Body Politic (33 page)

“Yellowlees,” I gasped, noticing that she no longer had the handcuff on her left wrist. “What happened?”

“I don't think he'll be doing any more surgery.”

“Drop the knife.” Davie had an automatic pistol in his hand. “Stand up slowly and put your hands on your head.” He glanced down at me. “Are you all right, Quint?”

“I'll live. What about Katharine?”

An army of guard personnel surrounded us. I saw a couple of medics squat down beside her. I managed to stand up, in time to see Amanda's hands being cuffed behind her back. Hamilton was on his knees with more medics beside the medical guardian and Adam. I stumbled over and crouched down.

“They're both gone,” the public order guardian said hopelessly. Yellowlees's throat had been cut from ear to ear. If he hadn't been lying face down, there would have been blood everywhere. As for Adam, there didn't seem to be a mark on him. Till I looked at his chest and saw the stain over his thorax. You didn't have to be a cardiologist to realise which organ had been perforated.

“We have failed to look after our young,” said my mother from behind me. “The heart of the body politic no longer beats.”

I looked up at her. She was leaning against my father, her face a blotched and flaking ruin.

“She's coming round,” the medic said. “Heavy blow to the chin, but her jaw's still in one piece.”

I kneeled down beside Katharine and helped her sit up. Her eyes rolled then focused on me.

“What happened? Where . . .” She was slurring her words. She started to look around. “Where's Adam?”

“Why did you follow me out here, Katharine? I told you to . . .”

She grabbed my arms hard. “What's happened to Adam?”

There was nowhere to hide. “When the lights went out, he ran out. To help you, I suppose . . .”

“She killed him,” Katharine said dully. “The bitch killed him.”

I nodded slowly. “She killed the guardian too.”

Her eyes flared. “I don't give a fuck about the guardian. He deserved everything he got. But Adam . . .” She let out a single, devastated sob. “Adam . . . never laid a finger on anyone. That's why they all took advantage of him.” She pushed me away and got to her feet. “I want to see him.”

Hamilton stepped up. “Come with me. He's in that ambulance.” I was surprised by the sympathetic look on his face.

“It's over now, Katharine,” I called after her feebly.

She turned and skewered me with a glare. “It's not over for me, Quint.”

“I'll catch up with you later.”

“Where are you going?” she demanded suspiciously.

I squeezed her arm. “Things to clear up. Keep your mobile switched on.”

“You're not going to interrogate her now, are you?” She brought her face up to mine. “I want to be there when you do.”

I wasn't going to commit myself to that. I shook my head. “I've got some family business to sort out.”

She kept her eyes on me. “So have I.”

My mother looked like she'd collapsed into the armchair by the fireplace in her study. Otherwise I would have been harder on her.

“You had him here all the time, didn't you?” I glanced at my father. He was leaning against the marble mantelpiece and looking uncomfortable.

She nodded.

“Thanks for telling me. You realise I might have caught the murderess more quickly if you hadn't put that distraction in my way?” I bent over her. “Did you know that Billy was funding Yellowlees's research so he could sell the results?”

“No, Quintilian,” she said weakly. “Anyway, you've no hard evidence of that.”

I'd seen the look on the medical guardian's face when he mentioned Billy's barracks number. “You must have known that Yellowlees couldn't have made that kind of breakthrough without finance.”

“He was . . . reticent about how he'd been able to make such progress,” she said, looking away. “I know, I should have pressed him.” Her eyes, almost invisible under swollen flesh, moved back to me slowly. “As you see, I've already stopped using the serum.”

I didn't feel congratulations were in order. “You sent for Hector, didn't you? Why?”

Her distended cheeks took on an even redder tint. “Vanity. I . . . I wanted him to see how much younger I looked.”

I glanced at my father again. He shrugged awkwardly.

“I got what I deserved,” my mother said with a faint laugh. “He was horrified by what he called the unnatural reversal of my condition. He wanted to get you to investigate the medical guardian.” She shaded her eyes with unsteady fingers. “I couldn't allow that so I kept him here.”

I was amazed. I couldn't say I knew my mother well. Over the past fifteen years I'd rarely seen her. But the idea that she was concerned about how she looked seemed almost as much of a betrayal of Enlightenment principles as Billy's deals. Then again, I was an expert in betraying the Enlightenment. Maybe it ran in the family.

“I want all of this to be given full publicity,” I said.

My mother raised her head, wincing with the effort. “That is a matter for the Council to decide.” Her tone was more like it used to be.

“I want everyone to know that senior auxiliaries were stealing from the city, that they were selling the city's young people as whores. I want the medical guardian's use of illegally obtained organs for . . .”

My mother raised her hand. “All right, Quintilian. I'll put those points to the Council,” she said wearily. “Where are you going?”

“I have some unanswered questions.”

Hector caught up with me on the stairs. “You've done well, failure. I knew you'd get to the bottom of it.”

I shook my head. “All I've done is react to events.”

The old man smiled. “Very modest.” He continued downwards.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to my books. I've been without them for days.”

“More Juvenal?”

“I haven't seen anything here to put me off him.”

I got him into a Land-Rover, then walked towards the Transit. Just before I turned out of Moray Place, the lights in the empty gardens went out.

Like the sun in a minor constellation imploding.

I called Hamilton and asked him where Katharine was. She'd stayed in the infirmary with Adam's body. I couldn't think of anything to say to her as I drove to the castle.

The cell where the murderess had been taken was in the depths of the barracks block, at the end of a long, dank passageway. Guard personnel stood at five-yard intervals, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. I hadn't seen those for a long time.

“I've given instructions to shoot to kill if she makes a break,” said Hamilton.

“Brilliant. Don't you realise that she's finished killing? She could have knifed me but she didn't.”

The guard commander at the heavy steel door waited for the guardian's order, then unlocked it. The clang as it opened echoed down the corridor and came back at us like a vengeful spirit.

“Christ almighty,” I groaned. They had stripped Scott 372 down to her auxiliary-issue khaki singlet and knickers. Her wrists and ankles had been cuffed to a solid wooden chair that was bolted to the stone-flagged floor. “How's she going to make a break?” I asked. “Unless she happens to be related to Houdini, of course.”

“You can't be too careful,” the guardian said impassively.

“Aren't you freezing?” I said to the prisoner.

Amanda lifted her head. “I'm a cold-blooded creature, citizen,” she said, a smile flickering across her lips. “Haven't you noticed?”

I stood looking at her, struck again by how perfectly proportioned her features were. Let alone her body. But she was right. Her eyes were glazed like a reptile's.

“So,” she said, giving Hamilton a glance that would have dissolved most men's bowels. “It's interrogation time.”

I sat down opposite her and rested my elbows on the table. “I was rather hoping for a confession, Amanda.”

My use of that name made her smile again. “You don't have to sweet-talk me, Quintilian.” She pursed her lips curiously as she pronounced my name, like she was going to whistle. She repeated it and laughed as innocently as a child learning a new word. “I'll tell you everything, Quintilian. Only you though, no one else. Especially not anyone from the Council.” Her tone remained even but I noticed that her fingers – all eleven of them – had tightened on the chair arms.

I turned to the guardian.

He bit his lip then shrugged. “Very well. But the tape recorder is to run continuously.”

Amanda laughed, this time harshly. “Don't they trust you?” she asked me.

I waved Hamilton away. A technical auxiliary brought in the tape recorder and set it up. As soon as the door closed behind him, the murderess began to speak.

“You bastard, Quint. I should have been there.” Katharine was standing at the window, her back to me. “You owed me that.”

I looked at her from the sofa and wondered how much longer I could keep my eyes open. I'd got back from the castle in the early afternoon after listening to the confession for over twelve hours.

“What is this great debt I've suddenly acquired?” I demanded. “It seems to me you owe me an explanation of what you were doing following me out to the middle of the gardens.” I closed my eyes when she didn't say anything. “Anyway, I told you. She wouldn't speak to anyone except me.”

“Oh, the great Quintilian Dalrymple,” she said scathingly. “What makes you so special?”

“She needed someone who could understand what she did.” I opened my eyes when I heard Katharine coming over quickly.

“If you're so fucking clever, why can't you understand that I followed you out there because I was worried about you, because I . . .”

She buried her head in the cushion beside my leg, sobs jerking her shoulders.

I put my hand on her back. “Come on, you'd only have tried to hurt her.”

“And what if I did?” she said, looking up at me with wet eyes. “Could you blame me?”

“No.” I pulled her towards me. She didn't resist. “But this isn't only about Adam, Katharine.”

“Tell me what she told you,” she asked quietly. “At least I'm entitled to that.”

I nodded, then made the mistake of closing my eyes for a few seconds before I started to speak. Faces flashed in front of me. I made out Caro's and Katharine's, then they were both replaced by the flawless mask of the murderess, her lips moving as she spoke. I opened my eyes with a start and she disappeared. But her voice still rang in my ears, sweeter and more deadly than any siren's song.

“You know, Quintilian, none of it would have happened if Fergus – Scott 477 – hadn't been on sentry duty at the crematorium the night Gordon . . . the night Gordon's body was taken there.”

“Gordon and you were more than just close colleagues.”

“Gordon and I . . . Gordon and I knew each other all our lives. Our parents were neighbours.”

“In Trinity.”

“You have been doing your homework. When Fergus saw from the documents who was in the coffin, he called me.”

“Wait a minute. Gordon had a brother. Stewart Duncan Dunbar. Tell me about him.”

“That animal? Until Gordon died, I hadn't thought about him for years. Why are you interested?”

“You remembered him after you saw Gordon's body, though, didn't you? That's why I'm interested.”

“How . . . how do you know all this?”

“Never mind that just now. What did the older brother do to Gordon?”

“The same thing he did to me.”

“When did it happen?”

“Before they packed the pig off to the school for the deaf.”

“What age were you?”

“Eight. He . . . why are you making me go over this? I kept it locked away for years.”

“You learned things from Stewart Dunbar, didn't you? Like how to use a ligature.”

“How do you know that? There's something I don't understand here. Do you know the pig?”

“I met him. He had a connection with the directorate.”

“Where is he?”

“In a safe place.”

“They don't know, do they? Remember the tape.”

“What did Gordon's brother do to the two of you?”

“No, I don't want to . . . oh, what does it matter now? It's relevant to your inquiry, I suppose. What you've got to understand is that their house was like Bluebeard's castle. The parents were never there. They were lawyers, fanatical supporters of the Enlightenment.”

“Till they were found to have connections with the democrats in Glasgow and exiled.”

“That was much later. Who's telling this story?”

“Sorry. So what about Stewart Duncan Dunbar?”

“We never called him by his first name. It didn't seem appropriate. To Gordon and me he was the Beast. His room was like a laboratory. One that belonged to a scientist who'd gone right off the rails. There were animals splayed out on boards, cut open. Rats and rabbits, mainly, but he took the neighbours' cats too. God, the smell.”

“And the ligature?”

“When he reached his teens, he began to get even worse. He started doing things to his body – cutting himself, sticking pins into his thighs, putting pencils in his ears. That was how he damaged his hearing. His father found him thrashing around on the floor with the pencil points in his ears and an erection. Oh, and he was laughing.”

“The ligature, Amanda.”

“I'm coming to that. He got us into his room one day and locked the door before we could resist. Then he went for Gordon. Suddenly he had a leather bootlace round his neck. He passed out almost immediately. I tried to get the animal off him so he concentrated on me. I can still smell his breath. He never brushed his teeth. They were blue with decay. I had to turn away. Then he pulled my pants down and sodomised me. A few minutes later he did the same to Gordon.”