Body Politic (16 page)

“She was selected to go undercover?”

He nodded slowly. “Two years ago. I haven't seen her since.”

“Christ.”

His chin jutted forward. “You know what's the worst thing about it?”

I did, but I let him tell me.

“It's the uncertainty. She could be dead, could have been dead for a long time and I just don't know.” His hands were clamped to the steering wheel.

I wasn't proud of the pain that my question had etched into his face, but at least I'd found an auxiliary who could pass for a normal human being.

Hamilton hadn't got back to his office yet. I flashed my authorisation at his secretary, a thin young man with grey lips, and went into the guardian's private bathroom. I hadn't had a chance to visit the public baths for a week. The water temperature would have struck even a Spartan as low and the soap was as carbolic as Hamilton's temper, but I felt better afterwards.

Hamilton ambushed me in his outer office. “Dalrymple, what the—” He broke off and led me into his sanctum. “You're pushing your luck, laddie. What do you want?”

“I've got a problem.”

The guardian sat down behind his broad Georgian desk and started looking through the files in his in-tray. “Really? Don't tell me you need my help? I thought you preferred to work independently.” He raised his eyes. “Not that it's got you very far.”

As Davie said, time for the next round. I tossed my authorisation on to his pile of papers. “You remember what that says about co-operation, don't you, guardian?” I tried hard to make his title sound like an insult. “You choose. Either comply with the request I'm about to make or explain your refusal at the next Council meeting.”

Hamilton's eyes were colder than the water in his shower. “That rather depends on the request,” he said, his voice taut.

“One of the people I'm checking has a file that's classified Restricted. You keep those in the directorate archive here, don't you?”

“You want to see a Restricted file,” he said slowly. “Why?”

“That's not a question I have to answer.”

He picked up a pen. “Name of the subject?”

“Katharine Kirkwood.” I watched his reaction, but I couldn't tell if the name meant anything to him.

“Very well. Wait here.”

I raised my hand. “I want the complete file. Don't forget, I spend half my life in the archives. There's no way you'll be able to pull any pages without me noticing.”

Hamilton shot a ferocious look at me and walked out. I was surprised how quickly he came back with the maroon cardboard folder.

“There you are.” He seemed to have calmed himself down. “So, do you think the precautions we've taken for tonight are adequate?” After my idea about the killer working to a pattern, measures had been approved to monitor movement around the city centre even more than normal.

“Look at the fog,” I said, pointing outside the leaded windows. “There could be a massacre without anyone noticing.”

“Don't be ridiculous. We'll catch the bugger.” He looked at me. “Remember, the contents of that file are confidential.”

Large black letters to that effect were stencilled on the cover. “I can read, you know.”

“Which means that the subject is not to be given any hint of what we have collated.”

“Why?” I headed for the door. “Do you know something she doesn't?”

William Street, once the location of fashionable bistros and sandwich shops patronised by lawyers and their weak-kneed secretaries, is now occupied solely by female citizens who work in the nearby West End hotels and shops. There was less than half an hour till curfew. I sat in the Land-Rover under the streetlight and read the file.

“That's hers, isn't it?” Davie said, keeping his eyes off the typed pages. “What's she got to do with the murders, Quint?”

“God knows. Have you got that carving knife? I'll give it back to her.”

“Mind she doesn't use it on you.”

“I'm planning on keeping my hands to myself, don't worry.”

Davie grinned. “I wasn't thinking of your hands. You know what they call this street?”

“I do, guardsman.” The large number of women residents have led to it being referred to as “the Willie” in common parlance. “I thought auxiliaries kept themselves above that kind of thing.”

“Did you now?”

I left the maroon folder on the seat. As I went over to number 13, I wondered if Davie would resist the temptation to have a look. That would be a test for him.

“Quint.” Katharine stood in the doorway wearing a dressing-gown. “Have you found Adam?”

I shook my head. “I've made some other discoveries though.”

She looked at me then turned quickly. I followed her in, my eyes drawn to her bare feet. They were unusually long and thin and I could see the networks of tiny veins around her ankles. I wasn't aware that hotel maids were required to paint their toenails.

Katharine sat down on a pile of cushions on the floor and motioned me to the sofa.

“We didn't finish our conversation the other night.” I glanced around the small flat. It was no more than a bedsit with a door off to the toilet in the corner. The sofa I was sitting on converted into a bed and the only other furniture was a small table with a couple of rickety chairs, a kitchen cabinet and a chest of drawers. The Supply Directorate wasn't particularly generous to single female citizens, especially those with the kind of record I'd just been reading. Katharine had tried to put her own stamp on the place: she'd hung rugs made from scraps of different coloured material on the walls and stuck up pages copied from the large number of books that lay around the room. The extract nearest me was from one of Eliot's Sweeney poems.

I took the carving knife out of my jacket pocket, watching her face. It remained impassive. “This is from your brother's flat. Can you take it back?”

She knew I was putting her on the spot and she didn't like it. Her lips were set in a tight line. But she was curious too. “What were you doing with it?” She sat up straight. “You were running tests, weren't you? Why didn't you listen to me? Adam couldn't have killed that man in the gardens.”

“I can't take your word for that, Katharine.”

She nodded slowly. “No proof.”

“Not only that.” I pulled out my notebook. “You've been behaving like a civil servant before the Enlightenment.”

“What do you mean?”

“You've been economical with the truth.”

She stiffened even more. “Like you said, we didn't finish our conversation. You were called away.”

“I was. I seem to remember that you offered your help. You can do that by telling me more about yourself and your brother.” I handed her the knife, pushing Davie's comments to the back of my mind. Katharine took it nonchalantly and laid it on the floor.

“Haven't you checked us out by now?”

“The archives don't contain everything.” I'd been through Adam Kirkwood's file, which wasn't restricted. Davie and I had also questioned his workmates, who'd assumed he was in the mines. He seemed to be an adequate worker who kept himself to himself. None of them saw him out of work hours. There remained the question of the foreign banknote. Katharine was another puzzle. I'd been to the hotel and checked the duty roster. She was off duty on the nights of both murders. I was wondering how much of her past she would reveal voluntarily.

“What happened when they transferred you to the Prostitution Services Department?”

She looked at me curiously. “I still don't understand what that's got to do with Adam or with the killing.”

“Any chance of you letting me be the judge of that?”

She laughed. “All right. I refused the transfer, of course. They kept on at me for days. If they'd offered me something else I might have agreed, but they have that rule about auxiliaries never refusing duty. You know all about that. So I was demoted.”

So far, as per her file. “What next?”

“I was assigned work as a cleaner in one of the hotels down in Leith. That was someone's idea of a joke, I suppose. I spent more time fighting off drunken Scandinavian tourists than mopping floors.” She smiled bitterly. “If it was a joke, it backfired. It was in the hotel that I met the contact from the dissident group.”

I knew from the file that his name was Alex Irvine. She had what was referred to as “sexual involvement” with him.

“They had links with the democrats in Glasgow, who used them pretty cynically. We blew up a few buildings.”

“And got caught.”

“Naturally. Even at that time the Public Order Directorate was good at planting informers.” She looked at me coolly. “As you know very well.”

I lowered my eyes. “I wasn't involved with that kind of operation.” Hamilton became a great advocate of undercover work during the drug wars. I always preferred the investigative approach. “What was your sentence?”

“Three years on Cramond Island.” Her voice was flat. “I was lucky. They put the cell leaders up against a wall.”

She hadn't concealed anything. I should have been pleased, but her apparent frankness disturbed me. Maybe three years on the prison island, connected to the mainland by a causeway submerged at high tide, was enough to make anyone talkative. One of the few outbursts of resentment against the Council led to the facility being renovated two years ago. Conditions had been even worse than those in UK prisons before the breakdown of central government.

“Must have been tough.”

“I read a lot of books,” Katharine said impassively. “The Council chose them, of course.”

“And when you were released, they gave you no choice of work?”

“I would have done anything.” She shivered violently. “It was so fucking cold on that island. I still have it in me.” She curled herself up into a tight ball. “I don't think I'll ever feel warm again.”

“How was Adam affected by what you went through?”

“It didn't turn him into a murderer, if that's what you're thinking. It just made him give up the idea of becoming an auxiliary.”

I had to be sure about one thing. My mother's words about motive were ringing in my head. “How do you feel about what they did to Alex Irvine?”

I realised as soon as I said it that I'd cocked up badly. She hadn't mentioned the dissident's name.

Katharine's whole body went rigid. “You bastard.” She stood up and looked down at me like I was something that had crawled out from between the floorboards. “You knew all this already, didn't you? You've been giving yourself a hard-on listening to me cough it all up.”

Fortunately she'd forgotten about the knife. There was no need for her to answer my question. It was obvious what she felt about the people who'd killed her lover. But that didn't mean she was capable of murder, and there wasn't much point in asking her that. I felt my fingers trembling. From self-disgust more than anything else.

“Get out!” she shouted, striding towards the toilet.

I wasn't too shaken to miss the sight of her body, naked from ankle to throat, as her dressing-gown parted. Her pubic hair was a thick brown mass and her breasts firm and hard-nippled.

“Out!” she repeated, catching the direction of my gaze but too incensed to bother covering herself.

I left red-faced, like a schoolboy caught spying on matron. As I was halfway down the stairs, the lights went out.

Davie was talking to a guardswoman in the Land-Rover. He had moved the file so she could sit on the passenger seat. There was no way of telling if he'd read about Katharine. For some reason that disturbed me.

Chapter Ten

I was in the Bearskin, strange wailing music from the jazz band rising and falling like someone was playing with the volume control. The bagpiper was on duty this time. While the crowd was cheering, I looked at Billy Geddes and then at the woman he acknowledged: Patsy Cameron from Prostitution Services. She didn't flinch as she stared back at me. Her eyes were the cold fire of a star that burned up a long time ago.

The slam of a Land-Rover door in the street below woke me up. Boots that sounded like auxiliary issue number tens came up the stair. I parted the curtains and was greeted by the first grey tinges of an Edinburgh dawn. The fog had lifted.

I opened the door. “Jesus, what happened to you?”

Davie's face and uniform were blackened, his beret shoved back on his head.

“Fire!” he gasped hoarsely. “Fire in the Independence. Didn't you hear the sirens?” He grabbed the jug of drinking water and gulped down its contents. “Every fire engine in the city was called out.”

“In the Independence Hotel?” I thought of Katharine and wondered if she'd been working overnight. “What about casualties?”

“Amazingly few. Every auxiliary in the central barracks was mobilised.” He grinned ruefully. “Including me. We got the guests out pretty quickly.”

“What about the staff?”

He looked puzzled for a moment. “Most of them got out themselves. Oh, you mean the Kirkwood woman.” He gave a shrug. “I didn't see her.”

I stood in the middle of the room, my legs tingling in the chill. Had the murderer suddenly turned arsonist?

“The blaze started somewhere near the kitchens,” Davie said, raising his head from the kitchen sink where he was dousing himself. “I heard the hotel manager telling the fire chief that there have been some problems with the electrics recently. By the time I got there – about half four – it had spread all over the building. It's still burning at the south end but they've got it under control in the other parts. Christ, you should see the place. It looks like the photographs of Sarajevo they showed us in modern history classes.”

I went to dress. “You'll need to get me down there.”

“Why?” Davie followed me into the bedroom. “I thought you were expecting someone to be murdered last night.”