking about with a stick. I don’t hold much with forgiveness, Rutherford. Not these days.”

  Rutherford heard what was coming in Quire’s tone, and kicked out at his crotch. Quire was too alert for that, and turned to take the blow on his hip, then batted Rutherford’s leg aside and closed down upon him in a flurry of blows.

  XXXIII

  The Annan Road

  There was rioting in Dumfries when Quire staggered out, aching and stiff and weary, from the black coach that had brought him south. It had done so at remarkable speed. Remarkable, and punishing for any passengers, of which Quire had been the only one. His conveyance was the well-appointed funereal coach of the Widow, Mary Coulter, and it was as comfortable as any of its kind might be, but the road was rough and long, and no coach coul
d make that a pleasant experience. He did not feel himself ready to confront the raw vigour of a mob run wild, but that was what he found.

  Dumfries was not a large town, nor one with a reputation for much in the way of trouble. Despite that, Quire guessed there were well in excess of five thousand people besieging the jailhouse when he stepped down on to the main street. They were waving sticks and flinging stones at the windows and the gaslights. As Quire watched, a stone went through the hood of one of the lights, and it shattered and went out with a snap. Half the windows of the courthouse and its jail were already put in.

  Quire pulled the big, heavy bundle off the seat of the coach. It was wrapped in many layers of sacking, and was cumbersome enough to test even Quire’s considerable strength.

  “You’d best wait for me back at that coach inn,” Quire said to the driver who had brought him south in such haste.

  Fleck, the Widow had told Quire his name was, and the very sole of discretion. So much so that he had hardly uttered a word to Quire in all the journey, and his expression never varied from one of sour repose. But he knew his way about a coach and horse, Quire had to concede that.

  Fleck now turned the black coach about in the road and went trundling off. Quire gave his attention to the great mass of irate townsfolk that blocked off a long stretch of the high street. It was as febrile a mob as he had seen in a long time, and a big one for a town the size of Dumfries. Whatever had brought so many furious folk here, it had brought them from far afield.

  A hundred or more local militiamen were arrayed across the front of the judicial building, armed with canes and staves and batons. They watched the surging crowd with uneasy, tense expressions, many of them turning their weapons in their hands, or tapping them upon the ground. Quire had an idea of how these things worked. If men were sent out with guns, as often as not they were for show, meant to cow the mob into order; if men were sent out with batons, as often as not they were meant to be used, and they usually were. The chaotic scene before him had the clear feel, in his estimation, of impending violence.