The Edinburgh Dead

by Brian Ruckley

  The man was not moving at all. Quire wondered whether he should go down there and give him a good kick; see what that revealed. In the next instant, all thought of drunks, and of sleep, was utterly gone.

  Out of the darkness beyond the prostrate man, stepping over and around him, came hounds. Three of them. Huge, rangy beasts, perhaps wolfhounds. Quire’s breath caught in his throat. The beasts arrayed themselves in a line across the South Back. Quire could not be certain, but they looked to be unkempt, their coats scrawny. They stood there, staring at him. He stared back, thoughts of Edward Carlyle’s torn corpse flickering through his mind. Behind the hounds, the man who had been lying on the ground rose, entirely unhurt, entirely sober. He kept his back to Quire and walked away into the dark, as casual as anyone heading out for a lazy stroll on Arthur’s Seat. The dogs never once took their eyes off Quire.

  He turned and ran. He heard their claws scrabbling on the cobblestones as they sprang after him. They would be far too fast for him. He put everything into the sprint, but he knew they would have him. His arms pumped. He expected at any moment to hear the hounds give voice, but there was nothing; not a sound from them but that of claw upon stone.

  Quire stretched his mouth open, slapped his baton in there crossways and clenched his teeth tight on it. He veered sharply towards the high wooden gate of some manufactory yard. They were nearly on him now. He could feel them there, at his back.

  He threw his arms up and leaped for the top of the gate. It had looked good and solid, but it swayed and groaned as he hit it and grabbed hold. He smacked his face against the wooden planking, and almost spat out his baton.

  He scrambled with his feet, hauled with his arms, and managed to get an elbow hooked over the top. Then there was a hard blow to his left boot, and he looked down to see one of the dogs biting on it, shaking its head from side to side. He felt no pain, so could only guess that its teeth had sunk into the low heel.

  The other two hounds were rushing up, and within that one quick glance, he registered the wrongness of them. Matted hair, caked with all manner of noisome dirt; jaws agape, but entirely dry, no sheen of spit even on their pale and limp tongues; lifeless eyes. Silent, as surely no dogs would be at such a moment.

  Choking back what might easily become blind terror, Quire struggled to drag himself up and over the gate, but the weight of the creature pulling at his leg was too much. Another of them sank down and began tearing at the foot of the gate with teeth and paws alike. The third jumped at him. Somehow he managed to sway his body just enough to avoid its teeth. It fell back, lost its footing and rolled.

  Quire straightened his left ankle, pointing his naked foot. It slid free from the boot and the dog dropped back to the ground, trophy firmly grasped in its jaws. In an ungainly windmill of legs and arms, Quire pulled himself up and toppled over the gate. He hit the paved yard on the far side hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs and set his head spinning. He let the baton fall from his mouth and lay on his back, groaning.

  A furious attack was now launched upon the gate. There was a gap of perhaps half an inch between it and the ground. It was a chaos of snapping teeth and scraping claws. All three dogs were breaking away fragments of wood, sending cracks running up through the planks. They were sure to do themselves harm with such ferocious brutality, but Quire was almost certain that that would be of no great consequence or concern to them. These were surely beasts of the same kind as the man he had fought on the ice. The gate would yield before they did.

  Quire rolled carefully on to his hands and knees. His fall had done him no lasting damage, but it felt as though most parts of him were aching. He looked about, trying and failing to ignore the ever more ominous sounds of wood breaking apart. It was a cooper’s shop and yard. The walls were higher than the gate, though there were several barrels standing about that might give him enough of a start to get out and over without doing himself worse injury than he had already suffered.

  He got to his feet, cursing as his bare foot inevitably found a tack or sharp pebble the night had hidden. One of the dogs had got its paws and a good part of its head through a ragged hole in the bottom of the gate. Some of the planks were splitting away from one another and starting to lift as the beast thrust itself forward again and again. Quire stopped and picked up his baton. It was heavy, but he was not sure it would crack open a dog’s skull quickly enough. The doors of the workshop itself were shut, and had a light chain and lock across them. He went to the window to look inside, but could make nothing out. The gate creaked and cracked ominously behind him.

  Quire kicked at the workshop doors once, twice. Thrice, and the lock gave, the chain fell slack and he was in. It seemed to him that running was not likely to improve his position greatly, and if the dogs were set on coming in under the gate, that would give him as good a target to aim at as he was ever likely to get. He had seen coopers using some vicious-looking tools to work wood in the past; he could only hope that this one was no different. Any craftsman in his right mind would have his best tools away home with him, but the old ones, the no longer used ones, they might still be here.

  Within moments he re-emerged into the yard clutching a broadaxe. It was short-handled, wide-headed. Not of the sharpest sort, as best a quick run of his thumb along the blade could tell, but a great deal better than a baton.

  He had to move more quickly than he had anticipated, for the first of the dogs was almost in. Its mouth a mass of broken teeth and wood splinters, it was dragging itself through on its belly. It snapped at him as he drew near, and lunged, but the gate was strong enough—just—to keep it pinned for a moment longer.

  That was all Quire needed. He hacked down at the dog’s neck. That first blow did not go deep, but it parted the skin, and it taught Quire the weight and balance of the weapon. His second opened a yawning wound, exposing meat and bone and gristle. The third widened it, and the fourth went through and separated head from shuddering body.

  The jaw still worked, as that head rolled free. It snapped shut, and slowly opened. The headless torso still scraped feebly at the ground. There was no blood. Just a spreading slick of some stinking liquid of imprecise, pallid shade. A stench of decay and rot burst from the stump of the neck.

  The other two dogs were still ripping the gate to pieces, bit by bit. If they came both at once, Quire suspected he might have a problem.

  Someone was shouting. Quire looked round and up. At one of the windows high on the Canongate tenements, a woman was leaning out, a lantern in her hand.

  “Watch! Watch!” she was screeching, and a fairer sound Quire had never heard. “Thieves in the yards! Thieves on the South Back!”

  Another window was lifted, another voice—a man’s this time—added to the hue and cry. Through it, Quire heard a single long, thin whistle, coming from somewhere out on the South Back. At once, the two remaining dogs broke off from their attack, and Quire heard the soft tap-tap of their brisk walk away.

  He waited for the span of several deep, restorative breaths, revelling in the continued accusatory yells coming from that blessed woman. He doubted she could even see him, especially waving a lantern around in her own face, but he blew her a kiss anyway.

  Then he dropped the broadaxe, sat down heavily on his backside and stared at the dog’s head lying at his feet.

  XIV

  Surgeon’s Square

  Quire did not bother to knock at the door of the Royal Infirmary’s autopsy room. He pushed it open and walked straight in, for he did not mean to be refused an invitation.

  Robert Christison and a pair of assistants were gathered about a corpse on one of the slabs, all clad in soiled aprons, all leaning over the open body with expressions of rapt interest. Quire’s abrupt appearance brought them erect, and interest was replaced upon their faces by alarm at the dishevelled apparition manifested before them.

  “Sergeant Quire?” Christison said in surprise.

  He held some strange sort of tongs or pincers in his hand, and tapp
ed at the air with them, in Quire’s general direction.

  “You are looking rather the worse for wear, Sergeant,” he said.

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that, sir.”

  Quire could hardly dispute it. He was unshaven, his chin and cheeks darkened by grizzled stubble. His eyes must, he knew, betray the sleepless night he had just passed, and the heavy sack he had cradled in his arms was filthy. He presented more the appearance of an indigent than a sergeant of police, no doubt.

  “I don’t believe I was expecting a visit from you,” Christison observed. “Even the police are not encouraged to wander too freely into rooms such as this, you know, Sergeant.”

  “I’m just hoping for a few minutes of your time, sir. I think you’ll find them well spent.”

  Christison spread his hands above the partially dissected corpse. Though Quire was trying not to look too directly at the gruesome spectacle, he could not help but see that it was a woman, perhaps fifty or so years old.

  “I am, as you can see, engaged in rather important business at the moment. Extremely important, I would say. This woman’s death was taken for an unhappy accident—an excess of laudanum—until certain aspects of the case drew my notice. Certain bruising about her person, to be precise, suggestive of forced administration of the drug.

  “The body will not take a bruise after death. Were you aware of that, Sergeant? Or, to be more precise, the bruising that occurs after death is distinctive and does not result from force or blows, as might be the case in life. I am, I believe, the first in the country to have demonstrated and documented this with what might be called the proper rigour of the scientific method.”

  Quire shifted uncomfortably. The sack he carried was heavy, and his weaker arm was aching.

  “Just a few minutes, sir,” he said. “I swear to you I would not have come here if I didn’t think it important.”

  Christison sighed, and rubbed his chin.

  “Very well. Very well. Give me a minute or two with Sergeant Quire, would you, gentlemen? Go and smoke a pipe, or take the air, or whatever pleases you.”

  The two assistants—current or recent students of Christison’s, Quire guessed by their youthful looks—went reluctantly out, bestowing upon Quire glares of grave disapproval. It almost made him laugh, seeing those rosy-cheeked innocents so affronted by so trivially unexpected a turn of events. How ordered and polite they must imagine the world outside their cosy little bastions of learning to be.

  “What is it, then?” Christison demanded.

  “You’re the only man I know can read the tale of a corpse,” Quire said, advancing towards a vacant slab. “I’m in sore need of that today.”

  “Well, I do like to think…” Christison began.

  Quire unceremoniously emptied out the contents of the sack on to the slab. The dog’s decapitated corpse flopped down with a wet thud. The head tumbled after it, hitting the slab with a bonier crack, and rolled almost to the edge before coming to rest and fixing Quire with its lifeless gaze. The tongue protruded stiffly from between the yellowed teeth.

  “Good God, man,” Christison exclaimed. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Not entirely, sir. Not yet.”

  “I could have you thrown out for bringing such a thing in here. I could probably have you arrested, for God’s sake, and how would that look?”

  “Please, sir. All I’m asking is that you look at it. Unless I’ve misunderstood what it is you do here, you’ll surely see something of interest. And if you don’t, I’ll leave the moment you tell me.”

  Christison glared at him. Quire was testing their relationship to its very limits, he knew; quite probably beyond them, for it had never been more than a formal acquaintance as a result of their joint endeavours. But if he was any judge of men at all, Christison was the sort to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to succumb to his own innate curiosity.

  Christison took a step closer to the dog’s body and leaned to examine its raggedly severed neck.

  “I see no blood. There should be rather obvious evidence of catastrophic bleeding, internally, externally—everywhere, really—in a case of decapitation. There does seem to be some other fluid here, though.”

  He looked quizzically at Quire, who simply nodded. Christison took hold of the hound’s stiff legs and turned it over. He ran his fingers through its noisome fur, using them to push it apart here and there, seeing down to the skin. He grunted and muttered to himself quietly. Shook his head.

  He moved round to the end of the slab, set one hand on each corner of it, and leaned down to peer into the stump of the dog’s neck. He remained in that pose for some time; far longer, certainly, than Quire could ever have spent upon such an unappealing sight.

  For Quire’s part, he waited patiently and in silence. He watched Christison, and thought it a good thing that he had come here. He disliked the room, the way it reduced death and the dead to mere matters of so much bone, so much muscle. Like carcasses in the Flesh Market. It was all too unemotional and calculating for Quire’s liking; but unemotional and calculating were the very things he now needed.

  Christison took hold of a small clump of the dog’s hair between his forefinger and thumb and gave it a sharp tug. It came easily away, a little solid mat of it. He grimaced and wiped it off his hand on the edge of the slab.

  “Someone is having a little fun at my expense, are they?” he said at length to Quire, looking anything but amused. “It’s an ill-timed jest, if that’s what it is.”

  “No jest, sir,” Quire said earnestly. “I’ll swear to that any way you like.”

  “Clearly a contrivance of some sort, nevertheless,” Christison said. “This animal was dead before it was decapitated. There are incisions that were made in its chest wall and in its neck, and then sewn up again. Also after it was dead, as best I can tell. Why, precisely, would anyone wish to cut holes in a dead dog and then stitch them up again? Have you taken to the study of canine anatomy, Sergeant Quire? Or embalming?”

  “No, sir. I’m a student of much cruder sciences. It was me cut the head off this dog, and I promise you it was moving about just fine until I did it. In fact, it kept moving a wee bit after I’d done it too, but it stopped eventually.”

  “Not possible,” Christison said emphatically. “That it was alive when its head was separated, I mean. I think I can tell the difference between ante and post mortem as well in a dog as I can in a human. And I assure you, I can tell the difference very well indeed in a human.”

  His brow suddenly crunched into a frown, and his eyes narrowed as he looked from Quire to the dog and back again.

  “Now just a moment,” he said, pointing a finger at Quire and then shaking it as if to free up his nascent insight. “Is this about that body you brought through here… what was the man’s name?”

  “Edward Carlyle. This is one of the beasts that killed him, I think. This one or one much like it.”

  “Really?”

  And there was that vein of lively interest threading itself into Christison’s voice that Quire had hoped for. The stirring of his curiosity.

  “You said it was a dog that did it,” Quire observed, “and here’s the proof that you were right. There were two more like this, but they escaped me. Or I them, to be honest.”

  “Well, your persistence with such an unpromising case is admirable,” the professor said, bending to prod at the stump of the neck with his tongs. “Still, there is clearly some confusion at work here. What is this fluid? If I didn’t know better, I’d say it is from the beast’s blood vessels. Hand me that blade, would you, and the bone shears beside it.”

  Quire lifted the implements, surprised at the weight of them. They still bore the residue left by their application to the woman lying on the other slab. He gave them to Christison.

  “Let us just take a quick look, shall we?” the professor murmured.

  He cut open the dog’s chest. The long, flat knife slid through the animal’s hide smoothly, as easily as Quire had e
ver seen any blade cut. Christison cut along three sides of a rectangle, and pulled the large flap of skin roughly back, revealing the dog’s ribcage.

  A foul stink burst from the carcass, potent enough to set Quire—and even Christison—grimacing. The rotten stench of putrefaction. Quire clasped a hand over his nose and mouth.

  “That smell, Sergeant, is decay,” Christison said pointedly. “This animal has been dead a good deal longer than you seem to think.”

  He took the shears to the dog’s ribs. They crunched through the bones as if they were twigs. Then he cut away at the animal’s innards. He did it roughly, quickly.

  “Not taking my usual care, of course,” he said.

  The heart came free, the size of a pear. Blotched, discoloured and feeble-looking. Pale liquid dripped from it. Christison frowned. He set the organ down beside the corpse, neatly sliced it with a single sweep of the knife, and spread it. It opened like a butterfly of flesh.

  “Look at that,” he exclaimed as that same pale liquid flowed out from the exposed chambers. “Whatever this beast had in its veins, it was not blood. This is most puzzling.”

  He glanced at Quire with narrowed eyes.

  “You’re certain this is not some prank, Sergeant?”

  “I am. I’ve come across a good deal that is puzzling of late, sir. Things I can’t rightly explain, and I don’t know that anyone can except by means I can’t bring myself to believe in.”

  Christison raised a sharp eyebrow.

  “And what do you mean by that, precisely?”