The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [47]
“You see, that’s the very kind of folk I’m wanting to hear about.”
“Well, if you mean to hang them, I’m all for it. Good riddance. I’d give a lot to meet them again myself, but only if I’d a bit of an army at my back. These are men who don’t say a word, not a word. Don’t bleed—not any kind of blood I recognise, at least—nor feel no pain even if they’re cut. They’re not right, not right at all. Not natural.”
His voice had taken on a distant, low quality. He stared out over the lip of the bridge and across the roofs of the manufactories.
“Got dead eyes. Stronger than this horse here. Something of the Devil in them, I’ll tell you that. You go chasing after them, police, I’d take a lot of folk along if I was you. That, or a priest.”
With that, he turned away once more. He nudged the horse onwards.
“Do you know who’s buying their wares?” Quire asked.
“Couldn’t say.”
“Come on, there’s a only a few it could be. The anatomists at the university; one of the private tutors. The law’s no use against these bastards unless someone talks. Might be I could get someone at the buying end of things to tell me what I need.”
“Couldn’t say,” Merrilees insisted irritably. “You do your work, and leave me to do mine. If you lay hands on these folk you’re after, I’ll be wishing you well, with all my heart I will, but I don’t fancy your chances much, police. I’m telling you, they’re not like you and me. They’re something else. You’ve no idea.”
“I’ve an idea,” Quire said darkly. “I was at Duddingston myself. I saw things there that don’t make a lot of sense.”
Merry Andrew grunted at that, but would say not another word, for all the prodding and the pestering Rutherford and Quire belaboured him with.
The Antiquaries
The great hollow of land—once marshy, now neatly gardened—between the long rising ridge of the Old Town and the sweeping grace of the New was crossed by a construction of inglorious name but remarkable scale: the Mound. A huge descending ramp, it carried much of the constant traffic between the two Edinburghs.
From its summit, an observer might look out northwards across the geometric splendour of the New Town, and beyond its spires and chimney stacks glimpse the white-capped waters of the Firth of Forth, with the rolling farmlands of Fife as distant backdrop. That same observer, descending the Mound, might look back and be amazed by the chaotic drama of the Old Town: the gargantuan angular mass of the castle atop its rock and the dark crags of the tenements trailing away to the east of it, like a host of giants petrified in the act of clambering one over the other as they reached for the cloud-heavy sky.
Just there, at the foot of the Mound, stood the Royal Institution. A low slab of a building, with a veritable thicket of massive columns forming a huge portico and a panoply of cornices and carving and stone flourishes all around the edges of its roof. It squatted upon the land in splendid isolation, with Princes Street, the expansive boulevard that marked the beginning of the New Town, running along before it.
As Quire approached the steps that led up amongst those serried ranks of pillars, the wind was rumbling its way down the full exposed length of Princes Street, and his long coat snapped about his legs like a heavy flag caught up on a fence. The hessian sack he carried loosely in one hand bucked against his grip. There were few pedestrians about. Those who had to move were doing so on wheels: hackneys and broughams and plain old wagons rattled and trundled along Princes Street.
Quire pushed through the massive, solid oak doors and entered the Institution. Instantly, the rough and raucous weather was only a memory. A restful quiet prevailed within, almost churchly in its stillness. In the lobby, a soberly dressed and mannered doorman directed Quire towards the cloakroom, and seemed decidedly perturbed when he