The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [72]
Durand shook his head. He looked around the coffee shop, though Quire did not think he was truly seeing that which his gaze fell upon.
“I am a man in need of salvation,” Durand said softly. “If not in the life yet to come—that might be a lost cause—at least in this one. I cannot stay in that house, in that company, for fear of losing my mind. Yet I cannot leave, for fear of worse. Monsieur Carlyle taught me that. As he was perhaps intended to.”
He sighed, and hung his head, and then seemed to come to some abrupt resolution. He straightened his back, looked Quire in the eye.
“Do you understand that this is not a matter of investigation, of mere crime? That there is a battle to be fought here, against forces far darker than you would think possible? There is knowledge in the world much older than the new wisdoms of science and thought that so preoccupy men now. It is potent. You can be of no help to me, Sergeant, nor I to you, unless you know that. Unless you prove as fierce, as savage, as I think you might be. You must match that which you oppose, if you and I are not to be dragged down. Damned.”
“When men set dogs on me—dogs that don’t breathe, don’t bleed—and a man tries to kill me with a shovel, and won’t fall down when I put a ball in his chest… I know this is not mere crime, Durand. And I know there’ll be folk dying at the end of it all, one way or the other.”
“Good. You do not sound so much like an officer of police now.”
“I’m not like other police,” Quire said.
The truth of it saddened him. He was becoming once more the man he had thought behind him: the man of war, the man of violence, possessed by cold anger. But it was what he needed. There would be folk dying at the end, right enough, by hangman’s noose or otherwise. One of them might be him, if he could not summon up all that old ferocity.
“I will show you, then,” said Durand. “That is your trade. You can only know what you see, what you can touch. Then perhaps you will understand what needs to be done, or be ready to hear it from me, at least. Mr. Ruthven has a farm.”
“I had heard as much.” Quire nodded. “Some landholdings, I think I was told. But I don’t see what…”
“You will see. Cold Burn Farm. It is on the western side of your Pentland Hills. Not far. Go there, but go in numbers and well armed.”
Durand tossed his head back and emptied the last thick dregs of the coffee down his throat.
“Go to the farm, that is all. You will find your answers there, and there will be no turning back. There. I have done it. I have cast the dice. Let the matter fall out as it may.”
The Frenchman rose, and scattered a few coins on the table.
“Goodbye, Sergeant. Perhaps we will have the opportunity, and the cause, to speak again. Please do not come looking for me, though. You will only betray us both if you do that.”
Quire followed Durand out of the coffee house only a little later. He walked thoughtfully up the steps and into the quadrangle of the Exchange.
Men were cleaning the cobblestones of the yard. One stood by a barrel on a handcart, banging a long handle up and down with vigorous determination. A second held the canvas hose that emerged from the pump and played the rather intermittent jet of water it produced over the ground. A third swept with a wide brush.
Quire paused to watch them briefly, shuffling aside when the splashing water came too close to his boots. It seemed somehow unreal, this scene of mundane labour, when set beside his conversation with Durand. A misleading token of normality in a world descending into chaos.
He could not entirely trust Durand, for all that he believed the sincerity of the man’s fear and unease. But if the Frenchman could not, or would not, directly implicate Ruthven or Blegg, Quire could see little option but to follow where he directed him.
It was annoying, though. It would take a mail coach to get him out to the Pentlands, and he hated travelling in those rickety, noisy, cold old things.
XVII
Cold Burn Farm
Quire came in towards the