The Edinburgh Dead (41 page)

“You’re well out of the police business, maybe,” grunted Dunbar. “This affair with Knox and the Irish boys is a bloody thing, isn’t it?”

Quire could not quite agree with the first part of that, but the second gave him no great difficulty.

“A bloody thing for sure,” he said as they came to the foot of the Canongate.

The factories were in full clamorous flow, sending out their plumes of smoke to melt into the low roof of cloud. The drizzle was damping things down a bit—the stinks and the smoke and the folk all alike—but still the place was awash with carts and barrows and men hurrying this way and that.

“If you ever doubted me when I’ve said blame don’t follow as close in the footsteps of guilt as it should, you’ll know better now,” Dunbar opined. “Look at Knox, buying the bodies and not a charge against him. And Hare. They saw he was the worse of the two of them, and he’s to be free, just because he told them what they needed to send his friend to the gallows.”

Quire smiled to hear the bubbles of anger pushing up into Dunbar’s voice. It was a very fine thing, to hear the man getting back into his vituperative, argumentative flow.

“There’s a fair few folk baying for Knox’s blood,” Quire said. “He may not come out of this so pretty. But Hare—aye, that’s not right.”

Dunbar shook his head, despairing at the iniquities of the world and those who held its reins. An ease came over him, as if he were comforted by the reliable, familiar availability of targets for his critical appraisal. It told him, Quire hoped, that nothing of consequence had changed; that he would be hale and healthy and strong again soon, and back flying kites with his sons, forgetting what had happened.

“It’s barbarous times we’re living in, wouldn’t you say?” Dunbar said quietly. Not melancholy; just reflective.

“I would. Aye, I would.”

Calton Hill, which rose at the east end of Princes Street and looked out over the whole of Old and New Towns alike, held three prisons. The Debtors’ Jail, the Bridewell where the indigents and prostitutes and petty troublemakers found themselves, and the new Calton Jail, little more than ten years open, where the hard men went: the killers and the wounders, the blackmailers and the inveterate thieves. The jails stood side by side on the hill’s southern flank, lined up along the top of low cliffs and staring grimly out like a threefold threat and reminder for the city’s inhabitants of the consequences of transgression.

The Calton Jail presented by far the grandest and most fearsome countenance of the three. It was vast, like an amalgamation of castle and stately manor. Magnificent on the outside, in its austere way, as befitted such a prominent player in the architectural pageant of Edinburgh’s heart. On the inside, vile, malodorous and dangerous. Quire had been within its walls on several occasions, and every time had emerged from it eager for the cleansing airs and lights of an open sky. It was not an experience he was eager to repeat, but he went there in any case.

Nowhere was the jail more like a fortress than in its approaches. Its gatehouse stood on Regent Road, a wide boulevard that curved around Calton Hill’s southern slopes. It was a prodigious
structure, with two towers flanking the huge gates. Walls thrice the height of a man stretched away on either side, enclosing the prison yard and the enormous building that stood at the heart of it.

Once, Quire might have talked his way through the watch at the gatehouse without any difficulty, for a sergeant of police could come and go as he pleased; but he was no longer such a thing, and he found himself instead taken into one the offices built into the gatehouse, to face David Maclellan, a captain of the prison guard he knew of old. Not well, but at least he did know him.

“Of course I can’t let you in,” Maclellan said, pained at both the suggestion and the need for him to explain its impossibility.

“I thought maybe, since you’ve known me long enough, I might just get an hour. No more than that.”

Maclellan set his elbow on the desk, and rested his chin upon the upturned palm of his hand, staring meaningfully at Quire.

“You’re not making much sense, Adam. I ken you fine, but I ken you’re no policeman too, not any more. You’re just a man, and that’s not the kind of folk who get in to see William Hare.”

Quire gazed out of the office’s barred window in disappointment. It faced on to the main prison, and he could very faintly hear hand bells being rung in there. Feeding time. He had been there, once, when the inmates got their food, and it had been the worst slop he had ever seen, in or out of the army. Hardly fit for pigs.

“There’s been some got in to see him before,” Quire complained. “Reporters and the like; so they claim in the newssheets, anyway. I thought I’d have a chance at getting a word with him.”

“There’s no man here had more visitors than he did before the trial,” Maclellan grunted. “Lawyers and priests and all sorts. Aye, and maybe a reporter or two. But nobody sees William Hare now. Not unless they’re police, or have their permission and escort. That Jack Rutherford was the last, bringing the Ruthven woman. You must know him well enough. Ask him to bring you along, and maybe we’ll see about getting you in.”

Quire did not say anything. He remained quite still, staring out through the thick, speckled glass at the jail.

“It’s the best I can do, Adam, you must understand. This Hare… Jesus, he’s not just another prisoner. The city’s on the boil over the whole business. Everyone’s calling for his head. And he’s stopped talking, in any case. Hardly saying a word to anyone.”

“Isabel Ruthven, was it?” Quire asked, still not looking at the guard captain.

“Aye, might have been. I don’t particularly remember the name.”

“What was her business with Hare, do you know?”

Maclellan sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.

“I’ve no idea, Quire. Maybe a relative of one of the victims or something. I’ve no idea.”

“Would you do something for me?” Quire leaned across the desk, and put every ounce of sincerity and gravity he possessed into his appeal. “Would you just get a message to me if either of those two come back to see Hare? Rutherford or Isabel Ruthven. Either of them, or both. Send a message to my house—I’ll tell you where to find it—to let me know they’ve been.”

“And why would I do such a thing?”

Maclellan sounded more puzzled than affronted by the suggestion.

“Just because it might be very important to me,” said Quire, his mind working quickly, trying to tease sense out of the tangle of his thoughts. “It might be nothing, but it might not.”

He could see the hesitation in Maclellan’s face. So he gambled.

“And because I’ll put ten pounds your way if they come and I know of it within the hour.”

A bloodlust had hold of Edinburgh such as it had not felt in centuries. Perhaps ever. It was in ferment, so bloated with outrage and accusation that it trembled upon the brink of riot. There was but one thing that might stay the mob’s fury, for a while at least, and that very thing was about to be delivered unto them.

It had rained prodigiously in the early hours of the morning, cataracts spilling from the countless jostling rooftops of the Old Town. The rainwater had run in a myriad little rivers down the length of the High Street, gushing down the closes, sending even the rats scurrying for shelter and making the scavengers retreat with their barrows to the watch-houses to wait out the storm.

The rain did pass, but it left every eave dripping, every crease and crevice in the cobbled streets a pool. None of which did anything to deter the assembly of the greatest crowd the city had ever seen. They filled the Lawn Market, that highest part of the High Street, at which it approached the last narrow run up to the castle. Thousands upon thousands of them, standing shoulder to shoulder, all waiting; and all manoeuvring, as best they could in such a close-pressed throng, for a better sight of the gallows.

The most fortunate ones were those leaning from every window in every high tenement around the place of execution. They hung
dangerously far out over the ledges, jeering at those confined to the street below. Some, unable to force a place at a window, or dissatisfied with the view thence, had taken leave of their senses and climbed up on to the very rooftops themselves. They perched there upon the ridges, or clung to the chimney stacks, slipping and slithering on the wet tiles, promising at any moment to go sliding down and pitch themselves into the heaving, swaying mass of their fellow townsfolk on the street below. Such was the hunger to see William Burke die.

Only St. Giles’ Cathedral, brooding in all its sombre stateliness just a short way from the gallows, was spared the indignity of having onlookers scattered about amongst its spires and buttresses. It would, in truth, have offered some of the very finest views, but there were none willing to trespass upon its holy territory.

For all the fervent anticipation attendant upon his death, when they brought Burke out from the lock-up in Libberton’s Wynd where he had spent his last night it was not only his name the crowd roared, nor only his blood it bayed for.

“Where’s Knox?” some cried, and others: “Bring us Hare!”

The guards surrounding the gallows struggled to hold back the enlivened crowd. Such was the tumult that arose as he emerged on to the street that Burke quailed at it, and hesitated, and then seemed overcome with a longing for all of this to be over, and went quickly to the foot of the steps. Some in the mob tried to reach him as he passed them, but the guards pushed them back.

Burke went up the steps on to the platform so hurriedly that he almost stumbled. Abuse teemed around him, coming from every quarter, raining down upon him like a storm of stones.

There was no ceremony to it, little by way of preamble. Burke stood there, staring fixedly ahead, as the executioner prepared him for the moment to come, adjusting his collar, turning his neckerchief, so that the rope would fit about his neck clean and snug.

And the noose was settled over his head. For a breath or two a hush descended, broken only by the distant screech of seagulls circling far overhead. The executioner pulled the lever, the trapdoor
sprang and Burke dropped down and passed beyond any mortal concerns. His feet gave two sharp, vigorous twitches, and he was gone.

The twenty thousand or more who had come to see it done erupted in fierce joy, so violent their cries that the windows shook and the walls rang and rang with the echoes of them. And many of them did not depart, unwilling to concede that the momentous event was over, merely because its principal player was dead. They waited, and milled about in the High Street. For so long as Burke hung there, they waited.

It was not for another hour that they finally took his body down, and nailed it into a coffin and carried it off. Then began the scramble for pieces of the gallows, and sections of the hangman’s rope. As the workers who had built it moved in to dismantle the lethal contraption, so a host of the most stubborn spectators closed about them, and fought and argued over who might salvage what little scrap by way of memento for this extraordinary day.

Adam Quire and Catherine Heron did not watch William Burke’s execution. They climbed up, instead, to the crest of Salisbury Crags, and walked along the top of those long, curving cliffs, looking over the city laid out beneath them.

They walked hand in hand much of the way, and had the hill to themselves. The grass was wet and slippery, the air still damp from the downpour that had come before dawn; half the population of the Old Town was gathered about a single gallows. It all made for a near-deserted hill, and an eerie calm to the place.

They heard, though, when the time came, the great tumult rising from the Old Town, muted a little by distance, but unmistakable. The crying out of thousands of voices, all at once. The collective yearning of a city. They could tell, from the sound, the moment when Burke died.

They were at the highest point of the Crags by then, and stood in silence, holding one another’s hand, while the single voice of the city rolled around them.

William Burke might be dead, but he was not yet done as the centre of the city’s attention. The sentence passed upon him did not end with his execution.

The day after the hanging, the coffin into which his corpse had been nailed was taken to the University of Edinburgh’s huge college, close by the Royal Infirmary and Surgeon’s Square. It was the largest building in the city by some way, unless the whole complicated castle was accounted a single structure. It contained within it a broad quadrangle, surrounded by balustraded terraces. The four sides of the huge rectangular edifice that enclosed that quadrangle held, amongst many other riches, the university’s Medical School.

It was to there that Burke’s body was conveyed; specifically, to the largest of its lecture theatres. In that great bowl of an arena, the lid of the coffin was prised up and Burke’s corpse removed. His clothes were taken from him and he was laid out upon the slab at the heart of the amphitheatre. Shortly after noon, Professor Alexander Monro, the incumbent of the university’s Chair of Anatomy, applied a saw to the late William Burke’s cranium, cutting in a neat ring around the whole circumference of the head. With a little difficulty, he then removed the entire top of his skull, and in a great gush of thick and foul blood exposed his brain to the huge crowd of students and other curious spectators assembled in the theatre.