“Fair enough.”
“Get yourself some sleep, that’s my advice.”
Quire swayed only a little as he climbed the narrow stair into the body of the tenement. He steadied himself with a hand against the wall. The darkness was absolute, and the steps uneven, but he needed no light for such a familiar journey.
The nebulous contentment that had settled over him did not long outlast his arrival at the door to his rooms. It took him a puzzled moment or two to realise that something was amiss. The door stood fractionally ajar, and as he fumbled at the handle, his fingers encountered splintered wood. It had been broken in.
That realisation sharpened his senses and cleared his mind. He reached instinctively for his baton, but he had left it inside. He pushed the door gingerly, and it scraped open.
He waited on the threshold, squinting into the gloomy apartment, straining to catch the slightest sound. There was none. That someone had been there, though, was undoubted. Quire had few possessions, but they still made an impressive mess, strewn about in disorder as they were now. He advanced cautiously, stepping around and over the clothes scattered across the floor, the shards of broken wash bowl and jug, the toppled chair.
He went to the bed, and knelt beside it. He reached underneath and felt about with splayed fingers. They quickly found what he sought: a hard, smooth box. He withdrew it, set it on the bedding and lifted the heavy lid. Within, two fine pistols were safely nestled in their proper place. He had taken them from the baggage of a French captain, after he had killed the man at a farm in the wilds of Spain. Killed him while he slept, in fact, for it had been that kind of war and Quire had fought it as seemed necessary at the time.
Satisfied, he gently closed the box and returned it to its hiding place. A moment or two more of searching under the bed found the only other item of even modest value he owned. It was a sabre of the type carried by thousands of French soldiers in the late wars—a
Puzzled, he rose to his feet and surveyed the shambles. Thieves who left behind the only things that might have repaid their efforts were not a species he had encountered before. It did not take him long to restore at least a semblance of order, and in doing so he discovered his one loss. A shirt was gone. Only that. A humble, old shirt. All else was accounted for.
It was only at the very end, as he dragged a chair across the room, meaning to wedge it against the door to discourage—or at least give him some warning of—any returning visitors, that he noticed the strangest thing of all. Hanging on the inner face of the door was a crudely fashioned star of twigs. They were bound together with thin strips of bark and decorated, at each point of the star, with black feathers.
He stared at that mysterious token with sudden and deep unease. A dark substance encrusted some of the twigs, and though he could not be certain, he guessed that it was blood. Seized by an urgency he could not entirely explain, he tore the star down. As soon as his fingers touched it, a shiver ran through him, rushing up his arms, over his shoulders and crackling down his spine. He made to crush the foul thing in his hands. Some instinct restrained him, and he set it on the table, but turned away quickly and did not look at it again.
Drink usually made Quire sleep deep and sound, but his slumber that night was neither.
Davey Muir had been an occasional digger of graves at Duddingston Kirk for only a few months. It was a way to get a little coin over the winter, just like the digging of ditches and the dry-stone walling he did on the Marquis of Abercorn’s estate east of the village when the work was there to be had. In summer and autumn he worked the harvests on the farms further south. Come spring he would be sowing and maybe helping with the lambing. He turned his hand to whatever there was that would keep him from the poorhouse.
Gravedigging was far from the worst of it—that would be the walling, he reckoned, since he was clumsy and always ended up with bruised, sometimes bloodied, hands—and it paid better than most. He was too young and carefree to concern himself with the gloomy nature of the task: the dead needed burying, to his way of thinking, and it never had bothered him much to be around corpses. Spend any time around farms and you saw plenty of dead animals. Dead people troubled him little more than those.
Now, though, everything had gone very wrong. Now, he was thinking that taking the job at the kirk had been the most foolish thing he had done in all his short life. He had never once regretted leaving his turbulent family behind in Prestonpans, out along the east coast, when he was fifteen, but this might be the time to head back that way, and try to make amends with his brute of a father and slattern of a mother. Just to get a safe roof over his head for a while, in a place where no one would know where he had been, or what he had done.
It had seemed so easy. A man offering better than a month’s wage just for a few words. News of a burial, that was all. A day or two’s notice of any man headed for a grave without broken bones or the taint of sickness upon his corpse. Davey knew what that was about, of course. Everyone knew how the Resurrection Men went about their work. But what harm was there in it? The boy was dead and gone, with no need for what he’d left behind. And none to know, if the grave robbers did their work right: close up the coffin and re-lay the sod once they had lifted out the body. Leave it all neat and tidy.
But there was nothing neat or tidy about the business. Duncan Munro’s head was broken in. Davey had known the man a little; never had anything but kind words from him. Even so, it was not guilt so much as fear of consequence that grievously afflicted him now. Murder was a different thing to the mere theft of the dead. A thing to put a rare vigour into the police, and though they had not caught up with Davey yet, he knew they likely would. He had spent two days and the night between without a roof over his head, mostly up on Arthur’s Seat, shivering, bemoaning his misfortune; sheltering beneath a leaning crag from the drizzle floating in on the westerly breeze, watching the thin covering of snow melting away. He could bear it no longer. He had seen, from his elevated vantage point, the police who had been going from door to door in Duddingston village depart as dusk fell, trudging off back towards the city. So now, in the misty darkness, he crept back down to his lodgings.
He had a single room, cramped and a touch damp, attached as something of an afterthought to a short row of cottages. He lingered behind a concealing hedgerow for a minute or two—which was all his stunted patience and miserable condition would allow him—to make sure there was no one waiting for him. All was quiet. The thin mist and the encroaching twilight seemed to offer shelter enough for what he needed: just time to get stouter footwear, a cape, a few of those apples he’d lifted from the provisioner’s shop near the kirk. It was a long walk to Prestonpans.
Davey slipped inside as quickly as he could, lifting the rusty latch on the door with unaccustomed care, lest its creaking should betray his presence. Once within, he did not light a candle, but relied upon memory and the faint, faint light from the window to find his way about. The oiled cape first, pulled out from under his low bed; apples off the shelf and into a small sack; a candle or two, on impulse, though how he might light them he was not sure.
In reaching for those, his fingers encountered something unexpected, lying atop the box in which he kept the candles. Something small and strangely shaped. He took it up, and frowned at it, squinting. He could barely make out anything of it, but it seemed to be a figure of some sort; a little carved man, just two or three inches long. Davey shook his head in puzzled alarm and turned towards the window, the better to make it out.
“I’m grateful to you for taking it into your hand of your own free will.”
Davey yelped, dropped figurine and sack and cape alike, and stumbled back a couple of paces until his legs jarred up against the edge of a table.
The door was open, and standing there, framed against the very last watery light of the day, was a man Davey recognised with a lurching, dizzying dismay. It was not the face that told him who had come for him, but the horribly soft black gloves the man was already pulling from his lean hands.
“That will help a little, later,” Blegg said, stepping inside.
He used his heel to push the door closed behind him, never taking his eyes from Davey. The youth folded his arms across his chest, clutching his shoulders as if in pathetic defence of his vitals.
“Good Christ, you frightened me,” he gasped.
“Hush now. You’d not want the good folk of Duddingston hearing that you’re back amongst them, would you?”
“No, no. I’m away, this very night.”
“That you are. That you are, Davey Muir.”
