The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  I sat back and tried to work out what the hell was going on. The minute was marked “Senior Guardian/S.& E. Guardian Eyes Only”, which was interesting. It suggested that the rest of the Council – which, in an unusual link with the pre-Enlightenment UK cabinet, is defined in the city’s constitution as a body bearing collective responsibility – hadn’t been briefed about what was a major policy change. After the horrendous disaster at the Thorp plant at Sellafield in 2003, nuclear power became about as popular as a doctor with syphilis. So the Enlightenment had come to power with a promise to shut down Torness at all costs. What were my mother and William McEwan doing planning to start it up again?

  I went over to the sink and splashed water on to my face. Maybe they hadn’t actually gone ahead with the plan outlined in the minute. Surely some news of a big operation like that would have filtered out. On the other hand, why had the files gone from the archive? And why had William McEwan been so agitated about the Bone Yard? It looked like my idea about the city’s abattoirs was off target after all.

  Katharine came out of the bedroom in a pair of my faded citizen-issue pyjamas. I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I didn’t give her anything more than a mumbled greeting. And completely forgot that Davie was both late and in possession of a key.

  He chose that moment to make an entry.

  “Hello, Davie,” Katharine said without any sign of surprise.

  He took in her short hair and gaunt features, then what she was wearing. “Oh, aye?” he said, turning to me. “Got your fancy woman back, have you?”

  I was never one for pig in the middle. “I’ll just sit down and let you two get on with it.” When they worked together in the last murder case, Davie and Katharine had what could best be described as a relationship based on mutual loathing. He didn’t like her dissident record and work in the Prostitution Services Department, and she thought he was a typical boneheaded guardsman.

  “I am not anybody’s fancy woman,” Katharine said haughtily.

  Davie ran his eye over her again. “I see what you mean. Times been hard on the other side of the border?”

  “Not as hard as the ones the females in your barracks must go through waiting for the sex session roster to be posted.”

  “Children.” I waved the minute at them. “I’ve just got a big break in the case. Can you postpone the verbal boxing contest?”

  “Not really, Quint,” Davie said, his cheeks red above the thick curls of his beard. “She’s a deserter. I should take her in.”

  “Just try it, guardsman,” Katharine said, leaning forward on the balls of her feet like a lioness about to pounce.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, what’s your average age?” I demanded, glaring at them. “Above eight, by any chance? Look, this investigation’s just gone critical in more than one way. For the next few days we need to keep our canines out of each other’s throats.”

  Davie and Katharine exchanged glances that were still hostile enough to petrify a Leith hard man in the days before they all joined the guard, but at least they both kept quiet.

  “That’s better,” I said. “Davie, I hadn’t intended to tell you about Katharine, but since you’ve got into the habit of coming in without knocking . . .”

  “You said I could,” he protested with a pained expression.

  “Go and make some coffee, will you? We need to have a serious look at what we’re going to do next.”

  Outside, the noise of the early morning traffic suddenly seemed a lot quieter. I drew the curtain and saw a cloudful of large snowflakes so thick that I could hardly make out the flats across the street. As visual metaphors for how much Edinburgh citizens know about the activities of their guardians go, it wasn’t bad.

  I filled them both in about the Torness minute and tried to make it clear how dangerous it might be if they were to tell anyone else. Then I mentioned a pretty dodgy strategy I’d worked out for getting into the senior guardian’s personal archive. It involved a lot of dressing up and judicious use of the “ask no questions”. Neither Davie nor Katharine looked impressed, but since they weren’t liable to end up down the mines for impersonating a rodent control technician, they couldn’t complain too much. As things panned out, I didn’t need to open my make-up bag after all.

  My mobile buzzed and Davie answered it. “It’s the guardian,” he said, handing it over. “Sounds hot.”

  It was nothing like the inside of an advanced gas-cooled reactor, but it was still enough to get my circulation going.

  “Dalrymple? We’ve found Raeburn 03.”

  “Dead or alive?”

  “The former.” Hamilton’s voice took on the usual diluted quality it acquired when he had to talk about violence. “Cut up like the others.”

  “You haven’t touched anything, have you?”

  “I haven’t,” he said defensively. “The guardswoman who found the body brushed off the snow to find his barracks badge.”

  “What’s the location?”

  “The summit of Blackford Hill.”

  “We’re on our way.” I grabbed my jacket. “Come on, Davie.”

  Katharine was standing by the table. “What do you want me to do, Quint?”

  “Stay here and don’t answer the door.”

  Davie turned from the front door. “You could always do a bit of early spring cleaning.”

  She raised her middle finger.

  If Katharine stayed inside my pit all day I’d perform oral sex on the senior guardian. I didn’t tell her that though. She was always one for a challenge.

  “What was Machiavelli doing up here?” Davie asked as he steered the Land-Rover up the steep slope of the snow-covered road past the observatory. Scene-of-crime people were already taking photos of tyre tracks and cordoning off the area.

  “Good question. We’ll have to see if he was killed here or somewhere else.” My mind was already racing ahead. What if he’d been in the surrounding area before the murderer got to him? I could think of one place he might have been visiting – the laboratories at King’s Buildings. Maybe he’d recently acquired an interest in chemistry.

  There was only a faint line of light in the sky to the east. A generator was being set up ahead of us by the directorate’s technical squad. The guardian loomed out of the darkness.

  “Jesus Christ, Dalrymple,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

  “What’s the problem?” I asked lamely.

  There was a shout from ahead of us, then the floodlights came on in a sudden blaze. I blinked and tried to focus.

  “See for yourself,” the guardian said, tramping off to his vehicle.

  I moved towards the light.

  Davie was on my right. “Bloody hell,” he said with a rapid intake of breath. “I see what he means.”

  The body was lying just below the trig point at the summit. There was a carpet of fresh snow on it. Machiavelli was in a rough crucifix position with his legs about six inches apart, feet towards us as we laboured up the hill. But the position wasn’t what caught the eye. Despite the snow, a great crimson gout was visible. It was about six feet long and a couple of feet across and stretched out from the neck to the concrete pillar. From the neck. The body in the grey guard tunic had been decapitated on the spot. And I could see no sign at all of the head.

  You’d think the snow that had fallen on Edinburgh overnight would be a useful source of traces – footprints, spots of liquid and so on. The problem is it also covers things up.

  “What have we got then?” I said to Davie after we’d spent more than enough time crawling around in the snow beside the body.

  “Not a lot,” he replied, blowing on his fingers and then trying to flip over the pages of his notebook. “Except terminal bloody frostbite.”

  A guardsman came up with plastic cups of tea that was as grey as a citizen-issue block of writing paper. I gasped as my lips soldered themselves to the rim of the cup.

  Hamilton came up to where we were
standing about five yards from the body. His face was looking a lot redder than it had done earlier. Maybe he’d supplemented his tea with barracks whisky.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any doubt that it’s my deputy.”

  I shook my head. “We checked that. Obviously another body could have been dressed in his uniform, though God knows why anyone would bother impersonating him.”

  “Have some respect, Dalrymple,” the guardian said, giving me a ferocious glare. “The man’s been butchered.”

  “Sorry,” I said. It is a bit out of order to talk ill of the dead, even those who’ve been behaving suspiciously. “He had a distinguishing mark. A scar on his pelvis from a bone-marrow graft. It’s Raeburn 03 all right.”

  The medical guardian came over, peeling off surgical gloves and dropping them into a bag held out by one of her assistants. Her ice-blonde hair almost merged into the snowy backdrop – apart from the wide red stripe that extended from where Machiavelli’s head should have been. “Clearly the victim was alive when he was decapitated because of the spurting,” she said. “But he may well have been unconscious. He’d been badly tortured like the others.”

  I nodded. We’d logged knife wounds on the thighs and abdomen, but no organs had been cut out to make a cavity and no tape had been secreted.

  “The deep rope burns on his wrists suggest he was kept tied up for some time,” added the Ice Queen. “I’ll know more about the state he was in prior to death once I’ve run tests on the stomach contents and so on. The same goes for the time of death. I’d tentatively put it at around four a.m.” She turned to go.

  “I’ll see you in the mortuary when I’ve finished here,” I said.

  “I’ll be waiting for you, citizen.”

  Davie and I watched her move off across the trampled snow, her shape still eye-catching in the protective white overalls that made the rest of us look like semi-inflated rubber dolls.

  “To get back to business, gentlemen,” Hamilton said irritably. “Did the killer leave any traces?”

  “We’re still looking,” I replied. “The snow’s an effective shroud.”

  “There are Land-Rover tracks leading down the road,” Davie said. “They may well come from the guard vehicle used by Mach . . . by Raeburn 03.”

  Hamilton looked like he was about to ask Davie about the dead man’s nickname so I intervened. “And the guardswoman who found the body at . . .” I checked my notes. “At six twenty-one a.m. saw no sign of anyone.”

  “What brought her up here?” Davie said.

  “She told me she saw wheel tracks leading up from the main road and followed them,” I replied. “She did well considering the amount of snow that had already come down on top of the tracks.”

  “Amazing, Dalrymple,” Hamilton said with a snort. “A good word for the guard from you of all people.”

  I smiled at him. “I’ve got no problem with individual guard personnel. After all, I have a very good assistant.” Davie looked about as comfortable as politicians in the old days used to when someone mentioned poverty in the Palace of Westminster. “Of course, that may have something to do with the training manuals your directorate uses, guardian.”

  Hamilton decided this was a good time to depart, his boots crunching into the snow as he headed for his Land-Rover.

  “Thanks a lot,” Davie said. “My career in the directorate just took a major nosedive.”

  “Because you’re identified with a demoted auxiliary like me?” I laughed. “Tell the truth, guardsman. You love it when I have a go at the guardian.”

  “No, I don’t.” He started stamping his feet up and down and clapping his hands together. “Anyway, guard procedures work well enough, no matter which tosser wrote them. And what have you found out here that the rest of us haven’t?”

  He had a point there. Even if we had found plenty of traces, they wouldn’t necessarily have got us any closer to discovering the killer’s identity. Or motive. I watched as Machiavelli’s headless corpse was wrapped up by Medical Directorate personnel. Beyond them the city’s skyline stretched out in the light of morning which had been gradually increasing while we were on the scene. I ran my eyes along from the castle’s turretted bulk and down the Royal Mile’s line of spires and rooftops. In the east Arthur’s Seat crouched like a somnolent lion, its flanks albino white apart from the vertical black scars of the crags. The Ice Queen’s staff carried the shrouded body to a battered pre-Enlightenment ambulance that the mechanics in the Transport Directorate had miraculously managed to keep together. The city was going to pieces in all sorts of ways, and someone was taking individuals to pieces. But why had the murderer removed a senior auxiliary’s head from this frozen hilltop in the middle of the long Edinburgh night?

  I spent the day at the autopsy and checking out Raeburn 03’s rooms in his barracks and in the castle. There were no traces of Electric Blues in his stomach and no bags full of the drug in his wardrobe. That would have been too easy. Machiavelli and his accommodation were as clean as a model would-be auxiliary’s locker in the tented training camp in the Meadows. I did find copies of his namesake’s works on his bedside table, but they’re required reading for his ranks so I didn’t even smile.

  In the evening I attended the Council meeting. I thought there was a chance that the senior boyscout would be shaken up by Machiavelli’s gruesome death but if he was, he wasn’t showing it. What did get me going was his reluctance to accept that the latest murder was connected to the earlier two. Fair enough, there was no tape. But the other similarities convinced me that it was the same killer. Not for the first time I had the impression that I would make plenty of progress with the case if I tied the senior guardian to a chair and gave him the third degree. There was about as much chance of that happening as there used to be of insurance companies responding quickly to claims in pre-independence times. I considered trying to get Hamilton to give me access to his computer again so I could check out his deputy further, but that would have been a waste of time. What the senior guardian says goes. Unless you’re an insubordinate schemer like I am. I went back to my flat to scheme.

  “What do we do now?” Davie asked.

  We were sitting in the Land-Rover in Gilmore Place under the light of the streetlamps. It was glowing dully on the grey sludge that the morning’s snow had become.

  “Good question,” I said. “We haven’t exactly got much to go on.” There had been no reported sightings of Machiavelli’s Land-Rover during the time he was missing, so we had no idea where he’d been before the killer caught up with him. The vehicle had been found in a back street near the King’s Buildings with only Machiavelli’s and other guard personnel prints on it. The sentry’s log at the chemistry labs had no record of Hamilton’s deputy being there. And there were no witnesses around Blackford Hill – everyone had been asleep in their uncomfortable beds.

  “What did the medical guardian have to say in the Council meeting?”

  I shrugged. “She just confirmed that the time of death was around four in the morning and that the cause of death was severing of the carotid arteries. The wounds on the thighs and abdomen and the rope marks on the wrists were similar to those of the previous victims.”

  Davie looked up from his notes. “And the weapon?”

  “A sharp knife with a large blade, would you believe?”

  “Great.” He closed his notebook. “Like I said, what next?”

  I opened the Land-Rover’s door. “Ask me that tomorrow morning, guardsman.”

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t with that deserter woman, Quint,” he said, leaning out of the window.

  I looked back at him sternly. “As a loyal auxiliary, I know you wouldn’t do anything at all with a deserter, my friend.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” he replied, slipping the vehicle into gear and pulling away.

  What I called him was drowned out by the racket from an exhaust pipe shot through with more holes than a 1990s election manifesto.

  In
the stairwell’s feeble light I made out a hooded figure sitting on the floor across the landing from my front door. My heart seized up for a couple of seconds, then I remembered who else wore a long coat.

  “Katharine?” I moved towards her. “What are you doing out here?”

  She raised her head slowly. Her face was pale, the rings around her eyes so dark that for a moment I thought she’d gone three rounds with the city’s female boxing champion. She opened her mouth, whispered a few words I didn’t catch and pointed with an unsteady hand at my door.

  I followed the direction of her arm. And froze as solid as the ground around the concrete post at the top of Blackford Hill that morning.

  “Tell me it’s not what I think it is,” Katharine said faintly.

  I pulled out my mobile. “Davie?” I shouted. “Get back here. Now!”

  “Tell me, Quint,” Katharine repeated insistently, her breath catching in her throat. “Tell me.”

  I stepped carefully over the flagstones and knelt down in front of the discoloured bag that had been hung from my doorknob. I could make out the stamp of the Supply Directorate. It looked like a flour sack but I knew very well it didn’t contain that substance. More like a single, heavy object the shape and size of a football. On the floor beneath the sack were spatters of coagulated and partially frozen blood.

  “Fucking hell,” I said under my breath, then jerked backwards as the street door below slammed. The sound of nailed boots sprinting up the stairs filled my ears.

  “What is it?” Davie yelled as he careered on to the landing, narrowly avoiding Katharine’s legs.

  I pointed at the sack. “What do you think’s in there?”

  His eyes widened. “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes.” I pulled on rubber gloves then lifted the weighty bag off the handle and set it down gingerly. “Knife.”

  Davie handed me his service weapon. I took a deep breath and cut through the string round the top of the sack. Parted the flaps of material. And looked down on the severed head of Raeburn 03.