Quire, Cath and Emma watched in silence as the young man hurriedly, clumsily dressed himself. Humiliation enough, perhaps, to keep him away from the Holy Land for a while.
Once he was gone, Quire turned back to Emma, who had settled on to a chair and was sipping with incongruous delicacy from her cup of whisky.
“Edward Carlyle,” Quire said.
Emma scratched the side of her nose and pretended intense interest in whatever residue her fingernail collected.
“I’m told he was keeping your company of late,” Quire persisted. “Did you know he was dead?”
She did not trouble to conceal her surprise at that, but still said nothing. Cath was less circumspect.
“Oh, that’s a shame. He seemed decent enough. Did he not say, though, that he feared for his life?”
Emma greeted the question with a scolding grimace of displeasure, but Cath was unperturbed, and shrugged her bare shoulders.
“Well, he did say it.”
“You knew him as well?” Quire asked, his heart sinking.
Finding Cath here had been dismaying enough; if she became a more central part of all this, he would find himself having to navigate treacherous waters, both personally and professionally.
To his relief, she shook her head.
“Not in the way you’re thinking.” She said it with a hint of rebuke that Quire supposed he probably deserved, for he had indeed been reaching for the easy conclusion. “Just to speak to, when he was visiting. Once the drink was in him, he always ended up fretting about what might happen to him.”
“All right, all right,” Emma interrupted. “You’ll only tell it wrong. Truth is, he talked all manner of silliness when he was in his cups, and I can’t see you making any more sense of it than I did, Mr. Quire.”
“I’ve nothing more profitable to do with my time,” Quire replied, to Emma’s evident disappointment.
“It’s your time to be wasting, I suppose,” she sniffed. “He was always on about how he’d got himself tangled up with bad folk. Evil, he called them. Never said who or why, before you ask. But he was frightened, right enough. Frightened of them, frightened of what they were doing and where it would all end, with him along for the ride.”
“Said it was the Devil’s work,” Cath observed from the bed.
“Maybe he did,” Emma continued. “Didn’t do much for his humour once he got out of it, though. Turned up here drunk as a lord, saying he was done with it all, never going back. You’d think that’d settle him some, but he was weeping like a bairn. Said they’d never let him go. He was scared as any man I’ve seen, right enough.”
“He never gave away any names?” asked Quire.
The mention of Devil’s work put him at once in mind of that strange symbol left hanging upon the door of his rooms by his uninvited visitor. The mere thought of it, and of the intrusion that it had accompanied, made him uneasy.
Emma shook her head.
“Never a name, not that I heard. Are you sure you’ll not take a dram?”
She carefully refilled her own cup as she asked the question. The death of one of her customers was not a matter to disturb the rhythms of her day.
“Let me have some of that, would you?” Cath asked, and Emma brought another teacup down from the sagging shelf upon which it rested.
Quire watched the two women sharing their whisky out into fine china. A strange, distorted mimicry of refinement. A habit that put a shape into their day just as the civil, sober ritual of tea drinking did for the kind of people who must have first owned those cups. Quire found that a melancholy thought, but it was a tangled kind of melancholy, for not so very long ago it had been him sharing the whisky with Cath, just as he had shared her bed.
“Have you not got your own rooms any more then, Cath?” Quire asked quietly.
“Roof’s leaking,” she said with a faint smile. “Emma here had a bed to spare.”
Quire nodded, and held her gaze for just a moment or two. Cath had been chief amongst those matters that had almost ended his career in the police before it was properly begun, for consorting with such as her carried the penalty of instant dismissal. Superintendent Robinson had saved him from that consequence, and Quire was glad of it, but had never freed himself of regret at the loss of her companionship. His affection for her—if that was all it could be called—had proved a stubborn thing. He had thought the passage of time might diminish it. Standing there, watching her, he learned anew just how resilient it was.
The Resurrection Men
“We’re wasting our time,” Quire observed.
Sergeant Jack Rutherford appeared entirely unperturbed by Quire’s doubts. He appeared, in fact, in thoroughly equable mood.
“He’ll turn up sooner or later. I’ve got it on good authority.”
“I mean we’re wasting our time chasing the man in the first place.”
“The city fathers put coin in my pocket every week for the very purpose of buying my time,” Rutherford said, peering into the bowl of his little pipe. “I’ve sold the stuff already, so I’m not bothered how they decide I should occupy it. Pay’s the same.”
“I’d want paying better, myself, if I was selling my time just for the wasting. I’d rather be doing what needs doing.”
“That’s where you go wrong you see, Adam,” Rutherford said with a wry smile. “The thing is to be doing what you’re
He tapped his pipe gently against the stonework of the bridge. Spent tobacco spilled out and fell in a scattering cloud about their feet. The two of them were leaning on the parapet of a low, single-span viaduct across the Leith Water. The river rushed along beneath them, in eager haste to reach the sea. Or in haste, perhaps, to escape the clutches of the mills and distilleries clustered along its banks, a great congregation of brick and stone behemoths gathered to drink deep of its sustaining flow. So close and steeply did some of the buildings press that they made a dark and sheer-sided ravine for the river.
From their vantage point midway across the bridge, Quire and Rutherford could see into the yard of one of the smaller distilleries, a rather gloomy little square bounded by featureless brick walls. There were any number of empty barrels stacked up down there, and now and again booted and aproned workmen emerged from the enormous doors—like those of a huge barn—that stood ajar, but in the main nothing was happening, as it had been for close to an hour.
“You’re the one made the Resurrection Men so popular in the first place, so why you’re complaining now, I don’t know,” Rutherford said. “We’re not to let a single one of them rest easy till the Duddingston murderer’s found, that’s the word from on high.”
“Aye, except I’ve already told them where to look. Merry Andrew’s nothing to do with it. I was there, and it wasn’t him waving a shovel around at Duddingston.”
“The way I heard it, looking where you told them didn’t get them anywhere. So every other body-snatching crew gets the benefit of our attention, and no doubt we’ll be turning up stones and prodding the worms beneath until the end of our days. Or until someone more important than us loses interest.”
“It wasn’t normal, what happened that night. When did any body snatcher kill a man, before Duddingston? Half of them are students, for God’s sake. They’d piss themselves at a harsh word.”
“Maybe,” Rutherford nodded, “but there’s nothing soft about Andrew Merrilees and his lads. There’re students and then there’s them that make a business of the trade. That’s two whole different kettles of fish, as you well know.”
“Aye. I’m not saying he’s not deserving of a bit of our attention. Just that he’s not the man I’m after.”
“The man we’re all after, Quire. That’ll be what you mean?”
“Aye. Aye.”
