The Bone Yard Read online

  He looked around to see that we were alone. “It’s a new variant of the e. coli virus. We found it in some salami that a Danish tourist imported illegally.”

  “Jesus. Has anyone been infected by it?”

  He shook his head. “The man himself was repatriated the day he arrived and no other samples of the meat have been found.”

  “Thank Christ for that.”

  The chemist laughed, the folds of flesh on his face wobbling alarmingly. “Don’t worry. It happens all the time.”

  “Right,” I said, not particularly reassured. “If things are under control here, can you spare me some time?” I told him about the search for the Electric Blues lab.

  He looked intrigued, then his face fell. “Wait a minute, citizen. Does the Council know about this?”

  I pulled out my authorisation. “As you can see, you’re required to give me all the assistance I want.”

  “You aren’t answering my question,” he said, his jowls quivering.

  “Look, the Council will be briefed about this tonight.” I could see he was wavering. I considered putting him on the spot for his addiction to banned music, then I thought of a better way. “Have you lost any senior staff in the last six months or so, Lister 25?”

  He looked at me in surprise. “It’s funny you should mention that, citizen. I was going to call you after your last visit but it slipped my mind. Lister 436. She was an excellent toxicologist – I’d been grooming her to take over from my present deputy. Then she was suddenly transferred to the senior guardian’s private office last . . . let me see . . . last November, it must have been. Yes, late last November. I haven’t heard from her since.” Then he looked at me again, his wrinkled skin turning an even sicklier yellow shade than normal. “Surely you don’t think she’s been involved in the production of that drug?”

  I didn’t think it was necessary to answer that question. “Are you coming to see if we can find the lab?”

  The chemist already had his white coat off. “If I find that a student of mine’s been producing a substance like that, there’ll be serious trouble.”

  He may have looked like an elephant that’s been on a crash diet, but I wasn’t planning on getting in his way.

  Slaughterhouse Four is one of the many parts of Edinburgh that the tourists don’t see. At first glance it doesn’t seem like a place of death, unless the wind happens to be blowing towards you from it. The main block is a large Edwardian building with high windows and saucer domes at the corners. In the field and yards in front of it doomed sheep and cattle give a rustic touch to the rundown urban surroundings of soot-blackened housing and potholed roads.

  “Right, we’re going to have to be quick,” I said as Davie pulled up outside the checkpoint. “If there is something illicit going on here, whoever’s involved will clear out as soon as they hear we’re about the place.” I looked at the toxicologist on the front seat beside me. “I’m not going to spell out to the facility supervisors what we’re after. When they see you, they’ll probably assume it’s something to do with hygiene or infection control.”

  “Are we going to split up?” Katharine asked from behind.

  I nodded. “You go with Davie. If you see anything that looks like a lab, call me. Lister 25 and I will check out the resident science officer first.”

  As we cleared the sentry post, a heavy drizzle started to fall, weighing down our clothes with an evil-smelling spray in the few seconds it took us to get inside the abbatoir. Instantly the mild bleating and lowing from the animals ouside was replaced by the rattle of the machinery on the killing line and a high-pitched shrieking that made my stomach flip.

  As I heard the heavy steel door clang behind me, I suddenly wondered where the butcher of humans had been since he decapitated Machiavelli. He’d been quiet for too long. I was sure of one thing, though. He’d feel very much at home in Slaughterhouse Four.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I’ve been through a lot of post-mortems but they don’t compare with Slaughterhouse Four. The most diligent serial killer would have to work weeks of overtime to get into the league of mayhem that’s staged there every day. I’d consider turning vegetarian if the Supply Directorate could come up with alternative sources of protein, but soya and pulses don’t exactly flourish in the city’s farms.

  The toxicologist and I put on protective overalls and walked up the killing line. The animals can’t be stunned electrically because of the power shortages, so big men in blood-spattered clothing club them with round-ended iron bars. The petrified squealing is enough to make you lose yesterday’s breakfast as well as today’s. Then chains are lashed around rear ankles and the jerking carcasses are winched up. Slaughtermen with long-bladed knives wait for them down the line, yelling and joking to each other. You’d think they’d be disgusted by their work but people get used to anything. A spray of warm red liquid lashed across my chest, making me jerk backwards.

  Lister 45 grabbed my sleeve and pointed to the right. There was a double door that had been secured with a heavy chain.

  I indicated it to the auxiliary who’d been assigned to us. “What’s in there?”

  He put his mouth up to my ear and shouted above the din from the conveyor belt. “The Halal line. For the Moslem tourists, you know? We’re not allowed to go in from this side.”

  That sounded interesting. Even though the numbers of Moslem tourists has fallen recently because of the unrest in the Middle East, there are still a good few around. And the region does have a historical involvement in the drugs trade. Could there be a connection with the Electric Blues?

  “Open it up,” I said, beating the auxiliary’s doubtful look down without having to pull out my authorisation.

  He eventually managed to turn the key in the padlock and the door swung slowly open. The Halal line is in a poorly constructed extension to the main building, angled so it faces Mecca. There’s no conveyor belt so the slaughtermen get very close to their victims. Pairs of bearded guys in bloody aprons were wrestling sheep to the floor and cutting their throats. In the background a Moslem clergyman was reciting from a book. All of them looked up and stared at us with undisguised hostility as we came in.

  I walked past the holy man, who had rushed up and started to gesticulate wildly. There was a small room to the rear and I could see a couple of men in white coats through the glass door. They turned to me too, but they weren’t aggressive, they were just proud of their work. They held their hands out to me as I shoved open the door. Each contained the glassy jelly of a sheep’s eye.

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said, swallowing what had just arrived in my mouth.

  The toxicologist came in, ran a practised eye around the place and shook his head. “We’re wasting our time, citizen,” he said. “Let’s leave before these people get really annoyed.”

  We left the Moslems to it and rejoined the Enlightenment’s atheist killing line. There isn’t much to choose between them really. But as far as I’m concerned death isn’t a religious matter – it’s much more serious than that.

  “Nothing,” said Davie, pulling off his protective overalls. “We’ve been through the admin block, the packaging area and the coldstores. He shivered. “And they’re bloody cold, I can tell you. There was no sign of anything like a lab.”

  Katharine nodded in agreement, gulping tea from one of the mugs that the supervisor had sent in to us. We were in what passes for a meeting room in Slaughterhouse Four. It must be one of the few rooms in the facility that doesn’t have blood on the walls.

  “Same here, I’m afraid,” I said. “We did the sheep lines – ordinary and Halal – and the cattle.” I’d discovered from the supervisor that pigs, poultry (including pigeons trapped at night in the city centre) and what are called “other sources of meat” (horses, donkeys and clapped-out camels and the like from the zoo) are processed in Slaughterhouses One to Three. But Roddie Aitken hadn’t made many pick-ups or deliveries to those.

  “Are you sure this is sensi
ble, citizen?” Lister 25 asked, his wrinkled face partially hidden behind a mug. “I mean, if I were setting up a lab to produce illicit drugs, I wouldn’t do so in a slaughterhouse.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe this was just a transit point. The Electric Blues might be made elsewhere then brought here for onward distribution.” I looked round their pale faces and wondered how many of us would be stuffing our faces with meat that night. “And maybe I’m just following a lead up my own backside.”

  Davie turned up his nose. “In that case, I want a transfer back to the castle before you make me go the same way.”

  “Not yet, my friend.” I headed for the door. “There are still two other locations to check, remember? Meanwhile, I’ve got to go and spin a yarn to the Council.”

  Outside it was pitch dark beyond the narrow ring of light by the slaughterhouse entrance. From the pens there came the sighing and coughing of invisible animals. They wouldn’t be there for long. Like all the city’s killing lines, Slaughterhouse Four works non-stop shifts. But the main beneficiaries aren’t ordinary Edinburgh citizens. Our meat is rationed, while the tourists pay Third World prices for prime beef. That’s the perfect city’s version of equality.

  Hamilton was waiting for me on the ground floor of the Assembly Hall. I’d deliberately timed my arrival to minimise his chances of picking my brains before the meeting.

  “What the bloody hell have you been up to, Dalrymple?” he growled. “I heard a report that you’ve been poking around one of the slaughterhouses.”

  As I expected, it hadn’t taken long for news of our activities to get back to him. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll hear all about it at the meeting.”

  “Did you find anything?” the guardian asked as we went up the stairs towards the Council chamber.

  “Not a sausage,” I said with a tight smile.

  “What?” He followed me in, looking bewildered.

  There was already a gaggle of guardians around the chief boyscout. He looked over their heads as I approached and watched me with a serene expression which didn’t convince me for a moment.

  “Well, citizen Dalrymple, have you anything to report?” he asked, an almost undetectable edge to his voice. “Anything at all?”

  So that was the way he wanted it. “Yes, I have,” I replied, smiling as he blinked involuntarily. I was sure he knew where I’d been, but it would be interesting to see how he reacted. I wasn’t planning on telling him my line of thinking though. “We picked up a lead that linked Roddie Aitken with Slaughterhouse Four in Slateford.”

  “What was the nature of that lead, citizen?” The senior guardian was watching me as closely as I was watching him. The other guardians had stepped back a couple of paces to follow the duel.

  “Supply Directorate records show that there were three locations that Roddie visited frequently. One was Slaughterhouse Four.” No visible changes on the chief boyscout’s face. “Unfortunately, there was no sign of a lab capable of producing the Electric Blues.”

  “And what are the other two locations?” the senior guardian asked quietly. Too quietly, even by his standards. I reckoned there were knitting-needle teeth like a Moray eel’s behind those saintly lips and I wasn’t going to take any chances.

  “The Three Graces club was one,” I lied. “We’ve already taken that to pieces.”

  The chief boyscout kept after me. “And the other?” The tone of his voice rose a touch higher than the question required. I was sure he was desperate to know whether I was on to the lab.

  I felt Hamilton’s eyes on me. There was no option, but I felt a stab of guilt as I condemned him and a lot of his personnel to a wasted night. “The other?” I said, squeezing the moments for all they were worth. “The other is the City Distillery in Fountainbridge.”

  The skin on the senior guardian’s face slackened just enough for me to know that he’d bought my dummy. So had Hamilton.

  “The distillery?” he said incredulously. “It’ll take us days to search that rabbit-warren, man.”

  It wouldn’t, but he’d certainly be tied up long enough to give me the chance to check out the other places. I wasn’t happy about messing him around, but I had to make sure the senior guardian knew nothing about where I was really heading until I had enough evidence to confront him.

  “We’ll get going as soon as the meeting’s finished,” I said, trying not to look too enthusiastic.

  “The meeting has finished for you, citizen,” said the chief boyscout, moving down the chamber with his flock of acolytes. “You are excused the rest of the proceedings as well, guardian.”

  Lewis Hamilton should have been embarrassed at being treated in that offhand way by someone so much younger, but as we walked out he was beaming more than a poor man who’d won the lottery in the days before the last British government rigged the draw in favour of cabinet members. Obviously he hated meetings with the iron boyscouts as much as I did.

  The next few hours needed careful planning. Before Hamilton and I went to the distillery with a couple of squads of guards, I called Davie and asked him to start checking out the zoo with the chief toxicologist. I also told Katharine to wait for me at my flat.

  And then I pretended to be totally committed to the farce that I’d set up in the distillery. On the face of it, there was a reasonable chance that one of the city’s two whisky-producing facilities concealed a drugs lab, given the presence of chemists and suitably equipped premises. In fact, it had occurred to me in the Council meeting that if the chief boyscout didn’t have other things on his mind, he might have asked me why I’d visited the slaughterhouse before the potentially more suspicious distillery.

  Hamilton and his white-overalled staff had great fun stomping around the ramshackle distillery. Thirty years ago it was a state-of-the-art plant, but during the Enlightenment it’s been allowed to run down because of lack of funds. There’s never been any question of cutting back whisky supplies to citizens and auxiliaries though, despite the guardians’ own abstinence. Whisky and beer are the legalised opiates in their utopia.

  After a couple of hours, I decided to leave Lewis to it. “There are some things here I want to check in the archives,” I said, waving a sheaf of papers I’d abstracted from the facility supervisor’s files.

  “You can’t go now, Dalrymple,” the guardian said, looking round from a steel cabinet in the one of the labs. The distillery chemist was sitting in the corner with his head in his hands as one of Lister 25’s staff painstakingly disassembled a maze of glass tubes, balloons and beakers. “We’re making excellent progress.”

  Except you’re going to find even less of a sausage than we did at Slaughterhouse Four, I thought.

  “I won’t be long.” I walked away quickly and he didn’t follow.

  Outside, my planning hit a rough patch – transport. Davie had the Land-Rover at the zoo. I didn’t fancy having a guard driver with me where I was going so I commandeered the nearest vehicle, a pick-up truck with more rust than is on what’s left of the Forth Rail Bridge, and had another go at remembering how to drive. The last time Katharine almost bailed out. My technique didn’t seem to have got much better. I swerved out on to the main road and missed one of the city’s garbage trucks by the length of my forefinger – the one that’s short a couple of joints.

  I called Davie and asked how he was getting on.

  “Nothing so far,” he replied. “We’ve done the clinic, the foodstores and the admin block.”

  “Watch out for the peccaries,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m on my way to pick up Katharine.”

  “What are you driving?” he asked suspiciously. “More to the point, how are you driving?”

  “Very safely indeed.”

  “Oh, aye.”

  I signed off. The jokes were over. Now I had to drive ten miles out of the city in pitch darkness through numerous guard checkpoints. I hoped it was going to be worth it.

  The curfew was well under way and I ha
d enough trouble even navigating to my own flat.

  “About time,” Katharine said as she climbed in. “I’ve been bored stiff up there.”

  I headed for the junction. “Jesus!” Katharine put her hands out in time to stop her head hitting the windscreen.

  “Sorry. Bloody guard. They drive like lunatics.”

  “They’re not the only ones. Didn’t you see them, Quint?”

  I was leaning forward like a myopic pensioner. “The lights on this thing are about as much use as a guardian in a drinking competition.”

  Somehow we made it past the checkpoints that the guard have erected at every mile-post without any more near misses. Katharine called ahead on the mobile before we reached each one and we only had to flash our “ask no questions”. Apart from guard patrols, the roads were empty and completely unlit. It was like driving through a desert, although the temperature was a bit lower than the Gobi even on a bad night. Then we came out of a dip in the road about five miles out and were blinded by the lights of one of the city’s coal mines. They work round the clock like the slaughterhouses. I spent some time down one after I was demoted. Cutting sheep’s throats is probably only slightly more unpleasant, especially if being two thousand feet underground in a dripping, gas-ridden tunnel gets to you.

  We turned off and were enveloped by the night again. Now there were tall trees on both sides of us, bending over the road ahead like great predators about to pounce. The pick-up’s engine suddenly coughed, making both of us jump. You can be sure that the limited quantity of diesel the Council imports is the scrapings from the bottom of the oil companies’ tanks; they don’t give a shit about a city that has banned private cars.

  We came to a crossroads that was unmarked. Since citizens’ movements are carefully controlled and the drivers in the Transportation and Supply Directorates know where they’re going, the guardians have dispensed with signposts. It takes you back to Britain during the Second World War, except that people knew who the enemy was then. These days that isn’t so clear.