The Bone Yard (6 page)

“Did he tell you about the crazy guy with the knife?” the old man asked.

I nodded.

He swore under his breath, spittle landing on the carpet by the toe of my boot. “So congratulations on a job well done, ya shite.”

I couldn't think of anything to say for a bit. “Look,” I said eventually, “I liked the lad. He only came to me yesterday afternoon. It was when I came round today to follow up on his problem that I found him.”

Jimmie Semple looked back at me, his expression softening. “So you didn't think he was just wasting your time?”

I shook my head.

“Aye, well, I'm sorry if I was a bit  . . .”

“Forget it. Will you help me find the man in the hood?”

His eyes were wide, bloodshot, under the dense growth of his brows. “Aye, son, of course. But what can I do?”

“Tell me everything you saw and heard. Last night and the night Roddie was chased down the street.”

He told me about the hooded man first, but there wasn't much to it. He hadn't seen a lot more than Roddie, confirming only that the attacker was tall and solidly built and that the face had been obscured by the hood. He wasn't sure about the colour of the coat either – another triumph for the Council's enlightened policy on streetlamp brightness. He didn't even have much to say about the knife. It might have been a hunting blade, or even a carving knife. Christ. A blood-freezing image of the Ear, Nose and Throat Man came up before me like a spirit from the underworld: he used long knives to butcher his victims as well as to take off the end of my right forefinger. But he was long dead and buried, of that I was certain.

“What about last night?” I asked. “Did you see Roddie?”

“Aye, he came by on his way out.” The old man glanced over at the dusty clock on his mantelpiece. “Must have been about eight o'clock. He was on his way out to meet his pals for Hogmanay.”

“How did he seem?”

“Och, he was fine. He wasnae bothered about that lunatic.” Jimmie brought his hand down hard on his knee. “He should have been though.”

“He mentioned a girlfriend.”

“Aye. Good-looking lassie. I don't know her name. I only saw her from the window a couple of times.”

“Jimmie, did you hear Roddie come back last night? Did you hear anything at all from his flat?”

He shook his head and looked at me with an expression of infinite sadness. “No, son, I didnae. I wish I had. I had a half-bottle of whisky I'd been saving all year, you see. I was dead to the world long before midnight.” He gazed across at me, a sheen on his eyes. “How did Roddie die?”

I mumbled some bullshit about the case being subject to Public Order Directorate security regulations and left him to the view from his window.

He was better off not knowing what happened to his friend upstairs. Roddie would be on the mortuary table by now, the medical guardian waiting for me before she started the post-mortem. I wished I was on another planet. Preferably one on which I was the only human being.

Chapter Four

I left Davie in Drummond Street taking statements from the rest of Roddie's neighbours. Hamilton dismissed the guardswoman who was behind the wheel of his maroon Land-Rover and drove towards the infirmary. It was mid-afternoon by now, the sun already low in the western sky and the shadows lengthening in the city. The air was even colder than it had been, making the breath of the people unfortunate enough to be out on foot plume around their heads like the ink squirted by a nervous octopus.

“What kind of monster would do that, Dalrymple?” The guardian glanced at me. “Don't tell me you think it's an auxiliary.” Two years ago he'd never come to terms with my idea that the killer was one of the city's servants. I had the feeling he was less sure about the rank below his these days. Then again, he didn't think much of his fellow guardians now either.

“I haven't a clue, Lewis. It's too early to say,” I said. “You haven't heard any reports of a hooded man in the city centre, have you?” I tried to make the question sound nonchalant.

He looked blank and shook his head.

I told him what Roddie and Jimmie Semple had seen.

“It isn't much to go on, is it?” he said morosely.

“It might be all we get.” I looked out the side window as we passed the Potterrow Entertainment Club. It was once a famously shitty student union, but ten years ago the Tourism Directorate converted it into an electronic games centre. No Edinburgh citizens are allowed in, of course. The building's concrete walls are heavily stained with the soot that has built up since coal was reintroduced as the main heating fuel; the nuclear power station at Torness was shut down soon after the Englightenment came to power. A gaggle of Filipinos stood around outside the entrance stamping their feet and waving their arms in the cold. The amount of tartan knitwear they had on should have kept them warm. Maybe the quality of wool isn't as high as the Marketing Department claims.

“I don't think I'll bother with the post-mortem, Dalrymple. I've got some paperwork to catch up with.” Hamilton had always been squeamish during autopsies. He used to attend them just to keep an eye on me, but apparently he'd got beyond that stage. Progress indeed. Then he spoilt it all. “You can manage on your own, can't you?”

“What do you think?” I said sarcastically. That was always the problem with the first generation of guardians: they treated everyone like primary school kids.

“All right, all right,” Hamilton said wearily. “Obviously you'll need to attend the Council meeting tonight.”

“Obviously.” I relented a bit. “I'll give you a call beforehand and let you know what we find.”

He pulled up and let me off outside the infirmary's grey-black granite façade. It seemed like years since I'd walked past it at midday on my way to Roddie's. Sometimes I wish I'd found another line of work. But, like the Labour Directorate says, “Every citizen has a talent that the city needs.” Every citizen except the bastard who did for Roddie Aitken.

I found the Ice Queen in the mortuary antechamber, fully kitted up and ready to go. She gave me a brief nod, then handed me a set of protective clothing. Even in layers of green medical gear she looked pretty amazing, her figure firm and her complexion smooth. I made sure she didn't see the way I was looking at her. You don't want to play that kind of game with guardians, especially not guardians who can handle a scalpel.

“All right, citizen,” she said. “Let's see what we've got.”

I usually try not to get too affected by what's laid out on the mortuary table. Otherwise I'd keep away like Hamilton. But this time was different. I'd seen Roddie Aitken alive less then twenty-four hours earlier. He'd been sitting on my sofa talking in his boyish voice without much concern about the strange person who was following him. Watching the medical guardian and her assistants going about the normal procedures – removing the plastic bags over feet and hands, scraping fingernails, plucking sample hairs – made me feel seriously uncomfortable. From the bottom of the table I could clearly see the corner of the plastic bag that had been pushed into the wound in the groin. But the guardian wasn't to be hurried. She was examining the torn skin on the neck.

“I'll cut this whole area away now,” she said. “It looks like there's at least one reasonable impression of bite marks.”

“Good,” I said without much enthusiasm. “Now all we can hope is that the killer visited a dentist in the city.” The problem was that state-funded dental practices more or less died out in the years before independence and there were plenty of people growing up then who couldn't afford treatment. Even though the Council set up free dental care for all Edinburgh citizens not long after it came to power, a lot of them steer clear of the surgeries. The fact that the Medical Directorate spends as little as it can on pain-relieving drugs may have something to do with that.

“What do you reckon was the cause of death?” I asked. No harm in hurrying the Ice Queen along.

Her head was over Roddie's chest. “Still too early to say. Possibly heart failure brought about by the shock of what was done to him.” She pointed at the deep cuts in the flesh of the upper thighs as well as at the gaping hole.

The senior pathologist who was assisting her nodded vigorously in agreement. I got the feeling that he would rather have gone for a walk in the badlands beyond the city border than contradict his superior.

The door opened and a thin figure wearing a green gown over a guard tunic entered. One glance at the hands which almost immediately started rubbing together was enough for me to identify Hamilton's number two, Machiavelli. He bowed his head punctiliously at the medical guardian, who completely ignored him, then at the lower-ranked auxiliaries in the room. They had to acknowledge him as they couldn't risk showing what they really thought of him. Apparently I'd recently turned into the invisible man. No way was he getting away with that.

“What are you doing here, Raeburn 03?” I asked in a loud voice. “On work experience?”

His body stiffened. “I could ask you the same question, citizen,” he said after he'd run his eyes over the body in front of him.

I didn't like the way he was looking at Roddie. “Presumably you haven't spoken to your boss recently,” I said. Mentioning an auxiliary's senior officer is the best way to make him flinch. Machiavelli flinched. “I'm in charge of this case,” I continued. He didn't look at all pleased at that piece of news. Maybe he'd thought this would be an opportunity to make a different kind of name for himself in the directorate – Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Bucket instead of the Renaissance schemer.

The medical guardian had moved down to the middle of the table. She extended the incision she'd already made in the upper part of Roddie's abdomen to the point where the wound began. I glanced at Machiavelli and was surprised to see that he looked a lot less queasy than his boss used to when the dissecting knife went in. His eyes were fixed firmly on the Ice Queen's rubber-sheathed fingers. She parted the skin, examined the area, took some samples and finally laid hold on what had been rammed in to the cavity.

“There you are, citizen.” The guardian held up the plastic bag. It was about six inches square, covered in blood and dotted with bits of internal debris. Something I couldn't make out was weighing down one corner.

“What is that?” Raeburn 03 asked in a strangled voice. Maybe what he'd been watching was getting to him after all.

I let the photographer do her work, then took the bag from the guardian. On the scrubbed surround of a sink I ran a finger between the sealed opening – it was one of those bags that are used for frozen food and the like. Machiavelli was at my shoulder.

I turned the bag up and let its contents slide out.

“What on earth  . . .” Hamilton's deputy stretched his hand out.

I grabbed his wrist and squeezed hard. “Excuse me, Raeburn 03. You're on my territory.”

He gave me a glare that Medusa would have been proud of then stepped back a few inches.

I concentrated on the find. It was a cassette tape, made of clear plastic with the brown tape visible inside. There were no paper stickers on the outside and no writing to identify what had been recorded on it. I was, however, willing to bet my collection of Johnny Guitar Watson tapes that something had been recorded on the cassette. It looked to me like the killer was playing a very nasty game indeed.

“It's not a standard-issue cassette,” Machiavelli put in. “There's no Supply Directorate serial number on it.”

He was right. Citizens are only allowed to listen to music approved by the Heritage Directorate, which they can obtain free from the city libraries.

I looked at the cassette again. Near the top edge was a line of what looked like Chinese characters. Standard-issue cassettes are imported from Greece as part of the deal involving package holidays in Edinburgh for Greek nationals. So what we had here was technically a piece of contraband. More important, it suggested that the murderer had links with the world outside the city borders. Which raised the spectre of dissidents or gangs of psychos. Bloody hell. This was getting worse by the minute.

“Shouldn't we listen to find out if there's anything on the cassette, citizen?” Hamilton's number two had changed his tone. Now he was almost conciliatory. Bollocks to that.

“We're going to,” I said, putting the cassette into a bag of my own. “At tonight's Council meeting.” That dealt with him. Unless Hamilton was hit by a bus in the next couple of hours, Machiavelli wouldn't be deputising for him in the Council chamber and so he wouldn't hear a thing. At least until he wormed it out of one of the numerous iron boyscouts who liked his style. He must have been doing them a lot of favours.

“Citizen?” The medical guardian was back at the top end of the table. Her assistants had been wrestling with Roddie's jaws. “You were right. His tongue has been removed.”