The Bone Yard

by Paul Johnston

  I heard Katharine move and waved to her to keep back.

  Davie leaned forward, his lips drawn back in a rictus of disgust. “Bloody hell,” he hissed. Then he clutched my arm. “What’s that in his mouth, Quint?”

  “Give me your torch.”

  I tilted the head over and shone the light at the senior auxiliary’s swollen lips. The teeth were apart and a flat object covered in transparent plastic was protruding about two inches from them. I looked closer. There was no way I’d be able to open those hardened jaw muscles without an expanding clamp. That was a job for the medical guardian. But I already knew what was in there. The killer had provided another piece of music. And it had been personally delivered to me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As I knelt down beside Katharine, the staircase lights flashed three times.

  “Come on, that’s the curfew,” I said. “Let’s get you inside.” I looked over my shoulder at Davie. “Call the medical guardian, will you? And don’t let anyone inside the flat.”

  He nodded, glancing down at the sack and what had been inside it. “This should keep everyone occupied out here.”

  I pushed Katharine in gently as the lights went out and lit a couple of candles. She slumped down on the sofa, her chin resting on her breastbone. Her breathing was uneven. She looked like an explorer who’d given everything and was now resigned to the end.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting beside her and touching her hand. It was ice cold. “How long were you out there?”

  She shivered but no words came.

  I squeezed her chilled skin. “Tell me, Katharine. I need to have an idea of when the . . . the sack was put on my door.”

  She shivered again, this time more violently then laid into me. “You only care about your fucking investigation, don’t you, Quint? It was the same the last time. I should have known better than to come back. I don’t mean anything to you, do I?”

  I left the question unanswered, feeling the sting of her words turn into a warm sensation deep inside. So it wasn’t just concern about the drug formula that had brought her back to the city. Apparently she had some interest in me after all.

  “I’ve only been back for about half an hour,” she said, looking away from me. Then she let out a great sob.

  I took a chance and put my arm round her shoulders. She resisted for a few seconds, then moved towards me.

  “I . . . I couldn’t touch it,” she said, her voice quivering like a frightened child’s. “I couldn’t get to the door handle.”

  “It’s all right, Katharine. I didn’t exactly have a great time touching the sack myself.”

  She raised her head and looked at me in the candlelight. “No, there’s more to it than that.” Her eyes burned into mine. “You see, I knew what it was.”

  I stiffened involuntarily, suddenly gripped by the horrific thought that she had some involvement in the killing. “How, Katharine?” I asked, my voice unsteady.

  “I’ve seen a man’s head in a sack before,” she said, her eyes still fixed on mine. Whatever else I read in them, it wasn’t guilt. She’d been in bed with me all last night.

  Outside on the stair there was the pounding of many feet. Davie knocked and stuck his head round the door. “They’re here.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” I said, then turned back to Katharine. “When did you see a head before?” I got her to her feet and steered her towards the bedroom.

  She sat down on the bed and wrapped her arms round herself. “The time I told you about with the . . . the Cavemen . . . the leader was a madman and he used to lay into his own men all the time.” She glanced up at me, then looked down again. “Two of them started fighting over me . . . Christ, I don’t know why . . . they all had plenty of time to do whatever they wanted . . . and the leader, he just waded in and grabbed one of the guys by the hair . . . he had this long bayonet and he . . . he hacked the head off . . . then he put it in a sack and made the other Caveman wear it round his neck . . .”

  “Jesus, Katharine.”

  She looked up again and shrugged. “I was happy at the time, though I made sure I didn’t show it. One animal less.” Her voice broke. “But you don’t forget things like that.”

  I sat down beside her. “No, you don’t. You wouldn’t be a normal human being if you could.”

  Katharine laughed bitterly. “No way am I a normal human being, Quint.”

  “You think anyone else in this room is?” I stood up. “Look, I’m going to have to get out there. Stay here. I’ll be back.”

  She fell back on the bed like she’d been poleaxed. “I spend my life waiting for you, Quintilian Dalrymple.”

  As I pulled the covers over her, it struck me that there were plenty of less encouraging things she could have said.

  “What do you think, guardian?”

  The Ice Queen looked up from the mortuary table on which Machiavelli’s head had been placed. Behind her the body had been laid out on another table. In the bright lights it looked like a scene from one of the television pathologist series that were so popular in pre-Enlightenment times. Except that hospital finances in the 1990s wouldn’t have stretched to two tables for the parts of a single body.

  “What do I think?” the medical guardian asked irritably. “I think there are better ways to spend an evening.”

  I was surprised. I’d always assumed that the Ice Queen was in the habit of shutting herself up in the morgue’s refrigerated storeroom overnight.

  “On the other hand,” she continued, “I know that this head belongs to that body and I know that this is our killer’s third victim.”

  That was more like it – competent analysis a robot would be proud of. “What about the tape?”

  “Quite so.” The guardian straightened up and beckoned to her assistant to remove the contents of the dead auxiliary’s mouth.

  I followed her over to the sink. “Any thoughts on the victim?”

  The Ice Queen gave me a sidelong glance. “You surely don’t expect me to speculate on matters outside my field, citizen.”

  I grinned. “They aren’t exactly outside your field. Mach . . . Raeburn 03 was very well connected in the Council. If he was a target, who’s next among your colleagues?”

  She shook the water from her hands and made a passable attempt at indifference. “I really don’t see what you’re getting at. The other victims had no such connections.”

  I handed her a paper towel. “Maybe the killer’s working his way up the hierarchy. Ordinary citizen, auxiliary, senior auxiliary – next, a guardian?”

  She dropped the towel in a bin, managing to imply that my line of thought should go with it. “I’d keep that idea to yourself, citizen,” she said, looking across to the table. “Your tape’s been ejected.”

  I almost fell over. Verbal humour from the Ice Queen was about as likely as spontaneous cheering during a debate on The Republic. I took the tape from her sidekick and headed for the machine.

  Before I got there the guardian’s mobile rang. She spoke briefly and signed off.

  “An emergency Council meeting has been called, citizen. Your presence is required.”

  I started walking again. “What, now?”

  “Now.”

  I slotted the cassette into the cassette player, desperate to hear what was on it. I wasn’t disappointed.

  Great music, but not exactly consistent with the other pieces. Then I got the message. And experienced meltdown.

  The Council chamber. If the senior guardian was shocked by the discovery of Machiavelli’s head, he wasn’t showing it. That wasn’t the case with his colleagues. They were standing around him with their mouths open like a group of statues in the middle of a fountain. Fortunately the water supply had been turned off.

  “What is on the tape, citizen?” the chief boyscout asked after the medical guardian had confirmed that the head went with the body.

  I went over to the machine and hit the play button. The exquisite sounds of Paul Kossoff’s guitar was
hed over the guardians. I was pleased to see that at least one of them looked to be getting into the rhythm surreptitiously.

  “And that was . . . ?” the senior guardian asked when the music finished.

  “‘Fire and Water’ by Free,” I replied. “There are those who say that Paul Rodgers had the finest voice of all British rock singers.”

  “Really?” said the senior guardian in a voice that sounded interested but I was bloody sure wasn’t. Then his expression livened up a bit. “Did you say rock singers? The other pieces of music were blues, were they not?”

  I shrugged. “Free were influenced by American rhythm and blues like a lot of bands in the late 1960s. Paul Rodgers sang plenty of blues standards in his time.”

  The senior guardian’s eyes locked on to mine. “So why exactly was this song chosen, citizen?”

  I was pretty sure he was squaring up to me, daring me to come out into the open. In fact, that was probably why he’d called this emergency meeting – to make sure I came up against him in front of the other guardians rather than in private. He knew I’d been digging in the Science and Energy Directorate archive and he knew I’d heard William McEwan mention the Bone Yard. But he didn’t want to give me the chance to ask him any awkward questions. Like whether the song had anything to do with his directorate. I reckoned it did. “Fire and Water” sounded to me like a pretty unsubtle hint at nuclear reactors. The ones at Torness used to produce the equivalent of millions of fires and needed plenty of water in their cooling systems. But I needed something more solid before I could lay into him.

  “The song’s a typical lover’s complaint,” I said innocently. “The guy’s having a hard time with a woman who blows hot and cold.” I gave the Ice Queen a quick glance and was rewarded with her normal glacial gaze.

  Lewis Hamilton was shaking his head in annoyance. “What’s the point? Isn’t there any connection with drugs?”

  “Not one that’s hit me so far,” I replied. “I’ll need to think about it.”

  The chief boyscout finally decided that staring me out was a waste of time. “I trust you’ll let us know when your thought processes bear fruit. Another point, citizen. Why was the head left on your door?”

  Good question. I’d been wondering about that myself. The hooded man had followed Roddie Aitken to my flat, so he probably knew about my involvement from the beginning. The fact that he’d risked being spotted with his unsavoury bundle suggested either that he had something against me or that he wanted to get me in even more deeply than I already was. Which might explain the choice of “Fire and Water” as the latest musical offering.

  “Well, citizen?” the senior guardian asked, his saintly features beginning to tighten impatiently.

  “Well what?” I replied with a lot more impatience. “There are plenty of people who know I’m running the case. The murderer may be one of them.”

  “Plenty of people?” Hamilton’s forehead furrowed like it always did when he came to a conclusion that offends him. “The murders haven’t been publicised, Dalrymple. The only people who know about them are auxiliaries.”

  I let a wide smile blossom across my face. He’d just buried his foot in the shit. I didn’t have to add another word, so I turned on my heel and left the boyscouts to it.

  I let myself into the flat as quietly as I could and lit a candle. Then I sat down at the kitchen table, feeling its flimsy legs bend as I leaned on it, and tried to do some serious thinking.

  The main problem was that this wasn’t simply a multiple murder investigation, which would have been bad enough. There were too many things going on at the margins – like William McEwan’s death, the new drug formula, the nuclear physicist who ended up at Katharine’s farm, the Bone Yard. How the hell did they all come together? Could it be that they were all part of an agenda that did not include a future for the Council? Then there was the music. I had the definite impression that someone was pulling my chain, someone who knew how much I was into the blues. The first two pieces obviously referred to the uppers they’d called Electric Blues, but now there was “Fire and Water”, which I reckoned was a reference to the nuclear part of the puzzle. But why? What was I being told? That there was some connection between the decommissioned power station at Torness and the new drug?

  The bedroom door opened and Katharine stepped into the dim light of the candle. She rubbed her eyes, but I wasn’t paying much attention to them. The only garment on the lower half of her body was a pair of knickers. Her long legs looked in good condition – that’s what you get if you work on a farm where there’s no machinery. I had a look at them then went back to the black material covering her crotch. Presumably an itinerant salesman had called at her place since the Supply Directorate in Edinburgh provides only off-white underwear.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I am a creature of the night, my dear,” I said in an attempt at a Lon Chaney accent.

  “Creatures of the night who’ve got any sense spend it in bed.” She headed back into the other room.

  I pursued her after a diplomatic gap of a second or two. By the time I got there she was already back under the covers. I threw my outer layer of clothing off and slid under the thin blankets, shivering. Katharine was facing the other way but she pushed her rump towards me. I moved into the warmth that her body was making. Her legs burned against me. I couldn’t tell if she’d gone back to sleep or not, but she was very still. Then I remembered the Cavemen and what she’d been through. Suddenly I didn’t feel like making any further moves. So I absorbed her heat and fell into a surprisingly dream-free sleep.

  Which lasted until about six in the morning, when I woke up to the realisation that I was going to have to take some life-threatening decisions. I felt even worse when I saw that the other side of the bed was empty.

  “Morning.” Katharine appeared at the door with a mug of coffee. “I thought I heard sounds of the kraken waking.”

  “You’re up early,” I mumbled, trying to clear a way for words. My mouth was gummed up better than a glue-sniffer’s nasal tubes in the days when you didn’t need a guard permit for adhesive substances.

  “The life of the soil,” she said, sitting on the bed and drinking from her own mug. “You’ve almost run out of this stuff. You’re going to have to get Davie to pilfer some more.”

  “Do you mind? I earned that from a client who works in one of the tourist restaurants.” I gulped the coffee down. “Anyway, I’ve got other plans for him today.”

  “Have you now?” Katharine looked at me severely. “And what about me? If you think I’m going to stay in this shithole . . .”

  “Before you insult my home any further, one of those plans involves you.”

  “I hope you don’t expect me to dress up as a guardswoman and spend the day with him.”

  “Not exactly. I’m going to tell him to get you an ‘ask no questions’.”

  “Can’t I use yours?”

  “I might need it. Until you get it, do you think you’ll be able to bear staying in my shithole?”

  She shrugged, then nodded non-committally. I wasn’t convinced she’d stay but I had more worrying things on my mind. Like disturbing the senior guardian’s breakfast.

  “So you’ll sort out Katharine’s ‘ask no questions’ and take it to her at my place, Davie?”

  He was staring out at the New Town’s Georgian houses in the early morning gloom and looking pretty unimpressed. “What are you playing at, Quint? She a bloody deserter. If the public order guardian finds out . . .”

  “Well, you’d better make sure he doesn’t.” I slapped him on the thigh. “Lighten up, pal. She’s given me some pretty useful information.”

  “Oh, aye? And where’s it got you? I haven’t noticed any murderers sitting in the castle dungeons.”

  I nodded slowly, feeling the wet greyness of the walls in Forres Street seeping into me like a dose of pneumonia. “Someone’s playing games with us, Davie, an
d I’m not having fun. Especially since I don’t know the rules.”

  “The great Quintilian Dalrymple doesn’t know the rules?” he asked ironically.

  I wasn’t in the mood, so I did what I normally do when he takes the piss – assaulted him verbally using numerous words banned by the Council. He enjoyed it almost as much as I did. Eventually we got back to business.

  “Something else, Davie. Do you know anyone in the Fisheries Guard?” The sum total of the Council’s navy is half a dozen converted trawlers that protect the city’s fishing boats from the modern version of pirates – that is, headbangers from Fife armed with ex-British Army automatic rifles.

  “Those lunatics? Aye, I went through auxiliary training with some of them.” He looked at me seriously. “What’s going on? You don’t want to mess with those guys. They’re a bunch of total psychos.”

  “Who don’t pay that much attention to what the guard command centre tells them to do?”

  Davie shrugged. “They don’t need to. The captains have their own patch to patrol. They have carte blanche to deal with raiders however they want. All they need the castle for is to approve their ammunition supplies.”

  That was what I wanted to hear.

  Davie was peering at me suspiciously. “What are you up to, Quint?”

  “Me? I’m going to have a chat with the senior guardian.”

  “Is he expecting you?” Davie asked as I got out of the Land-Rover.

  “Put it this way – I don’t think he’ll exactly be surprised to see me.” I stopped and turned back to him. “Keep your mobile on. If you don’t hear from me in an hour, come knocking on his door.”

  “What?” The idea of making an unauthorised call on the chief boyscout looked about as palatable to him as a plate of citizen-issue black pudding.

  I walked down the slippery road towards the checkpoint that restricts access to Moray Place. All the guardians have their residences in the circular street that surrounds a small park. The original members of the Enlightenment had thought it appropriate that Council members live together, despite the fact that they’d cut themselves off from their families. Then again, living together didn’t have any dubious connotation as far as they were concerned. My parents were both guardians in the first Council and they’d given up living with each other in any significant way years before the last election.