Heads or Hearts

by Paul Johnston

‘Like hell,’ Davie whispered. He was probably right. There would be a purge of the Public Order Directorate, indeed of all the directorates. The city’s mines and farms would have plenty of new recruits.

  I looked around the stacks. Weapons had indeed moved in the direction of the holders’ feet. The only people resisting were Guardian Doris and her bodyguards.

  ‘Screw the traitors!’ Davie said, standing up and stunning the big men.

  The guardian seemed to be in a world of her own, maybe a vision of what Edinburgh could have been with her as leader. Then she snapped out of it.

  ‘For the last time, Doris, drop your weapon!’ Calder shouted.

  His fellow Council member shook her head, raised the pistol to her chest and shot herself in the heart. The bullet passed through her and ricocheted off the APC. It made Fergus Calder duck.

  It turned out that the vast majority of the Guard were loyal, though some of them were no doubt putting on an act. Whoever succeeded Doris Barclay would have to do a thorough check. Or maybe just forget about the whole thing and keep a close eye on future developments.

  I was called over to the senior guardian, who was wearing a suit of body armour that made him look like a robot – and he hadn’t even poked the end of a finger out of the APC.

  ‘Meet me at Moray Place in half an hour, Quint,’ he said.

  So first names were back in favour. That didn’t fill me with joy.

  Davie was dealing with his wounded – there had been no deaths.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ I said. ‘Can you check with the Raeburn personnel that everything’s all right with my old man and the Campbells?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’ll tell them about their son later.’

  ‘Right. Hey, Quint, what do we do with the gold and the rest of the smuggled goods?’

  ‘I’m sure Calder’s people will come for the precious metal. Make sure the plastic explosive and cocaine go to the castle.’

  Jimmy Taggart stuck out his hand. ‘Pleasure working with you again, sir.’

  ‘Glad you got through it in one piece. Your team?’

  ‘Two wounded, one seriously.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Ach, it was in a good cause.’

  I suppose he was right, though it was hard to tell what was good and what was bad in the ‘perfect’ city. No doubt Fergus Calder would put me straight.

  I got a lift down to Moray Place in a Guard 4×4. The driver was effusive about my role in what had gone down at the depot, but I shut him up. For all the horror she’d been involved in, I’d liked Guardian Doris. She was a genuine servant of Edinburgh and its people but, as had happened in the past with guardians, she’d let power run away with her.

  I was let into the senior guardian’s house and directed to the reception room on the ground floor. Calder, Jack MacLean, Billy and the outsiders – Andrew Duart, Hel Hyslop and Angus Macdonald – started clapping and even cheering. I lowered my head, not from modesty but because I didn’t like being fêted by barracudas.

  ‘Have a drink, man,’ MacLean said, forcing a glass of dark malt into my hand. ‘You saved us from not one but two armed uprisings.’

  ‘Very well done, Dalrymple,’ piped the Lord of the Isles.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Glasgow’s first minister.

  Even Hel Hyslop raised her glass at me, but it was Billy Geddes’s mocking smile that pushed me over the edge.

  ‘Shite!’ I said, my voice louder than all of theirs put together.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Lord of the Isles.

  ‘So you fucking should. How many of you knew about the gambling scheme in Edinburgh before I told you about it?’

  That shut them up.

  ‘All of you, eh?’ I glared at Billy. ‘Even those who swore they didn’t.’

  The senior guardian stepped forward. ‘We were evaluating its potential without officially approving it.’ He looked around for support.

  ‘We’ve got something similar in Glasgow,’ said Duart, ‘though it’s run privately.’

  ‘My office runs our scheme,’ said the Lord of the Isles.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Billy,’ I said, moving towards him. ‘It wasn’t by any chance your idea?’

  He laughed. ‘You could say that.’

  I looked at Calder and MacLean. ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

  ‘We had full confidence in you,’ said the finance guardian. ‘And we were right. You’ve solved everything perfectly.’

  ‘What?’ I yelled. ‘I did your dirty work by uncovering the actions of two dissident guardians. Meanwhile, you allowed Peter Stewart, one of your colleagues and a decent man, to get so distraught that he killed himself. Fuck your full confidence.’

  Calder came over and took my arm. I shook it free. ‘This is no way to behave in front of the city’s guests, Dalrymple.’

  ‘Licking their arses is pretty demeaning, don’t you think, Fergus?’ He might have dropped my first name, but I used his to show maximum disrespect. ‘You’re undoing all the work of earlier Councils to establish Edinburgh as a functioning independent state.’

  He shook his head. ‘You of all people should know how close to collapse the Council’s been in the past because of human weakness.’

  ‘And that’s going to go away when you get into bed with Duart and Macdonald? The public order guardian was right. This place will become a backwater.’

  ‘Rubbish. If you can’t control yourself, leave.’

  He wasn’t getting off so easily.

  ‘Have you asked yourself why Glasgow sanctioned arms shipments to Edinburgh?’

  ‘We didn’t,’ said Duart, putting his hand on an incandescent Hel Hyslop’s arm.

  I ignored that. ‘Well, have you?’ I said to the senior guardian. ‘Could it be that your supposed allies want to take over Edinburgh?’ Then I had another thought. ‘Or perhaps you knew about it and were stockpiling arms in case the citizen body gets uppity before the referendum.’

  Calder shook his head and looked at MacLean. They kept quiet, which suggested I’d got to them one way or another.

  I kept going. ‘Who gave the order for the football managers to be released from the castle? I know it wasn’t Doris Barclay. She was opposed to the gambling.’

  ‘Does it really matter?’ Jack MacLean said wearily.

  ‘It does to me.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Fergus Calder. ‘I had them let go. They make money for us.’

  ‘They’re in league with the city’s gangs, you fucking idiot.’

  I turned on my heel. If I’d been able to throw up on demand, I’d have done so. But the occupants of the opulent room were so used to muck that they wouldn’t have noticed.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Davie and I went down to Stockbridge and the safe house. The guardswoman behind the door demanded a password, which Davie gave.

  I found my father playing cards with John and Val Campbell. To my horror he was wearing my leather jacket.

  ‘What happened, failure?’ he said, looking round. ‘Did you save the city?’

  ‘This city’s beyond saving, old man.’

  He stared at me. ‘You don’t really mean that.’ For all his disgust at the dilution of the Enlightenment Party’s ideals, he still had some faith in the system.

  ‘No, I probably don’t,’ I said, suddenly very tired. ‘What are you playing?’

  ‘Three-card brag. I’m winning.’

  ‘You’re not betting for real, I hope.’

  ‘Val found a box of matches.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I went closer. ‘I need to talk to you,’ I said to the Campbells.

  They knew immediately what it was about.

  ‘Michael …’ Val said, clutching her husband’s arm.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said. ‘He was killed fighting against a drugs gang. He took a bullet to the chest and died instantly.’

  John Campbell caught his wife, who hadn’t lost consciousness but was gasping for breath, t
ears flooding her face.

  ‘Are ye sure, son?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘He did his duty.’ I would make sure Hume 481’s record showed that. He had already paid in full for his crimes.

  John took Val into the bedroom. I wondered if their son had told them anything about what he was doing. After all, he’d taken them into hiding. On balance, I reckoned they were clean. And if they weren’t, I didn’t care.

  ‘Poor people,’ my father said. ‘Ordinary citizens are the ones who suffer most.’

  He was right about that. The first Council had believed in equality, with guardians and senior auxiliaries living austere lives, devoted to their work. Fergus Calder and Jack MacLean were far from that template, though Peter Stewart probably wasn’t.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll take you and the Campbells home.’

  ‘I rather like it here.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘I like this jacket too.’

  ‘Well, you can’t have it.’ I took off the worn donkey jacket. ‘Come on, hand it over.’

  He huffed and he puffed, but eventually took the leather magnificence off.

  After we’d dropped the Campbells off at Wardie Road, Davie headed for Trinity.

  ‘Was their son really a hero?’ the old man asked.

  ‘You can read me like a Juvenalian satire. No, he wasn’t, but they don’t need to know that.’

  ‘You’re soft, Quintilian. No wonder you were demoted.’

  I thought of the combat zones I’d been through in recent days.

  ‘Very soft,’ Davie said. ‘I blame the parents.’

  By the time we got to the retirement home, the quality of banter was heading for the abyss.

  ‘You stole that jacket,’ was the old man’s parting shot.

  ‘You were cheating at cards,’ was mine.

  Davie had given up, but he was laughing loudly. At least we still had humour – not even the Council had been able to do away with that. If anything, thirty years of supposedly benevolent totalitarianism had turned us all into Aristophanes fans. That at least was worth celebrating.

  On the way up to the centre, I turned to Davie.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you’re next in line for deputy guardian.’

  ‘I didn’t know. They changed the protocol a few years ago and stopped telling us the rankings – so the guardians could choose whoever they wanted, of course.’

  ‘Why did Doris Barclay say you were next, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she was having a go at you. After I was made your official sidekick at the beginning of this case – or rather cases – she couldn’t have made me her deputy anyway.’

  ‘Hm. I think she was probably raising a finger at Fergus Calder for appointing me.’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘Did you ever think she was dirty?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s like she said. She really loved the city and she gave everything she had for it.’

  ‘Including using a butcher on two people – one of whose identity we don’t and probably won’t ever know.’

  ‘I’m not defending her, Quint. But she wasn’t dirty in the sense that Jack MacLean and your friend Billy Geddes are.’

  ‘What about Cowan?’

  ‘It’s not like the Education Directorate has a history of violence. Everyone just thought he was a touch crazy.’

  Which reminded me. ‘You know they call you Crazy Davie?’

  ‘Behind my back, aye.’

  ‘I wanted to be sure.’

  ‘Guess what they call you.’

  ‘Do I want to know?’

  ‘I don’t care. Quint the Quizzer.’

  ‘Boring.’

  ‘It could have been worse. Quint the Qunt?’

  ‘Ha. The rain’s stopped,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s a good omen.’

  It started again as we reached Moray Place.

  ‘Go easy on the guardswomen,’ I said, getting out.

  ‘Go easy on the medical guardian,’ he said with a wide grin.

  For once I decided to let him have the last word.

  Sophia opened the door herself.

  ‘I assumed you’d be making an appearance. I’ve sent the staff away for the night.’

  ‘But not your daughter.’

  Maisie was barrelling down the stairs with a human skull in her hands.

  ‘Look, man with the silly name.’

  ‘Hello, girl from a ghost story.’

  She laughed. ‘We’ve been doing anatomy.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She insists,’ Sophia said. ‘Come on, young lady. It’s time for bed.’

  ‘Can I put the skull on my pillow?’

  Sophia sighed. ‘If you have to.’

  ‘Good night,’ I called.

  ‘Good night, ladies. Good night, sweet ladies,’ was the response from Maisie.

  I was taken aback. Had she been reading Hamlet? Or T. S. Eliot? And had I just had a sex change? I went into the lounge to check.

  Sophia reappeared half an hour later. ‘I presume we’re celebrating. There’s champagne in the fridge.’

  ‘Guardian! Have you been on the take?’

  ‘Gift from the chief medical officer of Inverness. I wonder if he’s still alive.’

  ‘Didn’t sound good up there the last I heard.’

  I followed her into the kitchen and we consumed the wine without much talk.

  Sophia got up. ‘There’s beef in the oven, but you’ve got time to tell all.’

  So I did, opening the bottle of red wine she put on the table halfway through.

  ‘I can’t believe that Doris could do all that,’ she said when I’d finished.

  ‘I was surprised too, though you know my default setting for guardians is “don’t trust”.’

  ‘I always thought Brian Cowan was an intellectual who liked to rant, not a fighter.’

  ‘Anyone can become whatever they want.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ She took my hand. ‘Who would you want to be?’

  ‘There’s no finer place to be than in my head.’

  ‘Such conceit.’ She leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

  I managed to break off. ‘There’s just one thing.’

  ‘Oh, yes, man who has everything?’

  ‘You took the truth drug.’

  Her fingernails dug into the back of my hand and she drew her head back.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘It never appeared again. If someone working with Cowan or Guardian Doris had stolen it, it would have been used.’

  ‘You might not have been able to tell.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed, ‘if the people it killed had been hidden away. All right, call it a deduction. You take the Hippocratic Oath seriously, unlike some medical personnel I’ve known over the years. It’s impossible for you to countenance using a drug that induces death without warning.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, head down. ‘You’re right.’

  I took her hand. ‘I don’t blame you. Well, I do. You could have told me.’

  ‘You would have pestered me to use it on the people you brought in.’

  ‘True. Where is it now?’

  ‘In the city’s sewers.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Can we eat?’

  I suddenly realized how ravenous I was. Dinner was a gluttonous affair.

  In the middle of the night, I woke up. We had made sweet love and Sophia was asleep, the breath whistling almost soundlessly between her parted lips. I got up and went to the window, drawing the curtain a couple of inches.

  Lights shone above the doors of the guardians’ residences and the street lamps, but there was no illumination from any of the windows. The members of the city’s governing body were asleep, perchance to dream of more citizen-unfriendly schemes. Would Calder survive as senior guardian? I suspected so; the same went for Jack MacLean, with Billy no doubt remaining as his SPADE. But should they? They’d allowed two of their colleagues to di
srupt public order, ultimately in a big way, playing deaf and dumb throughout. All they seemed to care about was building ties with outsider states so that Edinburgh could become part of a reconstructed Scotland. Did I want that? My head said yes. If the other cities and regions got together, we would be left behind by remaining independent. But my heart was another matter. Like the guardians who had revolted, like Peter Stewart, I loved Edinburgh as it had been for three decades, despite its numerous failings. In a new Scotland people like Hel Hyslop would keep order. There would be no place for mavericks like me.

  Things might be quiet again in the ‘perfect city’ for now, but it was only a matter of months till the referendum. I had the feeling there would be plenty of work for me and Davie and Sophia. At least they were two people I could trust; three if I counted my father. Then there was Jimmy Taggart. And the many Guard personnel who’d remained loyal. Maybe things weren’t so bad.

  I got back into bed. As I drifted away, I heard the old bluesman Smokey Hogg’s ‘Dark Clouds’, quickly followed by Leroy Carr’s ‘Hurry Down Sunshine’. Maybe the Big Wet would finally end tomorrow, but I wasn’t holding my breath.