The Bone Yard (14 page)

“If you don't mind, guardian,” interrupted the Ice Queen. She was looking particularly stern tonight, her white-blonde hair combed back close to her scalp. “I have some test results that citizen Dalrymple is unaware of.” She gave me a perfunctory glance.

“Enlighten us,” said the senior guardian. If that was a reference to his other role as science and energy chief, no one seemed prepared to acknowledge it. There's no chance it was anything as flippant as a pun on the Enlightenment Party.

“Moray 310 died from loss of blood. I put the time of death at between five and six a.m. on Thursday 2 January.” She looked around at her colleagues with their clipboards and their bowed heads. “Tissue and blood tests have confirmed that the penis found in her mouth was that of the first victim, Roderick Aitken.” The heads remained bowed. The medical guardian caught my eye briefly. “Moray 310's tongue was removed as well.”

“Is there some significance in that, citizen?” the senior guardian asked.

I shrugged. “The medical guardian thinks it's a pointer to the other messages he's sending.”

“You mean the tapes?”

“Before we get on to that, senior guardian,” the Ice Queen interrupted again – she really was taking her life in her hands – “I found something unexpected in the victim's stomach.”

Now I was paying close attention. “What was it?” I asked.

The medical guardian suddenly seemed a lot less sure of herself. Her head was bowed now as she flipped over pages on her clipboard. Then she looked up. “It showed up in the toxicological analysis of the stomach contents.”

“It?” I shouted and was instantly surrounded by a ring of startled faces. “What is ‘it', guardian?”

The Ice Queen pursed her lips at me. “‘It', citizen, is a trace of a stimulant.”

“A drug?” said Hamilton, his eyes wide. The years he spent fighting the gangs that used to traffic in controlled substances had left him scarred for life. “What kind of drug?”

“I told you,” replied the Ice Queen. “A stimulant.”

“Not one of those that are sometimes prescribed for guard personnel on the border?” I asked.

The senior guardian looked down his nose at me. “Those are not controlled substances, as you well know, citizen.”

I did, but it's always worth winding the guardians up. Very occasionally they even lose their tempers. “So what is it?”

“A compound of one of the known methamphetamines and another substance that the Toxicology Department hasn't been able to identify.” The medical guardian glanced at Hamilton. “Where did she get it, guardian?”

“Don't ask me,” he replied, his cheeks red above the white of his beard. “We haven't found banned substances in the city for years.” He glared at her. “Maybe you should check that none of your people has been experimenting in the labs.”

“That'll do, guardian.” The chief boyscout wasn't impressed with inter-directorate scrapping, at least not in front of an outsider like me.

I had a thought while they were squabbling. “Maybe that's what the killer's been looking for. Maybe this is all about drugs.”

“Bloody hell,” said Hamilton, to be given a bowel-liquefying look by his superior. “You don't think the drugs gangs could be forming up again, do you, Dalrymple?”

“Who knows what's going on beyond the border? There have been plenty of drugs in the democratic states like Glasgow since they decided legalising them was a good idea.”

Hamilton wasn't giving up. “They also still have high levels of criminal activity.”

It wasn't the time for a debate about public order policy. “We'll need to close the Three Graces down immediately and see if we can find any sign of this new drug,” I said. “All the staff will have to be searched and questioned.”

That was more to Hamilton's taste. He was so anxious to get started that for a moment I thought he'd forgotten his incontinence pants.

The tourism guardian was in a similar plight – until the senior guardian assured him that none of the customers would be hassled. I might have known.

All of which overshadowed what I had to say about the tape that was inside the dead auxiliary. This time it was Jimi Hendrix playing “Red House”; the original studio version from 1966 – slow, sexy, very electric blues. And at least this time there was a lyric. So what the hell did it mean? The guy in the song hasn't seen the girl in the red house for ninety-nine and one half days; his key doesn't fit the door and he ends up going back across the hill to chase her sister. The expression on the Council's collective face said “And?” I didn't have much to suggest, except that Holyroodhouse where the auxiliary was murdered was now a kind of red house. They didn't buy it. Christ, I didn't buy it myself.

“Anything else, citizen?” asked the senior guardian.

Time for some more fun and games.

“A couple of things,” I said, giving the group around me a smile to soften them up. “Why did the dead auxiliary have a room of her own rather than a cubicle in a dormitory? Her barracks commander suggested I take it up with the Council.”

Silence for a time, then the senior guardian let out a long sigh. “What is the point of your question, citizen? Do you think that a single room is proof of corruption in high places?”

If only. No, I was just rubbing their noses in the reality of their supposedly equitable system.

“The Tourism Directorate recognises that certain key personnel need privileged treatment,” the chief scout continued. “For the good of the city.”

I let that pass without comment. “One last point. Roddie Aitken reported that he'd suffered an attempted assault by a hooded man to the guard.”

They were still in a ring around me, like a herd of cows congregated in the middle of a field. I went into biting fly mode.

“Someone's removed that report from the guard operations file.”

“What?” Hamilton looked like he was about to do serious damage to his cardiovascular system. I hadn't had a chance to tell him about my discovery before the Council meeting started. “How can you be sure the report was logged?”

“They are filed in numerical order, are they not?” said the senior guardian. He seemed to be very well informed about guard practices.

I nodded, unable to protect Hamilton from the bucket of shit he'd just thrown over himself. “The docket was torn out in haste. I found a small piece of the edge in the binder.”

The public order guardian was shaking his head slowly. “I'll find out who took it, you can be sure of that. Probably the idiot who forgot to follow the report up.”

Maybe. Or maybe there was someone in Hamilton's directorate who didn't want Roddie's complaint to be followed up. I wasn't sure how many other people in the Council chamber had the same thought.

We closed the nightclub and spent the rest of the evening looking for illicit drugs. We didn't find any. Davie and I were mobbed by a crowd of irate tourists when we left. They wanted naked flesh – not ours – but all I wanted was my bed. And I still hadn't turned forty. Pathetic.

Chapter Nine

“Stop!”

“What the  . . . ?” Davie stood on the brakes and pulled up in the middle of the deserted junction at Tollcross.

I put my shoulder to the door and leaped out on to the tarmac. I managed two paces, then fell flat on my face. My old friend the ice was back in force.

Davie pulled me to my feet. “What are you playing at, Quint?”

I started running again. “He was over there, in the shopfront.”

“Who?”

I reached the butcher's. Even though it was chained up, the sour reek of meat well past its prime was still about the place. Nothing human though.

“The hooded man,” I said. “I caught a glimpse as we went past.” I ran out into the middle of the road and looked around in every direction. It was dead quiet, all the local citizens housebound by the curfew a couple of hours back. Nothing moved except the city flags under every streetlamp gently flapping in the chill breeze.

“Are you sure?” Davie joined me and peered about doubtfully. “I didn't see anyone.”

I rubbed my eyes and tried unsuccessfully to swallow a yawn.

“I'm not sure of anything much at the moment, guardsman,” I said eventually and headed back to the Land-Rover. The idea of the hooded man hanging around the vicinity of my flat again suddenly struck me as farcical. It was probably just my imagination messing me about. So I got Davie to drop me off and fell into a sleep so subterranean that not even the killer in my worst recurring nightmare could locate me.

And then, over the next couple of days, everything in the investigation went quiet. You get that sometimes – a burst of headless poultry activity at the beginning, followed by a becalmed state like the one the Ancient Mariner enjoyed so much. So what was going on? Had the killer found what he was looking for? Maybe the dead auxiliary had somehow got her hands on a new stimulant. Or maybe Roddie Aitken had pulled the wool over everyone's eyes and managed to smuggle it in. You sit around with ideas swooping through your mind like swallows catching flies on a warm summer evening when you haven't got anything else to go on. But unfortunately this was the freezing heart of winter and the leads we were chasing up didn't give us much to bite on. At one stage I tried to convince myself that the killer had found the drugs and departed to seek his fortune in a more liberal city like Glasgow. But I wasn't that gullible, not even for a fraction of a nanosecond.

The Council's policy towards tourists didn't help much. I wanted to check out any who were regulars at the Three Graces. It would have been easy enough to do as customers have to fill in a card giving their name and hotel, but the tourism guardian accused me of wanting to harass the city's customers. I assured the Council I would apply all my well-honed diplomatic skills, but they weren't having it. So instead I had to stick to what used to feature in twentieth-century police procedural novels, i.e. chasing up every boring detail. Meaning that Hamilton and I had undercover surveillance teams tailing as many of the two victims' friends and contacts as we could manage, including the sex centre supervisor and Patsy Cameron; that we searched all their cubicles or flats while they were absent; that Davie compiled a list of everyone who had access to the guard complaint register; that the bite mark and DNA data from the second victim were checked against dental and medical records (no joy); and that, in my spare time, I tried to work out what the point of the blues tapes was. It was all as about as useful as an enema during an epidemic of dysentery.

Then, on Sunday afternoon when I was walking across the ice rink that the castle esplanade had become and trying hard not to use my buttocks as skates, I got inspired. Sex reared its purple rosebud head and I immediately stuck my hand in my pocket – to pull out my mobile and tell Davie to meet me at the centre where Roddie and Moira had achieved congress. I'd just remembered that citizens can be allocated lockers if they want to keep personal equipment secure.

“What's up?” Davie said when I got there, his backside against the rust-shot maroon door of his vehicle. “Getting desperate?”

“Very funny, guardsman. You know former auxiliaries like me aren't allowed to defile ordinary citizens.” That's why I have to spend every Thursday night with weird demoted women. One thing to be said for the investigation was that I had a reason for calling off my last session. The last thing I needed just now were distractions of a carnal nature. Well, almost the last thing.

It was a Sunday so there was a long queue outside the sex centre. As usual, citizens were grumbling about the fact that they had to meet here for sex rather than in their flats. The official line is that this way health standards are maintained, but everyone knows it's so that a firm grip is kept. It's not a joke though – any citizens caught having it off in unapproved premises get to acquire an intimate and long-term knowledge of potato picking and turnip tending on the city farms.

I pushed through to the front. Citizen Macmillan gave me a reluctant nod from her desk.

“Back again, citizen? Did you forget something?”

“Now you come to mention it  . . .”

“Well, don't take all day. People behind you have got things to do.”

I glanced round at the sullen faces in the reception area. They looked like children who've got to the front of the school dinner queue only to see that the last tray of chips has just run out.

“I won't keep you long,” I said. “Roddie Aitken and Sheena Marinello. Did they have lockers?”

The receptionist's eyes flashed open at the mention of Roddie's name. “Where is Roddie? Why do you keep asking questions about him?”

I knew she didn't expect any answers. In some ways I would have liked to tell her what had happened to him – she was obviously quite friendly with him. But she was better off not knowing.