Impolitic Corpses

by Paul Johnston

  But what had this to do with the attempted strangling in Leith? Ann Melville hadn’t mentioned any baby, and it would be difficult to strangle someone while carrying one, even in the marsupial pouches that were currently a craze among Edinburgh parents. And anyway, why dress up like a tree-fish when there were any number of more vicious, arms-bearing demons on display? Was Bosch the point? He was best known for his visions of heaven, earth and hell? Did someone think that Edinburgh was going to the underworld in a supermarket trolley? Was that evidence of a hankering after the Enlightenment? There was a local political party that propounded some of the Council’s more benevolent views, but no one paid much attention to them.

  I turned on the desktop computer. It was much smaller and faster than those that the City Guard used to have, and there were even so-called laptops to be bought now – but they were beyond my pocket. The national government’s aim was to connect every home to ScotNet, the official web provider. That was going well in the big cities, but I doubted many people in the remoter parts of the Highlands and Islands were hooked up. I tried to access scholarly articles on the painting, but there were only a few that you didn’t have to pay for, and they didn’t mention the tree-fish. It was a disturbing image – the sinister face, probably female, inside the tree trunk with its narrow scaly tail didn’t look to have the baby’s best interests to the fore. Tree? Fish? What was Bosch getting at? And what was the failed strangler implying? All I could think of was change, metamorphosis, mutability. Those applied to the process Edinburgh and the rest of the nation were going through, but the specifics made no sense. Maybe the victim had fathered a child and abandoned it, so this was nothing more than a case of revenge. I doubted it.

  My eyes strayed over the rest of the painting. Horror and disgust were the emotions it evoked, with its grotesque rotten fruit, freakish figures and their miasmic malevolence.

  Then, with the ease of a man much older than I was, I fell asleep …

  … to wake with my face on The Temptation of St Anthony, jerking my head back when I saw the pig’s snout of a man with an owl on his head. I hoped I hadn’t caught a plague of monsters. Then I was invaded by two.

  ‘Dadda, dada, dada!’ said Heck, embracing my leg and biting it.

  ‘Ooyah,’ I said, lifting him up. ‘We said your teeth are only for food, didn’t we?’

  ‘And toothbrush, dada, dada, dada,’ the wee smartarse said, with a wicked smile.

  A pair of fingers pinched my neck. ‘And didn’t we say no sleeping on desk or sofa?’ said Maisie, leaning closer. ‘You’re not making Mother happy. And you know how that makes me feel.’ She let go and walked away. Never one to hide her feelings, my daughter wasn’t someone I wanted as an enemy. By the time she was ten, she’d given up calling Sophia ‘Mum’ and I could count the times she’d called me ‘Father’ on the fingers of my right hand.

  Maisie was busying herself in the kitchen.

  ‘What are you up to?’ I asked.

  ‘Making breakfast for Mother,’ she said sniffily. ‘I don’t appreciate you drinking wine from my Frida glass.’

  I could have blamed Sophia, but there was no mileage in that. ‘Sorry. Though Mexicans like booze.’

  She gave me a withering look. ‘Beer and tequila, I think you’ll find.’

  Given that, last I heard, Mexico was ruled by a cartel of cartels, I reckoned the population would be lucky to get anything to drink that didn’t contain narcotics, but Maisie was undoubtedly more up to date on the politics of Latin America.

  ‘How about a walk to Princes Street Gardens?’ I said.

  Heck started leaping around like a kangaroo on heat. Maisie was less effusive, finally nodding as she went to the mistress’s bedroom with a tray.

  By the time a rucksack had been filled with pieces of equipment that Heck might want once in a year and Maisie had chosen three books, almost an hour had passed. Sophia appeared, still looking weary, and gave the wee man a hug before she wrapped an adult scarf around his neck about ten times.

  ‘At least it isn’t raining,’ she said. ‘If it starts, I want you back straightaway.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll hide them under my coat,’ I said, with a hesitant smile.

  ‘Don’t be a dick.’

  Maisie sniggered, prompting laughter from Heck. I picked up the buggy and headed for the door. The kids came down the stairs behind me, hand in hand. My son was talking non-stop in his personal Creole, of which about a third was comprehensible. ‘Pancakes’ was the most frequent word.

  We walked up Dublin Street, me pushing the buggy. For a three-year-old, Heck was bloody heavy. Maisie was already reading a book.

  ‘You’ll walk into a lamp post, love.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  She almost certainly wouldn’t. Although she was wearing glasses, her peripheral vision was better than most of the Guard personnel I’d served with. She often caught me making faces.

  ‘What’s the book?’ I asked.

  ‘Leviathan.’

  ‘Levia-thing,’ said Heck, belting laughter soon turning into hiccoughs.

  I put the less than trustworthy brake on the buggy, found a bottle and got him to drink. Eventually, he spluttered to silence and gave me a wide smile.

  ‘Hobbes, eh?’ I said. ‘Not exactly a beam of sunshine on a winter’s morning. “The kingdom of darkness …” and the like.’

  ‘There’s so much more to it than that,’ Maisie said, eyes still on the page. ‘The commonwealth is made of the citizen bodies, and depends on a social contract—’

  ‘Citizen bodies,’ I interrupted. ‘That sounds familiar.’

  ‘The Council’s body politic is gone for ever – you of all people must know that, Quint.’

  I was panting on the slope. ‘Why me of all people?’

  ‘Because you were involved in the revolution that put an end to the Enlightenment.’ She gave me a searching look. ‘Though you’ve been wasting your time since.’

  I would have remonstrated but I was about to throw up from the exertion. Maisie had made it clear that she agreed with Sophia about my books: they both thought the future was more important than the past.

  We went past the newly refurbished National Portrait Gallery. It had been a rooming house for citizens who worked in the tourist zone under the Council, its paintings in the big hotels or stored away. The Education Directorate concentrated on Edinburgh rather than Scottish history.

  By the time we crossed St Andrew Square – the garden now graced by something called an infinity pond – Heck was demanding pancakes so loudly that passers-by burst out laughing.

  Fortunately, there wasn’t a queue at the kiosk. It was about twenty metres beyond the Scott Monument. What had been the largest memorial to any writer in the world had lost that distinction some years back when a large section at the top had collapsed and flattened a group of tourists. The Municipal Board was consulting about rebuilding it, but there was a feeling that leaving it as it was would be a fine symbol of the Enlightenment’s ultimately gimcrack social structure. After all, Sir Walter did write The Heart of Midlothian.

  Heck was engaged in stuffing a chocolate pancake into his ravening maw, while Maisie was daintily nibbling at one filled with mango and papaya. A few years ago I’d never seen either of those fruits. I was drinking coffee on an empty stomach, asking for trouble. You take what risks you can as a family man. And seven Scottish poonds for that lot was risky enough.

  ‘Quint, what a surprise,’ came a voice from the level of my left hip.

  ‘Billy,’ I said neutrally, as I attached the reins to Heck. The last time we were at the gardens, he managed to run down one of the steep slopes between the levels. I didn’t like the odds of his pulling that off again without severe cranial damage.

  My former school and university friend, William Ewart Geddes, sat in the electric wheelchair with his usual sardonic smile. It wasn’t far from here that he’d been run over by horses on the race track covering the former train line
s back in 2020. He’d had his finger in many of the indigestible pies the city’s major thieves and murderers – often guardians and senior auxiliaries – had baked before the revolution. I still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to become my publisher, so subtle was he at dangling carrots, negotiating and manipulating. The sleek dark-blue coat he was wearing must have cost thousands.

  ‘Family day out?’ he said, looking at Maisie. She was sitting on a bench with her nose deep in Hobbes. ‘Your parenting skills are a bit random.’ He laughed as I tugged on Heck’s reins. My son went red-faced in rage. He stomped over to us and kicked Billy hard on the shin.

  ‘Ow, ya wee bugger,’ he said, clutching his lower leg.

  ‘Thought you had no feeling down there,’ I said, trying to restrain the rabid boy. Fortunately, he spotted a pigeon and went on the hunt.

  ‘It comes and goes.’ Billy grinned. ‘Massages help.’

  ‘I’ll bet they do.’ The Municipal Board licensed sauna clubs providing ‘special services’ to keep prostitutes off the streets in the centre.

  I took off my woollen gloves to get a better grip on the reins. ‘No way is this a chance meeting.’

  ‘Correct. You owe me something.’

  ‘Correction. You owe me something.’

  ‘You’ll get your royalties at the end of the year. Anyway, stop dodging the bullet. Where the hell is Waters of Death?’

  Ah. I’d ground to a halt two-thirds of the way through the third book of my fictionalized memoirs about a month back and had signally failed to relocate my mojo. I’d been stalling Billy for weeks.

  ‘You’ve dried up, haven’t you?’ he said, watching apprehensively as Heck headed towards us at speed, arms stretched towards a scrawny avian rat. ‘Catch him, Quint!’

  I did, then swung the wee lad within inches of Billy’s face. The skin was drawn back behind his ears and he should have been wearing a hat that went lower than his Homburg.

  ‘Have you had work done?’

  He scowled. ‘What’s wrong with supporting our local plastic surgeons?’

  ‘We got by perfectly well without them for three decades,’ I said, wiping a waterfall of snot from my boy.

  ‘This isn’t purely cosmetic,’ Billy said. ‘As you know.’

  I had a vision of his small form getting under the fence. He blamed me for chasing him there, overlooking the fact that he was carrying a briefcase full of illegal cash. I’d also screamed at him not to go.

  ‘All right,’ I said, trying to keep the little that remained of my right forefinger from Heck’s grasp. He found the stump endlessly fascinating. It wasn’t that he hurt me – his clutching made me remember how I’d lost the digit. That was one story I’d never be putting in a book.

  ‘Don’t worry, Quint,’ Billy said solicitously. ‘I’ll put my best editor on it. She’ll help you finish the book.’

  ‘Protecting your investment? No, Heck, not Uncle Billy’s nose.’ If Sophia had heard me making Billy a member of the family, I’d be in the seagull-proof rubbish sack that every household received. I glanced at Maisie, but Hobbes was far too interesting.

  ‘I can manage,’ I said.

  ‘But when? I’ve got overseas deals riding on publication in Scotland no later than May.’

  I watched a dark cloud louring over the castle.

  ‘Snow on the way,’ I said. ‘Got to go.’

  ‘Keep in touch,’ Billy said, reversing away and almost running over a small black child, who started to howl. ‘And nail yourself to your desk before I do.’

  ‘Better hit the accelerator,’ I said, too late.

  A large woman in brightly coloured robes ran after the wheelchair and landed a heavy blow on Billy’s shoulder. He screamed abuse.

  ‘Not your day, is it?’ I shouted after him.

  It turned out not to be mine either.

  I got the kids home in a taxi and ushered them inside the street door. It wasn’t till I’d struggled to collapse the buggy that I realized there were people on the steps above.

  ‘Wow,’ Maisie said. ‘It’s the presiding minister and the director of ScotPol.’ Even she, who disdained authority figures, was impressed. Mildly.

  ‘Quint,’ said Andrew Duart, extending a hand. The leader of the Scottish government was called presiding minister because he had almost presidential powers. The conservative opposition, led by the Lord of the Isles, had suggested chief minister to create a link to the clan system. They wanted to take the country back to the sixteenth century, when it had been completely separate from England and the rest of the now disunited kingdom. Of course, now there was no England in toto.

  I was busy with Heck, so managed to avoid taking the hand. I’d had dealings with both Duart and his one-time lover Hel Hyslop, the country’s top cop. Both were from Glasgow and had been – and doubtless still were – promoting that city’s interests above the other urban and rural districts. They also had substantially looser conceptions of truth and morality than I did. Still, at the worst I could use them for research. If I ever got Waters of Death finished, the next book would be largely set in their city.

  ‘What are you doing on the stair?’ I said, hoisting Heck on to my shoulders.

  Hel’s eyes flashed. ‘Your wife declined to admit us any further.’

  I laughed. ‘You should have made an appointment.’

  ‘There wasn’t time,’ Duart said, his goatee beard and the hair that remained on his cranium dyed blacker than pitch.

  ‘This is potentially a national emergency,’ Hel said, taking off her fur hat. I wondered which animal she’d skinned to get it. ‘There’s no time to lose.’

  We made it to the second floor, though my neck was killing me, and got the kids inside. I directed the visitors to the sitting room as Sophia appeared from the kitchen. The smell of roasting beef made my mouth juice up.

  ‘You refused to let them in?’ I said, grinning.

  ‘Not my types.’ Sophia had met them when she was Medical Guardian. She’d always had impeccable taste.

  ‘I’d better talk to them,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  She turned away. ‘At least the kids saw a bit of you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Heck, bursting into raucous laughter. ‘His not-finger. I saw his not-finger …’

  I left her to it. After closing the sitting-room door behind me, I went over to the sideboard.

  ‘I have several malts, not all from the south.’ Distilleries had set up all over the country due to huge demand for the best whisky from Scandinavia and other functioning markets.

  ‘Not for us,’ the presiding minister said imperiously.

  I poured myself a large measure of Lagavulin and dribbled water into it from a cut-crystal jug Maisie had found in a junk shop.

  ‘Pardon my incredulity,’ I said, leaning against the mantelpiece and looking down at them on the brown leather sofa, ‘but don’t you have the people you need for every kind of emergency?’ I wasn’t bitter – well, I’d got past the worst – that Hel Hyslop had shown no interest in finding a place for me in ScotPol. The truth was that I would never have fitted in.

  ‘In theory,’ said Duart. ‘Maybe I will have a small whisky.’ He glanced at Hel, but she shook her head.

  ‘You’ve got about ten minutes till my son does his main battle-tank impression, using you as grass-free knolls,’ I said, handing the presiding minister his dram. ‘Speak.’

  They did so.

  I drained my third large Lagavulin.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ I said.

  Hel’s brown curls had sprung up after being confined by the hat. Not for the first time, she made me think of the Gorgon. I looked rapidly away.

  ‘Neither of us is smiling,’ she said. That was true, but she’d never been good at happy faces.

  Andrew Duart’s expression was forbidding. ‘I don’t have a high opinion of Angus, but parliament will be in chaos if he isn’t located quickly.’

  ‘Why me?’ I demanded, resisting the temptation to refill my gl
ass.

  It was Hel Hyslop who was looking past me now, points of red on her cheeks.

  ‘Because I’m the best,’ I said, milking the situation. ‘And you feel guilty about not offering a job to the best.’

  ‘Would you have taken it?’ she demanded.

  ‘We’ll never know.’

  ‘Of course, we have the highest regard for your capabilities, Quint,’ said the presiding minister. ‘And the fact that the Lord of the Isles was last seen in Edinburgh makes you the prime candidate.’

  ‘So you don’t have the highest regard for ScotPol personnel here?’ I said. ‘Assistant Director Findhorn?’

  ‘Muriel is a manager, not an investigator,’ Hel said. ‘And your friend Detective Leader Oliphant is—’

  ‘Otherwise engaged,’ Duart put in before Hel expressed her dislike for Davie in terms that would have led to me showing her the door and the stairs. ‘This tree-fish case is very odd.’

  ‘Is it?’ I was surprised that the country’s leading politician was aware of that. ‘Do you know something about it that I don’t?’

  He glanced at Hel Hyslop, who frowned.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I read about it in the daily reports and mentioned it on the way down here. Typical piece of Edinburgh lunacy.’

  I wasn’t convinced. ‘You know of no connection between the tree-fish and the disappearance of the Lord of the Isles?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Duart, while the police chief shook her head.

  She eventually said, ‘No,’ after I gave her my best interrogator’s gaze.

  ‘To the pressing case in hand?’ the presiding minister asked.

  ‘Not so fast. I need you to agree to certain … conditions.’