The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [135]
William Burke might be dead, but he was not yet done as the centre of the city’s attention. The sentence passed upon him did not end with his execution.
The day after the hanging, the coffin into which his corpse had been nailed was taken to the University of Edinburgh’s huge college, close by the Royal Infirmary and Surgeon’s Square. It was the largest building in the city by some way, unless the whole complicated castle was accounted a single structure. It contained within it a broad quadrangle, surrounded by balustraded terraces. The four sides of the huge rectangular edifice that enclosed that quadrangle held, amongst many other riches, the university’s Medical School.
It was to there that Burke’s body was conveyed; specifically, to the largest of its lecture theatres. In that great bowl of an arena, the lid of the coffin was prised up and Burke’s corpse removed. His clothes were taken from him and he was laid out upon the slab at the heart of the amphitheatre. Shortly after noon, Professor Alexander Monro, the incumbent of the university’s Chair of Anatomy, applied a saw to the late William Burke’s cranium, cutting in a neat ring around the whole circumference of the head. With a little difficulty, he then removed the entire top of his skull, and in a great gush of thick and foul blood exposed his brain to the huge crowd of students and other curious spectators assembled in the theatre.
It took close to two hours for Monro to complete his dissection of William Burke, for the edification of those who had succeeded in obtaining a ticket for the much-anticipated event. Those who had been unsuccessful rioted in the quadrangle of the college, so aggrieved were they at their exclusion from the drama. They broke windows and tore up paving stones, and fought off the gang of baton-wielding police that was dispatched from Old Stamp Office Close.
The disorder did not end until Professor Christison brokered an agreement with the ringleaders of the mob whereby Burke’s corpse, returned to something approaching its natural state, would be put on public display for two days.
So the people of Edinburgh, in their thousands, filed past the corpse of the wretch whose vile deeds had fouled their city and comforted themselves with the knowledge that, upon this one man at least, the most perfect justice had been done.
And with the execution of that justice, the need to hold William Hare a prisoner in Calton Jail came to an end.
XXXII
Two Sergeants
In the dull twilight, a small carriage turned in to the entrance of Calton Jail, and rumbled under the arch of the gatehouse. Lamps burned on either side of the driver’s seat. It drew up on the yard, in the shadow of the great prison, where a small group of men awaited it. The governor, Captain Maclellan of the guards, a handful of his officers. And William Hare, in a heavy, high-collared coat that hid much of his face.
The police sergeant who drove the cart dropped down on to the yard’s cobblestones. Maclellan came forward to meet him.
“Jack Rutherford,” Maclellan said. “It’s a miserable duty you’ve got yourself tonight. Someone at the police house got a grudge against you?”
“Volunteered,” Sergeant Rutherford said, and when he saw Maclellan’s surprise, he shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it. The man’s under the Crown’s protection, after all. Got to see him safe out of the city. Let them lynch him somewhere else if they like, just so long as it’s outside the city bounds.”
Maclellan shook his head in amazement.
“Still. A devil like him, it’s a damn shame.”
“I don’t mind. Nobody else wanted to do it, and like I say, it needs doing.”
The governor murmured a few words to Hare, but the Irishman—no longer a prisoner, no longer under any obligation to feign civility or gratitude—paid him no heed, and climbed into the carriage with a sour grin upon his face.
It was done with no more ceremony than that. The worst killer any of the men present had ever encountered—none of them were in any doubt of that—walked free of