The Edinburgh Dead

The Scavenger and the Professor

Quire found Grant Carstairs—Shake—waiting for him in the entrance hall of the police house, two days after the discovery of the corpse in the Cowgate. The scavenger sat on a three-legged wooden stool, slumped down into himself like a loose pile of clothes. When Quire appeared, Carstairs looked up with rheumy eyes that betrayed both relief and anguish.

“I’ve been asking after you,” Quire said before the scavenger could speak.

“Aye, sir, aye. I heard as much. I’ve no been well.” Carstairs extended a trembling hand, regarding it with a sad, piteous gaze. “The palsy’s on me something dreadful, and my chest…”

He gave a thick, richly textured cough by way of illustration and bestowed upon Quire a mournful smile.

“Is it your body that’s ailing or your conscience, Shake?”

“Oh, sir. You may have the right of it there. They say you’re a sharp one, and so you are. Body and conscience, and wife too. There’s the truth. D’you ken my wife at all, sir?”

“I don’t.”

“No, of course not. Well, have you a wife yourself, then, sir?”

“No.”

“Well, my wife is a wife of a certain sort, sir. A righteous sort. A righteous woman, and not blessed with great patience for a poor sinner like myself. But for her, and for my conscience—but for the needles of the pair o’ them—I’d be in my sickbed still, not come here seeking after yourself.”

“Well, you’ve found me now.”

“Aye, sir. That I have.”

The scavenger rose unsteadily to his feet, one arm reaching for the wall to lever himself up, the other dancing at his side. Quire clenched his own left hand to still a sympathetic tremor; one infirmity called up by another. He grasped the old man’s elbow, taking what little weight there was to take.

“Can we speak, the two of us, somewhere a wee bit more private?” Shake asked, casting nervous glances around.

There were watchmen and policemen passing to and fro, and a steady traffic of townsfolk in search of succour, or delivering accusations, or asking after relatives. And there was Lieutenant Baird, standing in the doorway. He was deep in conversation with one of the members of the day patrol, but his eyes were drawn to Quire and to Carstairs.

“I can’t speak easy unless I ken it’s just you that’ll be hearing me, d’you see?” Shake murmured.

“Come, then,” said Quire, and gently guided Carstairs into a quiet side passage.

Shake’s hands began to leap and flutter with unease when he saw where he was being taken. The dark cells stood open and silent, like waiting mouths.

“Best place, if you don’t want to be seen or heard,” Quire said reassuringly. “That’s all.”

He closed the iron-banded door behind them, and the bustle of the police house was suddenly no more than a murmur. Quire could understand Shake’s reluctance to take up such quarters, however briefly. It was a miserable place, redolent of the troubles of those who had inhabited it. The dark cells were only used to hold those likely to harm themselves or others, and thus contained the equipment of restraint and of punishment. The door was heavy, with just a small grille of bars to admit light. There were iron rings in the wall for the attachment of bonds. And a flogging horse—a narrow four-legged bench, with leather straps by which a man’s wrists and ankles might be secured—bolted to the floor. It was there that Quire settled Carstairs to sit.

“You’ve a reputation as a fair man, sir,” the scavenger said. “A man less given to hasty judgement or condemnation than most of his fellows, when it comes to those of lower station than yourself. I’m hoping that’s true.”

“Aye, well maybe I am and maybe I’m not, but we’ll not know unless you tell what you came to tell, Shake.”

“I’d not have come at all otherwise, if I’d not thought you’d give me a fair hearing. It’s a terribly thin life, sir, the scavenger’s. Needs doing, right enough, the cleaning of the streets, the carting off of the muck and the city’s sheddings. But it’s a thin life.”

“It’s hard work,” Quire said. “I know it. And I know the pay’s meagre.”

“Aye, sir. Meagre. That’s the word. So the temptation’s something fierce. You find a body, and there’s none but yourself about…”

“You go through the pockets.” Quire nodded, taking care to keep his voice free of accusation, leavening it with understanding.

“Oh, you do, sir. You do if you’re a poor sinner. Then, if you’re a poor fool of a man, you tell what you’ve found to your good wife. And she’ll not be having it, sir. Not at all. There’ll be no rest in my house until I’ve put it right, and that’s the truth.”

“What did you find?”

A trembling hand brought forth a small object and offered it to Quire.

“Only this, sir. Only this. Inside, in a hidden pocket. Not a thing else.”

A small silver snuff box. Quire took it and lifted it to one side, the better to see it in the dim light. A thing of exquisite beauty, shaped like a tiny chest with fluted edges of silver rope, and with a dedication engraved upon its flat and polished lid in a flowery hand. Quire had to narrow his eyes and hold the box still closer to the grille in the door before he could make out the words.

Presented to John Ruthven

by his colleagues in

The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland

1822

“Get yourself home, Shake,” Quire said quietly. “You’ve done well. Done it late, but better than never, eh? Tell your wife I said so.”

The Royal Infirmary was an imposing structure: two wings projecting forwards from the grand central span of the building, the whole array adorned with a strict grid of tall rectangular windows. Quire passed through the gateway, flanked by pillars upon which sculpted urns rested, but turned aside from the steps leading up to the main entrance. His path took him instead to a side door, and down secluded passageways to the place where the corpses resided.

He found Robert Christison there, and was struck by the fact that the incumbent of the University Chair in Medical Jurisprudence seemed more contentedly at home in this chamber of the dead than any man—whatever his calling—should naturally be.

The tiled walls and floor reflected and concentrated the cold smell of vinegar and soap. Cabinets were arrayed around the walls, like a mute audience for the acts performed on the four waist-high stone slabs that took up much of the room. A crude trolley stood to one side; a conveyance for the dead that now bore not a cadaver but a neat array of tools of evident craftsmanship and gruesome purpose. Long-bladed flat knives, saws, hooks and forceps and shears. The means by which the human form might be dismantled.

There was but a single corpse there, that same one that Quire had so recently attended upon in the Cowgate. Christison stood over it, absorbed in his exploration of its corporeal mysteries. He had the sort of well-proportioned good looks that spoke of a gentle and uneventful upbringing. Though only thirty years old, when he straightened and looked at Quire he did so with the confidence and instinctive authority of one in full command of his profession and surroundings.

“Sergeant Quire. I expected you rather sooner.”

“There were certain enquiries I had to make this morning, sir, after some new information came into my hands.” He could feel the weight of the silver box in his pocket as he spoke. “Your message did not find me at first.”

“I see. Well, our subject is in no haste to be elsewhere, I suppose. I do have one or two other matters to see to, though, so we must be brief.”

Christison wiped his hands on the upper part of his apron.

“Do you wish to examine the body for yourself?” he asked.

From where he stood, Quire could see more than enough. Skin parted and lifted back; pale bones couched in the meat; tubes and sacs. There was, in this considered dissection of what had not long ago been a living, breathing man, a cold calculation that Quire found disturbing despite its benign intent.

“No, sir.”

Christison nodded, matter-of-fact.

“Seen all you need, no doubt, when you found him in… where was he found?”

“Cowgate, sir. Foot of Borthwick’s Close.”

“Yes.”

Christison made to pull the sheet that covered the dead man’s legs up over his head, but paused, and glanced at Quire with raised eyebrows.

“Did you smell him, though?”

“Sir?”

Christison bent over the corpse, and gave a long sniff at the horrible wound in its neck. It was an unnerving sight and sound.

“The nose is an undervalued tool in scientific endeavour,” the professor said as he laid the sheet down, shrouding that dead face. “I’ve found it so in my study of poisons, in any case.”

“He was poisoned?” asked Quire.

“It would take a particularly confused or intemperate kind of murderer to poison a man and then decide to tear his throat out as well, don’t you think? Gilding the lily somewhat. No, his end was just as it appears. But there’s an odd smell about him. Faded now, but it was strong when he arrived here.”

Quire’s mind went back to the dawn in which he had first encountered the body, curled there in cold solitude. Stinking, he recalled.

“Yes, sir. I noticed the same thing. Some of it I could recognise. Not all.”

“Quite. Excrement and whisky. But something else too. Put me in mind of wet fur. An animal aroma.”

Christison took up a selection of the instruments resting on the trolley and carried them to a sink in the corner. He spoke to Quire over his shoulder as he washed them.

“There’s nothing more he has to tell me. Or, more accurately, nothing further of what he might say that I have the wit to hear. Every victim of fatal misadventure has a tale to recount—so I would contend, at any rate—but it is a new and imperfect science I pursue here. If it was a poisoning then I might be of more assistance, but this… a butcher could likely tell you as much as I.”

Quire nodded mutely, though Christison was not looking at him. He had not truly expected any great revelation; hoped for it, perhaps, but not expected. The savagery of the man’s death had seemed to call for the effort nevertheless, and for all Christison’s brisk manner, he was known to be one who treated all who came under his knife, whatever their former standing, with the same disinterested, precise attention.

“There’s a certain amount more we might deduce, I suppose,” the professor was saying. “His hands, for example: this was a man who worked with them, but not by way of heavy labour. A craftsman, perhaps. Something along those lines.”

Christison glanced at Quire, who was nodding.

“You had already arrived at a similar conclusion, I see,” Christison said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Very good. I am delighted that the application of logic and observation is not a habit entirely absent amongst the guardians of our safety. What else? I can tell you he was but a recent convert to the pleasures of the bottle, for all that its scent has attached itself to him. His stomach was awash with alcohol—whisky, I would say—when I opened it up, so there can be little doubt that he was intoxicated when he died, but his skin and his organs show none of the signs we might expect in an habitual drinker. Only recently fallen upon hard times, perhaps.”

Christison shook the excess water from his hands, then took up a towel and rubbed them vigorously.

“As to the cause of his death, I have nothing to offer beyond the obvious. In my experience, God did not see fit to furnish we humans with the natural equipment to inflict this kind of damage, and we must therefore suspect an animal of some sort. The marks on the arm in particular are clear. There are indentations on the cervical vertebrae that I would take for the results of teeth as well. Muscles, larynx, trachea all torn or displaced. Blood vessels severed. This was brutal, brutal work. Quite horrible. Quite remarkable.”

For a moment, his detachment faltered, as he cast a somewhat uneasy glance towards the covered body.

“I’d say it was the work of a wolf, if we’d not rid ourselves of such vermin two centuries gone. And they were never what you might call frequent in the streets of Edinburgh, to the best of my knowledge.”

“Not a blade, then, or an axe?”

“Certainly not. This unfortunate had his flesh torn, not cut. Do we have a wild beast of some sort loose in the Old Town, Sergeant?”

“I don’t know, sir. Of some sort, perhaps.”

“I’ve never seen a dog running about the streets that looked a likely perpetrator of a crime such as this.”

“No. Nor I,” Quire said quietly.

The professor carried the tools of his trade with all the care of a minister of the Kirk bearing the paraphernalia of communion. He laid them out once more on the trolley, and then began to place them one by one into a polished wooden box.

“Well, I do hope you resolve this conundrum,” he said. “I’d not want to be looking fearfully over my shoulder the next time I’m on the Old Town’s streets after dark. Though if a beast is responsible, perhaps we must call this poor man’s end misadventure rather than crime, eh? Not a matter for the police, some might say.”

“Some might,” shrugged Quire. “Still, he’s likely got a family, wondering what’s become of him. They deserve to know. And those still alive deserve protection, if it’s a thing that might happen again unless prevented. Seems to me that’s what the police are for.”

“Laudable,” Christison said. “Have you a name for him, then?”

“I’m not sure of that yet. It might be he’s John Ruthven. That was the matter that kept me busy earlier: consulting the roll of electors. There’s a John Ruthven at an address in the New Town.”

Christison cocked a sceptical eyebrow.

“I’d not have taken him for a householder with such a distinguished abode. Not with those hands, or with the apparel in which he was found.”

“No. Nor I.”

“Well, let us hope the truth will out. It does on occasion.”

Christison closed the box in which his implements were now once more safely nestled. It clicked solidly shut and he turned a tiny golden catch to secure it.

“Tell me, did you see a porter loitering out there in the corridor when you arrived?” he asked Quire.

“No one, sir.”

Christison gave an irritated grunt.

“Would you care to walk with me, then? I must find one of my assistants to close this poor fellow up, make him fit for the grave. And a porter to take him on his way.”

Quire fell into step at the professor’s side. He was not sorry to leave that place.

“At least if I put a name and a family to him, he’ll not find his way on to a slab in a lecture theatre,” Quire said.

“My anatomical colleagues would have little use for such a damaged cadaver, in truth. But you would be surprised, I suspect, at how many families are willing to sell the deceased for that very purpose.”

“Not those as have a house in the New Town, though. Takes a deal more poverty than that, I should think.”

“No doubt.”

Christison glanced sideways at Quire, and read something there in his face.

“You disapprove, Sergeant. Surely you would rather the schools find their supplies through such legitimate channels, rather than line the pockets of the resurrectionists?”

“It’s none of it legitimate, to my way of thinking. Any man would hope for a bit more dignity in his ending,” Quire muttered, and at once regretted his gruff candour.

“Ah,” said Christison, pressing his box of instruments a little more firmly into the crook of his arm. “Well, we can agree upon the distastefulness of the enterprise, if not on the question of its necessity. We live in enlightened times, with the inquisitive intellect as our guide. That its discoveries come at a price is undeniable. Neither the city fathers nor my anatomical colleagues are quite so sentimental, however. To learn the secrets of the human body—and our city’s fine reputation was built in part upon the excavation of such secrets, let us not forget—a man must have a body in which to delve; anatomy can be taught without a cadaver, but it cannot be taught well. If we relied solely upon the produce of the gallows, our students would have the most meagre of fare, for all the sterling efforts of you and your fellow officers.”

Quire held his tongue. He liked Christison well enough and had no desire to dispute the practicalities of medical education with him. And there was, in any case, substance to what the man said: an understanding existed—never directly expressed, but present in the air like a flavour—that the police did not enquire too deeply into the means by which the dead reached Edinburgh’s famed, and lucrative, medical schools.

Whatever those means, Quire reflected silently, it was never the wealthy, or the powerful, who found themselves, after departing this life, displayed and dismembered for the edification of the students. Dignity in death was, like all else, unequally shared.