the departing night.
“Who is he?” asked Adam Quire, staring down at the corpse with a faint wince of distaste.
It was not the sight of it that disturbed him, but the smell. The body stank of sour whisky and blood, and the man had soiled himself in the last moments of his life. There was a less easily identifiable dank, musty strand to the symphony, too. It all made for a noisome aura that discomfited Quire, particularly since the stale flavours of last night still lingered rather queasily in his own mouth: all the beer he had drunk and the smoke-thick air he had breathed.
“No name for him, Sergeant,” said the young nightwatchman at his side. Lauder, but Quire was unsure of his forename; Gordon, perhaps.
“Who found him?”
“One of the scavengers. Grant Carstairs.”
“I know him. Shake?”
“Aye. Some folk call him that. Got a bit of the palsy.”
Quire kneeled at the side of the body, his knee slipping into a tiny, cold puddle couched in the crease between two cobblestones. He grimaced as the chill water soaked through his trousers.
“Nothing left of his throat,” Lauder said, gesturing with the extinguished lantern still clasped in his right hand. “Look at that. What a mess.”
Quire could see well enough. A ragged hole in the front of the dead man’s neck exposed gristle and meat. One sleeve of his jacket was torn to shreds, as was the arm beneath. Material and flesh were barely distinguishable in the morning gloom. Furrows had been gouged in his scalp, too, the skin torn; one ear was no more than a tattered rag.
“I’ve not seen the like,” the watchman murmured.
Quire had—and much worse—but not for a long time, and not outside the confines of a battlefield. He thought he heard as much wonder as horror in Lauder’s voice. The man was young, after all; not long employed. Perhaps he had never seen at such close quarters what havoc could be wrought upon the human body. He looked a little pale, though it might be but the watery light of the winter morning making him appear so.
“He’d not have died quietly,” Quire said, preoccupied now by the uncharitable fear that Lauder might empty his stomach, or faint, or otherwise complicate an already unpleasant situation.
He looked east and west along the Cowgate, then northwards up the gloomy length of Borthwick’s Close. The Old Town’s inhabitants were stirring from their dark tenements and gathering in silent huddles, distracted from the start of the day’s business by this gruesome spectacle.
“I’ll get some more men down here to help you,” Quire muttered to Lauder. “Once they’re here, you can start asking questions. See who heard what, and if anyone can put a name on him.”
The younger man’s scepticism was evident.
“Probably Irish. Cut loose once the canal was dug. Maybe he’s working on that new bridge.”
It was a lazy but not entirely foolish suggestion. The Old Town was full of Irish labourers bereft of labour, and Highlanders bereft of their high lands for that matter, all of them washed up here by the tides of ill fortune and poverty. More than a few had indeed found some escape from their poverty and lassitude in the building of the huge new bridge being thrown over the Cowgate, and to be named in honour of the king, George the Fourth.
But: “No,” Quire said. “He’s no navvy or builder.”
He lifted the man’s arm, turning it against the dead stiffness of the muscles to expose his palm.
“See his hand? No rougher than your own. He’s not been digging earth or breaking rock. And his clothes… might not have been a rich man, but he’s no pauper either. He’ll go in a pauper’s grave, though, if we can’t find him a name and a family. Don’t want that, if we can help it. It’s no way for a man to end his days.”
The dead man’s jacket had fallen open a little as Quire moved his arm. A flap of material there caught his eye now, and he reached gingerly in, felt the loose ends of torn stitching. He had to bend his weaker left hand at a sharp angle to do so, and felt a twinge of stiff pain in his forearm. His old wounds misliked the cold.
“Did you find anything in his pockets?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Lauder grunted.
“Did you ask Shake if there was anything?”
Lauder shrugged, his cape shifting heavily. Standing watch over a corpse, on a cold dawn at the end of a long night, in the Cowgate where the city’s police had no surfeit of friends… these were not the ingredients of contentment. At the best of times, few of Quire’s colleagues—the miserably paid nightwatchmen perhaps least of all—shared his notions of justice and dignity for the dead. Those things could be hard to find in the Old Town, even for the living. Easier not to try, sometimes.
“Just wait here until I get you some help,” Quire said as he rose to his feet. “It’ll not be long.”
He began to ascend the stinking ravine of Borthwick’s Close, pushing through the knot of onlookers that had gathered a short way up the alley.
“Anyone know him?” he asked as he went, but no one replied. They averted their eyes, on the whole. Only a child, holding the rough linen of his mother’s skirt with one tight hand, yesterday’s dirt still smudged over his cheeks, met Quire’s gaze fully. The boy parted his lips in an unappealing grin, and sucked air in through the corners of his mouth. It was an idiot sort of sound.
Quire was jostled as he made his way through the crowd, but no more than he would have expected. He was a big man, wide-shouldered and wide-chested, and he knew that his angular face, framed by dense, wiry hair, suggested ill humour more often than not. Though that appearance—enhanced by his grey greatcoat, the baton at his belt and the military boots he often wore out of ancient habit—deterred most troublemakers, no assembly in the Old Town was without one or two who thought themselves above such concerns. The place had a truculent state of mind.
Quire climbed up and up the close, careful on the rough and uneven cobbles, passing dozens of small windows, only a few of them lit by oil or candle or fire. He heard someone above him, leaning out from the third or fourth storey, hawk and spit; but when he looked, there was no one to be seen, just the man-made cliff faces blocking out the sky. The close narrowed as it rose towards the High Street—if he had extended both arms, Quire could have encompassed its whole width—before burrowing through the overarching body of a tenement to disgorge him on to the Old Town’s great thoroughfare.
It was akin to emerging from the Stygian depths of some malodorous tunnel into another world: one filled with bustle and light and all the energy and breezes that the closes did not permit within their tight confines. Scores of people moved this way and that, avoiding the little mounds of horse dung that punctuated their paths, flowing around the hawkers and stall-holders readying their wares, dodging the carts and carriages that clattered up the cobble-clad road. The air shivered to a cacophony of trade and greeting and argument.
Quire advanced no more than a pace or three before a salesman sought to snare him.
“A tonic of universal efficacy, sir,” the man cried, with an excess of unsolicited enthusiasm. He swept up a small, neat glass bottle from his barrow and extended it towards Quire. “No affliction of the lung or liver can withstand its beneficial application.”
Quire paused, and examined the dress of the man who thus accosted him. A short stovepipe hat, a neat and clean waistcoat tightly buttoned over a paunch of some substance. The loose cuffs of an expensive shirt protruding from the jacket sleeves. Clearly the uniform of one who made a tolerable profit from the ill health and gullibility of others.
The bottle Quire was invited to examine held a pale liquid of yellowish hue.
“Looks like piss.”
“Oh no, sir. Not at all,” exclaimed the affronted hawker, peering with a disbelieving frown at the flask in his hand. “A miraculous elixir, rather.”
Quire leaned a touch closer, gave the tonic his full attention.
“Horse’s piss,” he concluded, and left the man, still protesting, in his wake.
The police house was very near, on the far side of the High Street at Old Stamp Office Close. Quire cut across the currents of humanity towards it. He refused a flyer advertising a course of phrenological lectures that someone tried to thrust into his hand; narrowly avoided a crushed toe as a handcart piled high with half-finished shoes ground past.
It was all a little too much for one who had already been awake for longer than he would have wished, and
