Body Politic

by Paul Johnston

“Yes, why? Got a girlfriend there?”

  He nodded slowly, but it didn’t look like he had a furtive grope on his mind.

  The public order guardian leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Why exactly do you need these undercover clearances, Dalrymple? What are you up to?” He turned to Davie and looked with distaste at his trimmed beard.

  “It’s a long shot,” I said nonchalantly. “I’d rather keep it under wraps at this stage. It probably won’t come to anything.” If Hamilton discovered I was trailing a senior auxiliary, the blades of the fan would be permanently clogged with excreta. But I had to have the undercover passes – “ask no questions”, as they’re known in the directorate. Without them our surveillance activities would be interrupted all the time by curious auxiliaries.

  The guardian’s expression softened. “Oh, all right.” He scribbled a note. “Give this to my assistant, guardsman.” He fixed Davie with his eyes again. “I hope you’re not getting yourself into anything which demeans your rank.”

  “I’ll make sure regulations are observed, guardian,” Davie said compliantly, avoiding my eyes.

  “Sit down, man,” Hamilton said to me wearily. He shuffled the papers on his desk with the look of a man who can’t decipher the clues of the crossword, let alone have a go at the answers. “How on earth are we going to find this” – he pushed the papers away – “this savage?”

  I was surprised at the change in his bearing. Maybe the Council’s rejection of his demand for a state of emergency had knocked the certainty out of him. It struck me that the guardian actually had little experience of this kind of crime. He was an organisation man, an administrator at heart. And like all administrators, a plotter. The question was, how far did his plotting go? Was he just protecting the interests of his directorate or had he got involved in something a lot dirtier? Now I was the one who didn’t have a clue.

  Davie was waiting for me in the outer office. An attractive red-haired guardswoman lowered her head as I came out, but I saw the smile on her lips.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Davie. “Got the ‘ask no questions’?”

  He nodded, looking extremely pleased with himself.

  Although it was a Sunday morning, senior auxiliaries like Billy Geddes are expected to make an appearance at the office. Davie changed into his tourist clothes and went off to keep an eye on the Finance Directorate in Bank Street. I didn’t expect Billy to go anywhere revealing during daylight, but there was a chance he might meet someone during his lunchbreak.

  I walked across the esplanade and down to the infirmary. There was a lot of noise in the ward containing the fire victims, patients garrulously comparing experiences and nurses clattering around with trolleys. But the figure in Katharine’s bed was inert. I was a few yards from it before I realised that the occupant had grey hair and fleshy shoulders.

  “She discharged herself an hour ago, citizen,” said a familiar voice. “She shouldn’t have. The doctor didn’t have a chance to examine her arm again. But I couldn’t stop her.”

  Simpson 134, the senior nurse I’d seen the day before on my way to the Prostitution Control Department, was standing in the centre of the ward. Her subordinates moved around her like drones in the service of a queen bee. I paid less attention than I might have to her chest because I was cursing myself for not putting a guard on the door. She heard some of the words I came out with and looked about as impressed as the former king did when the mob told him where he could put his crown.

  “Any idea where she went?” I asked.

  “She said she was going home.”

  The nurse’s mordant tone puzzled me. “Is something troubling you, Simpson 134?”

  She eyed me coldly. “The city is being terrorised by a lunatic and you ask if something’s troubling me? Why aren’t you chasing the killer instead of that female citizen?” She turned away abruptly and walked out.

  There was a guard vehicle by the gate. I flashed my authorisation and got the guardsman to take me to Katharine’s flat. I felt uneasy. It seemed unlikely that she could have met anyone or that anything could have happened to her in the short time since she left the infirmary. A worrying thought came to me. If she had seen the killer from the far end of the corridor, then it was very possible that he had seen her too.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” She stood at the door, her hair wet and a towel round her shoulders.

  I felt a wave of relief dash over me, then recovered the power of speech. “Are you all right? They said you shouldn’t have left the infirmary.”

  “Checking up on me?” Katharine asked, her eyes wide open and ice-water cold.

  “You’re a witness, for God’s sake.”

  Her expression slackened. “I suppose I am. Sorry.” She let me into the flat.

  “Is your arm okay?”

  She flexed it slowly. “A bit sore but I’ll manage.” As she sat down on the sofa, her dressing-gown parted to reveal a length of thigh.

  I gulped and tried to look elsewhere. “Why did you discharge yourself?”

  “It’s a madhouse there,” she said, shaking her head. “Even in the middle of the night there are porters running up and down the corridors with patients on trolleys.”

  I pulled out my notebook and flicked through the pages. There was no need to remind myself of what I was going to ask her, but I was looking for a way to put it off.

  “What is it?” Katharine asked with a smile that made my heart beat faster. “You’ve got that faraway look again.”

  No point in delaying any longer. “Andreas Roussos in room 346: did you provide sexual services to him?”

  She didn’t turn away. Only the disappearance of her smile suggested that the question might have had some effect. “You’ve been checking up on me, haven’t you?” she said quietly. “I was hoping you wouldn’t get around to the department’s files.”

  “Answer the question, Katharine.”

  “All right. Why do you think I was so sure it was a t-v I saw with him? He wasn’t interested in women, Quint.”

  I thought about the fact that the murder victims had been sodomised. Maybe there was a link there with the Greek’s sexuality. I didn’t fancy it much. I had a feeling we were supposed to think the killer was a sex freak like the ENT Man.

  Katharine sat up and leaned over to me. “I want to help, Quint. Why won’t you let me? You’ve forgotten all about Adam.”

  I hadn’t. It was just that he was missing while she was right in front of me. He didn’t have her track record either. “Why do you do it? No one’s forcing you to fuck all those men.”

  She looked down at me without flinching. “What’s that got to do with your investigation?”

  “I’ll tell you. From the start you’ve held things back from me. I had to ferret out your dissidence conviction and the fact that you whore for the Tourism Directorate. How do I know you haven’t got more secrets?” I piled on as much indignation as I could. “On top of that, you expect me to accept your help? Christ, Katharine, you’re not living in the real world.”

  “And everyone else in Edinburgh is?” she asked ironically. “Anyway, I thought you knew everything about me from the moment we met. Remember that little demonstration you gave?” The smile disappeared from her lips. “I told you, Quint. After my time on Cramond Island I do what I’m told.”

  That was bullshit. It was clear from Patsy’s file that Katharine wasn’t being coerced. I kept on at her. “Does that include throttling the guy in the linen store?”

  Her mouth opened slightly and I heard her breathing quicken. “What do you mean?” she asked in a whisper.

  I stood up and faced her. “Why should I believe your story about the transvestite? Maybe you ripped the Greek’s eye out with those long fingers of yours.”

  The next few seconds would be crucial. She was about the most enigmatic person I’d ever come across, but I was still confident I’d be able to tell if she was lying.

  “You’ve made y
our mind up already, haven’t you?” she said, holding my gaze. “There’s no point in me saying anything.”

  I waited for a bit, then snapped my notebook shut. If she’d started to weep or plead, if she’d opened her legs and offered me sex, I’d have been seriously suspicious. As it was, she convinced me that she hadn’t been involved in the attacks on Roussos and the others simply because she didn’t care about them. Or about anyone else except her brother, it seemed.

  “I want to assign a guardswoman to you,” I said on my way out. “The assailant might have seen you.”

  “Forget it,” she said, her voice harsher. “I can look after myself.”

  I didn’t press the point. Suddenly the idea of arguing with her took on the aspect of Everest’s south-west face from below. I went downstairs to the safety of the street.

  “Dead ends,” said Hamilton laconically.

  I looked out from the window of his office in the castle. The city looked unreal in the late afternoon sun, a thin layer of mist hanging over the buildings like the last exhalations of an intelligent but slow-moving species of dinosaur. “Looks that way,” I said.

  “Do you think we can rely on the official t-vs’ alibis?” The guardian pronounced the initial letters with distaste.

  “Yes. We’ll have to look elsewhere for the butcher.”

  “But where, for God’s sake? My people have checked all the gaming tents and nightclubs. Some of the staff remembered Roussos, but no one could say if he’d been with anyone else. The same in the hotel.”

  “Did the consulate confirm his job?”

  “He’s an insurance consultant all right. Unless the contract they showed me was a fake.”

  That wouldn’t have surprised me, but there was no way of proving it. I walked towards the door. “Keep up the good work, guardian.”

  “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “To follow up my long shot. Looks like it’s our only chance.”

  I leaned my bicycle against the front of the tourist shop opposite the Finance Directorate and went in.

  Davie was behind a curtain. “She’s seen my ‘ask no questions’,” he said, glancing at a middle-aged auxiliary in a tartan plaid behind the counter who was studiously ignoring us. “And I showed it to the guardsman in the checkpoint.” He shrugged apologetically. “Had to – I did my auxiliary training with him. Don’t worry, he’ll keep quiet.”

  I looked over at the imposing building, formerly the headquarters of a bank. It stands on a prominence overlooking the gardens and is about as close as you get to architectural opulence in the city nowadays. The Council would claim that they’ve just left it as it was, but I wouldn’t buy that. Money still talks, whatever they say.

  “Is he still in there?”

  Davie nodded. “Been there all day, apart from when he went for a wander on the Royal Mile at lunchtime. He didn’t meet anyone.”

  “Or hand over anything?”

  “I don’t think so. It was pretty crowded. I suppose he could have slipped a note to someone. There were a lot of foreigners around.”

  “How many of them were Greeks, I wonder?” I frowned at him. “Next time stay as close as you can to him.”

  “Easier said than done. The High Street’s like a wheelchair track. Have you noticed how many of them there are these days?”

  “Yeah, it’s . . . hang on . . . here we go.”

  Billy Geddes had appeared outside the Finance Directorate. He stopped and exchanged a few words with the guardsman at the entrance.

  “I’ll take him now,” I said, jamming my woollen hat over my ears and wrapping a scarf round the lower part of my face.

  “I thought you might have dressed in drag,” Davie said with a grin.

  “Not on my bike. That would be a bit of a giveaway.”

  Billy’s Toyota was driven up by a porter. He got in and moved off down the Mound, followed by a Supply Directorate lorry that was pumping out clouds of fumes. I took a deep breath and dived into the smog. There was no getting away from it. Billy Geddes was a lucky bastard to have his own car and I was jealous as hell. Not that I was going to let that prejudice my handling of the investigation.

  Either Billy wasn’t really a bad boy or he was being very careful. He went straight back to his flat and stayed there. I took cover in the bushes lining the lower edge of Queen Street Gardens. Twice I was approached by track-suited auxiliaries. They backed off when they saw my “ask no questions”. Twilight deepened and the lights from Billy’s high windows shone out over the street. I caught a glimpse of him moving past, a mobile phone to his ear. There was no way of finding out who he was talking to.

  Later the lights were dimmed, though not extinguished completely. I was shivering in the gloom, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t wasting my time. Even the unchanged sheets and coarse blankets on my bed began to tempt me. I forced myself to concentrate on the elegant Georgian façade across the road. Nearby was number 17, where Robert Louis Stevenson lived as a boy. Perhaps he had the first intimations of Dr Jekyll here when the mist was swirling around, swallowing the drumming of horses’ hooves from passing carriages. The doctor and his sinister doppelganger seemed very close. Then I thought of the Ear, Nose and Throat Man’s hulking figure, a knife glinting in each hand, and felt a tingling in the stump of my finger.

  I was so caught up that I hardly heard the dull click of the door closing behind Billy. I looked over in time to see his small figure move quickly down the steps and along the street. There was no sound from his feet – he must have put on a pair of well-worn shoes – and that made me wonder what he was up to. I stepped away from the bushes and ran along the grass by the all-weather track, hoping he’d think I was a jogger. It was too late to vault the fence. I’d have to wait till Billy was off Heriot Row and use the nearest gate. The question was, where was he heading?

  When he got to India Street, he turned and walked downhill rapidly. I sprinted to the gate then froze as I saw Billy stop and look round. Fortunately I was obscured. He carried on. Then disappeared.

  My heart skipped a couple of beats. I went down India Street cautiously, looking at all the basement flats and the steps down to them. Nothing. Then it came to me. I’d forgotten about the narrow entrance to Jamaica Street. There was a bar patronised by senior auxiliaries further down. The lights were low, curtains covering most of the window space. A buzz of voices was audible despite the heavy door. Billy must have gone for a pint. I got my breathing back to normal and wedged myself behind a large rubbish container to see if he came out with anyone interesting. If I’d been spotted by a resident, the guard would be along any minute. They weren’t.

  Half an hour later I heard high-heeled footsteps coming from the darkness beyond the bar and swore under my breath. My geography was all screwed up. Jamaica Street looked like a cul-de-sac, but there were actually a couple of lanes leading on from it. They were unlit by streetlamps. Billy could have met someone there or kept going and shaken off a tail as incompetent as me. The footsteps came closer. I crouched motionless, wondering if they were a woman’s or a transvestite’s. As they passed, I looked out and got a clear view of the straight body and unmistakable chest of Simpson 134 from the infirmary. Except instead of a nurse’s uniform, she was dressed up in a flashy wool coat, black stockings and shoes that didn’t come from the Supply Directorate. She was also carrying the briefcase I’d seen her with outside Patsy’s office. She turned the corner and vanished.

  Jigsaw pieces began to come together in my mind. She must have been Billy’s contact, the one who told him when I left the infirmary. But what was she doing meeting him in a pitch-black backstreet?

  A faint noise came from the lane. Billy turned the corner and pulled open the bar door, to be greeted by raised voices.

  After a few minutes, I decided to leave him to it and set off home. My long shot had hit an interesting target but I couldn’t say I was much further on. None of what I’d seen was worth reporting to the Council. To confront them I ne
eded evidence and that was in shorter supply than Danish bacon in the city’s foodstores.

  As I crossed Heriot Row I had another thought. I’d completely forgotten to make the Sunday visit to my father. There was definitely something wrong with my memory.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When Davie arrived at six the next morning I was already working on the lists Hamilton had sent over.

  “What’s all that?” he asked.

  “Auxiliaries who were involved in the fire and the rescue.”

  “Have you found me there?”

  “Don’t worry, you’re not a suspect.” I glanced at the faded labourers’ fatigues he’d dressed himself up in. “Your feet aren’t the right size.”

  “What a relief.”

  I threw down my pencil. “This is a waste of time. There were hundreds of your lot at the Indie. Even if the killer is an auxiliary, he could have been off duty on Thursday evening and gone to the hotel earlier.”

  “To start the fire, you mean? What did the fire chief’s report say about arson?”

  “He’s still investigating, but there’s a good chance it was started deliberately. The heat around the kitchens was so intense that there’s not much evidence.”

  Davie scratched what remained of his beard. “You know what I think? If he was dressed as a t-v, he already had the freedom of the hotel. So he didn’t need a distraction.”

  I looked up at him. “What are you getting at?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe he set the fire just to show us what he can do.”

  I shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. “Bloody hell, Davie, that’s an idea which makes me look forward to the rest of my life.” It was also one with a definite ring of truth. I told him about Billy Geddes and the nursing auxiliary.

  “Why don’t you take her in and interrogate her?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “That would make Billy run for cover. Anyway, he’d just say he was giving her a knee-trembler against the wall.”

  “Very likely. That woman would crush all his ribs.”

  I laughed. “I’m going to ask Hamilton to put a guard on her. We can say it’s for her safety. Then at least we’ll know where she is all the time.”