Body Politic (8 page)

“Absolutely none,” said Hamilton, as firmly as a member of the Inquisition who'd just been asked if there was any possibility Galileo could be right about the solar system.

The deputy senior guardian didn't buy it. She turned to me. “Citizen?”

It was a tricky one. Life would have been a sight easier if I'd told them what happened to the ENT Man. They probably wouldn't even have thrown me into the cells for keeping quiet about it for five years. At least until I caught this killer. But it wasn't just my secret. It was all I still shared with Caro, lost beautiful Caro, whose photo, thank Christ, was obscured by Hamilton's head.

“We're waiting,” prompted the speaker, her voice sharper.

I let Caro fade away. And decided to keep our secret. “Well, there are a lot of inconsistencies in the modus operandi. The ENT Man removed organs from his victims, but he also took their ears and blocked their noses, sometimes with earth, other times with pieces of cloth.”

“He may have run out of time in Stevenson Hall,” said Hamilton.

“You think so? This murder looks to me like a carefully calculated killing. The person who did this knew how to avoid the patrols and gain entry to a protected building.”

“Whereas the otolaryngologist,” said the medical guardian, his fingers forming a pyramid under his chin as he repeated the term, “the otolaryngologist tended to keep out of the way of guard personnel.”

Except in two cases, I thought.

“As I remember,” the shrivelled finance guardian said, “he didn't clean up after himself either.” The old man glanced at the photos and twitched his lips.

Hamilton was shaking his head. “The woman was strangled, mutilated and sodomised. What more evidence is necessary?”

“Evidence that will enable citizen Dalrymple to catch him,” said the deputy senior guardian. “There seems to be precious little of that.” She looked at me again. “If you are dubious that it is the same killer, what grounds do you have for expecting more murders?”

It was a good question. They might give the impression of inhabiting a world light years away from the rest of us, but there's nothing wrong with the guardians' intellects. Except perhaps the public order guardian's.

“There was an outburst of serial killing in the years before the UK broke up. I read all the reports. The likelihood of a murderer who gets away with a killing of this kind doing it again is overwhelming.” I was trusting a hunch as well, but I didn't think that would impress them.

“You'd better make sure you catch him then,” said Hamilton grimly. “I propose that we increase the number of patrols in the tourist area at night. And that we continue to suppress all news of the guardswoman's death.”

“You realise that every auxiliary in the city knows about it by now,” I observed, giving him a grim look of my own.

“Auxiliaries are sworn servants of the city,” said the speaker loftily. “They will not divulge the news to ordinary citizens.”

And a formation of pigs had just been spotted over Arthur's Seat. “Even if they don't,” I said, “it's possible that the killer needs publicity. By denying him that we may increase the chances of him doing it again.” They all looked at me sternly. “Let's face it, censoring the news of the ENT Man's activities didn't exactly help us catch him.”

I caught a glimpse of the bust of Plato at the rear of the chamber. The Enlightenment used his ideas as the basis of the new constitution and they're still debated every week in all the barracks. “You're the students of human nature,” I said, trying to provoke a response. None of them reacted. It looked like I had them where I wanted. “By the way, I've taken on a guardsman as my assistant.”

Hamilton was as reliable as one of Pavlov's dogs. His eyes sprang wide open and his fists clenched.

“Hume 253 is his barracks number,” I continued. “He'll report to me alone during the investigation. No objections, I hope.”

If the deputy senior guardian disapproved of my tone, she concealed it. Which is more than can be said for the public order guardian. Now he looked like a dog that had just been fed something worse than standard-issue haggis.

I hadn't finished with them. “It seems to me that we're failing to address the most important question raised by this case.”

“No doubt you're about to tell us what that is,” said Hamilton in a strangulated whisper.

I closed my notebook and stood up. “You're right, guardian – I am. What's behind the timing? It's five years since the ENT Man last killed. Suddenly his modus operandi is repeated in part and a guardswoman is murdered in Stevenson Hall in the early morning of 20 March 2020. Why?”

Back at my flat I cleared everything off the table and sat down to turn dross into gold. As I told the Council, the archives had yielded nothing worth reporting. I'd a faint hope that I would find some detail that had been omitted from the barracks documentation concerning the dead woman. Even a juicy big Public Order Directorate stamp showing that something had been censored would have done – then I could have squeezed Hamilton about it. But there was nothing. It didn't take me long to come to the conclusion that I was as much at sea as the owl and the pussycat. At least they had a pea green boat.

The knock on the door came as a relief. I assumed it would be Davie, then with a shock I remembered Katharine Kirkwood. Maybe she couldn't wait until tomorrow. Her brother had been missing from my thoughts as well as from his flat. Still, the idea of laying eyes on her again was not unpleasant. I was disappointed.

“Billy?” I tried and failed to sound unsurprised.

“Quint, how the hell are you?” The short figure in a beautifully cut grey suit and pink silk shirt pushed past me. On his way he rammed a brand of malt whisky I hadn't seen for a decade into my hands.

“Christ, Billy, how did you find me?” I closed the door. “More to the point, after all this time, why did you find me?”

“I'm pleased to see you too. What kind of a welcome is that, for fuck's sake? I'm your oldest friend.” William Ewart Geddes, Heriot 07, one hundred and ten pounds of financial genius and calculating bastard, walked into the centre of the room and looked around under the naked light bulb. “Nice place you've got here, Quint,” he said with a sardonic grin. “I see you've still got your guitar. Not being a naughty boy and playing the blues, I hope.”

There was a time when Billy was as fanatical about B.B. King and Elmore James as I am, but that was before the Council banned the blues on the grounds that music has to be uplifting or some such bollocks. The fact that most of the drugs gangs idolised bluesmen had nothing to do with the decision, of course.

“No, I haven't played for years,” I said. “Not since I was demoted.” I opened the whisky and inhaled its peaty breath. “That's the last time I saw you as well. Why the sudden interest?”

Billy accepted a chipped glass reluctantly and sipped the spirit neat, his small grey eyes blinking. The sparse beard that covered his thin face showed definite signs of officially disapproved clipping.

“You know how it is,” he said. “No fraternisation between auxiliaries and ordinary citizens.” He grinned again, showing suspiciously even teeth. “Still, you've had time to cool off. And now I hear you're back in favour—” He broke off to examine the small, blurred photo of Caro on the wall, the sharpness in his expression dissipating. The three of us had been at the university together. He looked like he was going to say something about her, but the glare I gave him made him change his mind.

“As for finding you, that was easy. I'm deputy finance guardian, remember. All I had to do was pull your rates sheet.” He sat down gingerly on the sofa after inspecting it for anything that might damage his suit. Personally I'd have stayed upright if I'd been him.

“Deputy finance guardian? You look more like a stockbroker. Remember them?”

Billy laughed. “The clothes are nothing. You should see my flat.”

“No, thanks. I'm only a citizen. Luxury's bad for my character.” So's jealousy. I couldn't resist having a go at him. “Or so they used to say in the Enlightenment, didn't they?”

“Something like that,” Billy mumbled, his cheeks reddening. The party had alway taken second place to his personal ambitions. Obviously they were now in the process of being achieved. “Listen, Quint, how about a night on the town? I've got a car.”

“You're full of surprises.”

“There's a new nightclub in Rose Street.”

“Nightclub? You mean a place where semi-naked women prance around and tourists pay inflated prices for shitty whisky?”

“So you're interested.” Billy raised an eyebrow. “You'll need a change of clothes.”

I drained my glass. “I'll wear a tutu if I have to.”

As I dragged my only suit out of the wardrobe, I almost managed to convince myself that I was only going because I wanted to find out why Billy had turned up after five years. But as I always turned the light out during sex sessions, it was also a long time since I'd seen a woman in anything less than a layer of off-white Supply Directorate underwear. Men are animals.

The Toyota that Billy drove might well have been the newest vehicle in the city. I decided against asking him where he found the petrol to run it. He'd either have ignored the question or revealed some deal I didn't want to know about. The Council banned the private ownership of cars because it was unable to negotiate a favourable price with the oil companies for anything except poor quality diesel. I wondered what its members thought about the deputy finance guardian's wheels. I had a flash of the clapped-out 2CV he used to have when we were students. The problem then wasn't obtaining fuel, it was finding somewhere to park. Now Lothian Road stretched ahead of us like a long deserted runway whose controller had turned the landing lights on in the forlorn hope of attracting some passing trade. Looking around, I realised that the fog was less thick.

Billy accelerated hard down the hill past Stevenson Hall and jerked a thumb. “It happened in there, didn't it?”

I might have known. He wanted me to fill him in about the murder. I fed him some scraps which he accepted impassively but which, I was sure, he was storing away in his memory. At school Billy was famous for his ability to memorise pages of material in seconds. Coupled with his business acumen, that had sent him straight into the Finance Directorate in the early years of the Council.

“Your parents all right?” he asked as he swung the car into the pedestrian precinct of Rose Street and acknowledged the guardsman who waved him through. When we were boys, Billy was a constant presence in our house in Newington. His own parents were divorced.

“Growing old with about as much grace as those archbishops the mob walled up in St Paul's years ago – the old man especially.” Then I remembered that the next day was Sunday. Despite the investigation, I'd have to find time for the weekly visit.

“Don't suppose you see much of your mother,” Billy said as he pulled up. “Right, let's get in amongst them.”

The Bearskin was brightly lit. A pair of hypothermic girls wearing tartan shorts and crowned by headgear consistent with the club's name flanked the entrance. Placards in a variety of languages laid out the treats in store for prospective customers: live music (“the hottest in the city”), top quality food and the widest selection of beer and whisky in Edinburgh, as well as a floorshow Bangkok would supposedly have envied in the years before its decline.

Billy pushed through the mass of Chinese and Middle Eastern men – I couldn't see any female customers – and led me in without any money or ID appearing. The manager, despite his dinner jacket, smoothly shaved face and slicked-back hair, was an auxiliary, like most of the staff in clubs and casinos.

“Come on, Quint, I've got a table at the front.” Billy went down a short flight of steps towards a thick curtain. It was opened by a beaming girl with dead eyes. Her skirt would only cover her knickers if she stood very still. A wave of sound broke over us.

The activities on stage were hard to avoid. Billy was already at a table, eagerly following the spectacle. I tried to play it cool, but my eyes were drawn all the same. The place was packed, the audience making almost as much noise as the band, whose members all wore kilts. A banner above proclaimed they were the only jazz band in the world with a bagpiper. Fortunately he seemed to have the night off.

We were very close to the tangle of limbs on the stage. The costumes suggested that the scene was set in the sixteenth century. Most of them were strewn across the floor. Mary, Queen of Scots, her petticoats lifted over her back, was being penetrated from the rear by a wiry young man presumably meant to be her secretary Rizzio. As the music rose to a crescendo, he withdrew, flipped his royal partner on to her back and started to tear off her remaining clothes to the raucous accompaniment of the crowd.

Billy turned to me with a desperate smile on his face, then glanced over my shoulder and nodded. I followed the direction of his eyes and saw an old friend, though she didn't seem to be very happy to see me. Patsy Cameron must have been in her fifties but she still looked the part, dressed up in a black velvet evening gown that showed the amount of bosom you'd expect from the madam of a cathouse in a Western. Which is more or less what she'd been before the Council decided to make use of her in the Prostitution Services Department. Patsy and I had got on pretty well when I was still in the directorate. Now she was avoiding my eyes like they'd give her an X-ray from twenty feet away.

Looking back at the stage, I saw that the queen was now completely naked. She sat up and gazed out at the audience. My heart missed so many beats that it hurt. She was without doubt the most stunningly beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. Although the tresses of her red wig partially obscured her face, the perfectly proportioned features were still visible. As were her full, hard-tipped breasts and limbs that looked like the pure white marble of an ancient statue. She moved her eyes slowly around the room, giving certain individuals the benefit of her erotically charged but totally inscrutable stare. The girl at the curtain's eyes had been dead, but this one's were on a different plane altogether – both superior and all-knowing, detached but at the same time infinitely provocative. I felt seriously out of my depth.