The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [21]
He had hoped to find the youth Blegg had met still here, but the thicket of tables and chairs at the far end of the hall was unoccupied, save for a scattering of empty bottles and cups, and a sheen of broken glass strewn across the floor beneath them. He picked out a path between the tables, the brittle debris crunching and crackling beneath his feet.
The door to the kitchen was of the sort a farm cottage might have, top and bottom halves separate, and individually hinged. The lower section was locked, but the upper swung easily back when he pushed on it. He leaned over and peered around.
“Only whisky,” said the portly man bent over the sink without looking round. “Not a drop of ale left, if that’s what you’re after.”
“I’m not a man for the early drinking, Donald. Glad to see you washing your own dishes, though.”
The man turned about and rolled his eyes.
“Quire. Just the face I want to see at the start of a day.”
Donald MacQuarrie was not the owner of the Dancing School—that distinction belonged to a clutch of men a good deal more reclusive than him—but he had run the place for as long as Quire had been in the police service, and that he had not yet found himself jailed for it was a bitter miracle built out of wit and corruption and the playing of dangerous games. Nobody—or not many, Quire might grudgingly concede if pressed—came to the school to learn to dance.
“Where’s your kitchen lad, then?” Quire asked as MacQuarrie shook dishwater from his hands and dried them on the breast of his shirt.
“The Infirmary. Had an accident wi’ some glass last night. Fell on it.”
“Fell on it?” Quire snorted. “Come out here, Donald. I’ve a question or two for you.”
“Get away, Quire. There’s a lot of good money gets paid over so your kind’ll no be coming round here asking questions.”
“Aye, but it’s not paid to me, so keep me in a good humour and come out here. There’s none to see but these three folk, and there’s not one of them looks likely to remember a thing about this morning.”
The dancing girl stumbled a little as MacQuarrie reluctantly emerged to join Quire at one of the rickety tables, but the shrill song of the whistle did not falter, and caught her up again and set her turning in another unsteady reel.
Quire swept the table clear of the night’s detritus with the back of his arm, and tipped a chair up to drain some of the stale beer from it before he sat down. MacQuarrie’s weight set his own chair to groaning, but it stood up to the task.
“None of the other uncles about?” Quire asked innocently.
The school had three trades, once the pretence of teaching dance was discounted: the unlicensed selling of untaxed drink, whoring, and the pawning of stolen goods. Every night, a handful of the so-called uncles could be found at these very tables, waiting for their broking services to be called upon by the city’s thieves. MacQuarrie himself, Quire knew but could not have proved in law, was one of those uncles.
“Don’t waste my time with questions you ken fine I’ll no answer, Quire. Thanks to that wee fuck of a lad getting himself cut up, I’ve work to be doing this morning.”
“Two men just in here,” Quire said. “And don’t tell me you didn’t see them, since there’s nothing else here to look at.”
MacQuarrie maintained a glowering silence. He was not one to be easily cowed by a mere officer of the police.
“One of them not much more than a boy, the other a weasel of a man in black gloves,” Quire persisted.
“What of it?”
“I want to know their business.”
MacQuarrie shrugged and turned his attention to the dancer and her musician. He watched with flat indifference for a moment or two and then suddenly shouted, “Can you no shut that whining up, Stevenson?”
The old man with the whistle did