The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [148]
Quire felt a good deal more calm and content than he had expected to. There was, he realised as the flames consumed the corpse, a remarkable lightness about his life now. It contained almost nothing, had almost no weight to it. Blegg, and Ruthven, and everything that went with them were gone; so was his place on the city police. No wage, none of that purpose that his work had put into his life. Nothing left to him of it. All burned away, just as Hare was now, out on the moors.
There was Cath, though. He thought of her as he sat, looking out over the vast silver expanse of the Solway Firth that the bright day had discovered, far to the south, and freed from the shackles of darkness. The sun sent a thousand rippling, glittering shards of light racing over the surface of the sea.
Quire reached down and plucked a sprig of heather from beside his hard seat. He would take that back to Cath, he thought. For luck.
Acknowledgments
This book makes liberal use of real history to tell its tale, and this time I am therefore indebted not only to the usual and indispensible support network without which no writer could function, but also to a not inconsiderable number of people who one way or another made my distorting of historical truth possible:
The staff at the National Library of Scotland and at the Edinburgh City Archives, who were unfailingly helpful and efficient.
Jim McGowan, who has never heard of me, but whose unpublished thesis on Edinburgh’s police force in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was utterly fascinating and tremendously helpful.
Ewen, for the very timely provision of some audio drama recordings that really hit the spot, inspiration-wise.
Thanks, as ever, to the fine Orbit crew, as helpful a bunch of publishing folk as a writer could wish to be working with. In particular, thanks to Tim Holman for his support and assistance not just with this book—which were considerable—but all the way back to the beginning.
Thanks to Tina, my agent, for her help and support.
Thanks to my parents, for their encouragement from the first time I ever tried to write.
And to Fleur, for everything.
extras
meet the author
Brian Ruckley
BRIAN RUCKLEY was born and brought up in Scotland. After studying at Edinburgh and Stirling Universities, he worked for a series of organizations dealing with environmental, nature conservation, and youth development issues. Having had short stories published in Interzone and The Third Alternative in the 1990s, Brian started working as a freelance consultant on environmental projects in 2003 in order to concentrate seriously on his writing, which now takes up almost all of his time. He lives in Edinburgh. Find out more about the author at www.brianruckley.com.
interview
Have you always known that you wanted to be a writer?
From a very young age, writing fiction felt like a reasonable and natural thing to be doing. Crucially, nobody ever disabused me of that notion, so although I had plenty of other interests that I was quite happy to pursue professionally, writing was always there, in my head, as an option.
Did the idea for The Edinburgh Dead come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?
I had one very specific, pretty simple starting point. I was thinking about Burke and Hare, two of Edinburgh’s most famous historical inhabitants, naughty chaps who murdered lots of innocents in order to supply the city’s anatomy schools with corpses. A straightforward question occurred to me: what if the teachers of anatomy weren’t the only people who wanted to get their hands on some corpses back then? The whole book flowed from that one thought.
What is it about Edinburgh that made you want to set your book there?
Two things: familiarity—since I was born and brought up here, and know the place and its history far better than anywhere else in the world—and the richness and strangeness of that history. For a relatively