caught up on a fence. The hessian sack he carried loosely in one hand bucked against his grip. There were few pedestrians about. Those who had to move were doing so on wheels: hackneys and broughams and plain old wagons rattled and trundled along Princes Street.
Quire pushed through the massive, solid oak doors and entered the Institution. Instantly, the rough and raucous weather was only a memory. A restful quiet prevailed within, almost churchly in its stillness. In the lobby, a soberly dressed and mannered doorman directed Quire towards the cloakroom, and seemed decidedly perturbed when he declined.
A broad spiral staircase of polished stone took Quire up to the offices rented by the Society of Antiquaries. Papers were piled upon tables, with little evident order to them. Shelves of leather-bound books ran around the walls, many so worn and frayed that they looked as though they might fall apart in whatever hand lifted them. The place had a smell that Quire was unaccustomed to: that of parchment and dust and learning. He did not find it unpleasant.
A small, bespectacled man sat behind a desk so laden with documents and books that its surface could hardly be seen. He pulled his eyeglasses a little further down his nose with one finger, and peered at Quire over the top of them. Satisfied, he returned them to their former position.
“Can I be of some assistance?” he asked, scribbling a few last notes in the margin of a heavy tome open before him.
“I’m hoping so, if you know anything of the Society’s members and its past. I’m a sergeant of police. Quire.”
“William Anderson, secretary to the Society,” the man said, rising and extending his hand.
Quire shook it. The secretary’s hand felt small in his.
“John Ruthven,” Quire said. “That’s who I’m interested in.”
“I know the name, but his involvement with the Society ceased some time before my appointment, I’m afraid. I am not long in post, you know.”
“I understand. Nevertheless, he told me that he left in unfortunate circumstances. Ill humour on all sides, as he had it. Might be the sort of thing that’s remembered? Talked about?”
Anderson pursed his lips.
“I regret it is not something I would be able to assist you with, Sergeant. I pay little heed to gossip and hearsay, when it comes to matters that pre-date my responsibilities.”
“An admirable trait, I suppose,” said Quire. Improbably incurious, he might have added. “Perhaps you could suggest someone more talkative for me to go and pester?”
Anderson looked doubtful, and gave the bridge of his nose a thoughtful pinch, bobbing his glasses up and down.
“Mr. Macdonald is here,” he said with an air of reluctance. “Alexander Macdonald, assistant curator for the collection. He is in the store rooms, cataloguing. There is always cataloguing to be done.”
“Let’s hope he lacks your scruples when it comes to loose tongues.”
Quire found Alexander Macdonald in a long, gloomy chamber filled with rows of free-standing shelves, upon which resided a chaotic host of boxes and crates and grimy glass cases. Even as he advanced between the tight- packed stacks, Quire could feel his nose tingling and tickling beneath the assault of dust.
The assistant curator was standing on a low stool, reaching perilously upwards to feel about in a crate that rested on the uppermost shelf. Flakes and strands of straw packing drifted down as his apparently fruitless search grew more vigorous. He glanced down at the sound of Quire’s cautious approach. Quire was moving with a good deal more care than was his habit, for fear of dislodging some priceless artefact from its place. The shelving had evidently not been arranged with men of his size in mind.
“Ah, a visitor,” Macdonald exclaimed; redundant, but at least a touch more enthusiastic than Quire’s reception by Anderson.
Before Quire could explain himself, the curator gave a grunt of satisfaction and produced a short, flat length of enormously corroded metal from the crate. It was pitted and fractured, in places as thin as paper, and quite black.
“
He slipped the rotted blade back into the crate and stepped down from the stool.
“Sergeant Adam Quire. I’ve one or two questions in want of an answer.”
“Oh?” Macdonald’s raised eyebrows suggested a lively interest. “A criminal enquiry, is it? How exciting.”
“A few years back, there was some trouble between your Society and John Ruthven. Your secretary told me you’d be the one to shed some light on the matter for me.”
“Oh,” Macdonald said again, a little deflated this time. “Yes, I suppose Mr. Anderson would not wish to involve himself in such matters. He’s most protective of the Society’s reputation, you know. Wouldn’t want it to come out that he’d reported matters that put the Society in an unflattering light.”
“You needn’t worry about that. It’s just that I’m wanting to know more of Ruthven. Something of his nature, his activities. You follow me?”
“Would you care to sit down, Sergeant?”
Macdonald led Quire to the far end of the storage rooms, where, in a cramped corner, two rickety-looking chairs flanked a little round table. Quire had to move a box of papers bound up with ribbons before he could occupy the one to which he was directed. He carefully laid the hessian sack down flat on the table before him.
“It was a small unpleasantness in our history, the Ruthven business,” Macdonald said with an air of world- weary regret as he took his own seat. “Nothing more than that by all accounts. You must understand, many of our members are men of considerable reputation, and intellect, and… let us say they are men of robust character and strong opinion, often on the most arcane and obscure of topics. There is always some dispute grumbling away to enliven our proceedings.”
“Must have been of some consequence, if Ruthven resigned from the Society over it.”
“Resigned… well, in a manner of speaking.” Macdonald fluttered a hand in the musty air. “Difficult to be precise about meanings. You might say, though, that Mr. Ruthven chose to leave our ranks rather than face the ignominy of expulsion. He had fallen out with a number of the other senior members over some considerable period of time. You’ve met him, you say?”
Quire nodded, but chose not to expand upon that simple confirmation.
“You’ll have formed your own opinion, no doubt,” Macdonald went on, recovering some of his initial animation. “He has—or had then, at least—some rather eccentric views on various historical and philosophical subjects, and a somewhat rough manner with those who did not share them. Matters came to a head… well, I believe some questions were raised over a number of items that went missing from the Society’s collections.”
“He stole them?”
Macdonald was alarmed. He raised a splayed hand to fend off the very words.
“I did not say that, Sergeant. I very purposely did not say that. Questions were raised and no satisfactory answers could be agreed upon, so he and the Society parted ways. That is all.”
“What items went missing?” Quire asked.
“Oh, nothing of especial significance or value, either monetary or historical, as far as I know. Some pieces from Major Weir’s house, a lock of hair reputed to have been cut from the head of a witch before she burned. A set of keys once owned by Deacon Brodie. That sort of thing. Minor relics of the darkest corners of Edinburgh’s past, if you like. Interesting to a local historian of macabre bent, but not central to our collections.”
Quire could not keep the look of disappointment from his face. A few inconsequential trinkets gone missing years ago were no kind of lever with which to prise open Ruthven’s—or Blegg’s—secrets. That disappointment went entirely unnoticed by Macdonald, who was carried along by his own more recondite lines of thought.
“All of a piece, really, with his interests and descent,” the curator mused. “You may not know, Sergeant, but Mr. Ruthven is distantly descended from a notable family of dabblers in the arcane. So he liked to imply, in any case. Men who, in less enlightened times than our own, were drawn to alchemy, and much darker arts. Delusional mystics, would be the current judgement, fortunate to have avoided the stake and the fires of witch-hunters.
“There was a namesake of his, a John Ruthven of the sixteenth century, who habitually carried about his
