The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [139]
“Goodbye, Mr. Black,” he said. “I wish you well home.”
Hare glanced down at him, and Rutherford caught the momentary contemptuous sneer, if no one else did. He stalked back to the carriage, reflecting bitterly upon the ingratitude of murderers.
Rutherford lived with his wife and daughter in a flat at the back of a court along Nicolson Street. It was a good place to live. Edinburgh had not expanded southwards with the same grand visionary rigour that had been applied to the northward growth of the New Town. Its advance here had been, instead, incremental, one new building or development outside the city wall following another as inclination and opportunity arose. Nor had it matched the stately grandeur of the New Town’s long terraces and garden squares, but there were corners of elegance and a general mood of prosperity. For a police sergeant, spending his days scouring the streets and closes of the Old Town, it was a pleasing release to return there each night.
Rutherford walked down Nicolson Street with a weary tread. It had been about as long a day as he had suffered in months. By the time he had left Hare on the mail coach, and got the carriage back to the police stables, and endured the inevitable barrage of questions from his fellow officers in the police house, it was closing on midnight. He would have left without answering a single one of those eager enquiries if he thought he could manage it without causing indignant offence and disappointment, but instead he dutifully recited the tale of how William Hare had left Edinburgh. He made no mention of Isabel Ruthven, or of the delay in the West Bow.
He wondered absently about those things as he trudged homeward through the emptying streets, though. He did not know, nor want to know, what grubby transaction had been enacted while he waited and smoked his pipe with the carriage. With luck, his connection with the Ruthven family was entirely at an end now, and he would never have to spare another moment’s fretting over it all. The money had been good, of course—there was never enough of that, no matter how a man scrimped and saved—but it was not, Rutherford had come to feel, worth the worries that attended upon it.
He nodded to one or two people he knew as he drew near to his home. Were he less tired, he would have stopped to talk with them. It paid a man to keep in good standing with his neighbours. But his exhaustion was heavy upon him, and he walked on and turned empty-handed into the court where his family and, more importantly he felt, his bed awaited.
“Jack Rutherford.”
Rutherford turned, startled. Adam Quire stepped out from the darkness beneath the arch of a stairwell’s entrance. Rutherford hung his head and gave a nervous laugh.
“You gave me a turn there, Adam,” he said, knowing by his gut and by some indefinable quality in the way Quire held himself that here was a problem, and perhaps a grave one.
His weariness fell from him in an instant, dispelled by the shiver of alarm that went up his spine.
“Are you keeping well, Adam?” he asked, with a broad smile.
“That’s a good question,” Quire said. “You know, it took me a while to find out where you lived. I didn’t remember us ever talking of it, when we shared the same employment, so I suppose we can never have been great friends.”
“Friends?” Rutherford repeated, feigning bewilderment at the course of the conversation, and taking a step closer to his own stair, at the far end of the court. “I’d like to think so, aye.”
“How much did Ruthven pay you to break that bond?”
Rutherford frowned, shrugged.
“I’m not understanding you, Adam.”
The smallest tightening around Quire’s eyes told him that his acting skills had failed him. Quire had always been good at reading men. Good at breaking them, too. Rutherford began to grow seriously afraid then.
“That your stair over there, is it?” Quire asked, tipping