dead souls found inside. Burned beyond recognition. The gas works was having none of it, of course, but what else would they say?”
“Christ.” Dunbar puffed out his cheeks. “You’re a lucky bastard, I’ll give you that. It was me they called Impervious, but the name’s not fitting me any more, so I’m thinking you’d best have it.”
Dunbar indeed seemed anything but impervious now. He had been reduced, for a time at least, by his suffering. He was thinner than Quire had ever known him, and his shoulders stooped a little. He walked with the aid of a stick.
He would surely have died, there in the hospital, but for the water the nurses and his wife had trickled into his mouth, and the food paste they fed him as if tending to a babe. Perhaps he would have died but for the ministrations of Agnes McLaine. Quire did not know. All he knew was that Dunbar lived, and grew stronger every day, and for that he was intensely, unquestioningly grateful.
They walked on the flat ground by the palace, where children flew kites in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat. Flat ground was the kind Dunbar liked best, for the moment, since he tired quickly. There was low cloud down, hiding the top of the hill in mists, and a fine drizzle on the air.
“Is it done, then?” Dunbar asked. “The whole business, I mean. You’ve burned the man’s house down, and he’s cooked to a cinder. Not much more to concern yourself with, at a guess.”
Quire regarded his feet as they trudged along through the damp grass. He had shared nothing more than the barest outline of all that had happened, for he knew that was all Dunbar really wanted. He remembered nothing of the night in the Princes Street gardens beyond rushing away from Quire and Durand, and hearing Blegg coming up behind him. Quire had seen in his eyes, when he talked of it, the haunted look, quickly dismissed but there, quite plain. He would do nothing to add to the man’s burdens.
“It’s done,” he said, as lightly as he could. “Let’s leave it to rest, should we?”
“Aye, if you like.”
Quire was walking slowly, to match his pace to Dunbar’s. The subtle rain was soaking into his coat and his hair.
“I know you’re liking your fresh air these days,” he said, “but maybe we’d best be getting back. It’s a bit dreich out here.”
Dunbar grunted and looked up at the cloud-cloaked heights of Arthur’s Seat, as if noticing for the first time the inclemency of the day.
“If you like. Ellen’ll have porridge she wants to get down my neck, anyway. She’s of the belief that there’s no better fodder for the healing body. Spoons it down me every hour of the day or night.”
“Can she speak of me yet without cursing?” Quire asked.
“Let’s just say she’d as soon not be seeing you.”
“Can’t fault her for that. If I was her, I’d probably come after me with a kitchen knife.”
“Aye, well, the thought maybe crossed her mind, but I dissuaded her, so that’s one more thing you owe me.”
“Fair enough.”
They walked in silence for a little way, then Dunbar gave a chuckle as if at some funny thought.
“How’s your own woman?” he asked Quire.
“Cath? She’s fine. There’s a discussion to be had whether she’s to come out of the Holy Land and take up lodgings with me, but for now, it’s fine.”
Quire had removed himself from the Holy Land, with a whole medley of conflicting feelings about doing so, and taken up residence once again in his own quarters. He did not feel entirely safe or restful there, and might never again, but nor was the Holy Land a place he would ever be inclined to call home. Cath would follow after him, he thought, if he asked; he had not done so, but was thinking it might be the wisest thing to do. Perhaps the wisest thing he had ever done.
“And work? What about that?”
“Oh, I’ve not thought of it. Had other things on my mind of late.”
“You’re well out of the police business, maybe,” grunted Dunbar. “This affair with Knox and the Irish boys is a bloody thing, isn’t it?”
Quire could not quite agree with the first part of that, but the second gave him no great difficulty.
“A bloody thing for sure,” he said as they came to the foot of the Canongate.
The factories were in full clamorous flow, sending out their plumes of smoke to melt into the low roof of cloud. The drizzle was damping things down a bit—the stinks and the smoke and the folk all alike—but still the place was awash with carts and barrows and men hurrying this way and that.
“If you ever doubted me when I’ve said blame don’t follow as close in the footsteps of guilt as it should, you’ll know better now,” Dunbar opined. “Look at Knox, buying the bodies and not a charge against him. And Hare. They saw he was the worse of the two of them, and he’s to be free, just because he told them what they needed to send his friend to the gallows.”
Quire smiled to hear the bubbles of anger pushing up into Dunbar’s voice. It was a very fine thing, to hear the man getting back into his vituperative, argumentative flow.
“There’s a fair few folk baying for Knox’s blood,” Quire said. “He may not come out of this so pretty. But Hare—aye, that’s not right.”
Dunbar shook his head, despairing at the iniquities of the world and those who held its reins. An ease came over him, as if he were comforted by the reliable, familiar availability of targets for his critical appraisal. It told him, Quire hoped, that nothing of consequence had changed; that he would be hale and healthy and strong again soon, and back flying kites with his sons, forgetting what had happened.
“It’s barbarous times we’re living in, wouldn’t you say?” Dunbar said quietly. Not melancholy; just reflective.
“I would. Aye, I would.”
Calton Hill, which rose at the east end of Princes Street and looked out over the whole of Old and New Towns alike, held three prisons. The Debtors’ Jail, the Bridewell where the indigents and prostitutes and petty troublemakers found themselves, and the new Calton Jail, little more than ten years open, where the hard men went: the killers and the wounders, the blackmailers and the inveterate thieves. The jails stood side by side on the hill’s southern flank, lined up along the top of low cliffs and staring grimly out like a threefold threat and reminder for the city’s inhabitants of the consequences of transgression.
The Calton Jail presented by far the grandest and most fearsome countenance of the three. It was vast, like an amalgamation of castle and stately manor. Magnificent on the outside, in its austere way, as befitted such a prominent player in the architectural pageant of Edinburgh’s heart. On the inside, vile, malodorous and dangerous. Quire had been within its walls on several occasions, and every time had emerged from it eager for the cleansing airs and lights of an open sky. It was not an experience he was eager to repeat, but he went there in any case.
Nowhere was the jail more like a fortress than in its approaches. Its gatehouse stood on Regent Road, a wide boulevard that curved around Calton Hill’s southern slopes. It was a prodigious structure, with two towers flanking the huge gates. Walls thrice the height of a man stretched away on either side, enclosing the prison yard and the enormous building that stood at the heart of it.
Once, Quire might have talked his way through the watch at the gatehouse without any difficulty, for a sergeant of police could come and go as he pleased; but he was no longer such a thing, and he found himself instead taken into one the offices built into the gatehouse, to face David Maclellan, a captain of the prison guard he knew of old. Not well, but at least he did know him.
“Of course I can’t let you in,” Maclellan said, pained at both the suggestion and the need for him to explain its impossibility.
“I thought maybe, since you’ve known me long enough, I might just get an hour. No more than that.”
Maclellan set his elbow on the desk, and rested his chin upon the upturned palm of his hand, staring meaningfully at Quire.
“You’re not making much sense, Adam. I ken you fine, but I ken you’re no policeman too, not any more. You’re just a man, and that’s not the kind of folk who get in to see William Hare.”
Quire gazed out of the office’s barred window in disappointment. It faced on to the main prison, and he could
