of dangerous games. Nobody—or not many, Quire might grudgingly concede if pressed—came to the school to learn to dance.
“Where’s your kitchen lad, then?” Quire asked as MacQuarrie shook dishwater from his hands and dried them on the breast of his shirt.
“The Infirmary. Had an accident wi’ some glass last night. Fell on it.”
“Fell on it?” Quire snorted. “Come out here, Donald. I’ve a question or two for you.”
“Get away, Quire. There’s a lot of good money gets paid over so your kind’ll no be coming round here asking questions.”
“Aye, but it’s not paid to me, so keep me in a good humour and come out here. There’s none to see but these three folk, and there’s not one of them looks likely to remember a thing about this morning.”
The dancing girl stumbled a little as MacQuarrie reluctantly emerged to join Quire at one of the rickety tables, but the shrill song of the whistle did not falter, and caught her up again and set her turning in another unsteady reel.
Quire swept the table clear of the night’s detritus with the back of his arm, and tipped a chair up to drain some of the stale beer from it before he sat down. MacQuarrie’s weight set his own chair to groaning, but it stood up to the task.
“None of the other uncles about?” Quire asked innocently.
The school had three trades, once the pretence of teaching dance was discounted: the unlicensed selling of untaxed drink, whoring, and the pawning of stolen goods. Every night, a handful of the so-called uncles could be found at these very tables, waiting for their broking services to be called upon by the city’s thieves. MacQuarrie himself, Quire knew but could not have proved in law, was one of those uncles.
“Don’t waste my time with questions you ken fine I’ll no answer, Quire. Thanks to that wee fuck of a lad getting himself cut up, I’ve work to be doing this morning.”
“Two men just in here,” Quire said. “And don’t tell me you didn’t see them, since there’s nothing else here to look at.”
MacQuarrie maintained a glowering silence. He was not one to be easily cowed by a mere officer of the police.
“One of them not much more than a boy, the other a weasel of a man in black gloves,” Quire persisted.
“What of it?”
“I want to know their business.”
MacQuarrie shrugged and turned his attention to the dancer and her musician. He watched with flat indifference for a moment or two and then suddenly shouted, “Can you no shut that whining up, Stevenson?”
The old man with the whistle did not pause, or miss a beat. He whined on, oblivious. MacQuarrie grunted, and spat on to the floor.
“All right,” said Quire. “Give me a name, then. I know the one, but not the other. Who’s the young one? Where does he stay? How does he keep himself busy?”
“Can’t help you,” frowned MacQuarrie. “Not with either of them.”
Quire caught the whiff of the lie in the quickness of the response, and the shuffle of MacQuarrie’s eyes.
“I’ll not be well pleased if you’ve made me suffer the stink of this place for nothing, Donald. I can take a grudge for a lot less, and I’ll take it all the way to the excise men if you like. Get them in to measure just how many quarts of beer your customers are pissing out in the close each night.”
MacQuarrie laughed at that.
“You’re a wee man, Quire. No big enough by half to put a fright into me. You’re only the police, and you’re surely no thinking it’s the police that…”
Quire lunged across and pinned MacQuarrie’s hand flat to the table. He whipped his baton free from his belt and held it over the splayed fingers. MacQuarrie tried to jerk free, but Quire had all the strength of his good arm pressing down.
“You’ll not be washing many dishes with cracked knuckles, will you?” he said calmly.
“Do that and it’ll no be you with the grudge, and I ken plenty of bigger men than you.”
“Maybe, but you’ll still have a broken hand. And I’m thinking you know I’m not that easy frightened.”
MacQuarrie slackened, and gave a dry smile.
“By Christ, Quire. Can you no take a joke? Settle yourself down. I’ll give you a wee morsel, if it’ll get you out.”
Quire settled back into his seat and released MacQuarrie’s wrist. The big man shook his freed hand, and shook his head at the same time, as if in disappointment.
“I’ve only seen the younger one before,” he muttered, just loud enough for Quire to pick the words out from amongst the strains of Stevenson’s shrill tune. “Been in here once or twice. Likes seeing the lassies about, but no man enough to buy any more than the seeing. I’ve no heard his name, but I ken he stays out in Duddingston. Does labouring on the farms, I think. And digs graves.”
“He’s a gravedigger?”
“Aye. I think so. And maybe I caught mention of a burial when they were talking. Maybe there’s a man going into the ground at Duddingston Kirk tomorrow. You tell anyone you had that from me, though, and I’ll no be a happy man.”
“Hah.”
Quire leaned back in his chair, more than a little surprised. Whatever he had expected, however out of kilter he had thought the mood of Ruthven’s house and whatever scent of wrongness he had caught there, he had never thought it might lead to this. The discovery imbued him with a sudden vigour, like a child glimpsing if not the solution, at least a hint of the solution, to some frustrating puzzle toy.
“Do you know a man called Carlyle?” he asked. “Edward Carlyle.”
“I’m spent, Quire. I’ll no be spilling anything more for you this morning.”
“Something to spill, then.” Quire grunted. “Listen, Carlyle’s dead. There’s no trouble you could bring down on his head that’d bother him now. You tell me something about him, it means I don’t have to come back and start bothering your customers on the matter.”
MacQuarrie sighed.
“You’re just too dim-witted to ken when to stop aggravating folk, aren’t you, Quire? Look, there was a Carlyle in here a few times, the last month or two, with Emma Slight. He made for a bad drunk, and we threw him out. Told Emma not to bother bringing him round here again. That’s all.”
“Emma Slight. She’s one of the Widow’s tenants, isn’t she? In the Holy Land?”
MacQuarrie gave an ill-tempered shrug.
“You charge a penny entrance, is that right?” Quire asked as he pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.
“Aye,” grunted the proprietor of the school.
Quire withdrew Mrs. Mallinder’s carefully wrapped slab of butter from his pocket and slapped it down on the table. Its sharp edges had just begun to lose their definition. The two men regarded it in silence for a moment, both rather surprised at the noise it had made as it flopped down, and at how strange and unexpected it seemed, lying there in all its boneless softness on a table in the Dancing School.
Quire roused himself first.
“There you are, Donald. Keep that for yourself. At least you’ll have made a profit on the morning’s business.”
He left MacQuarrie staring at the slumping pat of butter in quizzical silence, as if he had never before encountered such a baffling object.
“No, you cannot have any men,” snapped Lieutenant Baird. “There’s two hundred thousand living souls in this city, Quire. Living, mark you, not already dead and beyond all earthly concerns. And we’ve a hundred and a half on the city police, if you include every last grubby little member of the night watch. Does that sound to you as though we’ve the men to spare for standing guard on a graveyard all night because you’ve heard some tall tale from Donald MacQuarrie? The master of the Dancing School, no less, and he’s got you dancing to a silly tune right enough, hasn’t he?”
Quire made to reply, but Baird was in full, acerbic flow.
