The Bone Yard (5 page)

Then I noticed his orange woollen hat. It was lying on the underside of the inverted table and it had been ripped to shreds. I began to get a seriously bad feeling about the scene.

I knocked on the bedroom door. Nothing. I opened it hesitantly, then drew breath in so sharply I almost choked.

Roddie was there all right. I saw immediately why he hadn't been answering.

His throat had been torn out.

I was bent over the kitchen sink, gasping and shaking. Trying to throw up, but aware very quickly that even though I hadn't seen a murder victim for nearly two years, I'd still seen too many in my life to be able to react like a normal human being. I wasn't sick in my stomach, but in what passes for my soul – sick that I'd abandoned Roddie to this, sick with responsibility and guilt. Jesus, I liked the guy and his naïve enthusiasm.

I splashed water on my face and stood up in front of the mirror. Shook my head and called myself a lot of names. And swore a solemn oath that I'd catch the evil bastard who slaughtered the boy who came to me for help. Then I went back to the door and looked at the horror on the bed.

I forced myself to be dispassionate. It's not difficult if you've been an auxiliary, even one who was demoted seven years ago like me. Auxiliaries pride themselves on being able to handle any crisis. One thing I definitely was not at that moment was proud. But I had to do my job. Roddie deserved the best I could give him even though it was far too late.

The first thing I did was call Davie. He was asleep after his night shift, but I heard the exhaustion vanish from his voice even over the mobile.

“Fuck.” The word rang out like a pistol shot. I knew it was one aimed at himself. “Bloody hell, Quint, I thought the lad was just imagining things.” He shot himself again with the same word. It sounded like we were both guilty about what had happened to Roddie Aitken. “I'm on my way.”

I called Lewis Hamilton. He'd have to be directly involved as there hadn't been a violent death since the last murderer ran riot. I hoped to the god I don't believe in that we didn't have another one like that on the loose. I also called the medical guardian and asked her to handle the post-mortem herself.

Before the guard arrived and turned the staircase into even more of a war zone, I carried out a quick private inspection of the flat. I didn't go far into the bedroom because there was a lot of blood on the floor and the killer would have left prints and traces. But the living room was another story. There were no visible signs of blood here, suggesting that the murderer had worn protection over his feet in the bedroom then removed it. I was thinking about the hooded man Roddie had described. What could be his motive? Smuggling? Black-market goods? There was no need to kill for those – plenty of people would willingly provide whatever you wanted for a price. But the way the place had been trashed, it certainly looked like a search had been undertaken. I hunted around for any evidence of pilfered supplies. Roddie Aitken definitely hadn't struck me as that kind of delivery man, though he might have sold me a dummy. But I found nothing in the living room. Perhaps there would be something in the bedroom. Or perhaps the killer had found what he was after.

In the distance I heard the high-pitched wail of sirens. It wouldn't be long before I had to face Roddie close up.

Hamilton came in looking pale, a team of people in white plastic overalls at his heels. “Good God Almighty, Dalrymple, what have you found?” He peered over my shoulder into the bedroom and flinched. The public order guardian never did like dead bodies.

I filled him in about Roddie's visit and request for help, though I kept quiet about the hooded man for the time being. Scene-of-crime personnel were already starting to take photos and sketch the room layouts; they seemed to have memorised the manual I wrote when I was in the directorate.

The medical guardian turned up, also in white plastic. “I'm impressed, citizen,” she said with a tight-lipped smile. “You even work on city holidays.”

“You don't mind handling this personally, do you?” I asked. “It's the first murder for—”

“I know my job,” she said tersely, then handed me some overalls. “Who's in charge on the public order side?”

“I'm taking the case.” I glanced at Hamilton, who looked a bit dubious. “I know I found the body, but that doesn't disqualify me.” If Hamilton knew how fired up I was to catch Roddie's killer, he'd have been even more dubious about letting me run the investigation, but I wasn't planning on telling him about the oath I'd sworn.

Davie came in, a grim look on his face. I beckoned to him to come over. “I'll need Hume 253 to work on this with me, guardian.”

“Very well, Dalrymple.” In the old days Hamilton wouldn't have let me lay down the law – that was his party piece. Now he's too busy protecting himself from the iron boyscouts, who were well pissed off when he refused to resign with most of my mother's gang.

I got Davie to oversee the scene-of-crime squad and told him to look out for any sign of illicit goods. Then, when the photographers finished with the longer-range shots, the medical guardian led me into the bedroom. We had to step around some large patches of partially dried blood on the worn carpet. Standing by the bed, we looked down at the mangled upper torso; a heavily stained sheet lay over the lower part of Roddie's body. His chest and arms were bare, splashed with blood from the gaping wound in his throat. The medical guardian, known to citizens who were prepared to take a chance as the Ice Queen because of her silver-blonde hair, was making preliminary observations into a small tape-recorder. The trachea had been ruptured and over two square inches of skin and cartilage torn out.

The guardian was bent over the wound, a magnifying glass in her hand. “The tears in the tissue are uneven,” she said, standing up slowly. “It looks like a bite.”

That was the way it struck me too. “A human bite?” I asked, pretty sure what the answer would be.

The Ice Queen nodded. “I think so. I can't see any signs of the deep laceration you get with bites from dogs and other animals with long canines.”

“Any teeth marks we can match up with dental records?”

She was bending over the body again. “It's a terrible mess, citizen. We might be lucky.”

“Look.” I pointed to the swollen skin on Roddie's wrists. “He was tied down.” Whatever was used, the killer had taken it with him. The thick marking suggested rope.

“That would have helped the assailant to bite his victim, but you'd still expect him to have been writhing around. I wonder if he was knocked out.” The guardian examined Roddie's head. “No sign of any blows here.”

I had a sudden flash of the hooded man running down the street. The neighbour said he'd seen a knife. I looked at the bloody sheet over the lower half of the corpse. Christ. What were we about to find underneath it?

The Ice Queen glanced across at me. It seemed she was on the same wavelength. “Ready?” she said in a low voice, her fingers on the edge of the sheet.

“Go.”

Carefully she lifted Roddie's shroud. I forced myself to take a deep breath, blinked my eyes once and focused on his lower abdomen.

“Oh, no.” Even the medical guardian, highly qualified stomach cancer specialist and fully paid-up member of the ultra hard-hearted wing of the iron boyscouts, was having trouble with this vision of horror. “I can't believe someone could do this to one of his fellow human beings.”

I parted company with her there. I'd come across several vicious bastards who happily sliced open their fellow human beings. But I saw her point. This was gross even by their standards. Where Roddie's genitals should have been there was nothing except a great hole stretching right up into the groin.

“The penis and scrotum are missing,” the guardian said.

I had a look under the bed. Nothing.

“It seems the killer took them when he or she left.”

The Ice Queen's glare lived up to her nickname. “Citizen, are you seriously suggesting that a woman carried out this atrocity?”

“We're hardly in a position to rule anything out so far.” But I didn't want to fight with her. “Forget that for now.”

She'd already done so. Her head was over the wound. “Citizen,” she said, her voice registering surprise. “There's something inside here.”

“What is it?”

“It looks like the edge of a clear plastic bag.”

I bent down and caught a glimpse of it. “Get it out,” I said. She hesitated. “Get it out,” I repeated impatiently.

She shook her head. “No. I want to wait till we get him on the slab. Pulling it out now might compromise other traces.”

She was right there. I looked up at Roddie's face, something I'd been avoiding doing much of so far. The eyes were bulging and his lips were drawn back from his teeth. There was blood on the teeth. I had a piercing flashback to Caro dying on the dirty floor in the barn on Soutra, her foot jerking spasmodically.

“Oh, Christ,” I muttered under my breath. “How come nobody heard him screaming?” I looked over at her. “Guardian, we're going to have to prise his mouth open. I think his tongue's been taken too.”

She nodded slowly. “That'll have to wait for the mortuary too. I estimate he's been dead for at least nine hours. Rigor mortis is well advanced.”

I thought of how I'd almost gone to see Roddie when I left the reception, then spent the early hours listening to Robert Johnson and shivering under a blanket. Not for the first time I felt pitifully inadequate.

Davie shook his head slowly as the body was removed by Medical Directorate personnel.

“Jesus, Quint, who did that to him? Do you think the hooded—”

I raised a finger to my lips and motioned in the direction of Hamilton. “Keep him to yourself till we finish up in here.”

He nodded. “Right you are.” He looked round at the auxiliaries who were dusting for fingerprints and itemising what was on the floor. Some of them had moved into the bedroom now. “What do you reckon went on in here last night?”

The public order guardian came over to us, his face greyer than the guard tunic he often wore instead of his guardian-issue tweed jacket.

“Well,” I said. “For what it's worth, we're not just dealing with a drunken argument that got out of control. I think the victim was tortured because the murderer wanted to know where something was – something that was valuable enough to kill for. There's no way of telling at this stage whether he found what he was looking for.”

“Is there a sexual slant to it as well?” Hamilton asked.

“Could be, in a seriously perverted way.” I shook my head slowly. “I'm not sure though. It's all a bit contrived. We'll have to wait and see what's been put inside the body.”

Hamilton gave an involuntary shiver. “I've never heard of a plastic bag being secreted inside a murder victim before.”

“Me neither.”

“I gather you think the killer cut the tongue out as well,” the guardian said, avoiding my eyes.

I nodded. “At first I thought it was to keep him quiet, but there would still have been some noise. We'll probably find out from the neighbours that there was music playing.” One of the Supply Directorate's standard-issue cassette players was lying smashed on the floor.

“Do you think the victim knew the killer?” Hamilton asked.

I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. What else have we got? The scratches round the lock suggest that whoever put the key in had a pretty unsteady hand.”

“Drunk? Shaking?” Davie suggested.

“Maybe the latter. Maybe the victim was being threatened at the time.”

There was some shouting outside the door. A guardsman stuck his head round.

“Neighbour, guardian,” he said. These days auxiliaries often speak like words are rationed. Why not? Everything else in the city is.

I remembered the old man Roddie mentioned. “Let him in, guardsman.”

A small figure almost ran in, slewing to a halt in front of us.

“It was Roddie, wasn't it?” he demanded desperately. “It was Roddie they carried out.”

“You're Jimmie, aren't you?” I looked at the short, stocky man in front of me. He was bald on top, but he made up for that with the largest pair of eyebrows I'd ever seen. It was like Nietzsche's moustache had acquired a twin and migrated.

“Aye,” he said, peering at Hamilton and Davie with the mixture of fear and loathing affected by most ordinary citizens. “Jimmie Semple.”

I put my hand on his arm and led him back towards the door. “Why don't we talk in your place?” I glanced over my shoulder in an futile attempt to pacify the guardian. “I'll be back soon.” It was obvious to me that the old man would clam up like a 1990s government minister in front of a parliamentary committee unless I got him away from anyone in the guard. Hamilton still fondly imagined that citizens would do anything an auxiliary told them.

“Who are you, son?” Jimmie Semple said as he took me into his flat on the ground floor. “You don't exactly have the look of one of them bastards.”

“Quint's the name. Quint Dalrymple.”

The old man sat down in his armchair at the window. “Oh, aye, I remember you. You were the one who caught that killer a couple of years back.” He shook his head. “Something like this has been waiting to happen ever since the fucking boyscouts turned the screw.” Then he caught and held my gaze. “What's happened to Roddie, citizen?”

“Call me Quint.” I didn't look away, though I'd have liked to. “You were right upstairs, Jimmie. It was him they took away.”

“That bastard in the hood got him. I knew he would. I told Roddie to be careful, but he didnae listen.”

“You're wrong,” I said, sitting opposite him and leaning forward. “He did listen to you. He came to me for help.”