The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [4]
He looked east and west along the Cowgate, then northwards up the gloomy length of Borthwick’s Close. The Old Town’s inhabitants were stirring from their dark tenements and gathering in silent huddles, distracted from the start of the day’s business by this gruesome spectacle.
“I’ll get some more men down here to help you,” Quire muttered to Lauder. “Once they’re here, you can start asking questions. See who heard what, and if anyone can put a name on him.”
The younger man’s scepticism was evident.
“Probably Irish. Cut loose once the canal was dug. Maybe he’s working on that new bridge.”
It was a lazy but not entirely foolish suggestion. The Old Town was full of Irish labourers bereft of labour, and Highlanders bereft of their high lands for that matter, all of them washed up here by the tides of ill fortune and poverty. More than a few had indeed found some escape from their poverty and lassitude in the building of the huge new bridge being thrown over the Cowgate, and to be named in honour of the king, George the Fourth.
But: “No,” Quire said. “He’s no navvy or builder.”
He lifted the man’s arm, turning it against the dead stiffness of the muscles to expose his palm.
“See his hand? No rougher than your own. He’s not been digging earth or breaking rock. And his clothes… might not have been a rich man, but he’s no pauper either. He’ll go in a pauper’s grave, though, if we can’t find him a name and a family. Don’t want that, if we can help it. It’s no way for a man to end his days.”
The dead man’s jacket had fallen open a little as Quire moved his arm. A flap of material there caught his eye now, and he reached gingerly in, felt the loose ends of torn stitching. He had to bend his weaker left hand at a sharp angle to do so, and felt a twinge of stiff pain in his forearm. His old wounds misliked the cold.
“Did you find anything in his pockets?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Lauder grunted.
“Did you ask Shake if there was anything?”
Lauder shrugged, his cape shifting heavily. Standing watch over a corpse, on a cold dawn at the end of a long night, in the Cowgate where the city’s police had no surfeit of friends… these were not the ingredients of contentment. At the best of times, few of Quire’s colleagues—the miserably paid nightwatchmen perhaps least of all—shared his notions of justice and dignity for the dead. Those things could be hard to find in the Old Town, even for the living. Easier not to try, sometimes.
“Just wait here until I get you some help,” Quire said as he rose to his feet. “It’ll not be long.”
He began to ascend the stinking ravine of Borthwick’s Close, pushing through the knot of onlookers that had gathered a short way up the alley.
“Anyone know him?” he asked as he went, but no one replied. They averted their eyes, on the whole. Only a child, holding the rough linen of his mother’s skirt with one tight hand, yesterday’s dirt still smudged over his cheeks, met Quire’s gaze fully. The boy parted his lips in an unappealing grin, and sucked air in through the corners of his mouth. It was an idiot sort of sound.
Quire was jostled as he made his way through the crowd, but no more than he would have expected. He was a big man, wide-shouldered and wide-chested, and he knew that his angular face, framed by dense, wiry hair, suggested ill humour more often than not. Though that appearance—enhanced by his grey greatcoat, the baton at his belt and the military boots he often wore out of ancient habit—deterred most troublemakers, no assembly in the Old Town was without one or two who thought themselves above such concerns. The place had a truculent state of mind.
Quire climbed up and up the close, careful on the rough and uneven cobbles, passing dozens of small windows, only a few of them lit by oil or candle or fire. He heard someone above him, leaning out from the third or fourth storey, hawk and spit; but when he looked, there was no one to be seen, just the man-made cliff faces blocking out the sky.