Body Politic

by Paul Johnston

  My mother raised her hand. “All right, Quintilian. I’ll put those points to the Council,” she said wearily. “Where are you going?”

  “I have some unanswered questions.”

  Hector caught up with me on the stairs. “You’ve done well, failure. I knew you’d get to the bottom of it.”

  I shook my head. “All I’ve done is react to events.”

  The old man smiled. “Very modest.” He continued downwards.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to my books. I’ve been without them for days.”

  “More Juvenal?”

  “I haven’t seen anything here to put me off him.”

  I got him into a Land-Rover, then walked towards the Transit. Just before I turned out of Moray Place, the lights in the empty gardens went out.

  Like the sun in a minor constellation imploding.

  I called Hamilton and asked him where Katharine was. She’d stayed in the infirmary with Adam’s body. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her as I drove to the castle.

  The cell where the murderess had been taken was in the depths of the barracks block, at the end of a long, dank passageway. Guard personnel stood at five-yard intervals, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. I hadn’t seen those for a long time.

  “I’ve given instructions to shoot to kill if she makes a break,” said Hamilton.

  “Brilliant. Don’t you realise that she’s finished killing? She could have knifed me but she didn’t.”

  The guard commander at the heavy steel door waited for the guardian’s order, then unlocked it. The clang as it opened echoed down the corridor and came back at us like a vengeful spirit.

  “Christ almighty,” I groaned. They had stripped Scott 372 down to her auxiliary-issue khaki singlet and knickers. Her wrists and ankles had been cuffed to a solid wooden chair that was bolted to the stone-flagged floor. “How’s she going to make a break?” I asked. “Unless she happens to be related to Houdini, of course.”

  “You can’t be too careful,” the guardian said impassively.

  “Aren’t you freezing?” I said to the prisoner.

  Amanda lifted her head. “I’m a cold-blooded creature, citizen,” she said, a smile flickering across her lips. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  I stood looking at her, struck again by how perfectly proportioned her features were. Let alone her body. But she was right. Her eyes were glazed like a reptile’s.

  “So,” she said, giving Hamilton a glance that would have dissolved most men’s bowels. “It’s interrogation time.”

  I sat down opposite her and rested my elbows on the table. “I was rather hoping for a confession, Amanda.”

  My use of that name made her smile again. “You don’t have to sweet-talk me, Quintilian.” She pursed her lips curiously as she pronounced my name, like she was going to whistle. She repeated it and laughed as innocently as a child learning a new word. “I’ll tell you everything, Quintilian. Only you though, no one else. Especially not anyone from the Council.” Her tone remained even but I noticed that her fingers – all eleven of them – had tightened on the chair arms.

  I turned to the guardian.

  He bit his lip then shrugged. “Very well. But the tape recorder is to run continuously.”

  Amanda laughed, this time harshly. “Don’t they trust you?” she asked me.

  I waved Hamilton away. A technical auxiliary brought in the tape recorder and set it up. As soon as the door closed behind him, the murderess began to speak.

  “You bastard, Quint. I should have been there.” Katharine was standing at the window, her back to me. “You owed me that.”

  I looked at her from the sofa and wondered how much longer I could keep my eyes open. I’d got back from the castle in the early afternoon after listening to the confession for over twelve hours.

  “What is this great debt I’ve suddenly acquired?” I demanded. “It seems to me you owe me an explanation of what you were doing following me out to the middle of the gardens.” I closed my eyes when she didn’t say anything. “Anyway, I told you. She wouldn’t speak to anyone except me.”

  “Oh, the great Quintilian Dalrymple,” she said scathingly. “What makes you so special?”

  “She needed someone who could understand what she did.” I opened my eyes when I heard Katharine coming over quickly.

  “If you’re so fucking clever, why can’t you understand that I followed you out there because I was worried about you, because I . . .”

  She buried her head in the cushion beside my leg, sobs jerking her shoulders.

  I put my hand on her back. “Come on, you’d only have tried to hurt her.”

  “And what if I did?” she said, looking up at me with wet eyes. “Could you blame me?”

  “No.” I pulled her towards me. She didn’t resist. “But this isn’t only about Adam, Katharine.”

  “Tell me what she told you,” she asked quietly. “At least I’m entitled to that.”

  I nodded, then made the mistake of closing my eyes for a few seconds before I started to speak. Faces flashed in front of me. I made out Caro’s and Katharine’s, then they were both replaced by the flawless mask of the murderess, her lips moving as she spoke. I opened my eyes with a start and she disappeared. But her voice still rang in my ears, sweeter and more deadly than any siren’s song.

  “You know, Quintilian, none of it would have happened if Fergus – Scott 477 – hadn’t been on sentry duty at the crematorium the night Gordon . . . the night Gordon’s body was taken there.”

  “Gordon and you were more than just close colleagues.”

  “Gordon and I . . . Gordon and I knew each other all our lives. Our parents were neighbours.”

  “In Trinity.”

  “You have been doing your homework. When Fergus saw from the documents who was in the coffin, he called me.”

  “Wait a minute. Gordon had a brother. Stewart Duncan Dunbar. Tell me about him.”

  “That animal? Until Gordon died, I hadn’t thought about him for years. Why are you interested?”

  “You remembered him after you saw Gordon’s body, though, didn’t you? That’s why I’m interested.”

  “How . . . how do you know all this?”

  “Never mind that just now. What did the older brother do to Gordon?”

  “The same thing he did to me.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Before they packed the pig off to the school for the deaf.”

  “What age were you?”

  “Eight. He . . . why are you making me go over this? I kept it locked away for years.”

  “You learned things from Stewart Dunbar, didn’t you? Like how to use a ligature.”

  “How do you know that? There’s something I don’t understand here. Do you know the pig?”

  “I met him. He had a connection with the directorate.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In a safe place.”

  “They don’t know, do they? Remember the tape.”

  “What did Gordon’s brother do to the two of you?”

  “No, I don’t want to . . . oh, what does it matter now? It’s relevant to your inquiry, I suppose. What you’ve got to understand is that their house was like Bluebeard’s castle. The parents were never there. They were lawyers, fanatical supporters of the Enlightenment.”

  “Till they were found to have connections with the democrats in Glasgow and exiled.”

  “That was much later. Who’s telling this story?”

  “Sorry. So what about Stewart Duncan Dunbar?”

  “We never called him by his first name. It didn’t seem appropriate. To Gordon and me he was the Beast. His room was like a laboratory. One that belonged to a scientist who’d gone right off the rails. There were animals splayed out on boards, cut open. Rats and rabbits, mainly, but he took the neighbours’ cats too. God, the smell.”

  “And the ligature?”

  “When he reached his teens, he began to get
even worse. He started doing things to his body – cutting himself, sticking pins into his thighs, putting pencils in his ears. That was how he damaged his hearing. His father found him thrashing around on the floor with the pencil points in his ears and an erection. Oh, and he was laughing.”

  “The ligature, Amanda.”

  “I’m coming to that. He got us into his room one day and locked the door before we could resist. Then he went for Gordon. Suddenly he had a leather bootlace round his neck. He passed out almost immediately. I tried to get the animal off him so he concentrated on me. I can still smell his breath. He never brushed his teeth. They were blue with decay. I had to turn away. Then he pulled my pants down and sodomised me. A few minutes later he did the same to Gordon.”

  “And you were eight years old?”

  “That time the parents listened to us. But instead of having him put away, they got him into the deaf school.”

  “Did you see him again?”

  “Only once. After he’d been thrown out. He was proud of it. He ran away not long afterwards. It took me a long time to blot him out. Gordon helped me, we helped each other. But I learned something from the Beast that was reinforced by the auxiliary training programme.”

  “What was that?”

  “The poetry of violence.”

  I woke with a jerk, sweat all over my face. I was still on the sofa. Katharine’s head was against my thigh, her breathing regular. I vaguely remembered sleep overwhelming me while I was telling her what Amanda had said. I lay still, feeling Katharine’s warmth and aware of her scent. Outside it was still light though the sun was well down in the west. I would have got up to stretch my cramped legs but I didn’t want to disturb Katharine.

  So I sat and thought about the poetry of violence. I knew something about that too. I saw the Ear, Nose and Throat Man turning on me, the light falling on his scarred face and rotten teeth. But instead of seeing Caro’s body, as I used to when I remembered the butcher, I pictured Amanda. The skin on her arms was smooth, sheathing well-toned muscles. When I’d stood up from the table in the cell, I glimpsed the curve of her breasts beneath the singlet and the lines of her bare, marble thighs.

  And her voice went on, running through the catalogue of her crimes in an easy, even tone. Apart from when she was talking about Stewart Duncan Dunbar, she never hesitated. Like the radio announcer reading the inter-barracks rugby results on a Sunday evening.

  I couldn’t stop myself closing my eyes. I went straight back to Amanda in the cell.

  “Fergus called me when he saw Gordon’s barracks number on the documents at the crematorium. There was some bureaucratic problem and the delivery squad didn’t notice how upset he was. It was the shock. I felt it too. There had been no news of Gordon’s death. When he didn’t come back to barracks, we assumed he’d been assigned an extra tour on the border. It wouldn’t have been the first time.”

  “You opened the coffin.”

  “I had to see him one last time. And when I did . . . I knew without even thinking about it that I was going to track the bastards down.”

  “You thought auxiliaries were being killed for their organs.”

  “That’s the way it looked. They’d taken his brain, eyes, liver, kidneys, pancreas, as well as other parts I couldn’t identify. Since the documents were official, I knew auxiliaries must have been involved.”

  “Fergus committed suicide when he realised what you were doing, didn’t he?”

  “I’d been using his clothes and boots. He put two and two together when he heard about the murders.”

  “You used a bootlace like Stewart, didn’t you? And you disguised yourself to get us off your trail. That way you gained time to find everyone who was involved.”

  “And to make them sweat. They deserved that.”

  “So it was all a question of personal revenge.”

  “No. I’m a good auxiliary. I wanted to purge the city of the disease that was afflicting it.”

  “You never thought of going to your superiors?”

  “Is that supposed to be funny? Who could I trust? I was already performing at the Bearskin. I’d seen plenty of senior auxiliaries in the audience.”

  “How did you come to be working there?”

  “It was that bitch Knox 96 – Sarah Spence – she recruited me last December. She’d been after me for weeks. I preferred performing to letting her go down on me. Killing her wasn’t exactly a hardship.”

  “You didn’t realise she was involved in a sex slavery deal Heriot 07 and the Prostitution Services controller were running?”

  “Is that what the medical guardian meant? It makes sense. There were always these young, half-brainwashed citizens wandering around the club. I was too busy chasing the people who killed Gordon.”

  “It’s not clear that he was killed deliberately. I think Yellowlees was telling the truth when he said he only took organs from bodies that were dead before they reached the infirmary.”

  “It’s too late to ask him for confirmation now.”

  “Your system was to kill every Thursday night. Because . . .”

  “Gordon died on a Thursday. I had to keep him alive somehow.”

  “And you were very careful to leave no prints, no traces to incriminate yourself. When you mutilated Sarah Spence in Stevenson Hall, you took off all your clothes, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I dumped the rags I used to clean myself in the barracks furnace later.”

  “And the damage to her anus?”

  “I used my truncheon. With a condom on it.”

  “To make sure we thought you were male.”

  “I had it all worked out. I had a good teacher.”

  “Who?”

  “Bell 03. The guy who wrote the Public Order in Practice manual.”

  “You . . . you shouldn’t believe everything you read in books. As for the driver, Rory Baillie, you trailed him from the mess?”

  “Believe it or not, I didn’t intend to kill him. After all, he wasn’t an auxiliary. I wanted information from him.”

  “But it was a Thursday night.”

  “My only night off.”

  “What made you change your mind about killing him?”

  “I found foreign currency in his wallet. And an infirmary authorisation issued by Simpson 134.”

  “After you killed Baillie, you planted Fergus’s clothes in the Water of Leith to make sure we didn’t suspect a woman.”

  “You found them, did you? It never said in the Guardian.”

  “What about Roussos, the Greek in the Independence?”

  “I was after Simpson 134, the nursing auxiliary. She was difficult to get close to. One day I saw her meet the foreigner and hand an envelope over. So I concentrated on him.”

  “You thought he had something to do with transplants?”

  “There are enough tourists in wheelchairs to make you wonder.”

  “After you sold a double dummy by dressing as a male transvestite, how did you persuade Roussos to go into the linen store?”

  “That was his idea. He said he liked doing it in unusual places.”

  “You know he was alive when you removed his eye?”

  “Yes. The fire alarm went off earlier than I thought it would. My incendiary device did a good job.”

  “You killed innocent people.”

  “Who’s really innocent, Quintilian? I know for certain you aren’t. And you’re the hero of the city now. I’d rather be dead than a hero in this cesspool.”

  I sat up with a start, this time waking Katharine.

  “Are you all right?” She ran her palm over my forehead. “You’re very hot.”

  “Bad dream,” I said, struggling to get the words out. I looked around, suddenly sure that the murderess was in the room with us.

  Katharine pulled me to my feet. “If we’re going to sleep, we may as well use the bed.”

  I followed her, glancing back one last time to convince myself Amanda wasn’t there. The muscles on my arms and the bruise
on my chest were aching. Katharine pulled back the covers and started to take her clothes off. I saw the triangle of hair in her crotch and the dark rings of her nipples but felt no response.

  “Can you understand why she killed?” I asked.

  She looked across at me and nodded. “Revenge for someone she loved.” She shuddered. “I can sympathise with that. From what you said about Caro, so can you.”

  I sat down slowly. She was right. We were all guilty of murder, in thought if not in deed.

  “After the fire I went back to tracking Simpson 134. Eventually I took a chance and went to the infirmary. Someone came down the corridor before I could get her to tell me what had been done with Gordon’s organs. I’d already decided that the medical guardian was responsible.”

  “The nurse almost identified you. She saw your fingers.”

  “I was lucky then. I thought you might be getting close. That’s why I gave up the Thursday routine. Do you think the show I put on for the guardians was a success?”

  “Brought the house down. You know, you could probably have got to the border with Yellowlees as a hostage. Some of his colleagues would have done anything to keep him alive.”

  “Maybe I should have given myself another chance. What will they do with me?”

  “Solitary for life.”

  “Kill me.”

  “What?”

  “Kill me before they come. I’m begging you, Quintilian.”

  “I can’t. I’m not a killer.”

  “I don’t believe you. Besides, this would be a mercy killing.”

  “What did you do with the organs you removed?”

  “They’re under a consignment of fish in the Scott Barracks cold store. I was going to send them to the Council when I had a complete collection.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Kill me. You can’t let me rot on Cramond Island.”

  “It’s too late, they’re coming.”

  “You’re no better than the rest of them. You dress up as an ordinary citizen but under the surface you’re still an auxiliary. And a coward.”

  The word shot through me like the volley from a firing squad. I sat up, disentangling myself carefully from the sheets, and went into the living room. Outside it was dark but the curfew hadn’t come into effect yet. I looked down at the road in the glow from the streetlights. Suddenly I was certain that I didn’t want to sleep again for a long time. In my dreams I couldn’t separate myself from Amanda. She’d used the manual I wrote to kill, in the mistaken belief that the city had been selling organs for profit. But even when I was awake, I couldn’t condemn her. Gordon, Katharine, Adam, Billy, Amanda and I all had the, same background. We were the children of families where love and affection had been replaced by devotion to the cause. The real criminals were in the Council.