The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [94]
She tapped the bowl of her pipe gently against the edge of the table, spilling a tiny drift of spent ash.
“Can you show me?” Quire asked her.
“Might be I could. Might be worth a wee look, now you’ve brung up the old times. I’d a mind to come up to the big town anyway, get myself some cloth for the making of a skirt. Are you paying, though, son?”
“I could put a shilling or two your way,” Quire said.
And Agnes nodded at that, and took a hard enough suck through her pipe to set the tobacco glowing in the bowl.
XXII
The House of Major Weir
“It’s a grim-looking place,” Quire observed.
The courtyard he and Agnes McLaine peered into was narrow, gloomy. Desolate. A low-browed, vaulted passageway had brought them in beneath the soaring tenements of the West Bow to this hidden square, buried like an abscess in the very heart of the Old Town. They could hear the thud and grind of the building works on the new bridge; they could hear, less clearly, the rattle of carts over the West Bow’s cobbles and the cries of hawkers in the Grassmarket. But all of that was as the sound of another world, for the courtyard felt abandoned and lifeless.
There was a crust of grime on the ground, and heaps of debris scattered around: rotting pieces of wood, piles of cloth or clothes so filthy it was impossible to say what colour they might once have been. The dusty smell of mould was in the air. A rat ran along the foot of one of the walls, its head bobbing up and down. When it realised it was no longer alone in its foraging, it vanished into a narrow crevice in the stonework.
Yet the place was not abandoned; there were clearly some folk calling it home. There were doors around the yard, and dark stairways leading up into the surrounding tenements like burrows cut by maggots. Some of the higher windows, Quire saw as he cast his gaze upwards towards the distant square of sky, were open. A white sheet hung from one of them, though there was no breeze to dry it in this tight little space.
“A few in here who’ll not be happy to have a sergeant of the police poking about, I’d guess,” Agnes mused.
“I’m not with the police,” Quire said. “Not any more.”
And that was true. He was cut loose from the foundations he had tried to set under his life in the last few years, his name struck from the books of the Edinburgh police.
It had been unceremonious, abrupt. No opportunity to defend himself, or to face his accusers. Just a courier at his door, presenting letters signed by Baird himself, in ostentatious style, that informed Quire he was dismissed, on grounds of misconduct. No pension would be paid, no appeal heard.
Reading those formal, impersonal lines of text, Quire could imagine quite clearly the satisfaction with which Baird must have signed his name beneath them. Seldom would a man have been so pleased to be the conveyor of bad tidings.
“That’s where we’re bound,” Agnes said, nodding towards a door at the far end of the courtyard.
She had come with her head and shoulders wrapped in a woollen shawl, though the weather was clement enough.
They crossed the square side by side, Quire going cautiously and with a certain trepidation, Agnes advancing in her heavy leather shoes with an almost eager tread. The door they approached was black with rot, its wood drilled through by worms and decay. There were gaps between it and its frame. When Quire put his eye to one, he felt a cool touch on his skin, the dank apartments beyond breathing out over him.
“It’s dark in there. Should have brought a lantern.”
“There’ll be light enough,” Agnes said.
Dismissal should have dismayed Quire more than it did, perhaps, but he was numb, and unsurprised. He had already resigned himself to this outcome. His life was being shaken apart, like a fox cub clasped in the jaws of a hunting dog, and he had come to expect little better. His mind had set itself to other purposes, though, and was too bent upon them to admit of mourning for his losses. He meant to do some shaking of his own