The Edinburgh Dead (20 page)

Quire hesitated. He was asking a great deal of the professor now, he knew. Challenging his loyalty to his calling, and his colleagues.

“Can you tell me who has been buying corpses from the Resurrection Men of late? Who is most likely to be taking delivery?”

Christison scowled at him, and Quire’s heart sank. He had overstepped the mark.

“Sergeant Quire,” the professor said, “if you seriously expect any respected anatomist to publicly testify to his receipt of cadavers from disreputable sources, your sense has truly deserted you. It matters not that the trade is common knowledge. It is unspoken knowledge, and should it cease to be so, the damage to the reputation of all those concerned—to the whole business of the teaching of medicine in this city—would likely be irreparable.”

“Yet there have been murders committed,” Quire said bluntly. “There’s those as are wishing I was numbered amongst the victims. I have to tell you, at this moment I care little for the protection of reputations, sir.”

“Well said, I suppose,” Christison grunted, though he did not sound convinced. “But really, Sergeant, you don’t need me to tell you where to look, surely? I thought you a perceptive man. One capable of deductive reasoning easily sufficient to this task.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It is in the nature of any trade that goods flow as the demand for them dictates, is it not? I think it was one of the recent great minds of this very city, Adam Smith, who shed light on such matters, but I suppose you find little time for recreational reading. Let me tell you this, then, and this alone: there is one dissection table in particular that is never short of a cadaver.

“Dr. Knox has five hundred students subscribed this year. More than all the other private tutors combined, I believe. No teacher of anatomy has ever drawn so many, and it is the steady procession of the dead passing through his school that brings them. Even our own students buy their way into his theatre, since the university cannot match his certainty of supply.”

“Robert Knox,” Quire murmured.

“You know him?”

“No. Only in… no, not really. I know the name, and something of the reputation.”

Not the whole truth, but as much of it as Quire wished to share.

“Well, I’d not put too much weight on reputations, Sergeant. They’re flimsy things that conceal more than they reveal. But remember: you did not have his name from me.”

“No, sir,” Quire said distractedly.

Knox’s name was one that had not been in his thoughts for a long time, and it came with an unsettling cargo of memory and connection.

“I’ll be away,” he said to Christison. “Let you get on with your proper work. Do you want me to take this?”

He indicated the dog’s torso and head.

“No, don’t trouble yourself,” Christison said. “I’ll have it burned.”

Quire nodded, rolled up the empty sack into a loose ball and threw it on to the slab beside the dog. He pulled open the door.

“We really don’t live in a world in which dead dogs kill people, you know, Sergeant Quire,” Christison said behind him.

“You might not, sir, but it seems I do,” Quire said quietly without looking round.

Surgeon’s Square was a sedate and graceful enclave, nestled into the south-east corner of the old city wall, no more than a minute or two’s walk from the Infirmary. Grand frontages clustered about a small garden, rather austere, but neat and well ordered. The square was an interloper, like a fragmentary forerunner of the New Town nestled into a hidden corner of the Old. Here, many of the men who had built Edinburgh’s mighty reputation in the medical sciences had for years plied their trade; and a lucrative trade it had been, as the buildings so clearly evidenced.

The Royal Medical Society stood on one side; the old hall of the College of Surgeons on another. Quire’s destination was nestled between them, and though not quite so grand, it still presented a
distinguished façade. Number Ten, Surgeon’s Square. The teaching rooms of Dr. Robert Knox.

Quire paused on the doorstep. He could not bring himself to reach out and make his presence known. Robert Knox. He had not seen the face that went with that name in more than ten years, and in truth remembered its features imperfectly. He remembered the circumstance of their meeting all too well, though. Better than he would have liked.

Coming here had been an instinctive reaction to Christison’s mentioning of the name. To hear it so unexpectedly, after so much time, had caught Quire off his guard. Now, as the vigour of the impulse faded, he mistrusted it. But still: it seemed he was caught up in a struggle to the death, and one he felt in imminent danger of losing. An approach to Knox might well be fruitless, but the most unpromising of handholds would look attractive to a drowning man.

The soft, deliberate clearing of a throat disturbed his line of thought. He turned to find a slight man with decidedly sharp and hawk-like features standing there, already dipping his head in submissive greeting. The little bowl of a hat he wore bobbed.

“Can I be of assistance, sir?” the man asked.

“I don’t know,” Quire said, letting loose a little of the irritation at his own indecision. “Who are you?”

“Paterson, sir. Doorkeeper.” He held up a little package, brittle paper tied with string. “Been to get some ink for Dr. Knox, or I’d’ve been here to greet you. If it’s greeting you wanted.”

“I wanted a word with Dr. Knox.”

“Who should I say is calling?” Paterson asked, moving smoothly past Quire and reaching for the door.

Quire held aside his coat to show the baton hanging at his belt.

“Sergeant Quire,” he said.

“So, you’ve taken it upon yourself to lecture me, have you?” Robert Knox cried. “I won’t have it. I won’t!”

It was a fearsome display. The doctor’s fury seemed entirely uncontrived, a wholly natural thing welling up from inside him. It put a beetroot blush into his cheeks and a wild gleam into his one good eye; the left socket was unnervingly empty. He had less hair than Quire remembered—a balding pate ringed by slightly greying fringes and sideburns, though he was no older than Quire—but what there was of it trembled now with his anger.

Quire stuck stubbornly, if with rapidly faltering enthusiasm, to his course.

“I mean only to say, sir, that these grave robbers have…”

“And you presume some connection between them and me?”

The strength of his indignation appeared to exhaust Knox. He slumped back in his chair, away from the great desk, and regarded Quire with something approaching disbelief.

It was an uncomfortable attention to be subjected to, but Quire’s discomfort went a good deal deeper than that. The room in which the two men sat—that prodigious desk between them like the polished bole of some huge fallen tree—was in part study, but only in part. It also served as a storehouse of what were, to Quire’s eye, grotesqueries.

Two short skeletons stood in glass-fronted cases, an honour guard flanking Knox. Their empty eye sockets seemed to Quire to be watching him with as much disdain as their owner. Atop a cabinet was a collection of disarticulated bones, each of them mounted on a wooden stand, the better to display their deformities. Every one of them was bent or twisted or gnarled with bulbous outgrowths. Beneath a dusty glass dome was a human hand, bleached of all colour, its fingers splayed, its skin peeled back to expose the intricate web of bone and tendons and muscles beneath it. There were gas fittings on the walls, small brackets like candle-holders. They were not burning now, but Quire could imagine how starkly eerie the place must seem when their light threw shadows from Knox’s strange collection.

The human body was here reduced to a parade of oddities and afflictions, its constituent parts exhibited in a menagerie of disease.
Quire could guess at the educational justification of it all, but he could not look upon it without being put in mind of those whose remains had found their way into the collection. He could not help but wonder about their lives, their suffering. He somehow doubted that such thoughts greatly troubled Dr. Knox.

“Are you a religious man?” Knox asked at length, his tone much moderated.

“No, sir. I am not.”

“Very well. You should then, being rational, be aware that the light of reason has shone brightly in this city these last fifty years. Great men have walked these streets, and their learning, their insight, in every field of thought from the arts to science to philosophy has illuminated all the land and driven superstition into exile. The flame is less bright now, perhaps, but still there are some men of exceptional talents, with the will to feed it. You do your city, and your nation, no service if you seek to traduce the reputation of those who strive to keep it lit.”

“That is not my intent, sir,” Quire said blandly. “I know only that we cannot have murder going unanswered, and that I am required, by duty and inclination alike, to find those responsible.”

“Again, you presume some knowledge upon my part that does not exist.”

“They are resurrectionists, sir. Lifters of corpses. It’s a matter of common sense to make enquiry of those through whose hands a great many corpses pass.”

“A very common kind of sense, indeed,” snorted Knox. “I smell the prejudice of the mob in it. The irrationalities and misguided sensitivities that would set shackles upon scientific endeavour. Let me make it clear, Sergeant: corpses do not pass through my hands, as you so casually put it. They receive the attention of my knife, and such skills as I possess, for the education of hundreds—many hundreds—of young men who set a not inconsiderable value upon it.

“Paterson, my doorkeeper, manages the supply of cadavers, and I can assure you they are acquired by means that need be of no
concern to you and your ilk. Now, if you will excuse me, I have matters requiring my attention. Be so good as to give me some peace, would you?”

Knox rose at that, and came briskly out from behind the desk, extending an open hand. It was, Quire supposed, the politest dismissal he could have hoped for in the circumstances. He stood, and shook the proffered hand. Knox’s grip was firm, almost excessively so. It was the grip of a man unfamiliar with the inhibitions of self-doubt; or inured to them by force of will.

“You do not recall me, sir, I suppose?” Quire said.

“Recall you?” Knox frowned as he released Quire’s hand from its imprisonment. “Why, have we met before?”

“You saved my life; or my arm, at the least.”

“Did I? In what circumstances?”

“Brussels. Thirteen years ago now.”

“Ah.” Knox nodded slowly. “Waterloo. Yes, there was a good deal of work for me there. You should have introduced yourself as a fellow veteran of those struggles in the first place, man. Why did you not tell me sooner?”

“It was not to the point of my visit, sir. And I did not expect you to remember.”

“Your arm, you say. Let me see, then.”

Taken aback, Quire found himself quite motionless, and with no words offering themselves to his tongue.

“Come, man,” Knox said with a rather cold smile. “Allow the craftsman to inspect his former works. You say I saved the limb. Let me see it, then.”

Quire tried to pull back the sleeve of his jacket, but the material was too thick and tight.

“Take it off, take it off,” Knox muttered.

Quire did so, and draped the jacket over the back of a chair. He rolled up his shirt sleeve to expose his left forearm, and turned it—with an uneasy tightening of embarrassment in his chest—so that Knox could examine the scars on its inner face.

“Burns,” the doctor murmured as he took hold of Quire’s wrist and ungently lifted the limb closer to his eye.

The skin was thick and messy and hairless, with an unnatural shine to it like wax that had hardened and smoothed in mid-flow. Ridges and furrows knotted themselves over the surface. In the midst of that wound, another, more distinct, resided: ugly and slightly raised, like a corrupted boil.

“And this?” Knox asked.

“You extracted a ball fragment, sir.”

“Ah. Well, you were fortunate, then. To work amidst burns, digging around in there—nine times in ten I’d think to lose the limb. Or the entire patient.”

“They told me afterwards that you prevented them from amputating it. You thought it might be saved. Removed not just the bullet but several pieces of my uniform from the wound.”

“Yes, yes. Often overlooked. It is rarely the lead itself that carries rot into the flesh, but what it takes with it. Very well. Cover yourself up.”

Quire pulled down his sleeve with relief, his left hand making a fist of its own volition, tensing against shivers of pain in his arm.

“Not my best or neatest work,” Knox said, handing Quire his jacket. “But that is to be expected: I was learning my trade then, on the army’s coin, and there were a great many demands on my time over those few days. That Corsican dwarf made sure of that, eh?”

“He did.”

“Well, luck was with you. And an astute surgeon, dare I say? Or one filled with the hubris of untrammelled youth, in any case.”

Knox’s manner was greatly mellowed, perhaps by self-importance, perhaps by fond reminiscence. Quire shared neither, and had no memory of any luck worthy of the name attending upon him in those days. Quite the reverse, in fact.