The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [113]
Beyond the pistol, hunched down under an oversized cloak—entirely buried by it, in fact, the better to obscure his features—was Spune. Flat on the bed of the cart, beneath a light canvas, lay Merry Andrew and the third of his grave-robbing triumvirate: Mowdiewarp. Which was a nickname Quire might have thought funny, had he not been entirely preoccupied with other concerns. Mowdiewarp was an old country name for a mole. A digger.
Merry Andrew was complaining, rather indistinctly due to the concealing canvas, as he had been for a considerable length of time.
“Have you never driven a wagon before?” he hissed. “I’ve got a bruise on every bone, the way you keep finding out the ruts, you daft fuck.”
Quire ignored him. He could imagine that Merrilees’ elongated, bony form made for a hard ride over these rough tracks, but it could not be helped. Merry Andrew could never have passed for Durand, no matter how bundled up in cloak or cape. The two were far too dissimilar in form and carriage. It was not possible to make a heron look like a grouse, whatever the size of the bag you put over its head. So Merry Andrew stayed hidden in the back, and Spune—the only one of them, in fact, of even passingly similar stature to the Frenchman—sat glumly up front, pretending to be sick and keeping his face well hidden.
Arrowheads of geese were ploughing the sky, honking as they went. A buzzard was mewing, off over the slopes of the Pentlands, quartering the heather and grassland with lazy glides. The wagon pitched and yawed and grumbled. And through it all, Quire could still hear Merry Andrew’s whining complaints.
“I’ll have your guts for fiddle strings if this doesn’t play out right after all this bloody misery, you police bastard.”
Quire had made a neat little confection of lies and truth for Merry Andrew and his boys; close enough to the latter to let him say it with an air of conviction, enough of the former to make his proposal tempting to them.
It had taken him longer to find them than he would have liked. A few hours of rummaging around in Edinburgh’s darker corners, and the distribution of coins he could not really afford to part with, not if he was ever to eat again. From the distillery where Spune was—occasionally—employed, he had been sent to an inn in the basement of a half-ruinous tenement near the canal basin at Port Hopetoun. The place was bursting with bargees and canal workers, for all that it was early in the morning, and the air so thick with tobacco he could have chewed it. He had, though, missed both Spune and Merry Andrew by an hour or more. Look for him at the Flesh Market, Quire was told, once he paid over a thrupenny piece.
The Flesh Market was down on the low ground between Old Town and New, in the shadow of the North Bridge. It was a mazy place packed with barrows and stalls and little shops. It was a stinking place too, and a raucous one, with meat traders and butchers and provisioners all competing to get themselves heard one above the other.
Quire found the butcher he had been sent to and was told that Merry Andrew had been there but minutes before, settling a debt. After that, an ironmonger’s shop in Blair Street, run by a man who was an uncle to the city’s thieves, and plied a secret trade in a great deal more than ironwork. But Merrilees was not to be found there either, and the ironmonger was at first unwilling to offer any alternative suggestion. He read some fell and fixed determination in Quire’s face, though, and the passage of a few more coins was enough to loosen his tongue.
Finally, wearily, Quire found Merry Andrew getting himself shaved at a barber’s beside the Royal Exchange. He waited outside, watching the razor sweep its way back and forth over the soapy skin. Andrew Merrilees looked to be entirely at his