Impolitic Corpses Page 3

  Davie knocked on the door. It was opened by a youngish woman with thin brown hair hanging loosely on both sides of a pockmarked face.

  ‘Ann Melville?’ Davie said, holding up his ID.

  She scrutinized the embossed card and then looked at me. ‘Quint Dalrymple? What an honour!’ Irony dripped from her words. Yet another citizen holding a grievance. I thought of the Truth and Reconciliation Hearing again. So much for amnesty.

  ‘You don’t have to invite me in,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘I know how you and the big man here work. Besides, I’ve got nothing to hide. Just don’t expect me to make tea or open a bottle.’

  We followed her down a dim hallway and entered a living room that was lit up like a Christmas tree. The Council had banned Christmas so, like everything else that had been absent from Edinburgh for thirty years, it was now extremely popular.

  ‘It’s not even Advent,’ I observed.

  ‘Every day is Christmas Day in the new Scotland,’ Miss Melville said. This time the irony was restrained, but present all the same. Some people were already disappointed by the way the state was operating. Me among them, though as a practising sceptic I’d never had the greatest expectations.

  We weren’t invited to sit down. That suited Davie, who wasn’t keen on intimate interviewing.

  ‘Tell us what you saw, please,’ he said, pulling out a recording device.

  I was still using a notebook, in which I jotted down what had happened. After I’d got to five question marks, I raised a hand.

  ‘Miss Melville, I’m having trouble making sense of this.’

  The young woman gave me a disparaging look. ‘Too hard for you? Stick to making up stories, then.’ She angled her head to the bookshelf behind her. I saw copies of my books. ‘Those are called novelized memoirs, eh? But really they’re just novels, right? Made up, I mean.’

  ‘They’re whatever the reader wants to make of them,’ I said, reluctant to carry on the conversation about the genre I was experimenting with. ‘You say the aggressor was already in the entrance hall when you came in.’

  She raised her shoulders. ‘So?’

  ‘But that you didn’t notice him or her till you were halfway up the first flight of stairs?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ve seen the lighting. It’s remarkably bright. Is there somewhere the tree-fish could have been hiding? Is there a back door?’

  ‘You can’t get out that way. There’s been a sinkhole in the garden for a couple of months and the door’s blocked up.’

  I glanced at Davie, who nodded confirmation.

  ‘Maybe he was hiding behind the bikes,’ Ann Melville said. ‘Or in a corner. I don’t know.’ There were spots of red on her cheekbones.

  ‘But you did see the victim.’

  ‘Jack Nicol? He was bending over his bike, chaining it up. I said “hi” to him, even though he’s a piece of dung.’

  She didn’t like the guy who had nearly died – that was interesting.

  I kept at her. ‘If you were only a few steps up the stairs, why didn’t you run back to help?’

  ‘Are you mad?’ she said, voice shrill. ‘There was a gun on his belt, a big pistol. I’m no’ stupid.’

  ‘So you called for help?’

  ‘I … yes, I did.’

  Davie took a step towards the witness. ‘Nobody else heard anything. You didn’t contact ScotPol either.’

  ‘Aye, I did!’ Ann Melville’s eyes were bulging, as was a vein that ran down the middle of her forehead.

  ‘At five thirty-seven,’ said Davie. ‘Just over an hour after the assailant was seen getting into a Land Rover outside.’

  ‘Any photos?’ I asked.

  She shook her head, eyes down. ‘My phone’s rubbish, I never use the camera.’

  Davie frowned. ‘So you were frit and ran up here, leaving Jack Nicol to what was very nearly his death.’

  Ann Melville shrugged. ‘None of my business. Nicol’s lowlife; I hate his guts.’

  ‘Can you expand on your description of the tree-fish?’ I said. ‘Height?’

  ‘The top of the vertical branches would have been about six foot, I suppose. No horizontal ones. The fabric looked like bark and there were holes cut out for eyes, so it could have been anyone. Christ, it stank.’ She shuddered. ‘And the hands that were holding the rope had long, spiky fingers. Not five – only three.’

  I broke off from the sketch I was making. ‘What kind of footwear?’

  She stared at me. ‘I don’t … oh, I see what you mean. Well, the tail, it wasn’t wide, stuck out like a snake. I can’t remember seeing feet.’ She grinned mockingly. ‘Anyway, fish haven’t got feet.’

  I finished my sketch and showed it to her.

  Ann Melville’s eyes widened. ‘That’s exactly right. How did you know?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said to Davie. ‘I don’t think you need to keep a guard outside.’

  ‘What?’ said the woman. ‘I’m under threat here.’

  I held the sketch before her eyes. ‘Something you haven’t told us?’

  ‘I … well …’ Ann Melville’s bravado had disappeared. ‘That monster – it saw me. It’ll know I’m talking to you.’

  ‘So what?’ said Davie. ‘It’s not like you’ve identified him or her.’

  ‘It doesn’t know that.’

  ‘How could you have?’ I asked.

  She grabbed my arm. ‘Keep the guard, promise me!’

  I raised my shoulders. ‘If you can add to your statement …’

  ‘It … it spoke to me.’ Now she was shaking like a leaf. ‘High voice, slow, really creepy.’

  ‘Well?’ said Davie, after a pause. ‘What did it say?’

  ‘The … the end of the world’s coming for you … soon.’ She sat down hard on the sofa.

  We left the officer where she was.

  ‘Let’s see what you drew,’ Davie said, as we went downstairs. I handed him my notebook. ‘Very artistic. What is it?’

  ‘It’s a detail from The Temptation of St Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch.’

  ‘The guy who did hell and the demons?’ Art history had been a feature of Enlightenment learning, so he wasn’t completely out of his depth.

  I nodded.

  ‘And what was it doing here?’

  ‘Detective Leader, I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  In the street, we crossed to the other side and spoke briefly to the witness who had seen the Land Rover. He was old and doddery, the lenses of his glasses in serious need of a clean. He confirmed that the figure had been a tree-and-fish hybrid and that it had climbed into a Land Rover, but he hadn’t seen the driver, never mind noted the registration number. The City Guard used to run Land Rovers, but since they had been kitted out with the Korean four-by-fours still used by ScotPol in Edinburgh, the city was full of clapped-out old machines that had been sold on.

  ‘Your people are canvassing about the victim?’ I said, as we got back into the vehicle.

  ‘Aye, Jack Nicol’s got to be the centre of interest now. Why was he attacked by that thing?’

  ‘Have your people checked if there are any Bosch-themed shows in the festival?’

  ‘No,’ he said, turning the key in the ignition. ‘Yes. There aren’t.’

  ‘That would have been too easy.’

  ‘And there are no reports of similar in the ScotPol database.’ He pulled away into the gloom. ‘Where to now?’

  ‘The infirmary. Maybe our suspicious victim will have woken up.’

  I thought of Sophia and the kids. I should call. The fact that Sophia hadn’t rung showed how little she approved of what I was doing on a Saturday night.

  Then I remembered another detail – or rather a major point – about the tree-fish in the painting: it was carrying a swaddled infant.

  I rang Sophia immediately and confirmed that she and the kids were all right. Wee Heck wasn’t an infant, but the idea was close enough to the bone.

  It wouldn’t have
been the first time a case had turned out to be about me.

  I needed to puncture the Enlightenment-inflated sense of my own importance. In any case, a tree-fish wasn’t so bad. Bosch had come up with many more horrific creatures.

  So had Enlightenment Edinburgh. So too, I suspected, might the reconstituted state of Scotland.

  TWO

  The chill rain was horizontal by the time we got to the infirmary. The city’s main hospital was still in the Victorian buildings in Lauriston Place, though the new facility out in Little France was nearly ready. Just as well. After thirty years of Council spending restrictions, the old place was coming apart, and not just at the seams. There had been a battle there during the revolution; Sophia, who, as Medical Guardian, had refused to leave her patients, had been wounded.

  Davie and I ran across the courtyard, past a pair of brand-new ambulances. The money from the oil and gas reserves in the open sea beyond Cape Wrath in Sutherland was being allocated all over Scotland – hence the new hospital as well as the bright white body-mobiles.

  ‘Nearly blind,’ he said, sleeve over his eyes. ‘That rain’s like bullets made of ice.’

  ‘Mainstay of many a crap crime story, especially ones set in locked rooms.’

  ‘Aye, right.’ He went to find out where Jack Nicol was. ‘Second floor,’ he said, heading for the stairs.

  The lifts were slow. People not in the know stood hopefully at the doors. Although there were fewer evening clinics than there used to be, the medical staff still worked long hours to improve the health of Edinburgh folk. The Council had done what it could, but the city missed out on decades of progress in equipment and drugs. That was changing for the better.

  A nurse took us to a small room with two male police officers standing outside.

  ‘Visitors?’ Davie asked.

  ‘No one at all, sir,’ said the broader of the men, his accent local.

  ‘Either a saddo or a bad boy,’ said the other, in the guttural tones of the central belt.

  If it was the latter, none of his associates would show their faces, to avoid being linked to him. Then again, one of them – women included – might have been the aggressor. But why dress up as a creature from Bosch?

  The patient was awake, a neck brace restricting his movements. His eyes made up for that by darting all over the room. They didn’t stay on us for long.

  ‘Right, ya piece of dung Hibee,’ said Davie, leaning over him, ‘who wants you deid apart from me?’

  The young man had a shaved head with a football tattooed on it in the green and white of Hibernian. Davie’s heart belonged to that team’s deadly rivals, Heart of Midlothian. There was a Scottish Championship now and the Edinburgh teams were up against serious opposition. Football had been banned until the last years of the Council so a lot of fast-forward catching-up was having to be done, much to the amusement of the five Glasgow mega-teams.

  ‘Naebody,’ Nicol muttered, eyes down.

  ‘Did you see your attacker?’ I asked, with a smile. Soft ex-cop.

  He tried to shake his head and immediately regretted it. ‘Nuh. Didnae see nothin’.’

  ‘So you don’t know who it was?’ Davie roared into the patient’s right ear.

  ‘Nuh,’ the patient said, putting a hand to his ear. ‘Leave us alone.’

  I took out my notebook and found the sketch.

  Jack Nicol stared at it blankly, but I was pretty sure there was a flicker of recognition. ‘Whit the hell’s that?’

  ‘A tree-fish, obviously,’ I said.

  ‘Tae hell wi’ that.’ He shifted his eyes away.

  I nodded. ‘Hell is where it’s from, all right.’

  ‘I dinnae ken nothin’.’

  Davie was close to detonating, but he managed to stay within ScotPol guidelines for dealing with people under suspicion if they had been hospitalized. The shaved one’s lawyer was no doubt on his way, ready to make the most of his primary status as a victim.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Davie said. ‘But we’re looking into your professional activities, son. I don’t think you’ll be seeing your own bed for a while.’ He scowled.

  I watched him stomp over to the door and then went up to the bed. ‘Give me a name,’ I said. ‘I can help you.’

  Nicol laughed. ‘Quint fuckin’ Dalrymple, the Council’s toy boy. You’re no’ even a cop now.’

  ‘Which is why you can trust me more than the big man.’

  ‘Fuck ye.’

  I held up the sketch again. ‘You’ve seen this before, haven’t you? Where?’

  He closed his eyes.

  After about a minute, I turned away.

  Then, as I reached the door, the patient said three words that piqued my interest.

  ‘Theatre of Life.’

  The trip had been worth it.

  It was after ten when I got back to the flat. I tried to make as little noise as possible opening the door. Sophia often went to bed early with Heck. She wasn’t the only female in the place, though.

  Maisie, eleven in body but sixty in mind, stood in the hall, arms akimbo. ‘And where do you think you’ve been, Quilp?’ She called me after Dickens’s malevolent dwarf when she disapproved. Which was happening more and more.

  ‘Case,’ I said. ‘Interesting one. I’ll tell you about it, if you like.’

  ‘Spare me,’ she said, turning away. ‘You were supposed to be with us.’ The door of her bedroom closed behind her.

  Sophia appeared from the adjoining room, hair in disorder, rubbing her eyes. She peered at me dubiously, presumably having taken out her contact lenses. There had been no such thing in the Council’s Edinburgh. I hadn’t been as brave as her – the idea of something on my eyeballs made me squirm – so I used glasses, admittedly much higher quality than those issued by the Medical Directorate. And I had to pay for them.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Quint,’ Sophia said, wrapping her arms round herself, not that it was cold in the flat. ‘Heck was asking for you all evening. He cried himself to sleep.’

  I took a step forward, then stopped. Her expression didn’t invite greater proximity. I took in her lined face and the rings under her eyes. She was thinner than she used to be and the veins in her hands stood out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, hearing the inadequacy of the words. ‘Davie had … had a case he needed help with.’

  ‘Stop it, Quint!’ she said, her voice loud enough to wake the street, never mind Heck. We waited, but there was no crying. Sophia went into the kitchen and took a bottle of white wine from the fridge. ‘Just stop it.’ She poured herself a glass, hand shaking. ‘Davie doesn’t need your help – he knows what he’s doing by now.’ She gulped wine. ‘We’ve been over this a thousand times. Weekends are for family. No exceptions – unless you’re writing.’

  That had been a hard-won concession and it only gave me two hours each Saturday and Sunday, but, though I should have been, I wasn’t writing these days. Writer’s block in pyramid dimensions.

  I wasn’t going to make excuses. ‘I’ll take them out tomorrow,’ I said, moving towards the bottle.

  Sophia took a step back. ‘You’re bloody right you will. I have a job, remember? One that requires me to bone up on new research. I need time in the study too.’ She emptied her glass and brushed past me on the way to the bedroom.

  So much for family time, but I wasn’t brave enough to say that aloud.

  I poured wine into a glass with Frida Kahlo, Legend printed above an image of the Mexican artist’s face that emphasized her monobrow and moustache. Maisie was a big Frida fan. She was keen on her politics too. I’d had to escort her to several meetings of the Edinburgh branch of the Scottish Communist Party. They hadn’t done well in either the municipal or national elections. People were into individual liberty – too much so, I was beginning to think. Strangling people dressed up as monsters from Bosch?

  Which prompted me. I had a tattered volume about the artist that I’d found in one of the many second-hand bookshops that had spr
ung up after the Municipal Board cleared out old books from the city’s libraries. It had even found the funds to buy new ones, including mine, which were often returned with profanities scribbled over the deathful prose.

  Our study was a small windowless space connecting the sitting room with Heck’s bedroom. With Davie’s help, I’d put shelves on all four walls. They were almost full, with Sophia’s medical textbooks taking up just over one. My main hobby nowadays was building my library. For research purposes, of course. The Scottish Revenue (ScotRev – someone in the administration had a deep love of Scot as a prefix – ScotMad, perhaps) allowed me to claim the cost back as expenses, though getting receipts out of some of the dealers was difficult. My burgeoning collection of art books was in the tall shelf on the longer wall. The guardians had encouraged citizens to study fine art, but in typical fashion had restricted works by artists they did not approve of – no Pop Art (I wasn’t rushing to change that), ancient Roman statuary (too derivative of the Greek) or religious painting – Bosch had been allowed, though not much taught, because his work was deemed to be sufficiently questioning about religious belief. Although religion itself hadn’t been banned, the regime was atheist and there were only a few surviving members of the Church of Scotland. In the new Scotland, there was freedom of religion, but that hadn’t exactly led to a stampede back to the churches, many of which had been turned into night-clubs and carpet shops. I could remember the latter from when I was a kid – some things always come back.

  Overtly religious art I could take or leave, but the creations of the masters were impossible to ignore. I had books on Michelangelo, Leonardo, El Greco and so on. But I found artists who depicted the essence of men and women more interesting – the elder Brueghel, for one, Rembrandt and van Gogh for two more. Hieronymus Bosch fell between the sacred and profane. His religious figures were often surrounded by ordinary people engaging their baser instincts.

  This was the case with the Lisbon triptych of The Temptation of St Anthony. St Anthony himself is located in the centre of the middle panel, but he is almost a minor player, surrounded by monsters and demons in numerous bestial forms. The tree-fish is to the right, carrying a baby in swaddling clothes and sitting on a red robe on the back of a giant rat – presumably not, in pre-Sherlock Holmes days, from Sumatra. In the background a village burns and the sky is filled by hybrid beasts and a strange armoured ship. If you didn’t know that St Anthony eventually prevailed, you wouldn’t give much for his chances.