The Edinburgh Dead

Nobody Sees William Hare

Mathieu Durand looked to Quire to be on the very brink of death. Both the Frenchman himself and Agnes McLaine insisted otherwise. Durand’s version was that he was indeed fatally ill, but that his final decline was further off than he had expected; Agnes’ was that Durand was a morose, fatalistic fool whose mortal dread of Blegg was doing as much to drag him down as any magics that might have been laid upon him, and if he could but shake himself free of it, he might well recover. Despite their differences, they seemed to Quire to have developed a certain rough affection—or respect, at least—for one another during their enforced cohabitation.

For all Quire knew, Durand deserved to die; perhaps that he had broken with Ruthven and Blegg did not excuse his earlier part in their transgressions. Quire chose not to judge that.

“What man would not prefer to die with the soil of his homeland under his feet?” Durand said as the three of them worked their slow way along the Leith seafront.

Quire had his hand under Durand’s arm to give him some support, and Agnes had found him a dusty, battered old walking stick from somewhere that he leaned heavily on. He was much reduced, even from the comparatively delicate figure he had cut when Quire first saw him, what felt an age ago in the drawing room of Ruthven’s house.

“Do you know,” Quire said, “the first time I met you, I guessed you might be quiet because you could not speak more than a word or two of English. Couldn’t have been much more wrong about that, could I?”

There was a broad expanse of dark, muddy sand laid out before them. The tide had retreated so far that the little breakers were mere flecks of white. Almost in those waves, at the very border between land and sea, a horse went pounding along the beach in full gallop. Its rider was crouched over its neck, tiny. The great horse stretched its long legs, and its mane and tail streamed out on the wind. The sand made fountains at its heels.

Quire and Durand and Agnes all stopped to watch it. For Quire at least there was something uplifting in the sight of that powerful creature running through the edge of the ocean, making for the horizon, putting its every effort into the simple act of the gallop.

The truth of it was rather more mundane, and mercenary, he knew. Every summer, a goodly portion of Edinburgh’s entire population could be found down here, on the Leith sands and all along the seafront at the back of them, for the day of the races. Whole squadrons of horses swept up and down the sands on that day, and whole fortunes swept back and forth through the hands of the bookmakers and the touts and the thieves. Some of the horse trainers liked to run their charges on the beach all year round, for the sake of familiarity and the endless flat softness of the place.

“Perhaps that is my boat, is it?” Durand said quietly.

Quire looked beyond the horse, and the beach, out across the restless sea lying between them and the shores of Fife. A steamer was there, looking frail and delicate at this distance, laying behind it a long trail of smoke that paled and frayed as it fell behind the vessel’s stacks, dissipating on the wind.

“It could be,” Quire said.

“Driving a boat with fire,” Agnes McLaine mused. “It’s an age of miracles we live in, right enough.”

It was Durand’s intent, within the hour, to take ship down the east coast, to England, and thence across the Channel back to France. To die there, as he would have it, and be buried. Quire could understand that. Even an exile might want, at the end, to go back into the earth of the land that birthed him. Better than dying, and staying, on foreign fields, as so many of the men he had known had done.

If Durand died at all, of course. Quire did not know whether the Frenchman or Agnes was right in judging his fate. Agnes thought the cruel spirit that had animated Blegg’s form was likely gone, unhomed and thinned, and thus unable to exert any malign influence upon the Frenchman; Durand could not bring himself to believe that, as far as Quire could tell.

“It was Hare you said was the name of the man bringing bodies to Blegg, wasn’t it?” Quire asked Durand absently.

The Frenchman nodded, and shrugged his cloak more tightly about him. It was a bright day, but the wind coming in off the Forth had sharpness to it.

“Same one they’ve used to try this man Burke?”

“I do not know,” Durand said. “But how many men of one name would you have in your city who sell the dead?”

Quire grunted. Burke’s trial was a grisly sensation. Its substance had overspilled the bounds of the court, too awful and ghoulish to be contained. It filled every newssheet, and was the talk of every tavern and coffee shop; it had roused the folk of the Old Town to a state of fevered outrage and fury unlike anything seen in years. Not a little of their anger was directed upwards, towards Edinburgh’s lofty masters, for the outcome of the prosecution was not what the instincts of the mob demanded.

Sixteen murders, by most reckoning. Sixteen innocent men and women cruelly slain, all smothered and consigned to the dissecting table of Dr. Robert Knox. And from out of all that horror, there was but one man set to answer for it. William Burke would hang. Knox was spared any legal assault at all, and Hare—Hare it was who sent Burke to the hangman, for he had turned King’s evidence. The lawyers had bought his testimony with the promise of freedom. And that, the people of Edinburgh had clearly concluded, was obscene travesty.

“He’s to go free, they say,” Agnes said. “Hare.”

“He is.” Quire nodded. “He’s under the King’s protection now, still locked up, but he’ll be turned loose soon enough. And then he’ll be back to Ireland, I should say, since he’d be torn to pieces if he’s recognised around here. And anything he knows about Blegg or Ruthven’ll go across the sea with him. The papers have said nothing about that. Only the business him and Burke did with Knox. There’s no mention of any corpses going Ruthven’s way.”

“You should leave it be,” Agnes said quickly.

“I don’t know if I can,” Quire said, watching the steamboat plough its way through the waves, closing on the harbour.

“They decided it was a gas explosion,” Quire told Wilson Dunbar. “I read it in the Evening Courant, a few days after. Tragic loss of one of Melville Street’s finest houses, and the three poor dead souls found inside. Burned beyond recognition. The gas works was having none of it, of course, but what else would they say?”

“Christ.” Dunbar puffed out his cheeks. “You’re a lucky bastard, I’ll give you that. It was me they called Impervious, but the name’s not fitting me any more, so I’m thinking you’d best have it.”

Dunbar indeed seemed anything but impervious now. He had been reduced, for a time at least, by his suffering. He was thinner than Quire had ever known him, and his shoulders stooped a little. He walked with the aid of a stick.

He would surely have died, there in the hospital, but for the water the nurses and his wife had trickled into his mouth, and the food paste they fed him as if tending to a babe. Perhaps he would have died but for the ministrations of Agnes McLaine. Quire did not know. All he knew was that Dunbar lived, and grew stronger every day, and for that he was intensely, unquestioningly grateful.

They walked on the flat ground by the palace, where children flew kites in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat. Flat ground was the kind Dunbar liked best, for the moment, since he tired quickly. There was low cloud down, hiding the top of the hill in mists, and a fine drizzle on the air.

“Is it done, then?” Dunbar asked. “The whole business, I mean. You’ve burned the man’s house down, and he’s cooked to a cinder. Not much more to concern yourself with, at a guess.”

Quire regarded his feet as they trudged along through the damp grass. He had shared nothing more than the barest outline of all that had happened, for he knew that was all Dunbar really wanted. He remembered nothing of the night in the Princes Street gardens beyond rushing away from Quire and Durand, and hearing Blegg coming up behind him. Quire had seen in his eyes, when he talked of it, the haunted look, quickly dismissed but there, quite plain. He would do nothing to add to the man’s burdens.

“It’s done,” he said, as lightly as he could. “Let’s leave it to rest, should we?”

“Aye, if you like.”

Quire was walking slowly, to match his pace to Dunbar’s. The subtle rain was soaking into his coat and his hair.

“I know you’re liking your fresh air these days,” he said, “but maybe we’d best be getting back. It’s a bit dreich out here.”

Dunbar grunted and looked up at the cloud-cloaked heights of Arthur’s Seat, as if noticing for the first time the inclemency of the day.

“If you like. Ellen’ll have porridge she wants to get down my neck, anyway. She’s of the belief that there’s no better fodder for the healing body. Spoons it down me every hour of the day or night.”

“Can she speak of me yet without cursing?” Quire asked.

“Let’s just say she’d as soon not be seeing you.”

“Can’t fault her for that. If I was her, I’d probably come after me with a kitchen knife.”

“Aye, well, the thought maybe crossed her mind, but I dissuaded her, so that’s one more thing you owe me.”

“Fair enough.”

They walked in silence for a little way, then Dunbar gave a chuckle as if at some funny thought.

“How’s your own woman?” he asked Quire.

“Cath? She’s fine. There’s a discussion to be had whether she’s to come out of the Holy Land and take up lodgings with me, but for now, it’s fine.”

Quire had removed himself from the Holy Land, with a whole medley of conflicting feelings about doing so, and taken up residence once again in his own quarters. He did not feel entirely safe or restful there, and might never again, but nor was the Holy Land a place he would ever be inclined to call home. Cath would follow after him, he thought, if he asked; he had not done so, but was thinking it might be the wisest thing to do. Perhaps the wisest thing he had ever done.

“And work? What about that?”

“Oh, I’ve not thought of it. Had other things on my mind of late.”

“You’re well out of the police business, maybe,” grunted Dunbar. “This affair with Knox and the Irish boys is a bloody thing, isn’t it?”

Quire could not quite agree with the first part of that, but the second gave him no great difficulty.

“A bloody thing for sure,” he said as they came to the foot of the Canongate.

The factories were in full clamorous flow, sending out their plumes of smoke to melt into the low roof of cloud. The drizzle was damping things down a bit—the stinks and the smoke and the folk all alike—but still the place was awash with carts and barrows and men hurrying this way and that.

“If you ever doubted me when I’ve said blame don’t follow as close in the footsteps of guilt as it should, you’ll know better now,” Dunbar opined. “Look at Knox, buying the bodies and not a charge against him. And Hare. They saw he was the worse of the two of them, and he’s to be free, just because he told them what they needed to send his friend to the gallows.”

Quire smiled to hear the bubbles of anger pushing up into Dunbar’s voice. It was a very fine thing, to hear the man getting back into his vituperative, argumentative flow.

“There’s a fair few folk baying for Knox’s blood,” Quire said. “He may not come out of this so pretty. But Hare—aye, that’s not right.”

Dunbar shook his head, despairing at the iniquities of the world and those who held its reins. An ease came over him, as if he were comforted by the reliable, familiar availability of targets for his critical appraisal. It told him, Quire hoped, that nothing of consequence had changed; that he would be hale and healthy and strong again soon, and back flying kites with his sons, forgetting what had happened.

“It’s barbarous times we’re living in, wouldn’t you say?” Dunbar said quietly. Not melancholy; just reflective.

“I would. Aye, I would.”

Calton Hill, which rose at the east end of Princes Street and looked out over the whole of Old and New Towns alike, held three prisons. The Debtors’ Jail, the Bridewell where the indigents and prostitutes and petty troublemakers found themselves, and the new Calton Jail, little more than ten years open, where the hard men went: the killers and the wounders, the blackmailers and the inveterate thieves. The jails stood side by side on the hill’s southern flank, lined up along the top of low cliffs and staring grimly out like a threefold threat and reminder for the city’s inhabitants of the consequences of transgression.

The Calton Jail presented by far the grandest and most fearsome countenance of the three. It was vast, like an amalgamation of castle and stately manor. Magnificent on the outside, in its austere way, as befitted such a prominent player in the architectural pageant of Edinburgh’s heart. On the inside, vile, malodorous and dangerous. Quire had been within its walls on several occasions, and every time had emerged from it eager for the cleansing airs and lights of an open sky. It was not an experience he was eager to repeat, but he went there in any case.

Nowhere was the jail more like a fortress than in its approaches. Its gatehouse stood on Regent Road, a wide boulevard that curved around Calton Hill’s southern slopes. It was a prodigious structure, with two towers flanking the huge gates. Walls thrice the height of a man stretched away on either side, enclosing the prison yard and the enormous building that stood at the heart of it.

Once, Quire might have talked his way through the watch at the gatehouse without any difficulty, for a sergeant of police could come and go as he pleased; but he was no longer such a thing, and he found himself instead taken into one the offices built into the gatehouse, to face David Maclellan, a captain of the prison guard he knew of old. Not well, but at least he did know him.

“Of course I can’t let you in,” Maclellan said, pained at both the suggestion and the need for him to explain its impossibility.

“I thought maybe, since you’ve known me long enough, I might just get an hour. No more than that.”

Maclellan set his elbow on the desk, and rested his chin upon the upturned palm of his hand, staring meaningfully at Quire.

“You’re not making much sense, Adam. I ken you fine, but I ken you’re no policeman too, not any more. You’re just a man, and that’s not the kind of folk who get in to see William Hare.”

Quire gazed out of the office’s barred window in disappointment. It faced on to the main prison, and he could very faintly hear hand bells being rung in there. Feeding time. He had been there, once, when the inmates got their food, and it had been the worst slop he had ever seen, in or out of the army. Hardly fit for pigs.

“There’s been some got in to see him before,” Quire complained. “Reporters and the like; so they claim in the newssheets, anyway. I thought I’d have a chance at getting a word with him.”

“There’s no man here had more visitors than he did before the trial,” Maclellan grunted. “Lawyers and priests and all sorts. Aye, and maybe a reporter or two. But nobody sees William Hare now. Not unless they’re police, or have their permission and escort. That Jack Rutherford was the last, bringing the Ruthven woman. You must know him well enough. Ask him to bring you along, and maybe we’ll see about getting you in.”

Quire did not say anything. He remained quite still, staring out through the thick, speckled glass at the jail.

“It’s the best I can do, Adam, you must understand. This Hare… Jesus, he’s not just another prisoner. The city’s on the boil over the whole business. Everyone’s calling for his head. And he’s stopped talking, in any case. Hardly saying a word to anyone.”

“Isabel Ruthven, was it?” Quire asked, still not looking at the guard captain.

“Aye, might have been. I don’t particularly remember the name.”

“What was her business with Hare, do you know?”

Maclellan sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.

“I’ve no idea, Quire. Maybe a relative of one of the victims or something. I’ve no idea.”

“Would you do something for me?” Quire leaned across the desk, and put every ounce of sincerity and gravity he possessed into his appeal. “Would you just get a message to me if either of those two come back to see Hare? Rutherford or Isabel Ruthven. Either of them, or both. Send a message to my house—I’ll tell you where to find it—to let me know they’ve been.”

“And why would I do such a thing?”

Maclellan sounded more puzzled than affronted by the suggestion.

“Just because it might be very important to me,” said Quire, his mind working quickly, trying to tease sense out of the tangle of his thoughts. “It might be nothing, but it might not.”

He could see the hesitation in Maclellan’s face. So he gambled.

“And because I’ll put ten pounds your way if they come and I know of it within the hour.”