The Edinburgh Dead (23 page)

He sighed, and hung his head, and then seemed to come to some abrupt resolution. He straightened his back, looked Quire in the eye.

“Do you understand that this is not a matter of investigation, of mere crime? That there is a battle to be fought here, against forces far darker than you would think possible? There is knowledge in the world much older than the new wisdoms of science and thought that so preoccupy men now. It is potent. You can be of no help to me, Sergeant, nor I to you, unless you know that. Unless you prove as fierce, as savage, as I think you might be. You must match that which you oppose, if you and I are not to be dragged down. Damned.”

“When men set dogs on me—dogs that don’t breathe, don’t bleed—and a man tries to kill me with a shovel, and won’t fall down when I put a ball in his chest… I know this is not mere crime, Durand. And I know there’ll be folk dying at the end of it all, one way or the other.”

“Good. You do not sound so much like an officer of police now.”

“I’m not like other police,” Quire said.

The truth of it saddened him. He was becoming once more the man he had thought behind him: the man of war, the man of violence, possessed by cold anger. But it was what he needed. There would be folk dying at the end, right enough, by hangman’s noose or otherwise. One of them might be him, if he could not summon up all that old ferocity.

“I will show you, then,” said Durand. “That is your trade. You can only know what you see, what you can touch. Then perhaps you will understand what needs to be done, or be ready to hear it from me, at least. Mr. Ruthven has a farm.”

“I had heard as much.” Quire nodded. “Some landholdings, I think I was told. But I don’t see what…”

“You will see. Cold Burn Farm. It is on the western side of your Pentland Hills. Not far. Go there, but go in numbers and well armed.”

Durand tossed his head back and emptied the last thick dregs of the coffee down his throat.

“Go to the farm, that is all. You will find your answers there, and there will be no turning back. There. I have done it. I have cast the dice. Let the matter fall out as it may.”

The Frenchman rose, and scattered a few coins on the table.

“Goodbye, Sergeant. Perhaps we will have the opportunity, and the cause, to speak again. Please do not come looking for me, though. You will only betray us both if you do that.”

Quire followed Durand out of the coffee house only a little later. He walked thoughtfully up the steps and into the quadrangle of the Exchange.

Men were cleaning the cobblestones of the yard. One stood by a barrel on a handcart, banging a long handle up and down with vigorous determination. A second held the canvas hose that emerged from the pump and played the rather intermittent jet of water it produced over the ground. A third swept with a wide brush.

Quire paused to watch them briefly, shuffling aside when the splashing water came too close to his boots. It seemed somehow unreal, this scene of mundane labour, when set beside his conversation with Durand. A misleading token of normality in a world descending into chaos.

He could not entirely trust Durand, for all that he believed the sincerity of the man’s fear and unease. But if the Frenchman could not, or would not, directly implicate Ruthven or Blegg, Quire could see little option but to follow where he directed him.

It was annoying, though. It would take a mail coach to get him out to the Pentlands, and he hated travelling in those rickety, noisy, cold old things.

Quire came in towards the farm buildings along hedgerows. He felt foolish, creeping under cover as if he was back in the Peninsula, fearful of an ambush, rather than scrambling across wet fields on the edge of the Pentland Hills; but his every instinct had told him this was the way to do it. Perhaps if Durand’s despondent fear had not been so apparent, Quire might have marched straight up the main farm track and hammered on the door of the farmhouse. But he had seen just how frightened the Frenchman was, and he had apprehension enough of his own as to what might await him here. So he came at the farm along hedgerows, and waited for dusk to fall before going down amongst the buildings.

It was a long wait, for the Carlisle mail had put him out at the side of the road not long after noon, and though it was a fair walk from there to Cold Burn Farm, it did not take Quire much time to get on to a rise of ground from where he could look down into the main yard. The Pentland Hills were at his back, a chain of rounded heather-cloaked mounds rolling away into the south. The moon came up; a vast yellowish orb hanging over the shoulder of those gentle peaks.

What Quire saw caused him some puzzlement. He knew a working farm, and a well-kept one, when he saw it, and this looked like neither to him. There was a thin trail of smoke drifting up
from the farmhouse chimney, so the place was clearly occupied. But there were slates missing from the roof of the biggest barn. There was a broken-down cart, missing a wheel, collapsed on to its axle and lying there in a corner of the yard like a skeleton. At the edge of a field where it backed on to a long, low cowshed, there was a wide black stain, a circular scab of ash and soot and burned grass. Even the hedgerow beneath which Quire sheltered had a look of neglect; its thorns had grown leggy and gnarled and gappy. Too long since they had been laid or cut. He could neither see nor hear any animals, not in the fields, not in the yard. So why did Ruthven keep a farm at all, if it was not being worked?

Night came on, and Quire tired of his vigil. He eased himself up, flexing his legs to break out the stiffness in his knees, and trotted down towards the buildings. He kept in the lee of the hedge, and ducked his head down to ensure he did not break the skyline, or frame himself against the lambent moon.

A soft light was in one window of the farmhouse now; the kitchen, he would guess. He made that his first target. If there was a whole gang of brawny farm lads waiting to spill out and kick him around, he wanted to know about it. Durand’s insistence that Quire should not come to this place alone had been easily, if regrettably, dismissed: the Frenchman could not be expected to know that the Edinburgh police had no authority out here beyond the city bounds, nor that Baird, the current master of the police house, would sooner gnaw off his own thumb than pay heed to any suggestion, on any topic, emanating from Quire. In fact, Quire had taken it as his life’s calling to stay beneath Baird’s notice, as far as that was possible.

It was easy enough to reach the corner of the big barn unseen. There was no smell of animals on the still night air. None of the straw or hay he would have expected to see scattered about. He watched the lighted window of the house across the yard for a little while. It was blurred by condensation, so he could not be certain, but there was no obvious sign of movement within. Only the faintly inconstant light of candles; and that thread of smoke, still just visible ascending from the chimney into the moonlit sky.

Quire knew better than to run, even though the beating of his heart told him his body wanted it. Instead he went slowly and silently across the yard, bent low, hands almost brushing the ground. He balled himself up against the wall beneath the window, straining his ears for any human sound leaking out. Nothing. No voice, no movement. He breathed deeply. And ventured a quick look.

He put his head above the sill of the window, and squinted in. The steam beaded on the glass made everything vague, but he could see enough to know it was indeed the kitchen. An empty one, as best he could tell with the moment’s examination he permitted himself. He settled back down on to his haunches.

Then, footsteps, and a rattling of the handle on the farmhouse door just a few yards from where he squatted. A tingling excitation of fear ran through the skin of his hands and arms. The door jerked open with some violence, and a lurching figure emerged in a flood of light.

A big man, but all his strength was in his chest and arms, for his hips were narrow and his legs spindly. Not someone Quire recognised. He staggered a little as he came out from the farmhouse, taking a few steps in and out of the pool of light falling from the open door. He laughed to himself as he did it, amused by his own incoherent feet. First belch, then fart escaped his swaying form. At which he laughed again.

Quire shrank back into whatever meagre shadows there might be beneath the window; he willed himself to fade, become thin and faint, and berated himself for not waiting for some cloud to veil that vast moon. He pressed his shoulders to the wall, narrowed his eyes to slits lest the whites of them should give him away. He held his breath.

Peering out between his touching eyelashes, he watched as the man set one wide hand against the wall of the farmhouse, leaned heavily on it and with the other unbuckled his trousers. A heavy ring of keys clattered on his belt as he did so. A strong stream of piss played over the stones. The man was humming to himself as
he urinated. The flow faltered, and dwindled in fits and starts to nothing.

The man hauled his trousers up once more and fumbled clumsily with his belt. Still Quire did not breathe. He could feel a crushing tightness building in his chest and throat, but he kept his jaw clamped shut, and wished with all his might for this drunken fool of a farmhand to remember how to buckle his own belt.

A fox barked, some little way off in the fields behind Quire. The man straightened and looked that way, hands still at his waist. He blinked stupidly and frowned into the darkness. Quire counted his own heartbeats; fought with his desperate need to suck in some air. And the big man’s gaze dropped, fell upon Quire’s face, slipped drunkenly away from it. But then the eyes sharpened a touch. The gaze returned to Quire. The man opened his mouth.

Quire surged up, emptying his burning lungs and filling them again in the space of one long pace. He put his shoulder into the man’s midriff and lifted him bodily from the ground. It was not easy, to turn in mid-stride with that much weight across him, but he did it, and punched the man back against the farmhouse wall. He heard the bony crack of the man’s skull against stone, but had brawled with enough drunks to know that beer was a mighty shield against blows that would take any sober man down. He put a pair of hard, quick strikes in under the ribcage with his right fist; pushed up with his left hand under the chin to smack head against wall again. Then he could feel the strength go from the man’s legs, could feel his weight sinking him.

Quire lowered him to the ground and knelt beside him. His knee was in the pool of urine, and he could feel the last vestiges of its quickly fading warmth through his trousers, but he ignored that. He listened. Nothing. No cries of alarm, no pounding feet. The farmhouse door still stood open, its light and warmth flooding into the night, but no one emerged.

Quire put a hand under each armpit and dragged the insensible man across the farmyard. Hard boot heels scraped on the cobbles, but that seemed unlikely to rouse any pursuit if it had not already
been sparked. He could smell the drink coming thickly off his captive. Hopefully any companions he had left behind in the farmhouse were similarly befuddled. All Quire wanted now was a bit of time. He knew better than to taunt the gods of luck. Discovered once was more than enough.

The closest of the farm’s many buildings was the long, low, rather decrepit cowshed at one end of the yard. The moonlight was falling full upon its face, and Quire could see a heavy bar across its door, secured by chain and padlock. He unceremoniously pulled the ring of keys from the man’s belt and examined them. One looked a likely fit for the lock.

He clamped the key crossways between his teeth and, one step at a time, hauled his captive towards the shed. Any unconscious man—or a dead one, for that matter—had a terrible weight to him, and Quire knew that. He had not expected, though, quite how quickly his damaged left arm would weary of the task. He could feel it slipping out from under the man’s shoulder, moment by moment.

Had the shed been a few yards further, he might have lost his grip. As it was, he reached the door with his left arm trembling and cramping. He took the key with that hand, bearing the man’s full weight on his right arm and hip. He was relieved at the ease and quiet with which the padlock clicked open. The chain made a little more noise as it came free, and the key fell from the lock and rang softly on the ground before skittering into shadows. Quire glanced back towards the house. There was still no further sign of life. It might be that fortune had belatedly chosen to smile upon him, and there was no one else around to trouble him.

He lifted the bar and eased the door open; not much, just enough to let him enter. The silence and darkness that awaited within were welcome. A few last, painful heaves and he and the farmhand were inside, and the door closed behind them.

Quire sat for a moment on the hard floor, sucking in a few deep breaths. He reached blindly in the darkness, found the man’s arms and folded them across his chest. He let his hand rest there, feeling
the rise and fall of the ribcage. Satisfied that no lasting harm had been done, he ground a thumb into his left palm, trying to ease some of the taut discomfort in the muscles. As he did so, his surroundings slowly, subtly impressed themselves upon his senses.

The place smelled like no cowshed he had ever encountered. It had a dry, almost herbal scent to it. And the distinctive stink of goat. As his eyes adapted themselves to the traces of moonlight seeping in through the ill-fitting door, he picked out a strange complexity of shapes. There were no byres, no stalls, as best he could tell; none of what was needed to handle cattle. Only some odd constellation of objects—he could not tell what in the gloom—hanging from the rafters above him. Jars or other storage vessels along the walls. Down at the far end, at the very limit of what his eyes could detect, perhaps tables or desks.