House of Dust

by Paul Johnston

  Davie drove down the Royal Mile; for all the original Council’s republican fervour, the street leading to the now ruined palace retains its name to make the tourists happy. He kept his hand on the horn to ensure the city’s visitors stuck to the pavements. Most of them were more interested in the tacky souvenirs and cut-price woollens than in a rust-devoured guard vehicle.

  “Hold tight!” Davie yelled as he took a left on to the North Bridge, the worn remoulds sending us into a skid that seemed terminal for much longer than was comfortable.

  “Thanks a lot, big man,” I said, my heart pounding like a bass drum.

  “Think nothing of it,” he said with a laugh. “Now sit back and enjoy the view.”

  I did what he recommended, struggling to get my breathing under control. There was plenty to see as we traversed the great triple-arched bridge linking the Old Town with the New. The gardens and the neo-classical galleries to the west were more pleasing to the eye, but my gaze was irresistibly drawn to the castellated walls to the north-east. There it was: the New Bridewell, the jewel in the new Enlightenment Edinburgh’s crown. The fortifications of the original prison reared up from the bare rock face in an unbroken chain over three hundred yards long. The obelisk in the former burial ground – now topped out with transmitter aerials and discs – pointed towards the sky at the left. To the rear the Nelson Monument on top of the Calton Hill mirrored its effect, and the circular watchtowers were almost lost in the bulk of the central block. As we got nearer I could see the razor wire that had been erected on top of the old defences. The mob that stormed the Bastille would have got nowhere with this monstrosity.

  “Where’s the Council going to find the prisoners to fill its new toy?” I asked.

  Davie grinned. “Where we’re going now.”

  “Aye,” I said, nodding. “There’s no shortage of gangbangers down in Leith these days.”

  “And there’s even a gangbanger with one arm,” he said. “Maybe it’s a new form of initiation ceremony.”

  That sent a shiver up my spine.

  We were in the depths of the citizen residential area near the docks. Davie had taken a left turn off Constitution Street and immediately lost his bearings. The narrow lanes were deserted, the locals at work or school. Some of them had optimistically hung their washing on the wires above the road – no tumble dryers outside the tourist zone in this city – but the sun’s weak April rays were unlikely to do much good in the confines of the buildings.

  “Where is it we’re headed?” I asked.

  “Socrates Lane,” Davie said, grabbing the road map. “Should be somewhere around here.”

  “Socrates Lane?” I said. “Spot the name imposed by the Council.” I wound my window down and checked out the place. I soon realised that it wasn’t as deserted as I’d thought. There was movement behind the grubby net curtains over the upper windows on both sides.

  “We are not alone,” I said. The back streets near the port were a notorious haunt of youth gangs and black-marketeers.

  Davie chucked the atlas on to my lap and let off the handbrake. “Don’t worry. They won’t attack a guard vehicle in broad daylight.”

  There was a light rattling on the Land-Rover’s roof.

  Davie slammed on the brakes and stuck his head out of the window. “Here!” he shouted. “I’ll pull it off if I catch you!”

  I decided against putting my own head outside. “Someone having a wettie?”

  “Aye,” Davie grunted. “I saw the little scumbag. He couldn’t have been more than ten.”

  “They recruit young these days,” I said. “Maybe he’s in the Portobello Pish.”

  “Ha.” Davie hung a left and pulled up behind a couple of barracks patrol vans.

  I made a quick survey of the upper flats before I got out. No sign of any more piss-artists.

  A female auxiliary with an unusually healthy complexion came over from a gaggle of solemn barracks personnel. “Hello, Citizen Dalrymple. Remember me?”

  I glanced at the badge on her tunic. “Baltic 04. Oh aye. We checked out the spirits bond a couple of years back, didn’t we?”

  She nodded. “When some lunatic poisoned the whisky.” She pointed to a doorway. “He’s up there,” she added, her voice suddenly trembling.

  “Bad one?” Davie asked over my shoulder.

  Baltic 04 nodded, her eyes down.

  “All right,” I said, “you stay out here. The public order guardian and his deputy will be arriving any minute now with the scene-of-crime squad and the medical team. Keep them on the street till I tell you otherwise.” I waited till she looked up again. “Your people haven’t touched anything, have they?”

  She shook her head. “It’s the left-hand flat on the second floor. I went in on my own after we got the tip-off. And I was wearing gloves, citizen.”

  I looked at her heavy boots. “Let’s hope you didn’t trample over any vital traces.” I touched her arm. “I’m sure you were careful, Baltic 04. Have you got a murder bag?”

  “On the front seat of the leading van,” the auxiliary said. “Em, citizen? How shall I keep the guardian out?”

  I was handed a protective suit by a solemn auxiliary. “Tell him I’m on the job,” I said.

  “Aye,” Davie muttered. “That would put anyone off.”

  The stairwell we were ascending was completely covered in gang graffiti. Even the worn steps had been given coats of luminous paint, words and crude pictures applied in black ink. On the walls there were vertical red lances every few feet.

  “Bingo,” I said, remembering the tattoo on the severed arm. “This is a Leith Lancers base.”

  Davie nudged open a door that was attached by only one hinge and looked around. “Unoccupied, I’m glad to see.”

  “I’m hoping it stays that way, though the guard presence should have scared them off for a while.”

  “And as soon as the Mist comes down, they’ll vanish for the duration,” Davie said with a grim smile.

  I kept going, stepping over a fairly recent heap of human excrement, till I reached the landing on the second floor. The doors to both flats were open and the reek made me choke.

  “Christ, how do people live here?”

  Davie shrugged. “They don’t. They have other places where they kip. This is what they call a kicking hole, where they bring the ones they want to teach a lesson to. Members of other gangs, ordinary citizens who rat on them to us, you know how they operate.”

  I walked into the flat and almost fell into a wide hole where the floorboards had been smashed open. These walls had been decorated in the same way as the stairwell, the centrepiece above the shattered fireplace being a drawing of a figure in guardian-issue clothes looking remarkably like Lewis Hamilton. There were at least a dozen lances protruding from his torso. St Sebastian had it easy by comparison.

  “The bog, Quint,” Davie said, his eyes wide as he turned towards me. “Jesus, that’s too much.”

  I went past him and looked through the doorway. At first I thought the walls of the confined room had been decorated like all the other surfaces in the tenement, admittedly with even more red than elsewhere. Then I realised that the white tiles, though layered with grease and muck, had not been coated with paint. The covering was dried blood.

  “Fuck,” Davie said, staring into the bathroom despite himself. “I don’t believe this.”

  I looked at the floor and pointed. “Footprints. Some of them are probably from our friend downstairs but we might get lucky.” I stepped round the ribbed markings on the bloodstained boards, my feet unsteady in the protective bootees I’d pulled on outside the front door.

  The room was about ten feet by eight, the small window in the left wall covered by uneven planks. All that remained of the sink and lavatory were blackened holes in the surfaces. There was no bath – the water restrictions during the Big Heat had led to all remaining baths being removed from citizen residences – and the shower base was three inches deep in shit. I glanced up and saw
that the ceiling was also criss-crossed by long sprays of congealed red. The guy I assumed they’d come from was lying along the right-hand wall. His head was resting on the raised surround of the shower base and his hair was smeared with its contents.

  “Fuck is right, Davie,” I said, trying to breathe only through my mouth. Then I kneeled down beside the one-armed corpse.

  The lower part was dressed in standard youth gang gear: citizen-issue trousers turned up to beneath the knee, heavy boots. I remembered the yob with the red flash on his cheek I’d encountered at the bus stop. This guy was taller, his legs stretched out and close together. I moved my eyes reluctantly to the torso. It was naked, the victim’s motionless chest scrawny and spattered with muck. I looked closer. The spots on the pallid skin were dry faecal matter, not blood. I glanced up at the ceiling again and wondered how fresh the blood up there was. Maybe the victim had been mutilated elsewhere.

  I steeled myself to lean over the upper part. The young man’s face was almost at ease, the muscles slack, eyes closed and the mouth shaped into an incongruous smile. I felt in my pocket for my magnifying glass and held it over the stump of his right arm.

  “It looks like a perfect match.” Her voice was muffled by a surgical mask that she’d sensibly donned.

  I wrenched my neck as I twisted round. “Jesus, Sophia, stop doing that. I almost had a heart attack.”

  “Sorry.” She looked about the room. “What a hell-hole,” she said, shaking her head. “I suppose it’s an appropriate location for a sick attack like this.” She nudged me to one side. “Let’s have a look then.” She bent down and examined the wound. After a minute she straightened up. “Yes, I’m almost certain the arm in Ramsay Garden came from this victim.”

  “Almost certain?” I demanded. “How many other recently severed arms are you engaged in identifying?”

  “None,” she said tartly. “But I won’t be a hundred per cent sure till I have the body and the limb on the slab together.”

  “From what I can see, there’s no blood on the floor underneath the stump,” I said, trying to make sense of the scene. “I reckon he might have been dumped here after death.”

  Sophia leaned forward again. “Possibly. It really is quite extraordinary. The stump is completely sealed, as was the arm. Cauterisation of some sort but, again, there’s no sign of scorching.” She stepped back and started talking into her dictation machine.

  I watched and listened, trying to follow what she was saying but rapidly getting lost in the medical terminology. Then Sophia’s eyes opened wide and the cassette recorder dropped to the floor with a crack.

  “Oh no, Quint!” she gasped. “Oh no!”

  I looked to the front and felt the hairs on the back of my neck go as rigid as porcupine spines. “What the—?” I broke off and watched what was happening in front of me.

  The corpse with one arm had come back to life. Eyes half open, the young man scrabbled on the filthy floorboards with the fingers of his remaining hand, let out a cracked groan and then lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  “He’s in shock,” Sophia said, hitting buttons on her mobile.

  I knew exactly how he felt.

  “I should have checked for a pulse,” Sophia said, her face pale.

  We were back on the street, an ambulance having just taken the comatose youth to the infirmary.

  “So should I,” I said. “So should Baltic 04. But the guy looked deader than a dodo. I didn’t see any sign of breathing.”

  She nodded. “I know. I’ll be running tests. He’s most likely in deep post-traumatic shock.” Her brow beneath the white-blonde hair was deeply lined. “There should have been some chest movement though.” She stripped off her protective suit and moved towards her Land-Rover. “Let me know what you find at the locus,” she said. “I’m going to supervise this intriguing patient.”

  “Don’t let him die on you,” I called after her. She made an unguardian-like gesture with her hand.

  Davie came up holding a clipboard. “That was a surprise.”

  “This case seems to be full of them. What have you got?”

  “Nothing much so far. We’re tracking down residents and canvassing for witnesses. Oh, and there’s an all-barracks alert out for anyone who looks like a Leith Lancer.”

  I walked to the vehicle we’d arrived in. “I need a wash and something to drink. I’ve still got the taste of that shithole in my mouth.”

  He followed me. “The guardian’s set up base-camp in Baltic Barracks. He’s expecting you there.”

  “Great.” I opened the Land-Rover door then took in the surroundings of Socrates Lane again. Broken windows, litter in the gutters, drainpipes hanging at crazy angles from stone blackened by the smoke from coal fires. “Jesus, Davie, this must be the worst street in the city.”

  He started the engine and laughed. “Aye, it’s almost as bad as the Fisheries Guard mess-hall down the road.”

  “Close call,” I said, nodding. I’d spent a horribly drunken night on a horribly filthy floor with the crew of a patrol ship during the whisky investigation in 2025. The crew and their crazy captain had subsequently sailed off into the wide blue yonder. The latter wore an eye patch and had a dunt in his skull from a crowbar. “I wonder where Dirty Harry and his pirates ended up, Davie?”

  “Wherever it is, I wouldn’t fancy being in the vicinity,” he said, shaking his head as he pulled out of the street. “Harry’d have felt at home here though.”

  “No, he wouldn’t.” My thoughts were still full of the flat where we’d found the victim. “Not even a psycho drugs gang boss could survive in these tenements.” I stared out at the grey granite walls. “But the Council expects ordinary citizens to manage.”

  Davie looked like he wanted to argue but he didn’t bother. There wasn’t much he could say.

  Baltic Barracks was only a hundred yards from the junction, a solid building that used to be a spirits bond; the small, heavily barred windows had made it easy to defend during the drugs wars. No tourists ever come to Leith these days, so the guard depot and the main street it’s on have had minimal maintenance.

  Baltic 04 was in the entrance hall. “Thank Christ,” she said, taking her life in her hands by using a religious reference proscribed for auxiliaries. “The guardian and the Mi— His deputy have been making everyone’s life—”

  “All right,” I said, wading in before she was overheard. “You did a good job keeping them off my back at the scene.” I gave her an ironic smile. “Pity you didn’t notice the victim was still with us”

  The auxiliary’s face fell. “Sorry about that, citizen.”

  “Don’t worry about it too much. I made the same mistake. Where are they?”

  “In the ops room.” Baltic 04 pointed down the corridor. “Forgive me if I don’t join you.” She headed off rapidly in the opposite direction.

  “Come on, Davie,” I said. “Time to perform some more operations.”

  That took up the whole afternoon.

  “I don’t understand why these adolescents won’t talk.” The Mist turned away from the pair of sullen lads, irritation bringing dots of sweat to her face.

  “Because they think all auxiliaries are poison,” I said, watching as the younger of the only Leith Lancers the guard had so far managed to pick up sniggered contemptuously. I was wasting my breath trying to get them on my side. I’d already had a go at breaking them down individually without any guard personnel present. They regarded me as poison too, my DM status notwithstanding. They wouldn’t even confirm their names. We knew one of them was called Jax – the name was tattooed on his neck – but that was about it. They’d been found in a ruin on the other side of the Water of Leith so they probably didn’t know what had happened in the tenement in Socrates Lane. Even a photo of the victim sent down from the infirmary provoked the big zero as regards reactions. The rest of the gang members were obviously keeping their heads as far down as they could.

  “Very well,” Hamilton’s deputy said
to the barracks commander. “Lock them up. In separate cells. No food or drink.”

  I watched as the youths were led away, the leg irons they’d been fitted with clanking as they walked to the door with studied jauntiness.

  The public order guardian got up stiffly from a mess table. “This is getting us nowhere. We have no idea of the victim’s identity and it doesn’t look like he’s going to be much help in the immediate future.”

  Sophia had called several times. The one-armed guy was stable but still unconscious. There was a question of brain damage, though there were no visible wounds to his skull. It had been confirmed beyond all reasonable doubt that the arm in the administrator’s bath came from the Leither.

  I swallowed the last of my barracks coffee and got a mouthful of gritty dregs. “Anything more on the tip-off?” I asked Davie.

  He shook his head. “The guard haven’t been able to find anyone who’ll own up to seeing who used the public phone in Easter Road.” The Council restricts telephones to one on every street and the exchange had been able to trace the number of the phone used to tell Baltic Barracks about the one-armed man.

  “I’m still guessing it was a Leith Lancer who made the call,” I said. The barracks operator was only able to say that the voice had been male and the accent coarse. “Someone out there knew about the attack. It may just have been a witness who wanted to get help to the boy.”

  “The scene-of-crime squad is still following up traces and prints, but so far there’s nothing that points to the assailant’s or the victim’s identity,” Davie said. “The missing finger hasn’t turned up either.”

  The Mist was standing under the opaque glass at the edge of the basement mess ceiling; the heavy boots of auxiliaries on the pavement above were passing regularly. “And the Housing Directorate’s list of residents in Socrates Lane tells us only that the tenement’s been unoccupied for five years,” she said.