The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  “As I said, citizen. You know him.” He was still smiling viciously, like a public executioner fingering the blade of his axe. Then he struck. “He stood watching while your woman friend was strangled by the Ear, Nose and Throat Man. He was that psychopath’s leader.”

  I was back in the barn on Soutra seven years ago during the attack on the city’s last remaining drugs gang; men turning to run and leaving a slim, shuddering form on the floor. Caro. She died a few seconds after I got to her.

  “The Wolf,” I said incredulously. Then I made the connection with the gang leader’s name. The Screecher. No doubt he thought that was a really neat pseudonym for a blues singer.

  I focused on the guardian again. “You’re even sicker than I thought you were. You’ve been dealing with Howlin’ Wolf? You set the Wolf on Roddie Aitken? You let the Wolf play games with me while he was cutting your own auxiliaries to pieces?”

  I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. It only took a split second. The head-butt spread his nose over his face like a ripe plum. That was the first instalment of his payment for the lives of Roddie Aitken and William McEwan.

  Then I sank back into a chair and sat there quaking. The Wolf. Jesus. We really were up against Edinburgh’s public enemy number one.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I called Davie in and got him to handcuff the chief boyscout to the arm of his chair. Now that I had him where I wanted him there was no need to use Harry’s guys as postmen, so we called them off and got them to assemble at the castle. Hamilton and Katharine soon joined us in the senior guardian’s study.

  “What happened to him?” Lewis asked, bending over to examine the comatose figure on the desk.

  “Remember those operations women used to get done before the Enlightenment to make themselves more appealing?” I asked. “He was in urgent need of one.”

  “Not only women had nose jobs,” Katharine said sharply.

  Lewis Hamilton seemed to be impressed by what I’d done to his boss. “I take it he was responsible for everything,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “What did he tell you?”

  “Not as much as he might have. I got carried away before he finished.” I filled them in on what I’d learned.

  Hamilton looked even more disgusted when he found out that we were up against the Wolf. “Good God, man, I assumed that bloodthirsty lunatic left Edinburgh years ago and went to prey on the youth of some less stable city.”

  “Well, he’s back home,” I said. “The question now is how do we track him down?”

  “Use the drugs?” Davie suggested. “They’re what he wants, aren’t they?”

  Hamilton wasn’t keen. “What are you proposing, guardsman? That we tie them to a tree in Princes Street Gardens and wait for him to pick them up?”

  Davie shrugged. “It was only an idea.”

  “Bait,” I said, nodding. “It’s reasonable enough.” I pointed at the figure that was still slumped over the desk. “We could use him instead of the drugs.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to sell either of those options to the Council,” Hamilton said. “It’s going to be hard enough to get them to accept that their hero’s been concealing all these horrors.”

  “So how are we going to find the killer?” asked Katharine.

  I went over to the window and looked out through the trees into the circle of grass in the middle of Moray Place. It was there that the hunt for the last killer ended. Something about that case was beginning to resurface in my mind, but it was like a deep-sea diver avoiding the bends: coming up extremely slowly. Whereas I was certain we needed to nail the Wolf quickly before he used his knife, let alone his teeth, again. Why had he been quiet for so long?

  It was coming up to the time of the Council meeting. We were going to confront the guardians with the photos and papers that proved the senior guardian’s guilt. Hamilton drafted in squads of guards to seal off the area around the Assembly Hall, just in case any of the chief boyscout’s supporters were inclined to resist. Davie called Harry and told him to bring his people down to Moray Place. We needed an escort we could rely on for the guy with the flattened nose and they had the right qualifications.

  In the Land-Rover surrounded by burly figures in oil-and salt-impregnated uniforms, the senior guardian was doing his best to look like an early Christian martyr. His long hair and wispy beard, the latter now matted with blood, added to the effect. He sat with his hands manacled to guards, his chin up and his eyes set in a glassy stare.

  “What’s the plan then?” Davie asked as we drove through Charlotte Square. It was so cold that the breath of the tourists around the gambling tents stood up from their mouths like periscopes above the surface of a dark ocean.

  “Council meeting first,” I said, glancing round at the senior guardian. “The last one for you.” He made no sign of having heard me. “Then a detailed interrogation in the castle,” I continued, turning back to Davie. “He knows things that’ll lead us to the Wolf, I’m sure of it.”

  Katharine was crushed up against me in the front seat. I felt her arm and leg move. “How are you sure, Quint? Another one of your hunches?”

  I didn’t reply, just looked out as we passed the shops and restaurants on Princes Street. Their garish lights and banners were giving tourists the come-on like an aged tart in serious need of cosmetic surgery. Or even a total body transplant.

  I turned to the senior guardian. “There’s something I don’t get about the Bone Yard. Why did you bury the bodies of the auxiliaries who’d been exposed to radiation? You could have burned them in the furnace there.”

  He gave me a brief, superior glance. “Scientists don’t destroy material that might prove useful in the future, citizen.”

  I looked away in revulsion.

  We skidded on the Mound’s icy surfaces then pulled round the corner. Guard personnel waved us into Mound Place and Davie stopped by the railing separating the road from the steep slope of the gardens. An evening race meeting was in progress despite the weather. They use guard sprinters when it’s too cold for the horses.

  I ran my eye around the steps leading up to the Assembly Hall. A couple of guardians, one of them the Ice Queen, were looking at us dubiously, puzzled by the extra security. I don’t know if they recognised the figure in the back of the vehicle.

  “Right, get him out,” I said to Harry and his men.

  Doors creaked and the Land-Rover began to empty. I followed Katharine out of the passenger door and stopped to stretch my legs. During that process I made the mistake of blinking. I was aware of a sudden flurry of movement to the rear. That flurry came as the senior guardian wrenched the two guardsmen who were attached to him towards the railing. They stuck their free hands out to stop themselves, but he whiplashed forward like he’d been jabbed with a cattle prod. The point of the black-painted railing upright came out of the back of his neck, forming a small pyramid trimmed by strands of bloody hair. As cosmetic surgery goes, it was pretty radical. The irony of the city’s chief official committing the heinous crime of suicide in front of the Assembly Hall wasn’t bad either.

  In the background to the right, the broken spire of the Enlightenment Monument rose up into the darkness, like a vandalised roadsign pointing to a utopia that no one believes in any more.

  The Council meeting was pretty fraught. After the medical guardian had supervised the removal of the senior guardian from the railing and confirmed that he was dead, Hamilton hit his colleagues with the Bone Yard evidence. They were white-faced and quiet, like schoolchildren whose chemistry teacher had just drunk battery acid in front of them. It wasn’t difficult for Lewis to get himself elected temporary senior guardian. Considering that had been his ambition for at least fifteen years, he was very cool about it. I wasn’t surprised to hear them vote for a total news blackout about the Bone Yard and the chief boyscout’s suicide as well. A report of the latter might have resulted in Edinburgh citizens dancing in the streets.

  Afterwards we went up to the
castle. No mutilated bodies had been discovered, there were no reports of violence. Christ, there weren’t even any reports of “suspicious behaviour”, the guard’s blanket charge for citizens who get up their noses. So where was the Howlin’ Wolf and what was he doing?

  “Maybe he’s crossed back over the border,” Davie said. We were sitting at Hamilton’s conference table tossing ideas around.

  “Maybe he has,” I said. I was looking out at the bright lights of the city centre.

  “You don’t believe that, do you, Quint?” Katharine said, leaning back in her chair. She had her coat buttoned up. Hamilton’s idea of heating would have gone down well in ancient Sparta.

  I shook my head then glanced across at the guardian’s computer terminal. When in doubt, hit the archives. Except that in this particular case I knew I’d be wasting my time. I spent years trying to trace the Wolf and his gang members in the records when I was in the directorate, but he’d made sure they all kept out of the Council’s bureaucracy from the second the Enlightenment came to power. I still got up and went over to the machine, unable to resist the temptation. Maybe there was something in the previously restricted files on the deceased senior guardian that referred to the deal with the Wolf.

  But there wasn’t. As I’d already discovered, the chief boyscout knew all about what to include in the archives and what to keep to himself. The filing cabinets in his study contained pharmacological reports and production schedules of the Electric Blues, but nothing about distribution or the Wolf. I did find out from the chief boyscout’s personal file that his first sexual encounter was with a man who’d been a senior figure in the Church before independence, but he was hardly the only teenager who’d been down that path.

  At midnight we called things off. Davie drove Katharine and me back to my place. As we swung round the bend at Tollcross and entered the blacked-out zone outside the tourist centre, I found myself dredging my memory for the thought that had eluded me earlier. It was something about the last murder case that being in Moray Place had provoked. The deep-sea diver was still controlling his buoyancy as carefully as a Supply Directorate clerk distributes ration books, but I was close, I almost had it.

  We arrived outside my flat. I got out stiffly, forgetting how cold it was. The icy road surface did for me again and I landed hard on my arse, which put all thoughts of how to catch the Wolf temporarily out of my mind. The fact that Katharine was laughing at me didn’t help the process of ratiocination either.

  “Jesus Christ, what a day,” I groaned, dropping on to the sofa.

  “Don’t forget last night,” Katharine said. “And yesterday. It seems you need to make an application to get a night’s sleep these days.”

  I reached out for the bottle of whisky on the table. “Two fingers for you and two fingers for me,” I said, holding it up to the candle flame.

  She raised an eyebrow but didn’t refuse her share. “What happens next, Quint?” she asked, pushing my legs away and sitting down next to me.

  The whisky had an instant effect. The faces of the people I’d been involved with over the last twenty-four hours flickered before me like the frames of an old film: the lumberjack who’d recognised me; the fragile inmates of the Bone Yard with their clouded eyes, their blotched complexions and their soft, sad voices; the toxicologist dashing to greet them, tears coursing down his wrinkled face; and the senior guardian, his face splashed with blood from his shattered nose and, at the last, his body hanging like a hooked fish from the railing spike.

  “What happens next?” I repeated wearily. “We try to find the Wolf before he gets bored with selecting his victims and goes back to indiscriminate mayhem. He used to be an expert at that.”

  Katharine nudged me with her elbow. “That wasn’t what I meant.” She put the fingers of one hand on my chin and turned my face towards her. “What happens to us?”

  My mouth experienced a sudden attack of paralysis. I could look at her, take in the way her eyes were wide apart and fixed on mine – but speak? No chance.

  “You’ve been so distant, Quint. It’s like I don’t exist,” she said, nudging me in the ribs again with enough force to make me wince. “I suppose you think I only came back to the city to tell you about the drugs formula.”

  The function of movement returned to my mouth but I was having difficulty forming a sentence with the words in the right order. Eventually I made the grade.

  “Wait a minute, Katharine. You’ve not exactly been sending out too many signals yourself. What did you expect me to do? Listen to your story about the Cavemen then drag you to bed?”

  Her face slackened and she gave me another smile. I’d seen more of those in the last five minutes than I had since she came back. “I’m sorry. You were so good about all the shit that happened to me.” Her gaze dropped and her voice became less assured. “I suppose I just thought you’d be glad to see me again. Treat me like a long-lost lover rather than a psychiatric case.”

  I slid my hand over hers. She didn’t move it away. “I thought you’d given up on men,” I said. “You did kind of give that impression, Katharine.”

  She laughed. “I kind of gave that impression because I had given up on men, Quint. But you were never just one of them to me. I saved your life, remember.” She moved her face close to mine.

  I wasn’t too sure where this debate was headed. “So because of that you have some kind of hold over me?” I asked, leaning my forehead against hers.

  She nodded then put her lips against mine. At first she didn’t make any attempt to kiss me and I didn’t respond. Then we seemed to get used to each other and there was a lot of tongue contact.

  Eventually she pulled away. “Come on, let’s get under the covers. Otherwise they’ll find us like Captain Scott and his friends in the morning.”

  We stumbled into the bedroom, arms round each other. Her coat proved to be as big a source of trouble as it had been since I first laid eyes on it. We finally got our outer layers off and took refuge in my bed. It was dark under the covers but we didn’t seem to have forgotten the general layout of each other’s bodies.

  “God, I haven’t been near a shower for days,” I said as my shirt came over my head.

  “And you think I have?” Katharine replied from the region of my lower abdomen.

  Once I was sensitive about what got up my nose, but years of weekly visits to the communal baths have put paid to that.

  “Katharine,” I gasped, suddenly feeling her mouth on my cock, “a condom, I’ve got one in the . . .”

  A few seconds later her face came up to mine. “Too late,” she said, her voice deep and alluring. “How long do you need to get hard again?”

  “Twenty minutes?” The hard points of her breasts were rubbing against my chest and her groin was crushed against mine. I was forced to recalculate. “Quarter of an hour?”

  “I’ll settle for ten minutes,” she said, breathing into my ear. “That’s my best offer.”

  I closed my eyes and moved my hands down her back. “Done,” I murmured, wondering exactly what kind of deal I’d just signed off on.

  It turned out that I was party to an agreement similar to that entered into by Cleopatra and Mark Antony – something along the lines of “Forget the major crises taking place in the outside world, let’s spend the rest of our lives screwing”. Except that the rest of our lives in this case meant the next four hours. That was a long way beyond what I thought would be the limit of my energy reserves, as well as a strain on my stash of condoms.

  I must have fallen into an abyss of dreamless sleep because the next thing I knew was the flailing sensation of coming up for air after a long dive. It wasn’t just me waking up though. What also resurfaced was the thought that had been bothering me last night. Who says sex isn’t good for the mind?

  I sat up in bed, only vaguely aware that my shoulders were in the process of becoming a heat-free zone. My mind had just gone into overdrive. The murder case two years ago. Remembering that in Moray Place ha
d set off the chain of ideas that I couldn’t get hold of at the time. But now I had it. I’d made the connection I needed to identify that murderer by using information I’d got from a former member of Howlin’ Wolf’s gang who was a prisoner in the city’s sole prison – the gang member known as Leadbelly. He might be able to help me again. But was he still alive? The last time I saw him he looked like he was a living skeleton and that was nearly two years ago.

  I toppled out of bed and scrabbled around in my clothes for my mobile.

  “What’s going on, Quint?” Katharine asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

  “Lewis?” I said, waving at her to be quiet. “Are you in the castle? Good. I want you to log on to your computer.”

  “What are you talking about, man?” the guardian said in confusion. “It’s not even six o’clock.” You have to wake up very early in the morning to beat Lewis Hamilton.

  “Don’t argue, just get over to the terminal. Ready? Okay, do exactly what I tell you. Call up the main directorate menu. Got that?”

  There was a long pause. “All right, it’s on screen.”

  “Highlight the Corrections Department option.”

  “The Corrections . . . ?”

  “Just do it!” I shouted.

  “I have,” Hamilton replied tersely.

  “Highlight Cramond Island.”

  “Done.”

  “Highlight Prisoner Register.”

  “Done.”

  “Right. Are there any prisoners who entered the facility in 2015?” I couldn’t remember Leadbelly’s prisoner number but the year he was captured was burned on my memory permanently because of Caro’s death.

  “There’s only one,” the guardian said at last.

  “Highlight his number.”

  “Done.”

  “Okay,” I said breathlessly. “Scroll down the file and see if there’s any reference to his drug gang name of Leadbelly.”