The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [145]
“Police are coming,” Fleck observed, startling Quire with his sudden loquacity.
He looked up, and saw and heard the police carriage make its shaking approach along the track towards them. Quire darted around to the far side of the coach, hiding himself from their view. He watched Fleck doff his hat and call a greeting as they trundled past, but neither of the two police officers in the carriage responded. They looked, from the glimpse of their faces Quire caught through the windows of the coach, thoroughly dejected. As would he be, he supposed, if his official duties involved saving men such as Hare from the justified wrath of the common folk, and escorting them safely on their way.
Once the police carriage was out of sight, Quire went to the front of the coach and reached up to offer Fleck his hand. The coachman regarded it blankly for a moment or two, then took it in his own and gently shook it.
“I’m grateful for your help,” Quire said in the dawn’s gathering light.
Fleck just nodded.
“I’ll hope to see you in a day or two,” Quire said.
And with that they parted, Fleck to Dumfries, Quire to the moors. Before he went, he loaded the musket. The movements were more familiar now than they had been for years. He had made Fleck stop, on a wild stretch of road somewhere a couple of hours south of Edinburgh, and spared a few precious minutes from the pursuit to get a feel for the gun and his handling of it. Standing there, on the edge of bleak, empty fields, he loaded, and fired, four or five times over, the shots booming out over the barren land. Each time he had been a little faster, a little surer. As he would have to be, he suspected.
He ran out into the heather. He did not try for too much pace. He was tired enough already, and had no wish to bring himself to his knees any sooner than he had to. And he remembered, from his youth, just how treacherous these places could be to a man who attempted to cover too much ground too quickly, hiding all manner of pits and hollows and tripping roots beneath the endless, featureless carpet of heather.
Hare was out of sight, swallowed up by the vast landscape, but Quire did not concern himself with that. He had marked the man’s course, and angled his own to meet it, out there in the trackless waste. If he could not see his quarry for now, it would only be some hollow in the land, or the tiny dip of a valley cut by a little burn, that was hiding it from him.
Grouse burst from his feet and went churring away low over the heather, like winged balls shot from the mouth of a cannon. The first time it happened he almost fell, so alarming and unexpected was the noise and blur of movement; after that, he was not so easily startled. Watchful, though. Always watchful.
There came a time when he slowed, first to a trot, and then a walk. And, at last, to a halt. He stood, knee-deep in the brittle heather, and looked out across the undulating ground before him. Slowly, he unshipped the Brown Bess from his shoulder and pulled back the hammer until it locked into place. He fixed his gaze upon one patch of heath, a hundred yards or more away. There was a hue mixed in there, a patch of it, that did not quite belong. Quire stared at it, and waited.
Hare rose to his feet. Quire could see the feral glee in the man’s smile, even at that distance.
“You’re a plague, Quire,” Hare shouted out across the heather. “A revenant, sent to haunt me again and again, is that it? Do you not know I’m under the King’s protection?”
It was the first time Quire had heard the voice of his enemy. While it resided in Blegg, it had never once spoken to him. It did so now in a soft Irish brogue. Whether mimicry or memory or pure invention, Quire did not know. It did not matter. He did not mean to listen to much of what the thing might have to say.
Hare began to run towards him. Quire dipped his left shoulder to let the backpack slip from it. The pack’s fall was cushioned by the mat