troubled him in his younger days. He had unlearned just enough to make him pause, make him think where once there would have been no thought.
He set the Brown Bess to his shoulder, shouting as he did so: “Stop.”
The man was raising the shovel. Quire sighted along the barrel, staring into the black mass of the man’s chest, worrying whether he could trust his left arm to hold the gun steady. Another half a second of doubt, washed away by one thought: he’s already killed one man tonight. He squeezed the trigger.
The rasping click of the hammer falling, the flint sparking. A flaring, blinding light in his right eye. Smoke puffing upwards. The musket kicking his shoulder, sending out a lance of flame and more white smoke from its mouth. The crash of the shot, loud as a cannon out here on the ice, echoing from the trees around the loch and from the great night-clad mass of Arthur’s Seat.
Quire blinked, chasing the dancing lights out of his eye, squinting through the drifting smoke. It had been a good shot, undoubtedly; he had put the ball right into the man’s chest. Probably killed him. He was therefore astonished to find the great dark figure bearing down on him at pace, the shovel lifted one-handed against the sky. That great spade was about as long as Quire’s own arm, and looked to be solidly made; how this man was wielding it like a little axe for chopping kindling was beyond him. His bewilderment did not slow him down.
Ears still ringing with the sound of the shot, he slithered to one side, finding the ice so treacherous that he had to go down on his haunches and up again to keep his balance. He lurched sideways, to avoid the blade of the shovel as it came scything down and bit into the ice, sending up a spray of chips.
Quire set both hands on the barrel of the gun. It was hot, but not unbearably so. He swung it without taking too much trouble about the aim. Just connect with the dark form assailing him; just knock the man down. He did land the blow, but it was inconclusive, the butt of the musket skidding off shoulder and forehead. The gun’s weight carried Quire round, his heels sliding helplessly over the ice.
He fell backwards, banging his skull against the rock-hard skin of the loch. It saved him, for the shovel came lashing back on a flat arc that would have struck him had he not fallen. Quire rolled. Heard another blow crunching down where he had been. Heard too a splintering, creaking groan run through the ice upon which he lay; felt a tremor. Fear coursed through him, then. They were far from the shore. Far from the thickest, firmest stretches of ice where it was anchored to the land. Too late to discover caution, though.
“Bastard,” he hissed, scrabbling, rolling.
A ferocious kick caught him in his stomach, just under the ribs, and lifted him, sent him sliding. It drove the wind from his lungs too, and his chest cramped down upon its own emptiness. The musket fell from his hands. He looked for it, and reached for it.
And he saw his assailant, poised for that one brief shard of time on one foot, go down through the ice. It gave with a brittle crackle of defeat, whole plates of it fracturing, and the big man slipped silently and instantly into the black water beneath. The ice beneath Quire’s legs gave too, and his feet dipped into the chill loch. He gasped and clawed himself forwards. He could hear the whisper of cracks running beneath him. His hips broke more ice. His flooded boots were like chill fists about his ankles, pulling at him. He hauled and strained, panic putting a desperate strength into his raking fingers and his shoulders, and he dragged himself just far enough to be able to swing his legs up and out of the water.
Quire lay on his back, sucking in the frosted air, blowing out grateful fogs of breath. The stars above glimmered. Moment by moment his breathing slowed, and he mastered the shock of fear. He got on to his hands and knees, every movement tentative, measured, and reclaimed the gun.
He looked back into the dark maw opened up in the ice. Little tremulous waves in the water’s surface caught tiny glints of moonlight. There were no hands reaching for the jagged edges of the hole. No sign at all of the grave robber.
Quire did not get to his feet. He did not trust the ice. Instead he crawled like a child, testing each placement of hand and knee before allowing his weight to fall through the limb, dragging the musket along as he went. His feet were numb and heavy.
Only when he had put a slow twenty yards between him and the broken ice did he rise cautiously, holding the Brown Bess out horizontally as he did so in the hope it might wedge itself across any gap should the ice break. He was starting to shiver.
He stood and looked out over the dark plain of the loch. All was still and quiet, as if nothing had happened, as if there were only the ice and the water beneath it and the world was just as it had always been. Quire blew into his left hand, the hot breath stinging his gelid skin.
Then there was a crunching thud from far across the loch. Quire squinted into the night, and saw nothing. It came again, a strangely muffled, dull sound. Like someone beating at a distant door. At the dimmest, furthest extent of his vision, he saw a patch of ice burst up, close to the southern shore. Numb—his body from the cold, his mind from disbelief—he watched the surface of the loch break apart from beneath and a dark form rise from it and force its way towards the land. He could hear quite clearly the ice splintering and shattering as the figure made its lurching retreat into the darkness.
After a moment or two the sound died away, and Quire could see nothing more. He stared out into the night for a little while longer, then turned back towards Duddingston village and began to walk, shaking.
VIII
Calder’s
“Of course I’m blamed for it. I was there.”
Quire was bent over his tankard, clutching it with both hands, elbows resting on the table. He peered down into the brown, foamy liquid as if hoping the mere sight of it might ease his troubles. But he knew that only the drinking of it would do that, and only for a few hours. Much as he craved that stultifying release, he had learned— belatedly, but better so than never—how illusory such respite was.
Wilson Dunbar had already drunk enough to liven up his opinions of anyone’s troubles.
“Well maybe if there’d been more than just you,” Quire’s stocky companion exclaimed, “if they’d listened to you in the first place, it’d all have fallen out differently. Maybe the man’d still be sucking air if… ach, but it’s never the officers pay the price, is it?”
“I’m an officer now,” Quire muttered. “Sergeant, anyway.”
“Aye, true enough. The damnedest thing, for those of us as’ve known you a while, but not to my point. It’s a matter of blame: those it sticks to, those it don’t. Your Lieutenant Baird—he’s one it don’t. Me and you, we’re ones it does. Nothing fair about it.”
“It’s fair,” grunted Quire. “The man was happy in his beer until I dragged him out of the Sheep Heid. To get his own head stoved in. First time I’ve seen a man killed like that, in front of me, since… since a long time.”
Dunbar snorted. He had always been a disputatious sort, even when in uniform. Long retirement from the soldier’s life had not changed that, and nothing brought it more nimbly to the surface than drink. Not that it needed bringing far.
“You know fine death doesn’t need your help or anyone else’s when it’s set its eye on someone,” Dunbar said, flourishing his own near-empty tankard. “Comes when it likes.”
“Maybe it does. That bastard on the ice thought to visit it upon me, as well, and that makes it personal to my way of thinking. I’ll have him. I’ll have all of them.”
Calder’s tavern was crowded, as it most often was of an evening. It did not take many bodies to make it so, for it had a low ceiling of plaster and beams, and a long-striding man might spring across its breadth in a half-dozen paces. Even so, it packed in a rare variety of customer. Quire might be the only policeman there—and that was a part of its appeal to him—but there were soldiers and brewers, glass-blowers and grocers, clerks and lamplighters. Sometimes footmen and stable hands from the nearby palace itself, though they kept to themselves as often as not, perhaps fearful of leaking secrets the Keeper of Holyroodhouse would rather stayed behind its grand walls.
Tonight, the mood—save in the corner Quire had made his own—was boisterous. A soldier was rattling out a
