The auxiliary slumped forward as Davie pulled the magazine away. He rubbed his throat and gulped, his jowls vibrating like a petrified chipmunk's. Within seconds he'd called Anderson on the internal phone and told him to bring the relevant files.
I smiled at him while we were waiting. The fat man's skin had acquired a sheen of sweat. Auxiliaries have been demoted for obstructing the bearer of a Council authorisation, but I had a feeling he was more worried about his magazine. He would have paid a Scandinavian tourist plenty for it.
The co-ordinator bustled in with an armful of folders. He was balding, with the professional driver's paunch and fondness for black leather. If leather trousers had been available from the city's clothing stores, Anderson would have had a wardrobe full of them. As it was, his jacket was scuffed and his belt looked like it was about to give way. He must have had both items since before the time of the Enlightenment. Only his standard-issue boots looked new. The shine on them suggested he'd once been in the army.
“Hello there, gents,” he said cheerily. “Here's all the stuff I've got on Rory: personal file, time sheets, medical record, the lot.” He dumped the papers on his boss's desk and shook his head. “Poor sod. We thought he'd been drafted to the farms or down the mines.” He turned to me. “Is it true what they're saying, that one of his kidneys was cut out?”
“It is.” I motioned to him to sit down. “We'll go through the records later. In the meantime, I'd like you to fill me in about Baillie. How well did you know him?”
“Hardly at all,” he said with a shrug. “Even though we were in the army together.” He ran his hands down his jacket. “Rory was a secretive bugger.”
“Tell me everything you can about him,” I said.
The sun appeared suddenly above the buildings and light flooded into the room, making everyone screw their eyes up. The fat auxiliary mopped his face with a filthy handkerchief.
“Good driver,” the co-ordinator said. “Plenty of experience in all kinds of vehicles â cars, Land-Rovers, trucks, ambulances, oil tankers.” He looked at Davie and me. “There hasn't been much call for armoured cars since you lot dealt with the gangs,” he added ironically.
“Watch it,” growled Davie.
“Did he have any particular speciality?”
“Not really. As Ferguson 73 will confirm, we run a fair system here.” His emphasis on the word “we” made it clear who was really in charge. “Everyone changes round regularly to maintain efficiency.”
“Very commendable,” I said, not buying that explanation for a second. “Why do I get the impression you're stonewalling, citizen? Would you like Hume 253 here to take you up to the castle and interrogate you with his friends?”
Anderson's shoulders dropped and his cocksure attitude vanished in the sunlight. Ferguson 73 started waving his hands about in a belated and wholly unnecessary attempt to make his subordinate see reason.
“Look, citizen,” the driver said desperately, “I don't know anything about what Rory was up to.”
“But you suspected something.”
Anderson nodded. “Aye. I mean, we've always had a reputation for being on the make, we drivers, especially when we're on the tourist buses and horse-drawn carriages. Christ, they offer us tips. We can't offend them by saying no.”
Davie and I didn't say anything. The commander put his head in his hands. It was obvious he was on a percentage.
“But Rory,” Anderson continued, “Rory was something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“He always had a lot more in his wallet than the rest of us, even though his roster was the same as everyone else's.” The co-ordinator shrugged. “I've often wondered where he got it.”
“Those tips you mentioned â how much do you make from them?”
“Say five US dollars, maybe ten of those Chinese things . . .”
“Renminbis,” said the fat commander hoarsely.
“Ever get anything from the Greeks?”
Anderson smiled. “Oh aye, they're very generous. They'll give you five thousand of their currency on a good day.”
I wrote the numbers down in my notebook. “What could a driver expect to make from tips every year?” I glanced at the man behind the desk. “Net of what he pays your boss here.”
The driver grinned. “No one works the tourist routes more than two months a year and often the guard stop us accepting tips.” He scratched his chin. “Say three hundred dollars US.”
Or around three hundred thousand drachmae, I calculated. Still a lot less than Baillie's wife had flushed away. I turned to Ferguson 73. “Right, here's how we're going to do this. Personally I don't give a shit that you've been taking a cut. As long as you tell me everything that's been happening in this facility and go through the files with us, I'm prepared to forget about your financial arrangements. If you're good, you might even get your magazine back.”
The commander's face lit up and he started simpering like a trainee auxiliary at his first sex session.
I raised my hand. “But remember, my colleague here is in the Public Order Directorate. If he thinks either of you is holding out on us, expect tackety boots and thumbscrews.”
The threat seemed to work. We spent hours in the mess but there was nothing that cast any light on the source of Rory Baillie's wealth. The only interesting thing we discovered was about the night shifts Jean Baillie said her husband often worked. There was no reference in the duty rosters to him having driven any vehicle after eight p.m. for over six months. So what was he doing at nights?
Back on Melville Street it occurred to me that Katharine Kirkwood lived less than five minutes' walk away. Like her brother lived a few minutes walk from where Rory Baillie was murdered. Coincidence?
As I was closing the Land-Rover door, Anderson appeared round the corner. He was panting from the short run.
“Just a minute, gents.” He looked over his shoulder. “Something I didn't want to say in front of the fat shite. Rory, he caught me eyeballing the wad he was carrying . . . must have been a month or so ago. He told me he had a friend he helped sometimes.” The driver leaned further into the cab. “He said the friend was in the Finance Directorate.”
I didn't have to rack my brains for long to come up with an idea of who that could be.
Chapter Nine
Thursday evening. After a few sunny days, the fog had returned and was settling over the city as thickly as the mustard gas in a Wilfred Owen poem. I trudged up the Mound, the prospect of another Council meeting with nothing much to report weighing on me more heavily than the concrete overcoat worn by the ENT Man. B.B. King once sang about outside help â he didn't want any, but I could have done with some. I'd just spent the afternoon in the archives and I kept losing track of the time. That's always a bad sign during an investigation. If my mind starts wandering, I know the trail's going cold.
Then, out of my favourite colour, the idea came to me. I ran up Mound Place and sat down in the vestibule of the Assembly Hall to scribble some notes. Shortly afterwards a pair of gleaming brogues appeared in front of me.
“Come on, Dalrymple, you'll be late. Again.”
At the sound of Hamilton's voice I closed my notebook hurriedly.
“Working on anything interesting?”
“Are you?”
The guardian shook his head. “But I don't have to, do I? You're the special investigator.”
I followed him up the stairs and wondered about the old sod. Hamilton's involvement with the hangings still nagged me, but it had nothing to do with the murders. I'd like to have nailed my former boss, but that was another obsession from the past I had to forget.
“Your report, citizen,” said the deputy senior guardian brusquely as the meeting came to order. As the days went by, she, along with most of her colleagues, had become noticeably sharper under the strain. The city's intellectuals, who prided themselves on their deep knowledge of the human condition, were finding the killings harder to live with than ordinary citizens. Most of the latter found Baillie's murder fascinating, a source of endless speculation and gossip.
“Perhaps you could give us a recapitulation of all the evidence you have collated to enable us to gather our thoughts,” the speaker added wearily, her command of the guardians' tortuous syntax apparently unaffected.
I started off slowly, trying to spin out the little I had to report. “Well, guardians, extensive research has revealed little of significance. Sarah Spence had an exemplary service record and the only unresolved matter is where she was on the Saturday night twelve days before her death. The rosters of all directorates have been examined and no reference to her has been found.”
“But you reported yesterday that the guardsman at her barracks remembered seeing an official authorisation,” said Hamilton.
I'd told them about that to pad out an even more vacuous report. “True enough. So we're left with two possibilities. Either Taggart” â I heard the public order guardian's intake of breath â “I mean Knox 31 was mistaken, or somebody removed all traces of that authorisation from the records.”
“No doubt you favour the latter,” Hamilton said ironically. “You were always keen on conspiracies. I'd be more inclined to think the guardsman confused the dead woman with someone else.”
“What, one of your men made a mistake?”
The speaker looked at me sternly. “Continue, citizen.”
“Right. Rory Baillie. Twelve fifty thousand drachmae notes and thirteen US hundred dollar bills were recovered from the sewers outside his flat.” I glanced along the row of stony faces. “This raises more questions than it answers. For a start, none of the serial numbers on the banknotes tallied with the currency records at the airport and Leith docks.”
“Meaning that some of our visitors bring in more than they declare. That's quite normal, citizen.” The scratchy voice was that of the finance guardian, Billy Geddes's boss.
“The problem isn't only the existence of undeclared foreign currency in the city,” I said to the wizened old economist. “Though if you ask me, it doesn't seem to be in line with Enlightenment principles. The significant point is the amounts. Even the most generous tourist is hardly likely to tip a driver fifty thousand drachmae. So what was Rory Baillie doing to earn that sort of money?”
No one came up with an answer. I could have asked the same question about Adam Kirkwood, but I'd kept him out of my reports; I didn't think Katharine's case had anything to do with the Council. But I'd checked Adam's banknote. It hadn't been declared either.
“Is that all, citizen?” the speaker asked.
I shook my head. “We've been trying to track down some of the women Baillie spent his time with, but no one was willing to talk.” I gave them a bitter smile. “It isn't only in the barracks that speaking to strangers is discouraged.”
“Thank you for that observation. Kindly confine yourself to reporting the facts.” The deputy senior guardian looked at me like a hassled schoolmistress who's just been pushed over the edge by the class smartass.
I felt a bit sorry for her. “All right. A final point about Baillie. I've double-checked all the records and there's no reference anywhere to him working nights. That contradicts what his wife told us.”
“Maybe he was lying to her to cover up his extramarital activities.” Robert Yellowlees gave a brief but unusually sympathetic smile for a guardian. His colleagues didn't look too impressed.
“Maybe. But we're assuming he was murdered after curfew, when the lights were out. If he was with a girlfriend, wouldn't he make sure he was at her place by then?”
“He would,” put in Hamilton. “The chances of him avoiding all the patrols are minimal.”
I was less sure about that than he was â after all, the murderer had managed to get away twice â but I didn't argue. The likelihood was that Baillie had an authorisation and everyone in the chamber knew it. I gave them a couple of minutes to think about the fact that someone was manipulating the city's precious bureaucracy.
Then I hit them again. “There's more bad news. There was no forensic evidence pointing to the killer on the clothing found in the Water of Leith â only blood and other matter from the victim. Either the murderer was very lucky not to leave traces or he was very careful.”
“We're assuming the latter, of course,” said Yellowlees with a humourless smile.
“Of course.” I looked around the guardians. They looked about as bereft of ideas as a 1990s cabinet. Time to give them a nudge with the cattle-prod. “I had a thought on the way up here. Both the victims were killed in the early hours of a Friday morning.”
“So?” said Hamilton.
“So maybe there's a pattern. This is Thursday evening.”
The guardians' eyes were all wide open now.
“What odds will you give me on another killing in the next twelve hours?”
Davie drove up Ramsay Lane towards the castle. The fog was very thick now. Just what we wanted, especially tonight. Burke and Hare conditions.
“What are we doing up here?” Davie asked.
“I need something from Hamilton.”
“Round six of fifteen.”
“Have you been counting?”
“Got to do something while I'm hanging around.” He accelerated through the checkpoint and on to the esplanade.
“Tell me, Davie,” I said, watching him closely. “What do you know about the directorate's undercover operations?”
He looked like I'd just punched him in the balls.
“Not much,” he said quietly. “Why do you ask?”
He was a lot paler than he had been when we were next to Baillie's body. “What is it, Davie? What's the matter?”
He looked away to the damp tarmac, then turned back to me. “You remember I told you I had a girl. She . . .” He didn't finish the sentence.