The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  “A couple of headbangers on a raiding ship had a go with crowbars.”

  “I suppose he didn’t even notice.”

  Davie laughed. “How did you guess?”

  We finally caught up with the other guard vehicle. Near the mouth of the old Imperial Dock – now called the Enlightenment Dock, of course – I made out a hulk alongside which must have been raised from the seabed very recently. Then I realised that guard personnel were carrying stores on board down a narrow gangway.

  “Jesus, we’re not going out in that, are we?” I asked, pointing my open mouth in Davie’s direction.

  “What did you expect?” he answered, putting his shoulder to the driver’s door. “This is the Fisheries Guard, not the High Seas Fleet.”

  Katharine and I followed him out.

  “Evening, Davie.” The bald guardsman called Harry was standing on the damp dockside. He was wearing filthy oil-stained overalls. “These’ll be your pals. No.” He raised a hefty, blackened hand. “I don’t want to see any ID.” He grinned broadly. “That way, when you fall overboard, I’m in the clear.”

  “Very funny,” I said. “Where’s the captain?”

  This time he laughed out loud. A bull with a hard-on would have bellowed more decorously. “Captain? Our magnificent vessels haven’t got room for wankers standing on the bridge telling the crew what to do.” He leaned towards me and I made the disturbing discovery that the stoved-in area on the top of his skull was pulsing like it had its own heart.

  “But if you’re looking for the guy in charge, that’s me.”

  I commented on that under my breath, making sure my lips didn’t move. Davie and Katharine were already walking the plank down to the rotting ex-trawler’s deck.

  “After you,” said the skipper.

  I set off, feeling my boots slip on the gangway and trying to remember when I’d last been on a boat.

  “Down into the bowels,” dirty Harry yelled, pushing me towards a door beneath the wheelhouse. Apart from a faded maroon heart painted on the superstructure, the ship would have had no problem masquerading as a raider.

  “Right,” the guardsman said, pulling out a bottle of barracks whisky and gulping from it before offering it round. “It just so happens that this vessel’s going on routine patrol in eastern waters tonight.” He looked at our faces one by one, holding his gaze on mine. “Eastern waters between Dunbar and Cove. Any good?”

  I nodded. That covered the area of the power station.

  “But you’ll need to understand one thing,” the bald man said, his face cracking into a grin again. “My business is beating a thousand kinds of shite out of fish thieves. That takes priority over your wee outing. They aren’t very nice people, pirates, so if you’re not into violence, you’d better keep your heads down.”

  “What makes you think I’m not into violence?” Katharine asked, taking hold of a fish knife from a rack on the wall.

  Harry laughed like a kid who’s come across the key to his father’s booze cabinet. “My kind of woman,” he boomed.

  Maybe it was just me, but I had a bad feeling about the way the cruise was starting off.

  We had moved out into the firth, six deck crew members taking positions at the vessel’s bow and stern. They were all carrying light machine-guns. Fisheries Guard personnel are among the few who get their hands on the Council’s small store of high-quality firearms. Officially guns were banned after the last of the drugs gangs were dealt with seven years back, but truncheons and auxiliary knives aren’t much good against pirate ships. Until you board them, at least. I reckoned Harry and his crew had done that often enough over the years.

  After we cleared the dock, Katharine and Davie had crashed out. I went up to the cramped wheelhouse and watched the bald man at work. He swung the wheel with the natural seaman’s easy mastery, his mouth set in a solid smile suggesting he lived in hope that raiders would appear as soon as possible. He acknowledged my presence with an unconcerned nod but didn’t waste his breath on talking. Eventually I decided to give it a go.

  “Your people don’t seem to give a shit about us or what we’re doing on board, guardsman.”

  “What makes you think I do?” He grinned humourlessly. “Citizen.” He managed to imbue that word with all the guardsman’s loathing of ordinary citizens who get themselves involved in auxiliary business. I hadn’t put him down as a bigot. A psychopath, yes.

  “I was one of you lot once,” I said, trying to impress him. “My barracks number was—”

  “I know who you were.” He leered at me in the feeble light from the navigation instruments, no trace of even a hard man’s smile on his face now. “You were the fuckhead who got a lot of my mates killed in the drugs wars.”

  That was one way of looking at it. I decided to move the conversation back towards its original direction.

  “Your people, they will keep quiet about this, won’t they?”

  Nice one, Quint. Judging by the way the skin on his scalp had gone all tense, I’d managed to insult him and his beloved crew.

  “My people always keep quiet,” he replied after a long pause. “Citizen.”

  I’d completely screwed up on the diplomacy front so I reckoned I had nothing to lose. “Like they’ve kept quiet about what happened at Torness a couple of years back?”

  Now things got very subdued in the wheelhouse. The trawler’s engine ploughed away beneath us and the waves belted into the bow, fortunately not too heavily. I looked ahead and saw nothing, not a single light. Or anything else. I hoped my companion knew where he was going.

  “So that’s what this is all about,” the guardsman said eventually. “I thought as much.” Then he clammed up again. This was like having a conversation with Rip van Winkle – as soon as it got interesting, decades of nothing.

  “Were you out in eastern waters that night?” I asked, trying very hard to pretend I knew what had happened at the power station.

  “Out in eastern waters,” he repeated. “That would be a good title for a book, eh? ‘Out in eastern waters.’ I like it.”

  “Great, why don’t you use it for your memoirs?” I said, choking on my impatience. “So were you? Out in eastern waters?”

  “Sure we were,” he said, suddenly looking at me seriously. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear the story.”

  Do the bears in what remains of Edinburgh zoo shit in the shrubberies?

  So the bald man with the eyepatch and the dented head told me what he’d seen. End of wisecracks for a bit.

  “I don’t know why I’m letting you in on this. Still, Davie told me you’re okay and I owe him one. That lunatic saved my life on the border when I was on my first tour. It’ll be hours before we get there even if the pirates don’t distract us and, now I think of it, I could do with telling someone the story. We were warned that we’d have a lifetime of shovelling coal if we ever opened our mouths and we haven’t. But it isn’t right. It festers inside you like something a surgeon should have dealings with.”

  “December 2019,” I said.

  “Aye. The fifth.” Harry shook his head then spat out of the open side window. “It’s not a date I can see myself ever forgetting. It was a night like this. Heavy cloud and no chance of making out the campfires on the hills over in Fife. I was pissed off. I wanted to practise my celestial navigation.” He paused and reached for the bottle of barracks malt he had near the wheel. “That’s why so few people had any idea about the explosions.”

  “Explosions?” I said, my gut going leaden.

  “That’s right, citizen. The fuckers had been messing about with the reactors, from what I could gather on the emergency channel. We were about five miles offshore when it started. Christ, the flashes were bright for all the cloud. The power station buildings suddenly looked like they were ten feet away.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What do you think we fucking did?” He turned on me and I could see the rhythmic pulsing in his damaged skull. “I may look like a headcase,
but I’m still an auxiliary. We went in to pick up the injured.”

  “What about . . . weren’t you worried about the fallout?”

  “I never even gave it a thought, pal.” He glared at me again. “You did say you used to be an auxiliary, didn’t you? We look after our own, remember?”

  An image of Caro lying on the floor in the barn during the attack I planned came up in front of me, then disappeared into the murk that was all round the boat.

  “What’s the matter, citizen? Don’t you want to know what we found?” the bald man asked, a dead smile plastered across his face. “Well, I’m telling you what we found even if you’ve lost the stomach for it.” He gulped whisky again. “Fuck all is what we found. As soon as I radioed in my position I was ordered to return to base. Just like that. No discussion, no argument. Goodnight, Torness.” He laughed bitterly. “Course, it didn’t end there. A squad of special guards was waiting for us in Leith. We were confined to the ship until senior auxiliaries from the Science and Energy Directorate arrived and told us to zip our lips together about the firework show or else.”

  “One of those auxiliaries is now the senior guardian, isn’t he?”

  “I think I’ll give that question the body swerve.” He laughed, this time with a trace of humour. “In fact, I think I’ve told you all I’m going to, citizen.”

  I nodded slowly. He’d already said enough to make this freezing cruise worth while. “Thanks, Harry,” I said, taking the bottle from his thick-fingered hand. “I wish you’d call me Quint.”

  The bald man glanced at me with his single eye. “And I wish I had the nerve to sail this bloody boat right across the North Sea. To hell with the fucking Council.” He grabbed the bottle back and grinned malevolently. “And to hell with you, citizen Quint.”

  At least he’d managed to say my name.

  After I swallowed some more whisky to help me get over the shock of hearing a serving auxiliary badmouth his lords and masters, I went down to the cramped cabin over the engine compartment and passed out with my head next to Davie’s on the table. I woke to the smell of good-quality coffee. No doubt it had been looted from a raiding ship.

  “It’s dawn,” Katharine said, handing me a metal mug so battered it could have come from Schliemann’s excavations at Troy. “We’re lying a couple of miles off the power station. The big man wants to know what we’re doing next.” She smiled faintly. “And so do I.”

  “Ah.” I ran my hand through my hair and considered what Harry had told me about Torness. “My plans are in the process of being changed.”

  She moved away haughtily. “I’m sure you’ll let me know when you’ve got them straight.”

  “No, I mean . . . oh, for Christ’s sake, sit down, Katharine.” I nudged Davie and was greeted with his version of a grizzly on the morning hibernation ends. “Time for a wee chat.” I took a gulp of coffee and filled the pair of them in. By the time I finished, neither of them looked very happy.

  “Are you sure about this?” Davie asked dubiously. “I never heard any rumours about explosions. If they were that big, wouldn’t people in the city have seen or heard something?”

  “It’s a long way, Davie, and there was cloud cover. Anyway, if you don’t believe me, ask your mate with the Grand Canyon in his skull.” I turned to Katharine, wondering how many fearful thoughts had just passed through her mind. “Your farm’s not many miles inland from Torness, is it?” I said softly.

  She nodded, her face registering confusion rather than panic. “I wasn’t there then, of course. But none of the others ever mentioned it.”

  I was trying to work out a way to broach the next difficult topic but Davie steamed in ahead of me.

  “Any sheep with two heads?”

  Katharine was obviously even further ahead than that. “No,” she replied calmly. “And no unexplained illnesses or deaths either. Human or animal.”

  Feet pounded down the steps.

  “Oh, you’ve finally woken up, have you?” Harry shook his head disapprovingly at Davie.

  “You, being a member of the superior race, don’t need to sleep, I suppose?” I said.

  “That’ll be right.” Harry let out one of his roaring laughs. “So, have you changed your mind about going ashore for a picnic by the sarcophagus, citizen Quint?”

  I felt Katharine and Davie’s eyes on me.

  “Doesn’t sound like a particularly good idea after all,” I said.

  The bald man laughed again. “You got that right, pal. I wouldn’t have let you go anyway. What I can do is take us in to about half a mile range so you can look at the place through binoculars. You’re in luck. The cloud’s lifting and the pirates must all be stoned. The sea’s as empty as a foreigner’s wallet after the Tourism Directorate has finished with it.”

  He thundered back up to the wheelhouse, leaving us to our thoughts. Mine would have done serious damage to a Geiger counter.

  Grey, freezing morning that stung my eyes and laid waste to my circulation a couple of minutes after I went up on deck. Straight ahead of us stood the great rectangular block of the power station, stark and incongruous against the snow-covered fields behind. I looked through the binoculars Harry had handed me. The concrete end walls were heavily discoloured but between them bright yellow sheeting covered the entire extent of the central façade.

  “Not much sign of damage,” Davie muttered.

  “Obviously they had to cover it up,” Katharine said. “People in the tourist planes would soon have noticed if the place had blown up.”

  I nodded. “They must have rerouted them inland until they fixed the sheeting. But still . . .” I lowered the bins and rubbed my chin. “If there had been any serious radiation leak, monitors abroad would have picked it up. Not every country in Europe’s as chaotic as this island.”

  Katharine moved nearer, running her lower arms along the rusty deckrail. “What are you getting at, Quint?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it was very localised. Maybe the reactor core wasn’t affected.”

  Davie stood up straight and breathed in deeply, then thought better of it. “Christ, is the air safe around here?”

  “I’ve been in this area dozens of times since the fireworks,” Harry shouted from above, then bellowed out a laugh. “Do I look any the worse for it?”

  Katharine and I exchanged glances.

  “I’m not going any closer though,” the big man continued. “So make the most of it.”

  We did. I scanned the high wire fencing. Yellow signs with the nuclear symbol had been hung every few yards. The fencing extended all the way along the pier which had given the only access to the power station. The Edinburgh land border is miles away and the technicians had to come by boat in the early years of the Enlightenment.

  “Quint, what’s that?” Katharine had grabbed my arm hard. “Over there by the gate.”

  I looked through the bins again. Surely not. The words I’d first heard William McEwan use to the senior guardian leaped up like one of the traps laid by the Viet Cong to skewer foot-soldiers in the jungle. It looked like Torness really was the Bone Yard. The unmistakable components of a human skeleton, completely bare of all remnants of flesh and clothing and splayed out in the shape of a St Andrew’s cross, were clinging to the densely strung wire.

  On the way back to Leith, Harry told us he reckoned the skeleton had been put there to scare dissidents or any other interested parties away from the power station. Maybe they were meant to think the fence was electrified, though there hadn’t been much juice coming out of that edifice recently. The Science and Energy Directorate had apparently deserted the place completely. Left it and whatever nuclear nastiness was in it to the east wind and the fauna of what used to be East Lothian.

  It was nearly dark by the time Harry navigated his pride and joy back into the Enlightenment Dock. I decided against reminding him to keep quiet about our trip.

  “Good luck to you, Davie,” he said as we started slithering up the frozen gangplank. “And to
you, hard woman. Pity we didn’t get the chance to see you fight.” He let out a restrained roar. “I’m not wishing you luck, citizen Quint. You’re way, way beyond the realms of luck.”

  I raised a finger to the daft bugger. He was right though. Even if I’d found the Bone Yard, I hadn’t got anything to use against the senior guardian. Let alone the madman who’d been practising his butchery skills in the city.

  “What are we going to do now?” Katharine asked as we got into the Land-Rover.

  “Aye, what next, Quint?” said Davie.

  “Stop ganging up on me, will you?” I yelled, burying my hands in my pockets and sinking my chin down on to the jacket that had done such a bad job of keeping the sea air out. I’d suddenly found myself thinking of Roddie Aitken. That was making me feel as blue as Mississippi Fred McDowall when he sang “Standing at the Burial Ground”.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We headed down Ferry Road towards Trinity. I wanted to call in at the retirement home to let my old man know I was all right. On the way I turned my mobile back on. Less than a minute passed before Hamilton was on my case.

  “Dalrymple? Where the hell have you been?” His voice was tense.

  “What’s happened?” My heart missed a beat as the idea that the killer had struck again hit me.

  “Nothing’s happened, man.” That couldn’t be right. He sounded like a ferret had crawled into his auxiliary-issue long johns. “I’ve been ringing your number every half-hour and getting unobtainable.”

  “Oh.” I tried to play it cool. “I’ve been checking out various archives. I forgot I’d turned it off.”

  “And where’s Hume 253? I haven’t been able to raise him either. What have you been doing with that ‘ask no questions’ I issued? I suppose you think I was born yesterday.” With his heavy beard, he’d have been a big draw in the infirmary’s neo-natal ward. “Anyway, what have you got to report at tonight’s Council meeting?”

  That was a good question. I turned the question back on him while I scrabbled around for something to fob his colleagues off with. Unfortunately he had even less than I did. It was going to be a fun evening.