Body Politic (28 page)

“I'm going down to Scott Barracks to do some digging.”

“In the gardens? Apparently if you spit on your hands . . .”

I didn't respond to that. It had just struck me that tomorrow was Thursday. The killer was probably getting ready for another attack. Then again, today was April Fools' Day. I wondered how much of a sense of humour the butcher had.

I stood on Goldenacre looking up at the façade of the stand. I had a dim memory of watching a rugby match with my father when I was a small boy: a freezing winter's afternoon high above the pitch, being buffeted by the wind. I couldn't remember anything of the match itself. It probably involved some of Hector's students. He used to follow the rugby before the Enlightenment gave him other things to think about.

Scott Barracks is a custom-built block beyond the rugby field. It stands between the once affluent area of Goldenacre and the outskirts of Leith, where civil unrest was endemic in the first ten years of the Enlightenment. The lack of large buildings in the vicinity forced the planners to erect a dreary three-storey block of mess rooms and sleeping quarters. Auxiliaries from the barracks always had a reputation for being headbangers. I wished Davie was with me.

I flashed my authorisation and went into the entrance hall. The place had the usual institutional smell, the drab paint and scuffed woodwork of all barracks – but there was something else to the atmosphere. The guardsmen and women on duty seemed strangely depressed. There was none of the enthusiastic officiousness encouraged by the Council. I was directed to the commander's office by a young woman who looked like she hadn't slept for a week. I knocked and went in without waiting for a reply.

Scott 01 raised his head slowly and looked at me without blinking. He was hollow-eyed and prematurely bald. He couldn't have been much over thirty and even before he said anything I could see that he was having a hard time holding the job down. His beard was flecked with grey and it was probably a long time since he last smiled.

“Dalrymple,” I said, showing him my authorisation. If he knew about me, he wasn't showing it.

“What can I do for you, citizen?” His voice was unusually high-pitched, reedy as a shepherd's pipe on a distant hillside.

“I need immediate access to your records room.”

That got a flicker from his eyelashes. “If you need a file, I can have it brought to you here, citizen.”

And then you can see which one I want, I thought. “No, thanks. I want you to escort me to the archive personally and I want no one else to know I'm in there.”

“Can I see your authorisation again?” he asked.

I'd run out of time. “No, Scott 01. If you've got a problem, call the public order guardian.” I beat his fingers to the phone. “After you've taken me.”

“Very well.” The commander closed the file he'd been working on and stood up.

I wondered if he'd move any faster if I shouted “Fire”. Probably not. Auxiliaries are trained to keep a hold of themselves. Or at least to look like they're keeping a hold of themselves.

A group of guardswomen passed us in the corridor. They lowered their voices and their faces when they saw the commander and me. The first two were nondescript but the third wasn't the kind you look away from. I recognised her immediately. It was Mary, Queen of Scots. She gave me a quick glance and was gone. I didn't catch her barracks number.

I waited impatiently as Scott 01 unlocked the records room. In accordance with security regulations its door was steel-plated and equipped with three separate locks. In the early years of the Enlightenment there had been frequent break-ins by relatives trying to discover the whereabouts of auxiliaries after they'd been separated from their families. More recently the Education Directorate has been working hard to explain the need, as the Council sees it, for the city's servants to be anonymous and breaches in security have fallen away.

The commander stood back at last and let me into the windowless room. Then I waited till he'd locked me in. No doubt he'd be haring back to his office to call Hamilton.

Now for the ENT Man's brother. I pulled Scott 391's file, relieved to find that the thick maroon folder hadn't yet been sent to the central archive. The barracks are reluctant to hand over information on their people, even to other auxiliaries. So I sat down and learned all about the dead guardsman.

Or rather, tried to fill in the gaps. Auxiliaries have to write a Personal Evaluation at the start of the training programme. Scott 391's was remarkable because of the complete lack of reference to his older brother. He went on at some length about his parents, who were lawyers and strong supporters of the Enlightenment; he described his feelings about several schoolfriends and filled three pages about a girlfriend; he even wrote about the family house in Trinity and what he got up to as a kid in the area. But about his brother Stewart, not a word.

I went on through the file, tracing the guardsman's life through school, where he was particularly good at biology, to tours of duty on the border after he'd finished auxiliary training, to community service in Leith. He seemed like a conscientious enough guy, without much imagination. He fitted in well. It seemed pretty clear that he'd had no contact at all with his brother since the beginning of the Enlightenment, unless he'd been very clever about it. Auxiliaries get very little free time and they have to ask permission to move outside barracks areas – which, of course, would be recorded in the file. Gordon Oliver Dunbar spent most of his time off pumping iron in the barracks gym or writing seriously dull papers on Plato for the debating society. Then I got to the section about his sexual activities.

I felt a bit guilty. I always do when I go through other people's files. The problem is, I like it. I get a kind of vicarious pleasure from witnessing other lives, the successes and failures, the dreams and unachieved ambitions. No doubt voyeurs get the same rush.

My subject was definitely hetero. All his sessions were spent with female auxiliaries. I took a note of the numbers for the last couple of years, as well as those of his friends – not that they're described as such in Enlightenment-speak. His “close colleagues” amounted to eighteen barracks numbers. Either he was a liar or he was distinctly popular. It would take hours to go through all their files and, anyway, I wasn't sure what I was looking for. The poor sod had died before the first murder.

I went on to the end of Scott 391's file, turning the pages with rapidly decreasing interest. Then I got to the end and sat up like I'd been jabbed with a picador's lance. I tore out the memo that had been stapled in last and hammered on the door for it to be opened.

Scott Barracks is less than two hundred yards from the crematorium that serves the northern half of the city. The night the coffin containing the ENT Man's brother was delivered, something very unusual had happened there.

Chapter Seventeen

I PARKED THE
Transit outside the low brick building. The sign said that services, secular of course, were held only in the afternoons. Judging by the state of the place, I reckoned that the mornings were devoted to maintenance and cleaning. The Council had obviously shied away from rebuilding the dilapidated facility.

A thin, balding man with yellowish skin appeared on the steps. He rubbed his hands nervously and came over to the van. “Are you wanting to work in the gardens?” he asked, peering at the Parks Department sticker. “Only, they usually come on a Monday.”

I jumped down and showed him my “ask no questions”. His lack of beard and uniform showed he wasn't an auxiliary so there was no need to let him know my identity.

“Em, I hope there's no dissatisfaction with my work,” the official said warily. “I've always followed the Council's instructions to the letter.”

I shook my head. “There have been no complaints. You are . . .?”

“Douglas Haigh,” he said, thumbs on the seams of his worn grey trousers and the upper part of his body bending forward like a heron following a fish. “Haigh with ‘g-h',” he added. “I've been here for thirty years. How may I help you?”

“I need to see your records, citizen.” I stepped away from him and into the building. I didn't fancy his cadaverous appearance much. It looked like devotion to his work had kept him in a job that would normally be an auxiliary's.

“My records? Certainly.” Haigh overtook me and headed down the corridor with long strides. “What precisely do you want to know?” He had started rubbing his hands together again.

“You sent a memo to Scott Barracks on 8 March. It was a Sunday . . .”

“I work seven days a week,” he put in.

“What a surprise,” I said under my breath, pulling the sheet of paper from my pocket. “‘I wish to point out that Scott 477, the sentry on duty on the night of 7-8.3.2020, was guilty of several serious breaches of procedure. One, he . . .'”

“My word, yes. I remember that night very clearly.” He led me into a small office set back from the passageway that was echoing from our footsteps.

“You were here during the night?” That sounded promising.

Haigh sat down in an ancient chair that he had bound together with plastic-covered wire and motioned me to the other even more rickety seat. “Indeed I was.” He gave a brief, thin-lipped smile. “I don't like the flat I was assigned. Saturday nights are quiet here. There are usually no deliveries. But there was one that night.” The joints of his fingers cracked. “And a very curious one it was too.”

I leaned forward. “Why was that?”

“Well, first of all, the documentation was incomplete. If I hadn't happened to be here when the delivery was made, I would have had a terrible job chasing up the missing information.”

“What exactly was missing, citizen?”

Haigh cleared his throat like a professor about to start a lecture. “The Consignment of Human Remains form must show the barracks numbers of the auxiliary who approves release from the hospital or wherever the death was registered. It must also show the number of the guardsman or woman who accompanies the coffin and the name of the civilian driver.” He spread his arms dramatically. “In this case, none of them was filled in.”

I suddenly realised that the old ghoul was about to give me something precious. That was what prevented me from grabbing the desiccated bureaucrat by the throat to speed things up.

Haigh turned quickly to the grey metal cabinets behind him and produced a folder. He must have seen the look on my face.

“I took down the guardswoman's and the driver's details,” he said proudly. “And I even succeeded in obtaining the nursing auxiliary's number.”

I snatched the file from him. The top page was a mass of boxes and numbers, some filled in, others ticked or crossed out. It was what I found at the bottom that made me whistle. The dead guardsman had been logged out of the infirmary by Yellowlees's girlfriend, Simpson 134. The guardswoman accompanying the coffin was Sarah Spence, the murder victim we found first. After that, I wasn't too surprised to see Rory Baillie's name in the box marked “Driver”. But what the hell did it all mean?

“Anyway,” Haigh continued, “after the coffin was brought in, I went off home, thinking that was enough disorder for one night.”

The memo I'd taken from the barracks was making sense now. “And when you came back in the morning, you found all the screws on the coffin loose and the documents strewn across the floor.”

“Quite so.” He shook his head. “The sentry must have had a look at the body. After all, he was in the same barracks.” Now he was rubbing his hands like Lady Macbeth on speed. “I wonder if that's what drove him to kill himself.”

“What?” I looked up in astonishment. “The sentry committed suicide?”

Haigh's face turned even paler. “Oh, I . . . I assumed you knew about that. I . . . I didn't mean to . . .”

The constitution is firm about suicide. People who kill themselves become non-citizens without any memorial. No one, not even family and friends, is allowed to talk about them. The rules are even stricter when it comes to auxiliaries. No wonder Haigh was worried.

“I'm s . . . sorry,” he stuttered. “I heard it from one of the sentries last week. I . . . promise I won't . . .”

I raised my hand. “It's all right, citizen. You've been a great help.” As I left his office I saw a self-satisfied smile creep across the parchment of his face.

The commander of Scott Barracks looked up wearily when I burst back into his office.

“You had a suicide here recently,” I said.

That seemed to bring him even nearer to the end of his tether. “Scott 477,” he said in a faint voice. “It was a great shock. The barracks hasn't been the same since.”

Now I understood the atmosphere of the place. “When did it happen?”

“A week ago today – 25 March.”

I checked the barracks number in my notebook. “Scott 477 was a ‘close colleague' of Scott 391, the guardsman who was killed on the border.”

The commander nodded. “He was. And he was very down about his death. But . . . but he wasn't suicidal. I spoke to him at some length after I received the memo from the crematorium manager.” He shook his head slowly. “There was something else. Something happened afterwards.”

I thought about the date: 25 March. The news of Rory Baillie's murder had been made public by then. Could there be a connection? Something else struck me.

“How did Scott 477 commit suicide?”

There was a flash of hostility at my question in the commander's eyes. “He hanged himself, if you must know. In the storeroom.”

I nodded. “I'll need to see his file. You can have it brought to me here.”

Before it arrived, my mobile buzzed.

“It's Davie, Quint. Where are you? Billy Geddes has just left the Finance Directorate. He's heading down the Mound on foot.”