‘Then you can locate it?’
‘It’s possible.’ I examined my shoes. ‘But first I’d need to know a little more…’
When I looked up again, she was gone.
At The Cross, the caddies were speaking quietly with the chairmen. We caddies had organised ourselves into a company, boasting written standards and a Magistrate of Caddies in charge of all. We regarded ourselves superior to the chairmen, mere brawny Highland migrants.
But my best friend and most trusted ally, Mr Mack, was a chairman. He was not, however, at The Cross. Work was nearly over for the night. The last taverns were throwing out the last soused customers. Only the brothels and cockpits were still active. Not able to locate Mr Mack, I turned instead to a fellow caddie, an old hand called Dryden.
‘Mr Dryden,’ I said, all businesslike, ‘I require your services, the fee to be agreed between us.’
Dryden, as ever, was willing. I knew he would work through the night. He was known to the various brothel-keepers, and could ask his questions discreetly, as I might have done myself had the lady’s fee not been sufficient to turn me employer.
Me, I headed home, climbing the lonely stairs to my attic quarters and a cold mattress. I found sleep the way a pickpocket finds his gull.
Which is to say, easily.
Next morning, Dryden was dead.
A young caddie called Colin came to tell me. We repaired to the Nor’ Loch where the body still lay, face down in the slime. The Town Guard – ‘Town Rats’ behind their backs – fingered their Lochaber axes, straightened their tall cocked hats, and tried to look important. One of their number, a red-faced individual named Fairlie, asked if we knew the victim.
‘Dryden,’ I said. ‘He was a caddie.’
‘He’s been run through with a dagger,’ Fairlie delighted in telling me. ‘Just like those other three.’
But I wasn’t so sure about that…
I went to a quiet howff, a drink steadying my humour. Dryden, I surmised, had been killed in such a way as to make him appear another victim of the city’s stabber. I knew though that in all likelihood he had been killed because of the questions he’d been asking… questions I’d sent him to ask. Was I safe myself? Had Dryden revealed anything to his killer? And what was it about my mistress’s mission that made it so deadly dangerous?
As I was thus musing, young Gisborne entered the bar on fragile legs.
‘Did I have anything to drink last evening?’ he asked, holding his head.
‘Master, you drank like it was your last day alive.’
Our hostess was already replenishing my wine jug. ‘Kill or cure,’ I said, pouring two glasses.
Gisborne could see I was worried, and asked the nature of the problem. I was grateful to tell him. Any listener would have sufficed. Mind, I held back some. This knowledge was proving dangerous, so I made no mention of the lady and her book. I jumped from the messenger to my words with Dryden.
‘The thing to do then,’ my young master said, ‘is to track backwards. Locate the messenger.’
I thought back to the previous evening. About the time the messenger had been arriving, the lawyer Urquhart had been taking his leave of the Monthly Club.
‘We’ll talk to Urquhart,’ I said. ‘At this hour he’ll be in his chambers. Follow me.’
Gisborne followed me out of the howff and across the street directly into another. There, in a booth, papers before him and a bottle of wine beside them, sat Urquhart.
‘I’m pleased to see you,’ the lawyer announced. His eyes were bloodshot, his nose like a stoned cherry. His breath I avoided altogether. Aged somewhere in his thirties, Urquhart was a seasoned dissolute. He would have us take a bumper with him.
‘Sir,’ I began, ‘do you recall leaving the company last night?’
‘Of course. I’m only sorry I’d to leave so early. An assignation, you understand.’ We shared a smile at this. ‘Tell me, Gisborne, to which house of ill fame did the gang repair?’
‘I don’t recollect,’ Gisborne admitted.
Urquhart enjoyed this. ‘Then tell me, did you awake in a bed or the gutter?’
‘In neither, Mr Urquhart. I awoke on the kitchen floor of a house I did not know.’
While Urquhart relished this, I asked if he’d taken a chair from the tavern last night.
‘Of course. A friend of yours was front-runner.’
‘Mr Mack?’ Urquhart nodded. ‘You didn’t happen to see a grotesque, sir?’ I described the messenger to him. Urquhart shook his head.
‘I heard a caddie was murdered last night,’ Urquhart said. ‘We all know the Town Rats can’t be expected to bring anyone to justice.’ He leaned towards me confidentially. ‘Are you looking for justice, Cully?’
‘I don’t know what I’m looking for, sir.’
Which was a lie. For now, I was looking for Mr Mack.
I left Gisborne with Urquhart, and found Mack at The Cross.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I saw that fellow going in. A big fat-lipped sort with eyebrows that met in the middle.’
‘Had you seen him before?’
Mack nodded. ‘But not here, over the loch.’
‘The new town?’ Mack nodded. ‘Then show me where.’ Mack and his fellow chairman carried me down the steep slope towards the building site. Yes, building site, for though Princes Street and George Street were finished, yet more streets were being artfully constructed. Just now, the builders were busy on what would be called Charlotte Square. We took the simpler route, down past Trinity Hospital and the College Kirk, then along Princes Street itself. There were plans to turn the Nor’ Loch into either a canal or formal gardens, but for the moment it was a dumping ground. I avoided looking at it, and tried not to think of poor Dryden. Joining the loch to the old town sat The Mound, an apt name for a treacherous heap of new town rubble.
‘All change, eh, Cully?’ Mr Mack called to me. ‘Soon there’ll be no business in the old town for the likes of you and me.’
He had a point. The nobility had already deserted the old town. Their grand lands now housed wheelwrights and hosiers and schoolmasters. They all lived in the new town now, at a general distance from the milling rabble. So here the foundations were being laid, not for the new town alone, but for the death of the old.
We passed into George Street and the sedan chair was brought to rest. ‘It was here I saw him,’ Mr Mack said. ‘He was marching up the street like he owned the place.’
I got out of the chair and rubbed my bruised posterior. Mr Mack’s companions had already spotted another likely fare. I waved them off. I must needs talk to my mistress, and that meant finding her servant. So I sat on a step and watched the workcarts grinding past overloaded with rocks and rubble. The day passed pleasantly enough.
Perhaps two hours had gone by when I saw him. I couldn’t be sure which house he emerged from; he was some way along the street. I tucked myself behind some railings and watched him head down towards Princes Street. I followed at a canny distance.
He was clumsy, his gait gangling, and I followed him with ease. He climbed back up to the old town and made for the Luckenbooths. Here he entered a bookshop, causing me to pause.
The shop belonged to a Mr Whitewood, who fancied himself not only bookseller, but poet and author also. I entered the premises quietly, and could hear Whitewood’s raised voice. He was towards the back of his shop, reciting to a fawning audience of other soi-distant writers and people to whom books were mere fashion.
The servant was pushing his way to the front of the small gathering. Whitewood stood on a low unsteady podium, and read with a white handkerchief in one hand, which he waved for dramatic effect. He needed all the help he could get. I dealt daily with the ‘improvers’, the self-termed ‘literati’. I’ll tell you now what an improver is, he’s an imp who roves. I’d seen them dragging their carcasses through the gutter, and waylaying hoors, and scrapping with the tourists.