The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [33]
“I’m an officer now,” Quire muttered. “Sergeant, anyway.”
“Aye, true enough. The damnedest thing, for those of us as’ve known you a while, but not to my point. It’s a matter of blame: those it sticks to, those it don’t. Your Lieutenant Baird—he’s one it don’t. Me and you, we’re ones it does. Nothing fair about it.”
“It’s fair,” grunted Quire. “The man was happy in his beer until I dragged him out of the Sheep Heid. To get his own head stoved in. First time I’ve seen a man killed like that, in front of me, since… since a long time.”
Dunbar snorted. He had always been a disputatious sort, even when in uniform. Long retirement from the soldier’s life had not changed that, and nothing brought it more nimbly to the surface than drink. Not that it needed bringing far.
“You know fine death doesn’t need your help or anyone else’s when it’s set its eye on someone,” Dunbar said, flourishing his own near-empty tankard. “Comes when it likes.”
“Maybe it does. That bastard on the ice thought to visit it upon me, as well, and that makes it personal to my way of thinking. I’ll have him. I’ll have all of them.”
Calder’s tavern was crowded, as it most often was of an evening. It did not take many bodies to make it so, for it had a low ceiling of plaster and beams, and a long-striding man might spring across its breadth in a half-dozen paces. Even so, it packed in a rare variety of customer. Quire might be the only policeman there—and that was a part of its appeal to him—but there were soldiers and brewers, glass-blowers and grocers, clerks and lamplighters. Sometimes footmen and stable hands from the nearby palace itself, though they kept to themselves as often as not, perhaps fearful of leaking secrets the Keeper of Holyroodhouse would rather stayed behind its grand walls.
Tonight, the mood—save in the corner Quire had made his own—was boisterous. A soldier was rattling out a hectic beat on a table with drumsticks. A little group of women who sold candles on the Canongate were engaged in good-natured argument over who had done the most business, and should therefore be buying the drinks. A solitary old man was complaining to no one but himself about the bad tobacco that would not hold a light in his pipe.
“And those fine gents buying the dead off the bastard body snatchers,” Dunbar cried. “There’s more could shoulder a bit of that blame you’re cuddling. How many times is it the corpse of a rich man that ends on the cutting slab, eh? If it’s a matter of such importance, did you ever see one o’ them teachers themselves give over their carcass to the knife once they were dead and gone? Or their dead father or mother or brother? You did not. Explain me that.
“No, don’t waste your time, I’ll do it for you: it’s the poor and the nameless get opened up for those precious little students to leer at, just like it’s the poor and the nameless get to bleed when there’s a battle to be fought. The French had it right, for a while at least: give us nameless folk a few guillotines and a wee revolution, see what a difference that’d make. Let others do the bleeding for a bit.”
None of which Quire would dispute, but tonight he could not share in Dunbar’s fervour. He watched Mrs. Calder pushing her way through the throng of customers. She was not only proprietor of his preferred drinking den, but his landlady, and a solicitous one at that. She and her serving girls saw to the cleaning of his rooms a few floors above, the washing of his clothes, and now and again to his feeding. He had earned her kind regard, along with a handsome reduction in his rent, some time ago, when he dissuaded—forcefully—some disreputable fellows from taking her husband’s debts out of his hide. Mr. Calder had been carried off by a fever not long after, but his widow’s affection for Quire persisted, undimmed.
“You never bled yourself, as I recall,” Quire