The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  I called Davie and told him to meet me at the sex centre. Then I followed the guardsman to his vehicle. The moon was higher in the inky sky now and my feet were blocks of ice dug from the deepest glacier in Greenland. But they were nothing compared with the freeze-dried heart of the beast who was loose in this benighted city.

  Citizen Macmillan recognised the photograph I’d been given at Moray Barracks immediately.

  “Aye, that’s Sheena Marinello all right.” She shook her head and muttered something abusive. “So she was an auxiliary.” The photo showed the dead woman wearing a guard tunic, her hair plaited in the requisite female auxiliary style. “I thought she was a stuck-up bitch.”

  “Is the supervisor on duty?”

  “Is he fuck. He left about half an hour ago looking like his arse was on fire.”

  We left her to the queue of customers that had built up behind us.

  “We’ve got two choices,” I said as we got back into the Land-Rover.

  “And neither of them involves eating, I’m sure,” Davie complained.

  “Oh, guardsman, I’m sorry, are you hungry? We’ll just stop the investigation for an hour so you can refuel. After all, it’s only a double murder.”

  “Up all your orifices, Quint,” he replied. “So what are the two choices? Check if the supervisor’s gone back to his barracks and . . .?”

  “Actually, you might get a chance to eat at the other one.”

  “Great. Let’s go there.” He turned the key and waited for the prehistoric starting motor to engage.

  “Fair enough.” I picked up my mobile and called Moray Barracks. They hadn’t seen the supervisor since midday. So I called Hamilton and asked for all barracks to be alerted about the missing auxiliary.

  “Where are we going then?” Davie enquired when I finished.

  “To the Three Graces in the Grassmarket. Or rather, the Two Graces as it now is.”

  “A sex club.” Davie shook his head vigorously. “I couldn’t possibly, citizen.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  We got there in under three minutes.

  Although it was only eight o’clock, there was already a large crowd of tourists around the replica of the Three Graces outside the club. We were told to get to the back of the queue in at least ten languages as we pushed our way through. At least I think that’s what was being said.

  A couple of gorillas in dinner jackets three sizes too small blocked my passage. Then they saw, in rapid succession, my authorisation and Davie. They let us through. Next we were greeted by two girls in toga-like robes which showed more than they covered up. The things some people have to do for the Council – and auxiliaries can’t say no to any duty they’re assigned.

  “Who’s in charge?” I asked.

  “Watt 94, citizen. You’ll find her at the bar.”

  “Good. I could do with a drink.”

  The girls parted the curtain and we went down into the club proper. It was large but there still weren’t enough tables. The air was full of smoke – tourists being the only people in the city allowed tobacco products – and I had to blink my eyes to see what was happening on stage. Then I had to blink them again to convince myself I hadn’t fallen into wet dreamland. So did Davie and he’s about as prone to shock as the journalists who covered what MPs got up to in the days before MPs became extinct like the dodo and the elephant.

  On the raised stage there were three nymphs cavorting to the sounds of a seriously languid saxophone. Cavorting doesn’t fully cover what the women were doing. They were all completely naked, their hair done up in ribbons like the originals in Canova’s sculpture. They were also standing close together. There the similarities with the work of art ended. Each of them was holding a pair of very large, knobbly dildoes and applying them to any opening they could reach. One of the three, presumably the dead auxiliary’s replacement, was definitely not having a good time – or at least wasn’t covering that up very well. The crowd, which contained a lot more men than women, was yapping and cackling like a pack of exceptionally ravenous hyenas. The noise got even louder when one of the Graces lay down and spread her legs. Another got down between them and started lapping at her colleague’s groin. Meanwhile the third, the unhappy one, simultaneously plunged a green dildo into her own fanny and a purple one into the crouching auxiliary’s arse. Wonderful stuff.

  “Duty calls, guardsman.” I manhandled Davie away to the bar that ran down the left side of the room.

  “You didn’t exactly have your eyes lowered, Quint,” he said with a grin.

  “I’m following up an important line of enquiry.”

  “Oh, aye.”

  I leaned against the polished mahogany of the bar. The burly barman was looking a bit uncomfortable in his Doric chiton and sandals. I asked him for whisky and Watt 94.

  “What can I do for you, citizen?”

  I turned to see a tall, middle-aged woman in lace blouse and tartan evening skirt. She had short black hair, bright red lips and eyes of burnished steel. You can always spot a senior auxiliary, even when they’re out of uniform.

  I flashed her my authorisation and emptied the glass that had appeared in front of me. It was tourist-quality whisky – a sight better than even barracks malt.

  She eyed my glass coldly and nodded. “I was expecting you.”

  “Were you now? How come?”

  She glanced over her shoulder then sent the barman away. “You know how it is. Bad news travels fast. You’re here about Moray 310, I take it.” Her voice was so deep I had trouble picking it up over the drone of the saxophones in the band.

  “I’m also looking for a male auxiliary from her barracks – Moray 37. Seen him in here?”

  She shook her head. “My men on the door would have told me if one of our own people had tried to get in.” Auxiliaries are supposed to get their kicks only in barracks sex sessions.

  “So tell me about the dead woman.”

  She shrugged. “I was only posted here a couple of days ago. I can show you her file . . .”

  “I’m a big boy, Watt 94. I can find files by myself.”

  Spots of colour appeared on her cheeks, then that reliable old auxiliary self-control kicked in. “Really. Well, instead of wasting my time, you should go behind stage and talk to the club co-ordinator. She knows everything there is to know about the Three Graces.”

  I pulled Davie away from a plate of deep-fried miniature haggises. The Dietetics Department would never let Edinburgh citizens overdose on suicide food like we used to before independence, but the tourists can eat as much of it as they like.

  On stage the Graces had got bored with their sex aids and were fiddling around with a trio of rough-looking young men in leather shorts. The Three Disgraces, presumably. We passed through another curtain and entered a shabby backstage area manned by a stage crew who were paying no attention to the show. Two of them were hunched over a chessboard. That’s the way your more old-fashioned auxiliary spends his leisure time.

  “Where’s the co-ordinator?” I asked.

  One of the guys stuck a thumb out and jerked it in the direction of a dim corridor.

  Davie was about to take issue with the guardsman’s manners, but I shook my head.

  At the end of the corridor was a row of mirrors and sinks. At the last sink was someone I hadn’t seen for some time. “Patsy? What the hell are you doing out of your cell?”

  “Well, well, the great Quintilian Dalrymple.” The woman took a step back and appeared in all four of the mirrors between her and me. Suddenly I had four ex-brothel keepers in their mid-fifties to deal with. They all looked in pretty good nick, blonde hair perfectly coiffured and well-stacked figures squeezed into black velvet dresses. On the other hand, none of them looked particularly pleased to see me.

  “What are you doing here, Patsy?” She’d once been in charge of the Prostitution Services Department.

  “New career,” she said, giving me an acid smile. “You can’t be sure of anything in life.”
/>   “I didn’t have you down as a philosopher.”

  She ignored that. “So what’s happened to my star performer? All they told me was that she’s had a accident.”

  “You’re going to have to spend some time training up her replacement.”

  Patsy turned to me, her face suddenly slack. “What happened to her?”

  “Someone bit out her throat and cut her apart,” I said, watching her closely. Patsy used to know a lot of the city’s hard men. “She wasn’t the first, either. Any idea who might have done it?”

  “I’m just an ordinary citizen now, Quint. I only know what I hear around the club.” She looked up at me, her eyes wide apart. “Is there another lunatic out there like the last time?” Suddenly she looked like a frightened old woman despite the layers of make-up and the tough talking.

  “Maybe. So what have you heard around here? What can you tell me about Moray 310?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Quint, she had a name.”

  “I know,” I said in a conciliatory voice. It’s usually me who gets pissed off when auxiliaries are referred to by barracks number. Maybe I was turning back into what I’d once been. Shit. “What can you tell me about Moira?” The guardsman who gave me the photo had told me the victim’s first name.

  Patsy rested her rump against the edge of the basin. “She was a complete natural. I couldn’t teach her much. Men just had to look at her and she had them under her spell. It was the way she moved. Slow and seductive, like a snake. She made the guys feel it was them who were shafting her, not that piece of rubber.” She laughed softly and looked over at me. “I’ve only seen two other women who had that kind of power.”

  I knew what she was about to say.

  “Your friend Katharine was one of them.” She held her eyes on me to see how I reacted.

  “Thank you for that, Patsy,” I said with a scowl. “Let’s get back to Moira, shall we? Was she involved in anything else?”

  “Anything the Council wouldn’t approve of, you mean?” Patsy gave me a bitter smile. “Why would you believe what I tell you, Quint?”

  She had a point. She’d been known to have trouble with the concept of truth. But we were friends once, in the far distant past when I was in the directorate and she was turning herself from the city’s number one madam into a high-ranking auxiliary.

  “I trust you, Patsy,” I said, smiling back at her and glancing around at the decrepit washroom. “Why would you lie? Things don’t get much worse than this.”

  “That’s true enough,” she said, nodding. “Moira was . . . clever. Cunning. She was one of those auxiliaries who pretend they have the city’s interests at heart but are really only looking after themselves.”

  “There are a few of those around,” I said ironically.

  “Aye, a few.” She laughed. “Well, I can spot that type a mile off, so I always kept an eye on her.”

  This was getting interesting.

  “But I never picked up on a thing.”

  No, it wasn’t.

  “She was smart, kept a tight grip on herself, even when the punters got her pissed.”

  “So this conversation’s been a waste of time,” I said, putting my notebook back in my pocket.

  Patsy shrugged and turned back to the mirror. “If you say so, Quint.”

  I headed for the door.

  “But there’s one thing I can’t work out . . .”

  I hit the brakes.

  “She was on the phone in the corridor a few days ago.” All facilities like this have phones for the staff to keep in touch with their barracks control room. “And she was really scared. Shouting and screaming. Till she saw me at the other end of the passage.”

  “What was she saying?”

  “She kept repeating the same thing. I couldn’t make any sense of it.”

  I went up to her and took hold of her fleshy arms. “What was it, Patsy? What was she saying?”

  “‘The electric blues.’” She looked at me uncomprehendingly. “She kept asking, ‘What about the electric blues?’”

  I let go of her and stepped back, thinking of the tape we took out of Roddie Aitken. Eric Clapton playing electric blues. Then I thought of the auxiliary’s semi-frozen body, the legs splayed wide apart.

  I was bloody sure another tape had been left inside her. The question was, what had been recorded on it?

  Chapter Eight

  It was a long night. Davie and I waited for the surviving Two Graces plus the victim’s replacement to take a break from delving into each other. They were no more ecstatic about our delving into their relationships with the dead Moira than the new girl had been on stage. It soon became obvious that they thought their ex-colleague was a supercilious cow who kept herself to herself outside business hours. None of them had any idea exactly what she got up to when she wasn’t at the club, but the general idea seemed to be that she was doing a lot of freelance whoring among the wealthier tourist clientele. Patsy had the same impression. So where had the dead woman stashed her loot?

  “Moray Barracks?” Davie asked as we came out into the freezing night air of the Grassmarket.

  I nodded. “She was asking for trouble if she kept currency or jewellery in her barracks, but we have to start somewhere.”

  Davie pulled away from the even larger crowd that had gathered outside the club. Performances go on until four in the morning – no wonder the performers have trouble looking enthusiastic. “Do you think it could be a tourist who killed her?” he asked, swerving to avoid a Japanese guy in a Black Watch kilt.

  “Christ, Davie, don’t let Hamilton hear you saying that. That would be even worse than an auxiliary. Think of the dilemma that would give the Council. As far as it’s concerned, tourists’ arses exist primarily for us to kiss, not for tourists to shit out of.”

  “It’s not quite like that, Quint,” he said testily. “Without the income from tourism, the city would be more or less insolvent.”

  I love it when Davie turns back into a model auxiliary and spouts the Council’s standard line. I didn’t find it very convincing. “So you approve of your fellow auxiliaries spreading their legs for the tourists, do you?”

  He gave me the glare guardsmen use when citizens are massively out of line. “Of course I fucking don’t, but how else are we going to attract the business? These days people from the successful countries don’t just want package tours that take in a few museums and medieval banquets. They want cheap sex.”

  I nodded, looking out at the crowds of half-cut foreigners wandering around the Cowgate. They want cheap sex, horse-racing in Princes Street Gardens, casinoes on every street corner, whisky and tartan knitwear. What they don’t want is to bite people’s throats out and hide music cassettes inside them. I didn’t have much idea of what was going on, but I was sure of one thing: Edinburgh’s latest multiple murderer was a home-grown product, born and bred in the city like his victims. Which led me back to another thought. Where was the bastard hiding out? Someone must know him; someone probably saw the bloodstains on his clothing after the second killing. So where the hell was he? I called Hamilton and asked him to get his people to check all the barracks’ patrol reports. We might be lucky. Perhaps some vigilant guardsman had spotted a suspicious character in the early hours but failed to pull him in. Perhaps some citizen on his or her way to the early works buses had reported a strange man in a long coat. And perhaps Edinburgh citizens go to bed every night reciting “Our Senior Guardian who art in heaven . . .”

  We would have got a warmer reception at Moray Barracks if we’d walked in sporting bubonic plague sores. Eventually my Council authorisation prevailed. I looked up from signing the sentry’s log and saw Hamilton’s deputy Machiavelli exiting at speed. The guardsman at his side had a guard rucksack on his back.

  “I hope you’re not going to lower morale even further by asking awkward questions,” said the barracks commander, a doleful guy with bald head and thick brown beard who’d been called down to meet us. He looked like Fri
ar Tuck after a particularly heavy night, except that he could probably count the number of times he’d smiled in his life on the fingers of one hand.

  I gave him a smile of my own to show him he was already out of his league. “Awkward questions, Moray 01? Of course not. The morale of your barracks is much more important than the threat posed to the city by a psychotic killer.”

  That had some effect. The commander stepped back like I’d propositioned him, then struggled to regain his composure. A vein pulsed prominently in the middle of his forehead.

  “Show us her cubicle. In person, please.”

  Moray 01 glanced at me to check I was talking to him, swallowed when he realised I really did want him to act as barracks porter and headed slowly down the corridor.

  Moray Barracks is a seventeenth-century mansion that used to be a teacher training college before the Enlightenment. The Council decided it would serve their purpose better as the barracks covering the lower end of the Royal Mile and the Cowgate, not least because teacher training is now part of the auxiliary training programme. Auxiliaries learn hand-to-hand combat, survival skills (useful when they do their tour of duty in the notoriously dangerous border posts) and what are called public order skills; then those of them who want to teach are deemed ready for action and chucked straight into schools. At least there aren’t many discipline problems in the classroom. The downside is that Moray House has been wrecked, its decorated walls knocked through to make dormitories and its moulded ceilings left in partial ruin. Very enlightened.

  The commander led us through a female dorm, then a male one. I was on official business of course, so I paid attention to the semi-naked bodies on display in the first room. The female auxiliaries glanced across briefly, then ignored me as effectively as prime ministers used to ignore cabinet members in the old days.

  We left the second dormitory and went up a wide staircase that had once been elegant and ornate and was now high quality drab, the steps chipped from heavy auxiliary boots. Moray 01 stopped at the first door on the next floor and pointed.