‘Ah. An interestin qualification. Whit are ye, some kinna agoraphobic?’
‘You ken I’m no.’
‘I only ken whit ye tell me.’
‘I ayewis lie tae ye.’
‘That sounds like the start o wan o thae undergraduate pub philosophy discussions. Ken, a statement that contains its ain internal contradiction.’
‘Right. An organism that contains the seed o its ain destruction. So can ye no deal wi that, eh? Whit’s up? Am I makin ye feel uncomfortable?’
‘If I could,’ said the mirror, ‘I would turn ma face tae the wa.’
Wednesday. Carlin stood patiently in the Scottish department in the basement of the Central Library on George IV Bridge, while an old guy in a mouldy raincoat produced a dozen books from an enormous briefcase and asked if he could renew them all again.
‘All of them?’ asked the librarian.
‘Yes please. I’m doing research. I need them all.’
‘Well, so long as nobody else has requested them. Could I have your card, please?’ She began to bring up the different titles on screen, checking them in and checking them back out again. The old fellow wiped his brow with his raincoat sleeve.
‘You could save yourself carrying them back and forth if you phoned us,’ the librarian said while she worked. ‘We can renew them over the phone.’
‘I’m not on the phone,’ he said.
She reached the last book. ‘This one’s been requested, I’m afraid. I can’t let you have this one again.’
‘But I need that one. That’s the most important. In fact, it’s essential.’
‘I’m sorry. You could request it back again, for when the reader who’s requested it returns it, but you can’t have it just now.’
‘Don’t you have any other copies? I mean, who else is wanting to look at that particular book?’
The librarian checked on the computer. ‘No, that’s the only copy. I’m sorry, but it has definitely been requested.’
The old man tutted. ‘Well, who is it that wants it? It’s very obscure. Nobody else would be interested.’
‘Somebody obviously is,’ said the librarian.
‘Give me a name then,’ said the auld yin.
‘I can’t do that.’
‘The other ones are no use without that one. If I can’t have that one I don’t want any of them.’
‘But I’ve just renewed them all for you.’
‘I didn’t know you weren’t going to let me keep that one. If I’d known that I wouldn’t have bothered asking for these ones.’ He turned and stumped out through the door.
The librarian sighed and began to cancel all the entries she had just made. A queue had formed. There was a cough from behind Carlin and a man’s voice asked quietly who was next.
I am,’ said Carlin.
‘How can I help you?’
He had very thick-lensed black-framed glasses and what was left of his reddish hair was stretched across his freckled pate like an abandoned cat’s-cradle. Something about his appearance appealed to Carlin; he looked like he might lead the same kind of isolated life. Together, they took a few steps away from the desk, a move that seemed to be spontaneous, shared by both of them.
‘I’m lookin for as much information as ye have aboot someone called Major Weir. D’ye ken him?’
The man smiled. Carlin noted from a badge on his lapel that he was addressing Mr MacDonald.
‘You’ve come to the right place. The infamous Major. Yes, I think we’ve a few bits and pieces on him.’
For the next ten minutes MacDonald darted among the stacks, producing books of varying size and antiquity. He got Carlin to fill in some request slips for the more obscure ones. Most of the material was incorporated in secondary sources, and much of it had clearly been recycled from one book to another over the years. There was a good chunk in Robert Chambers’ Traditions of Edinburgh. Weir was mentioned delicately in Hugo Arnot’s Celebrated Criminal Trials. The supernatural elements of his tale were detailed in George Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, and in a strange document called ‘A Collection of Providential Passages Antient and Modern Forreign and Domestick’ written by James Fraser, who claimed to have known the Major. There was a modern collection of Scottish Ghost Stories which had conflated the most salacious details from these and other sources. There was a book of Justiciary Proceedings containing the seventeenth-century equivalent of transcripts of the Weirs’ trial. Their names cropped up in most books on Edinburgh’s past, usually with the true nature of their crimes glossed over or summarised as ‘too horrible to dwell upon’.
By careful cross-reading, Carlin began to deconstruct Hardie’s potted account: Weir’s sister was called Jean, not Grizel (the latter name, that of a former landlady of the Major’s, having somehow attached itself to her at some stage). Jean, not her brother, was accused of witchcraft, and she was found not guilty of it, but was convicted of incest. Weir was accused of fornication, adultery, bestiality and incest, and convicted on the latter two charges. The lurid tales of witchcraft and satanism, it seemed, had been spread like a coverlet over the truth. But if reality was hidden, there was barely disguised glee in many of the accounts that a man so grimly good on the surface should have been found so exotically bad underneath: a witness enthusiastically reported that Major Weir and his staff, which was burnt at the stake with him, ‘gave rare turnings’ in the fire at the Gallowlee.
MacDonald seemed to have an extraordinary knowledge of where to locate even passing mentions of the case. He sat Carlin at a desk with a pile of books and periodically appeared at his side with another old clothbound volume. ‘This is interesting,’ he’d say. ‘There’s a record of the court proceedings in this one.’ Or his finger would point at a column of dense print: ‘Just here. Another devilish trick our dear Major was supposed to have performed.’ Carlin nodded his thanks and read on.
MacDonald came back after a while with a small cardboard box in his hand. ‘Have you used a microfilm projector before?’ he asked. They went over to the big-screened machine and MacDonald took a roll of film out of the box and fed it onto the spools. He flicked a switch and the machine whirred into life.
‘You turn this spool to go forward, this one to go back,’ he explained. ‘This is your focus control. Sit down, please. Now wind it forward.’
A grainy image of antique-looking print appeared.
This is a copy of a pamphlet called Ravillac Redivivus,’ said MacDonald. ‘It was written in 1678 by an Englishman called George Hickes, chaplain to the then Scottish Secretary of State, the Duke of Lauderdale. Francois Ravaillac was a French Catholic who in 1610 stabbed King Henri IV to death for supposedly betraying the faith. The pamphlet goes into some detail about this crime.’
