“This is Moira . . . I mean Moray 310’s cubicle.” The commander made to depart.
“I haven’t finished with you yet,” I said, pushing the door open. The room beyond was quite large, containing a sofa, armchair, table and desk as well as a single bed. I looked at Davie then at the Friar Tuck lookalike. “I definitely haven’t finished with you yet.”
The commander was suddenly finding the carpet, which was in unusually good condition for a barracks, a source of great fascination.
“What’s going on here, Moray 01? Why did the dead guardswoman have a room of her own instead of a dorm cubicle?”
He mumbled something about her overnight shifts and heavy workload.
“Come on, commander, all auxiliaries have times when they have to do the night shift. Why did Moray 310 – sorry, Moira, as you called her – get special treatment?”
The vein on his forehead had turned dark blue. Eventually he raised his head and faced me. “I’m not able to say. It’s a Council matter, citizen.”
“And this is a Council authorisation.”
He turned to go. “So address your questions to the Council.”
I glanced at Davie, who looked like he fancied playing basketball with the commander’s head. “Wait a minute. Raeburn 03, the Public Order Directorate official I saw leaving when we arrived, has he been in here?”
Moray 01 stopped but didn’t turn round. “I don’t see why he should have been, citizen. Now, if you don’t mind . . .”
“Thanks for your co-operation,” I shouted after him.
Davie stepped up. “Cool it, Quint. You aren’t among friends here.”
I nodded and looked around the well-appointed room. “Get a scene-of-crime squad down here, Davie, including a fingerprint guy. We’re going to have to tear this place apart.”
We did so. And found nothing special. Prints that were soon matched to the victim and other barracks members; underwear that was definitely not standard issue, but that came from the Prostitution Services Department stores rather than smugglers; and a couple of books of Eastern erotica that were presumably source material for the nightclub act. So either the killer got what he was looking for or she’d hidden it elsewhere. We spoke to some of her colleagues, but none of them was very close to her. They claimed to know nothing about her trips to Roddie Aitken’s sex centre and I believed them. Most auxiliaries are very bad at lying.
At one in the morning my mobile buzzed.
“Dalrymple?” came Hamilton’s voice. “We’ve picked up the missing auxiliary Moray 37. He’s being brought to the castle.”
“We’re on our way.”
Adrenalin and black coffee are the main things that keep you going during investigations, but it helps if you get a little help from your leads. With the sex centre supervisor we got the big zero.
Sample question: “Moray 37, why did you allow Moray 310 to impersonate a dead citizen and have sex with Roddie Aitken?”
Sample answer: “I was doing her a favour. I knew her in barracks when she was a trainee auxiliary.”
Sample question: “Why did you risk your own position to do a favour for an auxiliary who didn’t exactly lack the means of obtaining all the sex she wanted at the club?”
Sample answer: “Because she asked me.”
Sample question (one of Hamilton’s – you can tell by the stilted Council diction): “Why did you absent yourself from the sex centre without authorisation?”
Sample answer: “Because I panicked when I heard about the murder.”
And so on. I kept after him, the guardian kept after him, but his answers didn’t change. Eventually I concluded that he really had been doing the dead woman a favour. Maybe she fluttered her eyelashes at him and he couldn’t say no, despite his sexuality (his file confirmed what his demeanour suggested). He had solid alibis for both murders and a search of his cubicle revealed nothing incriminating. At five in the morning we let him go, putting one of Hamilton’s best undercover operatives on his tail. I had the feeling he was a dead end.
Davie and I got a couple of hours’ uncomfortable sleep on the sofas in the guardian’s outer office. I had a hazy dream about a drugs gang boss called Elmore, but that didn’t do me any good. There never had been such a character – or one called James, or Eric, or Clapton, or God. Sometimes you can’t even trust your subconscious.
Hamilton woke us up with more big zeroes. Apparently none of Roddie Aitken’s workmates was into contraband any juicier than Danish bestiality magazines. And none of the barracks patrols had seen any hooded men with tell-tale bloodstains on their coats.
Then it was time to set off for the infirmary. For the next post-mortem.
I walked into the grey granite building in the pitch darkness that passes for morning at this time of year in Edinburgh. I felt the cold biting at my hands with sharp, insistent teeth, making the stump of my right forefinger tingle like it had just been touched by the blade of the Ear, Nose and Throat Man’s knife again. That sick bastard would have enjoyed all this. But not even he went to the extent of planting tapes in his victims.
“Mind if I come with you?” Davie asked, catching me up. “I’ve never seen a post-mortem.”
I looked at him in surprise. “Haven’t you?”
“How could I? There haven’t been any murders since the last ones you solved.”
“No, I suppose there haven’t. And you spent most of that investigation on surveillance.”
“Aye. So can I come?”
I led him through the entrance hall with its patient line of thin, coughing citizens. The place was busy even at this early hour. “Suit yourself,” I said. “Personally I can think of better ways to start the day.”
“And I can’t?” Davie stared at me fiercely. “You’re always telling me to educate myself in the ways of the criminal.”
“All right, big man, I said you could come. But promise me one thing.”
“What?”
We stopped outside the mortuary and showed ID.
“Don’t let the side down by losing your grip on your breakfast.”
Another ferocious glare. “I’m an auxiliary, citizen. We never lose our breakfast.”
“Right.”
We robed up.
“We’ve got another bite mark,” the medical guardian said, bending over the victim’s neck.
“Which will no doubt match the last one but, like it, won’t match anything in the records.” I joined her at the upper body. The skin was no longer under a sheen of ice and lividity was visible towards the underside. The auxiliary’s teeth were still clenched, with dried runnels of blood leading down to the ragged hole in the throat.
The Ice Queen moved down to the lower abdomen. “Severe lacerations to the thighs and vagina. Mutilation of the outer labia and . . .” She lowered her face. “And removal of the clitoris.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath from Davie. His face was about the same shade of green as his gown. “Before or after death?” I asked.
“I’ll need to run more tests. It’s difficult to be sure of the time or cause of death yet.” The medical guardian looked up at me. “But given that the victim’s hands were bound, at least some of the knifework could have been carried out while she was alive.”
“Her feet weren’t tied though.”
She nodded. “True enough. You’d imagine she’d have been thrashing around.”
“Maybe he stunned her.”
“There’s no indication of any blow to the head.” The guardian took a pair of forceps and applied them to the object in the dead woman’s vagina. There was a noise like the sound of an oar entering the surface of the sea as she pulled. Davie’s breathing was very loud. I nodded towards the door but he paid no attention.
“There you are, citizen.” The Ice Queen held the blood-encrusted plastic bag up. It was caught for a second in the flash from the photographer’s camera.
“What a surprise,” I said, blinking my eyes. “Another cassette.”
“Not much doubt it was
the same killer,” she said.
“Have you got a cassette player in the vicinity, guardian?”
She had moved back up to the top of the table. “In my office.”
“Let’s have a break from this, Davie.” I led him towards the door. His legs weren’t too steady.
The guardian’s voice came as I put my hand on Davie’s elbow. It was sharp, the pitch suddenly higher.
“For the love of God.”
Guardians, like all auxiliaries, are sworn atheists. Normally I would have been entertained by one of them referring to the supposedly non-existent deity. But not this time. I looked round to see her leaning against the slab. Her assistant was bent over the corpse’s jaws, having just wrenched them apart, his head turned away. The Ice Queen was holding a pink and black shrivelled object in her forceps.
“It’s a penis, citizen,” she said, the timbre of her voice now deep and throaty. “A penis severed at the root by a very sharp knife.”
Davie blundered out of the door, but I went back slowly to the table. There was no escaping the thought that it was Roddie Aitken’s member which had been placed in the dead woman’s mouth.
The Council chamber, seven o’clock in the evening. I had several things to share with the iron boyscouts and another couple I was going to keep to myself. Davie and I’d had a busy day.
“I trust you are making every effort to trace this homicidal maniac, citizen,” the senior guardian said as his colleagues gathered round me like a family of tweed and brogue-clad vultures.
I resisted the easy shot; of course, the fact that the latest victim was an auxiliary was having an obvious effect on how seriously the Council treated my investigation.
“I’m making all the efforts I can, guardian,” I said. “Unfortunately, so’s the killer.” I glanced at the chief boyscout. “But I don’t think he’s a maniac. He’s been smart enough to avoid all the patrols, he’s got a plan and he’s running rings round us.”
The senior guardian looked at Hamilton. “Is citizen Dalrymple out of his depth, guardian?”
“I’d like to see anyone else do any better,” he answered brusquely. That was about as close to a vote of confidence as I could expect from Hamilton.
The senior guardian nodded at me slowly. His wispy beard made him look like a forgiving Christ, but the tone of his voice was more Old Testament. “Very well. Your report, citizen.”
“If you don’t mind, guardian,” interrupted the Ice Queen. She was looking particularly stern tonight, her white-blonde hair combed back close to her scalp. “I have some test results that citizen Dalrymple is unaware of.” She gave me a perfunctory glance.
“Enlighten us,” said the senior guardian. If that was a reference to his other role as science and energy chief, no one seemed prepared to acknowledge it. There’s no chance it was anything as flippant as a pun on the Enlightenment Party.
“Moray 310 died from loss of blood. I put the time of death at between five and six a.m. on Thursday 2 January.” She looked around at her colleagues with their clipboards and their bowed heads. “Tissue and blood tests have confirmed that the penis found in her mouth was that of the first victim, Roderick Aitken.” The heads remained bowed. The medical guardian caught my eye briefly. “Moray 310’s tongue was removed as well.”
“Is there some significance in that, citizen?” the senior guardian asked.
I shrugged. “The medical guardian thinks it’s a pointer to the other messages he’s sending.”
“You mean the tapes?”
“Before we get on to that, senior guardian,” the Ice Queen interrupted again – she really was taking her life in her hands – “I found something unexpected in the victim’s stomach.”
Now I was paying close attention. “What was it?” I asked.
The medical guardian suddenly seemed a lot less sure of herself. Her head was bowed now as she flipped over pages on her clipboard. Then she looked up. “It showed up in the toxicological analysis of the stomach contents.”
“It?” I shouted and was instantly surrounded by a ring of startled faces. “What is ‘it’, guardian?”
The Ice Queen pursed her lips at me. “‘It’, citizen, is a trace of a stimulant.”
“A drug?” said Hamilton, his eyes wide. The years he spent fighting the gangs that used to traffic in controlled substances had left him scarred for life. “What kind of drug?”
“I told you,” replied the Ice Queen. “A stimulant.”
“Not one of those that are sometimes prescribed for guard personnel on the border?” I asked.
The senior guardian looked down his nose at me. “Those are not controlled substances, as you well know, citizen.”
I did, but it’s always worth winding the guardians up. Very occasionally they even lose their tempers. “So what is it?”
“A compound of one of the known methamphetamines and another substance that the Toxicology Department hasn’t been able to identify.” The medical guardian glanced at Hamilton. “Where did she get it, guardian?”
“Don’t ask me,” he replied, his cheeks red above the white of his beard. “We haven’t found banned substances in the city for years.” He glared at her. “Maybe you should check that none of your people has been experimenting in the labs.”
“That’ll do, guardian.” The chief boyscout wasn’t impressed with inter-directorate scrapping, at least not in front of an outsider like me.
I had a thought while they were squabbling. “Maybe that’s what the killer’s been looking for. Maybe this is all about drugs.”
“Bloody hell,” said Hamilton, to be given a bowel-liquefying look by his superior. “You don’t think the drugs gangs could be forming up again, do you, Dalrymple?”
“Who knows what’s going on beyond the border? There have been plenty of drugs in the democratic states like Glasgow since they decided legalising them was a good idea.”
Hamilton wasn’t giving up. “They also still have high levels of criminal activity.”
It wasn’t the time for a debate about public order policy. “We’ll need to close the Three Graces down immediately and see if we can find any sign of this new drug,” I said. “All the staff will have to be searched and questioned.”
That was more to Hamilton’s taste. He was so anxious to get started that for a moment I thought he’d forgotten his incontinence pants.
The tourism guardian was in a similar plight – until the senior guardian assured him that none of the customers would be hassled. I might have known.
All of which overshadowed what I had to say about the tape that was inside the dead auxiliary. This time it was Jimi Hendrix playing “Red House”; the original studio version from 1966 – slow, sexy, very electric blues. And at least this time there was a lyric. So what the hell did it mean? The guy in the song hasn’t seen the girl in the red house for ninety-nine and one half days; his key doesn’t fit the door and he ends up going back across the hill to chase her sister. The expression on the Council’s collective face said “And?” I didn’t have much to suggest, except that Holyroodhouse where the auxiliary was murdered was now a kind of red house. They didn’t buy it. Christ, I didn’t buy it myself.
“Anything else, citizen?” asked the senior guardian.
Time for some more fun and games.
“A couple of things,” I said, giving the group around me a smile to soften them up. “Why did the dead auxiliary have a room of her own rather than a cubicle in a dormitory? Her barracks commander suggested I take it up with the Council.”
Silence for a time, then the senior guardian let out a long sigh. “What is the point of your question, citizen? Do you think that a single room is proof of corruption in high places?”
If only. No, I was just rubbing their noses in the reality of their supposedly equitable system.
“The Tourism Directorate recognises that certain key personnel need privileged treatment,” the chief scout continued. “For the good of the city.”
I let t
hat pass without comment. “One last point. Roddie Aitken reported that he’d suffered an attempted assault by a hooded man to the guard.”
They were still in a ring around me, like a herd of cows congregated in the middle of a field. I went into biting fly mode.
“Someone’s removed that report from the guard operations file.”
“What?” Hamilton looked like he was about to do serious damage to his cardiovascular system. I hadn’t had a chance to tell him about my discovery before the Council meeting started. “How can you be sure the report was logged?”
“They are filed in numerical order, are they not?” said the senior guardian. He seemed to be very well informed about guard practices.
I nodded, unable to protect Hamilton from the bucket of shit he’d just thrown over himself. “The docket was torn out in haste. I found a small piece of the edge in the binder.”
The public order guardian was shaking his head slowly. “I’ll find out who took it, you can be sure of that. Probably the idiot who forgot to follow the report up.”
Maybe. Or maybe there was someone in Hamilton’s directorate who didn’t want Roddie’s complaint to be followed up. I wasn’t sure how many other people in the Council chamber had the same thought.
We closed the nightclub and spent the rest of the evening looking for illicit drugs. We didn’t find any. Davie and I were mobbed by a crowd of irate tourists when we left. They wanted naked flesh – not ours – but all I wanted was my bed. And I still hadn’t turned forty. Pathetic.
Chapter Nine
“Stop!”
“What the . . . ?” Davie stood on the brakes and pulled up in the middle of the deserted junction at Tollcross.
I put my shoulder to the door and leaped out on to the tarmac. I managed two paces, then fell flat on my face. My old friend the ice was back in force.
Davie pulled me to my feet. “What are you playing at, Quint?”
I started running again. “He was over there, in the shopfront.”
“Who?”
I reached the butcher’s. Even though it was chained up, the sour reek of meat well past its prime was still about the place. Nothing human though.
The Bone Yard Page 10