The Bone Yard Read online

  “I’ll cut this whole area away now,” she said. “It looks like there’s at least one reasonable impression of bite marks.”

  “Good,” I said without much enthusiasm. “Now all we can hope is that the killer visited a dentist in the city.” The problem was that state-funded dental practices more or less died out in the years before independence and there were plenty of people growing up then who couldn’t afford treatment. Even though the Council set up free dental care for all Edinburgh citizens not long after it came to power, a lot of them steer clear of the surgeries. The fact that the Medical Directorate spends as little as it can on pain-relieving drugs may have something to do with that.

  “What do you reckon was the cause of death?” I asked. No harm in hurrying the Ice Queen along.

  Her head was over Roddie’s chest. “Still too early to say. Possibly heart failure brought about by the shock of what was done to him.” She pointed at the deep cuts in the flesh of the upper thighs as well as at the gaping hole.

  The senior pathologist who was assisting her nodded vigorously in agreement. I got the feeling that he would rather have gone for a walk in the badlands beyond the city border than contradict his superior.

  The door opened and a thin figure wearing a green gown over a guard tunic entered. One glance at the hands which almost immediately started rubbing together was enough for me to identify Hamilton’s number two, Machiavelli. He bowed his head punctiliously at the medical guardian, who completely ignored him, then at the lower-ranked auxiliaries in the room. They had to acknowledge him as they couldn’t risk showing what they really thought of him. Apparently I’d recently turned into the invisible man. No way was he getting away with that.

  “What are you doing here, Raeburn 03?” I asked in a loud voice. “On work experience?”

  His body stiffened. “I could ask you the same question, citizen,” he said after he’d run his eyes over the body in front of him.

  I didn’t like the way he was looking at Roddie. “Presumably you haven’t spoken to your boss recently,” I said. Mentioning an auxiliary’s senior officer is the best way to make him flinch. Machiavelli flinched. “I’m in charge of this case,” I continued. He didn’t look at all pleased at that piece of news. Maybe he’d thought this would be an opportunity to make a different kind of name for himself in the directorate – Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Bucket instead of the Renaissance schemer.

  The medical guardian had moved down to the middle of the table. She extended the incision she’d already made in the upper part of Roddie’s abdomen to the point where the wound began. I glanced at Machiavelli and was surprised to see that he looked a lot less queasy than his boss used to when the dissecting knife went in. His eyes were fixed firmly on the Ice Queen’s rubber-sheathed fingers. She parted the skin, examined the area, took some samples and finally laid hold on what had been rammed in to the cavity.

  “There you are, citizen.” The guardian held up the plastic bag. It was about six inches square, covered in blood and dotted with bits of internal debris. Something I couldn’t make out was weighing down one corner.

  “What is that?” Raeburn 03 asked in a strangled voice. Maybe what he’d been watching was getting to him after all.

  I let the photographer do her work, then took the bag from the guardian. On the scrubbed surround of a sink I ran a finger between the sealed opening – it was one of those bags that are used for frozen food and the like. Machiavelli was at my shoulder.

  I turned the bag up and let its contents slide out.

  “What on earth . . .” Hamilton’s deputy stretched his hand out.

  I grabbed his wrist and squeezed hard. “Excuse me, Raeburn 03. You’re on my territory.”

  He gave me a glare that Medusa would have been proud of then stepped back a few inches.

  I concentrated on the find. It was a cassette tape, made of clear plastic with the brown tape visible inside. There were no paper stickers on the outside and no writing to identify what had been recorded on it. I was, however, willing to bet my collection of Johnny Guitar Watson tapes that something had been recorded on the cassette. It looked to me like the killer was playing a very nasty game indeed.

  “It’s not a standard-issue cassette,” Machiavelli put in. “There’s no Supply Directorate serial number on it.”

  He was right. Citizens are only allowed to listen to music approved by the Heritage Directorate, which they can obtain free from the city libraries.

  I looked at the cassette again. Near the top edge was a line of what looked like Chinese characters. Standard-issue cassettes are imported from Greece as part of the deal involving package holidays in Edinburgh for Greek nationals. So what we had here was technically a piece of contraband. More important, it suggested that the murderer had links with the world outside the city borders. Which raised the spectre of dissidents or gangs of psychos. Bloody hell. This was getting worse by the minute.

  “Shouldn’t we listen to find out if there’s anything on the cassette, citizen?” Hamilton’s number two had changed his tone. Now he was almost conciliatory. Bollocks to that.

  “We’re going to,” I said, putting the cassette into a bag of my own. “At tonight’s Council meeting.” That dealt with him. Unless Hamilton was hit by a bus in the next couple of hours, Machiavelli wouldn’t be deputising for him in the Council chamber and so he wouldn’t hear a thing. At least until he wormed it out of one of the numerous iron boyscouts who liked his style. He must have been doing them a lot of favours.

  “Citizen?” The medical guardian was back at the top end of the table. Her assistants had been wrestling with Roddie’s jaws. “You were right. His tongue has been removed.”

  I got a lift in a guard vehicle back to Drummond Street. Davie had spoken to most of the neighbours. They’d all been well into the bevy from the early evening, but some of them said they heard music coming from Roddie’s flat after midnight. The guy across the stairwell had knocked on his door to wish him happy New Year but got no reply and assumed he was pissed like the rest of them.

  I told Davie about the cassette. “Let’s borrow a machine and listen to it. I don’t want to go into the Council meeting blind. Or deaf.”

  We borrowed Jimmie Semple’s cassette player and set it up in Roddie’s flat. The scene-of-crime people had finished, having found, so Davie told me, no fingerprints apart from Roddie’s and no sign of illicit goods. They’d left the place as it was, so we had to step over books and cushions to get to the single power point. I pushed what was left of Roddie’s orange hat under the sofa – it was giving me a lot of angst.

  I stuck the cassette in and waited for what I was pretty sure was some kind of message from the killer.

  What I got was a hell of a surprise.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Davie asked after a minute.

  “If what you think it is is Eric Clapton playing ‘Tribute to Elmore’, then yes, guardsman, it is.”

  We listened until the music stopped and left the tape running. There didn’t seem to be anything else recorded.

  Davie rubbed his beard. “Well, boss, you’re the expert. What does it mean? What’s this got to do with Roddie Aitken?”

  “And why was it stuck inside him?” I looked into the darkness outside, then glanced both ways in the street below. No hooded man. “God knows.”

  “A non-standard-issue tape with banned music on it.” Davie nudged my arm. “It must mean something, Quint.”

  I wasn’t arguing with that. A series of unpleasant thoughts had struck me. The blues had been banned not long after the Enlightenment came to power because the drug gangs that used to terrorise the city took them as their trademark. The leader of each gang gave himself the name of a famous bluesman – Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker – and the gang members followed suit. My love affair with the blues had started before that. When I was a kid in the nineties, contemporary music was so poor that my friends and I ended up turning to what we thought was the genuine
tradition. But I couldn’t say the blues were only a source of pleasure to me. The psycho who killed Caro and eleven others called himself Little Walter. And now we had a clown messing about with Clapton and Elmore James. This was bad news almost on a par with the Stop Press from Sarajevo in August 1914.

  “It’s an instrumental,” Davie said, breaking into my thoughts.

  “A chance for ‘God’ to show off his skills on the bottle-neck that Elmore was famous for. What’s your point, Davie?”

  He shrugged. “I was just thinking that if there had been a lyric, it might have told us something.”

  I headed for the door. It was half six and I needed to talk to Hamilton before the Council meeting at seven. “It might have,” I said over my shoulder. “But then again, we might not speak this particular language. The message is presumably directed at someone who does.”

  Davie’s boots clattered down the stair behind me. “I thought you knew all there is to know about the blues, Quint,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Not when they’re being played by a lunatic, my friend.”

  Some of the most unpleasant experiences of my life have occurred in the Council chamber. As a result, I hate the place. The building used to be the Assembly Hall where the Church of Scotland had its annual knees-up. It was an attempt at steepling Gothic splendour, but its blackened façade strikes me more like the castle of a vampire with a taste for coal dust. Hamilton was doing an imitation of a sentry on autopilot outside. Behind him the central tourist area was lit up brighter than a Christmas tree in the days before trees became an endangered life form. In the suburbs beyond, where the ordinary citizens live, the lights were a lot dimmer.

  “Are you aware of the fact that Raeburn 03 was at the autopsy?” I demanded, warming up for the fight I was about to have with the boyscouts.

  The guardian looked surprised. “I was not. Did he get in your way?”

  “He did, Lewis. Pull his chain, will you?”

  Hamilton smiled grimly. “With pleasure.” His face darkened. “We’re in trouble, aren’t we, citizen?”

  “I reckon so. This killer’s more than just a butcher. He’s playing mind games too.” I told him about the tape.

  The guardian swore under his breath, an action which would have definitely convinced his colleagues that he was past it. Guardians pride themselves on being above coarse language. Me, I’m a big fan.

  “Come on, guardian, we’re going to be late.” I let him go first through the doorway and up the wide staircase. Busts of Plato were all over the place, the philosopher’s wrinkled brow and featureless eyes giving a greater impression of fallibility than the first Council intended. He was their master, The Republic and The Laws the cornerstones of the new constitution. Unfortunately he didn’t specify how to deal with murderers who stick music cassettes inside their victims.

  We were admitted into the chamber. When my mother was senior guardian, there had been a vast horseshoe table. The Council members sat round it and people like me who had to give reports sat between the horns and felt small. The iron boyscouts have changed things. In an attempt to show that they’re even more devoted to Plato than their predecessors, they emptied the hall of all its furniture and remain on their feet throughout the daily meetings. As the meetings sometimes go on long into the night, they’ve taken to moving around the hall – the senior guardian playing at Socrates wandering the streets of ancient Athens with the rest of them as his interlocutors. I suppose it keeps them off the freezing streets of Edinburgh.

  “Good evening, guardian. Citizen.” The senior guardian nodded briefly at us and led us into the middle of the hall. The other thirteen guardians gathered around. They were all carrying clipboards. I saw the medical guardian. She had her notes under her arm and her hands stuffed into the pockets of her light brown tweed jacket.

  “The meeting is in session,” said the senior guardian, his head held high and his hands behind his back. He looked like a preacher about to address a congregation, the thin beard backing up his earnest expression. “I understand from the public order guardian that Citizen Dalrymple is to lead the investigation into the unwelcome discovery at Drummond Street.” He glanced at Hamilton. For a moment I thought there was going to be trouble about control of such a serious matter being given to a non-auxiliary, but the senior guardian let it pass. He knew I could do a better job than anyone in the Public Order Directorate. “Perhaps you will favour us with your report, citizen,” he said, turning his unwavering eyes on me.

  “All right,” I said. I’ve always got a kick out of trying to stamp my authority on the guardians. Shocking them out of their routine is a good ploy. “Let’s start with a bit of music.” I pushed through the ring of tweed jackets and put the cassette in the player that was kept in the chamber.

  I couldn’t really say that Clapton went to the top of the Council charts. Most of the boyscouts were too young to have much more than a vague idea of what kind of music they were hearing. Those who did know – like the heritage guardian, an expert on eighteenth-century Scottish art who had the look of a poorly preserved mummy but was actually five years younger than me – tried to appear scandalised that the blues should be heard in the Assembly Hall. As for the senior guardian, he kept his head held high. There was a faint smile on his lips but I couldn’t make up my mind if he looked more like a tolerant saint suffering for his faith or a public-school headmaster about to use his cane in the old days. The music stopped and there was a long silence.

  “Thank you for sharing that with us,” the senior guardian said eventually. “I presume this was the cassette that was found inside the victim.”

  Obviously the grapevine was working well.

  “It is, guardian,” I replied.

  “And what exactly is the significance of this particular . . . how shall I describe it . . . piece?” The guardian moved towards where I was standing by the cassette player, his colleagues close behind.

  I shrugged. “Search me, guardian.”

  He gave me a thin smile. “But you know what it is and who performed it?”

  “Oh, aye. It’s Eric Clapton’s ‘Tribute to Elmore’. Elmore being Elmore James, leading proponent of the bottle-neck guitar.”

  Some of the guardians made a note but most didn’t bother.

  “Very interesting, citizen,” said the heritage guardian, holding his pen vertically like a child trying to attract the teacher’s attention. “But what did the murderer mean by putting it—”

  “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves, guardians,” interrupted Hamilton. I’d been wondering how long he’d keep quiet. “Clearly some information about this case has become available to you already.” He looked around balefully. “I’d like to know how.”

  Nobody volunteered an answer. Gossip between the directorates is the lifeblood of the system, but none of the iron boyscouts could admit that openly – certainly not in front of an ordinary citizen like me. I let them stew for a few moments, then outlined what I’d found in Roddie Aitken’s flat. This time all of them took notes.

  “So, to summarise,” the senior guardian said when I’d finished. “We are dealing with a murderer who took care to leave no fingerprints, who took advantage of the only night of the year when there is no curfew to effect his escape, who tortured his victim to discover the whereabouts of some object as yet unknown and who left this piece of music as some kind of message.”

  Not bad for a scientist. And the senior guardian isn’t just any scientist. He was a senior researcher in the mechanical engineering faculty at the age of twenty-one and a key member of the Science and Energy Directorate a few years later. The word is that when he became senior guardian he never even considered assigning his original directorate to someone else. But no matter how much they fancy themselves, guardians aren’t investigators and he hadn’t mentioned everything.

  “Correct – as far as it goes,” I said. Then I gave them something else to chew on. “I’m assuming the murderer was the hooded figure seen
by the victim four times before he was killed. What does that tell us, guardians?”

  Rustling of papers and eyes definitely lowered. I felt like a professor leading a seminar for a group of students who were never given reading lists.

  “What are you getting at, Dalrymple?” Hamilton asked suspiciously. He wasn’t impressed that I was springing something we hadn’t discussed on him.

  “Simply this. The hooded man – not that I’m necessarily convinced it’s a male at this stage – showed himself several times to Roddie Aitken. Why? Why didn’t he just follow him back to his flat the first time and do what he did last night?”

  The senior guardian was nodding, his lower lip caught between his teeth. “I see what you mean, citizen. He was trying to frighten his victim.”

  “Very good, guardian,” I said. “The killer was trying to frighten him into handing over something.”

  “But what was that something?” Hamilton said, his brow still furrowed.

  “I don’t know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Either he found what he was looking for in the flat or—” I broke off. It had occurred to me that maybe Roddie never had what his killer wanted. He didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who was into the black market. So why was the bastard after him? Could it be a case of mistaken identity or was it something more sinister? Possibilities started to bombard me.

  “Wake up, citizen,” said the medical guardian, her pale face looking unusually impatient. “Or what?”