The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [86]
“The folk who buy them do, that’s what matters,” Cath grunted, rolling away from the sight, shrugging the sheets back up over her shoulders.
She did not like to be reminded, any more than Quire did, of her trade. Not in this moment. Quire realised then, in his sluggish way, that he was not the only one who had tried to make a kind of release and escape for themselves last night. He was ashamed to have so crudely drained the morning of its gentleness. But still he held the charm, and squinted at it.
“Where do they come from?” he asked. “Does the Widow make them herself, or are there folk still doing little magics like these?”
“Aye, there’s folk like that,” Cath said into the bedding. “There’s always been folk like that. You’ve just got to ken where to look.”
Later, as afternoon turned to evening, tired but still lighter of heart than his situation and his fears warranted, Quire met Wilson Dunbar outside St. Giles’ Cathedral on the High Street. It was a long-standing and regular arrangement, that had made more sense when Quire had actually been employed at the police house, just over the street.
The cathedral—a great crouching mass surmounted by a grandiose stone crown—always put Quire in mind of a titanic black beetle squatted down and bearing carbuncles on its back. He found Dunbar waiting for him on its steps, and together they walked down through the crowds towards Calder’s.
Dunbar was working as a builder these days. Some kind of combination of quartermaster, labourer and gang master, as far as Quire could tell, happily engaged in the construction of the grand new High School on Calton Hill. He smelled of stone dust and mortar. He examined Quire with critical eyes as they wove through the evening crowds.
“You look in a better mood than I’ve seen you of late,” he opined.
“Do I?”
“Aye, you do. It’s unsettling, I’ll tell you. Like the sun coming out at midnight.”
“Might be I spent some time with Cath last night,” Quire said.
“Ha!” Dunbar clapped his hands together loudly enough to startle a boy carrying a basket of oysters past. “First smart thing you’ve done in a wee while. Last I heard, you had a fair few reasons you couldn’t be doing that. What happened to them?”
“The Police Board happened to them. I’ve already been suspended from duty. They’re working themselves up to turning me out on the street.”
Dunbar stopped in the midst of the street, his mood abruptly overturned. Quire walked on a few paces, then stopped and turned back.
“What happened?” Dunbar asked.
“Got myself on the wrong side of the wrong folk. Come on, don’t stand there like a fool. Calder’s is waiting on us.”
He led the way on down towards the Canongate.
“They’re the fools, to be thinking they’re not needing your services,” muttered Dunbar darkly.
“Maybe. World’s full of fools. Might be I’m one of them. I had my chances to leave things be.”
“And why didn’t you?”
“Because there were dead men needing answers. One of them got his head broken in with a spade in front of his son. Because I can’t abide anyone thinking they can be party to that and never have to pay the price. Because they came after me. Thought they could frighten me off; or kill me. Because I’m a stubborn bastard. Take your choice of those.”
“Reasons enough,” Dunbar said.
“There’s more. The men who’ve got the blood on their hands… there’s strange things happening. Not like anything I’ve seen before. Not like anything you’d give credence to, without seeing it yourself. It’s dark as it gets, at the heart of this, I reckon.”
Quire was pleased, and not a little surprised, to find his mood surviving even this gloomy talk. He could feel the sinking sun still warm on his back. They passed the head of Leith Wynd, and he smiled to himself at the memory of Cath.
“Can you not let someone else do the stopping?” Dunbar asked despondently, his tone betraying his foreknowledge of the answer.
“I’d be a long time waiting for that to happen. Best I can tell, I’ve got fewer friends in the police house, and certainly on the board, than the bloody murderers themselves. If I thought he