The Bone Yard (21 page)

Davie and I went out into the cold. Darkness still prevailed in the sky overhead and the underpowered streetlights weren't making too much of an impression on it. They were helped a bit by the thick carpet of snow that was lying on all the surfaces. It reflected their feeble glow and muffled the sound of the buses on the main road. Citizens unlucky enough to be working in the mines were already heading for the collection points, scarves wrapped around their faces. Eyes were sunk as deep in their sockets as those of the prisoners on Death Row after the last, desperate UK government reintroduced capital punishment.

Davie had parked the Land-Rover away from the pavement as the snow had drifted near the buildings. Walking into the road, I caught sight of thin parallel tyre tracks about two feet apart. Probably some poor sod in a wheelchair going to the infirmary for an early morning appointment.

“Where to then?” asked Davie.

“The main archive on George IVth Bridge.”

“Not again,” he groaned as the starter motor whined and eventually fired. “This case is about as much fun as the paper chases we did during auxiliary training.”

“Don't knock it, guardsman. It's the only lead we've got.” He was about to ask me about it. I'd have to tell him eventually but I didn't want him to know about Katharine yet. I spoke before he could. “Did the guardsman who was attacked yesterday have anything more to say?”

Davie shook his head. “I checked with his barracks commander late last night. Apparently he was still pretty shaky.”

“He took a hell of a pounding.”

Davie swung carefully round the snow-covered junction at Tollcross, slowing to walking pace as we passed a City Guard emergency unit. A Mines Department bus had mounted the pavement and turned an
Edinburgh Guardian
kiosk into firewood. The passengers were standing around looking dazed and confused, but happy; whatever happened next, they'd missed at least part of their shift in the frozen earth.

“I wouldn't worry,” Davie said as he accelerated up Lauriston Place. “I played rugby against that guardsman once. He used his head like it was the business end of a battering ram. He probably bangs it against a wall himself if he doesn't get his daily ration of hits.”

At the archive I sent him off to see if Hamilton's people had reported anything overnight. That made him very happy. Then I told him to come back as soon as he'd finished, which didn't impress him so much.

Even at eight in the morning there were plenty of auxiliaries in the archive. Paper has come to dominate this city in the eighteen years since the Enlightenment came to power. Here were large numbers of highly educated people spending their lives chasing files. Winston Smith in
1984
would have felt very much at home, though his first name wouldn't have made him popular with the Council – too redolent of what's still seen as the bankrupt legacy of the British establishment. The Enlightenment regarded computers as socially divisive and educationally sterile, so they got rid of as many as they could. Those the guardians have kept are used to run the Council's classified records, but there aren't enough to go round for that. Just as well. That means I can still find a lot of sensitive information in the archives.

I found a quiet corner and took out the ID card Katharine had given me. Under the bright reading light it didn't take me long to discover something very interesting. The card proclaimed that Hamish Robin Campbell had been born on 27.11.1970, had the status of ordinary citizen, was five feet nine inches tall, weighed twelve stone six pounds, had light brown hair, a complete set of teeth and an appendix scar; he was in the Leisure Department of the Tourism Directorate, lived at 19b Elgin Street and his next of kin was his wife Muriel Campbell. The photograph that stared out dully from the laminated card was of a balding, sad-faced man who looked like he'd been working too hard for too many years. In that respect he was no different from most of his fellow citizens who'd invested their lives in the Enlightenment. Except they don't carry fake ID cards. If you've seen as many as I have, you can spot a ringer faster than the annual strawberry ration disappears from the city's foodstores.

I had a pretty good idea where this particular specimen came from too. The City Guard's Documentation Department is staffed by skilled forgers and graphic designers. The problem is, they're all auxiliaries and auxiliaries are by training and nature perfectionists. They make a really good job of every false ID they produce for undercover agents, with the result that those IDs often look more convincing than the real cards the Citizen Registration Department issues.

So what was going on here with Hamish Robin Campbell? Was he a former guard operative who'd deserted? Or could he be an active undercover man who'd penetrated the gang that was run by the crazy guy he called the Screecher? The obvious person to ask would be Hamilton, but that wouldn't prove much. I'd never heard of covert guard operations being run outside the city borders and, anyway, Campbell might have been handled by one of the iron boyscouts without the public order guardian's knowledge. I also wanted to keep this to myself till I found out more about the dead man and his links with the drug formula.

I had a plan about how to do that but it would need careful timing. In the meantime I checked the Deserters Register for Campbell's name. It wasn't there. Either he'd managed to leave the city without being missed or his name had been deliberately kept out. Then I checked the Accommodation Index and discovered that there had once been a Muriel Campbell living at 19b Elgin Street, but she died in 2016. That was as much confirmation as I needed that the ID had been produced by auxiliaries. It's standard procedure to use an address that checks out superficially, but the forgers in the castle aren't required to update secondary details. Now I was sure the card was fake. But I wasn't looking forward to what I had to do next.

“Davie, I need to get Hamilton out of his office for a while.”

If he was surprised, he didn't show it. “You're keeping something to yourself, aren't you, Quint?” He made a skilful adjustment to the Land-Rover's steering as we came on to the esplanade. Judging by the way other guard vehicles were slewed about the snow-covered expanse beneath the castle entrance, most drivers had decided that parking in the normal neat ranks was not essential today.

“Is it that obvious?”

“Aye.” Davie laughed. “You get this faraway look in your eyes when you're on to something tasty. Like a kid opening the
Enlightenment Encyclopedia
at the page headed ‘Human Sexuality' for the first time.”

“Very funny, guardsman.” I gave him a stern look. “What page number is that again?”

He pulled up by the sentries. “Volume three, page four hundred and thirty-seven.” He undid his seatbelt and looked back at me thoughtfully. “I suppose I could get the guardian to come down to the operations room to go over the roster of personnel involved in the investigation. These days he almost licks your feet if you ask for his advice.”

“Poor old sod. The iron boyscouts think he's a joke.”

“Well, I don't,” Davie said defensively, “and neither should you. He's been asking what you're up to.”

“Has he now? Tell him I'm checking on the guardsman who got his brains rearranged yesterday.”

Davie nodded. “Okay. Give me ten minutes before you go to his quarters.”

I put my hand on his arm. “There's the small matter of the clerk in his outer office.”

Davie grinned. “Oh, don't worry about Amy. I'll tell her you're on official business.”

“I can do that myself.”

“Aye, citizen. But will she keep quiet about your visit afterwards?”

He headed off through the gate, acknowledging the guards. I sometimes wonder if there are any female auxiliaries in the city who he hasn't provided with an unforgettable sex session.

Hamilton's clerk was middle-aged and faded, her hair as grey as the auxiliary-issue suit she was wearing. But there was a red glow about her cheeks. Whatever Davie said to her seemed to have done the trick. As soon as I went in to the outer office she looked down at her papers. As I went in to the guardian's office, I heard the outer door close behind her. I was on my own. The question was, for how long?

The last time I used Hamilton's computer was during the search for the murderer two years ago. I was banking on the chance that he hadn't changed his password since then. I sat down, logged on and entered the word “colonel”. Then I hit the return key and waited, feeling my heart pounding in my chest. The screen flashed and the Council Archive main menu came up. I highlighted the City Guard line, then the Confidential Operatives line in the subsidiary menu that followed. I was asked again for a password. As in all systems, users are instructed not to use the same one that they use for initial access. But Lewis Hamilton was a leading proponent of the Enlightenment's anti-information technology position and he used his terminal about as often as I agree with current Council policies. The chances were that he used the same password. I entered it and waited for alarm bells to ring. They didn't. The menu of the file containing details of all the guard's undercover operatives appeared. I was in.

I glanced at my watch. Nine thirty-three. I hoped to hell Hamilton was buying Davie's strategy. Tea is brought round at quarter to ten in the castle. That would give Davie an extra chance to stall the guardian.

I went into the Operatives' Aliases option and entered the name on the ID card. There was a brief pause and then the file came up. Hamish Robin Campbell: alias approved 12.8.2018. That was interesting. It showed that the guy had been undercover for three and a half years. I noted down the barracks number of the auxiliary who had assumed the alias, which was Watt 103. Things were looking promising. Then I requested the reports Campbell had filed on his activities and my luck ran out as comprehensively as the guy's at the end of the queue when the whisky runs out on a Saturday night.

The screen told me that Campbell's reports were “Not Available”. That's jargon for “So Secret That Even Guardians Don't Have Access”. There was only one person who could call up “Not Available” files and that was the chief boyscout. Who knows what his passwords were? “Baden” and “Powell”?

I went back into the main menu and tried to bring up Watt 103's service record. All auxiliaries' data are held in the Council Archive, but I was pretty sure this particular servant of the city had officially died a long time before Katharine came across him. And so it turned out. Watt 103 didn't feature as a serving auxiliary, but there was a reference to him in the “Auxiliaries – Deceased” archive. According to that, he had died of a heart attack in the infirmary on 4 December 2019. Unless he'd come back to life like a cataleptic character in an Edgar Allan Poe story, someone had been messing around with the records. And whoever that was had fallen foul of the cross-referencing system, suggesting he or she didn't have a complete grasp of the archives but also hadn't wanted to involve a professional clerk.

I heard the outer office door bang. After a delay that made my heart shake, rattle and roll there was a knock on the door of the inner office. Then another knock. I waited, frozen to the seat in front of the terminal, ready to claim I was a technician updating Hamilton's software and fully aware that wouldn't do anything more than buy me a little more time. Then I heard footsteps moving away and the outer office door close again. The guardian's notorious temper seemed to have put the visitor off entering without permission. That was the first time I'd ever felt grateful that Hamilton was such an irascible old bugger.

It was obviously time to get out but I still wanted to know more about Watt 103. I scrolled down his personal details and came to a piece of information that made all the tangled nerves I'd suffered in the last twenty minutes worth while. The auxiliary who staggered to Katharine's collective farm south of Dunbar had been trained as a physicist before the Enlightenment. Not just any kind of physicist either, but a nuclear physicist. After the Council was established, he'd been involved in the decommissioning of Torness nuclear power station. I sat back in the chair after I logged off and looked out through the leaded windows towards the gull-grey water of the Firth of Forth. Torness nuclear power station went out of service in 2007. So what was one of the few remaining nuclear physicists in a city where coal has been the main fuel for fifteen years doing over the border? And what was he doing in a gang that operated close to the city's former main source of energy?

I smelled a very large mutant rat glowing brightly in Edinburgh's Enlightenment gloom.

I met Davie and the guardian in the corridor outside the operations room.

“Ah, there you are, Dalrymple.” Hamilton was looking twitchy, which isn't usually a good sign. He started running his hand back and forward through his beard as if the Council had just decreed that auxiliaries must be clean-shaven but that razors aren't allowed. “There seems to be a bit of a problem.”

It was unlike him to be vague, even when he ran into trouble.

“What is it?” I asked, glancing at Davie. He didn't look particularly bothered.

“It's my bloody deputy,” the guardian replied.

“Raeburn 03? He hasn't fallen under a bus, has he?”

Hamilton glared at me. “That isn't funny, Dalrymple. I don't think much of him as an individual but he's an excellent administrator.”

Most of that was for Davie's benefit. I wondered if the guardian knew that his number two was known as Machiavelli by everyone else in the guard.

“So what's the problem with your excellent administrator?” I asked.

“We don't know where he is,” Davie put in. “No one's seen him since yesterday evening.”

That sounded interesting. “When you say no one, you mean no one you've asked so far,” I said.