The Bone Yard (26 page)

“What is on the tape, citizen?” the chief boyscout asked after the medical guardian had confirmed that the head went with the body.

I went over to the machine and hit the play button. The exquisite sounds of Paul Kossoff's guitar washed over the guardians. I was pleased to see that at least one of them looked to be getting into the rhythm surreptitiously.

“And that was  . . . ?” the senior guardian asked when the music finished.

“‘Fire and Water' by Free,” I replied. “There are those who say that Paul Rodgers had the finest voice of all British rock singers.”

“Really?” said the senior guardian in a voice that sounded interested but I was bloody sure wasn't. Then his expression livened up a bit. “Did you say rock singers? The other pieces of music were blues, were they not?”

I shrugged. “Free were influenced by American rhythm and blues like a lot of bands in the late 1960s. Paul Rodgers sang plenty of blues standards in his time.”

The senior guardian's eyes locked on to mine. “So why exactly was this song chosen, citizen?”

I was pretty sure he was squaring up to me, daring me to come out into the open. In fact, that was probably why he'd called this emergency meeting – to make sure I came up against him in front of the other guardians rather than in private. He knew I'd been digging in the Science and Energy Directorate archive and he knew I'd heard William McEwan mention the Bone Yard. But he didn't want to give me the chance to ask him any awkward questions. Like whether the song had anything to do with his directorate. I reckoned it did. “Fire and Water” sounded to me like a pretty unsubtle hint at nuclear reactors. The ones at Torness used to produce the equivalent of millions of fires and needed plenty of water in their cooling systems. But I needed something more solid before I could lay into him.

“The song's a typical lover's complaint,” I said innocently. “The guy's having a hard time with a woman who blows hot and cold.” I gave the Ice Queen a quick glance and was rewarded with her normal glacial gaze.

Lewis Hamilton was shaking his head in annoyance. “What's the point? Isn't there any connection with drugs?”

“Not one that's hit me so far,” I replied. “I'll need to think about it.”

The chief boyscout finally decided that staring me out was a waste of time. “I trust you'll let us know when your thought processes bear fruit. Another point, citizen. Why was the head left on your door?”

Good question. I'd been wondering about that myself. The hooded man had followed Roddie Aitken to my flat, so he probably knew about my involvement from the beginning. The fact that he'd risked being spotted with his unsavoury bundle suggested either that he had something against me or that he wanted to get me in even more deeply than I already was. Which might explain the choice of “Fire and Water” as the latest musical offering.

“Well, citizen?” the senior guardian asked, his saintly features beginning to tighten impatiently.

“Well what?” I replied with a lot more impatience. “There are plenty of people who know I'm running the case. The murderer may be one of them.”

“Plenty of people?” Hamilton's forehead furrowed like it always did when he came to a conclusion that offends him. “The murders haven't been publicised, Dalrymple. The only people who know about them are auxiliaries.”

I let a wide smile blossom across my face. He'd just buried his foot in the shit. I didn't have to add another word, so I turned on my heel and left the boyscouts to it.

I let myself into the flat as quietly as I could and lit a candle. Then I sat down at the kitchen table, feeling its flimsy legs bend as I leaned on it, and tried to do some serious thinking.

The main problem was that this wasn't simply a multiple murder investigation, which would have been bad enough. There were too many things going on at the margins – like William McEwan's death, the new drug formula, the nuclear physicist who ended up at Katharine's farm, the Bone Yard. How the hell did they all come together? Could it be that they were all part of an agenda that did not include a future for the Council? Then there was the music. I had the definite impression that someone was pulling my chain, someone who knew how much I was into the blues. The first two pieces obviously referred to the uppers they'd called Electric Blues, but now there was “Fire and Water”, which I reckoned was a reference to the nuclear part of the puzzle. But why? What was I being told? That there was some connection between the decommissioned power station at Torness and the new drug?

The bedroom door opened and Katharine stepped into the dim light of the candle. She rubbed her eyes, but I wasn't paying much attention to them. The only garment on the lower half of her body was a pair of knickers. Her long legs looked in good condition – that's what you get if you work on a farm where there's no machinery. I had a look at them then went back to the black material covering her crotch. Presumably an itinerant salesman had called at her place since the Supply Directorate in Edinburgh provides only off-white underwear.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “It's the middle of the night.”

“I am a creature of the night, my dear,” I said in an attempt at a Lon Chaney accent.

“Creatures of the night who've got any sense spend it in bed.” She headed back into the other room.

I pursued her after a diplomatic gap of a second or two. By the time I got there she was already back under the covers. I threw my outer layer of clothing off and slid under the thin blankets, shivering. Katharine was facing the other way but she pushed her rump towards me. I moved into the warmth that her body was making. Her legs burned against me. I couldn't tell if she'd gone back to sleep or not, but she was very still. Then I remembered the Cavemen and what she'd been through. Suddenly I didn't feel like making any further moves. So I absorbed her heat and fell into a surprisingly dream-free sleep.

Which lasted until about six in the morning, when I woke up to the realisation that I was going to have to take some life-threatening decisions. I felt even worse when I saw that the other side of the bed was empty.

“Morning.” Katharine appeared at the door with a mug of coffee. “I thought I heard sounds of the kraken waking.”

“You're up early,” I mumbled, trying to clear a way for words. My mouth was gummed up better than a glue-sniffer's nasal tubes in the days when you didn't need a guard permit for adhesive substances.

“The life of the soil,” she said, sitting on the bed and drinking from her own mug. “You've almost run out of this stuff. You're going to have to get Davie to pilfer some more.”

“Do you mind? I earned that from a client who works in one of the tourist restaurants.” I gulped the coffee down. “Anyway, I've got other plans for him today.”

“Have you now?” Katharine looked at me severely. “And what about me? If you think I'm going to stay in this shithole  . . .”

“Before you insult my home any further, one of those plans involves you.”

“I hope you don't expect me to dress up as a guardswoman and spend the day with him.”

“Not exactly. I'm going to tell him to get you an ‘ask no questions'.”

“Can't I use yours?”

“I might need it. Until you get it, do you think you'll be able to bear staying in my shithole?”

She shrugged, then nodded non-committally. I wasn't convinced she'd stay but I had more worrying things on my mind. Like disturbing the senior guardian's breakfast.

“So you'll sort out Katharine's ‘ask no questions' and take it to her at my place, Davie?”

He was staring out at the New Town's Georgian houses in the early morning gloom and looking pretty unimpressed. “What are you playing at, Quint? She a bloody deserter. If the public order guardian finds out  . . .”

“Well, you'd better make sure he doesn't.” I slapped him on the thigh. “Lighten up, pal. She's given me some pretty useful information.”

“Oh, aye? And where's it got you? I haven't noticed any murderers sitting in the castle dungeons.”

I nodded slowly, feeling the wet greyness of the walls in Forres Street seeping into me like a dose of pneumonia. “Someone's playing games with us, Davie, and I'm not having fun. Especially since I don't know the rules.”

“The great Quintilian Dalrymple doesn't know the rules?” he asked ironically.

I wasn't in the mood, so I did what I normally do when he takes the piss – assaulted him verbally using numerous words banned by the Council. He enjoyed it almost as much as I did. Eventually we got back to business.

“Something else, Davie. Do you know anyone in the Fisheries Guard?” The sum total of the Council's navy is half a dozen converted trawlers that protect the city's fishing boats from the modern version of pirates – that is, headbangers from Fife armed with ex-British Army automatic rifles.

“Those lunatics? Aye, I went through auxiliary training with some of them.” He looked at me seriously. “What's going on? You don't want to mess with those guys. They're a bunch of total psychos.”

“Who don't pay that much attention to what the guard command centre tells them to do?”

Davie shrugged. “They don't need to. The captains have their own patch to patrol. They have carte blanche to deal with raiders however they want. All they need the castle for is to approve their ammunition supplies.”

That was what I wanted to hear.

Davie was peering at me suspiciously. “What are you up to, Quint?”

“Me? I'm going to have a chat with the senior guardian.”

“Is he expecting you?” Davie asked as I got out of the Land-Rover.

“Put it this way – I don't think he'll exactly be surprised to see me.” I stopped and turned back to him. “Keep your mobile on. If you don't hear from me in an hour, come knocking on his door.”

“What?” The idea of making an unauthorised call on the chief boyscout looked about as palatable to him as a plate of citizen-issue black pudding.

I walked down the slippery road towards the checkpoint that restricts access to Moray Place. All the guardians have their residences in the circular street that surrounds a small park. The original members of the Enlightenment had thought it appropriate that Council members live together, despite the fact that they'd cut themselves off from their families. Then again, living together didn't have any dubious connotation as far as they were concerned. My parents were both guardians in the first Council and they'd given up living with each other in any significant way years before the last election.

I flashed my authorisation at the guardswoman by the heavy gate. She was young and hard, her fair hair drawn back tight in the regulation ponytail.

“Which guardian are you visiting, citizen?” she demanded, her hand on the telephone in the sentry box.

I didn't want to give the senior guardian any advance warning. “Your boss, the public order guardian,” I said with a winning smile.

She was very far from returning that. “The guardian is at the castle, citizen.”

“I don't think so. He told me to be here at seven thirty on the dot.” I was pretty sure the guardswoman wouldn't risk annoying Hamilton by checking on his whereabouts.

His temper was to my advantage again. She took her hand away from the phone and raised the barrier. “It's number seven,” she said.

“It's not the first time I've been here,” I said as I walked past her. “Unfortunately.”

Around the corner she couldn't see that I carried on past the residence that Hamilton rarely used and headed for the senior guardian's. In the gloom before sunrise the streetlights, which are kept on overnight here for security reasons, cast sparkling circles of pale orange on the icy paving stones. I was thinking about the infrequent visits I made to my mother here. The last was after the end of the murder case in 2020. I was usually torn to shreds by her and I had a nasty feeling her successor was about to keep up the tradition.

I knocked on the black door. It opened before I could blink. The male auxiliary on the other side must have been as close to it as the Three Graces' chiffon wraps are to their buttocks.

He ran an eye down me and made to close the door again.

“I'm Dalrymple,” I said, sticking my authorisation in his face. “The senior guardian's expecting me.” Well, that was a bit of a liberty, but there was some truth in it.

“I have no record of any appointment,” the auxiliary said, stuttering slightly. He must have been in his late twenties but he suddenly looked like he needed a nappy. You often get that with members of his rank when the bureaucracy fouls up.

“Look,” I said, pushing past him. “It's bloody freezing outside. I told you, the senior guardian will—”

“The senior guardian will do what, citizen Dalrymple?”

I looked up to see the man himself standing halfway down the ornate staircase, a file under his arm. Apparently I was too late to interrupt his breakfast. Then again, deities don't need to bother with food and drink.

“I need to talk to you,” I said. At my side I felt the auxiliary flinch as I deliberately omitted his superior's title.

There was a pause as the chief boyscout considered my fate.

“Very well. I was just going into the library. Will you join me?”

I wasn't sure whether the excessive politeness was for the benefit of the auxiliary or whether he always behaved like this out of Council meetings. It knocked me off the course I'd decided on. But only for a few moments.

“You often came here when my predecessor was in office, I imagine,” he said, sitting down in a leather armchair beside the open fire. The walls were lined with books as high as the ceiling. They seemed mainly to be scientific tomes. Over by the barred window was a row of gunmetal cabinets. I wondered if they contained the files that had been removed from the Science and Energy Directorate archive.