The Edinburgh Dead (9 page)

Quire unhooked his baton from his belt—its presence there in the first place being open to question, since it was in all ways that
mattered his badge of police office and, as Baird had made entirely clear, this was not a matter for the police—and rapped upon the door.

A tremulous voice arose from within, barely seeping out through the wooden planking on to the night air.

“Who’s there?”

“Edinburgh police,” Quire said, putting a decorative flourish upon his wilful disregard of Baird’s instructions. There were any number of things that kept Quire from sleep of a night; disobeying Lieutenant Baird was not one of them.

“Oh no,” the inhabitant of the watchtower said, and then fell silent. To Quire’s surprise, the door showed no sign of opening. He looked up and down the road. It was empty, and the village quiet. He took hold of the iron handle on the door and pushed, but some lock or bar stymied him.

“Would you let me in?” he called with studied calm.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that, sir.”

Again a silence ensued, instead of the further explanation Quire would have appreciated.

“Why is that?” he asked heavily.

“Not without my father’s say-so, sir. He’s an elder of the church. In charge of the watch.”

“Where is your father?” Quire asked, his spirits sinking rapidly.

“In the Sheep Heid.”

“Oh, aye? And what’s his name?”

“Mr. Munro, sir. Duncan Munro. The elder. By which I don’t mean a church elder—I said that already—but Duncan the elder. I’m the younger.”

“Of course you are,” said Quire.

The Sheep Heid was an inn of some repute. On another night, Quire might have found its seductive advances wholly irresistible. As he stepped across the threshold, he was taken in a warm and welcoming embrace of fire-heat and tobacco fumes, neighbourly talk and laughter.

Mounted on the wall above the bar was the head for which the tavern was named: that of a four-horned ram, observing the comings and goings with what struck Quire as a somewhat judgemental eye. It was quite a beast, one set of horns re-curved around its ears and back towards its cheeks, the others erect and sharp as knives. For all the smoke and chatter bubbling about it, it had an air of detachment, as if come from another time and place to gravely preside over this assemblage of men.

“I’m after Duncan Munro,” Quire said to the nearest of the drinkers, and was directed to a corner table currently occupied by a boisterous party exhibiting good cheer and ruddy cheeks. Curlers most of them, Quire reckoned, cheeks and humour alike enlivened by their return from the ice to this cosy lair.

The man he sought was no recent arrival, though. He was settled in his chair with a loose ease only lengthy occupation could bestow, and the colour in his face was all too clearly the product of drink and the heat of the inn’s fire.

“I was looking for you in the watchtower,” Quire said by way of blunt introduction.

The conversation faltered. Every eye turned to him, Munro’s a little more sluggishly and blinkingly than most.

“Me?” the church elder asked.

“I’m a sergeant of police, over from the city, and wanting a word with those watching the graveyard tonight.”

“That would be me, right enough,” Munro confirmed.

“What are you doing here, then?”

“Preparing for the long night ahead,” Munro replied with an explanatory shake of his tankard, and an appreciative chuckle from his companions.

“Well, the night’s not waited for your preparations to be completed,” Quire observed, pointing to the little thick-paned window behind Munro. “It’s gone and started itself.”

“Surely not.”

Munro twisted in his seat, those closest at hand shrinking away from his dangerously rocking mug. He took in the darkened scene
beyond the glass at some length, and then gave out a considered, thoughtful grunt.

“The nights do come in fast this time of year,” he observed.

Quire walked close at Munro’s side as they covered the short distance from the Sheep Heid to the gates of the kirk. Before leaving the inn, he had set a light to his lantern, and now angled its shutters to lay out a guiding beam before them. He was concerned for the other man’s safety, since the roadway was snowbound and Munro’s stride a touch unsteady. His concern proved unfounded, though. The man was sure-footed, perhaps aided by the ballast of a girth that placed considerable demands upon the belt and waistcoat tasked with its containment.

A feast of stars was strewn above them, food for the eye, and the crescent moon like a knife of polished ivory.

“Quire, eh?” Munro said as they drew near to the watchtower. His good humour had survived his removal from the inn thoroughly intact. “That’s a name with a fine religious tone to it. A churchgoing family, perhaps?”

“No,” Quire said, glad that he had not shared his forename as well. “A farming family. Until I left the land, at least.”

“Ah. Ah.”

Munro sounded a little disappointed, but shrugged it off easily enough.

“Well, a believer in the sanctity of life, at least, and that of the righteous dead, or you’d not be troubling yourself with our business tonight. Am I right?”

“More or less.”

Munro pounded on the door of the tower.

“Open up, lad. We’ve an officer of the law come calling, to share our heavy duty.”

Duncan the younger gave them admittance to a cramped little chamber which a crackling fire had packed with so much heat that Quire felt dizzy. The son eyed his father cautiously as the older man sank into a low wooden chair with a contented sigh, while
Quire’s attention was taken by the gun resting across pegs above the hearth.

It was properly known as a Land Pattern flintlock musket, but Quire, and everyone else with any soldiering in them, knew it as the Brown Bess; a soft, almost companionable name, he always thought, for something that had spat such storms of smoke and fire and lead and spilled such torrents of blood the world over these last hundred years. This lady had been midwife and nursemaid in the savage birth and nurturing of Britain’s empire.

“What is it you’re here for?” the youth asked him.

“He thinks there’s those who mean to rob our grave tonight,” his father said before Quire could answer.

The older man’s eyes were already closed, and his clasped hands rested comfortably upon his stomach.

“I’ve explained that we’ve had no trouble like that here in years, and not likely to have when there’re lights in the windows of this tower, and smoke from our chimney.”

He opened one eye and cast an investigate glance towards the window that looked out over the graveyard.

“Lights in the windows,” he said again, pointedly. “Man can talk as much sense as he likes, and profit by it not at all if nobody’s listening.”

His son hastened to find a candle in the drawer of a long table that stood against one wall. He lit it with a taper from the fire and set it on the window ledge, its fluttering flame a precautionary beacon against whatever men of ill will might lurk in the outer darkness.

“Ground’s frozen, anyway,” Munro said. “Who’d be so set upon transgression that they’d try to dig through that?”

“They’d need to be determined upon their course, right enough,” Quire agreed.

“Or most fiercely in thrall to greed. They say the anatomists pay ten pounds for a body.”

It was a good deal more than Quire could earn in a month.

“How long do you keep watch after a burial?” he asked.

“A week or so,” grunted Munro, closing his eye once more and sniffing. “They come early, if they’re going to come at all. After that, the corruption of the body… well, nobody would want it then. And only when the one we’ve buried was taken in the prime of life, and sound in wind and limb. As this lad was.”

A sorrowful weight settled over his words.

“Drowned in a ditch. The worse for the drink, they say, but I don’t know. Anyway, the Resurrection Men don’t much want the old ones, or the sick ones. So people say, in any case.”

“It’s true,” Quire acknowledged.

“Is it true they put cages about the graves in the city yards?” the younger Munro asked hesitantly, perhaps embarrassed by his morbid curiosity.

“Sometimes,” Quire said, seating himself far enough from the fire to avoid its fiercest heat. “If the family can afford it. Mort safes, they call them. Great iron things.”

Munro grunted, in a heavy, languid way that suggested sleep could not be long delayed.

“Hellish times we live in, that the dead should be disturbed in their sleep by pagans and atheists. Pagans and atheists, the lot of them: the diggers and these so-called medical men alike. Lapdogs of Satan. No grave should be opened, unless it’s at the end of days.”

And with that judgement issued, the elder of the church lapsed into lugubrious slumber. He snored, softly and gently, and it was a soothing sound. Rather like the contemplative rumbling of waves upon a pebble beach.

The sleeper’s son perched himself on the window ledge, beside the trembling candle, and began to read a Bible so old and well-used that its leather binding had softened to the flimsiness of cloth. His lips moved as he read, though Quire was not sure whether it was unconscious habit or deliberate recitation.

“You spend a lot of nights in this little castle, lad?” he asked the boy quietly.

The young Duncan, sitting there with the holy book open on his lap, lifted a stiff finger to his lips, pointed at his torpid father, and
returned to his study of the text. Quire could not help but smile at the impertinence, loyalty and faintly submissive obedience that were all bundled up together in the scene.

The heat, and the lullaby of Munro’s snoring, worked their soporific magics upon Quire, and he found his thoughts drifting aimlessly. His gaze rested upon the gun lodged above the fire, and he wandered into a remembrance of past times that was as much dream as memory.

He had carried a Brown Bess of his own all across Portugal and Spain, and into France. She had done as much as—more than, perhaps—any other woman to make him who he was. Taught him, certainly, more memorable lessons than the few teachers he had known in his brief schooling.

What sound it was that interrupted his hazy reverie, and how much time had passed, Quire could not say. But there was something; some dissonant shard of the outside world that jarred in his ear and was gone before he was wakeful enough to take hold of it.

He jerked upright in his chair, scraping its feet on the flagstone floor. The fire was still crackling, though it had sunk a little lower in the hearth; Munro still snored, though it was a feeble, whistling kind of snore now. But the son, perched upon the ledge of the dark window, was the embodiment of tension, staring out into the night. The soft Bible in his hands was forgotten, on the verge of slipping from his grasp.

“What is it?” Quire asked.

“I don’t know,” the youth said uneasily. “Something.”

And then it came again: a scrape of metal on stone, so faint as to be barely distinguishable from nervous imagination. But distinguishable—and real—it was. Quire surged to his feet.

“Get away from the window,” he snapped. “You’ll not be able to see anything anyway. Snuff that candle.”

As Munro the younger did as he was told, Quire kicked his father’s outstretched foot. Even that was only enough to bring the man haltingly and blearily back to wakefulness.

“What’s happening?” he asked, rubbing at his eye.

“That’s what we’re going to find out. Do either of you know how to load that gun?”

“What?”

Father directed a fearsome enquiring glare towards son, who shrank beneath its force and said, apologetically: “There’s someone out there.”

“Is there?” The doubt was evident in Munro’s voice, but so was a fragment of alarm. “It’ll be nothing. No need for the gun.”

“And if it’s not nothing?” Quire demanded. “There’s many kinds of resurrectionists, Munro. Not all of them are students, not all of them are gentle. Arm yourself. It might put some handy fear into them, if nothing else.”

It was evident at once that the man had not handled a gun in a long time, if ever. He fumbled even as he was digging a cartridge out from a pouch. He held the musket too low, and it swayed and rocked in his grasp. He was afraid of the gun, Quire knew, for he had seen it in others before. Afraid of the gun and of what it signified.

Quire took it out of Munro’s hands and, for the first time in many years, found himself loading a Brown Bess. Tearing at the paper cartridge with his teeth, catching the smell of the powder and thinking it a touch stale. Spit out the scraps, prime the pan. Stand the gun on its heel and pour the rest of the powder down the barrel. Turn the cartridge, feeling the weight of the ball in his hand; press it into the barrel with a fingertip. Tight enough. Slip the ramrod out from its seat under the barrel, punch down with it, pack ball and paper wadding and powder down firm. Replace the ramrod.

Quire looked up. Both Munros were regarding him with unease.

“There’s a man who knows his way about a musket,” the elder said quietly. Sadly.

But Quire knew he had been slow and imprecise. At his best, at Waterloo, he had been amongst the fastest in the company. Four shots in a minute. Not any more. Not nearly. It was not a skill he wished to rediscover, any more than was the killing of men. He offered the gun to Munro, who regarded it with distaste.