The Edinburgh Dead (2 page)

“I have heard them described, of course, and seen illustrations, but this is my first opportunity to observe the thing itself. Copper and zinc plates, separated by plasterboard soaked in brine. Am I correct?”

“I believe it is charged with acid rather than brine, but in principle you are correct, yes. A quite remarkable contraption. I confess my facility with the construction and care of the things is somewhat limited. Carlyle there, on the other hand: an invaluable man. A natural and subtle talent when it comes to the machinery, whether electrical or mechanical, with which our world is becoming so crowded. He is employed here for that sole purpose, and I dare to think there is none in Scotland to match his expertise.”

“Carlyle, you say?” the other man murmured, staring with acute intensity at the indicated attendant, white-clad as the others, who was examining the Voltaic pile with proprietorial concern.

“Indeed. Edward Carlyle.”

“Tell me, Professor Ure—if the question is not unwelcome, of course—tell me, have you had any success in stimulating the heart?”

“No, no. Not as yet. The heart remains unresponsive. I have to say, I believe it is through stimulation of the phrenic nerve that the greatest successes will be achieved: it is my hope that it might one day even be possible to thereby restore life and its functions to the victims of drowning, suffocation. Even hanging. But we are scientists, you and I, eh? We must have a realistic view of these things. Our ignorance is reduced with every passing day—how could it be otherwise, when so many great minds are applied to the task?—but it remains prodigious.

“I rather fancy, if you will forgive me an aphorism, that we live not in the Age of Reason, as so many proclaim, but in that of Ignorance; for there is nothing reason so readily proclaims to the attentive mind as the extent of our ignorance. It transforms what were once mysteries, for ever inaccessible to human comprehension, into merely phenomena we have not yet explained, and thereby at once increases what we know and what we do not. Do you see?”

“Very astute, I am sure.”

“Yes. Well. If you are interested in natural philosophy, you should consider attending some of my evening lectures. Every Tuesday and Thursday at seven o’clock. All the most recent developments are explained.”

“I am an Edinburgh man. I am seldom in Glasgow, unfortunately; we came today only for your demonstration.”

“Oh, I see. I am flattered. I did not catch your name, sir.”

“No? Well, forgive me, I must have a word with my man Blegg over there. Do excuse me.”

Blegg cut a slight figure in comparison to his master, and at that master’s approach he was already sinking his head in obsequious expectation of instruction.

“Do you see the man beside the pile, Blegg? His name is Edward Carlyle. We require him, and his services, so you get yourself over
there and give him my compliments. Convey my admiration of his work, and ask whether he would hear a proposal I have for him. One that could be of the utmost mutual benefit. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Blegg dipped his head once more, his hands clasped as if in submissive prayer.

“And make some enquiries. We will be requiring rooms for the night. It is too late to return to Edinburgh now.”

Blegg hesitated, unsure whether further commands would be forthcoming.

“Be about it, then,” his employer snapped.

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

And Blegg scampered away to deliver the message.

The castle had colonised its craggy perch over centuries, embracing the contours of the rock with a network of angular walls, yards and barracks and gun platforms. Spilling eastwards from it, encrusting the long ridge that trailed down to the royal palace, was the Old Town of Edinburgh. There—packed inside the strict confines once set by the city’s defensive wall—soaring tenements vied for space, crowding one another, making labyrinths of the narrow spaces they enclosed. It was an aged place; not designed but accreted over centuries. Thickened and tangled by the passage of years.

A multitude of gloomy and overshadowed alleyways projected, like ribs, from the great street running down the spine of the ridge. They descended into the shallow valleys to north and south, sinking away from the cleansing breezes. Through these closes and wynds the people of this ancient Edinburgh moved, and in them they lived. And died.

Down there, where one of those closes gave out on to the Cowgate, a low and grimy thoroughfare, dawn revealed a dead man curled in the doorway of a shuttered whisky shop, his blood crusted in black profusion upon his clothes and on the cobblestones around him. Looking like something forgotten, or spent and casually discarded, by the departing night.

“Who is he?” asked Adam Quire, staring down at the corpse with a faint wince of distaste.

It was not the sight of it that disturbed him, but the smell. The body stank of sour whisky and blood, and the man had soiled himself in the last moments of his life. There was a less easily identifiable dank, musty strand to the symphony, too. It all made for a noisome aura that discomfited Quire, particularly since the stale flavours of last night still lingered rather queasily in his own mouth: all the beer he had drunk and the smoke-thick air he had breathed.

“No name for him, Sergeant,” said the young nightwatchman at his side. Lauder, but Quire was unsure of his forename; Gordon, perhaps.

“Who found him?”

“One of the scavengers. Grant Carstairs.”

“I know him. Shake?”

“Aye. Some folk call him that. Got a bit of the palsy.”

Quire kneeled at the side of the body, his knee slipping into a tiny, cold puddle couched in the crease between two cobblestones. He grimaced as the chill water soaked through his trousers.

“Nothing left of his throat,” Lauder said, gesturing with the extinguished lantern still clasped in his right hand. “Look at that. What a mess.”

Quire could see well enough. A ragged hole in the front of the dead man’s neck exposed gristle and meat. One sleeve of his jacket was torn to shreds, as was the arm beneath. Material and flesh were barely distinguishable in the morning gloom. Furrows had been gouged in his scalp, too, the skin torn; one ear was no more than a tattered rag.

“I’ve not seen the like,” the watchman murmured.

Quire had—and much worse—but not for a long time, and not outside the confines of a battlefield. He thought he heard as much wonder as horror in Lauder’s voice. The man was young, after all; not long employed. Perhaps he had never seen at such close quarters what havoc could be wrought upon the human body. He
looked a little pale, though it might be but the watery light of the winter morning making him appear so.

“He’d not have died quietly,” Quire said, preoccupied now by the uncharitable fear that Lauder might empty his stomach, or faint, or otherwise complicate an already unpleasant situation.

He looked east and west along the Cowgate, then northwards up the gloomy length of Borthwick’s Close. The Old Town’s inhabitants were stirring from their dark tenements and gathering in silent huddles, distracted from the start of the day’s business by this gruesome spectacle.

“I’ll get some more men down here to help you,” Quire muttered to Lauder. “Once they’re here, you can start asking questions. See who heard what, and if anyone can put a name on him.”

The younger man’s scepticism was evident.

“Probably Irish. Cut loose once the canal was dug. Maybe he’s working on that new bridge.”

It was a lazy but not entirely foolish suggestion. The Old Town was full of Irish labourers bereft of labour, and Highlanders bereft of their high lands for that matter, all of them washed up here by the tides of ill fortune and poverty. More than a few had indeed found some escape from their poverty and lassitude in the building of the huge new bridge being thrown over the Cowgate, and to be named in honour of the king, George the Fourth.

But: “No,” Quire said. “He’s no navvy or builder.”

He lifted the man’s arm, turning it against the dead stiffness of the muscles to expose his palm.

“See his hand? No rougher than your own. He’s not been digging earth or breaking rock. And his clothes… might not have been a rich man, but he’s no pauper either. He’ll go in a pauper’s grave, though, if we can’t find him a name and a family. Don’t want that, if we can help it. It’s no way for a man to end his days.”

The dead man’s jacket had fallen open a little as Quire moved his arm. A flap of material there caught his eye now, and he reached gingerly in, felt the loose ends of torn stitching. He had to
bend his weaker left hand at a sharp angle to do so, and felt a twinge of stiff pain in his forearm. His old wounds misliked the cold.

“Did you find anything in his pockets?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Lauder grunted.

“Did you ask Shake if there was anything?”

Lauder shrugged, his cape shifting heavily. Standing watch over a corpse, on a cold dawn at the end of a long night, in the Cowgate where the city’s police had no surfeit of friends… these were not the ingredients of contentment. At the best of times, few of Quire’s colleagues—the miserably paid nightwatchmen perhaps least of all—shared his notions of justice and dignity for the dead. Those things could be hard to find in the Old Town, even for the living. Easier not to try, sometimes.

“Just wait here until I get you some help,” Quire said as he rose to his feet. “It’ll not be long.”

He began to ascend the stinking ravine of Borthwick’s Close, pushing through the knot of onlookers that had gathered a short way up the alley.

“Anyone know him?” he asked as he went, but no one replied. They averted their eyes, on the whole. Only a child, holding the rough linen of his mother’s skirt with one tight hand, yesterday’s dirt still smudged over his cheeks, met Quire’s gaze fully. The boy parted his lips in an unappealing grin, and sucked air in through the corners of his mouth. It was an idiot sort of sound.

Quire was jostled as he made his way through the crowd, but no more than he would have expected. He was a big man, wide-shouldered and wide-chested, and he knew that his angular face, framed by dense, wiry hair, suggested ill humour more often than not. Though that appearance—enhanced by his grey greatcoat, the baton at his belt and the military boots he often wore out of ancient habit—deterred most troublemakers, no assembly in the Old Town was without one or two who thought themselves above such concerns. The place had a truculent state of mind.

Quire climbed up and up the close, careful on the rough and
uneven cobbles, passing dozens of small windows, only a few of them lit by oil or candle or fire. He heard someone above him, leaning out from the third or fourth storey, hawk and spit; but when he looked, there was no one to be seen, just the man-made cliff faces blocking out the sky. The close narrowed as it rose towards the High Street—if he had extended both arms, Quire could have encompassed its whole width—before burrowing through the overarching body of a tenement to disgorge him on to the Old Town’s great thoroughfare.

It was akin to emerging from the Stygian depths of some malodorous tunnel into another world: one filled with bustle and light and all the energy and breezes that the closes did not permit within their tight confines. Scores of people moved this way and that, avoiding the little mounds of horse dung that punctuated their paths, flowing around the hawkers and stall-holders readying their wares, dodging the carts and carriages that clattered up the cobble-clad road. The air shivered to a cacophony of trade and greeting and argument.

Quire advanced no more than a pace or three before a salesman sought to snare him.

“A tonic of universal efficacy, sir,” the man cried, with an excess of unsolicited enthusiasm. He swept up a small, neat glass bottle from his barrow and extended it towards Quire. “No affliction of the lung or liver can withstand its beneficial application.”

Quire paused, and examined the dress of the man who thus accosted him. A short stovepipe hat, a neat and clean waistcoat tightly buttoned over a paunch of some substance. The loose cuffs of an expensive shirt protruding from the jacket sleeves. Clearly the uniform of one who made a tolerable profit from the ill health and gullibility of others.

The bottle Quire was invited to examine held a pale liquid of yellowish hue.

“Looks like piss.”

“Oh no, sir. Not at all,” exclaimed the affronted hawker, peering with a disbelieving frown at the flask in his hand. “A miraculous elixir, rather.”

Quire leaned a touch closer, gave the tonic his full attention.

“Horse’s piss,” he concluded, and left the man, still protesting, in his wake.

The police house was very near, on the far side of the High Street at Old Stamp Office Close. Quire cut across the currents of humanity towards it. He refused a flyer advertising a course of phrenological lectures that someone tried to thrust into his hand; narrowly avoided a crushed toe as a handcart piled high with half-finished shoes ground past.

It was all a little too much for one who had already been awake for longer than he would have wished, and he entered the abode of Edinburgh’s city police with a certain relief.

The cells that packed the ground floor of the main police house were unusually quiet, even the three—the “dark” cells—reserved for the most troublesome, or troubled, guests. Perhaps the cold of the last few nights had discouraged those given to misbehaviour. The place still had its familiar stink, though: a unique medley that never seemed to change, no matter how its component parts might vary. Quire suspected it was founded on a fog of human sweat, piss and vomit that had settled into the walls. There were smaller watch-houses scattered around the city, but somehow none of them had acquired quite the depth of odour that attached itself to the Old Stamp Office Close building.