The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [9]
“Sergeant Quire. I expected you rather sooner.”
“There were certain enquiries I had to make this morning, sir, after some new information came into my hands.” He could feel the weight of the silver box in his pocket as he spoke. “Your message did not find me at first.”
“I see. Well, our subject is in no haste to be elsewhere, I suppose. I do have one or two other matters to see to, though, so we must be brief.”
Christison wiped his hands on the upper part of his apron.
“Do you wish to examine the body for yourself?” he asked.
From where he stood, Quire could see more than enough. Skin parted and lifted back; pale bones couched in the meat; tubes and sacs. There was, in this considered dissection of what had not long ago been a living, breathing man, a cold calculation that Quire found disturbing despite its benign intent.
“No, sir.”
Christison nodded, matter-of-fact.
“Seen all you need, no doubt, when you found him in… where was he found?”
“Cowgate, sir. Foot of Borthwick’s Close.”
“Yes.”
Christison made to pull the sheet that covered the dead man’s legs up over his head, but paused, and glanced at Quire with raised eyebrows.
“Did you smell him, though?”
“Sir?”
Christison bent over the corpse, and gave a long sniff at the horrible wound in its neck. It was an unnerving sight and sound.
“The nose is an undervalued tool in scientific endeavour,” the professor said as he laid the sheet down, shrouding that dead face. “I’ve found it so in my study of poisons, in any case.”
“He was poisoned?” asked Quire.
“It would take a particularly confused or intemperate kind of murderer to poison a man and then decide to tear his throat out as well, don’t you think? Gilding the lily somewhat. No, his end was just as it appears. But there’s an odd smell about him. Faded now, but it was strong when he arrived here.”
Quire’s mind went back to the dawn in which he had first encountered the body, curled there in cold solitude. Stinking, he recalled.
“Yes, sir. I noticed the same thing. Some of it I could recognise. Not all.”
“Quite. Excrement and whisky. But something else too. Put me in mind of wet fur. An animal aroma.”
Christison took up a selection of the instruments resting on the trolley and carried them to a sink in the corner. He spoke to Quire over his shoulder as he washed them.
“There’s nothing more he has to tell me. Or, more accurately, nothing further of what he might say that I have the wit to hear. Every victim of fatal misadventure has a tale to recount—so I would contend, at any rate—but it is a new and imperfect science I pursue here. If it was a poisoning then I might be of more assistance, but this… a butcher could likely tell you as much as I.”
Quire nodded mutely, though Christison was not looking at him. He had not truly expected any great revelation; hoped for it, perhaps, but not expected. The savagery of the man’s death had seemed to call for the effort nevertheless, and for all Christison’s brisk manner, he was known to be one who treated all who came under his knife, whatever their former standing, with the same disinterested, precise attention.
“There’s a certain amount more we might deduce, I suppose,” the professor was saying. “His hands, for example: this was a man who worked with them, but not by way of heavy labour. A craftsman, perhaps. Something along those lines.”
Christison glanced at Quire, who was nodding.
“You had already arrived at a similar conclusion, I see,” Christison said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good. I am delighted that the application of logic and observation is not a habit entirely absent amongst the guardians of our safety. What else? I can tell you he was but a recent convert to the pleasures of the