The Edinburgh Dead

Edinburgh, 1828

The castle had colonised its craggy perch over centuries, embracing the contours of the rock with a network of angular walls, yards and barracks and gun platforms. Spilling eastwards from it, encrusting the long ridge that trailed down to the royal palace, was the Old Town of Edinburgh. There—packed inside the strict confines once set by the city’s defensive wall—soaring tenements vied for space, crowding one another, making labyrinths of the narrow spaces they enclosed. It was an aged place; not designed but accreted over centuries. Thickened and tangled by the passage of years.

A multitude of gloomy and overshadowed alleyways projected, like ribs, from the great street running down the spine of the ridge. They descended into the shallow valleys to north and south, sinking away from the cleansing breezes. Through these closes and wynds the people of this ancient Edinburgh moved, and in them they lived. And died.

Down there, where one of those closes gave out on to the Cowgate, a low and grimy thoroughfare, dawn revealed a dead man curled in the doorway of a shuttered whisky shop, his blood crusted in black profusion upon his clothes and on the cobblestones around him. Looking like something forgotten, or spent and casually discarded, by the departing night.

“Who is he?” asked Adam Quire, staring down at the corpse with a faint wince of distaste.

It was not the sight of it that disturbed him, but the smell. The body stank of sour whisky and blood, and the man had soiled himself in the last moments of his life. There was a less easily identifiable dank, musty strand to the symphony, too. It all made for a noisome aura that discomfited Quire, particularly since the stale flavours of last night still lingered rather queasily in his own mouth: all the beer he had drunk and the smoke-thick air he had breathed.

“No name for him, Sergeant,” said the young nightwatchman at his side. Lauder, but Quire was unsure of his forename; Gordon, perhaps.

“Who found him?”

“One of the scavengers. Grant Carstairs.”

“I know him. Shake?”

“Aye. Some folk call him that. Got a bit of the palsy.”

Quire kneeled at the side of the body, his knee slipping into a tiny, cold puddle couched in the crease between two cobblestones. He grimaced as the chill water soaked through his trousers.

“Nothing left of his throat,” Lauder said, gesturing with the extinguished lantern still clasped in his right hand. “Look at that. What a mess.”

Quire could see well enough. A ragged hole in the front of the dead man’s neck exposed gristle and meat. One sleeve of his jacket was torn to shreds, as was the arm beneath. Material and flesh were barely distinguishable in the morning gloom. Furrows had been gouged in his scalp, too, the skin torn; one ear was no more than a tattered rag.

“I’ve not seen the like,” the watchman murmured.

Quire had—and much worse—but not for a long time, and not outside the confines of a battlefield. He thought he heard as much wonder as horror in Lauder’s voice. The man was young, after all; not long employed. Perhaps he had never seen at such close quarters what havoc could be wrought upon the human body. He looked a little pale, though it might be but the watery light of the winter morning making him appear so.

“He’d not have died quietly,” Quire said, preoccupied now by the uncharitable fear that Lauder might empty his stomach, or faint, or otherwise complicate an already unpleasant situation.

He looked east and west along the Cowgate, then northwards up the gloomy length of Borthwick’s Close. The Old Town’s inhabitants were stirring from their dark tenements and gathering in silent huddles, distracted from the start of the day’s business by this gruesome spectacle.

“I’ll get some more men down here to help you,” Quire muttered to Lauder. “Once they’re here, you can start asking questions. See who heard what, and if anyone can put a name on him.”

The younger man’s scepticism was evident.

“Probably Irish. Cut loose once the canal was dug. Maybe he’s working on that new bridge.”

It was a lazy but not entirely foolish suggestion. The Old Town was full of Irish labourers bereft of labour, and Highlanders bereft of their high lands for that matter, all of them washed up here by the tides of ill fortune and poverty. More than a few had indeed found some escape from their poverty and lassitude in the building of the huge new bridge being thrown over the Cowgate, and to be named in honour of the king, George the Fourth.

But: “No,” Quire said. “He’s no navvy or builder.”

He lifted the man’s arm, turning it against the dead stiffness of the muscles to expose his palm.

“See his hand? No rougher than your own. He’s not been digging earth or breaking rock. And his clothes… might not have been a rich man, but he’s no pauper either. He’ll go in a pauper’s grave, though, if we can’t find him a name and a family. Don’t want that, if we can help it. It’s no way for a man to end his days.”

The dead man’s jacket had fallen open a little as Quire moved his arm. A flap of material there caught his eye now, and he reached gingerly in, felt the loose ends of torn stitching. He had to bend his weaker left hand at a sharp angle to do so, and felt a twinge of stiff pain in his forearm. His old wounds misliked the cold.

“Did you find anything in his pockets?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Lauder grunted.

“Did you ask Shake if there was anything?”

Lauder shrugged, his cape shifting heavily. Standing watch over a corpse, on a cold dawn at the end of a long night, in the Cowgate where the city’s police had no surfeit of friends… these were not the ingredients of contentment. At the best of times, few of Quire’s colleagues—the miserably paid nightwatchmen perhaps least of all—shared his notions of justice and dignity for the dead. Those things could be hard to find in the Old Town, even for the living. Easier not to try, sometimes.

“Just wait here until I get you some help,” Quire said as he rose to his feet. “It’ll not be long.”

He began to ascend the stinking ravine of Borthwick’s Close, pushing through the knot of onlookers that had gathered a short way up the alley.

“Anyone know him?” he asked as he went, but no one replied. They averted their eyes, on the whole. Only a child, holding the rough linen of his mother’s skirt with one tight hand, yesterday’s dirt still smudged over his cheeks, met Quire’s gaze fully. The boy parted his lips in an unappealing grin, and sucked air in through the corners of his mouth. It was an idiot sort of sound.

Quire was jostled as he made his way through the crowd, but no more than he would have expected. He was a big man, wide-shouldered and wide-chested, and he knew that his angular face, framed by dense, wiry hair, suggested ill humour more often than not. Though that appearance—enhanced by his grey greatcoat, the baton at his belt and the military boots he often wore out of ancient habit—deterred most troublemakers, no assembly in the Old Town was without one or two who thought themselves above such concerns. The place had a truculent state of mind.

Quire climbed up and up the close, careful on the rough and uneven cobbles, passing dozens of small windows, only a few of them lit by oil or candle or fire. He heard someone above him, leaning out from the third or fourth storey, hawk and spit; but when he looked, there was no one to be seen, just the man-made cliff faces blocking out the sky. The close narrowed as it rose towards the High Street—if he had extended both arms, Quire could have encompassed its whole width—before burrowing through the overarching body of a tenement to disgorge him on to the Old Town’s great thoroughfare.

It was akin to emerging from the Stygian depths of some malodorous tunnel into another world: one filled with bustle and light and all the energy and breezes that the closes did not permit within their tight confines. Scores of people moved this way and that, avoiding the little mounds of horse dung that punctuated their paths, flowing around the hawkers and stall-holders readying their wares, dodging the carts and carriages that clattered up the cobble-clad road. The air shivered to a cacophony of trade and greeting and argument.

Quire advanced no more than a pace or three before a salesman sought to snare him.

“A tonic of universal efficacy, sir,” the man cried, with an excess of unsolicited enthusiasm. He swept up a small, neat glass bottle from his barrow and extended it towards Quire. “No affliction of the lung or liver can withstand its beneficial application.”

Quire paused, and examined the dress of the man who thus accosted him. A short stovepipe hat, a neat and clean waistcoat tightly buttoned over a paunch of some substance. The loose cuffs of an expensive shirt protruding from the jacket sleeves. Clearly the uniform of one who made a tolerable profit from the ill health and gullibility of others.

The bottle Quire was invited to examine held a pale liquid of yellowish hue.

“Looks like piss.”

“Oh no, sir. Not at all,” exclaimed the affronted hawker, peering with a disbelieving frown at the flask in his hand. “A miraculous elixir, rather.”

Quire leaned a touch closer, gave the tonic his full attention.

“Horse’s piss,” he concluded, and left the man, still protesting, in his wake.

The police house was very near, on the far side of the High Street at Old Stamp Office Close. Quire cut across the currents of humanity towards it. He refused a flyer advertising a course of phrenological lectures that someone tried to thrust into his hand; narrowly avoided a crushed toe as a handcart piled high with half-finished shoes ground past.

It was all a little too much for one who had already been awake for longer than he would have wished, and he entered the abode of Edinburgh’s city police with a certain relief.

The cells that packed the ground floor of the main police house were unusually quiet, even the three—the “dark” cells—reserved for the most troublesome, or troubled, guests. Perhaps the cold of the last few nights had discouraged those given to misbehaviour. The place still had its familiar stink, though: a unique medley that never seemed to change, no matter how its component parts might vary. Quire suspected it was founded on a fog of human sweat, piss and vomit that had settled into the walls. There were smaller watch-houses scattered around the city, but somehow none of them had acquired quite the depth of odour that attached itself to the Old Stamp Office Close building.

Though the place was quiet, the comparative peace had not done anything to lighten Lieutenant Baird’s mood. Quire’s immediate superior disliked him, and never troubled to disguise the fact. He also disliked his current duty. The three lieutenants of police each took their turn as officer in charge of the police house, a task that combined tedium and unavoidably close acquaintance with the city’s least appealing inhabitants. When his turn came about, Baird’s manner seldom did anything but sour. All of which led Quire to expect a gruff welcome, which he duly received.

“Took you long enough,” Baird grunted, barely lifting his gaze from the ledger in which he was scratching away.

“Would you send some men to the body in the Cowgate, sir?” Quire said as politely as he felt able. “Get them asking around. There’s one of our night men down there who needs to be away to his bed.”

Baird put an arch of irritation into his eyebrows as if consenting, solely by dint of his own near-saintly nature, to an outrageous request.

“Is the superintendent about?” Quire asked.

“He’s occupied. In the court. What is it you’re wanting to trouble him with?”

Belatedly, Baird looked Quire in the eyes, and bestowed upon him a suspicious glare.

Quire shrugged.

“I was told he wanted a word with me, that’s all,” he lied.

Baird looked doubtful, but directed Quire with a flick of his head towards the staircase.

Two creaking flights carried Quire up to the little courtroom where justice was applied to those charged with minor crimes. There, amongst the benches, the Superintendent of Police, James Robinson, was in conference with a clutch of judicial clerks. They spoke softly, as if to protect the dignity of the chamber, with its wood-panelled walls and leaded windows and buffed floorboards.

At Quire’s approach, Robinson dismissed the others with a nod and a murmur. They filed quietly out, and the superintendent rose a little stiffly from his seat and regarded Quire, his eyes narrow and inquisitive. He was a man of calm authority, with grizzled sideburns, a handsome face weathered by experience—he was a good deal older than Quire’s thirty-seven years—and a deliberate manner. It imbued his gaze with a certain weight.

“You look like a man in want of sleep, Sergeant,” Robinson observed. “An early start for you, I hear.”

Quire nodded.

“A body, sir. In the Cowgate. Foot of Borthwick’s Close.”

“Ah. Is that beer I smell on you? I hope you are not testing your constitution too severely, Quire.”

The superintendent’s tone was almost casual, but carried a touch of circumspect concern. He knew more of Quire’s history than most, and that history was not one of unblemished restraint and good judgement.

It was only the patronage of James Robinson that shielded Quire against the worst effects of Lieutenant Baird’s antipathy. And, indeed, against the wider consequences he might have suffered for his occasional past infringements of law and discipline, from which that antipathy sprang. He and Robinson, bracketing Baird in the hierarchy of command, shared something the other lacked, something that inclined them towards a certain mutual regard: they had both been soldiers.

There was more to their relationship than that, though. For Quire’s part, he had a vague, imprecisely formed notion that Robinson had been a saviour of sorts to him. At his first admittance to the ranks of the police, Quire had been something of a lost soul, and a drunken one at that. The years following his departure from the army had been turbulent and troubled: peace could be testing for one schooled in nothing but war. He had carried within him a certain restless anger and rebelliousness that should, by rights, have cut short his tenure as an officer of the law. That he had avoided dismissal was due solely to Robinson’s patient, stern tutelage. For that, and the measure of purpose and worth his continuing employment had slowly brought him, Quire owed the man a debt of gratitude.

As Robinson regarded him now, his gaze wore a faintly paternal sheen.

“A night of indulgence, was it?” the superintendent enquired. “With that lackey of yours, I suppose… what’s his name? Dunbar?”

“Nothing excessive, sir,” Quire said, smothering a wry smile at the thought of Wilson Dunbar being anybody’s lackey. “I’m well enough. The drink’s not been my master for a long time now.”

The assertion was accepted without comment.

“So, this corpse,” Robinson said. “Are you done with it for now?”

“That’s the thing I wanted to ask you about. I’ve a mind to send him to the professor.”

“Why?”

“The man was… savaged. It was bloody work. Entirely out of the ordinary. I’d like to know what Christison has to say about it.”

“I’d not want him bothered without good reason,” said Robinson. “Man’s got a fair few demands upon his time, you know. I’ll not have his willingness to aid us exhausted by too many requests.”

“I’d have asked Baird, but he’d only tell me that: not to waste my time—or Christison’s—on some nobody dead in the Old Town.”

“Lieutenant Baird,” Robinson corrected him. “You might make at least some pretence at observing the proprieties of rank, Quire.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re sure you’re not, are you? Wasting time, I mean.”

“No such thing as a nobody, sir. I’ve seen—we both have—enough folk of the sort Baird would call nobody die for King and Country to know that. Every man deserves a name putting to him, a bit of time spent on the explanation of his dying. The wars taught me that, and you too, I know. A man like Baird doesn’t…”

“Don’t test my patience, Quire,” Robinson muttered, grimacing. “You’re the best man I’ve got when there’s rough business to be conducted, and sharper than most, so I’ve never regretted any allowances I’ve made you, but I’m not in the best of tempers. The Board of Police are trying me sorely these days, and the gout’s got a hold of my leg something fierce.”

“I’d never want to add to your troubles, sir,” Quire said quickly. “This is the only work I’ve ever found myself good at, outside the army. I owe that to you, I know. It’s just I can’t abide the notion of one man being less worthy of our efforts than another.”

“Just tell me you’re sure this needs Christison’s attention, that’s all.”

“The body’s a mess, sir. Like nothing I’ve seen in years.”

Robinson looked dubious, but there was a foundation of trust between the two of them to be drawn upon.

“I’ll arrange for him to take a look then,” he said. “Don’t go making an issue of it with Lieutenant Baird, though.”

“No, sir,” Quire agreed with what he hoped was appropriately meek humility.