I had a plan about how to do that but it would need careful timing. In the meantime I checked the Deserters Register for Campbell’s name. It wasn’t there. Either he’d managed to leave the city without being missed or his name had been deliberately kept out. Then I checked the Accommodation Index and discovered that there had once been a Muriel Campbell living at 19b Elgin Street, but she died in 2016. That was as much confirmation as I needed that the ID had been produced by auxiliaries. It’s standard procedure to use an address that checks out superficially, but the forgers in the castle aren’t required to update secondary details. Now I was sure the card was fake. But I wasn’t looking forward to what I had to do next.
“Davie, I need to get Hamilton out of his office for a while.”
If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. “You’re keeping something to yourself, aren’t you, Quint?” He made a skilful adjustment to the Land-Rover’s steering as we came on to the esplanade. Judging by the way other guard vehicles were slewed about the snow-covered expanse beneath the castle entrance, most drivers had decided that parking in the normal neat ranks was not essential today.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Aye.” Davie laughed. “You get this faraway look in your eyes when you’re on to something tasty. Like a kid opening the Enlightenment Encyclopedia at the page headed ‘Human Sexuality’ for the first time.”
“Very funny, guardsman.” I gave him a stern look. “What page number is that again?”
He pulled up by the sentries. “Volume three, page four hundred and thirty-seven.” He undid his seatbelt and looked back at me thoughtfully. “I suppose I could get the guardian to come down to the operations room to go over the roster of personnel involved in the investigation. These days he almost licks your feet if you ask for his advice.”
“Poor old sod. The iron boyscouts think he’s a joke.”
“Well, I don’t,” Davie said defensively, “and neither should you. He’s been asking what you’re up to.”
“Has he now? Tell him I’m checking on the guardsman who got his brains rearranged yesterday.”
Davie nodded. “Okay. Give me ten minutes before you go to his quarters.”
I put my hand on his arm. “There’s the small matter of the clerk in his outer office.”
Davie grinned. “Oh, don’t worry about Amy. I’ll tell her you’re on official business.”
“I can do that myself.”
“Aye, citizen. But will she keep quiet about your visit afterwards?”
He headed off through the gate, acknowledging the guards. I sometimes wonder if there are any female auxiliaries in the city who he hasn’t provided with an unforgettable sex session.
Hamilton’s clerk was middle-aged and faded, her hair as grey as the auxiliary-issue suit she was wearing. But there was a red glow about her cheeks. Whatever Davie said to her seemed to have done the trick. As soon as I went in to the outer office she looked down at her papers. As I went in to the guardian’s office, I heard the outer door close behind her. I was on my own. The question was, for how long?
The last time I used Hamilton’s computer was during the search for the murderer two years ago. I was banking on the chance that he hadn’t changed his password since then. I sat down, logged on and entered the word “colonel”. Then I hit the return key and waited, feeling my heart pounding in my chest. The screen flashed and the Council Archive main menu came up. I highlighted the City Guard line, then the Confidential Operatives line in the subsidiary menu that followed. I was asked again for a password. As in all systems, users are instructed not to use the same one that they use for initial access. But Lewis Hamilton was a leading proponent of the Enlightenment’s anti-information technology position and he used his terminal about as often as I agree with current Council policies. The chances were that he used the same password. I entered it and waited for alarm bells to ring. They didn’t. The menu of the file containing details of all the guard’s undercover operatives appeared. I was in.
I glanced at my watch. Nine thirty-three. I hoped to hell Hamilton was buying Davie’s strategy. Tea is brought round at quarter to ten in the castle. That would give Davie an extra chance to stall the guardian.
I went into the Operatives’ Aliases option and entered the name on the ID card. There was a brief pause and then the file came up. Hamish Robin Campbell: alias approved 12.8.2018. That was interesting. It showed that the guy had been undercover for three and a half years. I noted down the barracks number of the auxiliary who had assumed the alias, which was Watt 103. Things were looking promising. Then I requested the reports Campbell had filed on his activities and my luck ran out as comprehensively as the guy’s at the end of the queue when the whisky runs out on a Saturday night.
The screen told me that Campbell’s reports were “Not Available”. That’s jargon for “So Secret That Even Guardians Don’t Have Access”. There was only one person who could call up “Not Available” files and that was the chief boyscout. Who knows what his passwords were? “Baden” and “Powell”?
I went back into the main menu and tried to bring up Watt 103’s service record. All auxiliaries’ data are held in the Council Archive, but I was pretty sure this particular servant of the city had officially died a long time before Katharine came across him. And so it turned out. Watt 103 didn’t feature as a serving auxiliary, but there was a reference to him in the “Auxiliaries – Deceased” archive. According to that, he had died of a heart attack in the infirmary on 4 December 2019. Unless he’d come back to life like a cataleptic character in an Edgar Allan Poe story, someone had been messing around with the records. And whoever that was had fallen foul of the cross-referencing system, suggesting he or she didn’t have a complete grasp of the archives but also hadn’t wanted to involve a professional clerk.
I heard the outer office door bang. After a delay that made my heart shake, rattle and roll there was a knock on the door of the inner office. Then another knock. I waited, frozen to the seat in front of the terminal, ready to claim I was a technician updating Hamilton’s software and fully aware that wouldn’t do anything more than buy me a little more time. Then I heard footsteps moving away and the outer office door close again. The guardian’s notorious temper seemed to have put the visitor off entering without permission. That was the first time I’d ever felt grateful that Hamilton was such an irascible old bugger.
It was obviously time to get out but I still wanted to know more about Watt 103. I scrolled down his personal details and came to a piece of information that made all the tangled nerves I’d suffered in the last twenty minutes worth while. The auxiliary who staggered to Katharine’s collective farm south of Dunbar had been trained as a physicist before the Enlightenment. Not just any kind of physicist either, but a nuclear physicist. After the Council was established, he’d been involved in the decommissioning of Torness nuclear power station. I sat back in the chair after I logged off and looked out through the leaded windows towards the gull-grey water of the Firth of Forth. Torness nuclear power station went out of service in 2007. So what was one of the few remaining nuclear physicists in a city where coal has been the main fuel for fifteen years doing over the border? And what was he doing in a gang that operated close to the city’s former main source of energy?
I smelled a very large mutant rat glowing brightly in Edinburgh’s Enlightenment gloom.
I met Davie and the guardian in the corridor outside the operations room.
“Ah, there you are, Dalrymple.” Hamilton was looking twitchy, which isn’t usually a good sign. He started running his hand back and forward through his beard as if the Council had just decreed that auxiliaries must be clean-shaven but that razors aren’t allowed. “There seems to be a bit of a problem.”
It was unlike him to be vague, even when he ran into trouble.
“What is it?” I asked, glancing at Davie. He didn’t look particularly bothered.
“It’s my bloody deputy,” the guardian replied.
&n
bsp; “Raeburn 03? He hasn’t fallen under a bus, has he?”
Hamilton glared at me. “That isn’t funny, Dalrymple. I don’t think much of him as an individual but he’s an excellent administrator.”
Most of that was for Davie’s benefit. I wondered if the guardian knew that his number two was known as Machiavelli by everyone else in the guard.
“So what’s the problem with your excellent administrator?” I asked.
“We don’t know where he is,” Davie put in. “No one’s seen him since yesterday evening.”
That sounded interesting. “When you say no one, you mean no one you’ve asked so far,” I said.
Davie looked at his notebook. “All personnel on duty in the castle, all personnel in Raeburn Barracks . . .”
“How about the senior guardian?” I looked at Hamilton.
“He’s been informed. He hasn’t seen him since the end of the Council meeting last night.”
I nodded, remembering Machiavelli’s urgent conversation with the chief boyscout outside the Council chamber. “I think we’d better run a check on your deputy, guardian. Is your computer operational?”
Hamilton strode away down the passage. “It was the last time I looked. Useless piece of junk. I don’t know what you expect to find there.”
“It’s amazing what you come across in the database sometimes,” I replied, grinning at Davie.
We set off after him, our boots ringing like drumbeats on the flagstones. I wondered where Machiavelli’s auxiliary-issue footwear was at this moment; and if he’d gone there willingly.
Hamilton was overjoyed when I offered to handle the computer. I was pleased too. That way he wouldn’t notice the tell-tale line informing him that he’d logged off ten minutes ago. I remembered to ask him for his password. He went all coy and wrote it down rather than say it in front of Davie.
I got into the senior auxiliary section of the Serving Auxiliaries archive and typed in Raeburn 03’s barracks number. It was then that the guardian began to have second thoughts.
“Em, Dalrymple,” he said, leaning over my chair. “What exactly do you expect to find out about my number two? You know how many checks personnel have to go through to reach his level in the hierarchy.”
I looked up at him. “He’s a missing person, isn’t he? Guard regulations state that anyone absent from their post for more than three hours is required to attend a review board.”
Hamilton looked at me like a medieval abbot who’d suddenly detected signs of demonic possession in one of his monks. “Since when did you care so passionately about guard procedure?”
I shrugged. “I did write most of the regulations when I was in the directorate.”
“That was a long time ago, citizen. You surely can’t suspect Raeburn 03 of any involvement in the murders.”
Even I wouldn’t have gone that far, at least not yet. “Look, guardian. He’s been very interested in the case since the beginning. He turned up at the first post-mortem, he was in the second victim’s barracks not long after her body was discovered, he’s been—” I broke off. Telling Hamilton that I was suspicious about Machiavelli’s friend the senior guardian was probably not a very good idea.
“Well?” demanded Hamilton. “He’s been what?”
I gave him a smile to pacify him. “He’s been someone the Council has had its eye on for promotion.”
My smile had the wrong effect. “You mean when it manages to get rid of me?” the guardian said, his cheeks scarlet. “Well, I’m not going anywhere. This is my directorate and I’m staying till I drop.”
Behind him Davie had his eyes raised to the inlaid ceiling. “I know that, guardian,” I said, scrolling down Machiavelli’s service record. I realised that I knew as little about him as I knew about his superiors in the Council. They’d all appeared out of the woodwork when my mother’s regime began to crack.
“Auxiliary training 2010 to ’12, then a year on the border, a couple of years in Raeburn Barracks administration, three years in the guard, a year in the Tourism Directorate . . . that’s interesting, guardian. Your deputy was in the Prostitution Services Department.”
“Get on with it, Dalrymple.”
I could see from Hamilton’s expression how impressed he was by that aspect of his deputy’s career. “Then he was in the Science and Energy Directorate for a year. As assistant to the present senior guardian no less.”
“That’s probably why he follows him around like a lost sheep,” the guardian growled.
“Uh-huh.” I kept on scrolling, then stopped abruptly. “And his last posting before this one was in the Finance Directorate, from 2019 to ’20.” I paused. There was no way Hamilton was going to let that pass without comment.
“Yes. As one of your friend Heriot 07’s assistants.” The guardian sounded like he’d just inhaled deeply in a pigsty. “I wonder what he learned from him.”
“My ex-friend Heriot 07,” I said, trying to stall him. Heriot 07 was the barracks number of Billy Geddes, who used to run all the city’s money-making scams. I was beginning to wish I’d kept a much closer eye on him since he’d been confined to a wheelchair. Jesus. There were wheelchair tracks in the street outside my flat this morning.
The door burst open.
“What is Citizen Dalrymple doing at your terminal, guardian?” The senior guardian’s voice wasn’t exactly sharp. He still sounded like he could sweet-talk the Lord God Almighty into passing on to him the secret of eternal life, but there was an edge to his voice that would have put the wind up Satan. “Kindly leave us, guardsman.” Davie didn’t hang around.
Hamilton hit the shutdown function. “I was supervising the citizen, senior guardian.”
“Never mind that.” The chief boyscout moved into the centre of the room and looked around like a pre-Enlightenment estate agent working out his percentage. “About Raeburn 03. I am handling the search for him personally.” He gave me a stare that he no doubt hoped would send my body temperature through the floor.
“I think there may be some connection with the murders,” I said, looking straight back at him. You could almost hear the clang of invisible sabres crossing.
“I will be the judge of that, citizen. If any such connection exists, you’ll be the first to know.” The senior guardian turned his attention back to Lewis Hamilton. “In the meantime, guardian, you will not pass any information from the Council Archive to citizen Dalrymple. Understood?”
The guy was about thirty years younger than Hamilton, but he was treating him like an auxiliary trainee on his first day in uniform. Lewis had his face set hard, but there was nothing he could do.
“I wish to speak with my colleague, citizen.” That was guardian-speak for “Close the door on your way out, scum.”
I left them to it.
And spent the rest of the day trying to work out how to dig up more information on Machiavelli, Billy Geddes and the dead physicist Hamish Robin Campbell. By the time I went back to the flat, I was beginning to make progress on two of those fronts.
Chapter Fourteen
There was a tap on the door just after eight o’clock that evening.
“Where the fuck have you been?” I yelled. “I told you to stay indoors.”
Katharine stood in the doorway of my flat, shaking off melting snow like a dog that’s been in a river.
“You told me?” she said, eyeing me blackly. “And who exactly are you to tell me what to do?”
I got up and went over to the kitchen area, not wanting to show her any more of how I felt. “You must be freezing. I’ll make coffee.”
She spread her coat over a chair and sank down into the sofa. “Coffee,” she said wistfully. “I haven’t had that for a long time.”
“Not many people in the city have – at least, not decent stuff. You can still find it if you know the right people.”
“How corrupt.”
I turned and saw that she was smiling ironically. “How realistic, more like. Since you object so strongly on moral gro
unds, can I have your share?”
She didn’t reply but the smile remained on her lips.
“So where have you been?” I asked, handing her the least chipped mug I possessed.
She laughed. “Now he wants to know where I’ve spent my day.”
“For Christ’s sake, Katharine, there’s a double murderer out there.” I gave her what I hoped was an unconcerned shrug. “Anyway, it’s better for me if you don’t hang around here. I don’t fancy being done for harbouring a deserter.”
She was about as far from buying that line as the city was from purchasing a fleet of Chinese limousines to ferry citizens to the mines.
“If you must know,” she said with a nervous flick of her head, “I was trying to score some drugs in the Cowgate.”
“You were what?” My voice went soprano.
“Don’t worry. I was pretty subtle about it.”
Somehow I managed to get a grip on myself. “Let me just get this straight, Katharine. You went down to the street in the city that’s most infested with undercover operatives and tried to find out if a new drug has appeared. You do know that Edinburgh has what Time magazine described as the most ferocious anti-narcotics programme in the western world, don’t you?”
She gave me a monarch-of-all-she-surveys look that would have impressed the long dead Margaret Thatcher. “Of course I know about the Council’s drugs policy. I also know that there are ways and means for tourists to get hold of stuff.”
I slumped back on the sofa beside her. “Don’t tell me. You pretended you were a tourist.”
She shrugged. “Obviously it worked,” she said in a remarkably convincing sing-song Scandinavian accent. “The guard haven’t turned up on my tail.”
The Bone Yard Page 16
