The Edinburgh Dead (24 page)

And sound. So faint, so tenuous, that he had to hold his breath to track it. In the most distant corner, where the darkness was complete and impenetrable. Cloth brushing against flagstones. Something—fingernails?—scratching on wood.

Quire tugged his pistol out from the deep pocket inside his coat. Its weight in his hand was a comfort of sorts, but he sincerely hoped it would not be needed. The noise would dispel any last hope of concealment, and he had brought only enough powder and balls for three shots. He had come meaning only to look, not to fight.

He peered into the furthest corner of the shed. There was something there, something moving. Something or someone. But he could not see anything, only hear the telltale frictional scrapings.

Quire’s legs wanted to run, carry him out into the fields and away from this strangely desolate and dark farm. The unconscious man at his feet might wake at any moment; some other curious guard might emerge from the farmhouse. But he had not yet seen anything to explain Durand’s fear, or the importance of this place.

Though there was a hollow foreboding taking root in his guts, Quire set himself on his haunches and whispered: “Who’s there?”

The response was immediate. A thrashing about in the darkness. Limbs battering against walls or furniture. Not a word,
though. Nothing to say if it was man or beast that lurked there. Quire could hear objects falling to the ground, breaking.

He tightened his grip on his pistol and cursed his misfortune. Or ill judgement, perhaps. It hardly mattered now which it was. He turned his back on the tumult in the shadows, his spine tingling with apprehension at the act, and peered out between the doors of the shed, angling his head to get a narrow view of the door to the farmhouse. Still open, still spilling light.

He heard wood cracking, splintering in the darkness behind him. His heart hammered. He looked back, blindly, into the depths of the cowshed. The frenzied thrashing grew louder still.

He slipped out of the shed and settled the bar down across its pegs on the door. He reached for the chain, at his feet, and found it tangled. He spent a precious moment or two trying to get it back in its place, but heard something overturned, a terrible crashing, from within; no longer in that far corner of the shed, he thought, but closer to the door. Time, he judged, was against him.

He let the chain fall and went on his toes—quickly, but quiet—to the corner of the shed and around into the deeper moon shadows. There was a crude outhouse of some sort leaning against the stone wall, with a sloping roof like a chicken coop. Quire brushed against it as he passed, and there was an eruption of excitement within. He recoiled from it, stifling a cry of alarm in his throat. This noise he could decipher more easily than the chaotic racket that still emanated from the main shed; this time, he could hear blunt claws scrabbling against the wooden planks. His nostrils caught the sharp, rotten stink of dog. Fear took hold of him. Simple, deep fear.

He ran, no longer caring about concealment. He pounded across the yard, the tail of his long coat flapping behind him, pistol still clutched in one hand. The light falling from the open farmhouse door bathed him, then he was beyond it and into the moon-softened darkness again.

Behind him he heard the doors of the cowshed shaking and groaning beneath sudden assault. He did not look back, not even
when he heard the beam that held them shut fracture, the deep, booming breaking of its back unmistakable.

He ran straight down the curving rough track. No time now for retracing the steps of his more cautious approach across the fields. The surface was a hopeless mess of humps and hollows, ruts and stones, that set him stumbling and made his flight ever wilder. The path fell in amongst trees, and the lantern of the moon’s face was taken from him. His eyes failed him. He almost fell, but staggered instead to lean against the trunk of a birch. He was panting, as much out of the anxious urgency of the moment as his exertions.

He looked back the way he had come. The steading was a black and menacing outline against the moon now, the line of smoke from the chimney laying a crack across that pale orb. More troubling was the heavy sound of footsteps. They were drawing near. Quire peered into the gloom.

It was a lone man, and not a large one at that, coming steadily down the track. He ran with his arms hanging loosely down at his sides. Trailing from one of them was a cord or rope of some sort, and still bouncing along at its end the iron ring by which it must have been secured to the wall. Quire could not see his face.

“Hold up, there,” he shouted, stepping into the centre of the track. “Are you a prisoner? I’m with the police.”

The approaching figure made no reply, just came jogging on, into the darkness cast by the trees crowding in on either side.

“Can you not talk?” Quire demanded uneasily, lifting his pistol.

Without breaking stride, the lean, rangy man swept up one arm and brought the iron ring roped to it lashing round in a wide curve towards Quire’s head.

“Jesus Christ,” Quire exclaimed.

He ducked, and the ring went hissing over his head. He leaped to one side as his assailant rushed at him, but his ankle turned on the lip of a rut in the track, and he fell to one knee. Before he could rise, there was a hand on the lapel of his coat, and another scrabbling at his belt.

Quire discharged the pistol into the man’s stomach. The flame
and noise and smoke erupted between them, blinding him, burning up into his nose. The shot had no effect upon its target.

The man got a hold on his belt, and in the space of a single heartbeat Quire was off the ground. He was taller and broader than his opponent by some way, yet he was lifted bodily into the air. He tried to club the man in the side of the head, but could not land a sure enough strike. And then the man threw him.

Branches slashed at Quire’s face. He hit a tree trunk with his hip. It spun him round and he fell head first amongst bushes. The pistol slipped from his grasp. Dazed, he rolled on to all fours and began scrambling through the undergrowth. He could see almost nothing in the deep shadow beneath the canopy, in the thick scrub. But he struggled forward, stems and thorns scraping his face and arms, driven on by the sound of crashing pursuit behind him.

He forced himself up on to his feet and blundered ahead, beating away saplings in his path. As he went, he took his baton from his belt; used it to flail at the vegetation before him. There was that emptiness in him now which he had not felt with such clarity for years; the dread simplicity of being in the presence of imminent death. As it had always done, it lent strength to his limbs.

He burst out from the copse and into the moonlight once more. His feet went from under him and he fell on his side into a ditch running along the edge of the field. It was clogged up with dead wood and fallen branches, but there was a foot or more of water in it too, and he sucked some of that into his lungs before he could get his head up.

The moon was abruptly obscured, and a great weight landed on Quire’s back, punching him down into the bottom of the ditch. He rolled over, spitting filthy water, flailing for a hold to pull himself up. Brittle wood broke beneath his grasp. Hands pressed down on his chest, forcing his head underwater. He blinked as he went under, caught a glimpse of a face above him, one side of it gilded by the moon. It was Davey Muir, the gravedigger he had seen with Blegg at the Dancing School.

Muir got a hold of Quire’s throat, and the fingers were like steel
bands. Spots of colour flared inside Quire’s eyelids. Water was in his nose. He clubbed with his baton at the arms holding him down, but it made no impression. The boy had an impossible strength. It was as if he was made of stone.

Quire’s body was howling for air. He let his baton fall, and instead took hold of Davey’s left hand; broke the third and fourth fingers backwards. It did not seem to bother Davey, but it did weaken his grip a fraction. Just enough. Quire managed to force that crippled hand away from his throat. He got his feet into Davey’s stomach and kicked out with all the desperate strength he could summon. It tore Davey free, and Quire burst up out of the water, roaring in fear and fury. And pain, for those fingers ripping away from his neck had felt as if they were taking his windpipe with them.

Quire got to his feet. His coat was as heavy as lead, soaked through. Water poured from it. He spat and sputtered. Davey was rising in front of him, the iron ring on its rope still hanging from his wrist like a manacle.

Quire fumbled about at his feet and dragged up a length of knotted branch. He swung it at Davey’s head. The gravedigger got an arm up, and the branch broke in two across his elbow, leaving Quire with just the stub of it.

Davey surged forward, piling up the filthy ditchwater in front of his pumping legs. Quire threw himself to one side, sprawling on the bank amidst a fringe of rushes and rotting logs. He tried to push himself, backwards, up and out into the field beyond, but the soft earth gave beneath his hands and heels and sucked him back down. Davey loomed over him, the light of the moon spilling over his shoulders, and flailed at him with the rope-tethered ring. It thudded into the ground by Quire’s head, spattering his cheek with wet mud.

Quire rose, sheer terror for once giving his left arm the strength to do what was needful. He threw himself inside the reach of the descending circlet of iron, and stabbed Davey in the eye with the broken stump of wood, leaving it planted there in the socket.

There should have been a scream. Writhing; panic; something. Davey simply faltered for a moment, and pawed rather ineffectually at the shaft of wood lodged in his skull. Quire hooked a leg behind Davey’s knee and barged him over. The youth toppled back, half in and half out of the water. The moonlight fell full on his face then, and Quire could see the ruin he had wrought. No blood, though.

He saw, too, the remaining eye staring up at him, and that filled him with resurgent terror, for it was an empty, animal eye, devoid of human intelligence, or sentiment, or awareness. He felt no kinship of any kind with whatever lay behind it.

Already Davey was trying to rise, hampered only by the slippery mud and unstable banks of the ditch, not by his broken bones or destroyed eye.

“God damn you,” Quire cried, shaking.

He did not know why he shook, whether it was from fear or anger. He did not care; he only cared that Davey should stay down, that this should end. For the first time, he could see the youth’s hands clearly, and they were a mass of little dark scrawlings, far too small for Quire to make them out in the darkness. It was as if some fine-handed scribe had taken a quill to the boy’s skin. Not tattoos, as best he could tell, but what else they might be he had no idea.

As Davey rolled on to his front, the better to push himself to his feet, Quire put a foot into the back of his right knee and took hold of his ankle. He might have baulked at what came next, had he thought about it. But there was no time, no thought; there was only life and death, and the cold, old Quire who knew precisely what it took to stay on the right side of the divide.

He stamped down with his foot, twisted with his arms, spun himself and put his whole body weight into the task of breaking out Davey’s knee joint. He felt it go, heard it crackle and tear, but he didn’t release Davey’s leg. He lay across it, and kept pushing, kept trying to turn the ankle further, until he was certain that limb could not bear the gravedigger’s weight. And never would again, most likely.

Even that, even the destruction of his knee, brought no wail of protest from Davey. Even though his foot projected at an absurd angle, his lower leg limp and twisted and loose, even with all that, he simply tried to rise, tried to reach Quire.

“God damn you,” gasped Quire. “God damn you.”

He had to lean back against the far bank of the ditch then, for he was trembling so violently that he thought he might fall. As it was, he only vomited, heaving his guts up into the dark water at his feet, while Davey slipped slowly down the opposite bank, still staring at him with that single, unblinking eye.

Quire turned away and pulled himself laboriously up into the field. He got unsteadily to his feet and staggered away, quite numb. He did not know if anyone—or anything—else would come after him. If they did, he had nothing left with which to oppose them. All he knew was that he needed to put as much ground as he could between himself and the gravedigger, still stirring feebly in the drainage ditch. Get himself away from this foul farm and out from under the light of this leering moon.

Beneath the powerful mid-morning sun, Davey Muir’s hand clawed weakly at the soft earth. His fingers dug in, gouging out little ruts, piling up the grass between them. He had left a scrabbled trail of mud through the field, where he had hauled himself from the ditch, dragged his broken body another few dozen yards.

Blegg stood looking down at him. The lower half of Davey’s left leg was rotated a good quarter-circle further than it should have been, the knee joint ruptured. A stick protruded a few inches from the ruined socket of his right eye. He made no sound. Just reached, and took a feeble handful of soil and grass, pulled it towards him. Reached, and held, and pulled.

“Go back to the farm,” Blegg said without looking round to the man standing disconsolately behind him. “Get a fire started.”

The man did not move at once. He stared in dumb horror at the crippled form on the ground.

“Wallace, did you get deaf as well as drunk and stupid last night?” Blegg snapped.