have a body in which to delve; anatomy can be taught without a cadaver, but it cannot be taught well. If we relied solely upon the produce of the gallows, our students would have the most meagre of fare, for all the sterling efforts of you and your fellow officers.”
Quire held his tongue. He liked Christison well enough and had no desire to dispute the practicalities of medical education with him. And there was, in any case, substance to what the man said: an understanding existed—never directly expressed, but present in the air like a flavour—that the police did not enquire too deeply into the means by which the dead reached Edinburgh’s famed, and lucrative, medical schools.
Whatever those means, Quire reflected silently, it was never the wealthy, or the powerful, who found themselves, after departing this life, displayed and dismembered for the edification of the students. Dignity in death was, like all else, unequally shared.
New Town
The New Town was another place, another world; not wholly separate from the Old, connected to it by threads both tangible and intangible, but as unlike to it as an ordered farm of cultivated fields was to the wilderness that preceded it.
The Old Town had taken centuries to form itself, a haphazard growth thickening along the High Street, knotting itself into ever tighter and more crowded patterns. The New was the product of a singular and potent vision, and had sprung up in barely fifty years. It had been laid out in stern grids and graceful curves across the slopes and open fields to the north of the Old, beyond what had once been a thin, marshy loch and was now elegant gardens that divided the two Edinburghs one from the other.
For all its grandeur there were places in the New Town, Quire knew, where life’s cruder urgencies held sway, but today it presented its most gracious face to him. The broad streets were flanked by wide pavements. Some were lined with gaslights, standing to attention like an honour guard of thin, stiff soldiers. The terraces of noble houses ran on and on, most of them fronted by iron railings, all studded with great doorways. Fashionably dressed folk moved to and fro—the women in their capacious skirts, the men in their tall hats and high collars—with calm, refined purpose.
The frontage of Ruthven’s house in Melville Street was not so much pleasing as stern. A few steps led up to the imposing door. A boot scraper was set into the flagstones, and Quire regarded it for a moment or two, debating whether to yield to his instinct to use the thing, merely because it was there. He sniffed and instead gave the door knocker, a heavy ring of solid brass, a few firm raps.
As he stood there waiting upon the threshold, two ladies of evident means strolled by, arm in arm. They watched him as they went, and he had the uncomfortable sense that they thought him as out of place as he felt. He smiled and nodded, and they smiled demurely back before looking away and murmuring to one another.
The great door swung open, and Quire found himself greeted not by some servant as he had expected but by a strikingly attractive woman of middle age, to whom the adjective demure could hardly have been less applicable. Her decolletage was far more revealing than had been the fashion for some time, exposing a great expanse of smooth skin, divided by the deep crevasse between the swell of her breasts. She regarded him with an expression so open, so appraising, that he found it unsettling.
“Is Mr. John Ruthven at home?” Quire asked, his discomfiture putting a slight quaver into his voice.
A smile pinched at her lips, and her knowing eyes widened a little. A fragrant perfume was stealing into Quire’s nostrils, all floral piquancy, much like the woman who wore it.
“He is,” she said. “Have you a name I might share with him?”
She stood aside as she said it, and ushered him in with an unfurling of her long, pale arm. He entered, catching a waft of that perfume once more as he passed by her.
“Sergeant Quire,” he told her.
“How nice. I am Isabel Ruthven. Can I take your coat?” she asked him, wholly unperturbed by the appearance of a policeman on her doorstep. “You have no hat, then?”
“Ah, no. No, I don’t, madam.” He felt an irrational flutter of embarrassment at his lack of headgear, as if its absence constituted some grave social misdemeanour. There were few things he cared for less than the strictures of society’s hierarchies, yet he could not help but be aware of them, and of the difference that lay between him and those who would live in such a house as this.
She hung his coat on an ornate stand in the hallway. He watched her neck as she did so: the line of her dress fell almost as low across her back as it did her front. He could see her shoulder blades moving beneath her white skin.
“Mrs. Ruthven,” he said. “It is Mrs. Ruthven, is it?”
“Indeed.” That smile again, which seemed at once guileless and far too suggestive.
“Could you tell your husband that I have something of his that I would like to return to him?”
“Of course. Come, he is in the drawing room. There is a seat just here you may wait on.”
She escorted him down the hallway, walking fractionally closer to him than was entirely comfortable or proper, so that her voluminous skirt brushed heavily against his leg. He thought it must be deliberate, but an instant later found that notion silly and chided himself for being so foolish.
A single rug was stretched out the length of the hallway, all burgundy, blues and creams. A massive side table, its chestnut surface so thoroughly polished that it almost glowed with an inner fire, held an ornate mirror fringed with gilt curlicues. As they passed it by, Quire glimpsed himself at Mrs. Ruthven’s side in the glass, and noted how each of them accentuated the other by their proximity: her grace and porcelain beauty rendered his rough edges and weathering all the more acute, and his shadows made her shine all the more brightly.
A stairway folded itself up the inside of the house, light pouring down from a vast skylight four floors above. Mrs. Ruthven led Quire beneath it, and beyond, to a padded bench with thick, carved legs.
“If you would just wait here a moment, I will announce you.”
Obedient, he sat, and watched her approach a tall panelled door opposite. At the last moment, as she raised one hand to tap at the wood, she looked back and settled on him a thoughtful gaze. She washed it away in a moment with a smile, and turned back to the door.
Quire heard only murmured voices from within as she leaned into the room, then she was beckoning him, and closing the door behind him, and he was looking around one of the most luxuriantly furnished chambers he had ever seen. A glittering chandelier that hung from a huge moulded rose in the centre of the ceiling; paintings the size of dining tables on the walls, dulled by age; a small piano of lustrous ebony; high-backed, long-armed chairs so thickly upholstered they looked fit to smother a man should he sink carelessly into them.
And three men. Standing closest to Quire, regarding him with expectant curiosity—therefore, Quire guessed, being John Ruthven—was a tall figure with a strong, if rather thin, face and a white neckcloth tied about a high, wing-tipped collar in a bow so ebullient it could not help but draw the eye.
Beyond him, peering around his shoulder, was a man a good deal shorter and older, with a face browned and leathered by years of sun, and fronds of fine lines at the corners of mouth and eyes. His greying hair was in the process of deserting his scalp, falling back in some disorder towards his temples.
Third and last, reclining in one of those mighty chairs with legs crossed and the elevated foot bobbing slightly, elbows resting on the arms of the chair, a man of rather wan and pinched countenance. His hands, encased in smooth black gloves, were steepled, the two index fingers just touching the tip of his aquiline nose. He regarded Quire impassively.
John Ruthven advanced and extended a hand, which Quire duly shook.
“Sergeant Quire, was it my wife said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good. This”—he stood aside and indicated the older man just behind him—“is Monsieur Durand. A house guest of mine.”
Quire hid his surprise at finding himself in the company of a Frenchman, and they exchanged nods. Ruthven flicked a casual hand in the direction of the seated man.
“And that is Mr. Blegg, my assistant. A factotum, you might call him.”
Quire duly gave another nod of acknowledgement, but there was only the most miserly of responses. Blegg
