Three in the morning; dry, now, but cold. The police driver leaves the engine running and our exhaust smoke drifts into the air to one side on a chilly breeze. The Grassmarket is silent. The car isn't; the radio chirps now and again and I can't stop coughing.
The cop in the phone box waves, bang on three.
"Corner of West Port and Bread Street, soon," Andy says, then hangs up.
It's walking distance, but we take the car anyway, pulling up outside the Gas Rock Cafe bar. Nothing much here; office buildings, shops across the street. Another unmarked car is parked on Bread Street itself. The vans with the uniformed police are parked on Fountainbridge and the Grassmarket, and the various patrol vehicles are still cruising in the neighbourhood.
McDunn takes a walk around, then comes back to the car.
We have some coffee from a big thermos, sipping it black. It helps my cough a bit.
"Soon," McDunn says, contemplatively, looking into his plastic cup as if searching for coffee grounds to read.
"That's what he said," I tell him, clearing my throat.
"Hmm." McDunn leans forward to the two guys in the front. "Don't smoke, do you, lads?"
"No, sir."
"I'll go outside to be unhealthy, then."
"That's all right, sir."
"No; I want to stretch my legs anyway." He looks at me. "Colley; smoke?"
I cough again. "Can't make me any worse."
Handcuffed to the DI: I guess it's a kind of promotion. We light our fags and have a stroll, down past the pub, across the road to look in the window of a second-hand bookshop, then walk up past a video shop, a butcher's and a sandwich shop, all of them dark and quiet. A taxi rattles past, for-hire light on, heading into the Grassmarket. We stand leaning over the pedestrian barrier at the kerb. The tenement buildings behind look run-down and from here I can see the Victorian pile of the old Co-op building which closed just this year, and the "sixties-modern Goldberg's department store, shut down the year before.
Doesn't even smell too good right here; there's a wet-fish shop just behind us and a chip shop down the road but upwind; even the pavement looks greasy. Can't imagine they'll be bringing the Euro-heads of state down this neck of the woods for a black-pudding supper and a dirty video. Christ; that beano's only three weeks away now. Bet the Lothian police boys are enjoying this little outing when they've got all that to look forward to. I expected to be busy doing lots of Euro-articles for the paper in the run-up, right about now. Ah well.
"He had a good Army record, your friend," McDunn says after a while.
"So did Lieutenant Calley," I suggest.
The DI ruminates upon this. He studies the cone of his cigarette, smoked down almost to the filter now. "Do you think he's politically inspired, your friend? Looks it, up till now."
I stare up High Riggs as another taxi comes bumping down towards us. McDunn folds his cigarette neatly against the railing of the barrier we're leaning on.
"I don't think it's political," I tell McDunn. "I think it's moral."
The DI looks at me. "Moral, Cameron?" He sucks through his teeth.
"He's disillusioned," I say. "He used to have lots of illusions, and now he's got only one: that what he's doing will make any difference."
"Hmm."
We turn to go; I drop my fag to the greasy pavement and grind the butt out with my shoe, then look up. The lights of the cab turning out of High Riggs and rattling down West Port swing across behind us.
I stare. McDunn's saying something but I can't hear what it is. Funny noise in my ears. McDunn's tugging at my wrist with the handcuffs. "Cameron," I hear him say, somewhere in the distance. He says something else after that but I can't hear what it is; there's this weird roaring noise in my ears; high-pitched but roaring. "Cameron?" McDunn's saying, but it's still no good. I open my mouth. He taps me on the shoulder, then holds my elbow. Finally he brings his head round in front of me, putting his face between me and the fish shop. "Cameron?" he says. "You all right?"
I nod, then shake my head. I nod again, pointing forward, but when he looks he can't see anything; the shop is dark and the street lights don't light up the interior.
"Ha…" I begin. I try again. "Have you got a torch?" I ask him.
"A torch?" he says. "No; got my lighter. What is it?"
I nod my head at the fish-shop window again.
McDunn flicks his lighter. He peers in, face close to the glass. He shields his eyes with his other hand, taking my hand with it.
"Can't see anything," he says. "Fish shop, isn't it?" He glances up at the shop's sign.
I nod back towards the unmarked car. "Tell them to reverse up Lauriston Street and put full beam on. On here," I say.
McDunn looks narrow-eyed at me, then seems to see something in my face. He waves to the car. They put the window down and he tells them.
The car whines backward up Lauriston Street, lights on.
Full beam; we turn away from the glare and stand just to one side of the shop front.
The fish shop has a pull-up front window. Inside there is a single slab of what looks like green granite, sloped a little off the horizontal, where the fish are displayed when the shop's open. It has stubby, rounded walls at each side and a little gutter at the bottom, near the window.
On the slab there are bits of meat, not fish. I recognise liver — ruddy chocolate-brown and silky-looking — kidneys like dark, grotesque mushrooms, what is probably a heart and various other cuts of meat, in steaks, cubes and strips. At top centre of the slab there is a large brain, creamy-grey-looking.
"Good Christ," McDunn whispers. Funny, it's that that brings the shivers, not the sight, not after that first glimpse and realisation in the taxi's headlights.
I look back at the neat, almost bloodless display. I suspect even a Sun reader would know none of this came from a fish; I'm fairly sure it's human, but just to leave us in no doubt, at bottom centre of the slab there is a man's genitalia; uncircumcised penis small and shrivelled and grey-yellow, scrotum crumpled and brown-pink, and the two testes pulled out, one to each side, little egg-shaped grey things like tiny smooth brains, connected by slender convoluted pearly tubes to the scrotal sac, so that the final effect is oddly like a diagram of ovaries connected to a womb.
"Halziel or Lingary, I wonder?" McDunn says, sounding a little croaky.
I look up at the sign. Fish.
I sigh. "The locum," I tell him. "The doctor; Halziel." I start coughing.
The lights behind us flash, just as I'm about to ask him for another fag. The car comes quickly across the street to us, turns to face down West Port, and the passenger's window opens again.
"Found one of them, sir," Flavell says. "North Bridge."
"Oh, my God," McDunn says, putting his free hand up to the back of his head. He nods down the street to the other car. "Get those lads here; the other one's lying in this fish shop, dissected." He looks at me. "Come on," he says, rather unnecessarily as we're still handcuffed together.
In the car, he unlocks the cuffs and pockets them without comment.
And so to North Bridge; slanting over the platforms and glass roofs of Waverley Station, newly painted, floodlit, the link between the old and the new towns, and barely a cobble's throw from the Caley building.
There are two cop cars there already when we arrive. They're pulled up near the high end of the bridge, on the west side where the view looks across the station and Princes Street Gardens to the Castle.
The decorated parapet of the bridge here holds a couple of large plinths, one on either side. On the east, where during the day you can see Salisbury Crags, the countryside of Lothian and the scoop of the Forth coast at Musselburgh and Prestonpans, the plinth supports a memorial to the King's Own Scottish Borderers; a group-sculpture of four giant stone soldiers. There is a similar plinth on the west side, where the cop cars are, blue lights strobing along the painted panels of the parapet and the grubby blond stonework of the plinth. Until now that plinth has been empty, sitting there unoccupied and unused except to provide temporary parking for the odd wittily removed road cone or possibly a platform for an adventurous rugby fan to demonstrate high-altitude pissing from.