The Edinburgh Dead (45 page)

“I’m grateful for your help,” Quire said in the dawn’s gathering light.

Fleck just nodded.

“I’ll hope to see you in a day or two,” Quire said.

And with that they parted, Fleck to Dumfries, Quire to the moors. Before he went, he loaded the musket. The movements were more familiar now than they had been for years. He had made Fleck stop, on a wild stretch of road somewhere a couple of hours south of Edinburgh, and spared a few precious minutes from the pursuit to get a feel for the gun and his handling of it. Standing there, on the edge of bleak, empty fields, he loaded, and fired, four or five times over, the shots booming out over the barren land. Each time he had been a little faster, a little surer. As he would have to be, he suspected.

He ran out into the heather. He did not try for too much pace. He was tired enough already, and had no wish to bring himself to his knees any sooner than he had to. And he remembered, from his youth, just how treacherous these places could be to a man who attempted to cover too much ground too quickly, hiding all manner of pits and hollows and tripping roots beneath the endless, featureless carpet of heather.

Hare was out of sight, swallowed up by the vast landscape, but Quire did not concern himself with that. He had marked the man’s course, and angled his own to meet it, out there in the trackless waste. If he could not see his quarry for now, it would only be some hollow in the land, or the tiny dip of a valley cut by a little burn, that was hiding it from him.

Grouse burst from his feet and went churring away low over the heather, like winged balls shot from the mouth of a cannon. The
first time it happened he almost fell, so alarming and unexpected was the noise and blur of movement; after that, he was not so easily startled. Watchful, though. Always watchful.

There came a time when he slowed, first to a trot, and then a walk. And, at last, to a halt. He stood, knee-deep in the brittle heather, and looked out across the undulating ground before him. Slowly, he unshipped the Brown Bess from his shoulder and pulled back the hammer until it locked into place. He fixed his gaze upon one patch of heath, a hundred yards or more away. There was a hue mixed in there, a patch of it, that did not quite belong. Quire stared at it, and waited.

Hare rose to his feet. Quire could see the feral glee in the man’s smile, even at that distance.

“You’re a plague, Quire,” Hare shouted out across the heather. “A revenant, sent to haunt me again and again, is that it? Do you not know I’m under the King’s protection?”

It was the first time Quire had heard the voice of his enemy. While it resided in Blegg, it had never once spoken to him. It did so now in a soft Irish brogue. Whether mimicry or memory or pure invention, Quire did not know. It did not matter. He did not mean to listen to much of what the thing might have to say.

Hare began to run towards him. Quire dipped his left shoulder to let the backpack slip from it. The pack’s fall was cushioned by the mat of springy heather. He dropped on to his right knee, and breathed slowly in and out. He rested his left elbow on his left leg and set the musket’s butt to his shoulder. He looked out along the line of the barrel, across the moor, to the figure running towards him.

He willed his weaker left arm to hold steady, willed his heart to slow, his eyes to clear. The fear was in him, but he pushed it away, far enough that it did not cloud him.

He could hear the heather thrashing against Hare’s legs. Could see the wild hatred in the man’s eyes. A tremor went through him, but he tensed himself to still it, and then let his muscles go slack once more. Closer and closer he let Hare come, knowing that if his first shot missed, he might not live long enough for a second. He
had been a fine shot once, and needed to be again. Closer, until he could see little glints of the risen sun on the buttons of Hare’s waistcoat, until he could bear it no more.

He held his breath, and squeezed the trigger, and the Bess roared in his hands. He shot Hare in the knee. It spun the man about and sent him crashing down into the heather, tall and straggly enough there to swallow him up completely.

Quire did not wait for him to rise, as he knew he would. He leaped to his feet, and began the ritual of reloading. His fingers shook, just slightly, as he fumbled the next cartridge out of his belt pouch. He heard movement, out there in the heather. He bit out the top of the paper packet, tapped just enough of the grey, grainy powder into the pan to prime it. He heard Hare rising. Held the gun erect, tipped powder down the barrel.

“Quire, you bastard,” he heard Hare cry at him.

Turned the cartridge about in his fingers, still less steady than he would have liked. Hare was running at him. He saw the dark shape, coming unsteadily now, hampered by his ruined knee. Got the ball into the gun’s mouth, pulled the ramrod up and out from its home. Punched it down Bess’ gullet. He looked up. Twenty yards, no more. Hare’s lips were pulled back in a snarl. Quire kept hold of the ramrod, shouldered the musket, shot Hare in the other leg.

They were so close that the smoke plumed out over Hare, and he fell forwards through it.

“You’re a hard man to kill, someone told me a while ago,” Quire said as he stepped back, out of reach of the hands clawing for him, “so I’ve given it a bit of thought, on the road down here.”

Hare was not done yet, though. Quire had misjudged the ferocious will and power of what was inside the man. Hare surged up once more, and part-staggered, part-rushed forward, throwing himself at Quire, who sprang away. Quire’s heel caught on a gnarled heather stem, and he fell back. He tried to roll at once, but the dense heather hampered him, and in less than a heartbeat’s span, there were hands like stone wrapped around his left ankle,
pulling at him. The scabbard of the sabre caught about a half-buried stone as Hare dragged him nearer, and he used that to lever himself up so that he could hammer with the butt of the musket at the arms that held him.

He hit his own leg as much as any limb of Hare’s, and the pain was excruciating, but the hands did come away from his ankle, once a few of the fingers were battered and broken. Quire scrambled away, and got rather gingerly to his feet. He put more ground between him and Hare as the latter rose again, swaying and rocking on legs too crippled to do much more than hold him there. He managed to move them, even so, and though he fell, and had to struggle back on to his feet, he came stubbornly on at Quire.

Who reloaded the Brown Bess again. He was strangely at peace, now that there was nothing to do, nothing to think about, save the immediate and obvious necessity. That calmness lent a speed to his hands. The musket was ready to fire again in no more than twenty seconds, and he brought it smoothly up and had the luxury of another second or two to measure his breathing and take good aim. That second shot had missed the knee at which it was aimed by some little way. The third did not, blasting out the joint in an eruption of shredded cloth and meat and bone splinters. Hare fell, and this time Quire did not think he would be rising soon.

“What are you?” Quire asked as he began to work his way through the movements needed to make the musket ready once more. It was mechanical now; the instinctive memory of it reawakened in him by repetition. He barely needed to watch what he was doing, and could keep his eyes upon Hare.

Hare was still trying to get to his feet, but his legs buckled beneath him and he went down. He lifted himself up on his hands and leered at Quire.

“What does that matter?” the beast laughed. “I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Quire grunted. “Future’s full of surprises, I’ve found. Best not to concern yourself overmuch with it. Concentrate on the present.”

He looked at his right hand. There was a fine layer of gunpowder dusted across it now. He wiped it clean on his trousers.

“Are you not the Devil, then?” he asked.

Hare laughed.

“No, Mr. Quire, I’m not your Devil. But think of me that way, if it makes you happy. I’ll not mind. Just stop with all your questions. You’d as well ask what the wind is, or the water, or the earth, as what I am.”

“They’ll have answers to all that, likely as not, the way the scientists and the philosophers and such are getting so busy these days,” Quire said as he raised the musket to his shoulder.

“Never to me,” Hare shouted, “never to me.”

To Quire’s amazement, he hauled himself to his feet yet again, bone crackling in his knees as he did so, his legs twisting and bending unnaturally. He took a long, sinking pace towards Quire, his face contorted into a mask of such pure hatred that it rendered it almost inhuman. More beast than man.

“Never to you,” Quire muttered, “Aye, you might be right about that.”

And he shot Hare for the fourth and last time, in the heart, and knocked him down with the force of it.

Quire set the Brown Bess aside then, leaving it safely out of reach of the still writhing figure in the heather. He drew his sabre as a flock of ravens went croaking overhead, rolling about. He glanced up at them, and saw for the first time that the sky was blue now; a pristine field of azure, from horizon to horizon.

He looked at Hare. He was lying face down. The violence of his movements was diminishing. Quire trod on one of the man’s outstretched arms and pinned it down. He hacked at the wrist with the sabre. It took a few blows to separate hand from arm, and it came away without much in the way of blood or gore. The spirit inhabiting Hare did not seem to notice.

Quire peeled the glove off the hand, and looked impassively at the crude writing and symbols scrawled across the skin. None of it he could understand; there was no meaning to it for him. But
Durand had said to clear the writing from the hand, and Quire thought that taking the hand from the body should serve just as well.

He cut the other hand away more easily. He rolled Hare on to his back. There was no movement in the limbs now, but the eyes still darted from side to side. They found Quire’s face, and held on to his gaze. The lips trembled, trying to recall the shape of a sneer.

Quire trotted over to his backpack and tipped it out. He gathered up the flasks of lamp oil and carried them to Hare’s corpse. He poured most of the oil over the body, and then set about the business of gathering as much dry, old heather as he could, slashing at it with the sword. It would dull the blade, but he hoped to have no further use for the thing. He heaped the loose, leggy clumps of heather over Hare’s prostrate form.

He meant, as well, to have no further use for the cartridges in his belt pouches, so he tore them all open and made a little mound of the powder close by the pyre. He soaked some more heather in the last of the oil, and laid that over the pyramid of gunpowder. And then, at last, he knelt, and held the musket low down, and sent sparks from the flintlock scattering out into the powder and the oil-soaked heather.

He sat on a low rock, perhaps thirty yards away, and watched Hare burn. Great yellow flames licked up into the sky, and thick, stinking black smoke that made coils of itself as it rose.

Quire felt a good deal more calm and content than he had expected to. There was, he realised as the flames consumed the corpse, a remarkable lightness about his life now. It contained almost nothing, had almost no weight to it. Blegg, and Ruthven, and everything that went with them were gone; so was his place on the city police. No wage, none of that purpose that his work had put into his life. Nothing left to him of it. All burned away, just as Hare was now, out on the moors.

There was Cath, though. He thought of her as he sat, looking out over the vast silver expanse of the Solway Firth that the bright
day had discovered, far to the south, and freed from the shackles of darkness. The sun sent a thousand rippling, glittering shards of light racing over the surface of the sea.

Quire reached down and plucked a sprig of heather from beside his hard seat. He would take that back to Cath, he thought. For luck.

This book makes liberal use of real history to tell its tale, and this time I am therefore indebted not only to the usual and indispensible support network without which no writer could function, but also to a not inconsiderable number of people who one way or another made my distorting of historical truth possible:

The staff at the National Library of Scotland and at the Edinburgh City Archives, who were unfailingly helpful and efficient.

Jim McGowan, who has never heard of me, but whose unpublished thesis on Edinburgh’s police force in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was utterly fascinating and tremendously helpful.

Ewen, for the very timely provision of some audio drama recordings that really hit the spot, inspiration-wise.

Thanks, as ever, to the fine Orbit crew, as helpful a bunch of publishing folk as a writer could wish to be working with. In particular, thanks to Tim Holman for his support and assistance not just with this book—which were considerable—but all the way back to the beginning.

Thanks to Tina, my agent, for her help and support.

Thanks to my parents, for their encouragement from the first time I ever tried to write.

And to Fleur, for everything.