The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  “Not yet they haven’t,” I said, resigning myself to the idea that my staircase might at any moment become a physical training location for most of the auxiliaries stationed in the castle. “Did you get a sniff of anything?”

  Katharine shook her head. “Bugger all, apart from some hash that even schoolkids in the old days would have laughed at.”

  “So for some reason it’s not being distributed yet. That confirms what I know from guard sources.”

  “Well, I’m glad I’ve been of some service,” she said acidly.

  “It wasn’t worth the risk, Katharine.”

  “I can look after myself, Quint. You know that.”

  Except when there’s a gang of Cavemen around, I thought. I didn’t share that with her.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Found out anything interesting?”

  I had to make a decision. I looked across at her, wondering if it was a good idea to involve her in the case. I’d get shat on from the stratosphere if the Council discovered I was sharing classified information with a deserter. On the other hand, I needed all the help I could get if it turned out that senior auxiliaries like Machiavelli had been bad boys. She turned towards me when she felt my eyes on her and fixed me with her bottomless green gaze. It was no contest. But I needed to check something out first.

  “Did the guy who died ever say anything about the old nuclear power station at Torness?”

  Her eyes were still on me. There was a long pause before she spoke. “No, he didn’t. At least not that I understood. He was raving most of the time. Like I told you, he just kept going on about the Screecher and the Bone Yard.”

  I’d begun to wonder if there might be some connection between Torness and the Bone Yard. But even if there were, what could that have to do with the Electric Blues and the killings in the city?

  “That was truly disgusting,” Katharine said, pushing her empty plate away.

  “Sorry. It’s not like it was when supermarket chains still existed. These days, if something’s out of season, you don’t get it, end of story.”

  “So in winter the only vegetables are potatoes, turnips and kale. They don’t have to be half rotten though. And as for the tinned soup . . .”

  “I suppose you’re spoilt on your farm.”

  “You obviously haven’t tried growing root crops without the benefit of machinery.” She sat upright. “Anyway, you still haven’t told me what you found out today.”

  I nodded. “I’m going to. But, Katharine . . .” I waited for her to look at me. “It won’t be like it was the last time we worked together two years back. You won’t be an official member of the team. Davie and the others can’t know about you.”

  “Suits me,” she replied. “What makes you think I wanted to be in the team?”

  “Nothing. But you risked your freedom by coming to tell me about the drug formula, so you must still have some feeling for the city.”

  She laughed harshly. “I don’t give a shit about the city, Quint. The Council has always done exactly what it wants with it.” She broke off and looked down. “But you’re right in a way. I was an auxiliary once and I swore an oath to serve the bloody place. As far as I’m concerned that means the people. And the people are being fucked by the system.”

  “You’d get on well with the democrats in Glasgow.”

  “I’d have gone there long ago if there weren’t so many gangs of lunatics between us and them.” She looked up and her eyes flared in the dim light. “Are you going to tell me what you know or not?”

  “Okay. I’ll just put some music on.” If my place had been bugged, Katharine and I were already up the Crap River without a punt-pole. But at least the bastards wouldn’t find out the latest news. Muddy Waters seemed appropriate.

  “You remember Billy Geddes?” I asked as the master belted into “The Hoochie Coochie Man”.

  “Your schoolfriend? How could I forget him? I thought he was crippled.”

  “He is. And even though the Council under my mother would probably have kept him on as a deal-maker, the iron boyscouts cut him loose without a second thought. Or so the archive shows. He was demoted and packed off to a disabled persons’ home in Merchiston a year and a half ago.”

  Katharine opened her hands. “And?”

  “And I found when I went there this afternoon that he hasn’t been seen since 18 November last year.”

  “Maybe he died.”

  I shook my head. “There’s no record of that. And no record of a transfer to another home. Christ, the guy’s in a wheelchair. He can’t go far on his own.”

  “So what are you saying, Quint?”

  I sat back, shaking my head. “I don’t know exactly. But it’s too much of a coincidence that Billy the arch-fixer disappears at the same time a new drug is developed.” I took a deep breath and filled her in about the Electric Blue we found in the dead auxiliary’s locker. She was unimpressed that I hadn’t told her last night, but I made up for that by mentioning Machiavelli’s disappearance.

  “I remember that bastard from the guard,” Katharine said, screwing her nose up. “I might have known he’d lick his way to the top.”

  I nodded. “The problem is, both he and Billy are dead-ends until we can track them down. I’ve got Davie doing a check on all the city’s disabled facilities, but I don’t reckon he’ll turn anything up.”

  Katherine looked at me, her forehead lined in frustration. “What are we going to do then?”

  I raised the stump of my right forefinger. “Never fear, Quintilian’s got a plan.”

  She looked seriously unconvinced. “What is it then, smartarse?”

  I tried to make it sound impressive, even though it was a last resort. I could only think of one senior scientist to consult. “I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather recently. I’m going to see the chemist.”

  I’d got Davie to find out where the chief toxicologist lived. It turned out he was one of those typical first-generation auxiliaries who was totally dedicated to the job. Either that or his manner put off even other scientists, because he avoided his barracks and spent his off-duty hours in a room above his laboratory. I deliberately didn’t give him any advance warning of what I thought would be my visit.

  Katharine saw it as our visit. “I’m coming with you, Quint.”

  “No, you’re not. Word about you will get back to the Council.”

  She smiled at me sweetly. “We’ll just have to make sure he keeps quiet about us, won’t we? Don’t worry, I’ll think of a way to do that.”

  “What about the driver?” I demanded. “Oh, forget it.” I called the castle and asked them to send me a vehicle. The auxiliary who brought it down would have to call for another Land-Rover to pick him or her up, but that was someone else’s problem. My problem, and Katharine’s, was whether I could remember how to drive after two years on my bicycle.

  “I’d rather have ridden a mad cow,” Katharine said, jumping down outside the labs as soon as I skidded to a halt in the snow. Mixing concrete with a straw would have been easier than finding gear in the clapped-out vehicle.

  “Was I that bad?”

  “No wonder cars were banned by the Council. You’d have reduced the population to double figures on your own by now.”

  “Thanks very much. I take it you’ll be walking back.” I led her to the gate. The guardswoman on duty waved us past when she saw my authorisation and the “ask no questions” which I’d passed to Katharine. I got directions to the chemist’s room.

  “Let me do the talking, all right?” I said as we walked into the building.

  “Oh, you know what you’re going to say, do you?”

  It was a fair comment. I reckoned the city’s chief toxicologist would answer my questions because something about him had given me the impression that he wasn’t the iron boyscouts’ number one fan. That didn’t mean I had a very clear idea of how I was going to get him started.

  We climbed to the fourth floor, our footsteps ringing down empty c
orridors which smelled of noxious substances and the sweat of scientists who, like everyone else in the city, don’t see the communal baths often enough. At the far end of a long passage we came to a door. A scrap of paper with the words “Chief Toxicologist” had been stuck to it with a drawing pin. The city has better things to spend its money on than laminated signs, even for senior auxiliaries.

  I put my ear to the faded black surface and heard the faint sound of music. I couldn’t make out individual notes but the rhythm was familiar.

  “He’ll keep quiet about our visit,” I whispered to Katharine with a smile.

  “Why?” Her face was blank.

  “Watch.” I raised one hand, knocked twice quickly and turned the handle. The chemist hadn’t locked it. He was probably too caught up in the music. “Good evening, Lister 25.”

  “What?” The chief toxicologist’s pachydermic features appeared from behind a lateral shelving cabinet filled with files, beakers, test-tube racks and pot plants. “What do you think you’re doing, citizen?” He moved across to the cassette player.

  “Leave the music,” I said. “Robert Johnson was a genius in my book.”

  Lister 25 stood still, his ungainly form bent over the low table. “You like Robert Johnson?” he asked in amazement. “You know who Robert Johnson was?”

  I shrugged. “Like I said, a genius. This is one of my favourites.” I glanced at Katharine. “‘Kind Hearted Woman Blues.’” She ignored me. “I don’t think you’re a genius though, Lister 25. Playing banned music in a Council building isn’t going to do your career much good.”

  The chemist turned the volume down and twitched his lips at me. “My prospects are severely limited as it is, citizen. Who’s your friend?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  Lister 25 nodded slowly. “I see. But you do want to know something.”

  I smiled. “Correct.”

  “And if I help you, my illicit addiction to the music of black America will remain unknown to my superiors?”

  “Correct again. You can trust me. I’m a blues freak too.”

  “Sit down,” said the chemist, waving expansively at a pair of unsound-looking plastic chairs. “I will endeavour to comply with your every demand. Is it about the matter we discussed on your last visit?” He looked doubtfully at Katharine.

  “The Electric Blues?” I said with a laugh. “What do you think of the name?”

  The toxicologist gave me a supercilious glance. “Electric blues were a travesty of the original Delta sound, citizen.”

  “You reckon? Well, whatever. I’m not here about them.”

  He rubbed his jowls pensively. “Really. I’m intrigued.”

  “Did you ever know a physicist by the barracks number of Watt 103?”

  He went pale faster than a tourist who’s put the last of his holiday money on a donkey masquerading as a horse at the Princes Street Gardens racetrack.

  “Are you all right?” Katharine said, moving quickly to the sink and running him a glass of water.

  Lister 25 was trying to take deep breaths. “Why are you . . . why are you interested in Watt 103, for God’s sake?”

  He must have been about the same age as the dead man. “How long have you known him?” I asked.

  “Since the first year of university,” Lister 25 gasped, finally bringing his breathing under control. “Alasdair was a brilliant physicist.”

  “A nuclear physicist,” I said, watching his reaction.

  The toxicologist nodded, then looked down. He’d started to knead the loose skin on the back of his left hand.

  “When did you last see him?”

  He shook his head weakly. “I don’t remember exactly. Two or three years ago.”

  “What was he doing then?”

  Lister 25’s breathing again began to sound like that of a diver who’s had his oxygen line slashed. “I . . . I . . . don’t . . . don’t . . . know. Class . . . classified work.”

  “You’re going to do him an injury, Quint,” Katharine said, settling the chemist gently in his chair. “Stop this. Stop it now.”

  I nodded reluctantly. “Just one more thing,” I said. “The Bone Yard. Have you ever heard of it?”

  Between more gasps and choking, the toxicologist managed to nod that he had. But he seemed not to know anything about what the word referred to.

  “Ask . . . ask the senior . . . the senior guardian,” he said as we were leaving. “He . . . he has . . . he has all the files.”

  I knew that already. And the chief boyscout was the one person I couldn’t ask about the Bone Yard. He’d warned me off already and I had a nasty feeling that if I asked again I’d end up in a box like his predecessor as science and energy guardian. And anyway, what did all this have to do with the murders? I couldn’t see what the link was. But I was getting more and more convinced that there was one.

  Katharine decided against walking back through the snow-carpeted streets of southern Edinburgh. It wasn’t a good decision. I still couldn’t make much sense of the Land-Rover’s gearbox.

  “You take the bed.” I put the candle I’d lit on the table.

  Katharine shook her head. “I’m all right on the sofa. I haven’t had much to do with beds recently. We sleep on sacks of straw on the farm.”

  “All the more reason to renew your acquaintance with a mattress now. What do you think Supply Directorate beds are?” I sat down and pulled out my notebook. “Anyway, I’ve got work to do.”

  She came over. “I can help.”

  “I wish you could. This investigation’s going nowhere faster than the old parties at the last election.”

  “That bad?” She smiled then looked at me seriously. “What does the Bone Yard mean, Quint?”

  “If I had any clue about that I wouldn’t be sitting here chewing the end of my pencil.”

  She shook her head impatiently. “No, I’m not talking about your investigation. What do the words ‘bone yard’ refer to?”

  I shrugged. “Cemetery, according to the dictionary.”

  “So have you checked out the city’s cemeteries and graveyards?”

  “Checked them out for what? There are dozens of them. And since the Council brought in mandatory cremation back in 2006, nothing much has gone into them.”

  She smiled grimly. “Which means they’d be good places for illicit activities like drug trafficking, doesn’t it?”

  I sat back and heard the flimsy chair creak beneath my weight. “But there hasn’t been any trafficking, Katharine. We’d have found bodies by now. The Electric Blues are fatal for people with weak hearts.”

  She nodded slowly. “Okay. What other angles have we got?”

  I grinned at her. “You should have taken up my mother’s offer to join the Public Order Directorate.”

  She was quiet for a minute. “I suppose if I’d stayed in the city, the Cavemen wouldn’t have got me,” she said eventually in a low voice.

  “Christ, I didn’t mean that, Katharine.”

  “It’s all right, Quint. It was a long time ago.” She got up from the table and moved towards the bedroom. “I’ll see you.”

  “Yeah. Goodnight.” I watched her svelte figure move into the darkness, then heard the door close tight. She might think it was a long time since she’d been abused by those neanderthals but she wasn’t anywhere near getting over it. Then I thought of Caro. It was nearly seven years since the Ear, Nose and Throat Man had killed her and I still had vivid dreams of her. Not often, but enough to make sure I felt guilty at every sex session. That’s what the Council’s managed to do in its relentless search for the utopian state. It imagined it could appeal to people’s desire for knowledge and self-advancement, but all it’s ended up doing is pandering to their animal appetites. All anyone thinks about apart from screwing is getting enough to eat.

  Which brought me back to the Bone Yard. It suddenly came to me that the city is indeed full of bone yards. But unlike the cemeteries, these ones operate to full capacity.
Every day of the year Edinburgh has to feed thousands of tourists as well as its own citizens. So the perfect city is extremely well endowed with slaughterhouses.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I woke up to a thud from the direction of the front door and looked at my watch blearily. Six thirty-two. The postman had beaten Davie. I staggered over from the sofa and picked up a brown A4 envelope. Then all traces of sleep were blown away as quickly as the smoke from the city’s myriad coal fires when the east wind kicks in.

  I’d recognised the small, ultra-neat handwriting. I received something from the same correspondent only a few days ago. It was William McEwan. I looked at the postmark. It was dated 4 January 2022, the day before the old man went head first down the stairs. The post in Enlightenment Edinburgh doesn’t run to standards Mussolini would have approved of, but it gets there in the end. And the envelope was unopened. It had escaped the random checks the Public Order Directorate makes on citizens’ mail.

  I ran my left forefinger under the flap and pulled out a sheaf of stapled pages. On the front was a brief handwritten note, which read:

  Quintilian,

  In case your regular visit to the home is delayed, I am sending you this classified minute. I have other documents which I copied illicitly before I left the directorate, but they are too sensitive to trust to the post. I hope this will bring you down to Trinity soon.

  W.M.

  Not soon enough, unfortunately. I stood in the centre of my freezing living room flicking through the pages. Then sat down on the sofa and took a deep breath. No wonder the Science and Energy Directorate archive was missing a lot of files.

  The minute was of a meeting between McEwan and the senior guardian dated 14 October 2019. Of course, the chief boyscout wasn’t senior guardian at that time. My mother was. At the meeting they agreed to follow the recommendations made in the Science and Energy Directorate’s feasibility study, which was written by none other than Watt 103, a.k.a. Hamish Robin Campbell, the man who had died at Katharine’s farm. And what did he write a feasibility study about? Whether the two advanced gas-cooled reactors at Torness nuclear power station could be reactivated.