The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [68]
“It’ll be the gossip on every lip soon enough,” Robinson said, “but I wanted you to hear it from me first.”
“On what grounds?”
“Oh, enough to give them an excuse. Truth is, there’s just a few too many on the Police Board don’t like my way of doing things. I’ve grown weary of fighting them, in any case, and the gout is plaguing me dreadfully these days. But I’m afraid you might soon feel the consequence of it. I refused to suspend you from your duties yesterday. There was a… lively, you might say, debate on the matter.”
Quire hung his head.
“If they’ve turned you out on my account…”
“Don’t flatter yourself overmuch,” Robinson gently chided him. “You’re a brick in this particular wall, right enough, but only the one. It’s not helped, though, that you apparently caused some small disturbance at the Royal Institution. At an exhibition of paintings, of all things. Birds, was it?”
“Anyone calling it a disturbance has never seen the real thing,” Quire said.
But he had not the heart to be argumentative, or truculent. He felt only sorrow at Robinson’s fall, and shame that he might have been, in however small a part, a cause of it. Robinson was a better man than the people who had seen fit to dispense with him. A man who had served his country in war, and his city in peace. But past service counted for little these days. The world, and those who governed it, moved too quickly to be carrying such burdens as memory and gratitude. So it seemed to Quire at that moment, at least.
“Listen, Adam,” said Robinson, leaning a little closer. “You’re in deep water. They’ll be coming for you, like as not, now that I’m gone. I know something of what this work means to you; what it’d cost you to lose it. Go carefully.”
“It’s too late for that. Ruthven’s tried to kill me. If he had not gone so far… I don’t know, maybe I could have let him be. But they came to my house and tried to kill me. That’s not a thing can go unanswered.”
“This business with the dogs?”
“The dogs, aye. Whatever’s at the root of this, it’s foul as a cesspit. There’s a darkness to it. Not just the killings. Something unnatural… maybe evil. I don’t know. Would you walk away from it, if you were me?”
“Probably not.” Robinson gave a rather sad shrug of his shoulders. “We all do things that are not in our own best interests sometimes. Just don’t do them blindly, or without thought. You’ll have little enough help to call upon inside these walls, I fear. It will be some while before my successor is appointed; in the meantime, Lieutenant Baird is to be acting superintendent.”
Quire groaned.
“Indeed,” sniffed Robinson. “Not by my recommendation, of course, but my influence is spent. If I can be of any assistance to you, come to me. But I fear the most I can do now is wish you luck.”
Message boys were a vanishing breed in Edinburgh. At the height of the city’s intellectual ferment late in the last century, half the inns in the Old Town had a couple of lads loitering about outside, happy to wait there for hours on the chance that a customer would have a message he wanted running to someone elsewhere. Those boys working the better establishments would have a split stick in which a written note would be carried, and a simple lantern of some sort for navigating the wynds after dark. Most, though, had relied solely upon hand and eye and quick feet.
With the growth of the New Town, and Edinburgh’s slow sprawl to all points of the compass, the sight of boys racing along the streets, wax-sealed notes in hand, had become a rare one. But not entirely unknown. Most of the lads who did the work now did it only