The Edinburgh Dead (14 page)

“All right, all right,” Emma interrupted. “You’ll only tell it wrong. Truth is, he talked all manner of silliness when he was in his cups, and I can’t see you making any more sense of it than I did, Mr. Quire.”

“I’ve nothing more profitable to do with my time,” Quire replied, to Emma’s evident disappointment.

“It’s your time to be wasting, I suppose,” she sniffed. “He was always on about how he’d got himself tangled up with bad folk. Evil, he called them. Never said who or why, before you ask. But he was frightened, right enough. Frightened of them, frightened of what they were doing and where it would all end, with him along for the ride.”

“Said it was the Devil’s work,” Cath observed from the bed.

“Maybe he did,” Emma continued. “Didn’t do much for his humour once he got out of it, though. Turned up here drunk as a lord, saying he was done with it all, never going back. You’d think that’d settle him some, but he was weeping like a bairn. Said they’d never let him go. He was scared as any man I’ve seen, right enough.”

“He never gave away any names?” asked Quire.

The mention of Devil’s work put him at once in mind of that strange symbol left hanging upon the door of his rooms by his uninvited visitor. The mere thought of it, and of the intrusion that it had accompanied, made him uneasy.

Emma shook her head.

“Never a name, not that I heard. Are you sure you’ll not take a dram?”

She carefully refilled her own cup as she asked the question. The death of one of her customers was not a matter to disturb the rhythms of her day.

“Let me have some of that, would you?” Cath asked, and Emma brought another teacup down from the sagging shelf upon which it rested.

Quire watched the two women sharing their whisky out into fine china. A strange, distorted mimicry of refinement. A habit that put a shape into their day just as the civil, sober ritual of tea drinking did for the kind of people who must have first owned those cups. Quire found that a melancholy thought, but it was a tangled kind of melancholy, for not so very long ago it had been him sharing the whisky with Cath, just as he had shared her bed.

“Have you not got your own rooms any more then, Cath?” Quire asked quietly.

“Roof’s leaking,” she said with a faint smile. “Emma here had a bed to spare.”

Quire nodded, and held her gaze for just a moment or two. Cath had been chief amongst those matters that had almost ended his career in the police before it was properly begun, for consorting with such as her carried the penalty of instant dismissal.
Superintendent Robinson had saved him from that consequence, and Quire was glad of it, but had never freed himself of regret at the loss of her companionship. His affection for her—if that was all it could be called—had proved a stubborn thing. He had thought the passage of time might diminish it. Standing there, watching her, he learned anew just how resilient it was.

“We’re wasting our time,” Quire observed.

Sergeant Jack Rutherford appeared entirely unperturbed by Quire’s doubts. He appeared, in fact, in thoroughly equable mood.

“He’ll turn up sooner or later. I’ve got it on good authority.”

“I mean we’re wasting our time chasing the man in the first place.”

“The city fathers put coin in my pocket every week for the very purpose of buying my time,” Rutherford said, peering into the bowl of his little pipe. “I’ve sold the stuff already, so I’m not bothered how they decide I should occupy it. Pay’s the same.”

“I’d want paying better, myself, if I was selling my time just for the wasting. I’d rather be doing what needs doing.”

“That’s where you go wrong you see, Adam,” Rutherford said with a wry smile. “The thing is to be doing what you’re
told
to do, not what
needs
doing. That way lies a peaceful life, and a decent pension.”

He tapped his pipe gently against the stonework of the bridge. Spent tobacco spilled out and fell in a scattering cloud about their feet. The two of them were leaning on the parapet of a low, single-span viaduct across the Leith Water. The river rushed along beneath them, in eager haste to reach the sea. Or in haste, perhaps, to escape the clutches of the mills and distilleries clustered along its banks, a
great congregation of brick and stone behemoths gathered to drink deep of its sustaining flow. So close and steeply did some of the buildings press that they made a dark and sheer-sided ravine for the river.

From their vantage point midway across the bridge, Quire and Rutherford could see into the yard of one of the smaller distilleries, a rather gloomy little square bounded by featureless brick walls. There were any number of empty barrels stacked up down there, and now and again booted and aproned workmen emerged from the enormous doors—like those of a huge barn—that stood ajar, but in the main nothing was happening, as it had been for close to an hour.

“You’re the one made the Resurrection Men so popular in the first place, so why you’re complaining now, I don’t know,” Rutherford said. “We’re not to let a single one of them rest easy till the Duddingston murderer’s found, that’s the word from on high.”

“Aye, except I’ve already told them where to look. Merry Andrew’s nothing to do with it. I was there, and it wasn’t him waving a shovel around at Duddingston.”

“The way I heard it, looking where you told them didn’t get them anywhere. So every other body-snatching crew gets the benefit of our attention, and no doubt we’ll be turning up stones and prodding the worms beneath until the end of our days. Or until someone more important than us loses interest.”

“It wasn’t normal, what happened that night. When did any body snatcher kill a man, before Duddingston? Half of them are students, for God’s sake. They’d piss themselves at a harsh word.”

“Maybe,” Rutherford nodded, “but there’s nothing soft about Andrew Merrilees and his lads. There’re students and then there’s them that make a business of the trade. That’s two whole different kettles of fish, as you well know.”

“Aye. I’m not saying he’s not deserving of a bit of our attention. Just that he’s not the man I’m after.”

“The man we’re all after, Quire. That’ll be what you mean?”

“Aye. Aye.”

“Nights are drawing out,” Rutherford said companionably. “Merrilees and his like should’ve hung up the tools of their trade for the summer by now. Too much by way of light. Word is he’s short of coin, though. Needing to do the work out of season.”

Quire stared down at the racing current below. The Water of Leith was nowhere very deep, not until it got down almost to its mouth on the Firth of Forth, and he could see the rocks of its bed quite clearly. There were a few traces of green weed streaming out from them like storm-stretched pennants. A pair of ducks were paddling furiously, making no progress upriver but holding station against the current. There must be some reason, Quire assumed, for their determined exertions, but he could not divine it.

The futility of his own assignment gnawed away at him. It was punishment, of a sort. He knew that well enough. Lieutenant Baird meant to grind his nose into the fact that it was not for him to choose who was pursued.

It galled Quire all the more that he was standing here on a bridge no more than a few minutes’ walk from Ruthven’s house. The New Town had spread so far in recent years that its north-western boundaries ran right down to the Leith Water. The banks of the river itself, though, remained a noisy, cantankerous bastion of industry; the workers laboured there while the owners enjoyed their luxurious new accommodations within earshot and eyesight.

To think of Ruthven and Blegg somewhere up there, savouring the comforts of their graceful home, left Quire thoroughly sour. There was unfinished business between them. To judge by the events at Duddingston, and what Emma Slight had told him of Carlyle’s last weeks, it might be brutal work.

“That’s him there,” Rutherford said in a calm and conversational tone. “Merry Andrew.”

The two of them, in almost perfect synchrony, lifted their elbows from the bridge’s parapet and stood straight.

“Which one?” Quire asked.

“The one on the wagon. Walks like a puppet on sticks. You’ll see when he gets down.”

The cart had turned into the yard from the lane that ran along the landward side of the chain of warehouses and workshops. The man sitting atop it, tugging at the reins of a big dray horse, was tall and thin and angular. Like a scarecrow. He even had unruly little clumps of hair sticking out from under his soft cloth hat, like so much brown straw. And when he dismounted, and led the horse over to a water trough, he did indeed walk like a puppet on sticks. He was all stiffness and jerks, as if his limbs had a life of their own.

“Huh,” Quire grunted in amusement.

“Aye, he’s a funny-looking fellow,” Rutherford agreed, “but he’s a mean and vicious bastard too, so watch yourself.”

“Shall we go down and introduce ourselves, then?”

“Give it a minute. We’ll get two of them if we employ a wee bit patience.”

Quire suppressed his frustration. To be moving, in whatever cause, would be better than all this waiting. But this was Rutherford’s hunt, not his.

“There you are,” Rutherford murmured soon enough. “Spune.”

A man in a tight leather cap, a much less remarkable figure than Merry Andrew, had come out from the dark maw of the distillery. He had a close-cropped beard and a red sheen to his features.

“That’s who Merry Andrew’s come to fetch,” Rutherford said. “Never lifts a spade or digs a grave without Spune on his right hand. Shall we meet them on their way out, then?”

Quire fell in behind as Rutherford led the way off the bridge. He spared a last glance towards the yard. Spune walked lazily up to Merrilees, and they exchanged some casual greeting in the manner of men long and well acquainted. A little of Quire’s slumbering enthusiasm bestirred itself. It might not advance his own particular concerns, but there was no harm in giving some of Edinburgh’s more notorious Resurrection Men a fright. And those engaged in the odious trade were a tight-knit community; it might just be that Merrilees would know something about Duddingston, if it could be prised out of him.

From the bridge, the narrow lane bent back sharply to parallel the Water of Leith’s curving course, itself overshadowed by looming brick cathedrals of industry just as the river was. As it turned out, Merry Andrew and Spune had spent little time on pleasantries, for the big black horse pulled the cart out from the distillery gateway just as Quire and Rutherford drew near. The horse was a dull-looking beast, but Merry Andrew was a good deal more alert to his surroundings. He looked up and down the lane as they bumped out on to the cobbled roadway, and then glanced sharply back to stare directly at Sergeant Rutherford.

“He knows me!” Rutherford called to Quire, and broke into a run.

Quire sprinted forward himself, and was amazed and not a little annoyed to see Merrilees flailing away at the horse’s rump, goading it into life. The animal, it transpired, had a better turn of pace than its appearance might have suggested, for it leaped away and swept the wagon off, thumping and banging over the uneven cobblestones.

There were plenty of folk in the lane—millworkers, barrowmen pushing along handcarts piled with bloated sacks and rolls of cloth—but the spectacle and cacophony of a big horse hauling a cart at such speed cleared a path quickly enough. People pressed themselves against the walls as the wagon thundered past with Quire and Rutherford in furious pursuit.

Merry Andrew was all elbows and wild gesture as he beat at the horse, twisting now and again to look back over his shoulder. He and Spune were bouncing violently on their seat, and Spune at least seemed less than happy with the situation, for he clung with both hands to the bench and hunched down.

The lane sloped gently up, and the river bent away in a sharp loop, a cluster of grim-looking manufactories crowding the triangle of land thus enclosed. There was another bridge up ahead, Quire knew, and beyond that only countryside and the long, straight road out to Queensferry on the distant shore of the Forth estuary. Whatever Rutherford’s thoughts on the matter, he reckoned he was not
paid nearly enough to be chasing a cart on foot all the way out of the city, and he redoubled his efforts, racing over the cobblestones with a certain sense of exhilaration.

Jack Rutherford evidently shared the sentiment, for he put in a burst of speed and got himself up to the back end of the cart, seizing hold of the rocking frame.

“Merrilees, you daft beggar…” Quire heard his fellow sergeant shouting, and then Rutherford fell and Quire was leaping over him.

He glanced back—Rutherford was sitting on his backside, rubbing his arm but wearing a look that said that his pride had taken the worse injury—and then threw himself onward.

The bridge was up ahead, much higher and broader than the one Quire and Rutherford had kept watch from. The cart was heaving up and down and from side to side as it approached. Coming to a quick calculation of where his best interest lay, Spune suddenly jumped from his seat and rolled inelegantly to a halt in a heap up against the low wall bounding the lane. Quire ran past him, interested only in the chief of this particular gang. If Baird would not let him pursue Ruthven and Blegg, and wanted him chasing Merry Andrew instead, that was what he would get, and let him try to complain about Quire’s inability to take instruction then.