The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [138]
Hare looked at her.
“Always me,” he said with a wolfish grin. “Always me.”
He held up his hands and splayed them, examining the inscriptions straggling across the back of them.
“It will have to do,” he said. “Needed more time, more tools to really make it hold and work, but this will do, for a while. Give me those gloves.”
Isabel brought them to him and he pulled them over his hands.
“I hardly dared to believe,” she said, almost breathless with excitement.
“You should have,” Hare scolded her lightly. “I told you I was not done yet. You should have believed me. Just needed the right place to do it—a place that remembered me well—and the right kind of man to host me, the right blackness of heart to open up the way as he departed. I knew Hare would be what we needed. I like to think I played my small part in making him what he was, so it seems only fair I should be repaid with the use of him.”
She embraced him, and he held her for a moment or two before easing her away.
“What now?” she asked. “You won’t leave me here, surely, whatever you said to Rutherford? I came to find you, didn’t I? Out at the farm. You couldn’t ask more of me than that.”
Hare ignored her.
“Is there any sign?” he asked, turning his face this way and that to show her his cheeks. “Any bruising, or scarring?”
“No, no.” She shook her head. “But listen, what comes now?”
“Turn that lamp down. No point taking even the smallest risk of discovery, now that the hard part’s done.”
She groaned in frustration, but bent down to quench the flame and return Weir’s house to its natural state of gloom. She straightened, and turned, and found Hare right in front of her, very close. He put his gloved hands about her throat, and pushed her roughly back against the wall.
“All good things come to an end, Isabel,” he whispered as his fingers tightened. “This city’s done for me now. I’ve known that for a long time now, even if your husband could never see it. So I’m away, I don’t know where. But I do know I’ll be going alone, and I’ll not be leaving behind anyone who knows what face I’m wearing.”
He held her there for long minutes, squeezing ever more tightly, until she breathed no more, and hung limp in his grip.
Hare strode out on to the West Bow with a confident gait, tugging the black gloves tight on his hands. Rutherford, taken somewhat unawares by his abrupt reappearance, hurriedly tapped out the pipe he had been smoking on the heel of his boot. He frowned at Hare.
“Did they not give you the lamp to bring back?” he asked irritably. “It’s police property, this carriage. I’ll have to answer if it doesn’t go back just as it came out.”
“You got paid, didn’t you?” Hare snapped.
“Indeed I did, Mr. Hare. Just like you did, I’d imagine, so have a care with that tongue of yours.”
“Don’t call me Hare. That’s a dangerous name these days.”
“Oh, aye? What would you have me call you?”
“It doesn’t much matter to me. Why not Mr. Black? That’s simple enough for you to remember, I should think.”
Rutherford curled his lip in loathing. He might have pursued the discussion, and pushed on into argument perhaps, but Hare brushed past him and clambered into the carriage, sinking back into its concealing shadows.
“The southern mail coach, isn’t it?” he said from inside there. “We’ll need to make good time now, if we’re not to miss it.”
Rutherford vaulted up to his station at the front of the carriage, muttering invective under his breath. He fell silent, though, as they moved off and the horse broke into a trot under the encouragement of the whip. A puzzled frown etched itself upon his face. Hare, he was thinking, no longer seemed to talk with quite the same strong Irish accent he had before.
They caught the mail coach by only a matter of minutes. There was but a single space remaining, on the high seat on the back of it, when they found it waiting by the roadside in Newington, south of the Old Town.
Hare climbed up there nimbly enough and settled himself in. He had the collar of his coat pulled high, and his soft cap tugged