Body Politic

by Paul Johnston

  Billy turned to me with a desperate smile on his face, then glanced over my shoulder and nodded. I followed the direction of his eyes and saw an old friend, though she didn’t seem to be very happy to see me. Patsy Cameron must have been in her fifties but she still looked the part, dressed up in a black velvet evening gown that showed the amount of bosom you’d expect from the madam of a cathouse in a Western. Which is more or less what she’d been before the Council decided to make use of her in the Prostitution Services Department. Patsy and I had got on pretty well when I was still in the directorate. Now she was avoiding my eyes like they’d give her an X-ray from twenty feet away.

  Looking back at the stage, I saw that the queen was now completely naked. She sat up and gazed out at the audience. My heart missed so many beats that it hurt. She was without doubt the most stunningly beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. Although the tresses of her red wig partially obscured her face, the perfectly proportioned features were still visible. As were her full, hard-tipped breasts and limbs that looked like the pure white marble of an ancient statue. She moved her eyes slowly around the room, giving certain individuals the benefit of her erotically charged but totally inscrutable stare. The girl at the curtain’s eyes had been dead, but this one’s were on a different plane altogether – both superior and all-knowing, detached but at the same time infinitely provocative. I felt seriously out of my depth.

  Then Rizzio, another member of the zombie eyes club, pushed her down, squatted on her chest and offered her his long, thin penis. She took it in her mouth and clutched his bony buttocks with her hands. The music started to build to a climax again as Mary, Queen of Scots inflated her cheeks in exaggerated movements. Eventually Rizzio pulled out and fountained over her breasts.

  That was when I had another shock. Rubbing my eyes in the smoke from the tourists’ cigarettes, I looked again. There was no doubt about it. The queen’s left hand was normal, but the right one was a textbook example of polydactyly. Like everyone else, she had one thumb – but she also had no fewer than five fingers.

  Chapter Five

  Davie arrived at eight o’clock on the dot and almost fell over laughing when he saw the state I was in. I turned my nose up at his offering of barracks bread.

  I only managed to formulate a coherent sentence after dosing myself with black coffee. “What do you know about Heriot 07, Davie?”

  “The flash bastard in the Finance Directorate? He’s got a reputation for looking after himself.”

  “How come he hasn’t been nailed then?” I wasn’t too happy about the way Billy had thrown his weight around at the nightclub. After the show had finished he got a hold of Rizzio and one of the waitresses and tried to interest me in a foursome. I prefer sex with women whose eyes have a bit more life in them. Besides, I was too pissed to do anything.

  “Things have changed since you were an auxiliary,” Davie said, shaking his head. “I’m beginning to see why you got out. You were one of those who thought the city should stay like it was in the early days, weren’t you?”

  “I was an idealist. Most people were then.”

  “Not any more, pal.” His voice was harder. “While you’ve been doing your Philip Marlowe impersonation, a fair number of senior auxiliaries have been acting less altruistically. There’s no shortage of smart operators like Heriot 07 who get what they can from the city. They cover their arses. If they’re spotted, they pay people off. Or arrange a good kicking.”

  “Sounds like Chicago under Al Capone.”

  “Or London before the UK fell apart.”

  “Don’t the guardians have any idea of what’s going on?”

  “That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Davie was looking twitchy.

  “Don’t ask me, I’m only a guardsman.” He turned away. “What are we doing today?”

  I gulped down the last of my coffee. “It’s Sunday. I have to call in on my father.” Even when I was in the directorate, the visit had been a fixture. Hamilton, always the understanding boss, used to complain about me taking a couple of hours off on the city’s single weekly rest-day. “But before that, we’re going to look for a convict.”

  The fog had lifted completely and we drove along Comely Bank in bright sunshine. After the checkpoint between the tourist area and the suburbs, the surroundings took a rapid change for the worse. Although the streets were cleaned and rubbish collected regularly everywhere, the road surface, pavements and buildings were crumbling. In the centre, squads of cleaners, painters, masons and gardeners worked round the clock. Not in the parts where tourists never set foot. A flash in the sky caught my eye. A large silver and blue plane droned overhead on its descent to the airport – probably the daily flight from Athens with another load of tourists for the city’s museums and fleshpots.

  I looked at a small group of citizens gathered outside a church. Although the city is officially a secular republic, religion is tolerated as long as it conforms to the Council’s standards of loyalty and civic responsibility. The thin but enthusiastic figures in their Sunday-best suits and dresses – smart enough despite the limitations of clothing vouchers – showed no dissatisfaction with the regime. People generally don’t. In the sixteen years since the Enlightenment came to power, the Council has managed to retain the trust of the overwhelming majority of citizens. Probably because most of them haven’t forgotten the economic chaos and the violence on the streets in the years before the last democratic election.

  “You stay in the Land-Rover,” I said as Davie pulled up at the East Gate of what had once been the most striking building in north Edinburgh. Fettes College, once one of Scotland’s foremost public schools, production line for generations of the politicians who had eventually brought the UK to ruin, was blown to pieces in 2009. I remembered playing rugby under the great grey-blue fairy castle walls when I was a kid. After independence and the abolition of private education, the school’s proximity to the gangland area of Pilton had made it an attractive base for the drug traders. The Council concentrated on establishing order in the city centre first, then moved to retake Fettes. Bad idea. The gangs were better armed than the Parachute Regiment. Although the Council eventually drove them out, the buildings were blown up to show the guardians what the gangs thought of them. The top of the college’s spire now lay hundreds of feet from its foundations. A small group of shaven-headed prisoners were loading stones on to a decrepit lorry.

  “What do you think you’re . . .” The guardsman shut up when he saw my authorisation.

  I studied the labourers. They were sweating in the sunlight and had their shirt sleeves rolled up. That made it easy to spot Leadbelly.

  “Bring that one to the Land-Rover,” I said to the auxiliary. “Gently.”

  “Number thirty-five,” he barked. “Get your arse over here.”

  I followed, shaking my head. You can always trust the guard to put people in the mood to co-operate.

  “Wait outside, will you, Davie?” At least he did what I asked. I got into the driver’s seat and beckoned to the prisoner to get in the other side. He was tall and I could see he had once been a hard man. Five years of the Cramond Island diet had turned him into a passable replica of a mummified corpse. He kept his eyes off me.

  “So, Leadbelly, been digging any potatoes recently?” The reference to one of his namesake’s best-known songs made him look at me quickly enough. A grin spread across his cracked lips and I saw that he had a serious shortage of teeth.

  “‘Digging My Potatoes’ – shit, it’s fucking years since I heard that. You know the blues?”

  I nodded.

  He gazed at me incredulously. “You know Huddie Ledbetter?”

  “‘Lining the Track’, ‘Matchbox Blues’ – I’ve got some recordings from 1942.”

  He smacked his bony thigh. “You have? Christ, I’d bend over in front of a guardsman to have a listen to them.”

  “You may not have to go that far.” I gave him my most encouraging smile.

  His grin
faded. “What do you want from me, man?” He peered at my clothes, noticing the lack of barracks number. “Who the fuck are you anyway?”

  “Call me Quint.”

  “Quint? What kind of name is that?”

  “There was a time when I was known as Bell 03.”

  “Is that right?” He leaned towards me. “You and me have had dealings.”

  You never know when it’s going to happen, but sometimes you get lucky. I had been trying not to get excited by the slight chance that Leadbelly would turn out to be the gang member who put me on to the ENT Man. And it turned out he was. If I believed in a god, I’d have said thank you.

  “You wrote me the note saying that the killer we were looking for would be in Princes Street Gardens the next Saturday night. You said he was going to get himself a tourist and really put the shits up us.”

  Leadbelly held his bloodshot eyes on me like he still needed final confirmation.

  “At the end you wrote ‘Axe the fucking . . .’”

  “Psycho,” he completed. “Okay, man, you’re the genuine item.” He grabbed my knee with a clawlike hand and brought his mouth close to my ear. “So did you?”

  I didn’t answer. He got the message though.

  “What do you want now then?” he asked eventually.

  “Tell me everything you know about him.”

  “After all this time?” He ran fingers with black nails over his scalp. “What’s the point?”

  “I’ve got Robert Johnson on tape too,” I said.

  “Never.” He watched me nod in confirmation. “You’re really something, man, you know that? Better get your notebook out then.” He blinked and held his eyes shut for a long time, as if he were steeling himself to dive off a cliff. “Right, here it is. We called him Little Walter. Fuck, that was a good one. He must have been six foot two and sixteen stone.”

  At least. I felt his weight on me again, falling back as I tightened the ligature.

  “And he was a shite. Fuck knows where the Wolf found him. He wasn’t one of us, he didn’t come from Pilton. He was good in a fight, mind, a handy man to have around. But he was weird, man. Christ, he was fucking insane. He had scars all over him; I’m sure he’d done most of them himself. And his breath reeked too. His teeth were even more rotten than mine.”

  I remembered. The bastard cocked his head, seemed to listen out. Then came the blue flash of his teeth in the light and the pitted skin of his face as he turned.

  “And he was so fucking out of control. He once told me that he used to come when he throttled people. After I saw how he left that auxiliary woman in the farmhouse up on Soutra, I thought enough is a fucking nough.”

  I saw Caro lying on the stone floor, her left foot jerking like she was stretching it to get rid of cramp.

  “I mean, he lived in a world of his own, man. He never paid any attention to our music, I don’t think he even liked the blues. I’m sure he only let us tattoo him because he got a thrill from the needle.” Leadbelly stopped and licked his lips as if he’d bitten into a putrid tomato. “Why are you making me talk about the sick fuck, for Christ’s sake?”

  “You ever hear his real name?”

  “What do you think? We only used our gang names.” He laughed harshly. “Like you assholes only use your barracks numbers.”

  “Not me, pal. How about family? Ever hear him talk about anyone he was close to?”

  He choked on another laugh. “Close to? That shite only ever got close to the people he butchered. How come you never caught him? He left enough evidence, didn’t he?”

  “I nearly caught him once in Leith. He went back to the same place . . .”

  “Yeah, he told us all about that. He reckoned he was something really special after he got away.” He raised a finger. “Wait a minute, I do remember something about a relative. A brother. Walter said he was a right wee wanker and he’d shown him a thing or two when they were boys.” He shook his head. “Didn’t mention a name, though.”

  “Or anything about where he’d grown up, where he went to school, anything like that?”

  “He was as silent as the grave I hope you put him in about all that.”

  I bet he was, the cunning bastard. “Anything else that could help me identify him?” I asked in desperation.

  Leadbelly shrugged. “Here, can I get back now? The others’ll be thinking you’re getting me to rat on them.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Not fair, man. I did you a good turn. Walter was an animal.”

  I closed my notebook. End of the road. What the hell had I been doing? I knew where the butcher was; why was I raking around in dead man’s dust? The chances of someone copying his modus operandi imperfectly were about as small as my chances of finding out the ENT Man’s identity. I had to forget the old obsession once and for all.

  The prisoner climbed out. Before closing the door, he leaned back in. “What about those recordings of Huddie?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get them to you.”

  It was obvious he didn’t believe me.

  “Give me half an hour.” I left my mobile phone with Davie and ran into the house in Trinity.

  As a former guardian, my father had been given the large room that took up the whole third floor of the Victorian merchant’s house. When he resigned in 2013, the Council’s plans for the provision of homes for all the city’s old people were well advanced, driven by the need for every able-bodied citizen to be available for full-time work. The old man was in his late sixties then and had no problem with the fifty-five steps to his room. He liked being alone, away from the resident nurse’s prying eyes. But recently he’d begun to wheeze and he lived in fear of being moved downstairs. I knew that was about as likely as the roulette tables being opened to ordinary citizens – he had a tendency to wander off and the nurse wanted him as far from the front door as possible.

  I opened his door without knocking. “Hello, old man.”

  “Hello, failure.” My father didn’t look up from his desk in the window but continued to run his finger along the page of the book he was studying. Finally he stopped and marked his place carefully.

  “At least the fog’s lifted.” I was looking out over the Firth of Forth from the high window. I could make out the island of Inchkeith, which the Council once used as a penal colony. Further west I could just see the top of what remained of the Forth railway bridge – both it and the road bridge had been severed during the fighting that followed the city’s declaration of independence. It suited the Council’s policy of isolation from the rest of the country to leave the bridges unusable.

  My father rose to his full height of six feet four inches and looked down at me, his breath catching in his throat. He never opened his eyes fully, which gave the impression of someone who was only half awake – that’s my earliest memory of him. Like most things to do with him, it was deceptive. He was one of the quickest-thinking people I’ve ever met.

  “What’s happened to you, lad? You look almost respectable.”

  “I know. It’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  The old man’s eyes flashed and a sardonic smile grew across his mouth. “You surprise me. Don’t tell me you want advice from a senile has-been, Quintilian.”

  He was the only person who liked calling me by my full name. He did choose it, much to his wife’s disgust. Classical names were a tradition in the Dalrymple family and since the old man’s academic field of expertise was rhetoric, the Roman orator Quintilian’s name had been doubly appropriate. I’m not complaining. At least he didn’t call me Demosthenes.

  “This is serious, Hector.” Even when I was at primary school, he’d insisted I address him that way. I don’t know whether he subscribed to some late-eighties belief in equality between parents and children or whether he just liked the sound of his own name.

  He sat down on the sofa beside me and stretched out his legs. Even indoors he always wore the guardians’ tweed jacket and heavy brogues thou
gh he was no longer entitled to them. The polish from the old brown shoes made my nostrils twitch.

  “Fire away, then,” he said encouragingly. He was more sympathetic to his fellow men’s weaknesses than some of his activities as one of the original guardians suggested.

  “I’ve been taken on by the Council. To investigate a murder.”

  His eyebrows rose and he began to question me in detail. I didn’t mention the ENT Man. He’d never heard about him.

  “So what do you think?” I asked when he’d finished interrogating me. “You were information guardian. Should the Council be suppressing all news of the killing?”

  He got up slowly then glared down at me. “Certainly not. You’re as much to blame as they are. You should have seen where this would lead.”

  I didn’t have a clue what he meant, but it was usually worth giving him some slack. “Which is where?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” he shouted. “Why did I resign from the Council?”

  I’d had enough of riddles. “What’s that got to with it?” I shouted back.

  “Answer the question, boy!”

  The only way was to humour him. I bit my tongue. “All right. You left because you thought the guardians were going beyond the principles of the Enlightenment and taking too much power for themselves.”

  “Exactly.” He was nodding his head like a teacher whose thickest pupil had just grasped that two and two don’t make five. “Which, for all the high-mindedness of the first Council members, would inevitably lead to corruption.”

  “And murder?”

  “Why not? I’d say that this killing is a direct result of the Council’s concentration of power in directorates personally controlled by its members.”

  Now he’d lost me. “Hang on a second. Lewis Hamilton’s got about as much idea of how to handle a murder case as I have of respecting my elders and betters, but you can’t deny his directorate’s cut down crime in general. What’s corrupt about that?”

  Hector shook his head. “You’re taking what I said too narrowly. I’m talking about the regime as a whole. If there’s no debate, no opposition, as has happened now that absolute power rests with the Council, there’s bound to be a lowering of standards, just like there was in the House of Commons before it self-destructed.”