The first landing was deserted, which did not surprise Quire. The rest of the city might be about the day’s labours, but those who called the Holy Land home kept a different routine. Most of them would not be found out and about before midday; some were owlish creatures, rarely stirring from their lairs until the day neared its end.
From above, drifting down the gloomy stairwell, came the faint and indistinct sound of someone singing. A woman, with a sweet voice. She was drunk, of course, but still: sweet. Quire paused, just for a moment, and listened. The passing thought that here was some intoxicated, and apparently quite happy, siren calling him on to whatever rocks lay above put a wry smile on his face. Then the song collapsed into fading coughs, and the stair was silent again.
He ascended, and found two figures waiting in the shadows of the next landing. They stirred themselves and straightened as he arrived, and held their arms loose and ready. Though it was difficult to be certain in the muddy light, Quire did not think he knew either of them by sight or name. Their demeanour, however, told him all he needed to know.
“I’m not after any trouble,” he said promptly. “Just visiting a friend.”
“Is that so?” one of the men—the nearer of the two—grunted. He had big hands, and an accent fresh from the heather. Men from the north, then. A bit desperate, like as not, and thinking the sort of customers frequenting the Holy Land stair of a morning would be easy pickings.
“The thing is this,” Quire smiled, “it’s police business I’m on, and you, I would guess, might be new in the town. Now maybe you don’t know that the Widow won’t take kindly to strangers disturbing her house, and you certainly don’t know that I’m having the sort of day as’d put a saint in a foul temper, so let’s just say you go along, and we’ll not be troubling one another further.”
It was never likely to work, not with men who had encountered neither him nor his reputation before, so Quire was unsurprised when the man moved. Those big hands came up, and reached. It was slow and obvious by the measures Quire put on such things. He kicked the man, hard, in the crotch and, as he squealed and folded down, broke his nose with a rising knee.
“Don’t be stupid,” Quire told the second of them, and that was all it took to put an end to it.
“Pick him up and get him downstairs. I don’t suppose you’ve the sense for it, but I’ll tell you anyway: there’s not much room in this town for newcomers to squeeze themselves in to the sort of business you’ve chosen. Find yourselves a less perilous occupation.”
The fallen man spluttered bloodily and moaned as his comrade hauled him to his feet and helped him hobble off down the stairs. Quire stood patiently listening to their unsteady descent, just to be sure that there would be no sudden resurgence of courage or vigour. He felt sorry for them: Highland men, probably evicted from their lands, destitute, short on options. He, or his colleagues in the police house, would likely be coming across them again.
Quire turned to the nearest door. It was battered and split, clinging to its hinges with no more firm a grip than a swaying drunkard in the street might apply to some convenient railings. Disrepair was the permanent condition of most doors in the Holy Land; there was no point in mending that which the police, or the inhabitants themselves, would soon unmend. He pushed gently, advanced across the threshold and was greeted by smiles.
Emma Slight was bent over a low table, pouring whisky from an unmarked bottle into a china teacup. She was wearing only a loose, long nightgown of thin white material that did nothing to hide the weight and contour of her breasts. Catherine Heron—who was a great deal better known to Quire than was Emma—sat upright on a rickety bed, light from the narrow window above giving her limp auburn hair a hint of life. She was clearly naked, though she concealed that nakedness beneath blankets that she had drawn up almost to her chin. Her presence, entirely unexpected, discomfited Quire, and he felt a hot blush rising in his cheeks.
Cath was the younger of the two women, her features not yet dulled or slackened by the years of hard living that had taken their toll on Emma. But she followed the same path, towards the same end: the disordered mounding of the bedclothes did little to mask the presence of another in her bed.
“Sounded like you had a wee bit trouble on the stair,” Emma said placidly.
“Nothing to worry about,” Quire said.
It was a struggle to shake off the unsettling effect that the discovery of Cath here had had upon him. And to dispel the confusing, confused tremble of past and present desire it engendered.
“Will you take the morning dram with us, Sergeant?” Emma asked, extending the teacup, a healthy measure of amber liquid within it. The cup was finely painted with flowers and briars. It was chipped and cracked, but once no doubt graced the table of a grander house than this, before being liberated by some light-fingered visitor.
“No, thank you,” Quire said. “I’ll take a look at whatever that is Cath’s got hiding under her bedclothes, though.”
“Ach,” said Catherine with a pained expression, “you’ve not forgotten what it is I’ve got down there, surely?”
“Hush. I’ve no time for games, Cath. I’d not thought to find you here this morning—it’s Emma I was after a word with—and though I’m not minding you listening in, your shy friend there’s not welcome.”
“No games?” Catherine gave a disappointed pout. She was allowing the blankets to slip a little lower, revealing more pale skin. “Well, you’re not the man you used to be. Anyway, my friend’s only a wee bairn. He’d be of no interest to you.”
“Show yourself, man,” Quire snapped.
A crestfallen face shrugged its way out from beneath the bedding. Smooth and fair skin, tousled hair youthfully thick. Eyes bright with trepidation.
Quire arched his eyebrows.
“Let me guess. One of our university’s finest?”
The young man bit his lip dumbly, but Quire did not need to have his question answered to know the truth of it. He growled in irritation. The student sat up straight beside Catherine, averting his eyes, distractedly toying with a little amber bead strung on a thong about his neck.
“I see Cath’s gulled you into buying one of the Widow’s charms,” said Quire. “Comforting, to know the nation’s future rests in the hands of those who find their pleasures in the Holy Land, and think some magic trinket’ll keep them safe from the consequences.”
He took some unworthy satisfaction from the embarrassment—perhaps even shame—that put a rosy tint in the man’s cheeks. The feeling did not linger, though. He was hardly entitled to much in the way of self-righteousness on the subject of Catherine Heron’s company.
“Speaking of the Widow, does she ken you’re here?” Emma asked pleasantly. “She does like to know what’s happening before it happens.”
“You can have the pleasure of telling her yourself, Emma, after I’m done with you. It’s only a few questions I’ve got in mind.”
“Can’t help you, Mr. Quire,” the older woman said as she lifted the cup to her cracked lips.
“You might at least let me ask before brushing me away,” Quire said, and returned his attention to the bewildered youth in Catherine’s bed. “Are you a student of the sciences, or of medicine perhaps?”
He received a hesitant, faintly alarmed nod of the head in response.
“You should know better than to think that bead’s got the magic to keep you free of the pox, then.”
“He’s safe enough with me,” Cath Heron muttered, affronted.
“Oh, I know that, Cath,” Quire said quickly. “I didn’t mean…”
He took Cath’s dark frown as a warning, and abandoned the topic.
“You get yourself off, back to your books or however it is you’re supposed to be spending your time,” he snapped at the student.
Quire, Cath and Emma watched in silence as the young man hurriedly, clumsily dressed himself. Humiliation enough, perhaps, to keep him away from the Holy Land for a while.
Once he
was gone, Quire turned back to Emma, who had settled on to a chair and was sipping with incongruous delicacy from her cup of whisky.
“Edward Carlyle,” Quire said.
Emma scratched the side of her nose and pretended intense interest in whatever residue her fingernail collected.
“I’m told he was keeping your company of late,” Quire persisted. “Did you know he was dead?”
She did not trouble to conceal her surprise at that, but still said nothing. Cath was less circumspect.
“Oh, that’s a shame. He seemed decent enough. Did he not say, though, that he feared for his life?”
Emma greeted the question with a scolding grimace of displeasure, but Cath was unperturbed, and shrugged her bare shoulders.
“Well, he did say it.”
“You knew him as well?” Quire asked, his heart sinking.
Finding Cath here had been dismaying enough; if she became a more central part of all this, he would find himself having to navigate treacherous waters, both personally and professionally.
To his relief, she shook her head.
“Not in the way you’re thinking.” She said it with a hint of rebuke that Quire supposed he probably deserved, for he had indeed been reaching for the easy conclusion. “Just to speak to, when he was visiting. Once the drink was in him, he always ended up fretting about what might happen to him.”
“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.
X
The Resurrection Men
“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 d
eep, 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.
The Edinburgh Dead Page 10
