Water of Death

by Paul Johnston

  As usual, most of the documentation was a waste of time – annual evaluations of worker competence, personal development statements, lifelong education credits, Platonic philosophy debates attended etc., etc. The original Council was genuinely committed to improving citizens’ lives and, more important, citizens’ abilities to make more of themselves. Whence the stress on education, the availability of better jobs for those who gained higher qualifications, the chance of roomier accommodation and so on. Even after twenty years no one has much of a problem with those ideals, although these days it’s the lottery prizes that provide most of the concrete benefits and very few people win those. You get the impression that the Council, desperate as it is to please the tourists, only goes through the motions with its own citizens. It’s the bureaucracy that’s taken charge, a vast, paper-consuming machine that piles up more and more data and requires a huge staff to satisfy its demands. But I wonder if anyone’s life is actually improved by the machine. Most of the files I see are only opened when new pages are inserted. No one has the time or inclination to read the contents.

  Except in the case of Fordyce Bulloch Kennedy. The consultation sheet stapled to the inside front cover showed that an auxiliary from the Edlott Department of the Culture Directorate had examined the file on 8 June. I checked inside and found that was the day after Fordyce’s ticket did the business. Obviously Edlott wanted background information on their latest winner. They’d even taken copies of particular pages, which was interesting because there are hardly any operational photocopiers in the city and auxiliaries are encouraged to make handwritten notes – thus adding to the bureaucracy. Paper in Edinburgh breeds faster than the nuclear reactors that put pockmarks all over the former Soviet Union in the early years of the century. I wrote down the barracks number of the auxiliary who’d been there before me – it was Nasmyth 05.

  As for the missing man, he seemed like a pretty average guy – early fifties, highly commended cabinet-maker, no violations of the City Regulations, no contacts with known dissidents or deserters, plenty of Mentioned in Annual Reports for giving voluntary lessons in furniture-making in his spare time. The only black mark was that he was a bit too devoted to his kids – the Council has always discouraged excessive emotional attachment to offspring because they want the city’s children to grow up strong and self-reliant. He was also very close to Hilda and had taken what was the risky step back in the early years of the Enlightenment of insisting they continue to live together. The Council then was keen on breaking up what it regarded as the constricting bonds of marriage and encouraging “personal growth”. The guardians eventually realised that it was easier to let couples stay together if they wanted to. In general Fordyce Kennedy seemed to be an all-round good citizen. In my experience that’s not necessarily a good sign.

  I went back to the stacks and pulled the files on his wife and children. As regards the female members of the family, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Hilda had been a cleaner in various tourist hotels until her mental state had begun to deteriorate, while Agnes had trained as a painter and decorator at the Crafts College. Her school records showed that she’d been an average student, one who’d shown no interest in becoming an auxiliary. For the last three months she’d been working in a former school that was being converted into a tourist hostel.

  The son Alexander – known as Allie – was a bit more interesting. He’d been a rebel when he was a teenager and had served several spells in the Gulag-like youth detention centres the Council used in the past to sort out nonconformists. He was a postman after that but his recent work records were pretty random. Under previous Councils he’d have been nailed as soon as he missed a day, but things are less strict now and the bureaucracy sometimes doesn’t function as effectively as it thinks. I began to wonder what Agnes’s older brother was up to. He looked like he might be worth a question or two.

  The only other thing that struck me about the family was that the two children were still registered as living with their parents. The Council always encouraged children to move into their own accommodation as soon as they were eighteen in order to break what it regarded as the divisive effects of the family on broader society. Of course, there was never enough decent housing to enable the guardians to insist on the policy for all citizens, but it was still a bit unusual for offspring in their mid-twenties to stay at home. Agnes’s excuse was that she was looking after her mother. What was her brother’s?

  I called the guard command centre in the castle on my mobile and asked the duty watch commander if she’d been informed about the missing lottery-winner. She answered in the affirmative without taking more than a second to think. Lewis Hamilton himself had told her to circulate a description to all barracks. They’d been on the lookout for Fordyce all over the city since last night but there had been no sign of him. I asked her to keep me advised and signed off. Then I finished taking notes from the folders and replaced them, following my normal practice of omitting my name from the consultation sheets. It keeps people guessing.

  On my way out I stopped off at Ray’s office. He was deep in his mass of paperwork. I dug into my shoulderbag and tossed over his book.

  “Ah, Black and Blue,” he said, giving it a quick glance. “What did you think?”

  “Good, my friend. It was the only one of Ian Rankin’s that I hadn’t read. A state-of-the-nation novel, no less. I’d almost forgotten that Scotland actually used to be a country.”

  “Before the robber barons in the Scottish parliament tore each others’ throats out and the drugs gangs divided up the territory,” Ray said, shaking his head. He sat back in his rickety chair and smoothed the folds of skin on his neck. In the guard he’d been a unit leader renowned for his upper body strength, but since he lost his arm nearly ten years ago he’d turned into a wraith-like figure. His black hair went pure white in the space of a few weeks and the eyes above his grey beard were lustreless. He put his hand on the tattered paperback I’d returned. “There was still oil in the North Sea then,” he said emptily.

  “Not for long there wasn’t,” I said, catching sight of his fingernails. They were ingrained with dirt that looked a lot more heavy duty than the usual archive dust. “How’s the book trade?”

  Ray looked up at me sharply and bit his lip. If I didn’t know him better, I’d have said he was trafficking more than the odd crime novel. “Not so loud, Quint,” he said. “That American dealer’s still around, I think. Any special requests?”

  “Whatever early editions of Chandler he’s got. Especially The Lady in the Lake. It’s my favourite.” I smiled. “Cheap early editions, of course.”

  He nodded. “Aye, of course. What have you got to trade?”

  “I still have a couple of E.C. Bentleys I can live without.” I gave him a wave. “See you, pal.”

  “Don’t let them grind you down, Quint.”

  “You know that’s not in my nature, Ray.” As I turned to go, I accidentally kicked a book across the ragged carpet on his office floor.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said quickly. “I’ll pick it up later.”

  “No worries,” I said, bending down. I put the copy of Wilfred Owen’s collected poems on top of Black and Blue. “Ian Rankin and Wilfred Owen. What you might call a strange meeting.”

  Ray’s mouth opened as if he were about to speak then shook his head slowly and went back to his files.

  I hit the street and sheltered from the sun under the awning. Opposite stands what used to be the National Library of Scotland and is now the Edinburgh Heritage Centre. For tourists, mind – no locals allowed. A group of Middle Eastern women in long robes and veils had gathered on the pavement. Their guide, an Arabic-speaking female auxiliary dressed up as a society hostess from the time of Sir Walter Scott, was trying hard to whip up interest. No doubt the visitors would just love the exhibition halls stuffed with Council propaganda. The photographs of the riots in 2002, the year before the last election, are apparently a big draw – drug dealers handing ou
t free scores on street corners, policemen being stoned, pub cellars under siege by the mob. No wonder the Enlightenment Party got the biggest majority in British history, then promptly declared independence and left the rest of the UK to mayhem and pillage.

  So, I wondered, what to do about Fordyce Bulloch Kennedy? There were several things I wanted to look into. The most obvious was Edlott. He would have a handler in the Culture Directorate, perhaps the one who’d consulted his file, to arrange his appearances as Robert Louis Stevenson and make sure he didn’t do anything embarrassing. That auxiliary was probably waiting to be packed off to the border on fatigue duty for not keeping a closer eye on him. The Labour Directorate was another possibility. They’re forever drafting citizens into emergency squads when pitprops collapse in the mines or workers desert from the city farms. The missing man may have been picked up by mistake, in which case his name should be on a list. Then there was Fordyce’s family. When she was lucid, his wife gave the impression of being worried that he’d disappeared for good but you never know. Most violence is committed by the people closest to the victim, even in this supposedly crime-free state, and it looked like the son might have been moving in dodgy circles. But there was one possibility I had to rule out before any of those. I turned left and headed towards the checkpoint.

  The guardswoman on duty was middle-aged, her fading red hair pulled back in a tight ponytail despite the recent ruling that female auxiliaries don’t have to tie their hair down any more. She raised the barrier before I got to it and waved me through, giving me a tight smile. She must have known who I was. Christ, she may have served with me in the guard years ago. Or perhaps it was just that she’d seen my photo in the Edinburgh Guardian after one of the big cases.

  I walked up to the Lawnmarket and turned left at the gallows where they still put on a weekly mock hanging for the tourists. A hot wind from the east gusted up the High Street, filling my eyes with dust. Across the road tourists were panting up the hill but I didn’t feel too sorry for them – unlike the locals, they could look forward to air-conditioning in their hotels. A couple of them turned into Deacon Brodie’s Marijuana Club. I stood for a moment and watched. Guard personnel dressed in eighteenth-century costume were checking passports, making sure no Edinburgh citizens who’d managed to slip past the checkpoint got into the premises. One of them looked across suspiciously at my faded shorts and crumpled T-shirt. I stared back then took in the garishly painted building. Like I said, there’s a lot of irony about the way the Council’s gone back on its anti-drugs policy. There’s also plenty of cynicism. The city’s a strictly no smoking zone for the natives on grounds of health but if foreigners want to fill their lungs with the smoke from cigarettes and joints supplied with the guardians’ approval, who gives a shit? As long as they pay upfront.

  I walked across the suntrap of the esplanade towards the castle gatehouse, ranks of guard vehicles drawn up on both sides. The guard command centre in the old fortifications is about as imposing a place as you can find, even in this spectacular city. It’s just a pity that the battered Land-Rovers and rusting pick-ups make the place look like a scrap merchant’s yard. The only vehicle with any class is a ten-year-old Jeep donated to the Council by a grateful American tourist agency. Somehow it’s ended up as Lewis Hamilton’s personal transport.

  I found the guardian in his quarters in what was once the Governor’s House.

  “Ah, there you are, Dalrymple,” he said, looking up from the neat array of papers on his desk. “I was wondering when you’d show up. I suppose you want to find out if the missing lottery-winner is in my records.”

  “Well spotted, Lewis.” I went over to the leaded windows and ran my eye over the northern suburbs. Across the firth I could just make out the hills of what was Fife in the old days and is now a Scottish version of the Wild West, complete with gunmen on horseback, massacres of the locals and abandoned mining towns – badlands in spades, pardner.

  Hamilton joined me. “As much as another month of this bloody heat to go,” he said, wiping the sweat from his wrinkled forehead. Although he was in his seventies, the public order guardian still had a firm grip on the City Guard. His beard and hair were almost completely white but his bearing was as military as ever. “Well, I’ve checked all my Restricted Files. There’s no reference to Kennedy . . .” He broke off and went back to the papers on his desktop. “What the hell was his first name?”

  “Fordyce,” I said. “Fordyce Bulloch Kennedy.”

  “Thank you.” Hamilton’s acknowledgement was curt. He didn’t like being helped out, especially by an auxiliary who’d been demoted from his own directorate.

  I can never resist having a go at guardians, especially one as thin-skinned as my former boss. “You would tell me if he was one of your undercover operatives, of course.”

  The guardian’s eyes bulged as he glared at me. Finally he managed to spit something out. “I tell you he’s not.”

  “But how do I know you’re telling the truth, Lewis?” I asked, prolonging the fun.

  “How do you know . . . ?” Hamilton took a couple of deep breaths. Even in these more open times guardians don’t like having their veracity impugned, as Councilspeak would have it. Auxiliaries are taught tension control techniques but Lewis was appointed by the first Council and never went through the training programme – unlike me. “You’re doing it deliberately, aren’t you? Grow up, man.”

  “Grow up, man,” I repeated dubiously. “Bit of an oxymoron, wouldn’t you say?”

  The desk telephone buzzed, saving me from the guardian’s tongue. I watched his expression change as he answered.

  “What?” Hamilton bellowed. “Where?” He listened for a couple of seconds. “When?” He listened again. “Any ID?”

  Shit. I’d been calculating the odds of him running through the full set of interrogatives beginning with “wh”.

  “Very well. Tell the barracks commander to keep me informed.” He slammed the phone down.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, trying to give the impression of idle curiosity.

  “Nothing for you to worry about, Dalrymple,” Hamilton said, shuffling files.

  Nothing makes me suspicious quicker than a guardian telling me not to worry. “What is it, Lewis?” I said insistently.

  He caught my tone and looked up. “Oh, very well. Body found by the Water of Leith. Sounds like heatstroke or the like.”

  “Tell me more,” I said, leaning over him.

  “Middle-aged male. No identification on the body.” The guardian glanced at me then reached over for a buff folder. “Ah, I see what you mean. What age is that missing lottery-winner?”

  “Fifty-two.”

  “You don’t think it’s him, do you?”

  “Only one way to find out, Lewis,” I replied, heading for the door. “Call your people and tell them to keep their sticky fingers off the body till we get there.”

  Chapter Three

  We piled into Hamilton’s Jeep and headed off the esplanade. His driver, a middle-aged guardswoman with a heavily freckled face, seemed to be enjoying herself as she turned down Ramsay Lane at speed.

  “What do you reckon?” I said to the guardian as we roared past the Assembly Hall where the Council used to hold its daily meetings. “Murder, suicide, accident or natural causes?”

  “My driver has a perfect safety record.”

  I almost fell off my seat. There had never been much evidence that Lewis Hamilton possessed a sense of humour, let alone that he was prepared to show it off in front of his staff.

  “Surely we shouldn’t be prejudging, Dalrymple,” he went on. “But if you insist on playing games, our statistics clearly show that death from natural causes is the most likely, especially at this time of year. Accidental death comes next. Apart from dissident-related killings around the city line, there have been hardly any murders in Edinburgh since 2022. And, I’m glad to say, suicide is still illegal.”

  I put my hands out as we swung on to the Mound and
down towards Princes Street. The guardian was having a veiled go at the members of the Council who had tried to repeal the regulation banning suicide. There had been an idea that citizens would feel they had greater control over their lives, or rather deaths. The conservative wing had won that particular battle.

  I took in the panorama from our elevated position. To the right protruded the stump of the Enlightenment Monument, as the original Council had renamed the Scott Monument. Its upper sections have been dropping off regularly in recent years and there’s now a rectangular structure of scaffolding covered with tarpaulin around the top. There are vast maroon hearts painted on each side, along with the names of the foreign companies that have done sponsorship deals with the Council.

  To my left a dustcloud was rising from the racetrack in the gardens. During the Big Heat spectators watch the horses from air-conditioned stands that look like a giant’s greenhouses. What used to be lawns and flowerbeds are mostly rock gardens filled with cacti these days, though the floral clock has been kept in operation. It was being watered by a morose Parks Department labourer who had his hose at arm’s length like he’d been asked to hold someone else’s dick. Splatters of the city’s precious water raked our windows as we reached the main thoroughfare. Before we crossed to Hanover Street I caught an eyeful of awnings and flags. Edinburgh has turned into an open-air cafe society, at least in the centre where the tourists go. They were easy enough to spot, their well-cut clothes in stark contrast to the faded Supply Directorate waiters’ uniforms and overalls worn by the citizens who work in the tourist zone. Some young Chinese were watching satellite television from micro-receivers on their wrists. No doubt they were keeping up with the Beijing Stock Market – pandaflation had been rampant.