The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  “The hooded man,” I said. “I caught a glimpse as we went past.” I ran out into the middle of the road and looked around in every direction. It was dead quiet, all the local citizens housebound by the curfew a couple of hours back. Nothing moved except the city flags under every streetlamp gently flapping in the chill breeze.

  “Are you sure?” Davie joined me and peered about doubtfully. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  I rubbed my eyes and tried unsuccessfully to swallow a yawn.

  “I’m not sure of anything much at the moment, guardsman,” I said eventually and headed back to the Land-Rover. The idea of the hooded man hanging around the vicinity of my flat again suddenly struck me as farcical. It was probably just my imagination messing me about. So I got Davie to drop me off and fell into a sleep so subterranean that not even the killer in my worst recurring nightmare could locate me.

  And then, over the next couple of days, everything in the investigation went quiet. You get that sometimes – a burst of headless poultry activity at the beginning, followed by a becalmed state like the one the Ancient Mariner enjoyed so much. So what was going on? Had the killer found what he was looking for? Maybe the dead auxiliary had somehow got her hands on a new stimulant. Or maybe Roddie Aitken had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes and managed to smuggle it in. You sit around with ideas swooping through your mind like swallows catching flies on a warm summer evening when you haven’t got anything else to go on. But unfortunately this was the freezing heart of winter and the leads we were chasing up didn’t give us much to bite on. At one stage I tried to convince myself that the killer had found the drugs and departed to seek his fortune in a more liberal city like Glasgow. But I wasn’t that gullible, not even for a fraction of a nanosecond.

  The Council’s policy towards tourists didn’t help much. I wanted to check out any who were regulars at the Three Graces. It would have been easy enough to do as customers have to fill in a card giving their name and hotel, but the tourism guardian accused me of wanting to harass the city’s customers. I assured the Council I would apply all my well-honed diplomatic skills, but they weren’t having it. So instead I had to stick to what used to feature in twentieth-century police procedural novels, i.e. chasing up every boring detail. Meaning that Hamilton and I had undercover surveillance teams tailing as many of the two victims’ friends and contacts as we could manage, including the sex centre supervisor and Patsy Cameron; that we searched all their cubicles or flats while they were absent; that Davie compiled a list of everyone who had access to the guard complaint register; that the bite mark and DNA data from the second victim were checked against dental and medical records (no joy); and that, in my spare time, I tried to work out what the point of the blues tapes was. It was all as about as useful as an enema during an epidemic of dysentery.

  Then, on Sunday afternoon when I was walking across the ice rink that the castle esplanade had become and trying hard not to use my buttocks as skates, I got inspired. Sex reared its purple rosebud head and I immediately stuck my hand in my pocket – to pull out my mobile and tell Davie to meet me at the centre where Roddie and Moira had achieved congress. I’d just remembered that citizens can be allocated lockers if they want to keep personal equipment secure.

  “What’s up?” Davie said when I got there, his backside against the rust-shot maroon door of his vehicle. “Getting desperate?”

  “Very funny, guardsman. You know former auxiliaries like me aren’t allowed to defile ordinary citizens.” That’s why I have to spend every Thursday night with weird demoted women. One thing to be said for the investigation was that I had a reason for calling off my last session. The last thing I needed just now were distractions of a carnal nature. Well, almost the last thing.

  It was a Sunday so there was a long queue outside the sex centre. As usual, citizens were grumbling about the fact that they had to meet here for sex rather than in their flats. The official line is that this way health standards are maintained, but everyone knows it’s so that a firm grip is kept. It’s not a joke though – any citizens caught having it off in unapproved premises get to acquire an intimate and long-term knowledge of potato picking and turnip tending on the city farms.

  I pushed through to the front. Citizen Macmillan gave me a reluctant nod from her desk.

  “Back again, citizen? Did you forget something?”

  “Now you come to mention it . . .”

  “Well, don’t take all day. People behind you have got things to do.”

  I glanced round at the sullen faces in the reception area. They looked like children who’ve got to the front of the school dinner queue only to see that the last tray of chips has just run out.

  “I won’t keep you long,” I said. “Roddie Aitken and Sheena Marinello. Did they have lockers?”

  The receptionist’s eyes flashed open at the mention of Roddie’s name. “Where is Roddie? Why do you keep asking questions about him?”

  I knew she didn’t expect any answers. In some ways I would have liked to tell her what had happened to him – she was obviously quite friendly with him. But she was better off not knowing.

  She shook her head slowly, her gaze lowered. “Roddie didn’t. He wasn’t one for sex aids or any of that kind of stuff.” Then she looked up at me again and her lips pursed. “But she was. The cow always had a bag with her. She took a locker the day she registered.”

  What had been a dull murmur from the citizens behind me was beginning to get louder. I heard Davie clear his throat and everything went quiet again. It was one of those times when a guard uniform is a handy thing to have around.

  “Were you wanting to have a look at her locker, citizen?”

  The tone of citizen Macmillan’s voice made me suspicious. “Don’t tell me it’s been cleared out.”

  She smiled triumphantly, pleased with herself for having got one over an authority figure, even one as marginal as me. “No, no, not yet. The supervisor told me to go through the locker file yesterday, but I haven’t had the time yet.”

  “Or the inclination?” I said, returning the smile that had momentarily transformed her face. These days there are a lot of citizens who don’t smile much. It wasn’t always like that. For years after the Enlightenment, people were almost pathetically grateful that the Council had managed to restore order after the nationwide chaos the drugs gangs had caused. The fact that everyone had work and a place to live was a major improvement. But things have got a lot harder recently.

  “Can I have the key?”

  She handed it over and got back to checking in clients.

  Davie and I beat a rapid retreat down the corridor.

  “You don’t want to mess around with citizens’ sex lives,” he said. “They were getting pretty restless back there.”

  “For a lot of them it’s all they’ve got to look forward to every week,” I said. “They don’t have the privileges your rank enjoys.”

  “Oh, aye?” he said belligerently. “Privileges like patrolling the back streets of Leith in the middle of the night? Privileges like burying your tongue in the arse of every drunken tourist who asks for directions to the nearest brothel? Privileges like . . .”

  I smiled at him. “Only joking, guardsman.”

  “Fuck you, Quint,” he said, shaking his head in disgust.

  “Here we are. Number 238.” I put the key in the lock. “Any chance of a result in here?”

  “I’m not betting on it, if that’s what you mean,” he replied testily.

  “Cheer up, Davie. There might be a gold-plated clue lying waiting for us in this locker.”

  “Aye, and you might stop taking the piss out of the likes of me.”

  “I take it you’re not optimistic then?” I said, pulling the door open.

  At first glance it looked like he was right. The auxiliary hadn’t left much behind. There was a bright orange dildo with a ridged top that could have done service as a witch’s nose in the days when kids were allowed to dress up on Hallowe’en. And
there were some pieces of good-quality black underwear, including a bra with holes for the nipples to poke through. I don’t know why, but I found it comforting that Roddie at least had the chance to experience imaginative sex with a professional. Exactly what she was doing impersonating an ordinary citizen in order to screw a raw young guy like him I still found puzzling. I pulled out an object covered in light brown foil.

  “What’s that?” Davie asked.

  “It’s a malt whisky-flavoured condom, guardsman. Don’t they have those in your barracks?”

  “Not the rubber, jackass.” He pointed past my leg at a small dusty blue object in the bottom left corner of the locker. “That.”

  “Bloody hell.” I dropped to my knees and whipped my magnifying glass out. Then pulled a plastic bag over my left hand, picked the thing up between thumb and forefinger and reversed the bag. “Well spotted, Davie.”

  “So what is it?” he asked, peering as I held the bag up to the light. “A tablet?”

  “Yup. We’ll need to get it to the toxicology lab sharpish. Look at the colour. I’ve got a feeling it’s what the killer was after.”

  “What do you mean look at the colour?”

  “Wakey, wakey, Davie. Remember the music on the tapes? Remember what the dead auxiliary was saying on the phone?”

  His eyes opened wide.

  “Exactly. I reckon what we’ve got here is a prime example of the Electric Blues.”

  That was what I reckoned, but scientists don’t deal in snap judgements. The chief toxicologist took my mobile number and sent me about my business without showing the slightest concern at my demand for a high-priority analysis. I considered pulling the senior guardian’s chain since it was his directorate I was dealing with, but decided against it. He would probably just spin me a line about how the complexities of science aren’t subject to being rushed.

  So Davie and I went back to the castle and sat in the Land-Rover on the sunlit but still ice-coated esplanade. We went through the list of guard personnel who had access to the complaint file. There were twenty-three people on it, including the public order guardian and his deputy. I wondered about Machiavelli. He seemed to have taken Hamilton’s warning to stay out of the case seriously. I hadn’t seen him for a few days. Then I remembered where I’d last caught sight of the shifty bastard: departing rapidly from the dead auxiliary’s barracks with a guardsman carrying a rucksack. What had he been doing there?

  “I suppose you know Machiavelli?” I said to Davie.

  He nodded. “Unfortunately.”

  “His reputation in the guard’s that bad, is it?”

  Davie shifted in the well-worn driver’s seat. It wasn’t the Land-Rover’s luxury upholstery that was making him uncomfortable. He always gets fidgety when I start questioning him about his superiors. Auxiliary training and discipline are hard to get over. Except in my case, of course.

  “Raeburn 03’s . . . well, he’s the kind of guy who gets up people’s noses. He’s devious, always gives you the impression that he’s working to his own agenda. Or at least some agenda that the rest of us don’t know about.”

  Those were more or less my thoughts too, but I’d have used plainer language. As far as I was concerned, Machiavelli was a shite on legs.

  “He’s got friends in high places though,” Davie added. “He always makes sure everyone knows how close he is to the guardians.”

  “Apart from Hamilton.”

  Davie laughed. “Aye. The guardian really hates the contents of his abdominal cavity.”

  “For someone who failed to make it through his first post-mortem, I’d recommend cutting down on the anatomical imagery.”

  “Very funny.”

  I looked at the list again, then out on to the glinting tarmac. “I can’t see why the docket should have been torn out of the file deliberately, Davie. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

  “Could be. It’s not exactly unknown for bits of documentation to go missing.”

  I nodded and looked out towards the northern suburbs. In the distance behind the equestrian statue of Field Marshal Haig – someone who got away with murder on a grand scale – flashes of icy light sparked from the dreadnought grey surface of the Firth of Forth. Cold sea, cold sky, and, somewhere out there, the latest butcher of the city’s young.

  I shivered. “Time to check some more files. That should warm us up.”

  It didn’t, but the chief toxicologist’s phone call did. We ran out of the guard archive in the castle and burned over to the labs. They’re in what used to be the university science area at King’s Buildings. The site was secured with razor-wire as soon as the Enlightenment came to power because of the interest the drugs gangs had shown in the equipment and chemicals stored there. The Council has never bothered to take the wire down, even though it could make better use of it on the border these days.

  “What is the provenance of this tablet, citizen?” the scientist asked after we’d cleared the security checks and got into his lab.

  “You mean where did I get it, Lister 25?”

  The chief toxicologist’s thick lips gave a brief and surprisingly delicate twitch, like an actor greeting a colleague across a crowded room in the days before that profession became superfluous to modern society’s needs. Lister 25 must have been very overweight in pre-Enlightenment days, but twenty years of auxiliary eating had left him with great folds of skin hanging from his face like an elephant on a controlled diet.

  “Sorry, that’s classified,” I said, avoiding any excessive lip movements in case I encouraged him.

  “I see.” He turned to the lab table and picked up a test-tube with a pale-coloured sediment in the bottom. “It’s just that this is very interesting, citizen. In fact, as far as I am aware, it’s unique. In several ways.”

  That certainly was very interesting. “And what ways are those? I presume it matches the trace that was found in the dead auxiliary’s stomach?”

  “Indeed. But that trace was so minute that, though I say so myself, I did very well just to identify it. I won’t bore you with the intricacies of its chemical structure, but this drug’s chief claim to uniqueness is its strength. The dosage contained in a tablet this size would be enough to cause massive increases in mental alertness and sexual potency in an average-sized person.”

  It seemed a fair bet that was why they were called “Electric” Blues.

  “How else are they unique?” Davie asked.

  Lister 25 carefully lodged the test-tube in a rack and turned back to us, then gave another twitch of his lips. “The compound is also exceedingly dangerous for anyone with a weak heart. The effect of a dose this size taken more than once in such cases would be severe nausea, stiffening of the muscles, convulsions, coma, respiratory collapse and then death.”

  “Fucking hell,” I said under my breath. “But the post-mortem on the dead auxiliary didn’t report those effects.”

  “As I said, citizen, in her case the dose was minuscule. She was doubtless a healthy specimen and it appears that she put a tablet against her tongue for a few seconds.” The scientist looked at me seriously. “You understand now why I asked you about the provenance. If there are quantities of this drug in the city, I can promise you that you will be picking up bodies on a regular basis. I am certain that no clinical trials have been carried out on this little beauty.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, with a scowl. “I’ll take your report to the Council this evening. What about manufacturing the drug? What kind of facilities would be needed?”

  Lister 25’s expression lightened. “That’s the good news, if there’s any to be found in this sorry tale. The compound is so complex that only a top-level chemist could produce it, and a well-equipped lab would be essential.” He opened his arms and looked around the room we were standing in. “The labs in this building would fit the bill. Come to think of it, the six chemists on my staff would too. There aren’t many other installations in the city that could do it.” He raised his hand to pre-empt me. “And
before you ask, citizen, neither I nor any of my people have had anything to do with these tablets. Whoever produced them should be put up against a wall.”

  He was bound to say his people were clean. And I wasn’t capable of understanding their technical capabilities. I only did chemistry for a term at school before begging to be allowed to change to something that had more to do with my experience of the world. As far as I was concerned moles were small blind creatures that used to be turned into trousers, not something to do with chemical structure.

  We left him to his test-tubes and bunsen burner. Before independence chemists would have worked for years to come up with a face cream to deal with those pachydermic wrinkles. Now they’ve got better things to do – or have they?

  That evening’s Council meeting was an uncivilised affair. I was the barbarian at the gates, of course. The boyscouts didn’t take kindly to my demand for searches to be carried out on all regular customers of the Three Graces. Eventually they went along with it; that’s the power the spectre of drugs-inspired chaos still has. They were even less impressed when I told them I’d already started checking airport records to see if any tourists with the symptoms described by the toxicologist had been flown out of the city over the last few days.

  The toxicologist was also the cause of a set-to I had with the senior guardian. I asked him, in his capacity as science and energy supremo, if what the guy had told me about his team of chemists was true. Maybe I should have put it a bit more tactfully, but I’ve always thought that tact is for people who don’t want anyone to know what they’re really thinking. I positively enjoy sharing my thought processes with auxiliaries, especially guardians. Apparently the enjoyment isn’t mutual.

  The senior guardian immediately leaped on to a horse so high you could have got the entire Greek army besieging Troy into it. “Citizen Dalrymple,” he said, his boyish face with its unlikely beard set hard, “I can give you my personal assurance that no laboratory in this city has been used to produce this drug.”

  I shrugged, trying not to look impressed but actually quite surprised. It’s unusual to get a credible personal assurance out of a guardian – they aren’t that different from twentieth-century politicians. He hadn’t finished either.