The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  Eventually we reached the last checkpoint before our destination.

  “Blue Sector Sawmill?” I asked the guardswoman on duty.

  “Straight ahead, about three-quarters of a mile. What are you doing out here at this time of night?” She flashed her torch at us, holding it on my face.

  I leaned out and pushed the beam down. The last thing I needed now was an eager auxiliary calling in to the guard command centre and reporting my presence out here. I held out our “ask no questions” and hoped that the guardswoman wasn’t old enough to have known me when I was in the Public Order Directorate. There wasn’t any sign of recognition. Usually young auxiliaries on their first tours of duty are the ones who get stuck on their own in the middle of nowhere. It’s supposed to be good for their characters.

  I accelerated away, following the road as it ran along the edge of a steep valley. I had a vague recollection of being driven out here to visit some friends of my parents when I was a kid. My old man told me that the village of Temple on the other side of the river had historical associations with the Knights Templar. I had a sudden vision of men in chain mail and white tunics emblazoned with red crosses, men who used a higher purpose like religion to justify slaughter. For some reason that made me think of the senior guardian.

  “I can see a light ahead,” said Katharine, bending forward to squint through the cracked windscreen.

  It was the single maroon lamp displayed by facilities manned by City Guard personnel. We traversed a couple of humpbacks in the road, but that wasn’t why I was feeling queasy. Davie hadn’t called in with anything from the zoo, so this was it. If we didn’t find something here, it would be back to letting the killer call the shots. And to being used as a urinal by the chief boyscout. Apparently even saints have to empty their bladders somewhere.

  The auxiliary who appeared at the sawmill gate was built like a lumberjack, though the Supply Directorate hadn’t managed to come up with an appropriate checked shirt. He rubbed his eyes and screwed them up when he saw the “ask no questions”.

  “What is it you’re after?” he asked suspiciously, admitting us into a Victorian farm courtyard stacked with piles of wood. “We don’t work a night shift here, you know.”

  “I need to see all the rooms in the facility,” I said, putting on the standard do-what-I-say-or-it’s-the-mines-for-you voice that undercover operatives affect when they’re checking up on their colleagues.

  The auxiliary wasn’t impressed – he was old enough to have been through this kind of idiocy dozens of times – but he went into what was obviously the office and threw some switches. The steading was flooded in light, the ornate gables and casements looking as incongruous as a sober tourist in the Grassmarket after midnight. In the nineteenth century it wasn’t a crime to embellish places of work. The Council prefers breezeblocks and concrete.

  We followed the lumberjack, who turned out to be the sawmill supervisor, into the various storehouses, cutting yards, machine rooms and accommodation areas. The auxiliary dormitory was well-behaved, shiny-faced guardsmen blinking in the unshaded overhead light; but the citizen workers were rebellious, at first grumbling about being woken up then running their eyes hungrily over Katharine. They get drafted for month-long tours of duty and there are no sex sessions during that time, so I couldn’t really blame them. Katharine returned their stares blankly and one by one they lowered their eyes.

  All of which would have been fascinating for a social psychologist studying the effect of enforced labour, but it got us nowhere. The nearest thing to a sophisticated chemical lab was the wood treatment room and the nearest thing to dangerous chemicals were the drums of creosote lining the walls.

  The auxiliary led us back to his office and offered us tea. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what that was all about?” he asked over his shoulder as he tinkered with a guard-issue spirit stove.

  He seemed like a pretty reasonable guy. He was past middle age, probably one of the original breed of auxiliaries who used to believe in the Council’s aims and now aren’t so sure. I decided to satisfy his curiosity. You never know what you might pick up if you treat people like human beings.

  “We’re on the trail of some illicit material,” I said. “There’s a chance it moved between here and the main depot.”

  The lumberjack turned round and faced me. I suddenly noticed that the whites of his eyes were cloudy and wondered how much he could see. That was maybe why he’d been posted out here, where all the damage he could do was to his own fingers on the circular saw.

  “What kind of material would that be then?”

  “I don’t think you want to know that, my friend.”

  “That bad?” He handed a mug to Katharine. “There you are, lady.” He was running the risk of getting his head in his hands to play with using that form of address with her, but she didn’t seem to regard him as a threat. Or a patronising arsehole. “Well, was there a particular driver involved?”

  There didn’t seem to be much harm in telling him that.

  “Roddie Aitken?” he said, his face breaking into a grin beneath the shag pile of his beard. “Good lad, Roddie. What’s he been up to?” Obviously the guard jungle drums hadn’t been beating this far out of Edinburgh.

  I looked down at the mug he was holding out to me. “He . . . he had an accident.” I didn’t have the stomach to be more precise.

  “Nothing serious, I hope.” The auxiliary gulped from his own mug. “Must be a couple of weeks since I last saw him.”

  I nodded. “The manifests say he was picking up different kinds of wood.”

  “Aye, that’s right.” The lumberjack nodded, then his eyes shifted slowly away from mine.

  It was one of those moments when you suddenly realise you’re on the brink of something big. You don’t get much warning, only a couple of seconds when the hairs on the back of your neck rise as if a barn dance has just started on your grave.

  “Course, he wasn’t only collecting from us,” the auxiliary said, rubbing his afflicted eyes again then giving a strangely melancholic smile. “There were some packages that came down from the other place too. Only they never say anything about it in the documentation.”

  I was suddenly finding breathing difficult. “The other place?” I asked hoarsely. “What other place? I didn’t see any lights except the one above your gate.” I glanced at Katharine.

  “Me neither,” she said, her gaze locked on the auxiliary.

  He shook his head. “Oh, there’s no light over there at night. Most of the poor sods behind the walls prefer the darkness. Not that they have much choice.”

  I slammed my mug down on his desk, splashing hot liquid on the back of my hand. “For God’s sake, what is this other place?” I shouted.

  He gazed back at us then sighed like an aged wise man finally giving in to his disciples’ demands for enlightenment.

  “The other place?” he repeated in a low, unwavering voice. “You won’t have heard of it. Most of the guardians don’t even know it exists.”

  “What?” Katharine said incredulously. Even she was losing her cool.

  The sawmill supervisor blinked his lustreless eyes. “They call it the Bone Yard.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “So you have heard of it,” the lumberjack said. He could obviously see more than I thought. He was smiling faintly at the expression of shock on my face. It must have rivalled Agamemnon’s when his wife produced an axe in the bathroom at Mycenae. Then the auxiliary’s voice hardened. “That means you must be working for the fuckers in the Science and Energy Directorate.”

  Still struggling to get my head round what was going on, I waved my hands at him ineffectually. “Public Order Directorate,” I gasped. “Special investigator.”

  He sat down again, looking marginally less ferocious. “Well, there’s plenty to investigate up there, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

  “Come on, Katharine,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

  Throughout this ex
change she’d been motionless, an inscrutable look on her face.

  The lumberjack let out a long, deep laugh that wouldn’t have been out of place in a cemetery at midnight. “Your Council authorisation won’t get you anywhere up there, citizen special investigator. The guards will be on to the Science and Energy Directorate before you can blink.” He leaned forward and looked at both of us. “I get the impression you’d like what you’re doing to stay a secret for as long as possible. Am I right?”

  I nodded at him and smiled. There used to be a fair number of auxiliaries like him in the early years of the Enlightenment – people who hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be a normal human being rather than a Council slave.

  “There’s a ten-foot stone wall with barbed wire on the top all the way round the place,” the lumberjack said. “The only gate’s in front of the old house. The wankers up there reckon their security’s tighter than the prison on Cramond Island’s.”

  “What exactly goes on up there?” Katharine asked.

  The auxiliary examined his hands with their swollen fingers for a few moments. “What they say they do – not that they ever say much since they’re a squad of specially chosen lunatics who never go back to the city and have as little to do with us as they can – what they say they do is dispose of cattle with new strains of BSE. That’s why the place is guarded so closely. Supply deliveries and pick-ups are made here, supposedly to avoid any chance of contamination. We do see cattle trucks going up the road occasionally.” He opened his clouded eyes at me knowingly. “Very occasionally.”

  I leaned forward into the ring of light round his desk. “But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”

  “Aye, there is,” the auxiliary said, nodding slowly. But I don’t know what. You’ll have to find that out for yourself.” Suddenly he gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Bell 03.”

  His use of my former barracks number showed he knew who I used to be. I wondered if he’d recognised me the minute we arrived. Perhaps he’d served with me in the directorate. There wasn’t time to ask.

  “Can you get us inside?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Forget it. I’m quite attached to this posting and I don’t want to lose it. Not even for you.” He smiled at me apologetically as he tugged his beard with his fingertips. At least he wasn’t one of those guardsmen like Harry who held it against me that their friends had been killed in the drug wars. “But I will tell you the best place to get a look over the walls. After that you’re on your own.”

  I glanced at Katharine. She shrugged, apparently unconcerned by the prospect of trying to penetrate a high-security facility. She was used to being on her own. So was I, but this was carrying things to extremes.

  The lumberjack was unrolling a detailed City Guard map. Katharine and I gathered round like carrion crows alighting on a carcass. Except I had the feeling that this particular carcass still had a fair amount of life in it.

  We went back the way we came for a mile then took the pick-up down a narrow lane that ran past a pine wood, driving slowly with only the sidelights on. The auxiliary reckoned the best way to approach the compound was from the rear, where the sentries were only placed every hundred yards. But we had to get there while it was still dark. We left the vehicle in a copse and headed off across the fields, following the compass bearing I’d worked out at the sawmill.

  “Quint, why don’t you call in Hamilton and have him pull the place apart?” Katharine asked in a low voice as we stumbled over the rough ground in the faint light of early dawn.

  “I wish I could.” Just after we started walking I’d tripped and landed in a ditch full of half-frozen water. Now my hands and arms were shaking uncontrollably. “But I’m certain that the senior guardian would put a stop to that before we got five yards beyond the gate.”

  “So the great Quintilian Dalrymple’s going to act the hero.” A smile played across her lips.

  “No one’s forcing you to be here,” I hissed, peering at the solid mass that was beginning to rear up on the ridge in front of us. The truth was, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, even if we did manage to get inside. I’d spent so much time and effort searching for the mysterious Bone Yard and I was bloody sure it was the key to everything else that was wrong in the city. But I was also in the process of committing the investigator’s worst strategic error: getting close to the solution and then hoping that everything will work out for the best. Sometimes it’s the only option you have.

  The house inside the walls was built by a Victorian mines magnate who had political aspirations. According to the lumberjack, Gladstone had been a frequent visitor. Since the old Liberal’s favourite hobby apart from rescuing fallen women was chopping up timber, it was surprising that the forest behind the wall was so thick. I wasn’t complaining. The profusion of branches hanging down over the walls made life difficult for the sentries. From behind the ruined chapel outside the compound – no sharing a pew with the peasants in the village kirk for the original owner – Katharine and I took in the lie of the land. The sun was rising but there was a mist so we weren’t as obvious as we might have been.

  “What next, Quint? If we sling over that rope your friend gave us, we should be able to get on to the wall in that sheltered place.”

  I took a quick look at the sentry posts. They were built up on the inside with only a couple of feet of planking cut with slit-holes showing from where we were. I had a feeling that the senior guardian would not be canonising whoever was in charge. Like a lot of top-security facilities in the city its impregnability was a matter of rumour rather than fact.

  “Okay, go for it,” I said, squeezing her arm. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  “You’d better be,” Katharine replied, looking over her shoulder. “After all, you’re the one who knows what he’s doing here.” She was away towards the wall before I could respond to that crack. Then the rope with the steel hook the lumberjack had given us flew over the wire on the top. It seemed to get a good purchase on something on the other side. I hoped it wasn’t a passing guardsman’s throat.

  Katharine hauled herself up, the long skirts of her coat stuffed into her belt, then signalled to me to follow.

  I stepped out and froze. There was a movement in the sentry box to my right. A period that felt like several decades, but in reality couldn’t have been more than five seconds, ground by. I couldn’t move back into the cover of the chapel wall in case that convinced the sentry that he or she had seen something. Swivelling my eyes, I satisfied myself that the maroon beret had drawn back from the slits in the planking. And ran for the wall like a frightened rabbit. It was only as I was halfway up the rope that the idiocy of the situation struck me. Taking refuge inside the walls of a top-security facility was carrying even my advanced appreciation of the bizarre a bit too far.

  “Come on, for God’s sake,” Katharine said, holding out her hand as I began to struggle.

  I took it without a second thought. I’ve never been much good at climbing ropes and I’m not proud either. There was a nasty moment when the barbed wire acquainted itself with my thighs, then I was over, pulling the rope up with me. We shinned down the other side and dived into the undergrowth. It was drenched in an icy dew.

  “What next?” Katharine asked. “We can’t see a thing from here.”

  “How do you fancy crawling through this?”

  She pulled her coat skirts out. “No problem. I’m properly equipped.” She glanced at my donkey jacket and soaked trousers contemptuously. “Unlike you.”

  So we crawled through the bracken and ferns till we reached the inner edge of the wood. In the distance at the far end of the enclosed land stood the main house, a large two-storey edifice in sandstone with enough windows to suggest that the man who built it either had an army of offspring or a lot of fawning friends who came to stay every weekend. Between us and the house was a fenced field where a couple of very sane-looking cows were chewing the cud. Away to the left was a much newer building, a
long, low line of breezeblock huts with shuttered windows. Late period Council style without a doubt. And at the far end, a taller building without a single window from which a brick-built chimney rose high above the tops of even the oldest trees. That was where we were headed. Except we got distracted on the way.

  The first thing we came across was a clearing in the wood. The surface of the ground seemed to be flat, then I noticed that it was covered by separate slabs of dull grey metal.

  “What are those?” Katharine asked, looking around the open space. “There must be over thirty of them.”

  We went closer. And I saw a yellow-bordered symbol on each slab that immediately brought Torness to mind.

  “Jesus.”

  “What is it, Quint?” Katharine asked again.

  I went closer. There was no doubt about it. The international warning for radiation danger was on every slab. What’s more, you didn’t have to be a metallurgist to get the idea that the metal was lead, or an undertaker to recognise the slabs as grave markers.

  “Jesus,” I repeated. “This is it. This is the Bone Yard. Literally.”

  Katharine stared at me, then glanced away towards a narrow gap in the trees on the other side of the clearing. “Someone’s coming,” she said quietly.

  I looked across the clearing and saw two figures approaching. The normal reaction would have been to melt back into the undergrowth and I almost did that. Then I realised that the figures weren’t looking at us. They were dressed in citizen-issue grey coats that were several sizes too big for them and their heads were covered by the flat caps that absolve the Supply Directorate from providing the population with umbrellas. They were also concentrating so hard on the path in front of them that I began to wonder if there were mantraps under the worn grass. Then the leading one stumbled and the other person put out a hand and supported his or her companion – it was impossible to tell which sex they were from our position. From their slow, unsteady progress, I got the impression they were very old.