Impolitic Corpses

by Paul Johnston

  Davie took hold of him and I led us in, telling them to wait in the small, grey-walled reception area. I went inside and found Sophia working on a male corpse. She’d just removed the top of his skull.

  ‘Quint,’ she said, in a mixture of surprise and irritation. ‘I’m up against the clock.’ She peered at the brain.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not here to see you.’ The moment the words left my mouth, I realized I’d said the wrong thing. ‘I mean … we’ve got the father of the woman with the hole in her chest. He’s outside.’

  Sophia put down her scalpel. ‘All right, I’ll arrange for her to be wheeled to the identification window.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, with a tentative smile. ‘See you later?’

  ‘You know the address.’ She turned on her rubber-boot-covered heel.

  Shit. I really did need marriage guidance. I went back into the reception area, where Davie was sitting next to Laurence Monteith. As I got closer, I heard them talking about football. Well played, Davie, not least because he was a diehard rugby supporter. And, for some reason, a Jambo.

  ‘Please, tell me why I’m here,’ Monteith said, when he saw me. The spell was broken and his face was lined like a recently ploughed field.

  ‘I have some more questions,’ I said, hoping to distract him again.

  ‘Fucking tell me!’ he yelled, spit flying from his lips.

  ‘There’s someone here we’d like you to … look at.’

  The fat man fell on to his knees, then prostrated himself on the tiled floor, weeping and moaning. Davie and I looked at each other helplessly. When the middle-aged female clerk came, she knelt by Monteith’s side and spoke words that resulted in him getting to his feet after a couple of minutes. I found myself wishing that the dead woman wasn’t his daughter – but I was sure she was.

  We stood by the curtained window, Laurence Monteith wiping his eyes inadequately with the backs of his hands. The clerk handed him tissues, then knocked on the glass. The curtain opened. On the other side lay the dead woman, only her head visible. Her skin was utterly bereft of all signs of life now, but her features were still recognizable. Her father hit the floor again, this time unconscious.

  ‘Och,’ said the clerk. ‘I really need a few words of confirmation.’

  I opened my mouth but wasn’t quick enough to get even one word out. The door at the end of the corridor slammed open and Hel Hyslop appeared, still in black, beret jammed over her unruly curls.

  ‘I take it that’s the café owner and Hieronymus Bosch worshipper Laurence Monteith,’ she said. Armed personnel slipped past her and struggled to heave the fat man to his feet. Under a minute later the men were gone, the clerk shooing them away with her clipboard.

  ‘You may have got there first, but I’m taking over this line of inquiry, Dalrymple,’ Hel said, with a tight smile. ‘We’ve got Daphne Nicol too.’

  I didn’t ask about the son, Jack. He was probably still on the loose, given the ScotPol director’s tendency to brag.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Hyslop said.

  ‘To what, exactly?’ I demanded. ‘Have you forgotten that you and Duart specifically wanted me on this case?’

  She laughed. ‘It’s getting far too complex, even for an investigator of your … experience.’ The pause was long enough to make it clear just how much she rated my work.

  ‘What about Davie?’ I said. ‘Surely you want him on your team.’

  ‘No,’ she said, walking past us with her head high. ‘His loyalty is questionable.’

  Davie’s eyes widened.

  ‘I think I’ll call the presiding minister,’ I said, taking out my phone.

  ‘Call who you like,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘I’m in charge.’

  That made me think. There was no chance that she’d deposed Andrew Duart, but it was entirely possible that she had some dirt on him and was threatening to fling it into the public arena.

  ‘Looks like it’s you and me against the world,’ I said to Davie.

  He grinned. ‘Worked often enough in the past.’

  ‘We’re going to have to use off-the-wall methods.’

  He slapped his hands together. ‘Great. And the fourth degree?’

  ‘You never know. In the meantime, move out.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Good question. Fortunately, I didn’t have to answer it. My phone rang and what I heard made me choke on my own saliva.

  Davie pounded on my back till I could breathe and speak again.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, as I headed for the exit.

  ‘The Theatre of Life,’ I said, standing by the four-by-four’s passenger door. ‘Rory Campbell’s found the Lord of the Isles.’

  ‘Alive or dead?’

  ‘The former. Uninjured but terrified.’ I held my left forefinger against my lips. He got the message.

  We got in and he drove down the Cowgate. It was only five minutes to the theatre, which was enough for me to get some things straight with him. In writing. I found it unlikely that Hyslop, having frozen us out of the investigation and impugned Davie’s honour, would have left us with the ScotPol vehicle unless it was bugged, and may have been from the start. There might have been a camera too, but that would be harder to hide and there was no sign of one. I shielded what I was writing in my notepad to be sure. More worrying was if there was a tracking device.

  BUG IN HERE? ACT NORMALLY. PULL IN.

  Davie did so and we both got out, closing the doors.

  ‘I’m way ahead of you, Quint,’ he said. ‘I check every morning.’

  ‘Found anything yet?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Maybe they’re using something sophisticated and very small.’

  He put his hand in a pocket and took out what looked like a pen.

  ‘This is state-of-the-art. I got it from a pal in Technical Services. It picks up everything, no matter how smart or small.’

  ‘Run it over the vehicle again.’

  It made sense as Hyslop and her people had recently been in close proximity. Soon enough there was a low beep when he pointed the device at the rear windscreen.

  ‘Son of a female dog,’ he said, pulling open the rear hatch.

  The sound got more frequent as he scanned the housing of the windscreen wiper. He looked closely and then took out his City Guard service knife – something that was definitely not approved for ScotPol officers. A second later he brought the point of the knife in front of my eyes. The object on it was the size of the nail on my pinkie. Davie drew his forefinger across his throat, and I nodded. He dropped the mini-device to the asphalt and brought the heel of his boot down on it hard.

  ‘There’ll be a transmitter too,’ he said, continuing to search with the locating device. ‘Bingo,’ he said a few minutes later. There was a black box under the rear wheel. He crushed that too.

  ‘Wasn’t that liberating?’ I said, as we got back in.

  ‘We still stick out like a sore cock. There aren’t so many ScotPol four-by-fours in Embra, and only one with P23 painted in big letters on the roof.’

  ‘We’ve bought ourselves some time, big man. That may be exactly what the Lord of the Isles needs.’

  Davie parked round the back of the theatre. It was dark now, so we were less visible for the next sixteen hours or so. I hammered on the stage door. It opened on the chain and I saw Rory’s face, as well as the pistol he was holding.

  The door closed and opened more widely. He waved us in urgently, then slammed it shut again.

  ‘Good to see you, Quint,’ Rory said. He gave Davie a less than friendly look. ‘And your sidekick.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ Davie said. ‘Where’s the leader of the opposition?’

  ‘Having a lie down in my dressing room.’ Rory led the way, up poorly lit stairs and down dingy corridors. Theatres were the Jekyll and Hyde of buildings, done up in a dinner jacket out front and rough as a murderer’s hands in the back.

  We went into his room. To my sur
prise, Angus Macdonald didn’t wake up at the sound of our boots on the wooden floor. Whatever he’d been up to must have exhausted him. His clothes – a greenish-brown tweed suit, checked shirt, clan tie and brown brogues – were in pretty good condition. The only sign of tension were the lines on his forehead, which was furrowed even as he slept.

  ‘He was famished,’ Rory said, angling his head towards a pile of plates on his desk. ‘I couldn’t get much out of him, except that someone very nasty’s after him.’

  ‘Anyone see him coming in?’ Davie asked.

  ‘It was still light then, but he found his way to the door you used. He’s been here often enough on first nights. And we’re between productions, so there’s hardly anyone about.’

  ‘Two questions,’ I said. ‘One, why did he come here? And two—’

  ‘Have you called ScotPol?’ put in Davie.

  Rory gave him a stony glare. ‘No, I bloody haven’t. Your boss spent three hours last night interrogating me. One of her gorillas even gave me a couple of slaps.’

  ‘What did she want to know?’ I asked.

  ‘About the Bosch play and the props. Accused me of killing that poor woman. Unfortunately for her, the logs kept by the security guys at the warehouse show I wasn’t there.’

  ‘You know that the guard on duty when the corpse was brought in killed himself by running into his cell wall?’ Davie said.

  Rory nodded. ‘I didn’t know him well – Ricky was his name, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Ricky Fetlar,’ I said. ‘How did the so-called interview end?’

  ‘With me repeating what I know – which is only to do with the play and the ordering of the props – for the nth time. Eventually they gave up.’ He grinned. ‘My reputation as the bravest of the brave went before me.’

  Davie failed to swallow a laugh. He was out of order, as Rory had been an exemplary revolutionary leader. But he did, like many actors, have an exaggerated view of his talents.

  ‘And Lachie put pressure on Duart, who put pressure on Hyslop to cut you loose,’ I said, with a knowing smile.

  ‘Well, there was that,’ Rory admitted. ‘Quite right – I’m a senior elected member of the Municipal Board.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Davie. ‘Which gives you no more rights than any other citizen.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ I said, loud enough to make the Lord of the Isles stir. He didn’t wake up fully, though. ‘We need a plan.’

  ‘Hyslop told me that you and beefy here are off the case,’ Rory said, giving Davie a smile that was asking for retaliation. ‘You’re going to need a plan of extreme subtlety.’

  ‘Quite,’ I said. ‘You haven’t answered my first question. Why did old Angus come here?’

  Rory Campbell suddenly looked less sure of himself. ‘Like I said, I didn’t get anything very coherent out of him. Something’s really put the shits up him. He didn’t go to parliament, so presumably he doesn’t trust either Duart’s people or his own.’

  I thought of the visits the Lord of the Isles had made to Matthew Barker. The latter was no doubt back in a ScotPol cell, but the visits were still suggestive. Had the old man been planning his own escape rather than been abducted? I hoped he would be compos mentis enough to explain that when he came round.

  Rory was still talking.

  ‘Sorry,’ I interrupted, ‘say that again.’

  ‘He knew about the Bosch play.’ The actor frowned. ‘He said something about how the saviour would protect him.’

  Davie grunted. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘He was begging to eat, then he passed out,’ Rory said. ‘I think he’d been confined somewhere.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll take him off your hands.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ Rory said, eyeing Davie. ‘How do you know Thunderboots won’t keep Medusa advised?’ Hel’s curly locks had led to that nickname being used by the few, like Rory, who weren’t scared of her.

  I moved quickly to put myself between them. ‘We’re all on the same side here. Something dirty’s going on in the city – maybe the whole country – and we need to stay united.’ I wasn’t going to ask them to shake hands – that would have been asking for trouble – but I used my eyes on them enough to achieve an unspoken truce.

  ‘Which is why I can help,’ said Rory. ‘You don’t imagine that when the revolution succeeded, we disbanded our network?’

  To be honest, I hadn’t given much thought to the issue, but what he said made sense. In the period leading up to the referendum on the reunification of Scotland and the early years of national government, there had been plenty of disagreements, some involving violence on the streets – not much in Edinburgh, but plenty in Glasgow (especially when it didn’t become capital city) and in Dundee, where the anarcho-syndicalists were ideologically opposed to dealing with what they saw as capitalist robber barons. It occurred to me that they might have been after the Lord of the Isles – he was their number-one hate figure.

  ‘Wakey, wakey,’ said Rory. ‘I can direct you to a safe house and provide you with armed guards.’

  I looked at Davie. ‘Let’s stick to the first for the time being. And don’t tell anyone else where we are.’

  Rory nodded, but didn’t speak. I suspected he would share information about us with his closest subordinates but had to hope it wouldn’t go further. We didn’t have many options. I could hardly take the Lord of the Isles back to the flat on Great Citizen Street and have him play chess with Maisie. Shit. Me disappearing now would go down like a lead airship with Sophia.

  ‘I’m guessing you arrived in a ScotPol vehicle,’ Rory said.

  ‘What of it?’ Davie said. ‘It’s clean.’

  Rory smiled. ‘I’m sure it is. So clean that it’ll be seen by ScotPol’s helicopter, as well as showing up like a shining star on every traffic camera.’

  ‘Have you got an alternative?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but you’ll have to wait a bit.’ He picked up his phone and walked into the corridor.

  ‘Do you really trust this bandit?’ Davie whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ I said simply. ‘You should too. We haven’t got many friends right now.’

  As if to argue that point, his phone rang. He looked at the screen.

  ‘It’s Eilidh,’ he said.

  ‘Keep it short. They may be tracking us.’

  Davie listened, then signed off. ‘Hyslop’s tearing bits of people since we went off the grid. We’re now officially “wanted”.’

  ‘Wonderful. Turn that off and take the battery out.’ I called Sophia and told her that I’d be away for a while. She’d already been informed of our status – our photos were on TV. She asked what she was supposed to tell the kids, and I struggled to answer. I told her I loved her before I cut the connection, but was only told to get home as soon as I could.

  I dismantled my phone and put the pieces in my pocket.

  Rory came back. ‘Transport in half an hour.’ He looked at us. ‘You know, I think you need new costumes. I’ll do some work on your faces too.’

  Davie stood there with his head lowered like a bull about to charge.

  Again I got between them. Changing the way I looked could only be a good thing. Maybe Rory could get rid of my belly too.

  Then the Lord of the Isles woke up with a wail.

  EIGHT

  It took the old man a couple of minutes to calm down, after looking around and blinking, clearly confused as to where he was. Rory gave him a glass of water and he gulped it down.

  ‘Is that you, Dalrymple?’ he said, putting on his glasses.

  ‘It is, my lord.’ That was the first and last time I was going to address him by his title. I thought it might soften him up.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Looking for and finding you.’

  Angus Macdonald was staring at Davie now. ‘I know you. Elephant, isn’t it?’

  Davie sighed. During the Enlightenment he’d only been known by his barracks number or, to t
he likes of me, by his first name. ‘Oliphant,’ he said. ‘Detective Leader.’

  The old man looked as if he was about to have a heart attack, his eyes bulging and his right arm clutching his left.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ve been shut out of the case by Hel Hyslop,’ I said. ‘Despite the fact that she and Andrew Duart begged me to get on board.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, relaxing his grip. ‘There was an informal agreement among the party leaders that if one of us went missing, you were to be involved.’

  ‘Flattering,’ I said. ‘Shame nobody bothered to tell me.’

  He gave a weak smile. ‘Don’t take it too personally. At that stage there was limited faith in ScotPol.’

  ‘Duart stuck to the agreement, but its informality appears to have let Hyslop off the hook.’

  The Lord of the Isles nodded and then tried to get to his feet. He sat back down rapidly.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Should we get a doctor to check you?’

  ‘I … I was generally well treated. Except for …’ He raised the bottoms of his trousers. There were bruised lines above both ankles.

  ‘Footcuffs?’ asked Davie, smothering a grin. He’d never trusted Angus Macdonald. Then again, neither had I, but I had the feeling he’d found himself well out of his depth, despite his power and wealth.

  ‘They were attached to a chain that went through a ring in the floor.’

  I raised a hand. ‘Let’s start from the beginning. How did you leave the house in Ainslie Place?’

  ‘Ah.’ He lowered his head like a naughty schoolboy. ‘Well, they got me out.’

  ‘They?’ I said.

  ‘My … captors.’ The old man was still looking at the floor.

  I exchanged looks with Davie and Rory. This was like extracting blood from granite.

  ‘And who are they?’

  Angus Macdonald’s head jerked up, his face suffused. ‘If I knew that, I’d have told you, man.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Let me get this straight. You don’t know who extracted you from a house full of security and other staff. Not to mention your valet, who will have been put through seven kinds of extreme interrogation on your behalf.’

  ‘Ach, the poor man.’ His lordship looked genuinely upset. ‘There … there was no other way.’