The Edinburgh Dead

Robinson’s Last Day

Adam Quire’s dreams, when he remembered them at all, had once been of fire, darkness and little else. Never, in other words, conducive to a restful slumber. Now, they were fiercer still. Teeth and shadows and horrors unnamed. He would come roughly out of sleep, trembling or sometimes rigid with morbid fear, to find himself entangled in his sheets and blankets.

Quire awoke, unrested, in just such a state of disorientation. Only the intrusion of the mundane upon his senses finally shook him free of the nightmare’s grasp. He heard the haberdasher’s wife on the floor above berating her husband—the disappointed tune to which their whole marriage was sung, as far as he could tell. He smelled, with the unique clarity of early morning, before familiarity blunted the pungency of their fumes, the breweries.

By such small, insistent statements, the world demanded his attention. The hallucinations of his sleeping mind retreated. In their wake they left only a dull fretwork of pain deep in his left forearm: a stubborn memento of his thrashing about. He dispelled it by making a fist, then flexing his fingers, grinding the thumb of his stronger right hand into the palm of his left.

Still wrapped in a thick, heavy woollen blanket, he sat on the edge of the bed and hooked out the pisspot from beneath it with his foot. While he urinated, his gaze drifted over the loaded French pistol he now kept at the side of his bed, and to the heavy bar he had fixed rather crudely across the door to his apartment. A man who felt in need of such fortifications in his own home could hardly be expected to sleep well, he supposed.

He listened to the clatter of the foundries rousing themselves from their own slumber. Down here in the Canongate, where once the wealthy had congregated, industry now colonised every space. Most of the rich and the titled had emigrated to the New Town, leaving their former haunts to men of a meaner sort. Amongst whose number Quire was quite content to count himself.

The sky and the city, and the light that served as go-between, carrying intimate and subtle messages to and fro, were in constant discourse. That morning, the heavens spoke in sharp and bright phrases, flinging gusts of wind down from amongst the scudding clouds to bluster over the roofs of the tenements and bundle their way down the length of the High Street. It was the kind of day Quire liked: sunlight illuminating the eastern face of every building, making even the ramshackle seem crisp, and wind enough to keep the Canongate from gathering an industrial fug over itself. A clean day.

He began the long ascent from the threshold of Holyrood Palace up towards the High Street and the distant castle. He had Mrs. Calder’s hot, heavy porridge in his stomach like a cannonball, which was both fortification and slight handicap. He could only be grateful for it, though: without his landlady’s solicitous attention, he would likely leave his rooms each morning unfed.

At the foot of the Canongate, wagons and horses bearing goods to and from the manufactories were already getting themselves tangled up in great logjams outside the very walls of the palace. As Quire left that maelstrom behind, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the vast rumpled mass of Arthur’s Seat rising behind the palace, its folds and furrows and hummocks as familiar to him and every Edinburgh resident as was the patina of their own face seen in a mirror. Most striking of all its features was the long rising curve of Salisbury Crags, a battlement of cliffs standing atop a steep rampart of scree and short grass, sweeping around that part of the hill closest to the city like a defensive bulwark against human encroachment upon the wild, high ground. Quire was fond of that view; or had been, for now sight of the hill put him in mind of Duddingston, hidden behind its great bulk, and of what had happened there.

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.