The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  “Or . . . I don’t know,” I said, smiling lamely.

  The senior guardian gave me a dubious look then turned to the Ice Queen. “Very well. Let’s have your report.” He paused momentarily before addressing her. “Guardian.”

  One of the problems the guardians have constructed for themselves is how to address each other in front of ordinary citizens. I’m bloody certain they use their first names when they’re on their own, but they can’t do that in front of the likes of me.

  The medical guardian ran through her preliminary report, putting the time of death around two a.m. and the cause of death shock-induced heart failure. She thought the knife the killer used had a large non-serrated blade – possibly a hunting knife. (Or possibly a standard-issue auxiliary knife, but I didn’t feel like raising that point for the time being.)

  “We are carrying out tests on matter removed from the victim’s fingernails,” the guardian said. “No other traces of the killer have been found, apart from the bite mark on the throat. This is being analysed as I speak and I am cautiously optimistic that we will have sufficient data to carry out a search of dental records.” She looked around her colleagues, ending at the senior guardian. “I hope to be able to provide further information at tomorrow’s meeting.”

  “Thank you, guardian.” The senior guardian turned to me. “Anything else you feel we should know, citizen?”

  I could think of a lot of hints concerning the way they run the city, but I bit my tongue. “We’ll be looking at all aspects of the victim’s background and following up leads.” I gave the information guardian the eye. She was a nervous-looking redhead who had survived from my mother’s time. “Are you intending to publicise the killing?”

  “That is a matter for the Council,” the senior guardian said, his gaze hard. “I suggest you get back to your investigation, citizen.”

  I headed for the door, then decided to give them a farewell gift. “Guardians,” I said over my shoulder, “we’re not dealing with an average murderer here. This one walked away with Roddie Aitken’s tongue and genitals as well as leaving us a cassette. A cassette that was not standard issue and suggests some connection with the world beyond the city border.” I turned and faced them. In the air above the guardians’ heads I could almost read the word “dissidents”. It has the effect on senior auxiliaries that “Brussels” used to have on Conservative politicians in the 1990s.

  I hadn’t finished with the Council. I wasn’t going to sleep easy tonight and I didn’t see why they should. I moved to the door then turned back to face them.

  “One of the few things I’m certain about in this case so far is that this isn’t the end of the killer’s activities. This is just the beginning. Pleasant dreams, guardians.”

  Chapter Five

  “Where to?” Davie asked from the driver’s seat of the guard Land-Rover he’d laid his hands on for the duration of the investigation.

  I stood by the railing looking out over the racecourse in Princes Street Gardens towards the ravaged stump of the Scott Monument; the top twenty yards of the space-rocket-shaped steeple fell off a few years back, making a mess of a tourist group from Hong Kong. Frost glistened on the floodlit grass while voices from the tourist restaurants and bars on Princes Street echoed around the surfaces of the ground, the granite buildings and the castle rock. Everything was hard, like the guardians wanted to be and the killer definitely was.

  “The hooded man’s out there somewhere, Davie,” I said, turning to him. “Somebody knows him.”

  “His friends and relatives maybe don’t know that he likes biting people’s throats out.” Davie shook his head slowly. “Why Roddie, for fuck’s sake? Why him, Quint?”

  “Let’s see if we can find out.” I climbed into the rust-spattered Land-Rover. “To the City Archives, guardsman. At the double.”

  “Now you’re talking.” Davie gave a sardonic smile as he started the engine. “There’s nothing I like better than an evening with the files.”

  “Sorry. You’d better call Fiona.”

  “I already have. She’s not expecting to see much of me in the immediate future.”

  We crossed the Royal Mile on the way to the main library which houses citizen archives. I felt sorry for the disruption to Davie’s love life, but not too sorry. At least he had a woman in the city. All I had were memories of one who was dead and one who had disappeared.

  “Right, what have we got?” We’d been through Roddie Aitken’s records and compiled lists of people to be interviewed – questioned, the guard would call it, but I prefer the subtle approach.

  Davie leaned back in his chair and stretched his muscular arms, then picked up the checklist we’d made. “Parents: Peter and Morag, 74m Ratcliffe Terrace.”

  “I’ll do them.” That promised to be a lot of fun. The local bereavement advisor would have been round by now, but they’re often unfeeling enough to make things worse for the families. I’d been coming across this more and more in the last few months. In the past, auxiliaries in the social care and welfare departments had been trained to cope with the needs of citizens. Now most of them were like miniature iron boyscouts, with all the social graces of the worst football fans in the years before the sport was banned by the European Union because of match-fixing and street warfare.

  Davie made a note. “Friends: apparently three close male friends and two close females, one of them his cousin.”

  The Council keeps tabs on citizens by making them declare the friends they see more than once a month. God knows how many auxiliaries that occupies updating files and carrying out spot checks.

  “Do you want to make a start on them tomorrow?” I said. “We’ll need to try and track down this girlfriend he had. Maybe she’s one of those two. If not, he might have met her at a sex session.”

  Davie nodded. “Then there are his workmates.”

  “We’ll check them out in the archives first. The likelihood is some of them will have black-market offence notifications. We may need to put them under surveillance rather than blunder in.”

  “Right.” Davie raised a finger. “I’ve just thought of something else. The report Roddie made to the guard about the hooded man.”

  I grinned. “Well done, guardsman.”

  Davie’s finger was now simultaneously moving up and down and swivelling. “I suppose you had that on your personal list?”

  “Of course I did. You’re the expert on the City Guard. See if you can find out why no action was taken.”

  “I can tell you that now, Quint. You know how busy we are, especially over the Christmas and New Year period.”

  “You never know what you might come across.” I stood up and looked around the high shelves packed solid with grey files. They ran for over fifty yards to the far end of the basement which was thirty yards wide – and these were only the archives for citizens like Roddie Aitken who live in the central areas because of their jobs. There are six other citizen archives, not to mention each of the twenty barracks archives where auxiliaries’ files are kept, and the central guard archive in the castle. Christ, what had the Council done to the city? Turned it into a paper mausoleum, where people’s souls are confined to the archives and their lives programmed more carefully than the computers the guardians keep to themselves. This wasn’t why the Enlightenment won the last election. Or why, even until recently, Edinburgh citizens preferred Council rule to the chaos caused by the drugs gangs in the past.

  I roused myself. “Come on, Davie. We’ll be late for your chief.” Hamilton had called an hour earlier and suggested we meet at my place to co-ordinate tomorrow’s activities. Now I came to think about it, the guardian had never been in my flat before. He must have fancied a change from his rooms in the castle.

  I felt a wave of exhaustion wash over me as we drove towards Tollcross. It’s always the same at the beginning of an investigation – there are so many angles to cover, so much you’re unsure about. Sleep is the first casualty, but you can usually rely on the odd
adrenalin rush to keep you awake. I got a very large one as we turned into Gilmore Place.

  “Jesus, Davie. Pull in. Look down there.” I pointed down the street towards the door of my staircase. The curfew had been in effect for a couple hours so there was no one about. Apart from a figure in a long coat with a hood.

  “Bloody hell.” Davie cut the engine and drew in to the kerb.

  “Leave the lights on,” I whispered. “We won’t see a thing otherwise.”

  We both leaned forward and watched the hooded man. He was leaning against the wall by the doorway, head bowed. It was difficult to gauge his height and weight because of the voluminous coat and the limited light we were casting.

  “He must have seen us,” Davie said, his hand straying down to his service knife.

  True enough. I knew what he was thinking. The bastard looked like he was waiting for me. I can recognise a challenge when I see one. He had some nerve showing himself on the streets, especially after curfew.

  “Stay here. I’m going a bit closer.”

  “Are you out of your—” Davie shut up when I raised my finger to my mouth.

  I opened the door carefully and set my feet on the icy pavement. Then walked slowly out into the middle of the street.

  A movement came from the hooded figure, a twitch of the head to tell me I’d been spotted. But he stood his ground. I stepped forward, my heart doing a passable imitation of Willie Dixon producing a particularly thunderous riff on the bass guitar. I got to within ten yards and could see that the coat was dark grey.

  Then everything moved into overdrive.

  I heard the roar of a clapped-out diesel engine and more lights came round the corner behind me. Hamilton. I’d forgotten about the guardian and his sodding rendezvous. In the few seconds it took me to wave at Davie to get in his boss’s way then run forward to my door, the hooded man was off like a greyhound.

  I went after him, but he was always going away from me; he obviously kept himself in a lot better shape than I did. I knew where he was headed. Round the corner to the right, there’s a yard where the Tourism Department store scaffolding for the tattoo they put on in the summer. If he got over the fence into it, he had a good chance of getting away altogether. My lungs were bursting as I came round the turn. The hooded figure was a good fifty yards ahead, his legs apparently unhindered by the coat. He would hit the fence any second now and it isn’t high enough to put off someone as fit as him.

  I ground to a halt, spitting something sticky and salty from my mouth, and pulled out my mobile phone.

  “Davie,” I gasped, “send vehicles round to the other side of the store in Gilmore Place Lane. Quick, he’s over the fence.”

  Over the fence didn’t do justice to the fugitive’s leap – he sailed over like he was a champion vaulter with his pole concealed about his clothing. I waited for a minute then walked painfully back to Davie and Hamilton.

  They were following the chase on their mobiles. I could tell from their expressions that the hooded man hadn’t been sighted. We drove round and watched guardsmen and women comb the piles of scaffolding. There was nothing.

  And nothing over the next few hours from all the guard units across the city, despite Hamilton’s fierce instructions to spare no effort in the chase.

  It was beginning to look like we were after one of the supernatural creatures that filled the world’s TV screens before the millennium – our very own file stamped “X”.

  In the morning Hamilton was apologetic. He had to be. I made it clear to him what I thought about the timing of his arrival in Gilmore Place. He muttered something about wanting to see how the other half lived. Jesus.

  “Still no trace of your hooded man, Dalrymple,” he added dolefully.

  I was at the leaded window of his office in the castle, looking out over the ice realm that the city had become overnight. The suburbs were wreathed in smoke from the coal fires while the glass frontages of the shops across the gardens glinted in the sunlight. To the right, tourists slipped and slithered their way up the Mound. It was closed to buses in the early morning. In the old days there had been an electric blanket under the road, but the Council gave up using it a couple of years ago because of the electricity restrictions.

  “You’d have thought there would have been some footprints around the depot he passed through,” I said.

  “Scuffmarks and the like. Nothing useful.”

  I had another bone to wrestle over with him. “So the Council decided not to publicise any details of the murder?”

  He looked up briefly from his papers. “Majority decision, yes.” Hamilton often fell into using the clipped sentences favoured by professional army officers and robots.

  “And were you one of those who voted in favour?” I asked, sitting on the edge of his wide desk. That always got to him.

  “No, I wasn’t actually,” he replied, glaring at me.

  “What’s happened?” I asked sarcastically. “Have you suddenly become a supporter of the free flow of information?” As far as I was aware the Council hadn’t brought April Fools’ Day forward.

  “Certainly not.” That was more like Hamilton. “I simply feel that in a murder as gruesome as this one we stand more chance of catching the perpetrator if we have the citizen body on our side.”

  “Very good, guardian.” I got off his desk in surprise. “We’ve finally found something we agree on.”

  He looked at me and shook his head hopelessly.

  My mobile rang.

  “Good morning, citizen.” The Ice Queen’s business-like tones. “First the bad news. There were no traces of the murderer under the victim’s fingernails. But the good news is that I have a profile of part of the killer’s upper jaw. Do you want some of my people to help with the archive search?”

  Two guardians trying to be helpful in one day. That was unusual. I handed her over to Hamilton to co-ordinate their directorates’ efforts. And went to interview Roddie Aitken’s parents.

  Ratcliffe Terrace. When I was a student a year before the Enlightenment we used to go to a bloody good pub there which had an antique panelled bar and a moulded ceiling. The beer wasn’t bad either. It got burned down by one of the drugs gangs not long after independence. Now it’s a day care centre – all mothers are working mothers in the perfect city, and children are looked after by city staff from six months.

  I slipped for about the tenth time that morning as I got out of the guard vehicle and headed for number 74. Davie’d just called to say that he’d spoken to two of Roddie’s friends and was on his way to the third, one of the women. He hadn’t found anything that looked significant so far.

  The stairwell smelled the same as mine and every other in the city – boiled root vegetables, dodgy sewage and rancid citizens. I climbed up to the fourth floor, feeling the muscles tight in my legs from my ineffectual sprint last night. The place was dead quiet, everyone except the Aitkens at work. I’d asked them via the guard to stay at home.

  The door was in surprisingly good nick – it had been repainted recently. I wondered where the paint had come from. The Housing Directorate hasn’t been doing much maintenance of citizens’ houses in the last few years.

  “I’m Dalrymple,” I said to the tall, balding man who eventually opened the door. He was stooping slightly, an expression of childlike bewilderment on his slack face. “You can call me Quint.”

  “Quint?” he repeated blankly.

  “Come away in,” said a strong voice behind him. A woman who was nearly as tall as Peter Aitken appeared, nudging him gently out of the way. “I’m Morag, Roddie’s mother,” she said, offering her hand. “You’ll be the investigator we were told to wait for.”

  I repeated my name.

  “Quint? Is that short for Quintus, the fifth born?” Her eyes were dark brown like her son’s and lively. Although her hair was pure white, the softness of her face suggested she was younger than her husband.

  “No, it’s short for Quintilian.”

  “The Rom
an orator and grammarian,” Morag Aitken added. She’d probably taken advantage of the Education Directorate’s continuing education programme. She led me and her husband, who was lagging behind, into the living room. It was a bit larger than mine and efforts had been made to decorate it distinctively. Someone had provided a series of pretty impressive watercolours depicting Edinburgh skylines.

  “Mine,” Roddie’s mother said, following the direction of my eyes. Then the façade cracked momentarily. “Roddie always liked them.” She took a deep breath then made an attempt at smiling. “Sit down, the pair of you.”

  “I met your son,” I said, forcing myself to look at them. “I . . . I liked him a lot.”

  “Aye,” his father said. “Everybody liked him.” His voice broke towards the end of the sentence.

  Morag Aitken was studying me. “How did you come to meet Roddie, Quintilian?”

  “He visited me on Hogmanay.” I was watching them carefully to see how they would react. “He had a problem he wanted my help with.”

  “What sort of problem?” Their voices came simultaneously. They glanced at each other in surprise.

  It was obvious Roddie hadn’t told them about the hooded man. Was he keeping it secret or did he just not want to scare his folks?

  “Oh, just a minor hassle at work,” I said, looking down at my notebook.

  “What was it?” Morag Aitken asked insistently. “Roddie never had any problems in the department.”

  “That’s right,” her husband said. “All the other delivery men thought he was a great lad. His superior told me he had high hopes for him.”

  I would be checking that, but the impression I was getting from the parents tallied with my own. Roddie was a genuinely good lad. So why had he been tortured and killed?

  “I’m sorry if this seems like an insulting question, but it may be important.” I found it difficult to look these seemingly decent people in the eye now. “Did Roddie ever . . . em, bring anything home from work?”

  Morag Aitken drew herself up like a lioness about to remove a jackal’s head. “That is an insult, citizen. Roddie was brought up to be totally honest.”