I began to get the distinct feeling that Roddie Aitken was too laid back for his own good. I reckon I’d have been down the road faster than the mob in London after the millennium when they spotted anyone who looked like a city trader or a lawyer.
“I didn’t really see what happened next,” he said. “Jimmie, my neighbour, opened the street door and pulled me in as the guy hurtled past. Jimmie swears blind he saw a big knife, but I don’t know . . .”
“What exactly was this Jimmie doing at the door?” I asked.
Roddie smiled. “He’s a nosy old bugger. Always sits at his window. He said he saw the man in the hood and didn’t like the look of him, so he came out.”
Davie stood up again and headed for the window. “And you reported this to the guard?”
“Jimmie told me I should.” Roddie Aitken shrugged. “I suppose he had a point – after all, he saw the knife. There are some crazies around, even in Edinburgh.”
He was right there. But I couldn’t figure out why even a crazy guy would follow a delivery man around. “Is there anyone who’s got a grudge against you, Roddie? At work, for instance?”
He looked at me innocently, as if the idea were ridiculous. “No. I get on fine with everyone, Quint. I reckon it’s just a piece of nonsense.” He paused and glanced down at his hands. They had suddenly started to shake. “At least I did, until I saw him behind me as I came along Lauriston Place on my way here.”
That explained why he’d been acting like a five-year-old on speed in the street. Davie was already on his way towards the door.
“What colour was the coat?” he asked.
Roddie shrugged. “I’m not sure exactly. Dark – maybe navy blue or black.”
The door banged behind Davie.
“Have you got a complaint reference?” I asked.
“Aye.” Roddie handed me a crumpled piece of official paper numbered 3474/301221. It told me that citizen Roderick Aitken, address 28f Drummond Street, age twenty-two years, next of kin Peter Aitken of 74m Ratcliffe Terrace (relation: father), had reported an attempted assault by a person unknown (probably male). The location and a description of the assailant were also given. I was pretty sure that the guard would have paid about as much attention to Roddie’s report as they pay to the city’s few remaining Christians when they complain that the Moslem tourists get more religious tolerance than they do. The thing is, the Christians are right. Maybe Roddie Aitken was too.
“Look, how do you feel about this, Roddie? Do you reckon the guy is really after you?” I fixed my eyes on his. “You’d better come clean with me. Are you in trouble?” I was thinking of his work – maybe he’d got in some heavy-duty black marketeer’s way.
Roddie opened his arms to protest his innocence. “I haven’t got a clue, Quint, honestly. I’m straight.” He looked at me with his wide brown eyes. “All I ever wanted was to be an auxiliary, but I failed the exams two years ago because my maths is so crap. I’m having another go next month. I don’t do what some of the others in the department do – pilfering, selling black and the like.”
I opened my mouth to speak but he beat me to it.
“And I haven’t been telling tales either. None of my workmates knows I’m doing the exams.”
I believed him. He was a pretty wholesome citizen, the kind who should have been in the guard instead of arselickers who don’t give a shit about the city. Like all of us, he could have done with a better diet and a shower more than once a week. But he gave the impression that he was proud to be an Edinburgh citizen. There aren’t too many like that these days.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Great. I can’t pay you very much . . .”
“Don’t worry about that. The Public Order Directorate subsidises me. After a fashion.” I looked at my watch. “There isn’t much I can do tonight though.”
Roddie stood up. “No problem. I’m going out with my friends.”
“Right. Stick with them and ring my mobile if you see the guy again.” I scribbled the number on a piece of paper. “I’ll come round to your place tomorrow and talk to your neighbour.”
He pulled his hideous orange hat down over his ears. “What time do you think you’ll come?” He suddenly looked a bit awkward.
“Some time in the middle of the day.” I wasn’t going to let him off the hook. “What’s the matter? You don’t like drinking, so you won’t have a post-Hogmanay hangover. Not planning an illicit sex session by any chance, are you?” Citizens are only supposed to have sex with officially approved partners.
His face was red, but he looked pleased with himself. “Well, I’ve got this girlfriend, Quint, and I’m hoping . . .”
“It’s okay. I won’t tell Hume 253.”
A second later Davie came back shaking his head. “No sign of the mystery man.”
I went to the door with Roddie and put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow then. Don’t worry about the idiot in the hood. Have a great Hogmanay.”
“Thanks, Quint.” Roddie headed down towards the street. “Same to you.”
“Not much chance of that,” I called after him. “I’m going to the guardians’ annual cocktail party.”
“Lucky you,” he replied, without a trace of irony.
He’d have had a great future as an auxiliary.
Chapter Two
I pulled on the least crumpled of my black sweatshirts and a reasonably clean pair of strides, also black. I wouldn’t wear anything smarter to a Council do on principle and anyway, my only suit is retro enough to be banned on the grounds that it might bring about a 1990s nostalgia cult. Then I checked myself out in the mirror. The usual suspect. One thing to be said for food rationing is that it keeps you trim. My jawbone looked like it was about to break through the parchment of my face and I didn’t seem to be big enough for my clothes. My half-inch-long hair was continuing its deep and meaningful relationship with greyness, but at least my teeth hadn’t fallen out. Yet.
Coming up to seven. They’d soon be kicking off at Parliament House, not that I intended to arrive on time. I took a last pull of whisky, decided against having a blast of B.B. King then hit the road. Davie had offered me a lift in his guard Land-Rover when he went off to the castle for his shift, but I prefer walking. You never know what you might come across on the perfect city’s streets. Hooded men lurking in doorways perhaps.
As I headed past Tollcross towards West Port and the Grassmarket, I found myself trying to put the last year’s chaos into some kind of order; 2021 wasn’t likely to take up too much space in Edinburgh history, not even in the make-believe version the Information Directorate was no doubt working on at this very moment. Most of the old guardians had been eased out in 2020 – thanks mainly to my mother, as senior guardian, at last coming to her senses and resigning – and for the rest of that year the new guardians kept their eye on the ball reasonably well.
“How are you doing, Quint?” The old man who hands out the Edinburgh Guardian at the corner of Lothian Road and Fountainbridge interrupted my reverie. “On the piss tonight?”
“After a fashion. How about you, Andy?”
He opened his worn duffel coat. “Look. I managed to get hold of a bottle of stout to bring the New Year in.”
I nodded, suddenly feeling guilty about the malt I’d been gulping. Christ, even last year the average citizen managed to find enough bevies to do the job. “Have a good one when it comes, Andy,” I said.
“Aye, laddie, you too.”
I walked on, seething. This is how Edinburgh is now. Things were buggered from the start of 2021. The city prides itself on being independent, but that doesn’t mean it can survive in a vacuum. There was a disastrous flu epidemic in the Far East and that sent tourist numbers from China, Korea and Japan right round the U-bend. Then the Russian mafia thought it would be a neat idea to lob some former Soviet warheads into the Middle East to screw up oil production and, all of a sudden, a lot of Arabic-speaking tourists had bet
ter things to do than mess about in Edinburgh’s shops and clubs. So revenues did a nose-dive and we only get meat once a week, a beer at the weekend if we’re lucky and enough coal to keep ourselves as warm as penguins on an ice floe. It’s a pretty good recipe for civil unrest. But the iron boyscouts – fifty per cent of the guardians are female but somehow “iron girlguides” doesn’t have the same ring to it – instead of patting us on the back and sweet-talking us about how the good times are just round the corner, decided to apply the thumbscrews. Everything’s by the book now, no leniency. Step out of line and you’re in the shit. But as they say on the streets, at least the shit’s warmer than your average citizen’s flat.
The castle rose up before me. It was lit up like a flagship in pre-independence times on an evening when the admiral had his pals round for a pint or two of pink gin. That was the kind of thing the Enlightenment Party, the Council’s forerunner, had vowed it would put a stop to. Everyone in the city would be equal, the same opportunities for all and so on. And here I was on my way to a reception where guardians and senior auxiliaries would be offering foreign dignitaries the best food and drink the city could provide, without an ordinary citizen in sight. If we could eat hypocrisy, there’d be no problems with malnutrition.
I came down into the Grassmarket and my nose filled with the delicate odour of cow dung. A couple of days a week, cattle are run in here by herdsmen dressed in seventeenth-century costumes as a spectacle for the tourists. The Agriculture Directorate swears the beasts are all BSE-free. I hope they’re right – there are sometimes rumours about outbreaks in the city farms, followed by the secret culling of infected herds. I edged round the cowpats. A squad of labourers was clearing them up without much enthusiasm. Beyond the skeletal trees in the middle of the broad street is the Three Graces Club where Roddie Aitken had his first sighting of the hooded man. It’s another example of the Council’s double standards. Strictly tourists only are allowed to watch a floorshow that gives the imagination the evening off, especially when the Three Graces themselves are on. I suppose Canova’s marble sculpture of the goddesses in the City Gallery might be a turn-on to a few perverts, but the performers in the club make sure everyone in the audience gets the point – using a lot of pointed accessories that the sculptor didn’t find space for.
I looked across at the replica of the ensemble on the pavement outside the nightclub. Even at this early stage it was surrounded by potential customers who were running their hands over the Graces’ rumps. When the original was first brought to Edinburgh for some ludicrous amount of money in the 1990s, I can remember people referring to it as the Six Buttocks. I can also remember my mother giving me a major earbashing when I did the same. She never was one for levity. Then again, when she was senior guardian she did plenty to establish the city’s reputation as the Bangkok of the North. I never quite understood how she managed to reconcile that with the Council’s ideals of sexual restraint and the inviolability of the body. Obviously filling the city’s coffers took priority. Ah well, I couldn’t hold it against her now. She died last January. I didn’t see her much after her resignation and the lupus she’d been suffering from for years gave her a bad time near the end. But I sometimes feel an unexpected sense of loss. I reckon my old man does too, not that he’d ever admit it.
As I walked up the West Bow past souvenir shops bedecked with tartan scarves and plastic haggises, it occurred to me that perhaps I was being too hard on the present Council. After all, they were only continuing the policies of their predecessors, with a zeal my mother and her colleagues would have approved of. Then again, there’s nothing worse than a young zealot. I should know. In a previous existence I was one. Before Caro died seven years back and my career in the Public Order Directorate became about as meaningful as a 1990s European Union directive on the configuration of bananas.
I stopped outside a shop and watched a Chinese family buying what looked like Edinburgh’s entire stock of souvenir playing cards. Their faces were wreathed in smiles, from the aged grandmother with suspiciously black hair to the infant cradled in her father’s arms. I shivered and stamped my feet as the cold bit hard. But it wasn’t just the chill that was getting to me. In the rush to establish a just and equitable society, we forgot about friendship and affection, not to mention love. We get physical at weekly sex sessions, but there are no sessions for emotion. Then I thought of Davie and his Fiona. Even though auxiliaries aren’t supposed to get emotionally involved, they seemed to manage all right. Maybe it was my own fault. I was still hung up on a woman I hadn’t seen for nearly two years. Katharine Kirkwood. She came to me because her brother had gone missing and we ended up in a multiple murder case. Then Katharine left the city. God knows where she was. She’d probably erased all traces of me from her memory by now.
I walked up to the Royal Mile and glanced at the gallows where they give the tourists a thrill with mock hangings. I was going through one of my regular depressive phases. There’s only one known cure – taunting guardians and senior auxiliaries. I headed to the reception with a spring in my step.
I resisted the temptation to spit on the Heart of Midlothian as I passed in front of St Giles. It used to be the tradition, but if you do that kind of thing nowadays you’re asking for trouble. They don’t mention it in the City Regulations (a document which I’ve come to know intimately in my line of work) and I don’t imagine anyone would complain if a tourist who’d read Walter Scott gobbed on the brass plaque that marks the site of the old Tolbooth. But the maroon heart is the emblem of the city and the guard are pretty touchy about it being messed with by ordinary citizens. Christ, I’d almost talked myself into emptying out my throat.
But I was interrupted. A horse-drawn carriage with a group of Africans in colourful robes missed me by about an inch on its way to the neo-classical façade of what was once known as Parliament House. It’s called the Halls of the Republic now – you can’t get away from Plato in this city. The Council only uses it for over-the-top receptions like this one. They prefer the Gothic pile of the Assembly Hall for their daily meetings. They have a point in one respect. This building was where the Scottish law courts were based before the Enlightenment won the last election in 2003. Since the Council rapidly dispensed with the concept of an independent judiciary and gave the Public Order Directorate responsibility for the administration of justice, they’d have been pushing their luck in the irony stakes if they’d located their base here. Besides, the draughts in the Halls of the Republic are even worse than down the road.
The guardsmen and women on duty at the entrance took one look at my clothes and moved towards me en masse, hands on their truncheons. Then they recognised me and stepped back. Some of them nodded as I came up – they were the ones who’d heard that I’m good at what I do. The rest belonged to the persuasion who regard me as a boil on the body politic. The way they were glaring at me suggested they’d like to take me round the back and use their service knives to lance me.
Inside the building a red carpet leads to the main hall. Auxiliaries dressed in medieval costumes lined the corridors. Maybe they gave the foreign dignitaries a thrill, but they did nothing for me. The old hall was another story though. It was packed with people who’d already got well stuck into the magic, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. It was the seventeenth-century roof that caught my eye: great oak hammerbeams arcing over the throng like the stained bones of some gigantic creature that had perished in the dawn of time. There were open log fires roaring in the ornately decorated fireplaces, their flickering light glinting on the varnish of the beams and catching the colours of the painted windows. One of them shows the charter of the newly independent city being handed over by a suspiciously well-fed citizen to the first senior guardian.
“Is that outfit the best you could do, Dalrymple?”
I gave up perusing the decor reluctantly and grabbed a crystal glass from a passing waitress who was dressed up as one of Robert the Bruce’s camp followers, complete with disembowelling
knife.
“Tell the truth, Lewis. You couldn’t bear the disappointment if I turned up in a suit.” I took a slug of the whisky. It was a dark, smooth malt that the Supply Directorate must have been keeping in reserve for this sort of occasion: there are no trading links with the Highlands any more and the whisky produced by the city’s two distilleries is a sight worse than this.
The public order guardian shook his head in disgust and sipped mineral water. He used to be famous for his rum and cigarette consumption before independence, but guardians don’t allow themselves any vices. In the case of coffin nails, they don’t allow anyone else that vice either: they banned them, along with TV and private cars, not long after they came to power.
“So, have you been enjoying youself telling the foreigners how little crime there was in Edinburgh last year, Lewis?” I was pleased to see my use of his name in public was giving him the needle. Guardians are supposed to be addressed by title only.
“And what if I have, citizen?” he said combatively. “The directorate’s kept things under a tight rein.”
I laughed. “That’s true enough. No murders, not many muggings—”
“None at all in the central tourist area,” he interrupted.
“Only a few burglaries in the suburbs,” I continued. “And officially, there’s no drug consumption, no rape, male or female, no gunrunning” – I glanced up from my glass and saw that Lewis Hamilton was beginning to look pleased with himself – “no pornography – at least among ordinary citizens – no bribery, at least none reported.” I gave him a smile before skewering him. “And a black market that runs as efficiently as any other department in the city.”
The Bone Yard Page 2