The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [61]
He moved round to the end of the slab, set one hand on each corner of it, and leaned down to peer into the stump of the dog’s neck. He remained in that pose for some time; far longer, certainly, than Quire could ever have spent upon such an unappealing sight.
For Quire’s part, he waited patiently and in silence. He watched Christison, and thought it a good thing that he had come here. He disliked the room, the way it reduced death and the dead to mere matters of so much bone, so much muscle. Like carcasses in the Flesh Market. It was all too unemotional and calculating for Quire’s liking; but unemotional and calculating were the very things he now needed.
Christison took hold of a small clump of the dog’s hair between his forefinger and thumb and gave it a sharp tug. It came easily away, a little solid mat of it. He grimaced and wiped it off his hand on the edge of the slab.
“Someone is having a little fun at my expense, are they?” he said at length to Quire, looking anything but amused. “It’s an ill-timed jest, if that’s what it is.”
“No jest, sir,” Quire said earnestly. “I’ll swear to that any way you like.”
“Clearly a contrivance of some sort, nevertheless,” Christison said. “This animal was dead before it was decapitated. There are incisions that were made in its chest wall and in its neck, and then sewn up again. Also after it was dead, as best I can tell. Why, precisely, would anyone wish to cut holes in a dead dog and then stitch them up again? Have you taken to the study of canine anatomy, Sergeant Quire? Or embalming?”
“No, sir. I’m a student of much cruder sciences. It was me cut the head off this dog, and I promise you it was moving about just fine until I did it. In fact, it kept moving a wee bit after I’d done it too, but it stopped eventually.”
“Not possible,” Christison said emphatically. “That it was alive when its head was separated, I mean. I think I can tell the difference between ante and post mortem as well in a dog as I can in a human. And I assure you, I can tell the difference very well indeed in a human.”
His brow suddenly crunched into a frown, and his eyes narrowed as he looked from Quire to the dog and back again.
“Now just a moment,” he said, pointing a finger at Quire and then shaking it as if to free up his nascent insight. “Is this about that body you brought through here… what was the man’s name?”
“Edward Carlyle. This is one of the beasts that killed him, I think. This one or one much like it.”
“Really?”
And there was that vein of lively interest threading itself into Christison’s voice that Quire had hoped for. The stirring of his curiosity.
“You said it was a dog that did it,” Quire observed, “and here’s the proof that you were right. There were two more like this, but they escaped me. Or I them, to be honest.”
“Well, your persistence with such an unpromising case is admirable,” the professor said, bending to prod at the stump of the neck with his tongs. “Still, there is clearly some confusion at work here. What is this fluid? If I didn’t know better, I’d say it is from the beast’s blood vessels. Hand me that blade, would you, and the bone shears beside it.”
Quire lifted the implements, surprised at the weight of them. They still bore the residue left by their application to the woman lying on the other slab. He gave them to Christison.
“Let us just take a quick look, shall we?” the professor murmured.
He cut open the dog’s chest. The long, flat knife slid through the animal’s hide smoothly, as easily as Quire had ever seen any blade cut. Christison cut along three sides of a rectangle, and pulled the large flap of skin roughly back, revealing the dog’s ribcage.
A foul stink burst from the carcass, potent enough to set Quire—and even Christison—grimacing. The rotten stench of putrefaction. Quire clasped a hand over his nose and mouth.
“That smell, Sergeant, is decay,” Christison said pointedly. “This animal