The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  We were in luck. The senior guardian was preoccupied – I’d like to have known what with – and let Hamilton and me off the hook.

  I went back to the flat and found Katharine asleep on the sofa. Her face wasn’t tense like it was when she was awake and she looked much younger. I put my hand out and, without touching her, moved it slowly downwards above her short hair and the contours of her cheek and jaw. I had a sudden flash of her as she straddled me in my armchair a couple of years ago, her neck taut as she simultaneously forced herself down on me and bent her upper body back. The fact that I hadn’t attended a sex session for nearly a fortnight suddenly became very apparent.

  Then I heard someone begin to pound up the stair in archetypal guard fashion. So did Katharine. She was instantly awake, sitting up and at the ready. Her face was lined again, the moment of repose gone.

  Davie shouldered open the door, carrying a large movable feast in both hands. “Guess what I’ve got here,” he said, looking pleased with himself.

  “Rations stolen from ordinary citizens?” Katharine asked with a sour smile.

  “Shut up, will you?” I hissed, stuffing a tape of Council-approved folk music into my machine. I didn’t want anyone to hear what we were about to discuss, let alone notice that I’d acquired a non-paying lodger who featured on the Deserters Register.

  “You don’t have to have any of it if your heavy-duty moral scruples get in the way,” Davie said to Katharine.

  That was it. I’d had it with them. “You’re a pair of tossers,” I shouted. “We’ve got our noses in all sorts of forbidden places and all you two can do is take the piss out of each other.” I gave them the sulphuric acid glare I inherited from my mother. I’ve practised it a lot less than she did but it seemed to get through to them. “I’m not joking. Either give me some decent back-up or fuck off out the door.”

  They both looked pretty sheepish.

  “So what have you got there, Davie?” I asked after a strained silence.

  “Em, right, there’s a pot of barracks stew, with decent meat in it “—he poked around in the dark brown contents of a cast-iron pan—” well, semi-decent meat.”

  Katharine’s nose twitched dubiously.

  “And wholemeal bread,” Davie continued, “barracks beer, apple crumble and – wait for it – real cream.”

  “Real cream?” Katharine leaned forward, an interested expression on her face. “Where did you get that?”

  “What’s it to you?” Davie looked affronted. “You reckon I took this—”

  “You remember where the door is, don’t you, guardsman?” I said, burning him with the acid look again.

  He glanced over his shoulder then sat down at the table. “It came from the guard kitchens,” he muttered. “If it’s any business of—”

  “I’m not joking, Davie,” I yelled.

  We settled down to eat to the strains of bagpipes and fiddles. It could have been worse. At least there weren’t any accordions.

  “Right, team, we have to talk.” I pushed my plate away and emptied my glass of barracks heavy.

  Katharine took the armchair, leaving Davie to join me on the sofa. “It’s about time we sorted things out, Quint,” she said. “I haven’t got a clue what we’re doing and I don’t think you have either.”

  “Thank you for that constructive opening.”

  “I’d have to go along with her there, Quint,” Davie said, keeping his eyes off me.

  “You as well? Now I really know who my friends are.” I pulled out my notepad and started flicking through the pages. That didn’t get me much further. “Okay. Review of where we stand. The cruise on your pal Harry’s floating shipwreck wasn’t a complete waste of time.”

  “That is reassuring,” Katharine said.

  It was her turn for the vitriolic look. “We’ve got confirmation that something disastrous happened at the power station near the end of 2019.”

  “Aye, but what’s that got to do with these murders?” Davie said, opening his arms wide like a drunken tourist who’s forgotten where his hotel is.

  “That’s the difficult bit.” I drew a square on my pad, wrote “Torness” in it then sketched in the coastline. “How far’s your farm from the power station again, Katharine?”

  “About ten miles, I suppose. We never go that way because of the—”

  “Because of the gangs,” I interrupted. “In particular, because of the gang led by the headcase known as the Screecher?”

  She nodded. “So?”

  “So maybe the Screecher got nosy and took a trip over the fence.”

  “In which case, either they were his bones on the wire,” said Davie, “or he glows in the dark.”

  “He might have sent one of his minions in,” I said.

  Katharine leaned forward and nodded her head. “He had a nuclear physicist in his gang, remember? Maybe the Screecher found him at the power station.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “And maybe the Screecher used what he learned from him to put the squeeze on someone in the Council. By threatening to spread the word about the explosions.”

  Davie’s hand came down hard on my knee. “Don’t piss about, Quint. We all know the senior guardian’s the most likely person to have had the squeeze put on him – Science and Energy is his directorate. Are you sure about this?”

  “No,” I said with a hollow laugh. “Except there are those files missing from the directorate archive. The ones you know who’s probably got in his private library.”

  Katharine sat back, shaking her head. “Even if you sneaked a look at them, they wouldn’t necessarily show any link to what’s been going on in the last couple of months.”

  “True enough.” I flicked through the pages again. This time I felt a couple of twinges. The first had to do with the toxicologist, but I let that one go for the moment. The second was much more pressing. Roddie Aitken had just made another appearance in my thoughts.

  “What have you come up with?” Davie asked.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You’re smirking like a kid who’s got off border duty by playing with himself during his assessment.”

  Katharine yawned. “I’d have thought that would get him a permanent transfer into the City Guard.”

  “Children,” I said, glaring them into submission. “Answer me this. As outlined in the manual I wrote for the directorate, what’s the basic rule of investigating practice?”

  Davie scratched his beard. “Always triangulate data?” he suggested without much confidence.

  “Wrong, guardsman,” Katharine said with a superior smile. “Always compare initial evidence and statements with subsequent data.” It was a long time since she’d done her auxiliary training, but what I wrote in the Public Order in Practice manual seemed to have stuck.

  “Very good. Unfortunately I haven’t been following my own instructions.”

  “Meaning what?” Davie demanded, pissed off that a demoted auxiliary who was also a deserter had shown him up.

  “Meaning that, in all this chaos, we’ve forgotten about the first victim.”

  Now Katharine was looking puzzled. “The young man? I assumed he had something to do with the Electric Blues.”

  I shook my head. “We never found any evidence of that. And he definitely didn’t strike me as a drug trafficker.”

  Davie got up and went back to the table. What was left of the apple crumble did a disappearing act. “Me neither,” he mumbled with his mouth full.

  “What are you saying, Quint?” Katharine asked.

  “I’m saying that tomorrow morning we hit the Delivery Department files and find out his movements over the last few weeks.”

  “But I’ve been through those files,” Davie said.

  “Yes, but we weren’t particularly interested in where he’d been delivering, were we? Maybe he went somewhere that’s linked with the drugs. Like, for instance, where they’re produced.”

  He nodded, not looking too convinced. Soon afterwards he went bac
k to his billet. Katharine went to bed and didn’t move when I lay down on the other side. I left a space between us which she didn’t move into. I didn’t feel confident enough to stake a claim. As I drifted off, thankful at least that the bed wasn’t moving up and down like dirty Harry’s ship of fools, I remembered the oath I’d sworn. I’d been ignoring Roddie, but I was back on track now. I didn’t care about the other two victims much, though even corrupt auxiliaries don’t deserve to die the way they did. But I cared about Roddie and his killer was going to find that out. I slept surprisingly well that night.

  The next morning was warmer and the snow was gone from the streets. It had turned into huge amounts of water that the works buses were spraying over citizens on the pavements. Their faces were even more sullen than they usually are first thing.

  Davie steered the Land-Rover down to the Supply Directorate depot off the Canongate. In pre-Enlightenment times it had been part of Waverley station, but the Council blocked the railway lines leading in and out of the city soon after independence. That was part of their policy of securing the borders and getting a grip on the drugs gangs. The fact that it enabled them to control everything that went on in the city was purely incidental, of course.

  The depot is gigantic, nearly half a mile long. The sentry at the gate took one look at the guard vehicle and waved us through without checking our IDs, which meant that Katharine didn’t have to show her “ask no questions”. I’d wondered about bringing her along – if we ran into Hamilton and he recognised her, we’d be in serious shit – but on balance it seemed safer to keep an eye on her. God knows what she’d have got up to on her own.

  We drove into the great covered area. Rows of packing cases and piles of stores stretched away into the distance. In the early days the Council decided to concentrate all the city’s supplies in one heavily guarded location to discourage thieving. That had the additional advantage of providing huge numbers of jobs for citizens involved in recording, packing and delivering the stuff. In fact, that may have been the only advantage because there’s probably more pilfering and black-market-controlled stealing now than there ever was before.

  Davie drove down the central passage towards the office section. We passed great heaps of potatoes and turnips, the bitter-sweet stink from the latter invading the Land-Rover; then boxes full of cheap clothes run up in the Council’s sweatshops, not that the guardians refer to them as such; and finally, shelves full of the tattered books that are bought in on the cheap from other cities’ ransacked libraries. Personnel from the Information Directorate’s Censorship Department were sorting through them, tossing the rejects into crates marked “For Burning”. The Council gets more heat from books than it does from the nuclear power station at Torness. There must be some sort of moral in that.

  Katharine was shaking her head. “There’s enough food in here to keep the city going for years.”

  Davie nodded. “Aye, and this depot doesn’t handle the meat. You should see how much of that they’ve got in the cold stores at Slateford.”

  That reminded me of the Bone Yard. Not long ago I thought it might have something to do with the slaughterhouses in that part of the city. Something about that idea still nagged at me.

  “So why are Edinburgh citizens all so thin and hungry-looking?” Katharine was saying. “Why doesn’t the Council increase the entitlement to food vouchers?”

  Davie shrugged, looking away as he pulled into a parking space beside a Supply Directorate delivery van that was held together with wire.

  “Don’t forget the tourists,” I said as I opened the door. “They get first bite at the cherry. And at the sirloin steak.”

  Davie slammed the door on his side. “Sirloin steak?” he asked. “What’s that, then?”

  The deliveries supervisor, a middle-aged woman with grey hair and the wan look of someone who’s seen it all and isn’t convinced it was worth the bother, greeted us without enthusiasm. But at least she was efficient.

  “All the delivery documentation pertaining to Roderick Aitken was removed from the main archive after his death. I will have it sent up to the meeting room for you to inspect.” She gave Davie a sceptical glance from behind the stacks of files on her desk. “I hope you get more out it than you did the last time you were here, Hume 253.”

  We went up grimy stairs to a room furnished with a table and chairs that wouldn’t have found space in a junk shop in the old days. No one could accuse Supply Directorate staff of creaming off quality goods to brighten up their place of work. I looked out of dirty windows at the scene that stretched across the depot’s endless concrete floor. Forklifts raced around like crazed dung beetles, loading and discharging, endlessly moving things from one location to another. Armies of staff paraded around with clipboards, checking deliveries off and distributing bits of paper. The system seemed to work but it didn’t exactly make you rejoice in the regime. A single computer would have saved an awful lot of hassle. But then there’d be citizens hanging around with nothing to do and the Council couldn’t have that.

  A couple of porters arrived with our very own collection of delivery sheets, waybills, receipts and rosters. We settled down to the kind of job that archivists dream about. I had some fun but the others struggled. After an hour we compared notes.

  “There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to the goods he delivered over the last three months,” Katharine said, pushing away the files she’d been working on. “New carpets to tourist hotels, fruit, vegetables and other supplies to food stores, beer to the citizens’ bars. About the only thing he hasn’t delivered is sex aids to the recreation centres.”

  “The old hands keep that job for themselves,” Davie said with a grin.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  He pulled a face that suggested he’d been wasting his time too. “No pattern with the vehicles he’s been driving either.” I’d put him on to that in case there were any Roddie had been assigned frequently; we could then have looked for a secret compartment where drugs might have been stashed. “Transits, Renaults, some Polish contraptions I can’t pronounce the name of. They even had him on a bicycle distributing styluses for the record players in the tourist clubs.” He raised his shoulders. “Nothing regular.”

  “Which leaves me,” I said, giving them a triumphant smile. “And I’ve got several goodies.”

  “Oh, aye?” Davie came round the table.

  “What is it, Quint?” Katharine kept to her chair, but her voice betrayed her interest.

  “What I’ve got is three places where he made more than six visits in the last month of his life, i.e. December. I haven’t gone any further back yet. I reckon any lead will be recent rather than months in the past.”

  “I wish you’d told me that,” Davie complained.

  “Why do you think the frequency of visits is important?” Katharine said, ignoring him. “Surely he could have gone only once or twice to the place we’re after?”

  “You’re right, he could have. But let’s hope he didn’t. Otherwise we’re going to be driving around the city for the rest of our lives.”

  She nodded. “Fair enough. So where are these three places?”

  “Number one, the zoo.”

  “Animal feed,” Katharine said, checking her notes.

  “Yup. Number two, a sawmill near a village called Temple about ten miles south of the city.”

  “Pine slats, two by fours and dormitory partitions.”

  “Right again. And number three, Slaughterhouse Four at Slateford.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Davie. “Sirloin steak.”

  Katharine actually laughed at that. “Among other things. So where do we go first?”

  I knew where I wanted to go first. It was finally time to check out the city’s meat production facilities.

  “How are we going to manage this on our own?” Katharine asked as we came out of the depot.

  “We aren’t,” I replied. “If we’re going to have any chance of finding the laboratory tha
t’s been producing the Electric Blues, we’re going to need expert help.”

  She thought for a moment then turned to me with a satisfied smile. “The toxicologist.”

  “Correct. Head for the King’s Buildings, Davie.”

  He turned down St Mary’s Street, glancing at me as he span the wheel. “Won’t we need some back-up, Quint?”

  “You mean, shouldn’t we inform Hamilton?” I asked with a laugh.

  He wasn’t impressed and gave both of us the benefit of his guardsman’s assault glare. “That as well. I seem to remember a lot of references in your handbook to keeping senior officers fully informed.”

  “True enough,” I said. “But that handbook was written for serving auxiliaries, not demoted ones like me.”

  “And me,” put in Katharine.

  “Also, telling Hamilton and calling in more guard personnel to help with the operation will mean that what we’re doing gets leaked within half an hour. I don’t want that. Don’t worry, Davie, I’ve got to report to the Council tonight. I just don’t want to give any advance warning of this line of enquiry.”

  I braced myself as he slammed his foot on the brakes at the junction with the Cowgate. Five or six cattle galloped nervously towards the Grassmarket, the herdsmen in medieval costume being applauded by a small group of tourists who presumably had nothing better to do with their time. At least those cows had escaped the city’s slaughterhouses – for the time being.

  I left Katharine and Davie in the Land-Rover outside the labs and went to find the chief toxicologist. This time he wasn’t listening to Robert Johnson in his private quarters, but was supervising a team of white-coated, masked, rubber-gloved chemists who were siphoning off a clear liquid with extreme caution.

  The toxicologist saw me through the glass panel. I gathered from his energetic semaphore that he didn’t want me to come any closer.

  “Citizen Dalrymple,” he said as he eventually emerged, pulling down his mask. “You caught me at a very delicate procedural juncture.”

  Classic senior auxiliary gibberish. “What is it you’ve got in there?” I asked.