Body Politic Read online

  Yellowlees was finding the papers on his desk a lot more interesting than my face. Finally he raised his eyes. “I remember the case,” he said hoarsely. “Bullet wound to the head.”

  I heard the door open behind me. It was Hamilton.

  Yellowlees looked both relieved and anxious. “Lewis was asking me about it this morning.” His gaze dropped again. “Since Margaret . . . died, everything’s fallen apart here.” He shook his head at me helplessly. “I can’t locate the file.”

  He was treating my mother so I gave him one last opportunity to come clean. It was obvious that the file contained something that he didn’t want me to know. “Are you quite sure about that, guardian? There could be serious consequences.”

  No reaction. Well, I tried. The medical guardian would have to take his chances. I filled them in on what I found out at the crematorium. “It looks like the murderer is working his way through a list of victims. They all had some connection with the dead guardsman except the Greek in the Indie – and I suspect the killer must have seen him with one of the others.”

  “But what’s the motive?” asked Hamilton. “If he’s got a list, he must have a reason for attacking these people.”

  “I’m not clear about that yet.” I glanced at Yellowlees. “But I can hazard a guess at who’s next on the list.”

  I left them to think about that. If the medical guardian wouldn’t talk, maybe Billy’s Greek contact would.

  Chapter Eighteen

  INTERROGATING NIKOS PAPAZOGLOU turned out to be as productive as asking an auxiliary to sing “God Save the Queen”. The Greek stared sullenly at the wall in the cell, mumbling over and over again, “I want to call the consulate,” in heavily accented English. Eventually I lost my cool.

  “All right,” I shouted. “I’ll let you talk to your people.” I slapped down in front of him the copies Katharine had taken of the pages Billy passed him in the museum. “After you tell me what this is all about and why you gave Heriot 07 that case with two hundred and seventy-five million drachmae.”

  When he saw the papers, the young man gave an involuntary start and his eyes opened wide. “How did you—?” He broke off and went back to stonewalling. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister.”

  I leaned over and glared at his sallow face. “You know what happened to Andreas Roussos, don’t you?” I said, my voice not much more than a whisper. “You know that someone took his eye out? Without an anaesthetic. As I see it, you’ve got two choices. Either you tell me what these pages mean and I let you out of here in five minutes . . .” I paused and moved in closer to him. “Or I print in the newspaper that you had links with Roussos and the killer comes after you.” I sat back and smiled. “I wonder which organ he’ll go for this time.”

  Papazoglou’s chin quivered and his tongue appeared between dry lips. Then he raised his hand so quickly that the guardsman at the door jumped forward with his truncheon raised.

  “Okay, okay,” the Greek jabbered, cowering. “You guarantee I face no charges?”

  “Sure,” I lied.

  He raised his hand very slowly, eyes fixed on the auxiliary, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “All right. These papers are—”

  There was a clang as the bolt was drawn back and the door pulled open. Hamilton came in, followed by a man with a heavy moustache whom I’d been hoping I wouldn’t see that day.

  “I’m sorry, Dalrymple. Mr Palamas from the Greek consulate insisted on being brought down.”

  The Greek I’d seen on the Calton Hill with Billy ignored me, standing behind Papazoglou and addressing his lecture to the public order guardian.

  “Under Edinburgh law, the prisoner is entitled to have a representative of his country present at all interviews. I am concerned that we were not officially informed that this” – he looked at me like I was an Untouchable – “this interrogation was taking place.”

  Hamilton opened his arms in a gesture of hopelessness. “I apologise on behalf of the Council for this lapse.”

  I stared at him in disgust, my arms folded tightly to stop myself offering violence to a guardian.

  Palamas nodded brusquely. “What are the charges, please?”

  Hamilton glanced at me.

  I shrugged; now that Palamas was pulling strings, Papazoglou would clam up. There was no point in holding him.

  “Em, no charges will be pressed,” the guardian said lamely. “Guardsman, escort these gentlemen to the esplanade.”

  I watched as Papazoglou left, relief etched into his face like acid. “Couldn’t you have stalled him for a bit longer? I almost got what I wanted.”

  Hamilton was examining his feet. “He got on to the deputy senior guardian. What could we do? You know how important Greek business is to the city.”

  I wished I knew a lot more about that particular matter. I could either tell Hamilton that I’d found out about the missing young people and that I suspected Patsy Cameron of being involved in some horrendous scam with Billy, or I could hit Billy’s flat. The latter would be much less hassle.

  “How did Palamas know we had Papazoglou?” I asked on my way out.

  “Every Greek at the race meeting saw him being arrested by the gate.” Hamilton sighed. “At the rate you’re going, there won’t be any tourist trade left in the city.”

  I parked the Transit outside Billy’s flat and got the guardswoman who’d been sent down after he was injured to let me in. The hallway was cool and the smell of floor polish filled my nostrils as I ran up the marble staircase.

  Inside the flat there was dead silence. I stood motionless for a few moments, breathing in deeply and listening. I suddenly had a premonition that someone was about to appear, someone who didn’t care too much about my health. I could have called the sentry up but instead I ran from room to room like a child certain that a monster was lurking. There was no one, of course. I’d been living on my nerves too much recently. Tearing the place apart would be good therapy.

  For a senior auxiliary sworn to live according to the Council’s ascetic standards, Billy had accumulated an amazing collection of luxury goods. The wardrobes in his bedroom were stuffed with Italian suits and shoes, silk shirts and ties, a couple of leather jackets – even a fur coat which the label showed to have originated from independent Siberia. Billy must have made a business trip there. It wasn’t the greed that pissed me off, it was the waste. He could get away with dressing up in flash suits, but not even Billy would venture out wearing a fur coat in Edinburgh. Mind you, in winter most buildings are cold enough to warrant one.

  The kitchen was insanely overstocked. There was a full range of French saucepans that would have been worth a small fortune in that country before the Moslem fundamentalists reduced it to a collection of bankrupt city-states. The cupboards were full of tinned foods that are never available in the city’s shops: tomatoes, olives, kidney beans, stuffed vine leaves. I even found the components of a pasta machine. I can’t remember the last time I ate spaghetti.

  After an hour I began to run out of steam. The only documents I’d found were from standard Finance Directorate files and there was no sign of any foreign exchange. I began to suspect that Billy had organised a hiding-place. I squatted down on the carpet in the middle of the sitting room and looked dispiritedly at the heap of his personal possessions that I’d piled up.

  “Shit, Billy,” I muttered. “What the hell have you done with it all?” Pins and needles started to attack my feet. I got up and went over to the table where he kept the first edition of Hume’s treatise. The first creak of the uneven floorboards made no impression on me. Then I shifted my weight to the other foot and the noise came again, this time louder. Eureka.

  I ran to the wall. Although the carpet looked like it had been secured with tacks, it came up easily when I stuck my fingers between it and the skirting board. I quickly moved the furniture aside – a couple of armchairs, a coffee table, an escritoire and a Georgian display cabinet that almost broke my back – and rolled
up the heavy floor covering. Where the small table stood, there was a two-foot square cut in the underlay. I lifted it and the boards beneath it, thinking how Billy must have been laughing to himself at the idea of me innocently standing there when he showed me the book. And struck gold. Literally.

  The hole contained six bars of that metal, over twenty thousand US dollars and so many wads of Greek drachmae that I didn’t waste time counting them. There was also a thick folder of statements from a bank in Berne, a file of papers similar to the one Billy had passed to Papazoglou and, right at the bottom, the confirmation I needed to connect the deputy finance guardian both to Yellowlees and to Patsy Cameron. What was Billy doing with a copy of a research report entitled “Towards the Effective Treatment of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus”? Was he bankrolling the medical guardian’s research? Or blackmailing him, perhaps?

  And what was he doing with Prostitution Service Department appraisals of ten male and female citizens? Their names had been blacked out and replaced with letter and number references which tallied with ten of those on the headless photographs in Roussos’s hotel room. The appraisals included physical and mental profiles and aptitude ratings for specific sexual services. They were all initialled PC. Things were falling into place at last.

  My mobile buzzed. I had a job finding it under the carpet at the edge of the room.

  “Quint, Davie. Subject is leaving the infirmary. Do I follow?”

  “Bloody right you do.” I put Davie in charge of Billy’s security so that he could also keep track of Yellowlees. “What about Heriot 07? Has he come round yet?”

  “Negative. I’ve got three guards in his room and another half-dozen in the corridor outside. That do you?”

  “Yes. Let me know where the subject’s headed. And Davie?”

  “Aye?”

  “Don’t lose him. The killer’s probably after him.”

  “Christ.”

  “Exactly.” I signed off and looked down at the money and documents around the hole in the floor. Suddenly I had a flash of the gaping wounds the murderer had cut in the bodies of his victims. How did what he was doing fit in with Yellowlees and the ENT Man’s brother? How did it fit in with Billy and Patsy? There was something missing from the equation and I couldn’t work out what it was.

  I ran down the stairs, this time impervious to the smell of polish. Something much ranker had filled my nostrils in Billy’s flat and I was sure it was about to get worse.

  The cloud had thickened over the city and it began to drizzle as I drove towards the castle. I reckoned it was time to come clean with Hamilton. There was too much going on for me to handle without more back-up. Even if there were some Council members who were bent, it wasn’t likely that Hamilton was one of them.

  I didn’t get the chance to find out. He came on the mobile when I was halfway up the Mound.

  “Dalrymple, that female citizen you’ve got working for you . . .”

  “Katharine Kirkwood?” I felt my stomach somersault. “What’s happened to her?”

  “A tourist found her lying unconscious in Reid’s Close off the Canongate.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She’s still there. An ambulance is on its way.”

  I accelerated out of the corner at the Finance Directorate and drove down towards the ruins of Holyrood Palace. I left the Transit on the pavement behind the ambulance. A guardsman stepped forward, then stopped when he saw my authorisation. A couple of his colleagues were talking to a male tourist who looked shocked. I ran into the narrow close. The high walls were dark grey, the flagstones wet from the drizzle. Round a corner I found the medics. They were bent over a figure in a light blue raincoat. A woollen hat lay on the ground between me and them.

  I went closer. “How is she?”

  The more senior of the two male medics turned to me. “Coming round. She took a heavy blow to the back of the head.”

  “Quint?” Katharine’s voice was weak. “Is that you, Quint?”

  “What happened?”

  “She . . . someone was behind me suddenly . . . hit me . . . I didn’t see . . .”

  The medic stood up. “She should be X-rayed. She’s probably concussed.”

  I knelt down and took her hand. Her eyes seemed unfocused. “Katharine, you’d better go to the infirmary. They think . . .”

  “No!” she said, her voice suddenly back to normal. “I’m staying with you. I was on to something. She must have seen me . . .”

  I looked round helplessly at the medics. “Keep an eye on her for a moment.”

  I went back down the close and found Hamilton questioning the tourist. “Did he see anything?” I asked.

  The man had a Korean flag on his baseball cap, jacket and shoulder bag. His English appeared to be Korean too.

  “From what we can understand,” said the guardian, “he was trying to find his way back to his hotel from the palace.”

  “Bit of an indirect route,” I said dubiously.

  Hamilton shrugged. “He’s got a copy of Jekyll and Hyde in his bag. Maybe he was in search of local colour.”

  “And he found Katharine in there?”

  There was another burst of incomprehensible English from the tourist, accompanied by what seemed to be positive head movements.

  “We’ll take that as a yes, shall we?” I turned to the Korean. “Did you see anyone else? Was anyone coming out when you went in?”

  More yabbering, but the gestures looked negative. I took Hamilton aside. “Get your people to find an interpreter before they take a statement from him. I don’t think he’s involved in this, but if we stall we can keep an eye on him.”

  Hamilton looked confused. “Not involved in what? What exactly was the woman—”

  He broke off as Katharine came staggering from the close, her face white and her right arm against the wall.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “You’re not supposed to be walking about.”

  She pushed one of the medics away. “I told you, Quint. I’m staying with you till we catch her.”

  “Catch who?” the guardian demanded. “What’s going on here, Dalrymple?”

  I took a deep breath. Now was the time to tell him about Patsy. So I did. I was a bit vague about the connection with the missing young people, but that didn’t seem to bother Hamilton. A tight smile began to show on his face as I spoke.

  “So the controller of Prostitution Services has been up to no good,” he said when I finished. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I never approved of her promotion to senior auxiliary rank.”

  You sanctimonious old bastard, I thought. Where would the Council be without the income from Patsy’s department?

  “You didn’t see her?” he asked Katharine.

  She shook her head. “But obviously she saw me. I followed her from outside her office to a café on the Royal Mile. She sat there for over an hour, then went into some shops. I had that woollen hat pulled down low over my forehead, but she must still have recognised me. Led me down here and hid in one of the doorways and hit me from behind, the bitch.”

  “She may have had help,” I said. “You’re lucky you weren’t injured more seriously.”

  Hamilton was desperate to get involved. “Shall I instruct all guard units and barracks to look out for the controller?”

  I raised my hand. “Wait a minute. I need to think.” I walked back into the dank close, stood in a granite corner and let the stream of images bombard me. The Bearskin, Patsy’s office, the Greek’s hotel room where I’d found the headless photographs, the hiding-place in Billy’s flat with the Prostitution Department appraisals. All those places had links with Patsy. But there was something else, something relevant that I couldn’t quite grasp. I put my hands against the damp stone and tried to hatch the idea that had begun to torment me. There wasn’t much time. Even if Patsy hadn’t recognised Katharine until she was knocked unconscious, she’d seen her close up here. She knew of my interest in Katharine and it would be clear that I was closing
in on her. So where would she go? None of the obvious places, I was sure of that. Patsy had been a smart operator before she joined the Enlightenment and I knew she hadn’t forgotten any of her old tricks. So where had she gone? I ran my mind back over the places: the Bearskin, her office – Christ, her office. Suddenly I saw Simpson 134, the dead nurse, the time she came out of the building where Patsy worked. Simpson 134. She was involved with Billy, she’d met him. That was it. I knew where Patsy was.

  “Let’s go,” I said, running back out to the pavement. “To Jamaica Street Lane North.”

  Katharine came with me to the Transit. As I drove off, Hamilton’s guard vehicle in my rearview mirror, I thought of the night I’d hidden behind the refuse bin and waited for Billy to reappear from the lane. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would have a meeting out of doors in the dark. He had a hideaway down the lane and I was positive that’s where Patsy had gone. I was also positive that we wouldn’t find her there alone.

  I stopped on India Street, near the bar I’d seen Billy go into that night after he met Simpson 134.

  “What’s the location?” Hamilton asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, watching his eyebrows jump. I wasn’t sure how to go about identifying the building where Patsy was either. If the people I suspected were there too, using the City Guard’s stormtrooper methods mightn’t be a good idea.

  “Quint?” Katharine said. “What if I walk down the street? That would probably bring Patsy out.”

  “More likely get you killed.” I thought about it. “On the other hand . . .”

  “Where are you going, Dalrymple?” Hamilton shouted as I reached the corner.

  “To talk to Patsy.” I smiled at Katharine. “Right idea, wrong person to carry it out. Patsy and I used to be friends.” I turned to Hamilton. “Put a roadblock at the other end of the lane. If I don’t contact you within five minutes, send in the cavalry.”

  “Quint . . .”

  I faced the front. “Stay here, Katharine.”