The Edinburgh Dead (11 page)

Quire lay on his back, sucking in the frosted air, blowing out grateful fogs of breath. The stars above glimmered. Moment by
moment his breathing slowed, and he mastered the shock of fear. He got on to his hands and knees, every movement tentative, measured, and reclaimed the gun.

He looked back into the dark maw opened up in the ice. Little tremulous waves in the water’s surface caught tiny glints of moonlight. There were no hands reaching for the jagged edges of the hole. No sign at all of the grave robber.

Quire did not get to his feet. He did not trust the ice. Instead he crawled like a child, testing each placement of hand and knee before allowing his weight to fall through the limb, dragging the musket along as he went. His feet were numb and heavy.

Only when he had put a slow twenty yards between him and the broken ice did he rise cautiously, holding the Brown Bess out horizontally as he did so in the hope it might wedge itself across any gap should the ice break. He was starting to shiver.

He stood and looked out over the dark plain of the loch. All was still and quiet, as if nothing had happened, as if there were only the ice and the water beneath it and the world was just as it had always been. Quire blew into his left hand, the hot breath stinging his gelid skin.

Then there was a crunching thud from far across the loch. Quire squinted into the night, and saw nothing. It came again, a strangely muffled, dull sound. Like someone beating at a distant door. At the dimmest, furthest extent of his vision, he saw a patch of ice burst up, close to the southern shore. Numb—his body from the cold, his mind from disbelief—he watched the surface of the loch break apart from beneath and a dark form rise from it and force its way towards the land. He could hear quite clearly the ice splintering and shattering as the figure made its lurching retreat into the darkness.

After a moment or two the sound died away, and Quire could see nothing more. He stared out into the night for a little while longer, then turned back towards Duddingston village and began to walk, shaking.

“Of course I’m blamed for it. I was there.”

Quire was bent over his tankard, clutching it with both hands, elbows resting on the table. He peered down into the brown, foamy liquid as if hoping the mere sight of it might ease his troubles. But he knew that only the drinking of it would do that, and only for a few hours. Much as he craved that stultifying release, he had learned—belatedly, but better so than never—how illusory such respite was.

Wilson Dunbar had already drunk enough to liven up his opinions of anyone’s troubles.

“Well maybe if there’d been more than just you,” Quire’s stocky companion exclaimed, “if they’d listened to you in the first place, it’d all have fallen out differently. Maybe the man’d still be sucking air if… ach, but it’s never the officers pay the price, is it?”

“I’m an officer now,” Quire muttered. “Sergeant, anyway.”

“Aye, true enough. The damnedest thing, for those of us as’ve known you a while, but not to my point. It’s a matter of blame: those it sticks to, those it don’t. Your Lieutenant Baird—he’s one it don’t. Me and you, we’re ones it does. Nothing fair about it.”

“It’s fair,” grunted Quire. “The man was happy in his beer until I dragged him out of the Sheep Heid. To get his own head stoved in. First time I’ve seen a man killed like that, in front of me, since… since a long time.”

Dunbar snorted. He had always been a disputatious sort, even when in uniform. Long retirement from the soldier’s life had not changed that, and nothing brought it more nimbly to the surface than drink. Not that it needed bringing far.

“You know fine death doesn’t need your help or anyone else’s when it’s set its eye on someone,” Dunbar said, flourishing his own near-empty tankard. “Comes when it likes.”

“Maybe it does. That bastard on the ice thought to visit it upon me, as well, and that makes it personal to my way of thinking. I’ll have him. I’ll have all of them.”

Calder’s tavern was crowded, as it most often was of an evening. It did not take many bodies to make it so, for it had a low ceiling of plaster and beams, and a long-striding man might spring across its breadth in a half-dozen paces. Even so, it packed in a rare variety of customer. Quire might be the only policeman there—and that was a part of its appeal to him—but there were soldiers and brewers, glass-blowers and grocers, clerks and lamplighters. Sometimes footmen and stable hands from the nearby palace itself, though they kept to themselves as often as not, perhaps fearful of leaking secrets the Keeper of Holyroodhouse would rather stayed behind its grand walls.

Tonight, the mood—save in the corner Quire had made his own—was boisterous. A soldier was rattling out a hectic beat on a table with drumsticks. A little group of women who sold candles on the Canongate were engaged in good-natured argument over who had done the most business, and should therefore be buying the drinks. A solitary old man was complaining to no one but himself about the bad tobacco that would not hold a light in his pipe.

“And those fine gents buying the dead off the bastard body snatchers,” Dunbar cried. “There’s more could shoulder a bit of that blame you’re cuddling. How many times is it the corpse of a rich man that ends on the cutting slab, eh? If it’s a matter of such importance, did you ever see one o’ them teachers themselves give over their carcass to the knife once they were dead and gone? Or their dead father or mother or brother? You did not. Explain me that.

“No, don’t waste your time, I’ll do it for you: it’s the poor and the nameless get opened up for those precious little students to leer at, just like it’s the poor and the nameless get to bleed when there’s a battle to be fought. The French had it right, for a while at least: give us nameless folk a few guillotines and a wee revolution, see what a difference that’d make. Let others do the bleeding for a bit.”

None of which Quire would dispute, but tonight he could not share in Dunbar’s fervour. He watched Mrs. Calder pushing her way through the throng of customers. She was not only proprietor of his preferred drinking den, but his landlady, and a solicitous one at that. She and her serving girls saw to the cleaning of his rooms a few floors above, the washing of his clothes, and now and again to his feeding. He had earned her kind regard, along with a handsome reduction in his rent, some time ago, when he dissuaded—forcefully—some disreputable fellows from taking her husband’s debts out of his hide. Mr. Calder had been carried off by a fever not long after, but his widow’s affection for Quire persisted, undimmed.

“You never bled yourself, as I recall,” Quire muttered to Dunbar. “Impervious Dunbar, come through all the wars with nary a scratch.”

“Thank Christ. Though I doubt he was watching.”

“I shot the man who killed him,” mused Quire. “Put a ball in his chest from no more than twenty paces.” He tapped hard at his own sternum for emphasis. “Didn’t much bother him. How does that happen? When did you ever see a man take a shot from a Bess in the chest and not blink at it?”

“Well, not ever,” conceded Dunbar. “But I’ve seen men lose their arm to a cannon shot and not know it was gone till I told them. And there was that Spaniard you gutted at Talavera…”

Quire winced.

“Aye, but that was then. It’s a different life I’m supposed to be living now. I’m a different man.”

“Trying to be a different man, maybe, but you’ve always had a
rare talent for the violence, and it a rare longing for you. The two of you’ve never been long parted.”

Quire cracked his mug down on the table, splashing a little of the beer out over the rim. He licked it from the back of his hand as he glared at Dunbar.

“Do you not think a friend might try to offer some comfort?” he growled. “And if you say that’s what you’re doing, I’ll say you don’t know comfort from your arse.”

“Truth’s a better remedy for any ill than comfort,” Dunbar said with a flutter of pomposity.

“That’s a whole stream of piss, wherever you heard it.”

“Aye, I suppose it is right enough. But this different man you’re trying to be still keeps guns and a sword under his bed, doesn’t he? You’ve no more left the past than it’s left you.”

“Are you saying you’ve no loot from Spain hidden away somewhere? They’re worth a fair few shillings, those guns. And that sword’s a good one. Might need the money one day.”

“Aye, right. Listen, a man needs ballast in his life, Adam, if he’s to hold a true course. Not trophies from old battles; not beer even, though it pains me to say it. Ballast. Bit of weight in the hold to keep from turning over, and that you’ll only get from others, not yourself. Family, friends, children. God knows, there’s nothing like children when it comes to ballast, take it from me. Children and a wife.”

“Christ, Dunbar,” Quire muttered.

“Aye,” Dunbar said, suddenly quiet. Suddenly knowing he had strayed into territory where truth walked hand in hand with hurt. “Aye, well.”

They lapsed into silence, each communing with his own thoughts. Quire’s spiralled in tight, beer-guided circles, seeming to be revelatory from moment to moment, yet somehow yielding nothing by way of lasting insight or conclusion.

At length, Dunbar pushed back his chair and took hold of Quire’s mug as well as his own. Quire had not emptied it, but he raised no protest.

“I’ll buy you some more comfort, then,” Dunbar said. “That I can do.”

He sank into the crowd, and Quire was left to ponder the mysteries of the tabletop. And to pick away at the knot of his problems. Baird had kept him well away from the aftermath of the events at Duddingston. Well away, and well aware of where Baird thought responsibility for the disaster lay. Quire could have done with the protective arm of James Robinson about his shoulders, but the superintendent was still sick, confined to his quarters atop the police house with none but wife and the gout for company.

Quire had told them to go after the gravedigger—Davey Muir, it turned out his name was—but the youth was, as yet, nowhere to be found. He had told them Blegg’s name, too, and where to find him, but that had proved equally fruitless. The men dispatched to Melville Street had been sent on their way in no uncertain terms by John Ruthven, who swore upon God’s judgement that he could vouch for Blegg’s whereabouts on the night in question. And a man such as Ruthven was not to be gainsaid by a mere sergeant of police, not without the weight of some evidence or incontrovertible testimony behind him; such testimony could only come from Davey Muir, in all likelihood, and Quire doubted the boy would be seen in these parts again.

But Quire did not feel in need of more evidence, or testimony, to render his own judgement. He had no name for the ponderous hulk of a man he had shot, nor an explanation for the failure of musket ball and icy loch alike to kill him; but he was as sure as he could be, allowing for the darkness of the night and the rapidity of events, that it had been Blegg disappearing over the kirkyard wall in Duddingston, and away into the night. If he was right in that, Ruthven had lied. And that made him, at the very least, accomplice to grave robbing and murder.

“I saw Catherine Heron in the street the other day,” Dunbar said, setting a pair of brimming tankards down on the table.

“Did you?”

Quire was taken aback by the unexpected turn in the conversation.

“She’s a good lass, for what she is,” Dunbar observed as he sat himself down.

“She is,” Quire agreed. “Have you a point beyond the flattery of someone who’s not here to listen?”

“Ballast, that’s my point. For a while, I thought the two of you might be going to set each other on an even keel.”

“And I thought you’d decided to keep quiet on the subject of ballast for tonight. You know fine well why that broke off. I’d not have my work now if I’d kept on down that path.”

Dunbar shrugged, and made a show of looking around the smoky tavern.

“Just a thought,” he said lightly. “Never you mind it. How about this, then: I’ll educate you in the fine art of making kites. I’ve been fashioning a pair for my boys, and you’d not credit the time it takes to do the thing right.”

Quire listened patiently to Dunbar’s disquisition on the subject. He noted—not for the first time—the miraculous transformation that marriage and fatherhood and the passage of years had worked upon his friend, turning as capable and willing a soldier as Quire had ever known into a model of domestic affection. For all his truculent instincts, Dunbar carried within him a kernel of peace that Quire could only envy. He had nothing in his own life to which he could hold quite so firm, save perhaps his work, and his doing of it.

The night subsided into gentle sloth as Dunbar’s company worked its gradual charm. Inconsequential talk and the steady flow of beer put just enough of a distance between Quire and his worries to soften them, and blur their outline.

The two men were the last to depart from the tavern. Mrs. Calder permitted Quire a latitude few other of her customers could hope for, so they finished their last tankards at leisurely pace, with empty tables about them. In the close outside, the two of them paused, looking up at the cloud-flattened sky.

“I could see you home, if you like,” Quire said, the words rumpled by drink.

“You’re hardly fit to find your own home, for all that it’s just up the stair,” Dunbar snorted.