House of Dust (7 page)

“And what was your reaction?”

Raphael looked at me and for a moment she almost seemed to lose her grip – which had been the point of my question. Then she ran a hand through her hair and regained control. “My reaction? I screamed. Only once.” She shook her head angrily. “Stupid. I've seen worse.”

Had she? I wondered about that briefly.

“Then the front door burst open and one of your colleagues thundered in like a mad bull.”

“Technically, not one of my colleagues. I'm a citizen, not an auxiliary.”

She regarded me with studied indifference. “I see. Well, citizen, I suggest that, without further delay, you view the object in my bath.”

I nodded. “By the way, how do I address you?”

She put her hands together and I noticed that she had the same metallic implant in her wrist as I'd noticed in Raskolnikov's. “You have a choice. Either madam . . .”

“I don't think so.”

“Or administrator.”

Ask a stupid question.

The bathroom, with doors off both the main room and the master – or rather, administrator – bedroom, was palatial. There were twin sinks with what I hoped for the sake of the Finance Directorate's scant reserves weren't solid gold fittings, antique mirrors, a bidet and, along the far wall, a Victorian bath standing on dragon's feet or the like. I ran my eye over the white tiles that covered all the vertical surfaces and immediately realised that something was missing – blood. Stepping over the black and white chequered floor tiles, I reached the porcelain monstrosity and bent down to look at the limb that was lying lengthways, palm down, at the bottom. It wasn't long before the stump of my right forefinger – an old injury from my time in the Public Order Directorate – began to tingle in sympathy. The middle finger had been removed beneath the bottom joint and there was no sign of it anywhere.

“How very odd.”

Sophia's voice made me jump.

“Shit. Don't creep up on people like that.” I wasn't too surprised that she'd made an appearance. She would have been informed by her directorate dispatcher and it wasn't the first time she'd acted personally in major enquiries.

She was already engrossed in her preliminary examination, speaking in a low voice into a dictation machine. The words “humerus”, “axilla”, “biceps” and “severed” were to the fore.

I let the medical guardian complete what she was doing and carried out my own examination. The limb, from the right side, had been taken off about an inch beneath the armpit. As far as I could tell, a very sharp instrument had been used: the surface of the traumatised area in the upper arm was remarkably smooth, the skin, tendon and bone cleanly cut. And again, there was no blood, showing clearly that the amputation had been carried out elsewhere. The skin was pallid all over and the amount of dark hair as well as the size and the heavy muscle development in the upper arm suggested it came from a male. The fingers were dirty, the nails bitten to the quick and a couple of them blackened. The wound on the stump of the missing finger was different, much less smooth than the arm surface.

“What do you reckon?” I asked. “I don't suppose some medical student could have stolen it from the infirmary.”

Sophia gave me an icy glare then nodded to her directorate photographer and his scene-of-crime squad minder to step forward. She moved aside to let them shoot.

“I'll have my staff check the pathology department, but it's out of the question.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, raising my hands to placate her.

“The skin and muscle condition leads me to think that the arm came from a young man – probably not more than twenty-five, possibly only nineteen to twenty. Hypostasis and other indicators suggest that the limb was removed between four and six hours ago; it's difficult to be precise. What intrigues me most, though, is the area of amputation. The trauma is very clean, very regular. A well-honed, extremely smooth blade, I assume. But that isn't all.” She stepped closer to me. “It's almost as if the wound's been cauterised, though there's no obvious mark of burning. The exposed nerves and tendons have been completely sealed.” She shook her head. “I've never seen anything like it.”

“What about the finger?” I asked. “That looks more like a cut from a standard knife.”

Sophia nodded. “Single, non-serrated blade.” She glanced at me. “And before you say it, yes, it could have been done by an auxiliary knife.”

I smiled. She knew that I had a long-standing habit of suspecting the Council's lackeys.

The photographers moved back.

“We're done on this side,” one of them said.

“Let's turn it over then,” Sophia said, pulling on transparent gloves. She leaned forward and lifted the arm up and over. “Ahha. Look at this, Quint.”

“Well, well. This should help us find the victim.” I took out my magnifying glass and held it over the tattoo that ran the length of the inner forearm. “The guy this came from is one of the Leith Lancers.” A nine-inch spear had been applied in red ink. It pierced a heart bearing the letters “L.L.” and the motto “Fuck the Guardians” in black.

“Scum,” Sophia said, so vehemently that the Medical Directorate photographer almost dropped his camera.

I nodded. “They're about as vicious a gang of headbangers as the perfect city's produced.” I raised my hand to silence her objections. “But they're keen on drinking stolen booze until they're legless. Why the hell has one of them ended up armless?”

That wasn't even the half of it. What I now needed to look into was how the severed limb got into the city's top-security VIP accommodation. Davie and I spent a couple of hours supervising the taking of statements and, in the cases of guard personnel, the virtual interrogation of potential witnesses; strongarm tactics, so to speak, are par for the course with auxiliaries who are under suspicion, even of nothing worse than incompetence.

Except there didn't seem to be any witnesses. Sentries had been on duty on every landing, as well as in the entrance hall and on the main esplanade checkpoint, at all times. None of them had seen any suspicious individuals, not least any carrying a long, fleshy object. The only people to have been allowed access to this part of the building after the other occupants went to the reception were the Glasgow leader Andrew Duart and his assistant. They'd arrived at eight thirty-one p.m. The scene-of-crime squad was gradually extending its activities to the hallways and other flats in the block. So far they'd found no obvious traces of the intruder: no spots of blood, no sign of breaking and entering, no missing digit. They'd been dusting for fingerprints but those they'd found and checked all came from guard and cleaning staff.

Around four a.m. Davie and I sat down to compare notes in the empty apartment next to the administrator's. There were eight in this block: four occupied by the Oxford delegation and one each by Duart and his sidekick, leaving two vacant.

“Not much to go on,” the big man said dispiritedly. “None of the sentries reports anything out of the ordinary. All the human and vehicular traffic logged entering and leaving the castle area has been accounted for.”

“Human and vehicular traffic?” I said ironically. The City Guard has a robotic language of its own.

“You know what I mean,” he muttered.

I looked at my notes. “The three Oxford academics are no help either. They weren't here during the evening, and their rooms are clean and secure.” Professor Raskolnikov had tried to pick my brains about the investigation but I deflected his questions.

“Which leaves the guys from Glasgow,” Davie said, his brow furrowed. “What do you think they're doing over here?”

“Attending the prison opening, I reckon.”

“No, I mean why have they even been allowed into the city? Remember the hassle we got after we'd been over there.” There was bitterness in his voice. “As far as some of my superiors are concerned, I've been a pariah ever since.”

I nodded and led him out into the corridor. “You're not the only one.” I grinned at him. “Let's go and take it out on Duart and his monkey.”

Davie was right behind me. “Hold me back,” he said with grim satisfaction.

The two Glaswegians had been accommodated on the first floor. I sent Davie to talk to the assistant so we could compare stories afterwards. He pounded on the door with regulation guard diplomacy.

I gave Andrew Duart's door a slightly more restrained knock. After a minute I heard the chain being drawn back.

“Quint Dalrymple,” the first secretary said, rubbing his eyes. He was wearing an expensive-looking silk dressing-gown with a pink and black Charles Rennie Mackintosh design. He peered at his heavy gold watch. “Don't tell me. You want to have that word now.”

“Correct.”

He let me in and took me over to the lounge area. His accommodation wasn't quite as vast as Raphael's, but it would still have put up half a dozen citizen families. Before he sat down, Duart took a couple of pills from his pocket and swallowed them, washing them down with liquid from an insulated flask.

“Glasgow water,” he said apologetically. “I don't trust the stuff you people drink.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He looked at me. “Oh, you mean the pills. Migraine. I had a terrible one earlier in the evening.”

I'd thought his face beneath what I was sure was dyed black hair looked unnaturally pale. “Is that why you didn't go to the reception?”

He peered at me curiously. “How do you know I was invited?”

I shrugged. “You told me you'd been invited to the prison inauguration. It's a reasonable conclusion that you were on the guest list for tonight as well.”

“You're right,” he conceded, smoothing his hair back. “I couldn't see straight and the idea of going to a party brought me out in even more of a sweat than I was already experiencing.”

I glanced at my notes. “Yet you were logged arriving here at eight thirty-one. That was an hour after the reception began.” I held him in my gaze. “Something go wrong with your travel arrangements?”

Duart looked straight back at me. “Yes, as a matter of fact we did have a problem. Or rather the helijet did. There was a delay while they cleaned a seagull out of a turbine.”

“You came in a helijet? One of those Oxford contraptions?”

He nodded, a faint smile on his lips. “Don't look so amazed, Quint. Glasgow and New Oxford have many joint interests. The Hebdomadal Council is sometimes gracious enough to afford me the use of its aircraft.”

I stored that away for future consideration. “So you stayed here all evening nursing your migraine?”

“Indeed. I was past the worst when I heard the administrator's scream.” He shook his head. “Pretty disgusting thing to find in your bath.”

I was watching him closely again. “You haven't had any similar cases in Glasgow, have you?”

He knew immediately what I was getting at. In 2026 the trip I'd taken to his city had involved plenty of mutilation. Not to mention murder.

“No, my friend,” he replied firmly. “The Major Crime Squad has been relatively underemployed since you honoured us with your presence.”

“How about the guilty parties?”

“Safely locked up in Barlinnie.”

I sincerely hoped he was being straight with me. The people behind those killings were capable of anything.

We chewed the fat for a bit longer but that didn't get me anywhere. I was pretty sure Duart was being straight with me about his lack of involvement in events on the floor above.

The first secretary looked at his watch again. “Are we done, Quint? I need some sleep.” He gave me a cautionary look. “I have a meeting with the senior guardian at nine o'clock.”

I got to my feet. “I wish you joy of it, Andrew.” First names were the way in Glasgow – something to do with equality and fraternity.

“What's this all about, for the love of God?” he asked. “Could the arm in the bath just be some kind of a sick joke?”

I opened the door and glanced back at him. “I doubt the donor's laughing.”

Back in the vacant flat upstairs Davie and I checked their statements. Duart's secretary said the same as his boss and, since no one missing an arm had turned up inside the building and neither of them had been seen leaving the complex, we moved on to other concerns. We'd covered several procedural issues with the command centre when there was a tap on the door.

“It's open,” I shouted.

Doctor Verzeni appeared, his thick hair ruffled. “Citizen Dalrymple,” he said, tripping over the consonantal clusters in my name. “Administrator Raphael would like to see you.”

“Right. Give me five minutes.”

The doctor stayed where he was. “I don't think you understand,” he said slowly. “We do not keep the administrator waiting.” The menace in his tone made me look up from my notes.

“Look, pal—” Davie began, breaking off when he saw me shake my head.

“I want to keep her sweet,” I said under my breath. The look on his face told me what he thought of that. “Finish off making arrangements, will you?”

Verzeni led me back into the Bell Rooms and I began the long walk to the lounge furniture. As I got nearer the plush Walter Scott sofa a frisson of surprise ran up my spine. The administrator was talking to herself.

She wrapped things up as I reached the end of the room, the only words that I heard being something like “imperative that camera locates subject soonest”. It was only when she touched the silver appendage round her neck that I got a hint of what she'd been doing.

Raphael registered the direction of my gaze. “This is my nostrum,” she said, raising her hand to her chest again.

“Your what?”

“My nostrum. It is what we call our personal computer cum communication device.” She beckoned me to come closer and tilted the device towards me. Something she did with her finger made a tiny screen filled with letters and digits appear. Another movement on the rear brought up a selection of icons. “It's also voice-operated,” the administrator explained. “My own voice is the only one that activates this particular unit, of course.”