The Edinburgh Dead (8 page)

MacQuarrie laughed at that.

“You’re a wee man, Quire. No big enough by half to put a fright into me. You’re only the police, and you’re surely no thinking it’s the police that…”

Quire lunged across and pinned MacQuarrie’s hand flat to the table. He whipped his baton free from his belt and held it over the splayed fingers. MacQuarrie tried to jerk free, but Quire had all the strength of his good arm pressing down.

“You’ll not be washing many dishes with cracked knuckles, will you?” he said calmly.

“Do that and it’ll no be you with the grudge, and I ken plenty of bigger men than you.”

“Maybe, but you’ll still have a broken hand. And I’m thinking you know I’m not that easy frightened.”

MacQuarrie slackened, and gave a dry smile.

“By Christ, Quire. Can you no take a joke? Settle yourself down. I’ll give you a wee morsel, if it’ll get you out.”

Quire settled back into his seat and released MacQuarrie’s wrist. The big man shook his freed hand, and shook his head at the same time, as if in disappointment.

“I’ve only seen the younger one before,” he muttered, just loud enough for Quire to pick the words out from amongst the strains of Stevenson’s shrill tune. “Been in here once or twice. Likes seeing the lassies about, but no man enough to buy any more than the seeing. I’ve no heard his name, but I ken he stays out in Duddingston. Does labouring on the farms, I think. And digs graves.”

“He’s a gravedigger?”

“Aye. I think so. And maybe I caught mention of a burial when they were talking. Maybe there’s a man going into the ground at Duddingston Kirk tomorrow. You tell anyone you had that from me, though, and I’ll no be a happy man.”

“Hah.”

Quire leaned back in his chair, more than a little surprised. Whatever he had expected, however out of kilter he had thought the mood of Ruthven’s house and whatever scent of wrongness he had caught there, he had never thought it might lead to this. The discovery imbued him with a sudden vigour, like a child glimpsing if not the solution, at least a hint of the solution, to some frustrating puzzle toy.

“Do you know a man called Carlyle?” he asked. “Edward Carlyle.”

“I’m spent, Quire. I’ll no be spilling anything more for you this morning.”

“Something to spill, then.” Quire grunted. “Listen, Carlyle’s dead. There’s no trouble you could bring down on his head that’d bother him now. You tell me something about him, it means I don’t have to come back and start bothering your customers on the matter.”

MacQuarrie sighed.

“You’re just too dim-witted to ken when to stop aggravating folk, aren’t you, Quire? Look, there was a Carlyle in here a few times, the last month or two, with Emma Slight. He made for a bad drunk, and we threw him out. Told Emma not to bother bringing him round here again. That’s all.”

“Emma Slight. She’s one of the Widow’s tenants, isn’t she? In the Holy Land?”

MacQuarrie gave an ill-tempered shrug.

“You charge a penny entrance, is that right?” Quire asked as he pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.

“Aye,” grunted the proprietor of the school.

Quire withdrew Mrs. Mallinder’s carefully wrapped slab of butter from his pocket and slapped it down on the table. Its sharp edges had just begun to lose their definition. The two men regarded it in silence for a moment, both rather surprised at the noise it had made as it flopped down, and at how strange and unexpected it seemed, lying there in all its boneless softness on a table in the Dancing School.

Quire roused himself first.

“There you are, Donald. Keep that for yourself. At least you’ll have made a profit on the morning’s business.”

He left MacQuarrie staring at the slumping pat of butter in quizzical silence, as if he had never before encountered such a baffling object.

“No, you cannot have any men,” snapped Lieutenant Baird. “There’s two hundred thousand living souls in this city, Quire. Living, mark you, not already dead and beyond all earthly concerns. And we’ve a hundred and a half on the city police, if you include every last grubby little member of the night watch. Does that sound to you as though we’ve the men to spare for standing guard on a graveyard all night because you’ve heard some tall tale from Donald MacQuarrie? The master of the Dancing School, no less, and he’s got you dancing to a silly tune right enough, hasn’t he?”

Quire made to reply, but Baird was in full, acerbic flow.

“If it was one of the city yards, maybe, but Duddingston?” the lieutenant sneered. “No. Not a single officer, not chasing off after some fancy of yours just because you think one man might have been talking to another in a cesspit on Toddrick’s Wynd. Not today, not any other day.”

“You know fine there’s only one reason for a man to be meeting a gravedigger in a place like that and asking after a burial,” snapped Quire, his patience—never the most robust of his qualities—faltering. “And you know just as well that the body snatchers like to do their digging outside the city these days. Less well guarded, less closely watched.”

“Fine by me,” Baird grunted, settling back in his chair and crossing his arms. “Let them dig away, so long as it’s not under our noses. If they think the body’s worth the snatching, the Duddingston folk’ll have a watch on it themselves. They know how these things go.

“What is this morbid fascination for the corpse trade you’ve suddenly acquired, anyway? It’s not to do with that body in the Cowgate, is it?”

“Not really,” Quire said.

Lying to Baird was not an unfamiliar experience for him.

“I hope not. Way I hear it, Christison’s called it animals, not men, that finished that fellow off. No great loss, a drunk falling asleep in a close and getting himself gnawed on. And we’ve not found a single soul who’s seen anything prowling about in the Old Town that might do such a thing to a man. It’s nothing to trouble us overmuch.”

Quire had long since lost any interest in Baird’s opinion of how he should conduct himself. The lieutenant had always been at him like a baiting dog at a badger, fired up by the rumours of Quire’s drinking and acquaintance with dubious women that had attended upon him in the earliest days of his employment.

Baird was a man with an eye on advancement. He cared, as best Quire could tell, hardly at all for the substance of police work, only
for the opportunities of promotion it might offer him; opportunities he had concluded would not be enhanced by association with a man like Quire.

“Turning a blind eye to the theft of corpses from their graves doesn’t sit right with me,” Quire said stubbornly. He had tired of the exchange, knowing defeat when it arrived, but his dislike of Baird would not allow him to retire gracefully from the field. “You’d not like some brother of yours digging up and carting off to the medical schools, would you?”

“It’s not something the city fathers want us bothering ourselves with too much, Quire. There’s more important matters to worry us, and you might think you get to choose how you spend your time, but I know better.”

Baird was pleased with himself, enjoying the exercise of his authority.

“Know your place, Quire,” the lieutenant said. “That’s always been your problem.”

In the entrance hall of the police house, Sergeant Jack Rutherford was pinning a recalcitrant visitor to the floor with the help of a couple of others. Quire recognised the subject of their rather weary efforts: Tam Wilkinson, a thief, well-known in certain quarters, who was evidently being invited to answer for his crimes at last. Wilkinson’s one free hand was scrabbling over the floor like a palsied crab, edging erratically closer to a little knife of a sort best used for peeling apples.

“Lend a hand, Quire,” Rutherford suggested equably. He was fully occupied holding down Wilkinson’s head and shoulders, while his two colleagues struggled to master one flailing leg apiece.

Quire advanced, and paused a moment to judge the movement of Wilkinson’s hand. Then he trod on it, firmly enough to prompt a howl of protest.

“Is Robinson about, do you know?” Quire asked as he bent down to retrieve the knife. A silly little thing, he thought, looking
down at it in his palm; but still, careless of them not to strip him of it before dragging him in here.

“Laid up with the gout, I heard,” Rutherford grunted. He adjusted his grip, locking an arm around Wilkinson’s neck preparatory to hauling the now compliant miscreant to his feet. Quire puffed his cheeks out in frustration.

“Might be he’s just worn out, of course,” Rutherford said. “Rumour is, he’s taking a beating from the Police Board these days. Folk with no better use for their time than making other folk’s lives difficult.”

“Aye, there’s a few like that around here.” Quire nodded.

He went out on to the High Street, despondent twice over. First for the troubles befalling Robinson, a man as far as Quire could tell entirely undeserving of the wrath of his masters; second, more selfishly, for his own inability to appeal Baird’s obstinacy to a higher authority. Without Robinson, it was a matter between Baird and Quire, and that was not the kind of matter that was likely to have a happy outcome. Still, some things could not be helped.

For years, Quire had marched and fought in obedience to the orders of those above him. That had eventually led him into a state he would never willingly revisit: not knowing why, beyond that mere obedience, he did what he did; not knowing, in his heart, upon which side of the divide between right and wrong his terrible deeds were placing him. The uncertainty had stayed with him, through the years of drinking and wandering and labouring after he left the army, though he had not recognised its corrosive persistence at the time. Only becoming an officer of the law had quieted it, and instilled in him a sense of convinced purpose. If he was to retain that precious, protective clarity, he had no choice but to follow where it led.

One or both of Ruthven and Blegg were involved in something they should not be, of that he had no doubt. Whether that something had played a part in Edward Carlyle’s death was unclear, but Quire had no intention of letting it remain so.

It began to snow as he wandered thoughtfully down the High Street. He paused at the great crossroads where the North and South Bridges pointed their respective ways out from the Old Town and looked up at the flakes swirling in ever thickening congregation around the steeple of the Tron Church.

It had been unseasonally and bitterly cold for days now. Winter appeared stubbornly unwilling to yield its dominion.

In the falling dusk, Adam Quire walked around the southern flank of Arthur’s Seat, serenaded by jackdaws tumbling raucously beside the rock faces. There was a thin cloak of snow on the ground, and a cruel, deep cold to the air now that the clouds had cleared away, leaving a sea of emergent stars. Quire paused where the track cut through a notch in the hill and turned, looking back towards Edinburgh. The setting sun lit the western sky with a rosy wash. Sprawled between that vast, glowing canvas and the looming crags of Arthur’s Seat, the city looked small, almost humble: a dark encrustation upon the land, studded with spires and a forest of chimneys. Pennants of smoke streamed from its innumerable mouths, a grey froth ascending into, and merging with, the darkening sky.

Quire had brought a lantern with him, but he did not light it yet. There was a certain peace to be had in the gloaming, which man-made illumination would dispel. Sheep were scattered along the track, and regarded him with the dull and lumpen vacancy of their kind. Arthur’s Seat was the King’s Royal Park, but its hereditary keeper, the Earl of Haddington, grazed his flocks over it as he saw fit. And quarried its cliffs, for that matter: if rumour was to be believed, the rock bones of the ancient hill had paved half the New Town.

The twilight was luminous enough still for Quire to avoid the little knots of sheep droppings strewn in his path, and for him to see, laid out to the south, mile upon mile of undulating farmland and copses and little settlements, and the dark, round-backed chain of the Pentland Hills dwindling away into the distance. And up ahead, as he rounded the haunch of Arthur’s Seat: Duddingston village itself.

The hamlet—little more to it than kirk, manse and a few cottages—clung to the foot of the hill, looking out over the reed-fringed expanse of Duddingston Loch. The loch was a single sheet of ice; the bare trees that ringed it were crusted with snow. Quire could see tiny figures on the ice, close in by the near shore: curlers, done with the day’s game, using their feet to herd their granite stones back towards the shore, exchanging boasts and commiserations.

The track descended slowly across the hill’s southern face, dipping towards Duddingston. Night fell about Quire as he followed it. He entered through the village gates with the kirk on his right. It was a modest building, entirely surrounded by a small walled graveyard. At the cemetery gate hung a set of jougs: an iron collar attached by a chain to the wall. It was an old punishment for miscreants, not practised any more.

The most striking feature of the gateway, though, was the watchtower. It was a squat construction, just two storeys, but other than in height it could have been the very twin of a tower in some medieval castle; a six-sided, castellated fortress in miniature. Latticed, arched windows stood in each flat face of the tower. Half the graveyards of Edinburgh were thus fortified now, so great was the need of the dead for protection against the avaricious living. That, Quire reflected as he stood looking up at the tower’s battlements in the gathering night, was a state of affairs fit to amaze and dismay any who spared it some thought. Any, at least, not so bedazzled by the city’s glorious reputation as a centre of learning as to be blind to the dark foundations of that glory. He allowed himself only a moment of bemused, rather mournful, reflection.