House of Dust (11 page)

“So now you're beating up kids, Quint.”

Katharine had managed to contain herself until we reached the middle of the infirmary courtyard. Then she planted herself in front of me and set to.

“He's a gangbanger,” I said, knowing already that this was an argument I wasn't going to win. “He and his pal were stealing citizens' vouchers.”

“And that gave you the right to break his wrist?” she shouted, her eyes wide. “Christ, you're no better than one of the guard's beaters.”

I tried to step round her but she moved to cut me off. “The beaters go looking for trouble,” I said, avoiding her gaze. “I came across the robbery by chance.”

Katharine jabbed her finger into my chest. “My hero,” she said sarcastically. “Edinburgh's knight in a shining donkey jacket. Has it ever occurred to you that the city's young people need sympathy and help?” She shook her head. “What good is more violence?”

I stared at a pair of guard drivers who were leaning against their vehicles' doors and watching us avidly. “Your wee pal Gus went for me with a sharpened stick, Katharine,” I hissed. “What should I have done? Invite him round for tea and scones?”

That only enraged her more. “For God's sake, Quint, I thought you were different from the rest of the lunatics in the Public Order Directorate.” She was leaning towards me, her lips wet and her chin flecked with spittle. “But you aren't, are you?” She turned on her heel. “Away and inaugurate the prison with your fascist friends.”

I watched her storm through the gateway and disappear in the twilight.

The guardsmen by the Land-Rovers nodded at me, their bearded faces creased in mocking smiles.

“Had you on the run there, didn't she, citizen?” one of them said.

I was on the point of laying into him when I remembered Katharine's reproof – and restricted myself to giving him and his mate the benefit of my middle finger.

Three hours in the castle did nothing to improve my mood. Davie and I found a small unused room across the yard from the command centre and co-ordinated the investigation from there. Hamilton and the Mist kept appearing and disturbing us, but at least the confined space prevented them setting up permanent residence.

“Do you want that roll?” Davie asked, eyeing the sole survivor of what had originally been a heaped plate supplied by the castle mess.

“One slice of reconstituted mutton per lifetime is enough for me, thanks.”

He leaned forward and snaffled the wholemeal bap. Shortly afterwards he spoke some words I couldn't decipher.

“Didn't they teach you not to eat with your mouth full on the auxiliary training programme?”

He glowered at me and swallowed. “What do you want to do now?” he said, enunciating like the jackasses who read the news on
Radio Free City
– the Information Directorate thinks listeners enjoy being talked down to.

“Oh, right.” I gave him a derisory smile. “What do I want to do now? I want to get to my bed, big man. There's not exactly much going on here.”

Davie looked at the notes he'd made. “Dead Dod's file didn't tell us much we couldn't guess.”

“Persistent truancy, a spell in a Youth Detention Centre for stealing clothing vouchers from his granddad, failure to attend a whole series of work placements,” I read from my notebook.

Davie nodded. “Plus numerous sightings with known members of the Leith Lancers.”

“And none of the few we've caught are telling us anything about Dod or about what happened to him.”

“Do you reckon they know who attacked him?” he asked, draining the last of his barracks tea from a chipped City Guard mug.

I shrugged. “Maybe not. Dead Dod seems to have been a bit of a loner. Which would have made him a perfect target for the assailant.”

“So,” Davie said, throwing down his pencil, “no witnesses from Socrates Lane, no statement from the victim – who's still comatose from whatever hyper-strength drug was pumped into him – and nothing useful from the scene-of-crime squad. Hell of a day's work, eh?”

There was a knock on the door and a statuesque guards-woman came in. “Report from the scene-of-crime squad, commander,” she said, handing Davie a maroon folder and giving him a smile that was warmer than the occasion required.

“Friend of yours?” I asked as the door closed behind her.

“Oh aye,” he said, grinning. “I'm a great believer in maintaining close relationships with my team.”

“Primarily the female members of your team.”

He'd raised a hand. “Hang on. It looks like I spoke too soon. The SOCS has lifted some footprints from the locus.”

“I'm not surprised. There was enough muck on the floors in there.”

His face darkened. “No good, though. They can't match the prints with anything in their archive.”

I went round to his side of the table and checked the facsimile of the print. “What, this shoe or boot is unknown to them?”

He ran his finger down the report. “That's what they say.”

I leaned back against the table, hearing the wood squeak on the bare flagstones. “Interesting. This might be more useful than you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the footwear would appear to have been produced outside Edinburgh.” I rubbed my hand across my forehead, feeling a headache beginning to set in. That made me think of the man who said he had a migraine yesterday evening. “How about Glasgow?”

Davie looked up at me, one eye screwed up. “Andrew Duart and his bum chum? Nah, don't be stupid, Quint. They were inside Ramsay Garden all night and I bet they've been in meetings all day. Shall I check?”

I nodded. “Aye. But I wasn't thinking of those particular individuals. If the Council's decided the west coast isn't the nest of vipers it used to be, perhaps there are other specimens on the loose.”

Davie was looking even more doubtful. “And how do you think you'll be able to track them down? There haven't been any passes issued to non-tourist aliens in the last few days. I looked at the register when I was setting up the security for the reception.”

He was right. If it was a foreigner who'd cut off Dead Dod's arm, he or she was likely to have entered the city illegally.

“Course, there's no shortage of tourists,” Davie added. “You want me to institute a census of our honoured guests' shoes?”

I shook my head. “Forget it. You know the Tourism Directorate would never allow that.” I walked round to the other side of the table and made a note in my book. “Anyway, whoever attacked the kid in Socrates Lane and left the arm in the administrator's bath had local knowledge.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.” Davie grinned. “Pity. I was going to point the finger – so to speak – at another group of visitors to Edinburgh.”

“Who?”

He looked over his shoulder and reassured himself that no one else had slipped in. “The Oxford delegation.”

“What?”

He raised his shoulders dispiritedly. “I know, I'm clutching at straws. There's something about those people that puts my back up. Why are they here? We don't need a prison, let alone one designed by a bunch of crazy professors.”

“What kind of investigation technique is that, guardsman?” I demanded, demoting him to the rank he'd had when I first met him; I still felt more comfortable with it than commander. “Something about them puts your back up?”

“Aye,” he said combatively, “take the piss if you like, but I know you feel the same way. And I know you're not a fan of the New Bridewell.”

According to Katharine he was wrong on both counts.

At midnight, when there was nothing new to report, we signed off with Hamilton and his deputy. We were informed that the senior guardian was unimpressed by the lack of progress, but that the Oxford delegation was at least glad that the arm's owner had been discovered. The Mist said that Administrator Raphael was particularly concerned and had been in touch with Sophia several times about the victim. The inauguration was to go ahead, though Raphael had asked for additional security; apparently she was worried that the perpetrator might try to disrupt it, though she'd given no explanation of that fear.

Davie drove me back to Gilmore Place and I climbed the stairs to my flat slowly, the effect of forty-plus hours without sleep numbing me as effectively as a pint of hemlock. Before I turned in I made a couple of calls, stabbing my finger on the buttons of my mobile by the light of a guttering candle. Neither got me anywhere. Sophia advised that the one-armed man was still deep in his chemically assisted slumbers and that the Toxicology Department was still no nearer identifying the substance in his system. And Katharine's mobile had been turned off, so I couldn't tell where she was or whether she'd calmed down: experience told me it was way too early for that.

So I took a couple of large grey Supply Directorate aspirins and collapsed into bed, too exhausted to take off more than the outer layer of clothing. I berated myself momentarily for having forgotten all about Lister 25, the missing chief toxicologist, then sank into oblivion.

We were standing in groups in the exercise yard of the prison, waiting for the circus to begin. It was a bright, cool day, the only clouds a ripple of cirrus high above; they looked like the exhalations of a giant winged creature that had overflown Edinburgh and decided it could have a better time elsewhere. I glanced at my watch and saw through the permanent condensation that it was a quarter to eleven. Fifteen minutes to kick-off.

Tackety boots clattered on the paving-stones inside the heavy gate as members of the Public Order Directorate pipe band moved their lower limbs surreptitiously to keep the circulation going. The area enclosed by the walls with their new wire excrescences was about eighty yards square, on a mound rising from the north to fall on the south and covered in grey gravel. Apart from the obelisk and the round structure on the west side, the yard was empty of stone structures. All the tombstones, funerary monuments, statues and miniature temples to the souls of the departed had departed, no doubt bulldozed away. The Corrections Department's requirement for a prisoners' exercise area was more pressing than that of conserving one of the city's prime historical sites. I wondered if they'd taken the bones out of the ground too, then decided it was unlikely: the symbolism of doomed prisoners tramping round on human remains would have been irresistible to the Mist and her friends.

I heard the gravel crunch to my right.

“Do you think the old philosopher would approve of what's been done to his mausoleum?” Billy Geddes gave a hungry laugh. “Neat, isn't it?”

I let my eyes follow his shrivelled arm in the direction of the rotunda that had originally been erected in honour of Edinburgh's native thinker David Hume. It used to be an open, uncapped space – appropriate for a man of ideas – but now the structure had been transformed into what looked disturbingly like a naval gun-turret. A mobile glass canopy had been placed on top, with a protruding steel extension that enabled a sentry to oversee the entire yard. As I watched, a group of VIPs that included Raphael and her brainboxes were shown the canopy in operation. The guardswoman on top was gripping the handrail almost as tightly as she was gripping her snub-nosed machine-pistol. It was a model I hadn't seen before in the city.

“I think the sainted D.H. would have been sceptical as to the building's benefits,” I said.

“Ha-ha,” Billy said. “Anyway, I thought Hume was an atheist. Who'd canonise him?” He was dressed in a charcoal-grey suit that definitely hadn't come from a Supply Directorate store, but the expensive material couldn't do much to hide the twisted, emaciated legs in his wheelchair. “What the hell are you doing here, Quint? They haven't got you on security detail, have they?”

“Sod off.” I looked round at the numerous guard personnel in the former burial ground. There was enough security here to satisfy an American President, not that the disunited states of America bother with one of those any more: the chief executives of the major global corporations pull all the strings. “I'm flying the flag for liberal values.”

“Mind you don't end up with a guardswoman on your head like David Hume.”

“A guardswoman with a new toy.” I glanced down at my former friend. “You haven't been indulging in a spot of arms dealing, have you?”

Billy grinned at me, his eyes the liveliest part of him. “Maybe. What's your problem, pal?”

“My problem,” I said, leaning over the wheelchair, “is that things are getting out of control here.” Then I ran my eyes round the walls and watchtower of the New Bridewell and realised I was talking rubbish. “Or rather, there's suddenly too
much
control in this supposedly benevolent dictatorship. Since when have firearms been allowed in the central zone?”

Billy shrugged. “As soon as the Council went ahead with the incarceration policy, that became inevitable. You can't expect a prison to operate without fully equipped warders.”

“Let me guess,” I said, staring into his grey eyes. “You did a deal with New Oxford for the weapons.”

He gave a harsh laugh. “The Council did a deal with New Oxford for much more than a few high-tech guns, I can tell you.”

I wasn't very surprised. “And how exactly is the cash-strapped Finance Directorate managing to pay for that?”

I think he would have told me – Billy Geddes had never been shy about blowing his own bassoon – but we were interrupted.

“What's going on here?” The senior guardian was wearing a black suit that was even more sumptuous than Billy's, the only concession to his rank being a maroon and white Council tie. He was also wearing a Grade A disapproving look. “Confidential information is not to be disclosed to Citizen Dalrymple.” He opened his eyes wide at Billy, the thick round lenses of his glasses giving him the appearance of a fish – one that ate flesh rather than seaweed. “Is that understood?”