The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [42]
Once he was gone, Quire turned back to Emma, who had settled on to a chair and was sipping with incongruous delicacy from her cup of whisky.
“Edward Carlyle,” Quire said.
Emma scratched the side of her nose and pretended intense interest in whatever residue her fingernail collected.
“I’m told he was keeping your company of late,” Quire persisted. “Did you know he was dead?”
She did not trouble to conceal her surprise at that, but still said nothing. Cath was less circumspect.
“Oh, that’s a shame. He seemed decent enough. Did he not say, though, that he feared for his life?”
Emma greeted the question with a scolding grimace of displeasure, but Cath was unperturbed, and shrugged her bare shoulders.
“Well, he did say it.”
“You knew him as well?” Quire asked, his heart sinking.
Finding Cath here had been dismaying enough; if she became a more central part of all this, he would find himself having to navigate treacherous waters, both personally and professionally.
To his relief, she shook her head.
“Not in the way you’re thinking.” She said it with a hint of rebuke that Quire supposed he probably deserved, for he had indeed been reaching for the easy conclusion. “Just to speak to, when he was visiting. Once the drink was in him, he always ended up fretting about what might happen to him.”
“All right, all right,” Emma interrupted. “You’ll only tell it wrong. Truth is, he talked all manner of silliness when he was in his cups, and I can’t see you making any more sense of it than I did, Mr. Quire.”
“I’ve nothing more profitable to do with my time,” Quire replied, to Emma’s evident disappointment.
“It’s your time to be wasting, I suppose,” she sniffed. “He was always on about how he’d got himself tangled up with bad folk. Evil, he called them. Never said who or why, before you ask. But he was frightened, right enough. Frightened of them, frightened of what they were doing and where it would all end, with him along for the ride.”
“Said it was the Devil’s work,” Cath observed from the bed.
“Maybe he did,” Emma continued. “Didn’t do much for his humour once he got out of it, though. Turned up here drunk as a lord, saying he was done with it all, never going back. You’d think that’d settle him some, but he was weeping like a bairn. Said they’d never let him go. He was scared as any man I’ve seen, right enough.”
“He never gave away any names?” asked Quire.
The mention of Devil’s work put him at once in mind of that strange symbol left hanging upon the door of his rooms by his uninvited visitor. The mere thought of it, and of the intrusion that it had accompanied, made him uneasy.
Emma shook her head.
“Never a name, not that I heard. Are you sure you’ll not take a dram?”
She carefully refilled her own cup as she asked the question. The death of one of her customers was not a matter to disturb the rhythms of her day.
“Let me have some of that, would you?” Cath asked, and Emma brought another teacup down from the sagging shelf upon which it rested.
Quire watched the two women sharing their whisky out into fine china. A strange, distorted mimicry of refinement. A habit that put a shape into their day just as the civil, sober ritual of tea drinking did for the kind of people who must have first owned those cups. Quire found that a melancholy thought, but it was a tangled kind of melancholy, for not so very long ago it had been him sharing the whisky with Cath, just as he had shared her bed.
“Have you not got your own rooms any more then, Cath?” Quire asked quietly.
“Roof’s leaking,” she said with a faint smile. “Emma here had a bed to spare.”
Quire nodded, and held her gaze for just a moment or two. Cath had been chief amongst those matters that had almost ended his career in the police before it was properly begun, for consorting with such as her carried the penalty of instant dismissal. Superintendent Robinson had saved him from that consequence, and Quire was glad of it, but had never freed himself of regret at the loss of her companionship. His affection for her—if that was all it could be called