The Bone Yard (30 page)

He nodded, not looking too convinced. Soon afterwards he went back to his billet. Katharine went to bed and didn't move when I lay down on the other side. I left a space between us which she didn't move into. I didn't feel confident enough to stake a claim. As I drifted off, thankful at least that the bed wasn't moving up and down like dirty Harry's ship of fools, I remembered the oath I'd sworn. I'd been ignoring Roddie, but I was back on track now. I didn't care about the other two victims much, though even corrupt auxiliaries don't deserve to die the way they did. But I cared about Roddie and his killer was going to find that out. I slept surprisingly well that night.

The next morning was warmer and the snow was gone from the streets. It had turned into huge amounts of water that the works buses were spraying over citizens on the pavements. Their faces were even more sullen than they usually are first thing.

Davie steered the Land-Rover down to the Supply Directorate depot off the Canongate. In pre-Enlightenment times it had been part of Waverley station, but the Council blocked the railway lines leading in and out of the city soon after independence. That was part of their policy of securing the borders and getting a grip on the drugs gangs. The fact that it enabled them to control everything that went on in the city was purely incidental, of course.

The depot is gigantic, nearly half a mile long. The sentry at the gate took one look at the guard vehicle and waved us through without checking our IDs, which meant that Katharine didn't have to show her “ask no questions”. I'd wondered about bringing her along – if we ran into Hamilton and he recognised her, we'd be in serious shit – but on balance it seemed safer to keep an eye on her. God knows what she'd have got up to on her own.

We drove into the great covered area. Rows of packing cases and piles of stores stretched away into the distance. In the early days the Council decided to concentrate all the city's supplies in one heavily guarded location to discourage thieving. That had the additional advantage of providing huge numbers of jobs for citizens involved in recording, packing and delivering the stuff. In fact, that may have been the only advantage because there's probably more pilfering and black-market-controlled stealing now than there ever was before.

Davie drove down the central passage towards the office section. We passed great heaps of potatoes and turnips, the bitter-sweet stink from the latter invading the Land-Rover; then boxes full of cheap clothes run up in the Council's sweatshops, not that the guardians refer to them as such; and finally, shelves full of the tattered books that are bought in on the cheap from other cities' ransacked libraries. Personnel from the Information Directorate's Censorship Department were sorting through them, tossing the rejects into crates marked “For Burning”. The Council gets more heat from books than it does from the nuclear power station at Torness. There must be some sort of moral in that.

Katharine was shaking her head. “There's enough food in here to keep the city going for years.”

Davie nodded. “Aye, and this depot doesn't handle the meat. You should see how much of that they've got in the cold stores at Slateford.”

That reminded me of the Bone Yard. Not long ago I thought it might have something to do with the slaughterhouses in that part of the city. Something about that idea still nagged at me.

“So why are Edinburgh citizens all so thin and hungry-looking?” Katharine was saying. “Why doesn't the Council increase the entitlement to food vouchers?”

Davie shrugged, looking away as he pulled into a parking space beside a Supply Directorate delivery van that was held together with wire.

“Don't forget the tourists,” I said as I opened the door. “They get first bite at the cherry. And at the sirloin steak.”

Davie slammed the door on his side. “Sirloin steak?” he asked. “What's that, then?”

The deliveries supervisor, a middle-aged woman with grey hair and the wan look of someone who's seen it all and isn't convinced it was worth the bother, greeted us without enthusiasm. But at least she was efficient.

“All the delivery documentation pertaining to Roderick Aitken was removed from the main archive after his death. I will have it sent up to the meeting room for you to inspect.” She gave Davie a sceptical glance from behind the stacks of files on her desk. “I hope you get more out it than you did the last time you were here, Hume 253.”

We went up grimy stairs to a room furnished with a table and chairs that wouldn't have found space in a junk shop in the old days. No one could accuse Supply Directorate staff of creaming off quality goods to brighten up their place of work. I looked out of dirty windows at the scene that stretched across the depot's endless concrete floor. Forklifts raced around like crazed dung beetles, loading and discharging, endlessly moving things from one location to another. Armies of staff paraded around with clipboards, checking deliveries off and distributing bits of paper. The system seemed to work but it didn't exactly make you rejoice in the regime. A single computer would have saved an awful lot of hassle. But then there'd be citizens hanging around with nothing to do and the Council couldn't have that.

A couple of porters arrived with our very own collection of delivery sheets, waybills, receipts and rosters. We settled down to the kind of job that archivists dream about. I had some fun but the others struggled. After an hour we compared notes.

“There doesn't seem to be any pattern to the goods he delivered over the last three months,” Katharine said, pushing away the files she'd been working on. “New carpets to tourist hotels, fruit, vegetables and other supplies to food stores, beer to the citizens' bars. About the only thing he hasn't delivered is sex aids to the recreation centres.”

“The old hands keep that job for themselves,” Davie said with a grin.

“What about you?” I asked.

He pulled a face that suggested he'd been wasting his time too. “No pattern with the vehicles he's been driving either.” I'd put him on to that in case there were any Roddie had been assigned frequently; we could then have looked for a secret compartment where drugs might have been stashed. “Transits, Renaults, some Polish contraptions I can't pronounce the name of. They even had him on a bicycle distributing styluses for the record players in the tourist clubs.” He raised his shoulders. “Nothing regular.”

“Which leaves me,” I said, giving them a triumphant smile. “And I've got several goodies.”

“Oh, aye?” Davie came round the table.

“What is it, Quint?” Katharine kept to her chair, but her voice betrayed her interest.

“What I've got is three places where he made more than six visits in the last month of his life, i.e. December. I haven't gone any further back yet. I reckon any lead will be recent rather than months in the past.”

“I wish you'd told me that,” Davie complained.

“Why do you think the frequency of visits is important?” Katharine said, ignoring him. “Surely he could have gone only once or twice to the place we're after?”

“You're right, he could have. But let's hope he didn't. Otherwise we're going to be driving around the city for the rest of our lives.”

She nodded. “Fair enough. So where are these three places?”

“Number one, the zoo.”

“Animal feed,” Katharine said, checking her notes.

“Yup. Number two, a sawmill near a village called Temple about ten miles south of the city.”

“Pine slats, two by fours and dormitory partitions.”

“Right again. And number three, Slaughterhouse Four at Slateford.”

“Don't tell me,” said Davie. “Sirloin steak.”

Katharine actually laughed at that. “Among other things. So where do we go first?”

I knew where I wanted to go first. It was finally time to check out the city's meat production facilities.

“How are we going to manage this on our own?” Katharine asked as we came out of the depot.

“We aren't,” I replied. “If we're going to have any chance of finding the laboratory that's been producing the Electric Blues, we're going to need expert help.”

She thought for a moment then turned to me with a satisfied smile. “The toxicologist.”

“Correct. Head for the King's Buildings, Davie.”

He turned down St Mary's Street, glancing at me as he span the wheel. “Won't we need some back-up, Quint?”

“You mean, shouldn't we inform Hamilton?” I asked with a laugh.

He wasn't impressed and gave both of us the benefit of his guardsman's assault glare. “That as well. I seem to remember a lot of references in your handbook to keeping senior officers fully informed.”

“True enough,” I said. “But that handbook was written for serving auxiliaries, not demoted ones like me.”

“And me,” put in Katharine.

“Also, telling Hamilton and calling in more guard personnel to help with the operation will mean that what we're doing gets leaked within half an hour. I don't want that. Don't worry, Davie, I've got to report to the Council tonight. I just don't want to give any advance warning of this line of enquiry.”

I braced myself as he slammed his foot on the brakes at the junction with the Cowgate. Five or six cattle galloped nervously towards the Grassmarket, the herdsmen in medieval costume being applauded by a small group of tourists who presumably had nothing better to do with their time. At least those cows had escaped the city's slaughterhouses – for the time being.

I left Katharine and Davie in the Land-Rover outside the labs and went to find the chief toxicologist. This time he wasn't listening to Robert Johnson in his private quarters, but was supervising a team of white-coated, masked, rubber-gloved chemists who were siphoning off a clear liquid with extreme caution.

The toxicologist saw me through the glass panel. I gathered from his energetic semaphore that he didn't want me to come any closer.

“Citizen Dalrymple,” he said as he eventually emerged, pulling down his mask. “You caught me at a very delicate procedural juncture.”

Classic senior auxiliary gibberish. “What is it you've got in there?” I asked.

He looked around to see that we were alone. “It's a new variant of the e. coli virus. We found it in some salami that a Danish tourist imported illegally.”

“Jesus. Has anyone been infected by it?”

He shook his head. “The man himself was repatriated the day he arrived and no other samples of the meat have been found.”

“Thank Christ for that.”

The chemist laughed, the folds of flesh on his face wobbling alarmingly. “Don't worry. It happens all the time.”

“Right,” I said, not particularly reassured. “If things are under control here, can you spare me some time?” I told him about the search for the Electric Blues lab.

He looked intrigued, then his face fell. “Wait a minute, citizen. Does the Council know about this?”

I pulled out my authorisation. “As you can see, you're required to give me all the assistance I want.”

“You aren't answering my question,” he said, his jowls quivering.

“Look, the Council will be briefed about this tonight.” I could see he was wavering. I considered putting him on the spot for his addiction to banned music, then I thought of a better way. “Have you lost any senior staff in the last six months or so, Lister 25?”

He looked at me in surprise. “It's funny you should mention that, citizen. I was going to call you after your last visit but it slipped my mind. Lister 436. She was an excellent toxicologist – I'd been grooming her to take over from my present deputy. Then she was suddenly transferred to the senior guardian's private office last  . . . let me see  . . . last November, it must have been. Yes, late last November. I haven't heard from her since.” Then he looked at me again, his wrinkled skin turning an even sicklier yellow shade than normal. “Surely you don't think she's been involved in the production of that drug?”

I didn't think it was necessary to answer that question. “Are you coming to see if we can find the lab?”

The chemist already had his white coat off. “If I find that a student of mine's been producing a substance like that, there'll be serious trouble.”

He may have looked like an elephant that's been on a crash diet, but I wasn't planning on getting in his way.

Slaughterhouse Four is one of the many parts of Edinburgh that the tourists don't see. At first glance it doesn't seem like a place of death, unless the wind happens to be blowing towards you from it. The main block is a large Edwardian building with high windows and saucer domes at the corners. In the field and yards in front of it doomed sheep and cattle give a rustic touch to the rundown urban surroundings of soot-blackened housing and potholed roads.

“Right, we're going to have to be quick,” I said as Davie pulled up outside the checkpoint. “If there is something illicit going on here, whoever's involved will clear out as soon as they hear we're about the place.” I looked at the toxicologist on the front seat beside me. “I'm not going to spell out to the facility supervisors what we're after. When they see you, they'll probably assume it's something to do with hygiene or infection control.”

“Are we going to split up?” Katharine asked from behind.

I nodded. “You go with Davie. If you see anything that looks like a lab, call me. Lister 25 and I will check out the resident science officer first.”

As we cleared the sentry post, a heavy drizzle started to fall, weighing down our clothes with an evil-smelling spray in the few seconds it took us to get inside the abbatoir. Instantly the mild bleating and lowing from the animals ouside was replaced by the rattle of the machinery on the killing line and a high-pitched shrieking that made my stomach flip.