The Edinburgh Dead

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 tapped 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 ever 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?”

“I’ve had one or two folk mentioning the Devil to me lately,” Quire grunted.

“Ha! Come now… ah, I see you are serious. Look, Sergeant, you strike me—and sound, I must say—like a man under a good deal of strain. Perhaps some rest and recuperation…”

“I’d agree with you, were it not for the fact that some folk seem set on killing me. Not the moment for a nap, I think. There’s something I need to ask you, sir, in confidence. I need to find a man can testify to the involvement of certain… gentlemen… in the business of body snatching. Without a witness, my hands are tied. Can you tell me…”

Quire hesitated. He was asking a great deal of the professor now, he knew. Challenging his loyalty to his calling, and his colleagues.

“Can you tell me who has been buying corpses from the Resurrection Men of late? Who is most likely to be taking delivery?”

Christison scowled at him, and Quire’s heart sank. He had overstepped the mark.

“Sergeant Quire,” the professor said, “if you seriously expect any respected anatomist to publicly testify to his receipt of cadavers from disreputable sources, your sense has truly deserted you. It matters not that the trade is common knowledge. It is unspoken knowledge, and should it cease to be so, the damage to the reputation of all those concerned—to the whole business of the teaching of medicine in this city—would likely be irreparable.”

“Yet there have been murders committed,” Quire said bluntly. “There’s those as are wishing I was numbered amongst the victims. I have to tell you, at this moment I care little for the protection of reputations, sir.”

“Well said, I suppose,” Christison grunted, though he did not sound convinced. “But really, Sergeant, you don’t need me to tell you where to look, surely? I thought you a perceptive man. One capable of deductive reasoning easily sufficient to this task.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It is in the nature of any trade that goods flow as the demand for them dictates, is it not? I think it was one of the recent great minds of this very city, Adam Smith, who shed light on such matters, but I suppose you find little time for recreational reading. Let me tell you this, then, and this alone: there is one dissection table in particular that is never short of a cadaver.

“Dr. Knox has five hundred students subscribed this year. More than all the other private tutors combined, I believe. No teacher of anatomy has ever drawn so many, and it is the steady procession of the dead passing through his school that brings them. Even our own students buy their way into his theatre, since the university cannot match his certainty of supply.”

“Robert Knox,” Quire murmured.

“You know him?”

“No. Only in… no, not really. I know the name, and something of the reputation.”

Not the whole truth, but as much of it as Quire wished to share.

“Well, I’d not put too much weight on reputations, Sergeant. They’re flimsy things that conceal more than they reveal. But remember: you did not have his name from me.”

“No, sir,” Quire said distractedly.

Knox’s name was one that had not been in his thoughts for a long time, and it came with an unsettling cargo of memory and connection.

“I’ll be away,” he said to Christison. “Let you get on with your proper work. Do you want me to take this?”

He indicated the dog’s torso and head.

“No, don’t trouble yourself,” Christison said. “I’ll have it burned.”

Quire nodded, rolled up the empty sack into a loose ball and threw it on to the slab beside the dog. He pulled open the door.

“We really don’t live in a world in which dead dogs kill people, you know, Sergeant Quire,” Christison said behind him.

“You might not, sir, but it seems I do,” Quire said quietly without looking round.

Surgeon’s Square was a sedate and graceful enclave, nestled into the south-east corner of the old city wall, no more than a minute or two’s walk from the Infirmary. Grand frontages clustered about a small garden, rather austere, but neat and well ordered. The square was an interloper, like a fragmentary forerunner of the New Town nestled into a hidden corner of the Old. Here, many of the men who had built Edinburgh’s mighty reputation in the medical sciences had for years plied their trade; and a lucrative trade it had been, as the buildings so clearly evidenced.

The Royal Medical Society stood on one side; the old hall of the College of Surgeons on another. Quire’s destination was nestled between them, and though not quite so grand, it still presented a distinguished façade. Number Ten, Surgeon’s Square. The teaching rooms of Dr. Robert Knox.

Quire paused on the doorstep. He could not bring himself to reach out and make his presence known. Robert Knox. He had not seen the face that went with that name in more than ten years, and in truth remembered its features imperfectly. He remembered the circumstance of their meeting all too well, though. Better than he would have liked.

Coming here had been an instinctive reaction to Christison’s mentioning of the name. To hear it so unexpectedly, after so much time, had caught Quire off his guard. Now, as the vigour of the impulse faded, he mistrusted it. But still: it seemed he was caught up in a struggle to the death, and one he felt in imminent danger of losing. An approach to Knox might well be fruitless, but the most unpromising of handholds would look attractive to a drowning man.

The soft, deliberate clearing of a throat disturbed his line of thought. He turned to find a slight man with decidedly sharp and hawk-like features standing there, already dipping his head in submissive greeting. The little bowl of a hat he wore bobbed.

“Can I be of assistance, sir?” the man asked.

“I don’t know,” Quire said, letting loose a little of the irritation at his own indecision. “Who are you?”

“Paterson, sir. Doorkeeper.” He held up a little package, brittle paper tied with string. “Been to get some ink for Dr. Knox, or I’d’ve been here to greet you. If it’s greeting you wanted.”

“I wanted a word with Dr. Knox.”

“Who should I say is calling?” Paterson asked, moving smoothly past Quire and reaching for the door.

Quire held aside his coat to show the baton hanging at his belt.

“Sergeant Quire,” he said.

“So, you’ve taken it upon yourself to lecture me, have you?” Robert Knox cried. “I won’t have it. I won’t!”

It was a fearsome display. The doctor’s fury seemed entirely uncontrived, a wholly natural thing welling up from inside him. It put a beetroot blush into his cheeks and a wild gleam into his one good eye; the left socket was unnervingly empty. He had less hair than Quire remembered—a balding pate ringed by slightly greying fringes and sideburns, though he was no older than Quire—but what there was of it trembled now with his anger.

Quire stuck stubbornly, if with rapidly faltering enthusiasm, to his course.

“I mean only to say, sir, that these grave robbers have…”

“And you presume some connection between them and me?”

The strength of his indignation appeared to exhaust Knox. He slumped back in his chair, away from the great desk, and regarded Quire with something approaching disbelief.

It was an uncomfortable attention to be subjected to, but Quire’s discomfort went a good deal deeper than that. The room in which the two men sat—that prodigious desk between them like the polished bole of some huge fallen tree—was in part study, but only in part. It also served as a storehouse of what were, to Quire’s eye, grotesqueries.

Two short skeletons stood in glass-fronted cases, an honour guard flanking Knox. Their empty eye sockets seemed to Quire to be watching him with as much disdain as their owner. Atop a cabinet was a collection of disarticulated bones, each of them mounted on a wooden stand, the better to display their deformities. Every one of them was bent or twisted or gnarled with bulbous outgrowths. Beneath a dusty glass dome was a human hand, bleached of all colour, its fingers splayed, its skin peeled back to expose the intricate web of bone and tendons and muscles beneath it. There were gas fittings on the walls, small brackets like candle-holders. They were not burning now, but Quire could imagine how starkly eerie the place must seem when their light threw shadows from Knox’s strange collection.

The human body was here reduced to a parade of oddities and afflictions, its constituent parts exhibited in a menagerie of disease. Quire could guess at the educational justification of it all, but he could not look upon it without being put in mind of those whose remains had found their way into the collection. He could not help but wonder about their lives, their suffering. He somehow doubted that such thoughts greatly troubled Dr. Knox.

“Are you a religious man?” Knox asked at length, his tone much moderated.

“No, sir. I am not.”

“Very well. You should then, being rational, be aware that the light of reason has shone brightly in this city these last fifty years. Great men have walked these streets, and their learning, their insight, in every field of thought from the arts to science to philosophy has illuminated all the land and driven superstition into exile. The flame is less bright now, perhaps, but still there are some men of exceptional talents, with the will to feed it. You do your city, and your nation, no service if you seek to traduce the reputation of those who strive to keep it lit.”

“That is not my intent, sir,” Quire said blandly. “I know only that we cannot have murder going unanswered, and that I am required, by duty and inclination alike, to find those responsible.”

“Again, you presume some knowledge upon my part that does not exist.”

“They are resurrectionists, sir. Lifters of corpses. It’s a matter of common sense to make enquiry of those through whose hands a great many corpses pass.”

“A very common kind of sense, indeed,” snorted Knox. “I smell the prejudice of the mob in it. The irrationalities and misguided sensitivities that would set shackles upon scientific endeavour. Let me make it clear, Sergeant: corpses do not pass through my hands, as you so casually put it. They receive the attention of my knife, and such skills as I possess, for the education of hundreds—many hundreds—of young men who set a not inconsiderable value upon it.

“Paterson, my doorkeeper, manages the supply of cadavers, and I can assure you they are acquired by means that need be of no concern to you and your ilk. Now, if you will excuse me, I have matters requiring my attention. Be so good as to give me some peace, would you?”

Knox rose at that, and came briskly out from behind the desk, extending an open hand. It was, Quire supposed, the politest dismissal he could have hoped for in the circumstances. He stood, and shook the proffered hand. Knox’s grip was firm, almost excessively so. It was the grip of a man unfamiliar with the inhibitions of self-doubt; or inured to them by force of will.

“You do not recall me, sir, I suppose?” Quire said.

“Recall you?” Knox frowned as he released Quire’s hand from its imprisonment. “Why, have we met before?”

“You saved my life; or my arm, at the least.”

“Did I? In what circumstances?”

“Brussels. Thirteen years ago now.”

“Ah.” Knox nodded slowly. “Waterloo. Yes, there was a good deal of work for me there. You should have introduced yourself as a fellow veteran of those struggles in the first place, man. Why did you not tell me sooner?”

“It was not to the point of my visit, sir. And I did not expect you to remember.”

“Your arm, you say. Let me see, then.”

Taken aback, Quire found himself quite motionless, and with no words offering themselves to his tongue.

“Come, man,” Knox said with a rather cold smile. “Allow the craftsman to inspect his former works. You say I saved the limb. Let me see it, then.”

Quire tried to pull back the sleeve of his jacket, but the material was too thick and tight.

“Take it off, take it off,” Knox muttered.

Quire did so, and draped the jacket over the back of a chair. He rolled up his shirt sleeve to expose his left forearm, and turned it—with an uneasy tightening of embarrassment in his chest—so that Knox could examine the scars on its inner face.

“Burns,” the doctor murmured as he took hold of Quire’s wrist and ungently lifted the limb closer to his eye.

The skin was thick and messy and hairless, with an unnatural shine to it like wax that had hardened and smoothed in mid-flow. Ridges and furrows knotted themselves over the surface. In the midst of that wound, another, more distinct, resided: ugly and slightly raised, like a corrupted boil.

“And this?” Knox asked.

“You extracted a ball fragment, sir.”

“Ah. Well, you were fortunate, then. To work amidst burns, digging around in there—nine times in ten I’d think to lose the limb. Or the entire patient.”

“They told me afterwards that you prevented them from amputating it. You thought it might be saved. Removed not just the bullet but several pieces of my uniform from the wound.”

“Yes, yes. Often overlooked. It is rarely the lead itself that carries rot into the flesh, but what it takes with it. Very well. Cover yourself up.”

Quire pulled down his sleeve with relief, his left hand making a fist of its own volition, tensing against shivers of pain in his arm.

“Not my best or neatest work,” Knox said, handing Quire his jacket. “But that is to be expected: I was learning my trade then, on the army’s coin, and there were a great many demands on my time over those few days. That Corsican dwarf made sure of that, eh?”

“He did.”

“Well, luck was with you. And an astute surgeon, dare I say? Or one filled with the hubris of untrammelled youth, in any case.”

Knox’s manner was greatly mellowed, perhaps by self-importance, perhaps by fond reminiscence. Quire shared neither, and had no memory of any luck worthy of the name attending upon him in those days. Quite the reverse, in fact.

“Come, then,” said Knox, opening the great panelled door and ushering Quire out to the head of the stairway. That his teaching practice was successful, as Christison had intimated, was beyond doubt. The oak staircase, the paintings upon the walls, the wide entrance hall below, all put Quire in mind of the house of some noble family; and this was not even Knox’s residence, merely his place of teaching.

“Paterson!” Knox shouted, leaning over the banister and peering down.

There was no response from his doorkeeper.

“Ach, that man,” muttered Knox. “Unreliable staff are a blight upon every enterprise, Sergeant, you mark my words.”

“I will make my own way out, Dr. Knox,” Quire said.

He glanced back as he descended the wide stairs, but Knox was already gone, retired to his desk and his gallery of silent specimens.