The Edinburgh Dead

Calder’s

“Of course I’m blamed for it. I was there.”

Quire was bent over his tankard, clutching it with both hands, elbows resting on the table. He peered down into the brown, foamy liquid as if hoping the mere sight of it might ease his troubles. But he knew that only the drinking of it would do that, and only for a few hours. Much as he craved that stultifying release, he had learned—belatedly, but better so than never—how illusory such respite was.

Wilson Dunbar had already drunk enough to liven up his opinions of anyone’s troubles.

“Well maybe if there’d been more than just you,” Quire’s stocky companion exclaimed, “if they’d listened to you in the first place, it’d all have fallen out differently. Maybe the man’d still be sucking air if… ach, but it’s never the officers pay the price, is it?”

“I’m an officer now,” Quire muttered. “Sergeant, anyway.”

“Aye, true enough. The damnedest thing, for those of us as’ve known you a while, but not to my point. It’s a matter of blame: those it sticks to, those it don’t. Your Lieutenant Baird—he’s one it don’t. Me and you, we’re ones it does. Nothing fair about it.”

“It’s fair,” grunted Quire. “The man was happy in his beer until I dragged him out of the Sheep Heid. To get his own head stoved in. First time I’ve seen a man killed like that, in front of me, since… since a long time.”

Dunbar snorted. He had always been a disputatious sort, even when in uniform. Long retirement from the soldier’s life had not changed that, and nothing brought it more nimbly to the surface than drink. Not that it needed bringing far.

“You know fine death doesn’t need your help or anyone else’s when it’s set its eye on someone,” Dunbar said, flourishing his own near-empty tankard. “Comes when it likes.”

“Maybe it does. That bastard on the ice thought to visit it upon me, as well, and that makes it personal to my way of thinking. I’ll have him. I’ll have all of them.”

Calder’s tavern was crowded, as it most often was of an evening. It did not take many bodies to make it so, for it had a low ceiling of plaster and beams, and a long-striding man might spring across its breadth in a half-dozen paces. Even so, it packed in a rare variety of customer. Quire might be the only policeman there—and that was a part of its appeal to him—but there were soldiers and brewers, glass-blowers and grocers, clerks and lamplighters. Sometimes footmen and stable hands from the nearby palace itself, though they kept to themselves as often as not, perhaps fearful of leaking secrets the Keeper of Holyroodhouse would rather stayed behind its grand walls.

Tonight, the mood—save in the corner Quire had made his own—was boisterous. A soldier was rattling out a hectic beat on a table with drumsticks. A little group of women who sold candles on the Canongate were engaged in good-natured argument over who had done the most business, and should therefore be buying the drinks. A solitary old man was complaining to no one but himself about the bad tobacco that would not hold a light in his pipe.

“And those fine gents buying the dead off the bastard body snatchers,” Dunbar cried. “There’s more could shoulder a bit of that blame you’re cuddling. How many times is it the corpse of a rich man that ends on the cutting slab, eh? If it’s a matter of such importance, did you ever see one o’ them teachers themselves give over their carcass to the knife once they were dead and gone? Or their dead father or mother or brother? You did not. Explain me that.

“No, don’t waste your time, I’ll do it for you: it’s the poor and the nameless get opened up for those precious little students to leer at, just like it’s the poor and the nameless get to bleed when there’s a battle to be fought. The French had it right, for a while at least: give us nameless folk a few guillotines and a wee revolution, see what a difference that’d make. Let others do the bleeding for a bit.”

None of which Quire would dispute, but tonight he could not share in Dunbar’s fervour. He watched Mrs. Calder pushing her way through the throng of customers. She was not only proprietor of his preferred drinking den, but his landlady, and a solicitous one at that. She and her serving girls saw to the cleaning of his rooms a few floors above, the washing of his clothes, and now and again to his feeding. He had earned her kind regard, along with a handsome reduction in his rent, some time ago, when he dissuaded—forcefully—some disreputable fellows from taking her husband’s debts out of his hide. Mr. Calder had been carried off by a fever not long after, but his widow’s affection for Quire persisted, undimmed.

“You never bled yourself, as I recall,” Quire muttered to Dunbar. “Impervious Dunbar, come through all the wars with nary a scratch.”

“Thank Christ. Though I doubt he was watching.”

“I shot the man who killed him,” mused Quire. “Put a ball in his chest from no more than twenty paces.” He tapped hard at his own sternum for emphasis. “Didn’t much bother him. How does that happen? When did you ever see a man take a shot from a Bess in the chest and not blink at it?”

“Well, not ever,” conceded Dunbar. “But I’ve seen men lose their arm to a cannon shot and not know it was gone till I told them. And there was that Spaniard you gutted at Talavera…”

Quire winced.

“Aye, but that was then. It’s a different life I’m supposed to be living now. I’m a different man.”

“Trying to be a different man, maybe, but you’ve always had a rare talent for the violence, and it a rare longing for you. The two of you’ve never been long parted.”

Quire cracked his mug down on the table, splashing a little of the beer out over the rim. He licked it from the back of his hand as he glared at Dunbar.

“Do you not think a friend might try to offer some comfort?” he growled. “And if you say that’s what you’re doing, I’ll say you don’t know comfort from your arse.”

“Truth’s a better remedy for any ill than comfort,” Dunbar said with a flutter of pomposity.

“That’s a whole stream of piss, wherever you heard it.”

“Aye, I suppose it is right enough. But this different man you’re trying to be still keeps guns and a sword under his bed, doesn’t he? You’ve no more left the past than it’s left you.”

“Are you saying you’ve no loot from Spain hidden away somewhere? They’re worth a fair few shillings, those guns. And that sword’s a good one. Might need the money one day.”

“Aye, right. Listen, a man needs ballast in his life, Adam, if he’s to hold a true course. Not trophies from old battles; not beer even, though it pains me to say it. Ballast. Bit of weight in the hold to keep from turning over, and that you’ll only get from others, not yourself. Family, friends, children. God knows, there’s nothing like children when it comes to ballast, take it from me. Children and a wife.”

“Christ, Dunbar,” Quire muttered.

“Aye,” Dunbar said, suddenly quiet. Suddenly knowing he had strayed into territory where truth walked hand in hand with hurt. “Aye, well.”

They lapsed into silence, each communing with his own thoughts. Quire’s spiralled in tight, beer-guided circles, seeming to be revelatory from moment to moment, yet somehow yielding nothing by way of lasting insight or conclusion.

At length, Dunbar pushed back his chair and took hold of Quire’s mug as well as his own. Quire had not emptied it, but he raised no protest.

“I’ll buy you some more comfort, then,” Dunbar said. “That I can do.”

He sank into the crowd, and Quire was left to ponder the mysteries of the tabletop. And to pick away at the knot of his problems. Baird had kept him well away from the aftermath of the events at Duddingston. Well away, and well aware of where Baird thought responsibility for the disaster lay. Quire could have done with the protective arm of James Robinson about his shoulders, but the superintendent was still sick, confined to his quarters atop the police house with none but wife and the gout for company.

Quire had told them to go after the gravedigger—Davey Muir, it turned out his name was—but the youth was, as yet, nowhere to be found. He had told them Blegg’s name, too, and where to find him, but that had proved equally fruitless. The men dispatched to Melville Street had been sent on their way in no uncertain terms by John Ruthven, who swore upon God’s judgement that he could vouch for Blegg’s whereabouts on the night in question. And a man such as Ruthven was not to be gainsaid by a mere sergeant of police, not without the weight of some evidence or incontrovertible testimony behind him; such testimony could only come from Davey Muir, in all likelihood, and Quire doubted the boy would be seen in these parts again.

But Quire did not feel in need of more evidence, or testimony, to render his own judgement. He had no name for the ponderous hulk of a man he had shot, nor an explanation for the failure of musket ball and icy loch alike to kill him; but he was as sure as he could be, allowing for the darkness of the night and the rapidity of events, that it had been Blegg disappearing over the kirkyard wall in Duddingston, and away into the night. If he was right in that, Ruthven had lied. And that made him, at the very least, accomplice to grave robbing and murder.

“I saw Catherine Heron in the street the other day,” Dunbar said, setting a pair of brimming tankards down on the table.

“Did you?”

Quire was taken aback by the unexpected turn in the conversation.

“She’s a good lass, for what she is,” Dunbar observed as he sat himself down.

“She is,” Quire agreed. “Have you a point beyond the flattery of someone who’s not here to listen?”

“Ballast, that’s my point. For a while, I thought the two of you might be going to set each other on an even keel.”

“And I thought you’d decided to keep quiet on the subject of ballast for tonight. You know fine well why that broke off. I’d not have my work now if I’d kept on down that path.”

Dunbar shrugged, and made a show of looking around the smoky tavern.

“Just a thought,” he said lightly. “Never you mind it. How about this, then: I’ll educate you in the fine art of making kites. I’ve been fashioning a pair for my boys, and you’d not credit the time it takes to do the thing right.”

Quire listened patiently to Dunbar’s disquisition on the subject. He noted—not for the first time—the miraculous transformation that marriage and fatherhood and the passage of years had worked upon his friend, turning as capable and willing a soldier as Quire had ever known into a model of domestic affection. For all his truculent instincts, Dunbar carried within him a kernel of peace that Quire could only envy. He had nothing in his own life to which he could hold quite so firm, save perhaps his work, and his doing of it.

The night subsided into gentle sloth as Dunbar’s company worked its gradual charm. Inconsequential talk and the steady flow of beer put just enough of a distance between Quire and his worries to soften them, and blur their outline.

The two men were the last to depart from the tavern. Mrs. Calder permitted Quire a latitude few other of her customers could hope for, so they finished their last tankards at leisurely pace, with empty tables about them. In the close outside, the two of them paused, looking up at the cloud-flattened sky.

“I could see you home, if you like,” Quire said, the words rumpled by drink.

“You’re hardly fit to find your own home, for all that it’s just up the stair,” Dunbar snorted.

“Fair enough.”

“Get yourself some sleep, that’s my advice.”

Quire swayed only a little as he climbed the narrow stair into the body of the tenement. He steadied himself with a hand against the wall. The darkness was absolute, and the steps uneven, but he needed no light for such a familiar journey.

The nebulous contentment that had settled over him did not long outlast his arrival at the door to his rooms. It took him a puzzled moment or two to realise that something was amiss. The door stood fractionally ajar, and as he fumbled at the handle, his fingers encountered splintered wood. It had been broken in.

That realisation sharpened his senses and cleared his mind. He reached instinctively for his baton, but he had left it inside. He pushed the door gingerly, and it scraped open.

He waited on the threshold, squinting into the gloomy apartment, straining to catch the slightest sound. There was none. That someone had been there, though, was undoubted. Quire had few possessions, but they still made an impressive mess, strewn about in disorder as they were now. He advanced cautiously, stepping around and over the clothes scattered across the floor, the shards of broken wash bowl and jug, the toppled chair.

He went to the bed, and knelt beside it. He reached underneath and felt about with splayed fingers. They quickly found what he sought: a hard, smooth box. He withdrew it, set it on the bedding and lifted the heavy lid. Within, two fine pistols were safely nestled in their proper place. He had taken them from the baggage of a French captain, after he had killed the man at a farm in the wilds of Spain. Killed him while he slept, in fact, for it had been that kind of war and Quire had fought it as seemed necessary at the time.

Satisfied, he gently closed the box and returned it to its hiding place. A moment or two more of searching under the bed found the only other item of even modest value he owned. It was a sabre of the type carried by thousands of French soldiers in the late wars—a briquet—and that, Quire had acquired from an anonymous dead musketman on… he no longer even remembered which battlefield.

Puzzled, he rose to his feet and surveyed the shambles. Thieves who left behind the only things that might have repaid their efforts were not a species he had encountered before. It did not take him long to restore at least a semblance of order, and in doing so he discovered his one loss. A shirt was gone. Only that. A humble, old shirt. All else was accounted for.

It was only at the very end, as he dragged a chair across the room, meaning to wedge it against the door to discourage—or at least give him some warning of—any returning visitors, that he noticed the strangest thing of all. Hanging on the inner face of the door was a crudely fashioned star of twigs. They were bound together with thin strips of bark and decorated, at each point of the star, with black feathers.

He stared at that mysterious token with sudden and deep unease. A dark substance encrusted some of the twigs, and though he could not be certain, he guessed that it was blood. Seized by an urgency he could not entirely explain, he tore the star down. As soon as his fingers touched it, a shiver ran through him, rushing up his arms, over his shoulders and crackling down his spine. He made to crush the foul thing in his hands. Some instinct restrained him, and he set it on the table, but turned away quickly and did not look at it again.

Drink usually made Quire sleep deep and sound, but his slumber that night was neither.

Davey Muir had been an occasional digger of graves at Duddingston Kirk for only a few months. It was a way to get a little coin over the winter, just like the digging of ditches and the dry-stone walling he did on the Marquis of Abercorn’s estate east of the village when the work was there to be had. In summer and autumn he worked the harvests on the farms further south. Come spring he would be sowing and maybe helping with the lambing. He turned his hand to whatever there was that would keep him from the poorhouse.

Gravedigging was far from the worst of it—that would be the walling, he reckoned, since he was clumsy and always ended up with bruised, sometimes bloodied, hands—and it paid better than most. He was too young and carefree to concern himself with the gloomy nature of the task: the dead needed burying, to his way of thinking, and it never had bothered him much to be around corpses. Spend any time around farms and you saw plenty of dead animals. Dead people troubled him little more than those.

Now, though, everything had gone very wrong. Now, he was thinking that taking the job at the kirk had been the most foolish thing he had done in all his short life. He had never once regretted leaving his turbulent family behind in Prestonpans, out along the east coast, when he was fifteen, but this might be the time to head back that way, and try to make amends with his brute of a father and slattern of a mother. Just to get a safe roof over his head for a while, in a place where no one would know where he had been, or what he had done.

It had seemed so easy. A man offering better than a month’s wage just for a few words. News of a burial, that was all. A day or two’s notice of any man headed for a grave without broken bones or the taint of sickness upon his corpse. Davey knew what that was about, of course. Everyone knew how the Resurrection Men went about their work. But what harm was there in it? The boy was dead and gone, with no need for what he’d left behind. And none to know, if the grave robbers did their work right: close up the coffin and re-lay the sod once they had lifted out the body. Leave it all neat and tidy.

But there was nothing neat or tidy about the business. Duncan Munro’s head was broken in. Davey had known the man a little; never had anything but kind words from him. Even so, it was not guilt so much as fear of consequence that grievously afflicted him now. Murder was a different thing to the mere theft of the dead. A thing to put a rare vigour into the police, and though they had not caught up with Davey yet, he knew they likely would. He had spent two days and the night between without a roof over his head, mostly up on Arthur’s Seat, shivering, bemoaning his misfortune; sheltering beneath a leaning crag from the drizzle floating in on the westerly breeze, watching the thin covering of snow melting away. He could bear it no longer. He had seen, from his elevated vantage point, the police who had been going from door to door in Duddingston village depart as dusk fell, trudging off back towards the city. So now, in the misty darkness, he crept back down to his lodgings.

He had a single room, cramped and a touch damp, attached as something of an afterthought to a short row of cottages. He lingered behind a concealing hedgerow for a minute or two—which was all his stunted patience and miserable condition would allow him—to make sure there was no one waiting for him. All was quiet. The thin mist and the encroaching twilight seemed to offer shelter enough for what he needed: just time to get stouter footwear, a cape, a few of those apples he’d lifted from the provisioner’s shop near the kirk. It was a long walk to Prestonpans.

Davey slipped inside as quickly as he could, lifting the rusty latch on the door with unaccustomed care, lest its creaking should betray his presence. Once within, he did not light a candle, but relied upon memory and the faint, faint light from the window to find his way about. The oiled cape first, pulled out from under his low bed; apples off the shelf and into a small sack; a candle or two, on impulse, though how he might light them he was not sure.

In reaching for those, his fingers encountered something unexpected, lying atop the box in which he kept the candles. Something small and strangely shaped. He took it up, and frowned at it, squinting. He could barely make out anything of it, but it seemed to be a figure of some sort; a little carved man, just two or three inches long. Davey shook his head in puzzled alarm and turned towards the window, the better to make it out.

“I’m grateful to you for taking it into your hand of your own free will.”

Davey yelped, dropped figurine and sack and cape alike, and stumbled back a couple of paces until his legs jarred up against the edge of a table.

The door was open, and standing there, framed against the very last watery light of the day, was a man Davey recognised with a lurching, dizzying dismay. It was not the face that told him who had come for him, but the horribly soft black gloves the man was already pulling from his lean hands.

“That will help a little, later,” Blegg said, stepping inside.

He used his heel to push the door closed behind him, never taking his eyes from Davey. The youth folded his arms across his chest, clutching his shoulders as if in pathetic defence of his vitals.

“Good Christ, you frightened me,” he gasped.

“Hush now. You’d not want the good folk of Duddingston hearing that you’re back amongst them, would you?”

“No, no. I’m away, this very night.”

“That you are. That you are, Davey Muir.”