The Bone Yard Read online

  In the distance I heard the high-pitched wail of sirens. It wouldn’t be long before I had to face Roddie close up.

  Hamilton came in looking pale, a team of people in white plastic overalls at his heels. “Good God Almighty, Dalrymple, what have you found?” He peered over my shoulder into the bedroom and flinched. The public order guardian never did like dead bodies.

  I filled him in about Roddie’s visit and request for help, though I kept quiet about the hooded man for the time being. Scene-of-crime personnel were already starting to take photos and sketch the room layouts; they seemed to have memorised the manual I wrote when I was in the directorate.

  The medical guardian turned up, also in white plastic. “I’m impressed, citizen,” she said with a tight-lipped smile. “You even work on city holidays.”

  “You don’t mind handling this personally, do you?” I asked. “It’s the first murder for—”

  “I know my job,” she said tersely, then handed me some overalls. “Who’s in charge on the public order side?”

  “I’m taking the case.” I glanced at Hamilton, who looked a bit dubious. “I know I found the body, but that doesn’t disqualify me.” If Hamilton knew how fired up I was to catch Roddie’s killer, he’d have been even more dubious about letting me run the investigation, but I wasn’t planning on telling him about the oath I’d sworn.

  Davie came in, a grim look on his face. I beckoned to him to come over. “I’ll need Hume 253 to work on this with me, guardian.”

  “Very well, Dalrymple.” In the old days Hamilton wouldn’t have let me lay down the law – that was his party piece. Now he’s too busy protecting himself from the iron boyscouts, who were well pissed off when he refused to resign with most of my mother’s gang.

  I got Davie to oversee the scene-of-crime squad and told him to look out for any sign of illicit goods. Then, when the photographers finished with the longer-range shots, the medical guardian led me into the bedroom. We had to step around some large patches of partially dried blood on the worn carpet. Standing by the bed, we looked down at the mangled upper torso; a heavily stained sheet lay over the lower part of Roddie’s body. His chest and arms were bare, splashed with blood from the gaping wound in his throat. The medical guardian, known to citizens who were prepared to take a chance as the Ice Queen because of her silver-blonde hair, was making preliminary observations into a small tape-recorder. The trachea had been ruptured and over two square inches of skin and cartilage torn out.

  The guardian was bent over the wound, a magnifying glass in her hand. “The tears in the tissue are uneven,” she said, standing up slowly. “It looks like a bite.”

  That was the way it struck me too. “A human bite?” I asked, pretty sure what the answer would be.

  The Ice Queen nodded. “I think so. I can’t see any signs of the deep laceration you get with bites from dogs and other animals with long canines.”

  “Any teeth marks we can match up with dental records?”

  She was bending over the body again. “It’s a terrible mess, citizen. We might be lucky.”

  “Look.” I pointed to the swollen skin on Roddie’s wrists. “He was tied down.” Whatever was used, the killer had taken it with him. The thick marking suggested rope.

  “That would have helped the assailant to bite his victim, but you’d still expect him to have been writhing around. I wonder if he was knocked out.” The guardian examined Roddie’s head. “No sign of any blows here.”

  I had a sudden flash of the hooded man running down the street. The neighbour said he’d seen a knife. I looked at the bloody sheet over the lower half of the corpse. Christ. What were we about to find underneath it?

  The Ice Queen glanced across at me. It seemed she was on the same wavelength. “Ready?” she said in a low voice, her fingers on the edge of the sheet.

  “Go.”

  Carefully she lifted Roddie’s shroud. I forced myself to take a deep breath, blinked my eyes once and focused on his lower abdomen.

  “Oh, no.” Even the medical guardian, highly qualified stomach cancer specialist and fully paid-up member of the ultra hard-hearted wing of the iron boyscouts, was having trouble with this vision of horror. “I can’t believe someone could do this to one of his fellow human beings.”

  I parted company with her there. I’d come across several vicious bastards who happily sliced open their fellow human beings. But I saw her point. This was gross even by their standards. Where Roddie’s genitals should have been there was nothing except a great hole stretching right up into the groin.

  “The penis and scrotum are missing,” the guardian said.

  I had a look under the bed. Nothing.

  “It seems the killer took them when he or she left.”

  The Ice Queen’s glare lived up to her nickname. “Citizen, are you seriously suggesting that a woman carried out this atrocity?”

  “We’re hardly in a position to rule anything out so far.” But I didn’t want to fight with her. “Forget that for now.”

  She’d already done so. Her head was over the wound. “Citizen,” she said, her voice registering surprise. “There’s something inside here.”

  “What is it?”

  “It looks like the edge of a clear plastic bag.”

  I bent down and caught a glimpse of it. “Get it out,” I said. She hesitated. “Get it out,” I repeated impatiently.

  She shook her head. “No. I want to wait till we get him on the slab. Pulling it out now might compromise other traces.”

  She was right there. I looked up at Roddie’s face, something I’d been avoiding doing much of so far. The eyes were bulging and his lips were drawn back from his teeth. There was blood on the teeth. I had a piercing flashback to Caro dying on the dirty floor in the barn on Soutra, her foot jerking spasmodically.

  “Oh, Christ,” I muttered under my breath. “How come nobody heard him screaming?” I looked over at her. “Guardian, we’re going to have to prise his mouth open. I think his tongue’s been taken too.”

  She nodded slowly. “That’ll have to wait for the mortuary too. I estimate he’s been dead for at least nine hours. Rigor mortis is well advanced.”

  I thought of how I’d almost gone to see Roddie when I left the reception, then spent the early hours listening to Robert Johnson and shivering under a blanket. Not for the first time I felt pitifully inadequate.

  Davie shook his head slowly as the body was removed by Medical Directorate personnel.

  “Jesus, Quint, who did that to him? Do you think the hooded—”

  I raised a finger to my lips and motioned in the direction of Hamilton. “Keep him to yourself till we finish up in here.”

  He nodded. “Right you are.” He looked round at the auxiliaries who were dusting for fingerprints and itemising what was on the floor. Some of them had moved into the bedroom now. “What do you reckon went on in here last night?”

  The public order guardian came over to us, his face greyer than the guard tunic he often wore instead of his guardian-issue tweed jacket.

  “Well,” I said. “For what it’s worth, we’re not just dealing with a drunken argument that got out of control. I think the victim was tortured because the murderer wanted to know where something was – something that was valuable enough to kill for. There’s no way of telling at this stage whether he found what he was looking for.”

  “Is there a sexual slant to it as well?” Hamilton asked.

  “Could be, in a seriously perverted way.” I shook my head slowly. “I’m not sure though. It’s all a bit contrived. We’ll have to wait and see what’s been put inside the body.”

  Hamilton gave an involuntary shiver. “I’ve never heard of a plastic bag being secreted inside a murder victim before.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I gather you think the killer cut the tongue out as well,” the guardian said, avoiding my eyes.

  I nodded. “At first I thought it was to keep him quiet, but there would still have been
some noise. We’ll probably find out from the neighbours that there was music playing.” One of the Supply Directorate’s standard-issue cassette players was lying smashed on the floor.

  “Do you think the victim knew the killer?” Hamilton asked.

  I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. What else have we got? The scratches round the lock suggest that whoever put the key in had a pretty unsteady hand.”

  “Drunk? Shaking?” Davie suggested.

  “Maybe the latter. Maybe the victim was being threatened at the time.”

  There was some shouting outside the door. A guardsman stuck his head round.

  “Neighbour, guardian,” he said. These days auxiliaries often speak like words are rationed. Why not? Everything else in the city is.

  I remembered the old man Roddie mentioned. “Let him in, guardsman.”

  A small figure almost ran in, slewing to a halt in front of us.

  “It was Roddie, wasn’t it?” he demanded desperately. “It was Roddie they carried out.”

  “You’re Jimmie, aren’t you?” I looked at the short, stocky man in front of me. He was bald on top, but he made up for that with the largest pair of eyebrows I’d ever seen. It was like Nietzsche’s moustache had acquired a twin and migrated.

  “Aye,” he said, peering at Hamilton and Davie with the mixture of fear and loathing affected by most ordinary citizens. “Jimmie Semple.”

  I put my hand on his arm and led him back towards the door. “Why don’t we talk in your place?” I glanced over my shoulder in an futile attempt to pacify the guardian. “I’ll be back soon.” It was obvious to me that the old man would clam up like a 1990s government minister in front of a parliamentary committee unless I got him away from anyone in the guard. Hamilton still fondly imagined that citizens would do anything an auxiliary told them.

  “Who are you, son?” Jimmie Semple said as he took me into his flat on the ground floor. “You don’t exactly have the look of one of them bastards.”

  “Quint’s the name. Quint Dalrymple.”

  The old man sat down in his armchair at the window. “Oh, aye, I remember you. You were the one who caught that killer a couple of years back.” He shook his head. “Something like this has been waiting to happen ever since the fucking boyscouts turned the screw.” Then he caught and held my gaze. “What’s happened to Roddie, citizen?”

  “Call me Quint.” I didn’t look away, though I’d have liked to. “You were right upstairs, Jimmie. It was him they took away.”

  “That bastard in the hood got him. I knew he would. I told Roddie to be careful, but he didnae listen.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, sitting opposite him and leaning forward. “He did listen to you. He came to me for help.”

  “Did he tell you about the crazy guy with the knife?” the old man asked.

  I nodded.

  He swore under his breath, spittle landing on the carpet by the toe of my boot. “So congratulations on a job well done, ya shite.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say for a bit. “Look,” I said eventually, “I liked the lad. He only came to me yesterday afternoon. It was when I came round today to follow up on his problem that I found him.”

  Jimmie Semple looked back at me, his expression softening. “So you didn’t think he was just wasting your time?”

  I shook my head.

  “Aye, well, I’m sorry if I was a bit . . .”

  “Forget it. Will you help me find the man in the hood?”

  His eyes were wide, bloodshot, under the dense growth of his brows. “Aye, son, of course. But what can I do?”

  “Tell me everything you saw and heard. Last night and the night Roddie was chased down the street.”

  He told me about the hooded man first, but there wasn’t much to it. He hadn’t seen a lot more than Roddie, confirming only that the attacker was tall and solidly built and that the face had been obscured by the hood. He wasn’t sure about the colour of the coat either – another triumph for the Council’s enlightened policy on streetlamp brightness. He didn’t even have much to say about the knife. It might have been a hunting blade, or even a carving knife. Christ. A blood-freezing image of the Ear, Nose and Throat Man came up before me like a spirit from the underworld: he used long knives to butcher his victims as well as to take off the end of my right forefinger. But he was long dead and buried, of that I was certain.

  “What about last night?” I asked. “Did you see Roddie?”

  “Aye, he came by on his way out.” The old man glanced over at the dusty clock on his mantelpiece. “Must have been about eight o’clock. He was on his way out to meet his pals for Hogmanay.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Och, he was fine. He wasnae bothered about that lunatic.” Jimmie brought his hand down hard on his knee. “He should have been though.”

  “He mentioned a girlfriend.”

  “Aye. Good-looking lassie. I don’t know her name. I only saw her from the window a couple of times.”

  “Jimmie, did you hear Roddie come back last night? Did you hear anything at all from his flat?”

  He shook his head and looked at me with an expression of infinite sadness. “No, son, I didnae. I wish I had. I had a half-bottle of whisky I’d been saving all year, you see. I was dead to the world long before midnight.” He gazed across at me, a sheen on his eyes. “How did Roddie die?”

  I mumbled some bullshit about the case being subject to Public Order Directorate security regulations and left him to the view from his window.

  He was better off not knowing what happened to his friend upstairs. Roddie would be on the mortuary table by now, the medical guardian waiting for me before she started the post-mortem. I wished I was on another planet. Preferably one on which I was the only human being.

  Chapter Four

  I left Davie in Drummond Street taking statements from the rest of Roddie’s neighbours. Hamilton dismissed the guardswoman who was behind the wheel of his maroon Land-Rover and drove towards the infirmary. It was mid-afternoon by now, the sun already low in the western sky and the shadows lengthening in the city. The air was even colder than it had been, making the breath of the people unfortunate enough to be out on foot plume around their heads like the ink squirted by a nervous octopus.

  “What kind of monster would do that, Dalrymple?” The guardian glanced at me. “Don’t tell me you think it’s an auxiliary.” Two years ago he’d never come to terms with my idea that the killer was one of the city’s servants. I had the feeling he was less sure about the rank below his these days. Then again, he didn’t think much of his fellow guardians now either.

  “I haven’t a clue, Lewis. It’s too early to say,” I said. “You haven’t heard any reports of a hooded man in the city centre, have you?” I tried to make the question sound nonchalant.

  He looked blank and shook his head.

  I told him what Roddie and Jimmie Semple had seen.

  “It isn’t much to go on, is it?” he said morosely.

  “It might be all we get.” I looked out the side window as we passed the Potterrow Entertainment Club. It was once a famously shitty student union, but ten years ago the Tourism Directorate converted it into an electronic games centre. No Edinburgh citizens are allowed in, of course. The building’s concrete walls are heavily stained with the soot that has built up since coal was reintroduced as the main heating fuel; the nuclear power station at Torness was shut down soon after the Englightenment came to power. A gaggle of Filipinos stood around outside the entrance stamping their feet and waving their arms in the cold. The amount of tartan knitwear they had on should have kept them warm. Maybe the quality of wool isn’t as high as the Marketing Department claims.

  “I don’t think I’ll bother with the post-mortem, Dalrymple. I’ve got some paperwork to catch up with.” Hamilton had always been squeamish during autopsies. He used to attend them just to keep an eye on me, but apparently he’d got beyond that stage. Progress indeed. Then he spoilt it a
ll. “You can manage on your own, can’t you?”

  “What do you think?” I said sarcastically. That was always the problem with the first generation of guardians: they treated everyone like primary school kids.

  “All right, all right,” Hamilton said wearily. “Obviously you’ll need to attend the Council meeting tonight.”

  “Obviously.” I relented a bit. “I’ll give you a call beforehand and let you know what we find.”

  He pulled up and let me off outside the infirmary’s grey-black granite façade. It seemed like years since I’d walked past it at midday on my way to Roddie’s. Sometimes I wish I’d found another line of work. But, like the Labour Directorate says, “Every citizen has a talent that the city needs.” Every citizen except the bastard who did for Roddie Aitken.

  I found the Ice Queen in the mortuary antechamber, fully kitted up and ready to go. She gave me a brief nod, then handed me a set of protective clothing. Even in layers of green medical gear she looked pretty amazing, her figure firm and her complexion smooth. I made sure she didn’t see the way I was looking at her. You don’t want to play that kind of game with guardians, especially not guardians who can handle a scalpel.

  “All right, citizen,” she said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  I usually try not to get too affected by what’s laid out on the mortuary table. Otherwise I’d keep away like Hamilton. But this time was different. I’d seen Roddie Aitken alive less then twenty-four hours earlier. He’d been sitting on my sofa talking in his boyish voice without much concern about the strange person who was following him. Watching the medical guardian and her assistants going about the normal procedures – removing the plastic bags over feet and hands, scraping fingernails, plucking sample hairs – made me feel seriously uncomfortable. From the bottom of the table I could clearly see the corner of the plastic bag that had been pushed into the wound in the groin. But the guardian wasn’t to be hurried. She was examining the torn skin on the neck.