The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [34]
“Thank Christ. Though I doubt he was watching.”
“I shot the man who killed him,” mused Quire. “Put a ball in his chest from no more than twenty paces.” He tapped hard at his own sternum for emphasis. “Didn’t much bother him. How does that happen? When did you ever see a man take a shot from a Bess in the chest and not blink at it?”
“Well, not ever,” conceded Dunbar. “But I’ve seen men lose their arm to a cannon shot and not know it was gone till I told them. And there was that Spaniard you gutted at Talavera…”
Quire winced.
“Aye, but that was then. It’s a different life I’m supposed to be living now. I’m a different man.”
“Trying to be a different man, maybe, but you’ve always had a rare talent for the violence, and it a rare longing for you. The two of you’ve never been long parted.”
Quire cracked his mug down on the table, splashing a little of the beer out over the rim. He licked it from the back of his hand as he glared at Dunbar.
“Do you not think a friend might try to offer some comfort?” he growled. “And if you say that’s what you’re doing, I’ll say you don’t know comfort from your arse.”
“Truth’s a better remedy for any ill than comfort,” Dunbar said with a flutter of pomposity.
“That’s a whole stream of piss, wherever you heard it.”
“Aye, I suppose it is right enough. But this different man you’re trying to be still keeps guns and a sword under his bed, doesn’t he? You’ve no more left the past than it’s left you.”
“Are you saying you’ve no loot from Spain hidden away somewhere? They’re worth a fair few shillings, those guns. And that sword’s a good one. Might need the money one day.”
“Aye, right. Listen, a man needs ballast in his life, Adam, if he’s to hold a true course. Not trophies from old battles; not beer even, though it pains me to say it. Ballast. Bit of weight in the hold to keep from turning over, and that you’ll only get from others, not yourself. Family, friends, children. God knows, there’s nothing like children when it comes to ballast, take it from me. Children and a wife.”
“Christ, Dunbar,” Quire muttered.
“Aye,” Dunbar said, suddenly quiet. Suddenly knowing he had strayed into territory where truth walked hand in hand with hurt. “Aye, well.”
They lapsed into silence, each communing with his own thoughts. Quire’s spiralled in tight, beer-guided circles, seeming to be revelatory from moment to moment, yet somehow yielding nothing by way of lasting insight or conclusion.
At length, Dunbar pushed back his chair and took hold of Quire’s mug as well as his own. Quire had not emptied it, but he raised no protest.
“I’ll buy you some more comfort, then,” Dunbar said. “That I can do.”
He sank into the crowd, and Quire was left to ponder the mysteries of the tabletop. And to pick away at the knot of his problems. Baird had kept him well away from the aftermath of the events at Duddingston. Well away, and well aware of where Baird thought responsibility for the disaster lay. Quire could have done with the protective arm of James Robinson about his shoulders, but the superintendent was still sick, confined to his quarters atop the police house with none but wife and the gout for company.
Quire had told them to go after the gravedigger—Davey Muir, it turned out his name was—but the youth was, as yet, nowhere to be found. He had told them Blegg’s name, too, and where to find him, but that had proved equally fruitless. The men dispatched to Melville Street had been sent on their way in no uncertain terms by John Ruthven, who swore upon God’s judgement that he could vouch for Blegg’s whereabouts on the night in question. And a man such as Ruthven was not to be gainsaid by a mere sergeant of police, not without the weight of some evidence or incontrovertible testimony behind him; such testimony could only come from Davey Muir, in all likelihood, and Quire doubted the boy would be seen in these parts again.
But Quire did not feel in need of more evidence, or testimony, to render his own judgement. He had no