“Never to me,” Hare shouted, “never to me.”
To Quire’s amazement, he hauled himself to his feet yet again, bone crackling in his knees as he did so, his legs twisting and bending unnaturally. He took a long, sinking pace towards Quire, his face contorted into a mask of such pure hatred that it rendered it almost inhuman. More beast than man.
“Never to you,” Quire muttered, “Aye, you might be right about that.”
And he shot Hare for the fourth and last time, in the heart, and knocked him down with the force of it.
Quire set the Brown Bess aside then, leaving it safely out of reach of the still writhing figure in the heather. He drew his sabre as a flock of ravens went croaking overhead, rolling about. He glanced up at them, and saw for the first time that the sky was blue now; a pristine field of azure, from horizon to horizon.
He looked at Hare. He was lying face down. The violence of his movements was diminishing. Quire trod on one of the man’s outstretched arms and pinned it down. He hacked at the wrist with the sabre. It took a few blows to separate hand from arm, and it came away without much in the way of blood or gore. The spirit inhabiting Hare did not seem to notice.
Quire peeled the glove off the hand, and looked impassively at the crude writing and symbols scrawled across the skin. None of it he could understand; there was no meaning to it for him. But Durand had said to clear the writing from the hand, and Quire thought that taking the hand from the body should serve just as well.
He cut the other hand away more easily. He rolled Hare on to his back. There was no movement in the limbs now, but the eyes still darted from side to side. They found Quire’s face, and held on to his gaze. The lips trembled, trying to recall the shape of a sneer.
Quire trotted over to his backpack and tipped it out. He gathered up the flasks of lamp oil and carried them to Hare’s corpse. He poured most of the oil over the body, and then set about the business of gathering as much dry, old heather as he could, slashing at it with the sword. It would dull the blade, but he hoped to have no further use for the thing. He heaped the loose, leggy clumps of heather over Hare’s prostrate form.
He meant, as well, to have no further use for the cartridges in his belt pouches, so he tore them all open and made a little mound of the powder close by the pyre. He soaked some more heather in the last of the oil, and laid that over the pyramid of gunpowder. And then, at last, he knelt, and held the musket low down, and sent sparks from the flintlock scattering out into the powder and the oil-soaked heather.
He sat on a low rock, perhaps thirty yards away, and watched Hare burn. Great yellow flames licked up into the sky, and thick, stinking black smoke that made coils of itself as it rose.
Quire felt a good deal more calm and content than he had expected to. There was, he realised as the flames consumed the corpse, a remarkable lightness about his life now. It contained almost nothing, had almost no weight to it. Blegg, and Ruthven, and everything that went with them were gone; so was his place on the city police. No wage, none of that purpose that his work had put into his life. Nothing left to him of it. All burned away, just as Hare was now, out on the moors.
There was Cath, though. He thought of her as he sat, looking out over the vast silver expanse of the Solway Firth that the bright day had discovered, far to the south, and freed from the shackles of darkness. The sun sent a thousand rippling, glittering shards of light racing over the surface of the sea.
Quire reached down and plucked a sprig of heather from beside his hard seat. He would take that back to Cath, he thought. For luck.
Acknowledgments
This book makes liberal use of real history to tell its tale, and this time I am therefore indebted not only to the usual and indispensible support network without which no writer could function, but also to a not inconsiderable number of people who one way or another made my distorting of historical truth possible:
The staff at the National Library of Scotland and at the Edinburgh City Archives, who were unfailingly helpful and efficient.
Jim McGowan, who has never heard of me, but whose unpublished thesis on Edinburgh’s police force in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was utterly fascinating and tremendously helpful.
Ewen, for the very timely provision of some audio drama recordings that really hit the spot, inspiration- wise.
Thanks, as ever, to the fine Orbit crew, as helpful a bunch of publishing folk as a writer could wish to be working with. In particular, thanks to Tim Holman for his support and assistance not just with this book—which were considerable—but all the way back to the beginning.
Thanks to Tina, my agent, for her help and support.
Thanks to my parents, for their encouragement from the first time I ever tried to write.
And to Fleur, for everything.
extras
meet the author
BRIAN RUCKLEY was born and brought up in Scotland. After studying at Edinburgh and Stirling Universities, he worked for a series of organizations dealing with environmental, nature conservation, and youth development issues. Having had short stories published in
interview
From a very young age, writing fiction felt like a reasonable and natural thing to be doing. Crucially, nobody ever disabused me of that notion, so although I had plenty of other interests that I was quite happy to pursue professionally, writing was always there, in my head, as an option.
I had one very specific, pretty simple starting point. I was thinking about Burke and Hare, two of Edinburgh’s most famous historical inhabitants, naughty chaps who murdered lots of innocents in order to supply the city’s anatomy schools with corpses. A straightforward question occurred to me: what if the teachers of anatomy weren’t the only people who wanted to get their hands on some corpses back then? The whole book flowed from that one thought.
Two things: familiarity—since I was born and brought up here, and know the place and its history far better
