The Edinburgh Dead (42 page)

It took close to two hours for Monro to complete his dissection of William Burke, for the edification of those who had succeeded in obtaining a ticket for the much-anticipated event. Those who had been unsuccessful rioted in the quadrangle of the college, so aggrieved were they at their exclusion from the drama. They broke windows and tore up paving stones, and fought off the gang of baton-wielding police that was dispatched from Old Stamp Office Close.

The disorder did not end until Professor Christison brokered an agreement with the ringleaders of the mob whereby Burke’s corpse, returned to something approaching its natural state, would be put on public display for two days.

So the people of Edinburgh, in their thousands, filed past the corpse of the wretch whose vile deeds had fouled their city and comforted themselves with the knowledge that, upon this one man at least, the most perfect justice had been done.

And with the execution of that justice, the need to hold William Hare a prisoner in Calton Jail came to an end.

In the dull twilight, a small carriage turned in to the entrance of Calton Jail, and rumbled under the arch of the gatehouse. Lamps burned on either side of the driver’s seat. It drew up on the yard, in the shadow of the great prison, where a small group of men awaited it. The governor, Captain Maclellan of the guards, a handful of his officers. And William Hare, in a heavy, high-collared coat that hid much of his face.

The police sergeant who drove the cart dropped down on to the yard’s cobblestones. Maclellan came forward to meet him.

“Jack Rutherford,” Maclellan said. “It’s a miserable duty you’ve got yourself tonight. Someone at the police house got a grudge against you?”

“Volunteered,” Sergeant Rutherford said, and when he saw Maclellan’s surprise, he shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it. The man’s under the Crown’s protection, after all. Got to see him safe out of the city. Let them lynch him somewhere else if they like, just so long as it’s outside the city bounds.”

Maclellan shook his head in amazement.

“Still. A devil like him, it’s a damn shame.”

“I don’t mind. Nobody else wanted to do it, and like I say, it needs doing.”

The governor murmured a few words to Hare, but the
Irishman—no longer a prisoner, no longer under any obligation to feign civility or gratitude—paid him no heed, and climbed into the carriage with a sour grin upon his face.

It was done with no more ceremony than that. The worst killer any of the men present had ever encountered—none of them were in any doubt of that—walked free of Calton Jail. Rutherford jumped back up on to the driver’s seat, clicked his tongue at the horse, and gave it a touch of the switch to bring it around, and the carriage rolled slowly out through the gatehouse and into Regent Road.

The men drifted off, back to their duties, none happy with the one they had just discharged. Maclellan lingered, though, a moment or two longer than the rest, staring after the disappeared carriage. He came to a decision, and called one of his men back to his side.

“Get me one of the lads can run a message down to the Canongate, would you?” Maclellan said. “Quick as you like.”

The carriage made its way slowly down towards Princes Street. It did not travel far, though, for outside the grand theatre on the corner of North Bridge it came to a halt, close in to the pavement so that it should not obstruct the other coaches and hackneys moving along behind it.

Isabel Ruthven walked smartly forward from where she had been waiting beside a street lamp. She reached up and pressed a banknote into Rutherford’s hand. He said nothing, but tucked it quickly away into a pocket. Isabel climbed into the carriage and settled in beside Hare. Who leered at her, baring his teeth.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you tonight,” he said, “but I’ll be damned if you’re not a sweet sight for a man’s been in a jail cell longer than he needed.”

“A charming compliment, Mr. Hare.” Isabel smiled.

The carriage lurched into motion once more. As it eased away from the kerb, the doors of the theatre opened, and the departing audience began to flow out on to the pavement, all abuzz at the splendour of the opera they had witnessed.

“Mr. Blegg wanted me to convey his appreciation for your silence
on the matter of his dealings with you,” Isabel said, looking out at those gorgeous, glittering opera-goers crowding out.

Hare grunted.

“Never much of a worry. The lawyers gave me immunity for everything I done with Burke. Nothing else. They’d have hung me alongside him if the other stuff came out.”

He looked sharply at Isabel.

“Still, you said I’d be paid for it, the time you came to see me. Twenty pounds, you said.”

“Indeed. We’ll get you your money this very night, shall we? But here, I brought you something to toast your freedom with.”

She produced a hip flask, bound in worked leather, and offered it to him. Hare sniffed it, and grinned at the smell.

“Whisky,” Isabel confirmed. “A very fine variety, I’m told, though I’m no drinker of it myself.”

Hare took a long drink from the flask, tipping his head back. The carriage jolted over cobbles, and he spilled a little of the amber fluid across his lips. It ran over his chin as he reached out a hand and laid it on Isabel’s knee.

“I could do with some other kind of celebrating,” he rasped at her.

She guided his hand away, not roughly, but firmly.

“No, Mr. Hare. Not tonight. Not if you want that twenty pounds.”

The carriage rolled on, up to the High Street, and there it turned west. Hare leaned across in front of Isabel to peer out into the street.

“I’m supposed to go to the southern mail. Get out of this damned city.”

He was slurring his words. They came sluggishly off his clumsy tongue.

“Don’t you worry,” Isabel said, pushing him back into his seat.

By the time the carriage was rattling down West Bow, and slowing to a halt at the foot of it, Hare was quite asleep. Rutherford dismounted and looked in.

“You’ll have to help me with him,” Isabel said casually. “Just to get him inside, then you can wait with the carriage. Hold on to this for me, would you?” She handed him the whisky flask that she had lifted from Hare’s limp hand. “Don’t drink from it, though. We’ll be needing you awake.”

The two of them worked Hare out of the carriage, and held him up between them, each getting themselves under one of his arms. It was not the kind of scene entirely unfamiliar to the inhabitants of West Bow or Grassmarket, and not many folk paid them much heed.

“Give me one of those lights,” Isabel said.

Rutherford unhooked one of the oil lamps hanging from the end of the driver’s seat and handed it her.

“In here,” Isabel told him.

They went through a low, dark passageway into the foul-smelling, rubbish-strewn courtyard beyond. Isabel showed the way with the light of the lamp, and the two of them bore Hare into Major Weir’s house.

The dreadful oppression of the place made Rutherford ever more agitated as they moved through its ruins. He started at every flicker of flame light across the crumbling, slumping walls.

“All right,” Isabel said. “This will do.”

Rutherford let Hare fall.

“You can go back to the carriage,” Isabel told him.

“Thank you,” Rutherford breathed with heartfelt relief, and made to retrace their steps through the grime and debris.

“Wait a moment.”

The voice came from the impenetrable darkness of the back room. It was an ugly sound, uneven and rattling. Thick.

“Just listen,” the voice came again. “We’ll send Hare out to you shortly. When he comes, you take him on where he needs to go. We’ll not be joining you.”

“Aye, all right,” Rutherford said. “You’re paying, so whatever you say.”

He went quickly away. Isabel looked into the darkness.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Are we not to leave together?”

“I’ll explain, but let’s get done what needs doing first. It’s not easy for me to talk. I need Hare.”

Isabel set the lamp down on a rotting length of timber, and went to the corner. She lifted a rag and began to bring out the items it had concealed. As she worked, Blegg crawled yard by effortful yard out into the lamp’s light.

His skin was crusted and blackened, burned back to the bone where it had been thinnest, over his scalp. His eyelids were gone, and the great white orbs of his eyeballs shone in the light. Much of his lips was gone too, scorched away. Across the whole upper half of his torso, scraps of charred clothing were merged into what remained of his flesh. Both hands were hooked into stiff, raw claws, the fingers bent inwards and flayed by heat.

Isabel laid a pair of gloves side by side on the floor. Next a shallow wooden bowl, into which she poured black ink from a small bottle. Last a stylus made of reed.

“I can lie across him,” Blegg said, “but my hands aren’t up to the rest of it. Just close up his mouth and nose. That’s all.”

Blegg hauled himself across Hare’s chest and lay there, a dead weight. Isabel knelt down and did as she had been told, pressing one hand over Hare’s mouth, pinching shut his nose with the other.

“He won’t wake,” Blegg hissed.

And he was right. William Hare died in his sleep. Suffocated.

Afterwards Blegg had Isabel wedge the stylus into his crippled hand, for he could not pick it up himself. He dipped it into the ink she had stolen from her husband’s stores, and began to write over the back of Hare’s hands.

“One thing I learned from Ruthven and that French bastard,” he grunted. “This does help with keeping a hold on the body.”

After that, he said nothing more that Isabel could understand for quite a time. He coughed out streams of Latin phrases from his ravaged form as he worked, his voice faltering and dwindling all the time. His body shook, collapsing beneath the strain of its
exertions. Isabel sat close by the lamp, her hands folded in her lap, waiting quietly. It did not take all that long for Blegg to sink down, slumping incrementally on to Hare’s corpse, and for his rasping voice to fade away to nothing. He lay there, perfectly still. Perfectly empty.

It remained thus for a time. The woman sitting silently, staring at the two corpses lying amongst the detritus of decades. The lamp’s glow fluttering around the walls. A steady, slow drip, somewhere out in the shadows, of rainwater that had leached its way down through the seams of the vast building above and fell now into this ruinous hollow at its base.

And at last, Hare shuddered. Isabel rose, her hands clasped, watching with gleaming eyes. Hare stirred, and shook, and rolled his head. He heaved, and pushed Blegg’s ghastly charred corpse off him and away. He did not even look at it as he rose to his feet, and stood there swaying and blinking.

“Is it you?” Isabel asked, hope and fear and anticipation all layered in the words.

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.