The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [3]
“Yes, sir,” Blegg dipped his head once more, his hands clasped as if in submissive prayer.
“And make some enquiries. We will be requiring rooms for the night. It is too late to return to Edinburgh now.”
Blegg hesitated, unsure whether further commands would be forthcoming.
“Be about it, then,” his employer snapped.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
And Blegg scampered away to deliver the message.
The Dead Man
Edinburgh, 1828
The castle had colonised its craggy perch over centuries, embracing the contours of the rock with a network of angular walls, yards and barracks and gun platforms. Spilling eastwards from it, encrusting the long ridge that trailed down to the royal palace, was the Old Town of Edinburgh. There—packed inside the strict confines once set by the city’s defensive wall—soaring tenements vied for space, crowding one another, making labyrinths of the narrow spaces they enclosed. It was an aged place; not designed but accreted over centuries. Thickened and tangled by the passage of years.
A multitude of gloomy and overshadowed alleyways projected, like ribs, from the great street running down the spine of the ridge. They descended into the shallow valleys to north and south, sinking away from the cleansing breezes. Through these closes and wynds the people of this ancient Edinburgh moved, and in them they lived. And died.
Down there, where one of those closes gave out on to the Cowgate, a low and grimy thoroughfare, dawn revealed a dead man curled in the doorway of a shuttered whisky shop, his blood crusted in black profusion upon his clothes and on the cobblestones around him. Looking like something forgotten, or spent and casually discarded, by the departing night.
“Who is he?” asked Adam Quire, staring down at the corpse with a faint wince of distaste.
It was not the sight of it that disturbed him, but the smell. The body stank of sour whisky and blood, and the man had soiled himself in the last moments of his life. There was a less easily identifiable dank, musty strand to the symphony, too. It all made for a noisome aura that discomfited Quire, particularly since the stale flavours of last night still lingered rather queasily in his own mouth: all the beer he had drunk and the smoke-thick air he had breathed.
“No name for him, Sergeant,” said the young nightwatchman at his side. Lauder, but Quire was unsure of his forename; Gordon, perhaps.
“Who found him?”
“One of the scavengers. Grant Carstairs.”
“I know him. Shake?”
“Aye. Some folk call him that. Got a bit of the palsy.”
Quire kneeled at the side of the body, his knee slipping into a tiny, cold puddle couched in the crease between two cobblestones. He grimaced as the chill water soaked through his trousers.
“Nothing left of his throat,” Lauder said, gesturing with the extinguished lantern still clasped in his right hand. “Look at that. What a mess.”
Quire could see well enough. A ragged hole in the front of the dead man’s neck exposed gristle and meat. One sleeve of his jacket was torn to shreds, as was the arm beneath. Material and flesh were barely distinguishable in the morning gloom. Furrows had been gouged in his scalp, too, the skin torn; one ear was no more than a tattered rag.
“I’ve not seen the like,” the watchman murmured.
Quire had—and much worse—but not for a long time, and not outside the confines of a battlefield. He thought he heard as much wonder as horror in Lauder’s voice. The man was young, after all; not long employed. Perhaps he had never seen at such close quarters what havoc could be wrought upon the human body. He looked a little pale, though it might be but the watery light of the winter morning making him appear so.
“He’d not have died quietly,” Quire said, preoccupied now by the uncharitable