The Edinburgh Dead

Two Sergeants

In the dull twilight, a small carriage turned in to the entrance of Calton Jail, and rumbled under the arch of the gatehouse. Lamps burned on either side of the driver’s seat. It drew up on the yard, in the shadow of the great prison, where a small group of men awaited it. The governor, Captain Maclellan of the guards, a handful of his officers. And William Hare, in a heavy, high-collared coat that hid much of his face.

The police sergeant who drove the cart dropped down on to the yard’s cobblestones. Maclellan came forward to meet him.

“Jack Rutherford,” Maclellan said. “It’s a miserable duty you’ve got yourself tonight. Someone at the police house got a grudge against you?”

“Volunteered,” Sergeant Rutherford said, and when he saw Maclellan’s surprise, he shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it. The man’s under the Crown’s protection, after all. Got to see him safe out of the city. Let them lynch him somewhere else if they like, just so long as it’s outside the city bounds.”

Maclellan shook his head in amazement.

“Still. A devil like him, it’s a damn shame.”

“I don’t mind. Nobody else wanted to do it, and like I say, it needs doing.”

The governor murmured a few words to Hare, but the Irishman—no longer a prisoner, no longer under any obligation to feign civility or gratitude—paid him no heed, and climbed into the carriage with a sour grin upon his face.

It was done with no more ceremony than that. The worst killer any of the men present had ever encountered—none of them were in any doubt of that—walked free of Calton Jail. Rutherford jumped back up on to the driver’s seat, clicked his tongue at the horse, and gave it a touch of the switch to bring it around, and the carriage rolled slowly out through the gatehouse and into Regent Road.

The men drifted off, back to their duties, none happy with the one they had just discharged. Maclellan lingered, though, a moment or two longer than the rest, staring after the disappeared carriage. He came to a decision, and called one of his men back to his side.

“Get me one of the lads can run a message down to the Canongate, would you?” Maclellan said. “Quick as you like.”

The carriage made its way slowly down towards Princes Street. It did not travel far, though, for outside the grand theatre on the corner of North Bridge it came to a halt, close in to the pavement so that it should not obstruct the other coaches and hackneys moving along behind it.

Isabel Ruthven walked smartly forward from where she had been waiting beside a street lamp. She reached up and pressed a banknote into Rutherford’s hand. He said nothing, but tucked it quickly away into a pocket. Isabel climbed into the carriage and settled in beside Hare. Who leered at her, baring his teeth.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you tonight,” he said, “but I’ll be damned if you’re not a sweet sight for a man’s been in a jail cell longer than he needed.”

“A charming compliment, Mr. Hare.” Isabel smiled.

The carriage lurched into motion once more. As it eased away from the kerb, the doors of the theatre opened, and the departing audience began to flow out on to the pavement, all abuzz at the splendour of the opera they had witnessed.

“Mr. Blegg wanted me to convey his appreciation for your silence on the matter of his dealings with you,” Isabel said, looking out at those gorgeous, glittering opera-goers crowding out.

Hare grunted.

“Never much of a worry. The lawyers gave me immunity for everything I done with Burke. Nothing else. They’d have hung me alongside him if the other stuff came out.”

He looked sharply at Isabel.

“Still, you said I’d be paid for it, the time you came to see me. Twenty pounds, you said.”

“Indeed. We’ll get you your money this very night, shall we? But here, I brought you something to toast your freedom with.”

She produced a hip flask, bound in worked leather, and offered it to him. Hare sniffed it, and grinned at the smell.

“Whisky,” Isabel confirmed. “A very fine variety, I’m told, though I’m no drinker of it myself.”

Hare took a long drink from the flask, tipping his head back. The carriage jolted over cobbles, and he spilled a little of the amber fluid across his lips. It ran over his chin as he reached out a hand and laid it on Isabel’s knee.

“I could do with some other kind of celebrating,” he rasped at her.

She guided his hand away, not roughly, but firmly.

“No, Mr. Hare. Not tonight. Not if you want that twenty pounds.”

The carriage rolled on, up to the High Street, and there it turned west. Hare leaned across in front of Isabel to peer out into the street.

“I’m supposed to go to the southern mail. Get out of this damned city.”

He was slurring his words. They came sluggishly off his clumsy tongue.

“Don’t you worry,” Isabel said, pushing him back into his seat.

By the time the carriage was rattling down West Bow, and slowing to a halt at the foot of it, Hare was quite asleep. Rutherford dismounted and looked in.

“You’ll have to help me with him,” Isabel said casually. “Just to get him inside, then you can wait with the carriage. Hold on to this for me, would you?” She handed him the whisky flask that she had lifted from Hare’s limp hand. “Don’t drink from it, though. We’ll be needing you awake.”

The two of them worked Hare out of the carriage, and held him up between them, each getting themselves under one of his arms. It was not the kind of scene entirely unfamiliar to the inhabitants of West Bow or Grassmarket, and not many folk paid them much heed.

“Give me one of those lights,” Isabel said.

Rutherford unhooked one of the oil lamps hanging from the end of the driver’s seat and handed it her.

“In here,” Isabel told him.

They went through a low, dark passageway into the foul-smelling, rubbish-strewn courtyard beyond. Isabel showed the way with the light of the lamp, and the two of them bore Hare into Major Weir’s house.

The dreadful oppression of the place made Rutherford ever more agitated as they moved through its ruins. He started at every flicker of flame light across the crumbling, slumping walls.

“All right,” Isabel said. “This will do.”

Rutherford let Hare fall.

“You can go back to the carriage,” Isabel told him.

“Thank you,” Rutherford breathed with heartfelt relief, and made to retrace their steps through the grime and debris.

“Wait a moment.”

The voice came from the impenetrable darkness of the back room. It was an ugly sound, uneven and rattling. Thick.

“Just listen,” the voice came again. “We’ll send Hare out to you shortly. When he comes, you take him on where he needs to go. We’ll not be joining you.”

“Aye, all right,” Rutherford said. “You’re paying, so whatever you say.”

He went quickly away. Isabel looked into the darkness.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Are we not to leave together?”

“I’ll explain, but let’s get done what needs doing first. It’s not easy for me to talk. I need Hare.”

Isabel set the lamp down on a rotting length of timber, and went to the corner. She lifted a rag and began to bring out the items it had concealed. As she worked, Blegg crawled yard by effortful yard out into the lamp’s light.

His skin was crusted and blackened, burned back to the bone where it had been thinnest, over his scalp. His eyelids were gone, and the great white orbs of his eyeballs shone in the light. Much of his lips was gone too, scorched away. Across the whole upper half of his torso, scraps of charred clothing were merged into what remained of his flesh. Both hands were hooked into stiff, raw claws, the fingers bent inwards and flayed by heat.

Isabel laid a pair of gloves side by side on the floor. Next a shallow wooden bowl, into which she poured black ink from a small bottle. Last a stylus made of reed.

“I can lie across him,” Blegg said, “but my hands aren’t up to the rest of it. Just close up his mouth and nose. That’s all.”

Blegg hauled himself across Hare’s chest and lay there, a dead weight. Isabel knelt down and did as she had been told, pressing one hand over Hare’s mouth, pinching shut his nose with the other.

“He won’t wake,” Blegg hissed.

And he was right. William Hare died in his sleep. Suffocated.

Afterwards Blegg had Isabel wedge the stylus into his crippled hand, for he could not pick it up himself. He dipped it into the ink she had stolen from her husband’s stores, and began to write over the back of Hare’s hands.

“One thing I learned from Ruthven and that French bastard,” he grunted. “This does help with keeping a hold on the body.”

After that, he said nothing more that Isabel could understand for quite a time. He coughed out streams of Latin phrases from his ravaged form as he worked, his voice faltering and dwindling all the time. His body shook, collapsing beneath the strain of its exertions. Isabel sat close by the lamp, her hands folded in her lap, waiting quietly. It did not take all that long for Blegg to sink down, slumping incrementally on to Hare’s corpse, and for his rasping voice to fade away to nothing. He lay there, perfectly still. Perfectly empty.

It remained thus for a time. The woman sitting silently, staring at the two corpses lying amongst the detritus of decades. The lamp’s glow fluttering around the walls. A steady, slow drip, somewhere out in the shadows, of rainwater that had leached its way down through the seams of the vast building above and fell now into this ruinous hollow at its base.

And at last, Hare shuddered. Isabel rose, her hands clasped, watching with gleaming eyes. Hare stirred, and shook, and rolled his head. He heaved, and pushed Blegg’s ghastly charred corpse off him and away. He did not even look at it as he rose to his feet, and stood there swaying and blinking.

“Is it you?” Isabel asked, hope and fear and anticipation all layered in the words.

Hare looked at her.

“Always me,” he said with a wolfish grin. “Always me.”

He held up his hands and splayed them, examining the inscriptions straggling across the back of them.

“It will have to do,” he said. “Needed more time, more tools to really make it hold and work, but this will do, for a while. Give me those gloves.”

Isabel brought them to him and he pulled them over his hands.

“I hardly dared to believe,” she said, almost breathless with excitement.

“You should have,” Hare scolded her lightly. “I told you I was not done yet. You should have believed me. Just needed the right place to do it—a place that remembered me well—and the right kind of man to host me, the right blackness of heart to open up the way as he departed. I knew Hare would be what we needed. I like to think I played my small part in making him what he was, so it seems only fair I should be repaid with the use of him.”

She embraced him, and he held her for a moment or two before easing her away.

“What now?” she asked. “You won’t leave me here, surely, whatever you said to Rutherford? I came to find you, didn’t I? Out at the farm. You couldn’t ask more of me than that.”

Hare ignored her.

“Is there any sign?” he asked, turning his face this way and that to show her his cheeks. “Any bruising, or scarring?”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “But listen, what comes now?”

“Turn that lamp down. No point taking even the smallest risk of discovery, now that the hard part’s done.”

She groaned in frustration, but bent down to quench the flame and return Weir’s house to its natural state of gloom. She straightened, and turned, and found Hare right in front of her, very close. He put his gloved hands about her throat, and pushed her roughly back against the wall.

“All good things come to an end, Isabel,” he whispered as his fingers tightened. “This city’s done for me now. I’ve known that for a long time now, even if your husband could never see it. So I’m away, I don’t know where. But I do know I’ll be going alone, and I’ll not be leaving behind anyone who knows what face I’m wearing.”

He held her there for long minutes, squeezing ever more tightly, until she breathed no more, and hung limp in his grip.

Hare strode out on to the West Bow with a confident gait, tugging the black gloves tight on his hands. Rutherford, taken somewhat unawares by his abrupt reappearance, hurriedly tapped out the pipe he had been smoking on the heel of his boot. He frowned at Hare.

“Did they not give you the lamp to bring back?” he asked irritably. “It’s police property, this carriage. I’ll have to answer if it doesn’t go back just as it came out.”

“You got paid, didn’t you?” Hare snapped.

“Indeed I did, Mr. Hare. Just like you did, I’d imagine, so have a care with that tongue of yours.”

“Don’t call me Hare. That’s a dangerous name these days.”

“Oh, aye? What would you have me call you?”

“It doesn’t much matter to me. Why not Mr. Black? That’s simple enough for you to remember, I should think.”

Rutherford curled his lip in loathing. He might have pursued the discussion, and pushed on into argument perhaps, but Hare brushed past him and clambered into the carriage, sinking back into its concealing shadows.

“The southern mail coach, isn’t it?” he said from inside there. “We’ll need to make good time now, if we’re not to miss it.”

Rutherford vaulted up to his station at the front of the carriage, muttering invective under his breath. He fell silent, though, as they moved off and the horse broke into a trot under the encouragement of the whip. A puzzled frown etched itself upon his face. Hare, he was thinking, no longer seemed to talk with quite the same strong Irish accent he had before.

They caught the mail coach by only a matter of minutes. There was but a single space remaining, on the high seat on the back of it, when they found it waiting by the roadside in Newington, south of the Old Town.

Hare climbed up there nimbly enough and settled himself in. He had the collar of his coat pulled high, and his soft cap tugged down over his brow, as if a man dreadfully troubled by the cold. Rutherford looked up at him. It seemed fitting, and prudent, to say something innocent of the sort that might pass between two men parting.

“Goodbye, Mr. Black,” he said. “I wish you well home.”

Hare glanced down at him, and Rutherford caught the momentary contemptuous sneer, if no one else did. He stalked back to the carriage, reflecting bitterly upon the ingratitude of murderers.

Rutherford lived with his wife and daughter in a flat at the back of a court along Nicolson Street. It was a good place to live. Edinburgh had not expanded southwards with the same grand visionary rigour that had been applied to the northward growth of the New Town. Its advance here had been, instead, incremental, one new building or development outside the city wall following another as inclination and opportunity arose. Nor had it matched the stately grandeur of the New Town’s long terraces and garden squares, but there were corners of elegance and a general mood of prosperity. For a police sergeant, spending his days scouring the streets and closes of the Old Town, it was a pleasing release to return there each night.

Rutherford walked down Nicolson Street with a weary tread. It had been about as long a day as he had suffered in months. By the time he had left Hare on the mail coach, and got the carriage back to the police stables, and endured the inevitable barrage of questions from his fellow officers in the police house, it was closing on midnight. He would have left without answering a single one of those eager enquiries if he thought he could manage it without causing indignant offence and disappointment, but instead he dutifully recited the tale of how William Hare had left Edinburgh. He made no mention of Isabel Ruthven, or of the delay in the West Bow.

He wondered absently about those things as he trudged homeward through the emptying streets, though. He did not know, nor want to know, what grubby transaction had been enacted while he waited and smoked his pipe with the carriage. With luck, his connection with the Ruthven family was entirely at an end now, and he would never have to spare another moment’s fretting over it all. The money had been good, of course—there was never enough of that, no matter how a man scrimped and saved—but it was not, Rutherford had come to feel, worth the worries that attended upon it.

He nodded to one or two people he knew as he drew near to his home. Were he less tired, he would have stopped to talk with them. It paid a man to keep in good standing with his neighbours. But his exhaustion was heavy upon him, and he walked on and turned empty-handed into the court where his family and, more importantly he felt, his bed awaited.

“Jack Rutherford.”

Rutherford turned, startled. Adam Quire stepped out from the darkness beneath the arch of a stairwell’s entrance. Rutherford hung his head and gave a nervous laugh.

“You gave me a turn there, Adam,” he said, knowing by his gut and by some indefinable quality in the way Quire held himself that here was a problem, and perhaps a grave one.

His weariness fell from him in an instant, dispelled by the shiver of alarm that went up his spine.

“Are you keeping well, Adam?” he asked, with a broad smile.

“That’s a good question,” Quire said. “You know, it took me a while to find out where you lived. I didn’t remember us ever talking of it, when we shared the same employment, so I suppose we can never have been great friends.”

“Friends?” Rutherford repeated, feigning bewilderment at the course of the conversation, and taking a step closer to his own stair, at the far end of the court. “I’d like to think so, aye.”

“How much did Ruthven pay you to break that bond?”

Rutherford frowned, shrugged.

“I’m not understanding you, Adam.”

The smallest tightening around Quire’s eyes told him that his acting skills had failed him. Quire had always been good at reading men. Good at breaking them, too. Rutherford began to grow seriously afraid then.

“That your stair over there, is it?” Quire asked, tipping his chin up to indicate the dark opening in the furthest tenement.

“Aye,” Rutherford said, looking that way, “that’s…”

Quire’s hand was over his mouth, his arm about his chest, dragging him violently backwards. Rutherford kicked and scrabbled to get his feet back under him, but Quire was the bigger and stronger of them by some distance. He hauled Rutherford into the nearest stair, and threw him down on to the first few steps. Rutherford turned on to his back, but did not rise.

Quire loomed over him, blocking out what little light there was in the courtyard. He held a pistol in his upraised hand, brandishing it like a cudgel.

“I’ll beat your head in if you give me the reason,” Quire hissed.

Rutherford lifted his hands, set them between him and Quire as if to fend him off.

“You’ve gone mad,” he said, as loudly as he dared.

Quire gave the pistol a warning shake.

“You keep your voice down, or that’ll be the reason for breaking your head,” he said quietly.

“All right, all right.”

The only thing Rutherford could think to do was delay matters, stretch them out, until some passer-by should disturb them and save him from Quire’s wrath. Quire, unfortunately, had always been a man inclined to hurry right to the meat of any talk.

“You’re the one told them I was going to the Assembly Rooms. You tricked it out of the boy bringing the message, somehow. If you lie, I’ll know it.”

Rutherford believed that to be true, so he chose to say nothing at all, merely giving out a faint whimper that he hoped would sound at least as piteous and frightened as he felt.

“Told Baird, too, that I’d been talking to Cath, maybe? Lost me my wage and my calling, in that case. Were you watching me, Rutherford? Spying on me for Ruthven and Blegg? Baird, too?”

Rutherford snorted.

“Baird’s a prancing prig.”

Quire suddenly hit him in the face with his free hand, looping it around outside the shield Rutherford had made of his arms. The blow broke open the corner of his lip, and punched his head back against the sharp edge of one of the stone steps. He moaned, and blinked in surprise and pain.

“For God’s sake, man,” he gasped.

“Hold your tongue.”

Rutherford had never heard quite such steady contempt and threat in a man’s voice. Quire had always carried a rather intimidating presence about him, but this was something different. This was cold, purposeful determination undiluted by any pretence at fellow feeling or human concern.

“Just tell me this, and I’ll leave you be,” Quire said. “It’s not you I’m after, Rutherford. You’re just the rat running around the edges. But tell me this: you’ve taken Ruthven money, and you told them I was going to the Assembly Rooms.”

Rutherford tasted blood in his mouth. He licked at the wound with his tongue, buying a fragment of time in which to think. This was not entirely the Quire he had known; he did not know precisely by what rules he now worked.

“Listen,” Rutherford murmured, making his choice and praying for a bit of good fortune. “You’re not wrong. I’ve a family, and I needed the money. Nothing more to it than that, Quire. You know how it is. It was nothing much they wanted of me, just a word now and again of what got talked about in the police house. Letting them know if any name they might be interested in ever came up, their own most of all.

“But that business with you getting turned off the force, and then the Assembly Rooms… aye, I might have played a wee part in all of that, but I broke with them after, Quire. I swear to you, I wanted nothing more to do with them after that. It was all getting too rich for my blood, and I never thought it would come to such a pitch. Taking a man’s profession and living away from him, that’s not right, not right at all.”

He waited with held breath to see the effect of his confession upon Quire. The result was not precisely what he had hoped for.

“Except you didn’t, did you? Break with them. You’ve been taking Isabel Ruthven to see William Hare in the Calton Jail, haven’t you?”

Quire made to bring that cruel-looking pistol down, and Rutherford flung up his arms to protect himself against what proved to be a feint. Instead, Quire bent down and punched him hard in the stomach. Rutherford coughed, and curled himself over, clutching his midriff.

“You were there tonight,” Quire said, calm and level. “I know it, so don’t deny it. All you need to do is tell me what she wants with Hare, and what you’ve been up to tonight. Tell me that, and we’re done.”

Rutherford recounted to him in great detail the events of the evening. He could see nothing in the business with Hare that could outrage Quire any more than the injuries that had been directed against his own person, so there seemed only gain to be had from trying to keep the brute happy.

“In the West Bow,” Quire said with unusual precision and clarity. “Through a short arched passage into a yard that looks like it’s not had a scavenger go through it in years. An empty apartment, at the back of the yard, foul and falling down. You’re sure of all that?”

Rutherford nodded.

“And someone waiting in there, for you and her to bring Hare?”

“Aye. Never saw who it was, and it was only Hare came out, like I said. He was acting a wee bit odd, right enough, but he’s not exactly what you’d call an ordinary man, is he? Can’t be, to have done the things he done. Look, can you let me up off these steps, Adam? It’s a damned uncomfortable bed you’ve got me lying on.”

“How do you mean, odd?” Quire asked. “What was odd about Hare?”

“I don’t know,” muttered Rutherford, almost as much irritated as afraid, now that the ardour of Quire’s violent passion seemed to have cooled somewhat, to be supplanted by a thoughtful intensity. “He was fiddling about with strange gloves he’d got from somewhere. Talking a bit different. Still a cocky bastard, mind. He just sounded different, like he’d changed his accent or something. All right?”

Quire at last tucked that pistol into his belt, and Rutherford felt a wave of relief washing through him. If he got out of this with a split lip and a bruise on his belly, he would count himself blessed.

“And you put him on the coach,” Quire said.

It did not sound like a question, but Rutherford chose to make it such, eager to display his compliance.

“Dumfries, that’s right. He’s gone to Dumfries, on the mail. I put him on the coach, in Newington.”

And then suddenly Quire’s fists were darting in again, both of them one after the other, battering Rutherford on either side of the jaw. Quire took hold of his hair, and lifted his head by it, pulling so hard that Rutherford feared a handful of it would be torn from his scalp.

“The thing of it is,” Quire murmured with chill contempt, “you’ve cost me more than I can easily pardon, Sergeant Rutherford. My employment’s bad enough, but it’s not the worst of it. You told them I was going to the Assembly Rooms, and by that telling you put a good friend of mine in a great trouble of deal. Trouble that’s still got him walking about with a stick. I don’t hold much with forgiveness, Rutherford. Not these days.”

Rutherford heard what was coming in Quire’s tone, and kicked out at his crotch. Quire was too alert for that, and turned to take the blow on his hip, then batted Rutherford’s leg aside and closed down upon him in a flurry of blows.