The further up into the Old Town Quire walked, the higher the buildings rose, the more crowded became the herds of chimneys atop them, the more tumultuous the ebb and flow of rude humanity that moved in their shadows. At the head of Leith Wynd, where Canongate became High Street, Quire encountered one member of that crowd he had not expected to see.
Catherine Heron was emerging from a whisky shop, clutching a wrapped bottle to her breast. The ragged hem of her wide skirts brushed the ground. She looked dishevelled, a little bleary-eyed, but there was a blushing tint to her cheeks—a token of resistant health.
Quire met her eyes, and an acknowledging half-smile escaped him before he could restrain it. He would have left things there, but Catherine hastened to fall into step beside him as he marched on.
“I was glad of your visit. It was good to see you again, Adam.”
“You thought so?” he said, a touch more briskly than was needful.
“I did think so. Been a long time.”
“I didn’t know you were sharing rooms with Emma now. It was her that brought me there.”
“Aye, you said.”
Out here, amidst the bustle, her manner had none of the brazen confidence she carried within the fortress of the Holy Land. She spoke softly and held her arms close, as if to pass unnoticed.
“I wasn’t sorry to see you,” Quire admitted, softening.
He could not sustain the pretence of indifference. He was tired, and aching, and as beset by threat and animosity as he had ever been. Cath brought good memories, and the warmth of old but unforgotten affections; a seductive comfort in hard times.
“We were short of the means to start the day,” Catherine said, giving the whisky bottle a little jiggle by way of explanation.
“I thought it was early for you. I can’t tarry, Cath.”
Quire stretched his stride a fraction to make the point blunt. However that affection might cling to him, he knew it could be a trap of sorts. He had troubles enough without courting afresh those he thought had been laid to rest some time ago. It cost him more pain than he would have guessed to set that cold armour about his heart, though.
“Such haste,” Cath said, gentle reproach leaking into her tone.
“I’m sorry. You know I can’t be seen consorting with you. You know that.”
“My sort, you mean,” she said, already falling behind him, letting him go.
“I’m sorry,” Quire repeated sincerely. “If it had been my choice, I’d never have broken off with you, Cath. But there are rules, and I’d not keep my…”
But she had stopped, and stood in the middle of the street watching him as he strode on.
“You were glad enough to break them before,” he heard her say with sad resignation, and he came to a halt, arrested by guilt and sympathy. But the traffic of bodies and barrows was already closing between them, and Catherine had turned away. He might have called after her, and wanted to. The certainty that picking away at a wound was the surest way to keep it from healing held him back. He caught a last fleeting glimpse of her turning down into Leith Wynd, and was left in the company of only his own failings and indecision.
The encounter put him in a black humour, and he advanced upon the police house with head down and brow furrowed. He paid little heed to those about him, who now included sternly dressed advocates on their way to offices or court, men of the cloth making for the austere bulk of St. Giles’ Cathedral, rich merchants in grave discussion as they headed for the coffee houses. There was wealth aplenty still in the Old Town, and it mingled intimately, indifferently, with poverty and sloth just as it had always done.
Quire’s absorption in his own inner world meant that he was taken unawares by the sudden appearance of Jack Rutherford at his side. His fellow sergeant had a buoyant gleam in his eye, in sharp contrast to Quire’s mood.
“Is it true what I’m hearing about dogs?” Rutherford asked, full of excited, disbelieving curiosity.
“Aye,” said Quire.
The man could not know what it had been like, Quire supposed, but a little more concern and less enthusiasm might not have been out of place.
“By Christ, Quire, what is it you’ve got yourself mixed up in? It must take some doing to get yourself bitten by a dog in the Canongate of a night.”
“I didn’t get bitten,” Quire grunted. “And there were three of them.”
Rutherford shook his head in amazement.
“So what do you mean to do about it?” he asked as the two of them drew near to the police house at Old Stamp Office Close.
“Kill them,” Quire said quietly, and even he did not know precisely to whom—dogs or men—he was referring.
“I am dismissed, Adam,” Superintendent Robinson said, with a calm and quiet that at first disguised the meaning of the words from Quire.
“Sir?” he said blankly.
“The Lord Provost has seen fit to dispense with my services, forthwith.”
Quire slumped down on to the bench that ran the length of the cloakroom. Robinson had found him here, trying to clean flecks of vomit from the breast of his waistcoat. A woman of considerable size had been found, unconscious from drink, in one of the wynds close by. When the watchmen brought her in to sleep it off in a cell, Quire had chanced to be there and volunteered to help carry her to her new domicile. An act of charity he regretted when she stirred from her beery slumber just enough to empty her stomach.
“It’ll be the gossip on every lip soon enough,” Robinson said, “but I wanted you to hear it from me first.”
“On what grounds?”
“Oh, enough to give them an excuse. Truth is, there’s just a few too many on the Police Board don’t like my way of doing things. I’ve grown weary of fighting them, in any case, and the gout is plaguing me dreadfully these days. But I’m afraid you might soon feel the consequence of it. I refused to suspend you from your duties yesterday. There was a… lively, you might say, debate on the matter.”
Quire hung his head.
“If they’ve turned you out on my account…”
“Don’t flatter yourself overmuch,” Robinson gently chided him. “You’re a brick in this particular wall, right enough, but only the one. It’s not helped, though, that you apparently caused some small disturbance at the Royal Institution. At an exhibition of paintings, of all things. Birds, was it?”
“Anyone calling it a disturbance has never seen the real thing,” Quire said.
But he had not the heart to be argumentative, or truculent. He felt only sorrow at Robinson’s fall, and shame that he might have been, in however small a part, a cause of it. Robinson was a better man than the people who had seen fit to dispense with him. A man who had served his country in war, and his city in peace. But past service counted for little these days. The world, and those who governed it, moved too quickly to be carrying such burdens as memory and gratitude. So it seemed to Quire at that moment, at least.
“Listen, Adam,” said Robinson, leaning a little closer. “You’re in deep water. They’ll be coming for you, like as not, now that I’m gone. I know something of what this work means to you; what it’d cost you to lose it. Go carefully.”
“It’s too late for that. Ruthven’s tried to kill me. If he had not gone so far… I don’t know, maybe I could have let him be. But they came to my house and tried to kill me. That’s not a thing can go unanswered.”
“This business with the dogs?”
“The dogs, aye. Whatever’s at the root of this, it’s foul as a cesspit. There’s a darkness to it. Not just the killings. Something unnatural… maybe evil. I don’t know. Would you walk away from it, if you were me?”
“Probably not.” Robinson gave a rather sad shrug of his shoulders. “We all do things that are not in our own best interests sometimes. Just don’t do them blindly, or without thought. You’ll have little enough help to call upon inside these walls, I fear. It will be some while before my successor is appointed; in the meantime, Lieutenant Baird is to be acting
superintendent.”
Quire groaned.
“Indeed,” sniffed Robinson. “Not by my recommendation, of course, but my influence is spent. If I can be of any assistance to you, come to me. But I fear the most I can do now is wish you luck.”
Message boys were a vanishing breed in Edinburgh. At the height of the city’s intellectual ferment late in the last century, half the inns in the Old Town had a couple of lads loitering about outside, happy to wait there for hours on the chance that a customer would have a message he wanted running to someone elsewhere. Those boys working the better establishments would have a split stick in which a written note would be carried, and a simple lantern of some sort for navigating the wynds after dark. Most, though, had relied solely upon hand and eye and quick feet.
With the growth of the New Town, and Edinburgh’s slow sprawl to all points of the compass, the sight of boys racing along the streets, wax-sealed notes in hand, had become a rare one. But not entirely unknown. Most of the lads who did the work now did it only when other trades they practised—thievery or scavenging or chimney-sweeping—were going slow; they were but part-time practitioners of the art of message-running.
One such found Quire at the police house that afternoon. A dishevelled-looking little fellow, skinny like a coursing dog. Well pleased with himself, though, for having landed such a simple assignment.
“There’s no note?” Quire repeated, looking down at the boy.
“No.” The boy held out his hands, palm up.
“And you’ve just come from the Royal Exchange? Not a hundred yards?”
“Aye.” A big smile.
“And you were paid for this, were you?”
“Only a penny.” The smile snapped out of existence, replaced by an expression of courageous stoicism in the face of life’s small injustices.
“Not so bad, is it, a penny?” Quire said. “Not for taking a wee stroll like that, with not even a letter to carry.”
The boy shrugged.
“Let’s be having the message, then,” Quire said.
“Misher Durand would like to speak with you. He is in the Royal Exchange coffee house and will be there for the next hour.”
It was clearly not the first time the boy had recited the message. Quire could imagine him, standing there before his client, made to parrot it until he had it right.
“Misher Durand?” said Quire, hope stirring to life in him. “Monsieur Durand. Is that it?”
“Aye. I said, didn’t I?”
“Good lad.”
Quire pressed a silver tuppenny bit into the boy’s hand.
“Don’t drink it, mind,” he called as the boy darted off in a state of delight. “Buy yourself some proper food or something.”
But the boy was already out the door and away across the High Street, and Quire’s advice fell only upon his unresponsive heels.
XVI
Coffee
Quire was not a frequent visitor to any of the coffee shops scattered through the centre of Edinburgh. He had never acquired a particular taste for the thick, dark brew, and found that its expense considerably outstripped any pleasure it might offer. Others heartily disagreed. Every vendor did a thriving trade; none more so than the Royal Exchange coffee house.
The Royal Exchange was a mighty building, enclosing on three sides a cobbled quadrangle, archways on the fourth opening out on to the bustling High Street. The higher floors were given over to offices of various sorts, but the ground floor was dedicated almost entirely to commerce. Colonnaded walkways ran around the courtyard, each full of shops.
The coffee house was entered by a flight of steps that sank down into the ground on the left side of the courtyard. A curved sign formed an arch at the top of the stairs, with a lantern hanging from it. Passing beneath this, the visitor was greeted by a pair of dark doors with small glass windows set in them. It was a modest portal for a place that was, on the inside, a hotbed of greed and debate. More business was transacted about its crowded tables than in half the shops and offices in the city. Entire shiploads of goods landed at Leith were auctioned off there; contracts were entered into for this or that service, this or that exchange of land and property. Philosophies were discussed, literary endeavours planned or decried.
Few crimes were committed, however—not those recognised by the law, in any case—and Quire’s duties had thus brought him through the door no more often than his pleasure had. The smell within was nevertheless instantly familiar, rich and bitter and warm: coffee and tobacco smoke.
He saw Durand at once. The dapper Frenchman was sitting alone at a small round table of polished mahogany, sipping dark coffee from a china cup. A silver coffee pot stood beside him. An ivory-topped walking cane rested against his knee.
As he had been on their first encounter, Quire was struck by the sun-browned tone of Durand’s skin. It was not, to say the least, a common appearance amongst Quire’s fellow Scots. Durand must be approaching sixty years of age, and a good portion of them had surely been spent beneath clear, hot skies.
Durand looked up almost as soon as Quire entered. An intelligent gaze, a touch nervous, but not nearly so veiled as on their previous meetings. He beckoned Quire over, and gestured towards an empty chair.
“Coffee?” he asked as Quire sat down.
“No, thank you. Not my drink.”
“I find it as much food as drink, myself. One of the few pleasures of true luxury your city offers.”
The man’s voice was flowing; heavily accented, but in the controlled way of one entirely comfortable with a second language.
“If you say so,” Quire said. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Monsieur Durand?”
“Ah, you treat my language with a little more gentleness than most of your compatriots.”
“And your English is excellent.”
“Thank you. I have a certain facility in languages, it is true. And I have had the time to master yours: I became an exile from my homeland many years ago. London was my refuge. And latterly here, of course. A beautiful city you have, Sergeant Quire.”
“I’m sure it’s very happy that you like it. Is there something you’re wanting to tell me, sir?”
“Not so gentle when it comes to pleasantries, I see. I have found that to be a common trait of your countrymen. Not that I complain. Not that I complain.”
Durand took a sip from his cup. He held it delicately. An increasingly loud argument—or perhaps it was a negotiation; it could be hard to tell the difference in these avaricious times—at the next table distracted Quire, and he shot an irritated glare at its occupiers. The two men concerned were sucking away at cigars in between their expostulations, blowing out jets of blue-grey smoke. That was a sight and smell that Quire always considered a little odd, not because he found it unpleasant—he rather liked that deep scent, in fact—but because it spoke to him of Spain. There had been hardly a cigar to be found in Britain until its officers and men came back from the Peninsular War, having learned the habit from the Spanish. The long struggle against Napoleon had all but bankrupted the country, and delivered only strange little trophies.
Quire turned back to Durand.
“Do you know what happened to Edward Carlyle? Can you testify to what occurred at Duddingston Kirk?”
“So hasty,” Durand said quietly, setting down his coffee. “No, I regret I will testify to nothing. Not in a court of law. Not unless I am assured of my safety, and that, I fear, will be a great deal harder to secure than you imagine.”
“What use are you to me, then?” muttered Quire in frustration.
“I confess, I am more interested in the question of what use you might be to me. Are you familiar with the Shelley book?”
“I’m not much of a man for poetry.”
“No, the wife. Frankenstein. The Modern Prometheus.”
“Not much of a man for reading in its entirety, to be truthful.”
“Not a requirement of your profession, I suppose. Never mind. Tell me: you hav
e the manner, and are of the right age… you fought against my countrymen, perhaps?”
The change in the course of the conversation did not greatly surprise Quire. For all his poise, Durand was a man quite evidently ill at ease with his situation, and with his company. His hand betrayed it, tapping nervously at the boss atop his cane. His eyes betrayed it, flicking from the thick, steaming black coffee to Quire’s face, to the door over his shoulder. The man needed a little indulgence, Quire judged, and he bit back his impatience.
“Seven years in the army, near enough. I was at Waterloo; Spain and Portugal before that.”
“Ah. Do you think me your enemy, then?”
“No, sir. That business is over and done with. If there are current matters fit to make you my enemy, of course, that’s different. But I’m hoping still that you’re here to make yourself a friend.”
“Indeed. I met Napoleon, you know.” A brief loss of focus to those nervous eyes, a glance towards memory. “It was a long time ago, before I fell out of favour with his regime. In Egypt. I was a member of the scientific expedition that accompanied him in his conquest of those lands.”
“I know.”
Durand’s surprise was obvious. Quire had no intention of providing an explanation for his knowledge, though. Let the man ponder the fact that he was not the only one with secrets.
“He was very small, I heard,” Quire said.
“Napoleon? Oui. A giant spirit, contained in modest accommodation. Not a good man, you understand. I do not claim that. But a great one.”
“Caused misery and havoc enough, if that’s what you mean by greatness.”
The Edinburgh Dead Page 16
