Body Politic
CONTENTS
The Quintilian Dalrymple Mystery Series
The Quintilian Dalrymple Mystery Series
THE BONE YARD
WATER OF DEATH
THE BLOOD TREE
THE HOUSE OF DUST
BODY POLITIC
A Quintilian Dalrymple Mystery
Paul Johnston
First published in Great Britain in 1997
by Hodder and Stoughton, A Division of Hodder Headline PLC
338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH,
eBook edition first published in 2011 by Severn Select an imprint
of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 1997 by Paul Johnston.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A CIP catalogue record for this title
is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0043-3 (epub)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
In the last decade of the twentieth century people bought crime fiction like there was no tomorrow â which soon turned out to be the case for many of them. It isn't hard to see why detective stories were addictive. The indomitable heroes and heroines with their reassuring solutions prolonged the illusion that a stable society existed outside the readers' security windows and armoured doors.
Since the Enlightenment won power in Edinburgh, the popularity of crime novels has gradually declined, though not as much as the guardians think. They would prefer citizens to read philosophical investigations rather than those of Holmes and Poirot, Morse and Dalgliesh, but even in the “perfect city” people hanker after the old certainties.
I often have trouble deciding what to believe. All the same, the message that the Council sent on my birthday gave me even more of a shock than the first time I heard James Marshall Hendrix playing the “Catfish Blues”.
I shouldn't have been so surprised. Sceptics and detectives have the same general principle: the only thing you can be sure of is that you can't be sure of anything at all.
Chapter One
Ghost-grey day in the city and seagulls screaming through the fog that had been smothering us for a week. Tourists started to head up George IVth Bridge for the Friday execution. I was the only local paying attention. If you want to survive in Edinburgh, you've got to keep reminding yourself this place is weirder than sweet-smelling sewage.
My shift with the squad of Parks Department labourers was due to finish at four but I'd made up my mind long before that. I had an hour before my meeting with the woman who signed herself Katharine K. It was 20 March 2020, I was thirty-six years old and I was going to break the rules.
“Are you coming for a pint, Quint?” one of the boys asked.
It was tempting, but I managed to shake my head. There would have been no escape if they had known what day it was. The Council describes birthday celebrations as “excessively self-indulgent” in the City Regulations, but the tradition of getting paralytic remains. It's one of the few that does. Anyway, I had a sex session later on and if you're pissed at one of those, you're in deep shit.
“Course he isn't.” Roddy the Ox wiped sweat and snot away with the back of his arm. “He'll be away to the library like a model arse-licking citizen.” Every squad's got a self-appointed spokesman and I never get on with any of them. So I go to the library a lot. Not just to broaden my mind. I spend most of my time in the archives checking up on the people my clients report missing.
“Actually,” I said, looking the big man in the eye, “I'm going to watch the execution.” Jaws dropped so quickly that I checked my flies. “Anybody else coming?”
They stood motionless in their fatigues, turned to stone. Not even the Ox seemed to fancy gate-crashing a party that's strictly tourists only.
The way things are, I usually try to stick out from the crowd. Not this time. As I was the only ordinary citizen pushing a bicycle towards the Royal Mile, I tried to make myself inconspicuous. The buses carrying groups to the gallows gave me a bit of cover. So did the clouds of diesel fumes, at the same time as choking me. Fifteen years since private cars were banned and still the place reeks.
The mass of humanity slowed as it approached the checkpoint above the library's grimy façade. Rousing folksongs came from loudspeakers, the notes echoing through the mist like the cries of sinners in the pit. Some of the tourists were glancing at adverts for events in the year-round Festival which is the Council's main source of income. Among them were posters of the front page of
Time
's New Year edition proclaiming Edinburgh “Worldwide City of the Year”. The words “Garden of Edin” were printed in maroon under a photo of the floodlit castle. I've worked in most of the city's gardens but I've yet to see a naked woman â or a snake.
I kept my head down and tried not to bump into too many people with my front wheel. The guards had raised the barrier as the time of the execution drew near. Fortunately they weren't bothering to examine the herd of people. I felt a stickiness in my armpits that would stay with me till my session next week at the communal baths. Why was I taking the chance? The fire in my veins a few seconds later answered the question â I'd managed to get into a forbidden part of the city. I felt like a real anarchist. Till I started calculating my chances of getting out so easily.
I let myself be swallowed up by the crowd that had gathered round the gallows in the Lawnmarket. Guides were struggling to make themselves heard, speaking Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Korean. There was a small group of elderly Americans in transparent rain-capes. They were among the first from across the Atlantic; until recently the Council refused entry to nationals of what it called in its diplomatic way “culturally bankrupt states”. A bearded courier in a kilt was giving them the sales pitch.
“The Royal Mile runs from the castle to what remains of Holyrood Palace,” he bellowed, pointing towards the mist-covered lower reaches. “The palace was reduced to ruins in the rioting that followed the last coronation in 2002. The crown prince's divorce and remarriage to a Colombian drugs heiress signed the old order's death warrant.” He paused to catch his breath and gave me a suspicious look. “The already fragile United Kingdom quickly broke up into dozens of warring city-states. Thanks to the Council of City Guardians, Edinburgh has been the only one to achieve stability . . .”
The propaganda washed over me. I knew most of it by heart. I wondered again about the note I'd found under my door yesterday. “Can't wait any longer,” it read. “Meet me at 3 Lennox Street Lane five p.m. tomorrow if you want work. Katharine K.” The handwriting was spidery, very different from the copperplate required in the city's schools and colleges. The writer must have been hanging about on the landing outside my flat for quite a time. Despite the fumes from the nearby brewery, the place was filled with her scent. I knew exactly what it was: Moonflower, classified Grade 3 by the Supply Directorate and issued to lower level hotel and restaurant workers. Beneath the perfume lay the even stronger smell of a client desperate for my services.
It was coming up to four thirty and the guides took a break from their shouting competition. Looking around the crowd, I was struck by how many of the tourists were disabled in one way or another: some were in wheelchairs, some were clutching their companions' arms, a few even looked to be blind. The Council had probably been working on a braille version of the hanging.
Then there was a hush as the condemned man was led up to the scaffold by guards in period costume. The prisoner's hands were bound and a black velvet bag placed over his head.
The guides started speaking again. The bearded man was explaining to the Americans that this was Deacon William Brodie, the city's most notorious villain.
“Here, in the heart of the city where crime no longer exists” â at least according to the Public Order Directorate â “Brodie committed his outrages. He was a cabinet-maker by trade, rising to become Deacon of Wrights and Masons. But by night he was a master-burglar, robbing dozens of wealthy householders.”
Encouraged by their guides' gestures, the tourists began to boo. The English-speaking guide moved nearer the gallows.
“Brodie was eventually caught, but not before his reputation had gained a permanent place in the minds of his fellow citizens. A century later the Edinburgh writer Robert Louis Stevenson used him as the model for his famous study of evil in
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
The man in the kilt gave a fawning grin. “Don't forget to pick up a souvenir edition of the book in your hotel giftshop.”
Under the gibbet final preparations were being made. I followed them closely, trying to work out how they faked it. There was no sign of a protective collar. It even looked like the victim was trembling involuntarily. I remembered summary executions I had seen, members of the drugs gangs that terrorised the city in the years after independence being put up against a wall. They had shaken in the same way, sworn at the guardsmen to get it over with. To my disgust I found that my heart was racing as it had done then.
The presiding officer, dressed in black tunic and lace collar, shouted across the crowd from the scaffold. “On 1 October 1788 Brodie mounted the set of gallows which he himself had designed â to be hanged by the neck until he was dead.”
There were a few seconds of silence to let everyone's flesh creep, then a loud wooden thump as the trap jerked open and the body dropped behind a screen, leaving the rope twisting one way then the other from the tarred beam. The spectators went wild.
I pushed my way to the side, wheeling my bicycle past the tartan and whisky shops towards Bank Street. I felt a bit shaky. It had struck me that maybe the execution wasn't just a piece of theatre for the tourists. I mean, staging mock hangings in a city where capital punishment has been abolished and violence of any kind supposedly eradicated is cynical enough. Actually getting rid of the small number of murderers serving life with hard labour in the city's one remaining prison would be seriously hypocritical. But with the Council you never know. It's always boasting about the unique benefits it's given us: stability, work and housing for everyone, as much self-improvement as you can stomach. But what about freedom? Even suicide has been outlawed.
I turned the corner. By the Finance Directorate, a great, dilapidated palace that had once housed the Bank of Scotland, the barrier was down and the city guardswoman standing in front of it was definitely not friendly. She stuck her hand out for my ID.