The Edinburgh Dead

All Hallows’ and All Saints’

All Hallows’ Eve was a night of rude celebration in Edinburgh’s Old Town. The poor and unwashed folk of the city fashioned from that fell night, when the lore of their forefathers told them that the Devil and his spirits stalked the darkness, an excuse for light and merriment and drinking.

In every tenement, no matter how squalid, how impoverished, there would somewhere be dancing and noise late into the night, as if by that commotion the evils lurking without might be held at bay. The Old Town seldom slept deeply, or for long, but on this night more than any other it shrugged off the darkness and busied itself deep into the wee small hours. The whisky shops, strewn in dense profusion along almost every street and wynd, stayed open late, lighting their windows with lamps and drawing in a constant stream of drunken customers, seeking to replenish their dwindling supplies. They brought empty bottles, and the whisky sellers filled them up from tapped barrels and sent them on their way; then, an hour or two later, the same folk would stagger in off the street, with the same bottle, empty once more, to be filled.

There were scuffles in the street, the whisky-fed frustrations and rivalries of the Old Town boiling up. It was in the nature of the place that with the release of celebration came too the release of its darker side, for the one could not be set free without the other. Small violences were done amidst the songs and the jigs; hard words said amidst the laughter. Everywhere, voices were loud, whether in argument or frenzied pleasure.

Some there were who tried to sleep amidst the tumult. They could not escape it, though, not in this layered, crowded place where folk lived as dense as bees in their hives.

Mrs. Conway, in her room in the West Port, tossed and turned uncomfortably in her bed. Her husband slumbered deeply, leadenly, at her side, as he always did. She, whose need for sleep was the more acute, since she must be up at four to make him his breakfast and it was already close on midnight, was kept from it by the Old Town’s restless convulsions. The witching hour drew near, and could be nothing other than restless on All Hallows’ Eve.

With every passing sleepless moment, Mrs. Conway grew more anxious and bitterly resentful of those drunken celebrants robbing her of her rest. Rough sounds added themselves to the mix, grating upon her weary senses. Scuffling, shouting, angry curses. Coming from the Burke house just next door. That was no great strangeness in itself, for it was a turbulent and drunken house on any night, let alone this wild one, but there was a harsh extremity to the clatter and thumps and voices leaking through the wall. Mrs. Conway could hear William Burke’s voice chief amongst those raised in anger, and the noise of it seemed to go on and on. Until at last it faded, and a quiet settled. Mrs. Conway whispered a small thanks to God, and slowly, slowly drifted off to sleep.

Hugh Alston had a grocer’s shop on the West Port, and lived with his wife in the flat above it. The two of them made their way, only a little the worse for drink, towards their stair as the witching hour turned. It had been a long day. They were tired but happy, for trade had been good of late.

The racket that greeted them was out of tune with their contentment. There were men shouting indistinctly at one another, a violent quarrel. Tables or chairs being overturned.

“It’s coming from Burke’s house,” Mrs. Alston said, as they stood together on the street, listening in dismay to the cacophony.

Then, sharp, cutting through the male voices, quite clear, a woman crying out: “For God’s sake, get the police. There’s murder here.”

The Alstons looked at one another in consternation.

“Get yourself upstairs,” Hugh said to his wife, “and lock the door behind you.”

Once sure his wife was safely climbing the stair to their apartment, he ran up the West Port to the watch-house there, and beat upon its door. But the nightwatchmen of the Old Town had many calls upon their attention that night, of all nights, and there was no answer. Its windows were dark, its lock secure.

Troubled, Alston went cautiously back down to his shop and home. All was silence now. Not a whisper escaped the house of William Burke. He sighed, and shook his head, and followed after his wife.

They slept uneasily through what remained of the night. And as they slept, that night turned and the city’s frenzy spent itself, and All Hallows’ Eve became All Saints’ Day.

The morning came in bleak and cold and cloudy. Sergeant John Fisher was on duty in the entrance of the police house at Old Stamp Office Close, and looked out through the open doors upon a High Street rousing itself more sluggishly into life than was its wont. The excesses of the night before weighed heavily upon the Old Town, and it had woken with bleary eyes and sore limbs and aching heads.

A man—agitated, fidgety—came in off the street.

“I’ve seen a body in a house on the West Port,” he said without preamble or introduction. “A poor woman, murdered.”

Fisher went with the man—Gray, his name turned out to be—up along the quiet High Street, and down the arc of West Bow on to the Grassmarket. Bottles and rubbish were strewn about there. They walked its length to the West Port, and Gray showed Fisher the house of William Burke.

A dark passage led back into a tenement. At its end, a narrow stair descended into gloom. Gray let Fisher precede him down the stair, and thus it was Fisher who came face to face with another man, climbing up.

“That’s him,” Gray said in alarm. “That’s Burke.”

“Would you let me into your house please, Mr. Burke,” said Fisher, ignoring the ferocious glare Burke was fixing upon Gray.

The room to which Gray guided them was a picture of wretched squalor. Rags and straw were scattered all over the bare floor, and every corner was piled high with disordered heaps of tattered and half-made shoes, and with the tools of the cobbler’s trade. A pot of boiled potatoes stood by the cold ashes of last night’s fire. There was not a single piece of furniture save a crude, low bed stretched out against one wall. It was the humblest of things, a few planks and sticks roughly nailed together. There was no mattress on it save a tightly packed mat of straw and old cloths. A faded, striped nightgown lay on the bed.

“There’s no body here,” Sergeant Fisher observed.

“A body you’re after, is it?” Burke muttered, his Irish brogue made harsh by his anger and contempt. “You’ll not find one here, whatever you’ve been told.”

“It was there, on the bed,” Gray insisted. The fear was plain in his voice.

“He’s saying it from spite,” Burke scoffed. “I turned him and his wife out last night, since I needed the bed for someone else.”

Fisher raised his eyebrows and looked questioningly at Gray, who did not deny it, but rather nodded.

“That’s right, that’s right. Mary Docherty, her name was. He turned us out to give her the room, but we came back this morning since we’d lost our boy’s stockings and thought them left here. And she were there, in the straw. Dead.”

Fisher went closer to the bed. He was reluctant to reach into it, or lift the nightgown, for fear of bugs or lice. But he needed to do no more than lean down and look closely to see the bloodstains smeared on its frame and dried on the stalks of straw.

He turned about and regarded William Burke thoughtfully.