House of Dust Read Free

their legs? You’re bloody right they do.
    I continued up the road and flashed ID at the checkpoint beyond the main archive. Ordinary citizens are only allowed into the tourist zone to work and technically I’m still of that rank, having been demoted for refusing orders back in 2015. But the Public Order Directorate has been using me as a freelance senior investigator for years so I’m allowed to move around unhindered, at least in theory.
    As I squeezed through a group of Indian tourists on Castlehill, I forced myself to concentrate on the report I was about to make. Lister 25 was Edinburgh’s chief toxicologist. He’d worked with me on some of my biggest cases. More interesting as far as I was concerned, he was a closet blues freak, a devotee of Robert Johnson – which wasn’t bad considering the Council banned the blues decades ago because of what it saw as the music’s subversive nature. A senior auxiliary like Lister 25 would have been for the high jump over the North Bridge if he’d ever been caught listening to the old master.
    But even more interesting right now was the fact that the city’s number one chemist had disappeared twelve days back. Without leaving a trace.
    I crossed over the narrow drawbridge leading to the castle gatehouse and asked the guardswoman on sentry duty where the public order guardian was. Lately, Hamilton had acquired the habit of roaming around his domain like a lost sheep and not answering his mobile. I was directed to the command centre in what used to be the Great Hall. On the way up the winding cobbled road I couldn’t miss different shots of the panorama over Edinburgh’s northern sector. Beyond the shops, marijuana cafés and gambling tents in the central zone – tourist access only – the suburbs where ordinary citizens live stretched away to the Firth of Forth, windows glinting in the sunshine. It looked like a picture of urban serenity; unless you knew how dangerous the youth gangs had made the streets the further you went from the city centre.
    In the restored medieval hall with its hammerbeam roof I got a surprise. It must have been a month since I last visited the Council’s security headquarters, but in that time a bank of new, ultra-modern computers had been installed. The detailed wall maps of each part of the city had been replaced in certain central locations by interlinked screen panels that gave virtual displays of streets and even individual buildings. As I watched in astonishment, one panel zoomed in on the greyhound track at Easter Road. I heard a dispatcher directing a guard vehicle to the perpetrator of a mugging who was hiding in the groundsman’s shed.
    â€œImpressive, don’t you think, Dalrymple?”
    I turned to the public order guardian. He was looking pleased, no doubt because he’d managed to sneak up on me. “What’s all this, Lewis? Don’t tell me the Council’s finally entered the twenty-first century?” Till now the city’s leaders had always done all they could to restrict the use of computers; they wanted to control the flow of information, but all they did was land themselves with a huge, paper-driven bureaucracy that no one could handle – not even an archive rat like me.
    â€œTrust you to carp,” the guardian said, shaking his head. “I’d have thought technology like this would make your job easier.” Although he was in his late seventies, Lewis Hamilton was still an imposing figure, his white hair and beard giving him the look of an Old Testament patriarch. Unfortunately, in recent times his staff have paid about as much attention to him as they do to the Holy Writ: auxiliaries are required to be atheists.
    I nodded. “It probably would.” I watched a heavily built middle-aged woman move towards us. “If I were given a free rein.”
    Hamilton caught the sharpness in my voice. “We’d all like one of those,