He found Robert Christison there, and was struck by the fact that the incumbent of the University Chair in Medical Jurisprudence seemed more contentedly at home in this chamber of the dead than any man—whatever his calling—should naturally be.
The tiled walls and floor reflected and concentrated the cold smell of vinegar and soap. Cabinets were arrayed around the walls, like a mute audience for the acts performed on the four waist-high stone slabs that took up much of the room. A crude trolley stood to one side; a conveyance for the dead that now bore not a cadaver but a neat array of tools of evident craftsmanship and gruesome purpose. Long-bladed flat knives, saws, hooks and forceps and shears. The means by which the human form might be dismantled.
There was but a single corpse there, that same one that Quire had so recently attended upon in the Cowgate. Christison stood over it, absorbed in his exploration of its corporeal mysteries. He had the sort of well-proportioned good looks that spoke of a gentle and uneventful upbringing. Though only thirty years old, when he straightened and looked at Quire he did so with the confidence and instinctive authority of one in full command of his profession and surroundings.
“Sergeant Quire. I expected you rather sooner.”
“There were certain enquiries I had to make this morning, sir, after some new information came into my hands.” He could feel the weight of the silver box in his pocket as he spoke. “Your message did not find me at first.”
“I see. Well, our subject is in no haste to be elsewhere, I suppose. I do have one or two other matters to see to, though, so we must be brief.”
Christison wiped his hands on the upper part of his apron.
“Do you wish to examine the body for yourself?” he asked.
From where he stood, Quire could see more than enough. Skin parted and lifted back; pale bones couched in the meat; tubes and sacs. There was, in this considered dissection of what had not long ago been a living, breathing man, a cold calculation that Quire found disturbing despite its benign intent.
“No, sir.”
Christison nodded, matter-of-fact.
“Seen all you need, no doubt, when you found him in… where was he found?”
“Cowgate, sir. Foot of Borthwick’s Close.”
“Yes.”
Christison made to pull the sheet that covered the dead man’s legs up over his head, but paused, and glanced at Quire with raised eyebrows.
“Did you smell him, though?”
“Sir?”
Christison bent over the corpse, and gave a long sniff at the horrible wound in its neck. It was an unnerving sight and sound.
“The nose is an undervalued tool in scientific endeavour,” the professor said as he laid the sheet down, shrouding that dead face. “I’ve found it so in my study of poisons, in any case.”
“He was poisoned?” asked Quire.
“It would take a particularly confused or intemperate kind of murderer to poison a man and then decide to tear his throat out as well, don’t you think? Gilding the lily somewhat. No, his end was just as it appears. But there’s an odd smell about him. Faded now, but it was strong when he arrived here.”
Quire’s mind went back to the dawn in which he had first encountered the body, curled there in cold solitude. Stinking, he recalled.
“Yes, sir. I noticed the same thing. Some of it I could recognise. Not all.”
“Quite. Excrement and whisky. But something else too. Put me in mind of wet fur. An animal aroma.”
Christison took up a selection of the instruments resting on the trolley and carried them to a sink in the corner. He spoke to Quire over his shoulder as he washed them.
“There’s nothing more he has to tell me. Or, more accurately, nothing further of what he might say that I have the wit to hear. Every victim of fatal misadventure has a tale to recount—so I would contend, at any rate—but it is a new and imperfect science I pursue here. If it was a poisoning then I might be of more assistance, but this… a butcher could likely tell you as much as I.”
Quire nodded mutely, though Christison was not looking at him. He had not truly expected any great revelation; hoped for it, perhaps, but not expected. The savagery of the man’s death had seemed to call for the effort nevertheless, and for all Christison’s brisk manner, he was known to be one who treated all who came under his knife, whatever their former standing, with the same disinterested, precise attention.
“There’s a certain amount more we might deduce, I suppose,” the professor was saying. “His hands, for example: this was a man who worked with them, but not by way of heavy labour. A craftsman, perhaps. Something along those lines.”
Christison glanced at Quire, who was nodding.
“You had already arrived at a similar conclusion, I see,” Christison said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good. I am delighted that the application of logic and observation is not a habit entirely absent amongst the guardians of our safety. What else? I can tell you he was but a recent convert to the pleasures of the bottle, for all that its scent has attached itself to him. His stomach was awash with alcohol—whisky, I would say—when I opened it up, so there can be little doubt that he was intoxicated when he died, but his skin and his organs show none of the signs we might expect in an habitual drinker. Only recently fallen upon hard times, perhaps.”
Christison shook the excess water from his hands, then took up a towel and rubbed them vigorously.
“As to the cause of his death, I have nothing to offer beyond the obvious. In my experience, God did not see fit to furnish we humans with the natural equipment to inflict this kind of damage, and we must therefore suspect an animal of some sort. The marks on the arm in particular are clear. There are indentations on the cervical vertebrae that I would take for the results of teeth as well. Muscles, larynx, trachea all torn or displaced. Blood vessels severed. This was brutal, brutal work. Quite horrible. Quite remarkable.”
For a moment, his detachment faltered, as he cast a somewhat uneasy glance towards the covered body.
“I’d say it was the work of a wolf, if we’d not rid ourselves of such vermin two centuries gone. And they were never what you might call frequent in the streets of Edinburgh, to the best of my knowledge.”
“Not a blade, then, or an axe?”
“Certainly not. This unfortunate had his flesh torn, not cut. Do we have a wild beast of some sort loose in the Old Town, Sergeant?”
“I don’t know, sir. Of some sort, perhaps.”
“I’ve never seen a dog running about the streets that looked a likely perpetrator of a crime such as this.”
“No. Nor I,” Quire said quietly.
The professor carried the tools of his trade with all the care of a minister of the Kirk bearing the paraphernalia of communion. He laid them out once more on the trolley, and then began to place them one by one into a polished wooden box.
“Well, I do hope you resolve this conundrum,” he said. “I’d not want to be looking fearfully over my shoulder the next time I’m on the Old Town’s streets after dark. Though if a beast is responsible, perhaps we must call this poor man’s end misadventure rather than crime, eh? Not a matter for the police, some might say.”
“Some might,” shrugged Quire. “Still, he’s likely got a family, wondering what’s become of him. They deserve to know. And those still alive deserve protection, if it’s a thing that might happen again unless prevented. Seems to me that’s what the police are for.”
“Laudable,” Christison said. “Have you a name for him, then?”
“I’m not sure of that yet. It might be he’s John Ruthven. That was the matter that kept me busy earlier: consulting the roll of electors. There’s a John Ruthven at an address in the New Town.”
Christison cocked a sceptical eyebrow.
“I’d not have taken him for a householder with such a distinguished abode. Not with those hands, or with the apparel in which he was found.”
“No. Nor I.”
&nbs
p; “Well, let us hope the truth will out. It does on occasion.”
Christison closed the box in which his implements were now once more safely nestled. It clicked solidly shut and he turned a tiny golden catch to secure it.
“Tell me, did you see a porter loitering out there in the corridor when you arrived?” he asked Quire.
“No one, sir.”
Christison gave an irritated grunt.
“Would you care to walk with me, then? I must find one of my assistants to close this poor fellow up, make him fit for the grave. And a porter to take him on his way.”
Quire fell into step at the professor’s side. He was not sorry to leave that place.
“At least if I put a name and a family to him, he’ll not find his way on to a slab in a lecture theatre,” Quire said.
“My anatomical colleagues would have little use for such a damaged cadaver, in truth. But you would be surprised, I suspect, at how many families are willing to sell the deceased for that very purpose.”
“Not those as have a house in the New Town, though. Takes a deal more poverty than that, I should think.”
“No doubt.”
Christison glanced sideways at Quire, and read something there in his face.
“You disapprove, Sergeant. Surely you would rather the schools find their supplies through such legitimate channels, rather than line the pockets of the resurrectionists?”
“It’s none of it legitimate, to my way of thinking. Any man would hope for a bit more dignity in his ending,” Quire muttered, and at once regretted his gruff candour.
“Ah,” said Christison, pressing his box of instruments a little more firmly into the crook of his arm. “Well, we can agree upon the distastefulness of the enterprise, if not on the question of its necessity. We live in enlightened times, with the inquisitive intellect as our guide. That its discoveries come at a price is undeniable. Neither the city fathers nor my anatomical colleagues are quite so sentimental, however. To learn the secrets of the human body—and our city’s fine reputation was built in part upon the excavation of such secrets, let us not forget—a man must have a body in which to delve; anatomy can be taught without a cadaver, but it cannot be taught well. If we relied solely upon the produce of the gallows, our students would have the most meagre of fare, for all the sterling efforts of you and your fellow officers.”
Quire held his tongue. He liked Christison well enough and had no desire to dispute the practicalities of medical education with him. And there was, in any case, substance to what the man said: an understanding existed—never directly expressed, but present in the air like a flavour—that the police did not enquire too deeply into the means by which the dead reached Edinburgh’s famed, and lucrative, medical schools.
Whatever those means, Quire reflected silently, it was never the wealthy, or the powerful, who found themselves, after departing this life, displayed and dismembered for the edification of the students. Dignity in death was, like all else, unequally shared.
IV
New Town
The New Town was another place, another world; not wholly separate from the Old, connected to it by threads both tangible and intangible, but as unlike to it as an ordered farm of cultivated fields was to the wilderness that preceded it.
The Old Town had taken centuries to form itself, a haphazard growth thickening along the High Street, knotting itself into ever tighter and more crowded patterns. The New was the product of a singular and potent vision, and had sprung up in barely fifty years. It had been laid out in stern grids and graceful curves across the slopes and open fields to the north of the Old, beyond what had once been a thin, marshy loch and was now elegant gardens that divided the two Edinburghs one from the other.
For all its grandeur there were places in the New Town, Quire knew, where life’s cruder urgencies held sway, but today it presented its most gracious face to him. The broad streets were flanked by wide pavements. Some were lined with gaslights, standing to attention like an honour guard of thin, stiff soldiers. The terraces of noble houses ran on and on, most of them fronted by iron railings, all studded with great doorways. Fashionably dressed folk moved to and fro—the women in their capacious skirts, the men in their tall hats and high collars—with calm, refined purpose.
The frontage of Ruthven’s house in Melville Street was not so much pleasing as stern. A few steps led up to the imposing door. A boot scraper was set into the flagstones, and Quire regarded it for a moment or two, debating whether to yield to his instinct to use the thing, merely because it was there. He sniffed and instead gave the door knocker, a heavy ring of solid brass, a few firm raps.
As he stood there waiting upon the threshold, two ladies of evident means strolled by, arm in arm. They watched him as they went, and he had the uncomfortable sense that they thought him as out of place as he felt. He smiled and nodded, and they smiled demurely back before looking away and murmuring to one another.
The great door swung open, and Quire found himself greeted not by some servant as he had expected but by a strikingly attractive woman of middle age, to whom the adjective demure could hardly have been less applicable. Her décolletage was far more revealing than had been the fashion for some time, exposing a great expanse of smooth skin, divided by the deep crevasse between the swell of her breasts. She regarded him with an expression so open, so appraising, that he found it unsettling.
“Is Mr. John Ruthven at home?” Quire asked, his discomfiture putting a slight quaver into his voice.
A smile pinched at her lips, and her knowing eyes widened a little. A fragrant perfume was stealing into Quire’s nostrils, all floral piquancy, much like the woman who wore it.
“He is,” she said. “Have you a name I might share with him?”
She stood aside as she said it, and ushered him in with an unfurling of her long, pale arm. He entered, catching a waft of that perfume once more as he passed by her.
“Sergeant Quire,” he told her.
“How nice. I am Isabel Ruthven. Can I take your coat?” she asked him, wholly unperturbed by the appearance of a policeman on her doorstep. “You have no hat, then?”
“Ah, no. No, I don’t, madam.” He felt an irrational flutter of embarrassment at his lack of headgear, as if its absence constituted some grave social misdemeanour. There were few things he cared for less than the strictures of society’s hierarchies, yet he could not help but be aware of them, and of the difference that lay between him and those who would live in such a house as this.
She hung his coat on an ornate stand in the hallway. He watched her neck as she did so: the line of her dress fell almost as low across her back as it did her front. He could see her shoulder blades moving beneath her white skin.
“Mrs. Ruthven,” he said. “It is Mrs. Ruthven, is it?”
“Indeed.” That smile again, which seemed at once guileless and far too suggestive.
“Could you tell your husband that I have something of his that I would like to return to him?”
“Of course. Come, he is in the drawing room. There is a seat just here you may wait on.”
She escorted him down the hallway, walking fractionally closer to him than was entirely comfortable or proper, so that her voluminous skirt brushed heavily against his leg. He thought it must be deliberate, but an instant later found that notion silly and chided himself for being so foolish.
A single rug was stretched out the length of the hallway, all burgundy, blues and creams. A massive side table, its chestnut surface so thoroughly polished that it almost glowed with an inner fire, held an ornate mirror fringed with gilt curlicues. As they passed it by, Quire glimpsed himself at Mrs. Ruthven’s side in the glass, and noted how each of them accentuated the other by their proximity: her grace and porcelain beauty rendered his rough edges and weathering all the more acute, and his shadows made her shine all the more brightly.
A stairway folded itself up the inside of the house, light pouring down from a vast skylight four floors above. Mr
s. Ruthven led Quire beneath it, and beyond, to a padded bench with thick, carved legs.
“If you would just wait here a moment, I will announce you.”
Obedient, he sat, and watched her approach a tall panelled door opposite. At the last moment, as she raised one hand to tap at the wood, she looked back and settled on him a thoughtful gaze. She washed it away in a moment with a smile, and turned back to the door.
Quire heard only murmured voices from within as she leaned into the room, then she was beckoning him, and closing the door behind him, and he was looking around one of the most luxuriantly furnished chambers he had ever seen. A glittering chandelier that hung from a huge moulded rose in the centre of the ceiling; paintings the size of dining tables on the walls, dulled by age; a small piano of lustrous ebony; high-backed, long-armed chairs so thickly upholstered they looked fit to smother a man should he sink carelessly into them.
And three men. Standing closest to Quire, regarding him with expectant curiosity—therefore, Quire guessed, being John Ruthven—was a tall figure with a strong, if rather thin, face and a white neckcloth tied about a high, wing-tipped collar in a bow so ebullient it could not help but draw the eye.
Beyond him, peering around his shoulder, was a man a good deal shorter and older, with a face browned and leathered by years of sun, and fronds of fine lines at the corners of mouth and eyes. His greying hair was in the process of deserting his scalp, falling back in some disorder towards his temples.
Third and last, reclining in one of those mighty chairs with legs crossed and the elevated foot bobbing slightly, elbows resting on the arms of the chair, a man of rather wan and pinched countenance. His hands, encased in smooth black gloves, were steepled, the two index fingers just touching the tip of his aquiline nose. He regarded Quire impassively.
The Edinburgh Dead Page 3
