with it. I hope you might be the man to do it, but it is a slender hope only. An illusion, most likely.”
Durand shook his head. He looked around the coffee shop, though Quire did not think he was truly seeing that which his gaze fell upon.
“I am a man in need of salvation,” Durand said softly. “If not in the life yet to come—that might be a lost cause—at least in this one. I cannot stay in that house, in that company, for fear of losing my mind. Yet I cannot leave, for fear of worse. Monsieur Carlyle taught me that. As he was perhaps intended to.”
He sighed, and hung his head, and then seemed to come to some abrupt resolution. He straightened his back, looked Quire in the eye.
“Do you understand that this is not a matter of investigation, of mere crime? That there is a battle to be fought here, against forces far darker than you would think possible? There is knowledge in the world much older than the new wisdoms of science and thought that so preoccupy men now. It is potent. You can be of no help to me, Sergeant, nor I to you, unless you know that. Unless you prove as fierce, as savage, as I think you might be. You must match that which you oppose, if you and I are not to be dragged down. Damned.”
“When men set dogs on me—dogs that don’t breathe, don’t bleed—and a man tries to kill me with a shovel, and won’t fall down when I put a ball in his chest… I know this is not mere crime, Durand. And I know there’ll be folk dying at the end of it all, one way or the other.”
“Good. You do not sound so much like an officer of police now.”
“I’m not like other police,” Quire said.
The truth of it saddened him. He was becoming once more the man he had thought behind him: the man of war, the man of violence, possessed by cold anger. But it was what he needed. There would be folk dying at the end, right enough, by hangman’s noose or otherwise. One of them might be him, if he could not summon up all that old ferocity.
“I will show you, then,” said Durand. “That is your trade. You can only know what you see, what you can touch. Then perhaps you will understand what needs to be done, or be ready to hear it from me, at least. Mr. Ruthven has a farm.”
“I had heard as much.” Quire nodded. “Some landholdings, I think I was told. But I don’t see what…”
“You will see. Cold Burn Farm. It is on the western side of your Pentland Hills. Not far. Go there, but go in numbers and well armed.”
Durand tossed his head back and emptied the last thick dregs of the coffee down his throat.
“Go to the farm, that is all. You will find your answers there, and there will be no turning back. There. I have done it. I have cast the dice. Let the matter fall out as it may.”
The Frenchman rose, and scattered a few coins on the table.
“Goodbye, Sergeant. Perhaps we will have the opportunity, and the cause, to speak again. Please do not come looking for me, though. You will only betray us both if you do that.”
Quire followed Durand out of the coffee house only a little later. He walked thoughtfully up the steps and into the quadrangle of the Exchange.
Men were cleaning the cobblestones of the yard. One stood by a barrel on a handcart, banging a long handle up and down with vigorous determination. A second held the canvas hose that emerged from the pump and played the rather intermittent jet of water it produced over the ground. A third swept with a wide brush.
Quire paused to watch them briefly, shuffling aside when the splashing water came too close to his boots. It seemed somehow unreal, this scene of mundane labour, when set beside his conversation with Durand. A misleading token of normality in a world descending into chaos.
He could not entirely trust Durand, for all that he believed the sincerity of the man’s fear and unease. But if the Frenchman could not, or would not, directly implicate Ruthven or Blegg, Quire could see little option but to follow where he directed him.
It was annoying, though. It would take a mail coach to get him out to the Pentlands, and he hated travelling in those rickety, noisy, cold old things.
XVII
Cold Burn Farm
Quire came in towards the farm buildings along hedgerows. He felt foolish, creeping under cover as if he was back in the Peninsula, fearful of an ambush, rather than scrambling across wet fields on the edge of the Pentland Hills; but his every instinct had told him this was the way to do it. Perhaps if Durand’s despondent fear had not been so apparent, Quire might have marched straight up the main farm track and hammered on the door of the farmhouse. But he had seen just how frightened the Frenchman was, and he had apprehension enough of his own as to what might await him here. So he came at the farm along hedgerows, and waited for dusk to fall before going down amongst the buildings.
It was a long wait, for the Carlisle mail had put him out at the side of the road not long after noon, and though it was a fair walk from there to Cold Burn Farm, it did not take Quire much time to get on to a rise of ground from where he could look down into the main yard. The Pentland Hills were at his back, a chain of rounded heather-cloaked mounds rolling away into the south. The moon came up; a vast yellowish orb hanging over the shoulder of those gentle peaks.
What Quire saw caused him some puzzlement. He knew a working farm, and a well-kept one, when he saw it, and this looked like neither to him. There was a thin trail of smoke drifting up from the farmhouse chimney, so the place was clearly occupied. But there were slates missing from the roof of the biggest barn. There was a broken-down cart, missing a wheel, collapsed on to its axle and lying there in a corner of the yard like a skeleton. At the edge of a field where it backed on to a long, low cowshed, there was a wide black stain, a circular scab of ash and soot and burned grass. Even the hedgerow beneath which Quire sheltered had a look of neglect; its thorns had grown leggy and gnarled and gappy. Too long since they had been laid or cut. He could neither see nor hear any animals, not in the fields, not in the yard. So why did Ruthven keep a farm at all, if it was not being worked?
Night came on, and Quire tired of his vigil. He eased himself up, flexing his legs to break out the stiffness in his knees, and trotted down towards the buildings. He kept in the lee of the hedge, and ducked his head down to ensure he did not break the skyline, or frame himself against the lambent moon.
A soft light was in one window of the farmhouse now; the kitchen, he would guess. He made that his first target. If there was a whole gang of brawny farm lads waiting to spill out and kick him around, he wanted to know about it. Durand’s insistence that Quire should not come to this place alone had been easily, if regrettably, dismissed: the Frenchman could not be expected to know that the Edinburgh police had no authority out here beyond the city bounds, nor that Baird, the current master of the police house, would sooner gnaw off his own thumb than pay heed to any suggestion, on any topic, emanating from Quire. In fact, Quire had taken it as his life’s calling to stay beneath Baird’s notice, as far as that was possible.
It was easy enough to reach the corner of the big barn unseen. There was no smell of animals on the still night air. None of the straw or hay he would have expected to see scattered about. He watched the lighted window of the house across the yard for a little while. It was blurred by condensation, so he could not be certain, but there was no obvious sign of movement within. Only the faintly inconstant light of candles; and that thread of smoke, still just visible ascending from the chimney into the moonlit sky.
Quire knew better than to run, even though the beating of his heart told him his body wanted it. Instead he went slowly and silently across the yard, bent low, hands almost brushing the ground. He balled himself up against the wall beneath the window, straining his ears for any human sound leaking out. Nothing. No voice, no movement. He breathed deeply. And ventured a quick look.
He put his head above the sill of the window, and squinted in. The steam beaded on the glass made everything vague, but he could see enough to know it was indeed the kitchen. An empty one, as best he could tell with the moment’s examination he permitted himself. He settled back down on to his haunches.
