The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [132]
Quire could not quite agree with the first part of that, but the second gave him no great difficulty.
“A bloody thing for sure,” he said as they came to the foot of the Canongate.
The factories were in full clamorous flow, sending out their plumes of smoke to melt into the low roof of cloud. The drizzle was damping things down a bit—the stinks and the smoke and the folk all alike—but still the place was awash with carts and barrows and men hurrying this way and that.
“If you ever doubted me when I’ve said blame don’t follow as close in the footsteps of guilt as it should, you’ll know better now,” Dunbar opined. “Look at Knox, buying the bodies and not a charge against him. And Hare. They saw he was the worse of the two of them, and he’s to be free, just because he told them what they needed to send his friend to the gallows.”
Quire smiled to hear the bubbles of anger pushing up into Dunbar’s voice. It was a very fine thing, to hear the man getting back into his vituperative, argumentative flow.
“There’s a fair few folk baying for Knox’s blood,” Quire said. “He may not come out of this so pretty. But Hare—aye, that’s not right.”
Dunbar shook his head, despairing at the iniquities of the world and those who held its reins. An ease came over him, as if he were comforted by the reliable, familiar availability of targets for his critical appraisal. It told him, Quire hoped, that nothing of consequence had changed; that he would be hale and healthy and strong again soon, and back flying kites with his sons, forgetting what had happened.
“It’s barbarous times we’re living in, wouldn’t you say?” Dunbar said quietly. Not melancholy; just reflective.
“I would. Aye, I would.”
Calton Hill, which rose at the east end of Princes Street and looked out over the whole of Old and New Towns alike, held three prisons. The Debtors’ Jail, the Bridewell where the indigents and prostitutes and petty troublemakers found themselves, and the new Calton Jail, little more than ten years open, where the hard men went: the killers and the wounders, the blackmailers and the inveterate thieves. The jails stood side by side on the hill’s southern flank, lined up along the top of low cliffs and staring grimly out like a threefold threat and reminder for the city’s inhabitants of the consequences of transgression.
The Calton Jail presented by far the grandest and most fearsome countenance of the three. It was vast, like an amalgamation of castle and stately manor. Magnificent on the outside, in its austere way, as befitted such a prominent player in the architectural pageant of Edinburgh’s heart. On the inside, vile, malodorous and dangerous. Quire had been within its walls on several occasions, and every time had emerged from it eager for the cleansing airs and lights of an open sky. It was not an experience he was eager to repeat, but he went there in any case.
Nowhere was the jail more like a fortress than in its approaches. Its gatehouse stood on Regent Road, a wide boulevard that curved around Calton Hill’s southern slopes. It was a prodigious structure, with two towers flanking the huge gates. Walls thrice the height of a man stretched away on either side, enclosing the prison yard and the enormous building that stood at the heart of it.
Once, Quire might have talked his way through the watch at the gatehouse without any difficulty, for a sergeant of police could come and go as he pleased; but he was no longer such a thing, and he found himself instead taken into one the offices built into the gatehouse, to face David Maclellan, a captain of the prison guard he knew of old. Not well, but at least he did know him.
“Of course I can’t let you in,” Maclellan said, pained at both the suggestion and the need for him to explain its impossibility.
“I thought maybe, since you’ve known me long enough, I might just get an hour. No more than that.”
Maclellan set his elbow on the desk, and rested his chin upon the