Body Politic Read online

  “Tell me, what do the organs that have been taken from the victims have in common?” I saw Hamilton’s eyes open wide.

  Yellowlees suddenly seemed more in control. “That’s obvious, citizen. Liver, kidney, eye. They can all be used, in part if not in whole, for transplantation.”

  “Which, of course, isn’t practised in Enlightenment Edinburgh.”

  The medical guardian nodded. “It goes against the constitution’s directive about the inviolability of the body.” He gave a bitter smile. “Besides, the abolition of private car ownership has reduced traffic accidents to a minimal level and the supply of organ donors has dried up.” He walked towards the door. “Excuse me. I have to see to Margaret.”

  Hamilton and I were left alone.

  “You knew they were lovers,” I said.

  Points of red appeared on the public order guardian’s cheeks. “It was something the Council was aware of, yes. I can’t say I approved, but others regarded it as nothing more than a minor foible.”

  Others obviously included my mother. As senior guardian, she must have known what Yellowlees was up to. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I wasn’t sure what to make of anything. I resorted to my usual fallback position. When in doubt, hit the archive.

  It didn’t get me very far. I got the supervisor to open the building for me despite the late hour and sat at a huge table with the photos from the Greek’s room on my left and the files of the forty-eight missing young people on my right. I was trying to link their ID card mugshots with the headless torsos. It was a waste of time.

  Well, not completely. All that naked flesh made me think of Patsy and the Prostitution Services Department. And then I remembered something. I’d seen Simpson 134 coming out of the building as I was on my way in to see Patsy. With a large briefcase. What the hell was she doing there? What was in the briefcase?

  I wondered about Patsy. Could she be the connection? I’d got the impression that she was nervous about Billy’s involvement in the Bearskin. But maybe she’d actually been nervous about my interest. Maybe she was in business with Billy.

  And that was where I got stuck. I already had the Council’s golden boy under surveillance. It would be a struggle for Davie, Katharine and me to keep a trace on Patsy too. Unless I went to the Council and told them about my suspicions. Which I didn’t want to do. Some individual or individuals on the Council were in this up to their necks. I needed conclusive evidence if I wasn’t to become the forty-ninth missing person. Or fiftieth including my father.

  So I went back to thinking about the killer’s modus operandi – it was like the ENT Man’s, but not exactly the same. That was significant, I knew it was. Everything came back to the ENT Man, but I just couldn’t work out how. This time even the archive failed me.

  It was after one when I got to the Transit. Katharine told me the Greek had stayed put all evening so I spoke to the hotel’s senior auxiliary and asked him to call me if Billy’s contact moved that night. Then Katharine and I went back to my place.

  I should have got as much sleep as possible before relieving Davie outside Billy’s flat, but things didn’t work out that way. Afterwards we lay sprawled on my bed and Katharine dropped off. Sleep wouldn’t come to me though. I was thinking about my father, still unaccounted for. Surely there wasn’t any link between his disappearance and the killer’s latest strike? I was getting nowhere. I got up and tiptoed out of the bedroom, overcome by an irresistible urge to listen to the blues. But even looking through my tapes didn’t provide any escape. I came across my Leadbelly recordings and thought of the convict I’d promised them to. There I was, back at the ENT Man.

  And suddenly my heart took off like one of the intercontinental ballistic missiles the last UK government had threatened to launch at its fellow European Union states. The Ear, Nose and Throat Man. Two things that Leadbelly said about him came back to me: that the butcher had mentioned a younger brother and that he had never showed much interest in the gang’s music. It was the second that struck me most. I remembered how the ENT Man looked as I came up behind him in the gardens, the way he held his head. Cocked to one side, like he was straining to hear. Christ, he cut his victims’ ears off; maybe the bastard had something wrong with his hearing. In which case there would be records. I knew exactly where to look.

  Katharine woke as I was pulling my clothes on.

  “Stay here and keep your mobile on,” I said. “It’s going to be a busy day.”

  The Council had concentrated all the city’s facilities for the treatment of the deaf in what had once been a school for children with hearing problems. I drove past the Haymarket and into the total darkness outside the central area. The great grey turreted building lay beyond an expanse of lawn but I had to use my memory to find it. The place was as lost in the mist as a fairy castle. Or a vampire’s. I stopped the Transit in a shower of gravel outside the main entrance.

  A startled guardsman appeared at the door. “It’s three in the morning, citizen. What the . . .?”

  I stuck my authorisation into his face. “The records room. Take me there.”

  He hesitated, glancing at the mobile phone on the table beside him.

  “Now, guardsman!” I shouted. “Call your commander afterwards.”

  “Yes, citizen.” He set off down the corridor at speed, his nailed boots echoing around like the dying fall of shotgun pellets fired out of range. At last, deep in the guts of the building, he skidded to a stop outside a heavy door.

  “Let me in and lock the door after me,” I ordered. I didn’t fancy being disturbed by anyone the guard commander might advise of my presence.

  Inside there was the familiar archive smell: dry paper and cardboard, dust in places where the cleaner’s broom never reaches and the still-acrid tang of sweat from the poor sods who spend their lives shuffling files. I’d already decided where I was going to start. I estimated that the ENT Man was in his mid-thirties when he died. So he could have been treated from the early 1980s, but there wasn’t time to trawl through that many files. There was a fair chance that when he was an adult he deliberately kept himself out of the Enlightenment’s bureaucracy so I went for the 1990s. It took me fifty-eight minutes to nail him. The photograph was of a fourteen-year-old boy but I recognised the misshapen features and empty eyes immediately.

  His name was Stewart Duncan Dunbar. Knowing it suddenly made him seem even more real than when I saw him in the flesh – like a vengeful ghost made corporeal, an evil spirit made human. I skimmed through the details, my fingers catching on the edges of the documents. Born 6.7.80, admitted to the school for the deaf 7.1.94, expelled 24.6.95. Surprise, surprise – he’d been a seriously disruptive pupil and was eventually kicked out for trying to rape a girl in the toilets. What was interesting in a worrying way was the nature of his deafness. Severe damage to the tympanic membrane caused by the insertion of pointed objects. I hazarded a guess that he’d injured himself in pursuit of some desperate sexual thrill. The last tests performed on him showed that he retained some vestigial hearing and that he’d made progress with lip-reading. Good enough progress to conceal his condition from the others in the Howlin’ Wolf gang. And from me. Not that I had much of a conversation with the animal.

  Then I found a couple of other things, one I’d been hoping for and another which made me shiver. The first was that he had a brother, one Gordon Oliver Dunbar – Leadbelly was right about that. The second was that their family address had been 18 Russell Place. That was less than a hundred yards away from my father’s retirement home.

  In the castle, the guardsman on watch leaped to his feet as I pushed open the door to Hamilton’s outer office.

  “You can’t go in there, citizen. The guardian’s . . .”

  I pushed past him and turned the lights on.

  Hamilton sat up on the couch, a blanket slipping down to reveal pale skin and a surprisingly grubby standard-issue singlet. “What the hell . . .”

  “Sorry to disturb your slumbers. I need to
use your computer.”

  “Why?” He started buttoning his shirt quickly.

  “I’ve found out the ENT Man’s identity.” I went round to the screen and keyboard behind his desk.

  “You’ve what?” His mouth gaped like an idiot’s.

  “Don’t get too excited. That doesn’t mean he’s the killer.”

  Hamilton sat down and reached for his brogues. “Well, don’t ask me how the bloody thing works. I always get my assistants to handle it.”

  I started to tap away. “Don’t worry. I think I can manage.” Only guardians and senior auxiliaries are provided with computers; the Council limits the number of machines ostensibly because of the shortage of electricity but in reality to control the flow of information. “I need your entry code.”

  “Oh.” The guardian looked sheepish. “It’s ‘Colonel’.”

  “Uh-huh.” I entered it. “Right, we’re into the main archive. Let’s go to the index of citizens’ names.”

  “What are you after?” Hamilton was leaning over my shoulder.

  “The ENT Man’s brother. How much do you want to bet that he’s an auxiliary?”

  “Are you still obsessed by that idea? Anyway, what makes you so sure the ENT Man himself’s not the killer?”

  I was tempted to come clean but a picture of Leadbelly came to me, not for the first time that night. I didn’t want to join him carting stones on bomb sites and sleeping in a cell on Cramond Island. Hamilton would have done me, accident or not; after all, I’d kept quiet about it for five years.

  “Here we are. Gordon Oliver Dunbar. Barracks number Scott 391.” I looked round at the guardian. “Just as well you didn’t put your shirt on it. Or your singlet.”

  “I don’t understand the point of all this. What’s this auxiliary supposed to have done?”

  “He might well be the butcher we’re looking for.” I went back into the main archive and called up details on Scott 391.

  Hamilton was slow but he got there in the end. “How did you find this name?”

  I felt his breath on the back of my neck. “That doesn’t matter just now. It—” I broke off as words came up on the screen.

  “‘No reference found’,” Hamilton read. He gave a dry laugh.

  “Shit! That can’t be right.” I tried again, hoping I’d made an input error. Same response. I stood up in frustration, jamming the back of the chair into the guardian’s midriff. I went over to the window without apologising. A few pinpoints of light were dotted about the city centre. Dawn was still an hour away and the outer reaches were plunged into a darkness denser than in any Edgar Allan Poe tomb. That was it. I rushed back to the keyboard.

  “The main archive only has files on the living.” I called up the “Auxiliaries – Deceased” archive and typed in the barracks number. “This has got to be it.” The cursor stayed where it was as the computer searched. “Come on, you bastard, come on.” I smelled Hamilton’s sour breath. Even if Scott 391 was dead, he might still be the connection I needed.

  Then the cursor jumped and the file came up.

  “Scott 391,” I read. “Date of birth 28.5.85, registered date of death 5.3.2020.”

  “He died over three weeks ago,” said the guardian.

  “Before the first murder,” I added, not giving him the satisfaction of pointing that out.

  “Exactly. Now will you tell me exactly what this is all about?”

  “Cause of death,” I continued. “Bullet wound to head during operations against scavengers near Soutra border post.” Everything came back to Soutra, I thought, seeing Caro’s body at the farm for a second.

  “Oh yes, I remember the report about that,” said Hamilton. “Bloody dissidents. They got away as well.”

  I motioned to him to be quiet. I needed to work out what to do. Scott Barracks where the dead auxiliary had been based is in Goldenacre and its territory includes both my father’s and the ENT Man’s family home. I remembered the guard vehicle Hector was seen walking towards. Was there a connection? Then there was Patsy. What was I going to do about her? What could she have to do with all of this?

  “Where are you going, Dalrymple?” Hamilton asked uneasily as I headed for the door.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I make my mind up.”

  It was six in the morning. I didn’t think Billy Geddes was likely to make an early start, so I called Davie and told him to meet me at my flat.

  He arrived looking like he’d been dragged through a bush backwards. “Where have you been all night?” he demanded. “I couldn’t get through on your mobile.”

  “Shit.” I pulled it out of my pocket. “I turned it off about three. I didn’t want any interruptions.” I turned it on again.

  “Lucky for you that Heriot 07 didn’t do anything naughty.” Davie glanced at Katharine. She’d emerged from the bedroom with her hair sticking up like a bomb had gone off under it. “Oh aye.” He looked at me knowingly.

  “I’ve been out all night, guardsman.”

  “Oh aye.” He rubbed his eyes with muddy fingers. “Any chance of me getting some sleep?”

  “Of course.” I gave him a tight smile. “When the investigation’s over.”

  “She looks like she’s been in bed all night,” he complained.

  Katharine was ignoring him. “Have you made some kind of breakthrough?” she said to me.

  “Sort of.” I wasn’t going to tell them about the ENT Man, so I was vague about his brother and concentrated on the other angles. “There might be a connection between Billy Geddes, Patsy Cameron and the medical guardian.”

  “Patsy Cameron in Prostitution Services?” Katharine asked, her eyes locked on me.

  I nodded. “I’m pretty sure the nursing auxiliary who died last night was involved.” I filled Davie in about events in the infirmary.

  “Simpson 134 and the medical guardian were more than just good friends,” he said.

  “You know about that?”

  “Christ, everyone in the guard knows about that. So you reckon they were doing more than just screwing?”

  I shrugged. “We need evidence. I’d like to keep an eye on Yellowlees, but right now I’ve got other priorities. Davie, you’ll have to watch Geddes again. Katharine, can you . . .”

  “Tail Patsy Cameron?” She didn’t look like she was too bothered by the prospect.

  “You’ll need a less conspicuous disguise, I think. Make sure she doesn’t spot you.”

  Katharine nodded impatiently. “I think I can manage that, Quint.”

  “What about you?” Davie put in. “What are these other priorities?”

  “I’m going down to Scott Barracks to do some digging.”

  “In the gardens? Apparently if you spit on your hands . . .”

  I didn’t respond to that. It had just struck me that tomorrow was Thursday. The killer was probably getting ready for another attack. Then again, today was April Fools’ Day. I wondered how much of a sense of humour the butcher had.

  I stood on Goldenacre looking up at the façade of the stand. I had a dim memory of watching a rugby match with my father when I was a small boy: a freezing winter’s afternoon high above the pitch, being buffeted by the wind. I couldn’t remember anything of the match itself. It probably involved some of Hector’s students. He used to follow the rugby before the Enlightenment gave him other things to think about.

  Scott Barracks is a custom-built block beyond the rugby field. It stands between the once affluent area of Goldenacre and the outskirts of Leith, where civil unrest was endemic in the first ten years of the Enlightenment. The lack of large buildings in the vicinity forced the planners to erect a dreary three-storey block of mess rooms and sleeping quarters. Auxiliaries from the barracks always had a reputation for being headbangers. I wished Davie was with me.

  I flashed my authorisation and went into the entrance hall. The place had the usual institutional smell, the drab paint and scuffed woodwork of all barracks – but there was something else to the atmosphere. The
guardsmen and women on duty seemed strangely depressed. There was none of the enthusiastic officiousness encouraged by the Council. I was directed to the commander’s office by a young woman who looked like she hadn’t slept for a week. I knocked and went in without waiting for a reply.

  Scott 01 raised his head slowly and looked at me without blinking. He was hollow-eyed and prematurely bald. He couldn’t have been much over thirty and even before he said anything I could see that he was having a hard time holding the job down. His beard was flecked with grey and it was probably a long time since he last smiled.

  “Dalrymple,” I said, showing him my authorisation. If he knew about me, he wasn’t showing it.

  “What can I do for you, citizen?” His voice was unusually high-pitched, reedy as a shepherd’s pipe on a distant hillside.

  “I need immediate access to your records room.”

  That got a flicker from his eyelashes. “If you need a file, I can have it brought to you here, citizen.”

  And then you can see which one I want, I thought. “No, thanks. I want you to escort me to the archive personally and I want no one else to know I’m in there.”

  “Can I see your authorisation again?” he asked.

  I’d run out of time. “No, Scott 01. If you’ve got a problem, call the public order guardian.” I beat his fingers to the phone. “After you’ve taken me.”

  “Very well.” The commander closed the file he’d been working on and stood up.

  I wondered if he’d move any faster if I shouted “Fire”. Probably not. Auxiliaries are trained to keep a hold of themselves. Or at least to look like they’re keeping a hold of themselves.

  A group of guardswomen passed us in the corridor. They lowered their voices and their faces when they saw the commander and me. The first two were nondescript but the third wasn’t the kind you look away from. I recognised her immediately. It was Mary, Queen of Scots. She gave me a quick glance and was gone. I didn’t catch her barracks number.

  I waited impatiently as Scott 01 unlocked the records room. In accordance with security regulations its door was steel-plated and equipped with three separate locks. In the early years of the Enlightenment there had been frequent break-ins by relatives trying to discover the whereabouts of auxiliaries after they’d been separated from their families. More recently the Education Directorate has been working hard to explain the need, as the Council sees it, for the city’s servants to be anonymous and breaches in security have fallen away.