The Bone Yard (13 page)

I nodded, looking out at the crowds of half-cut foreigners wandering around the Cowgate. They want cheap sex, horse-racing in Princes Street Gardens, casinoes on every street corner, whisky and tartan knitwear. What they don't want is to bite people's throats out and hide music cassettes inside them. I didn't have much idea of what was going on, but I was sure of one thing: Edinburgh's latest multiple murderer was a home-grown product, born and bred in the city like his victims. Which led me back to another thought. Where was the bastard hiding out? Someone must know him; someone probably saw the bloodstains on his clothing after the second killing. So where the hell was he? I called Hamilton and asked him to get his people to check all the barracks' patrol reports. We might be lucky. Perhaps some vigilant guardsman had spotted a suspicious character in the early hours but failed to pull him in. Perhaps some citizen on his or her way to the early works buses had reported a strange man in a long coat. And perhaps Edinburgh citizens go to bed every night reciting “Our Senior Guardian who art in heaven  . . .”

We would have got a warmer reception at Moray Barracks if we'd walked in sporting bubonic plague sores. Eventually my Council authorisation prevailed. I looked up from signing the sentry's log and saw Hamilton's deputy Machiavelli exiting at speed. The guardsman at his side had a guard rucksack on his back.

“I hope you're not going to lower morale even further by asking awkward questions,” said the barracks commander, a doleful guy with bald head and thick brown beard who'd been called down to meet us. He looked like Friar Tuck after a particularly heavy night, except that he could probably count the number of times he'd smiled in his life on the fingers of one hand.

I gave him a smile of my own to show him he was already out of his league. “Awkward questions, Moray 01? Of course not. The morale of your barracks is much more important than the threat posed to the city by a psychotic killer.”

That had some effect. The commander stepped back like I'd propositioned him, then struggled to regain his composure. A vein pulsed prominently in the middle of his forehead.

“Show us her cubicle. In person, please.”

Moray 01 glanced at me to check I was talking to him, swallowed when he realised I really did want him to act as barracks porter and headed slowly down the corridor.

Moray Barracks is a seventeenth-century mansion that used to be a teacher training college before the Enlightenment. The Council decided it would serve their purpose better as the barracks covering the lower end of the Royal Mile and the Cowgate, not least because teacher training is now part of the auxiliary training programme. Auxiliaries learn hand-to-hand combat, survival skills (useful when they do their tour of duty in the notoriously dangerous border posts) and what are called public order skills; then those of them who want to teach are deemed ready for action and chucked straight into schools. At least there aren't many discipline problems in the classroom. The downside is that Moray House has been wrecked, its decorated walls knocked through to make dormitories and its moulded ceilings left in partial ruin. Very enlightened.

The commander led us through a female dorm, then a male one. I was on official business of course, so I paid attention to the semi-naked bodies on display in the first room. The female auxiliaries glanced across briefly, then ignored me as effectively as prime ministers used to ignore cabinet members in the old days.

We left the second dormitory and went up a wide staircase that had once been elegant and ornate and was now high quality drab, the steps chipped from heavy auxiliary boots. Moray 01 stopped at the first door on the next floor and pointed.

“This is Moira  . . . I mean Moray 310's cubicle.” The commander made to depart.

“I haven't finished with you yet,” I said, pushing the door open. The room beyond was quite large, containing a sofa, armchair, table and desk as well as a single bed. I looked at Davie then at the Friar Tuck lookalike. “I definitely haven't finished with you yet.”

The commander was suddenly finding the carpet, which was in unusually good condition for a barracks, a source of great fascination.

“What's going on here, Moray 01? Why did the dead guardswoman have a room of her own instead of a dorm cubicle?”

He mumbled something about her overnight shifts and heavy workload.

“Come on, commander, all auxiliaries have times when they have to do the night shift. Why did Moray 310 – sorry, Moira, as you called her – get special treatment?”

The vein on his forehead had turned dark blue. Eventually he raised his head and faced me. “I'm not able to say. It's a Council matter, citizen.”

“And this is a Council authorisation.”

He turned to go. “So address your questions to the Council.”

I glanced at Davie, who looked like he fancied playing basketball with the commander's head. “Wait a minute. Raeburn 03, the Public Order Directorate official I saw leaving when we arrived, has he been in here?”

Moray 01 stopped but didn't turn round. “I don't see why he should have been, citizen. Now, if you don't mind  . . .”

“Thanks for your co-operation,” I shouted after him.

Davie stepped up. “Cool it, Quint. You aren't among friends here.”

I nodded and looked around the well-appointed room. “Get a scene-of-crime squad down here, Davie, including a fingerprint guy. We're going to have to tear this place apart.”

We did so. And found nothing special. Prints that were soon matched to the victim and other barracks members; underwear that was definitely not standard issue, but that came from the Prostitution Services Department stores rather than smugglers; and a couple of books of Eastern erotica that were presumably source material for the nightclub act. So either the killer got what he was looking for or she'd hidden it elsewhere. We spoke to some of her colleagues, but none of them was very close to her. They claimed to know nothing about her trips to Roddie Aitken's sex centre and I believed them. Most auxiliaries are very bad at lying.

At one in the morning my mobile buzzed.

“Dalrymple?” came Hamilton's voice. “We've picked up the missing auxiliary Moray 37. He's being brought to the castle.”

“We're on our way.”

Adrenalin and black coffee are the main things that keep you going during investigations, but it helps if you get a little help from your leads. With the sex centre supervisor we got the big zero.

Sample question: “Moray 37, why did you allow Moray 310 to impersonate a dead citizen and have sex with Roddie Aitken?”

Sample answer: “I was doing her a favour. I knew her in barracks when she was a trainee auxiliary.”

Sample question: “Why did you risk your own position to do a favour for an auxiliary who didn't exactly lack the means of obtaining all the sex she wanted at the club?”

Sample answer: “Because she asked me.”

Sample question (one of Hamilton's – you can tell by the stilted Council diction): “Why did you absent yourself from the sex centre without authorisation?”

Sample answer: “Because I panicked when I heard about the murder.”

And so on. I kept after him, the guardian kept after him, but his answers didn't change. Eventually I concluded that he really had been doing the dead woman a favour. Maybe she fluttered her eyelashes at him and he couldn't say no, despite his sexuality (his file confirmed what his demeanour suggested). He had solid alibis for both murders and a search of his cubicle revealed nothing incriminating. At five in the morning we let him go, putting one of Hamilton's best undercover operatives on his tail. I had the feeling he was a dead end.

Davie and I got a couple of hours' uncomfortable sleep on the sofas in the guardian's outer office. I had a hazy dream about a drugs gang boss called Elmore, but that didn't do me any good. There never had been such a character – or one called James, or Eric, or Clapton, or God. Sometimes you can't even trust your subconscious.

Hamilton woke us up with more big zeroes. Apparently none of Roddie Aitken's workmates was into contraband any juicier than Danish bestiality magazines. And none of the barracks patrols had seen any hooded men with tell-tale bloodstains on their coats.

Then it was time to set off for the infirmary. For the next post-mortem.

I walked into the grey granite building in the pitch darkness that passes for morning at this time of year in Edinburgh. I felt the cold biting at my hands with sharp, insistent teeth, making the stump of my right forefinger tingle like it had just been touched by the blade of the Ear, Nose and Throat Man's knife again. That sick bastard would have enjoyed all this. But not even he went to the extent of planting tapes in his victims.

“Mind if I come with you?” Davie asked, catching me up. “I've never seen a post-mortem.”

I looked at him in surprise. “Haven't you?”

“How could I? There haven't been any murders since the last ones you solved.”

“No, I suppose there haven't. And you spent most of that investigation on surveillance.”

“Aye. So can I come?”

I led him through the entrance hall with its patient line of thin, coughing citizens. The place was busy even at this early hour. “Suit yourself,” I said. “Personally I can think of better ways to start the day.”

“And I can't?” Davie stared at me fiercely. “You're always telling me to educate myself in the ways of the criminal.”

“All right, big man, I said you could come. But promise me one thing.”

“What?”

We stopped outside the mortuary and showed ID.

“Don't let the side down by losing your grip on your breakfast.”

Another ferocious glare. “I'm an auxiliary, citizen. We never lose our breakfast.”

“Right.”

We robed up.

“We've got another bite mark,” the medical guardian said, bending over the victim's neck.

“Which will no doubt match the last one but, like it, won't match anything in the records.” I joined her at the upper body. The skin was no longer under a sheen of ice and lividity was visible towards the underside. The auxiliary's teeth were still clenched, with dried runnels of blood leading down to the ragged hole in the throat.

The Ice Queen moved down to the lower abdomen. “Severe lacerations to the thighs and vagina. Mutilation of the outer labia and  . . .” She lowered her face. “And removal of the clitoris.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath from Davie. His face was about the same shade of green as his gown. “Before or after death?” I asked.

“I'll need to run more tests. It's difficult to be sure of the time or cause of death yet.” The medical guardian looked up at me. “But given that the victim's hands were bound, at least some of the knifework could have been carried out while she was alive.”

“Her feet weren't tied though.”

She nodded. “True enough. You'd imagine she'd have been thrashing around.”

“Maybe he stunned her.”

“There's no indication of any blow to the head.” The guardian took a pair of forceps and applied them to the object in the dead woman's vagina. There was a noise like the sound of an oar entering the surface of the sea as she pulled. Davie's breathing was very loud. I nodded towards the door but he paid no attention.

“There you are, citizen.” The Ice Queen held the blood-encrusted plastic bag up. It was caught for a second in the flash from the photographer's camera.

“What a surprise,” I said, blinking my eyes. “Another cassette.”

“Not much doubt it was the same killer,” she said.

“Have you got a cassette player in the vicinity, guardian?”

She had moved back up to the top of the table. “In my office.”

“Let's have a break from this, Davie.” I led him towards the door. His legs weren't too steady.

The guardian's voice came as I put my hand on Davie's elbow. It was sharp, the pitch suddenly higher.

“For the love of God.”

Guardians, like all auxiliaries, are sworn atheists. Normally I would have been entertained by one of them referring to the supposedly non-existent deity. But not this time. I looked round to see her leaning against the slab. Her assistant was bent over the corpse's jaws, having just wrenched them apart, his head turned away. The Ice Queen was holding a pink and black shrivelled object in her forceps.

“It's a penis, citizen,” she said, the timbre of her voice now deep and throaty. “A penis severed at the root by a very sharp knife.”

Davie blundered out of the door, but I went back slowly to the table. There was no escaping the thought that it was Roddie Aitken's member which had been placed in the dead woman's mouth.

The Council chamber, seven o'clock in the evening. I had several things to share with the iron boyscouts and another couple I was going to keep to myself. Davie and I'd had a busy day.

“I trust you are making every effort to trace this homicidal maniac, citizen,” the senior guardian said as his colleagues gathered round me like a family of tweed and brogue-clad vultures.

I resisted the easy shot; of course, the fact that the latest victim was an auxiliary was having an obvious effect on how seriously the Council treated my investigation.

“I'm making all the efforts I can, guardian,” I said. “Unfortunately, so's the killer.” I glanced at the chief boyscout. “But I don't think he's a maniac. He's been smart enough to avoid all the patrols, he's got a plan and he's running rings round us.”

The senior guardian looked at Hamilton. “Is citizen Dalrymple out of his depth, guardian?”

“I'd like to see anyone else do any better,” he answered brusquely. That was about as close to a vote of confidence as I could expect from Hamilton.

The senior guardian nodded at me slowly. His wispy beard made him look like a forgiving Christ, but the tone of his voice was more Old Testament. “Very well. Your report, citizen.”