“She was lying down there,” said the patrol leader, a middle-aged guardswoman with multiple scars crisscrossing her face. She pointed to marker tape on the road near where it met a ramshackle bridge over the river bed. “Dissident bitch,” she said, spitting into the dust. “Deserved all she got.” She gave me a suspicious glance and put her hand on the grip of her truncheon. It wasn’t hard to work out how she’d come by the injuries to her face. Plenty of older auxiliaries lost friends in the operations against the drugs gangs or got carved up in fights with dissidents and black marketeers. They tend to volunteer for permanent city line or border duty and they frequently don’t take prisoners. We were lucky this one had played things by the regulations.
“Find out what the guard squad know, Davie,” I said. “I’m going to scout around.”
“Okay.”
“Dry as a desert bone yard,” I muttered, kicking the hard surface of the road. It had once been asphalt but twenty years of neglect had turned it into a dirt track with more pockmarks than an adolescent addicted to deep-fried chocolate bars. There were drops and spatters of blood on the dusty surface. Across the water the track turned into what I remember had been a nature trail when I was a kid. The trees along it were drooping skeletons, their branches and trunks casting faded leaves like flakes of desiccated skin. The place echoed with the dazed and confused songs of birds whose genes hadn’t prepared them for life in the Big Heat. I found myself looking down at the meagre river and thinking of Frankie Thomson. It seemed like a long time since I’d kneeled by his body further down the same stream. I wondered if I was wasting my time. What could he have had to do with the woman who was nearly killed out here? What connection could Fordyce Kennedy have had with her? Christ, I hadn’t even been able to work out a connection between Frankie and Fordyce yet. Maybe this was one of those cases that don’t have connections. And yet – a homicidal attack so soon after the two poisonings in a city where murder is rarer than citizens who love the Council? A homicidal attack next to the Water of Leith. You had to wonder.
“No traces?” Davie called, finishing his conversation.
“Not that I can see. There’s no way of telling which way she and her attackers came and went.” I looked up and down the trail then moved back to the Water of Leith. “We’ll need to get search teams out here.”
“Why?” Davie asked doubtfully, flipping his notebook shut. “What do you expect to find?” I watched as Davie came across the bridge. He was shaking his head. “Nothing much from the guard patrol. They found the woman where the leader said and called in immediately. Apart from looking around the nearest buildings on the other side, they sat on their arses and waited for backup.”
“You can hardly blame them in this temperature,” I said. “To answer your question, what I expect to find is traces of the victim and her companions. If this has anything to do with the poisonings, we can probably forget finding anything that identifies her assailant.”
“Companions?” Davie drank from his flask and offered it to me. “How do you know she wasn’t on her own?”
“I don’t,” I said, handing back the flask. Even warm barracks water went down well in the burning sun. “But think about it. She had nothing on her apart from a few clothes. Dissidents usually come with the wherewithal to survive in the open for weeks.”
“Maybe she was robbed,” he suggested.
“Maybe. Or maybe she holed up somewhere nearby with her pals.” I grinned at him. “Leaving us a large pile of helpful evidence, maybe including bottles of the Ultimate Usquebaugh. You remember the tattoo?”
He nodded.
“A yellow number four. I reckon there were three others in her little gang.”
“Come into the shade, man,” Davie said. “The sun’s obviously getting to you.”
“Ha. All the same, it’s as good an idea as any you’ve come up with, pal. Call up a couple of squads to search the area. Till they get here, we’ll do the job for them. You take the other bank. I’ll stick to this one.”
He looked about as enthusiastic as a kid in one of the city’s primary schools on the morning of his quarterly political institutions test.
The trail on my side led away from the water and ended up at another heavily pot-holed road running alongside an expanse of overgrown fields. On the crest beyond them stood the ruins of what had once been Merchiston Castle School. It had been used by a particularly vicious drugs gang who called themselves the Boys in Blue. When the directorate finally caught up with them, the headbangers set fire to the former public school and turned themselves into the Boys in Red. I stopped and sniffed the hot air. Even this close to the city, you can smell the parched fields in the hinterland.
I moved on down the road, thinking of Katharine. She’d spent the last three years mucking out byres and picking potatoes. Had the end of the farm really turned her into a crazed killer? I didn’t think so. She was passionate and strong-willed, as I knew to my cost. She walked out on me in zozz because she thought I loved my job and myself so much that she didn’t stand a chance. But I couldn’t see her putting nicotine into whisky bottles. Then again, the way I panicked in the infirmary showed that my emotional involvement with her was still strong. How objective was I being?
The path led deeper into the woods. There was something about a spot where the road sloped back down towards the water that bothered me. I breathed in deeply. Dried leaves, earth, dust, a faint reek from the river bed – the same as everywhere else around there but not the same. Suddenly a raucous shriek came through the trees ahead, making me stop dead. The noise was repeated then another call at a slightly different pitch started up. I relaxed slightly. Crows. But it wasn’t just the birds that had got to me. I stepped forward carefully, feeling that something was about to happen.
Then my mobile rang.
“Dalrymple? Public order guardian.”
“What, Lewis?” I asked, still trying to put my finger on what was wrong about the glade around me.
“Get back to the city now.” I realised that his voice was tense.
“What is it?”
“There’s been a mass poisoning. There are two dead so far and over twenty more stricken and . . .” He broke off and the line went quiet.
“And?” I prompted.
“And . . . and it happened in your father’s retirement home.”
I froze, aware that an insect had flown into my open mouth but unable to move a muscle.
“Are you there, Dalrymple? Don’t worry, Hector’s not one of the dead. The senior guardian’s supervising treatment of the survivors.”
I felt the strength surge back into my body. I spat the fly out, turned on my heel and sprinted up the slope, only dimly aware that the crows had started to shriek again.
Chapter Eleven
“You’re still alive, old man.”
“So it would seem, failure.” Hector looked up at me from his desk and his eyes creased. For a moment I thought he was going to break down. Fat chance. “Are you in charge of this poisoning investigation I’ve been hearing about?” he demanded. “If so, you’re not doing a very good job.”
Davie was over by the door of my father’s room on the third floor of the retirement home. He wasn’t doing a very good job of stifling his laughter.
“How come you didn’t drink anything today?” I asked, moving over to the window. Down below, the street was jammed with ambulances and guard vehicles.
“Who said I didn’t drink anything?” Hector was doing his old trick of standing up to adversity with extreme cantankerousness. He raised his hooded eyes to my face and was a bit taken aback by what he saw. “All right, all right, I’ll tell you. I keep a stock of waterbottles in my wardrobe. Saves me going downstairs to get a drink all the time.”
“When did you last fill them up?” I asked, pulling out my notebook.
“A couple of days ago, I think.” He looked at the pile of Latin tomes in front of him. “Yes, it was Sunday. I’d just finished translating Martial’s Ep
igrams I, XV. It’s very fine, you know.” He looked at us like a kid with a new toy. “Tomorrow is too late to live so get on with it today, that’s the gist of it.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I said ironically. “Tell me, why didn’t you go down to breakfast this morning?”
He spread his hands over his books. “Too busy with this lot. Anyway, you can have too much burned porridge, especially during the Big Heat. Wouldn’t you agree, Davie?”
The guardsman shrugged noncommittally. The day Davie got too much porridge would be the day tourists lost interest in the Kilts Up Club in Rose Street.
“Can we get on?” I asked.
“Ask away, laddie.”
“Did you see anything suspicious from up here? Anyone you haven’t seen before?”
Hector gave a gruff laugh. “You mean a shifty-looking fellow carrying a big bottle with a skull and crossbones on it? Sorry to disappoint you, Quintilian.”
“Any talk among the others?”
He shook his head. “They’re all too busy with their illicit games of poker and their dirty magazines.”
“Uh-huh.” I inclined my head towards the door. “We’d better get going, Davie. The guardian will need help downstairs.”
“If it’s the water they’re poisoning now, can I not drink the whisky?” Hector asked plaintively.
“No, you can’t!” I shouted. When I saw the disappointment on his face, I relented. “Oh, all right. I’ll send you down a bottle of malt that’s been checked. For your personal use only.”
“Don’t worry, lad,” he said, rubbing his wrinkled hands. “I won’t be sharing it with anyone.”
Guard and nursing personnel were moving to and fro in the wide Victorian hallway like well-choreographed dancers, though the nailed boots didn’t quite fit in. Hamilton came out of the resident nursing auxiliary’s office as we reached the bottom of the stairs.
“Hurry up, Dalrymple. The senior guardian’s been asking for you.”
“I’ll bet she has,” I said under my breath.
In contrast to the organised chaos I’d just passed through, the office was a pocket of remarkable calm. Sophia’s team of medics had set up wallcharts and a field drug cabinet at one end and were working there with lowered voices. She herself was poring over the occupants’ files at the desk.
“Your father’s fine, isn’t he, Quint?” she asked with a concerned look that surprised me. So did her use of my first name in public.
I nodded. “He had his own private water stock.”
“I’ll have the chemists check it all the same,” she said, writing a note and handing it to one of her assistants.
Sophia stood up and moved to a corner, beckoning to me to join her. “It looks like you may have been right about the poisoners’ strategy.” She might have called me by my first name but she was finding it hard to look me in the eye. I didn’t care about that. A frightening thought had just struck me. Did someone want my father dead?
Davie came in with a clipboard, looking sweaty and harassed. Hamilton just looked harassed – he recycled his sweat into vitriol for use on subordinates who stepped out of line. Lister 25 also joined us. His expression was that of a man who’d landed a starring role in his own worst nightmare.
“Very well,” Sophia said. “Where do we stand?” That was apprently a rhetorical question because she didn’t let anyone else speak. “The deceased residents have been removed for post-mortem and the twenty-one stricken men are being treated in a secure ward in the infirmary. Three of them are in a critical condition.” She glanced over at Lister 25. “Chief toxicologist, do you have any news?”
The chemist nodded. “Preliminary tests on the tea drunk by the dead men at breakfast have shown that we are dealing with nicotine poisoning again.”
The old man mustn’t have drunk the tea, thank Christ. Sophia, Hamilton and Davie were looking outraged but I was more surprised by the small number of deaths and by the time between breakfast and the effect of the poison.
“What was the dosage?” I asked. “Shouldn’t there have been more deaths?”
Lister 25 nodded. “Good point, citizen. The dosage was indeed much less strong than in the Ultimate Usquebaugh.” He shook his head gravely. “It’s pretty horrible stuff whatever the dosage. Especially for old people.”
“We need to find the scumbag who put the nicotine in the tea.” I looked at Davie. “Did anybody see an intruder?”
He flicked pages on his clipboard. “No. I’ve collated the statements taken from the residents who are conscious. None of them saw anyone or anything out of the ordinary.”
“What about the water supply?”
“Drinking-water was delivered yesterday at ten thirty in the morning. I’ve relayed the driver and tractor numbers to the command centre. We’ll track them down soon.”
I looked round the room. “Where’s the nursing auxiliary?”
“In shock,” Sophia said, her stern tone expressing what she thought of that performance by one of her staff. “I’ll be talking to her shortly.”
I had no doubt of that. “I wonder where the nicotine was introduced into the tea chain, so to speak. The whole water delivery couldn’t have been poisoned. Plenty of people must have drunk from it since yesterday morning.”
Davie nodded in agreement. “Correct. Several of the residents have said that they drank water from the dispenser on the ground floor as early as yesterday midday.”
“Right,” I said. “So the nicotine must have been in the kettles or teapots. Or in the milk, I suppose.”
“We’re analysing all of those,” said the chief toxicologist.
I shook my head slowly. “Not that the entry point of the poison will get us any further on if no one saw who put it there.” I leaned over the desk and grabbed the Visitor Log. According to what the nursing auxiliary had written there, the waterman and the postwoman were the only externals in the building yesterday. We’d be checking them out, but I had the feeling we were up against someone who knew how to work round the Council’s bureaucracy.
“Quint?” Sophia said softly. “Have you considered why this particular location was targeted?”
“What do you think?” I asked, looking into her pale blue eyes. It wouldn’t be the first time that Hector had unwittingly got himself involved in a murder case, but it would definitely be the first time a killer had tried to get at me by aiming at the old man. That made me more angry than I’d been for a long time. I managed to channel how I felt into thinking about the next stage of the investigation. Whoever was behind all this had just made a major mistake.
The rest of the meeting consisted of Sophia and Hamilton wrangling over how many of the city’s auxiliaries should be committed to guarding the water supplies. He wanted every last one while she took a broader view – after all, the tourists still had to be looked after so that the city’s income didn’t dry up overnight. Apart from getting them to agree to post a guard unit at the retirement home, I didn’t involve myself in the debate. I was too busy trying to work out who had both the desire and the means to have a go at me via Hector. Desire could cover any number of survivors with a grudge from the drugs gangs I’d broken up when I was in the directorate. Most of them were outside the city and impossible to lay a hand on. Not many people in Edinburgh would remember, let alone care, that my father had once been information guardian. It was years since he resigned from the rank so what could anyone have against him now? Except in my line of work you find out pretty soon that coincidences don’t happen – meaning that the poisoning in the retirement home wasn’t a random event. I reckoned I was being sent a message along the lines of “we know where your only relative lives”. But who had the means to find out where Hector was? Retired citizen records are kept in the archive like all the rest of the city’s documentation and the only people who have access are auxiliaries. There was already one of those at the top of my dubious specimens list.
“Where are you going?” Sophia asked as I moved towards the door
.
Telling guardians you’re off to put the boot into suspect auxiliaries is always risky. “I need to check something about the dead lottery-winner’s family,” I lied.
She looked at me for a moment, then nodded.
“Come on, Davie,” I said.
“Oh no you don’t,” Hamilton growled. “I need Hume 253. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a crisis on our hands here.”
I shrugged. I could handle Nasmyth 05 with both hands tied behind my back. As I passed him on my way to the door, Davie handed me a sheet of paper covered in the copperplate script required of auxiliaries. I hoped it wasn’t a philosophy essay that he wanted me to look over.
In the street I flashed my authorisation and turfed a sour-looking guardsman out of the nearest directorate vehicle. It was a battered maroon pick-up. The last time I’d seen one of those had been at the Fisheries Guard base in Leith docks. As I started the engine, I wondered if Dirty Harry had sunk any raiders recently. I lost my grip on that thought as I struggled to engage first gear. Eventually I found it after provoking several guardsmen to ill-disguised mirth. I flicked them a V-sign with my mutilated right hand and pulled away, weaving through the crush of vehicles and personnel.
Heading for the city centre, I glanced at the screed Davie had written me. He’d somehow managed to find the time to look into what I’d dumped on him earlier. The Supply Directorate had advised that they knew nothing about any trade in fake antique furniture. That didn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t one but it left us with no leads.
“Great!” I shouted, pounding my thigh then swerving to avoid an elderly male citizen who’d obviously been sampling a secret stockpile of booze. As I passed, he made an impractical suggestion about what I could do with the pick-up.
“Ah-hah,” I said, reading Davie’s last line. “Now you’re talking.” The nursing auxiliary who should have stayed at the Kennedy flat last night had been located and taken to the castle dungeons. I decided to head there before going back to the Culture Directorate.
Water of Death Page 19