She tossed the question out on to the air like a diaphanous handkerchief, without the slightest interest in what he truly thought. He told her anyway.
“Dreadful. Aye, that might be one word for it.”
She smiled once more, wholly unperturbed by his rasping hostility. She tugged at her delicate calfskin gloves, tightening them over her hands.
“It is rather sad, to see a man such as yourself so overmatched. So out of his depth.”
“Might want to wait a wee while yet, before coming to that opinion.”
“How exciting,” she said drily. “You really don’t understand, do you, you poor man? Still you do not grasp who you are dealing with. My husband is quite untouchable, Mr. Quire. Quite untouchable. He counts as a friend everyone whose influence can help to keep him safe. I should know, for I’ve watched every penny we once had to our name flow out through the door in the service of that very aim.”
“Best give me your message, before I run short on patience.”
“Ah. Very well. I’m told that your friend is at my husband’s farm, and if you would be so good as to bring Mathieu Durand there, an exchange of some sort will be transacted.”
“Cold Burn Farm.”
“Indeed. Do you know it?”
Quire could not tell if her placid innocence was feigned or genuine, and did not greatly care. She was no fool, and could not be unaware how crude and cruel was the business she transacted.
“In any case,” Isabel said, “you have until nightfall tomorrow, I understand, to complete the rendezvous. That’s what Durand’s people would call it, I think? I’m told he is probably gravely ill by now, and will likely expire if you delay beyond that, which would be unfortunate for all concerned. I know I would regret it, myself; I always rather liked the man, for all his somewhat feeble, miserable manner. I do hope it won’t come to that.”
Quire regarded her coldly for a moment or two, staring into her bright eyes, wondering at the poison beneath that fair exterior. Slowly, deliberately, he hawked up a gobbet of spittle into his mouth and spat at her feet.
She looked down at the unsightly, muculent smear on the floorboards, then at Quire. She arched her eyebrows, and rose from the bed.
“And what if I made a prisoner out of you?” Quire said. “Would that not put your menfolk at something of a disadvantage?”
She laughed.
“Oh, I’m not nearly so precious to either of them as Mathieu is. My husband would be inconvenienced by my disappearance only until he concocted some explanation for it that satisfied the gossips of the New Town. And as for Mr. Blegg… I am not so foolish as to think it would trouble him overmuch either.”
Quire moved aside from the door and pulled it open. Isabel Ruthven gave him a buoyant nod as she drifted past him and out on to the stair. He slammed the door behind her, hard enough to shake its feeble hinges.
XXVI
Cold Burn Farm II
Merry Andrew’s cart was a rackety old contraption, too shabby and brittle for carrying much in the way of anything. The last time Quire had been aboard it, he had been the cargo, bouncing along over the Water of Leith bridge with Merry Andrew’s grave-robbing tools for company; now, he drove it. It had been a fair few years since he was called upon to steer a horse in harness, but he had done it often enough as a child on his father’s farm, and sometimes when he had been at war, for no army moved much of anywhere without a mighty train of wagons in its wake.
Nor did Quire, this time, ride alongside spade and crowbar and sacks for the bagging of bodies. His one French pistol rested on the seat beside him, rocking gently as the wagon progressed up the lumpy track. It was loaded and primed. The hammer could be cocked in a moment. Quire found it difficult to imagine any outcome that would not involve its firing. It was a day waiting for the shedding of blood. Whose it would be—that he would learn soon enough.
Beyond the pistol, hunched down under an oversized cloak—entirely buried by it, in fact, the better to obscure his features—was Spune. Flat on the bed of the cart, beneath a light canvas, lay Merry Andrew and the third of his grave-robbing triumvirate: Mowdiewarp. Which was a nickname Quire might have thought funny, had he not been entirely preoccupied with other concerns. Mowdiewarp was an old country name for a mole. A digger.
Merry Andrew was complaining, rather indistinctly due to the concealing canvas, as he had been for a considerable length of time.
“Have you never driven a wagon before?” he hissed. “I’ve got a bruise on every bone, the way you keep finding out the ruts, you daft fuck.”
Quire ignored him. He could imagine that Merrilees’ elongated, bony form made for a hard ride over these rough tracks, but it could not be helped. Merry Andrew could never have passed for Durand, no matter how bundled up in cloak or cape. The two were far too dissimilar in form and carriage. It was not possible to make a heron look like a grouse, whatever the size of the bag you put over its head. So Merry Andrew stayed hidden in the back, and Spune—the only one of them, in fact, of even passingly similar stature to the Frenchman—sat glumly up front, pretending to be sick and keeping his face well hidden.
Arrowheads of geese were ploughing the sky, honking as they went. A buzzard was mewing, off over the slopes of the Pentlands, quartering the heather and grassland with lazy glides. The wagon pitched and yawed and grumbled. And through it all, Quire could still hear Merry Andrew’s whining complaints.
“I’ll have your guts for fiddle strings if this doesn’t play out right after all this bloody misery, you police bastard.”
Quire had made a neat little confection of lies and truth for Merry Andrew and his boys; close enough to the latter to let him say it with an air of conviction, enough of the former to make his proposal tempting to them.
It had taken him longer to find them than he would have liked. A few hours of rummaging around in Edinburgh’s darker corners, and the distribution of coins he could not really afford to part with, not if he was ever to eat again. From the distillery where Spune was—occasionally—employed, he had been sent to an inn in the basement of a half-ruinous tenement near the canal basin at Port Hopetoun. The place was bursting with bargees and canal workers, for all that it was early in the morning, and the air so thick with tobacco he could have chewed it. He had, though, missed both Spune and Merry Andrew by an hour or more. Look for him at the Flesh Market, Quire was told, once he paid over a thrupenny piece.
The Flesh Market was down on the low ground between Old Town and New, in the shadow of the North Bridge. It was a mazy place packed with barrows and stalls and little shops. It was a stinking place too, and a raucous one, with meat traders and butchers and provisioners all competing to get themselves heard one above the other.
Quire found the butcher he had been sent to and was told that Merry Andrew had been there but minutes before, settling a debt. After that, an ironmonger’s shop in Blair Street, run by a man who was an uncle to the city’s thieves, and plied a secret trade in a great deal more than ironwork. But Merrilees was not to be found there either, and the ironmonger was at first unwilling to offer any alternative suggestion. He read some fell and fixed determination in Quire’s face, though, and the passage of a few more coins was enough to loosen his tongue.
Finally, wearily, Quire found Merry Andrew getting himself shaved at a barber’s beside the Royal Exchange. He waited outside, watching the razor sweep its way back and forth over the soapy skin. Andrew Merrilees looked to be entirely at his ease, his lanky frame stretched out in the barber’s chair, his head tilted back. Anyone not knowing him might have thought him a man of some means, a righteous member of the city’s merchant class, perhaps, tidying himself up in anticipation of a meeting to discuss business proposals with fellow traders.
Quire approached Merry Andrew when he emerged, fresh-faced and neat. The man seemed hungry for what Quire disingenuously offered: the chance to settle accounts with those rivals who had caused him such trouble last winter, and broken up one of his cronies; to rid himself of competitors in advance of the next body-snatching
