Water of Death

by Paul Johnston

  The scene-of-crime squad was still hard at work in the dead man’s house and the Raeburn auxiliaries were taking statements from the residents of Bell Place. Time for us to move on.

  The barracks commander came over as Davie and I were getting into the Land-Rover. “I want to redeploy my personnel,” he said, glancing around. There were a lot of sweat-stained and short-tempered auxiliaries in the vicinity. “They’ve got other duties and this isn’t exactly a high-priority operation.”

  “I’ll pass your views on to the public order guardian,” I said sharply. Raeburn 01’s jaw dropped. I liked that. I wasn’t going to feed the gossip mill by telling him Frankie Thomson was a DM so I had to tighten the screw. “You’re probably right, commander. It’s probably natural causes.” I held my eyes on his. “But just imagine what’ll happen to your career if you take people off the case and it turns out to be a suspicious death.” I gave him an acid smile. “Do you like picking potatoes?”

  Raeburn 01 pursed his lips and decided against answering that question.

  “We’re done here,” I said. “Send copies of all the statements to the castle and post a couple of sentries at the area the scene-of-crime squad has sectioned off.”

  “Could it be a murder case?” the commander asked in a low voice.

  I shrugged. “I won’t be able to decide that if your auxiliaries don’t stay on the job.”

  He gave me a snotty look and turned away.

  “Raeburn 01?” I called.

  He stopped and glanced back.

  “Thanks for your help.”

  He almost fainted. Politeness doesn’t feature much in contemporary Edinburgh, especially during the Big Heat. I like to maintain standards.

  “Don’t take the piss, Quint,” Davie said in a loud whisper.

  My mobile rang as we were heading for the central zone.

  “Where are you?”

  “Great goddess of wisdom, your voice is—”

  “Be quiet, Quint. I’m standing in the mortuary waiting to begin the post-mortem. I have a special dispensation to miss the Council meeting. Are you coming or not?”

  Shit. I’d forgotten about the p-m. Frankie Thomson’s file would have to wait for a while. “On my way, Sophia. Out,” I said, wondering again why she was so interested in this particular dead citizen.

  “Sophia?” Davie asked, a smile blossoming beneath his beard. “Sophia? Tell me it isn’t true.”

  I became aware of a burning sensation on my cheeks. “What do you mean?”

  “Not the Ice Queen? You’re not . . . ?”

  “The infirmary, guardsman. At speed.” I glanced at him. “And if you want to stay part of this investigation, I advise you to keep your mind on the job.”

  “Okay, boss.” He grinned and turned right on to Queen Street. “As long as you promise to do the same.”

  “At last.” The medical guardian, in green robes from head to toe, looked up from the naked corpse on the table. “I could have finished this by now. I don’t know why the regulations require investigating officers to be present.”

  I shrugged as I pulled on surgical overalls. “Blame the moron who wrote them.”

  She gave me a piercing look. “I do, citizen.”

  “Very good, guardian.” I joined her by the slab. “My experience shows that senior medical staff sometimes need to be carefully watched.” The medical auxiliary who was assisting took such a sharp breath that his mask almost disappeared into his mouth. I smiled at Sophia and pulled up my own mask.

  “As you can see,” she said, “we’ve stripped the body and started the preliminary investigation. Samples of the faecal matter on the dead man’s underwear and trousers have been taken for analysis, as have scrapings from his fingernails. Hairs from head and pubis plucked, fingerprints taken, dried blood swabbed from his right foot—”

  “As per routine,” I interrupted. “Anything unusual strike you?”

  She shook her head, as much to let me know that she wasn’t going to be rushed into a premature opinion as to answer the question. She’d swallowed a lot more manuals than I’d written and she was never one to let her imagination roam free.

  “Photographs taken, clothing removed, stains sampled,” she continued. “Fibres removed, individual garments bagged.”

  I looked over at Davie and raised my eyes to the ceiling. He didn’t respond. Like Hamilton, he’s never been fond of autopsies, but unlike his superior he’s tried to pay attention to mortuary procedures. Even if they put his breakfast at risk.

  “Right, let’s get on to the important part.” Sophia’s voice was still dispassionate.

  I joined her by the upper part of the body. Frankie Thomson’s mouth was open, the tongue partially protruding. The arms were by his sides and his legs were about six inches apart. In the warmth outdoors rigor mortis had been relatively slow to develop, allowing the morgue staff to reduce the wide angle between the legs that we’d seen on the river bank. Lividity brought about by the body’s position face down on the ground was visible on the front parts of the trunk and limbs.

  Sophia was talking into a microphone suspended from the ceiling – a technological advance on the old Medical Directorate style of nurses taking dictation that she was very proud of. The fact that it had been standard equipment for decades in pre-Enlightenment Edinburgh didn’t bother her. She walked round the table slowly, stopping from time to time. Apart from the body’s undernourished look, probably a combination of bad food and excessive alcohol, it was in reasonable condition. I thought back to the horrors I’d seen in this room – torsos without heads, mutilated bodies with organs missing, cadavers with items stuffed into their innermost recesses. Frankie Thomson was a picture compared with them, at least for the time being. Even Davie looked in command of himself.

  Then Sophia picked up her dissecting knife. She opened the neck and her assistant took a sample of blood from the jugular vein.

  “He seems to have been a heavy drinker,” I said.

  She nodded. Then she started to make the long Y-incision from inside the shoulders to the groin, describing a semi-circle round the tough tissue of the navel.

  Like Davie, I took my eyes off the body as the dissection proceeded. There was a time when I followed the pathologist’s every move. Not because I didn’t trust Sophia’s predecessors – though there had been at least one who misbehaved – and not because of some dubious macho desire for blood and guts and gore. No, the post-mortem used to be the royal road to understanding the deaths I was investigating. It was in the mortuary that you found out how the killers’ minds worked and how their victims were tied to the crimes they committed. The problem was, you also found out how low human beings can sink. That kind of knowledge pollutes your soul, so now I let the experts get on with it and try to keep my eyes off the worst.

  “Stomach now,” the guardian said to her assistant. She drew it away from the abdomen and put it carefully into the large stainless-steel receptacle he held out.

  “Shall I open the wall?” the auxiliary asked.

  “No,” Sophia replied firmly. “I’ll examine it afterwards.”

  I remembered what she’d said about the dead man having consumed something that didn’t agree with him. “Anything particular in mind?”

  “I don’t make presuppositions,” she replied, glancing across at me. “Neither do I rule anything out.”

  I should have known better than to try and force her hand.

  “I’ll examine the liver later too.” Sophia held up the dark red organ and scrutinised it briefly. She put it in the scales and read off the weight. Then she moved back up the abdomen and waited as her assistant opened the thoracic cavity.

  Davie stepped back as the bones were cracked, looking like he wished he was back on the border in the middle of a dissident raid.

  Sophia took the lungs out and applied her blade. Then she stood up straight. “He didn’t drown, Quint. There’s no sign of any froth inside.”

  “Right, that’s one possi
bility ruled out. What else can we say?”

  “Very little as yet, citizen.” She was back in Ice Queen mode. “As I said, I’ll be running tests on the stomach and its contents and the liver. Also the heart, blood, vitreous humour and so on.”

  “And you’ll let me know.” I stepped back, beckoning to Davie.

  She gave me what might have been the slightest hint of an amused look. “And I’ll let you know.”

  “No chance of any prognosis about time or cause of death, I don’t suppose?” I said from the door.

  “You don’t suppose correctly.”

  Squad dismissed.

  I wanted to get across to the archive but I badly needed to take on more liquid. The infirmary had been fitted with air-conditioning in the early years of the century, but it hadn’t been turned on for a long time and the Black Hole of Calcutta would have been cooler. We went to the canteen, where Davie rapidly got over the post-mortem and put away what he regards as a normal lunch. I had just the one filled roll with my jug of water. There’s a limit to how much grit-ridden luncheon meat and grey mayonnaise I can eat. Nursing auxiliaries and citizen workers sat slumped over the Formica-topped tables in the heat, their eyes anywhere except on their plates.

  “So what do you reckon, Quint?” Davie asked, his mouth full. He once told me that after the rations he’d had on the auxiliary training programme, he could eat anything. I thought he was joking.

  I poured the last of the jug’s contents into my chipped glass. “I reckon we’re going to the castle, my friend. You can keep Hamilton off my back while I hit the DM archive.”

  “Keep the public order guardian off your back?” Davie asked. “How do you expect me to manage that?”

  I got up from the table. “You’ll think of something, my friend.”

  “Oh, aye.” He followed me to the door. “I tell you what. I’ll distract him with a heap of barracks surveillance reports if you answer me one question.”

  I fell for it. “Okay, what do you want to know?”

  He caught up with me and grabbed my arm. “Are you really messing about with the medical guardian, Quint?”

  I glared at him. “No comment, guardsman.”

  He laughed at length. “Just watch out for chilblains on your . . .” He broke off as a pair of winsome young nursing auxiliaries passed into the canteen.

  Saved by the belles.

  The archive containing all the files on the city’s demoted auxiliaries is maintained by the Public Order Directorate and housed in the castle for maximum security. Imagine the embarrassment to the Council if the crimes committed by its trusted servants became common knowledge. Some of the reasons for demotion are seriously pathetic: repeated refusal to accept a partner in the weekly sex session, illicit meetings with the family members auxiliaries are supposed to cut themselves off from, even persistent failure to report for duty on time. On the other hand, some offences are potentially scandalous: bribery, corruption, summary execution of deserters. Most demoted auxiliaries fall between the two poles, disobedience being the most frequent violation of regulations. That’s what did for me back in 2015. I lost my lover Caro and my faith in the Enlightenment at the same time, and it was easier to drop out than to take any more orders in the directorate. One thing about being a DM is that you understand what it’s like to reach the end of the road, meaning that you regard fellow ex-auxiliaries in a different light from other ranks in the city – which was partly why I wanted to find out about Frankie Thomson before anyone else did. But that wasn’t all. I was still puzzled about the way he was sprawled on the river bank wearing only one shoe. And about the presence in his kitchen of three bottles of a previously unknown brand of whisky with little more than a sip taken from one of them.

  The DM archive is in what were originally cart sheds at the western end of the castle rock. They were turned into tearooms in the last century but the Public Order Directorate has no time for such frivolities, especially since no tourists have been allowed through the gatehouse since the Council took charge.

  I flashed my authorisation at the senior of the two guardsmen at the entrance. I could tell he knew me, but he still went carefully through the procedure of confirming my credentials with the command centre and entering my details in a logbook. Eventually I was allowed in to the building. An elderly female auxiliary with a sour face met me and led me to the requisition desk. There was absolutely no chance of me getting away with omitting my name from the records like I’d done in the citizen archive. I filled in the form for Thomson, Francis Dee, and waited in the stifling heat for the file to be located.

  “Here you are, Citizen Dalrymple,” the clerk said drily. “I’ll be checking that all the pages are intact before you’re allowed to leave.”

  I resisted the temptation to make a comment involving the Latin word “intacta” and took the weighty grey folder to a desk in the far corner of the poorly lit room. All the windows were shuttered to keep the sun and curious eyes out.

  I got stuck into the dead man’s tale – and a rather curious one it was. Frankie Thomson had been an Enlightenment member for two years when the party won the last election. He’d worked for the only Scottish bank to survive the chaos of the financial crash of 2001 and, reading between the lines, I got the idea that he’d handled some deals that benefited the party. After independence, even though he was in his thirties, he went through the newly instituted auxiliary training programme – tours of duty fighting on the border and against the drugs gangs included – then had been posted to Napier Barracks in the south of the city. His barracks number was Napier 25 and he’d spent ten years doing general administrative work, interspersed with periods of active duty on the streets – even senior auxiliaries had to do that at the height of the drugs wars.

  Then things went murky. The old harpy at the desk might be keeping a close eye on what I did with the file but that hadn’t always been the case. From 2013 until he was demoted in April 2024, Frankie Thomson’s documentation was much less complete. There were the usual barracks evaluations, sex session reports (he was hetero), medical records (which referred to his fondness for the bottle) and lists of close colleagues – the last with very few numbers on them, suggesting the dead man wasn’t exactly the sociable type. But, contrary to standard practice, there was hardly anything about what he actually spent his days doing. There were none of the pro formas detailing work rosters and no progress reports by senior auxiliaries. Someone had weeded this file, probably before it arrived in this archive. It was only by chance that I came across a reference to his place of work in a physical fitness programme he’d been ordered to attend in 2018. It made me think though. Apparently Napier 25 worked in the Finance Directorate – and not just in any old department. He’d been a member of the elite Strategic Planning Department.

  I leaned back and the poor-quality chair beneath me creaked alarmingly. Frankie Thomson might have ended up as a bog cleaner but he was massively overqualified for that job. I turned pages and found his Demotion Charge Sheet. At least no one had pilfered that. He’d been done not for ripping off the city, like certain people I could think of in the Finance Directorate, but for sticking his hand down a female tourist’s blouse in the Three Graces night club – she’d been a member of a group of potential investors Frankie was entertaining. Molesting the city’s visitors is as heinous a crime as you can commit in the Council’s eyes, especially in a joint like the Three Graces where the biggest spenders go, but something bothered me about the charge. I turned back to the front of the file. The dead man stared out at me from his auxiliary-entry photograph, his face twenty years younger and partially obscured by the beard required of his rank until recently. He had been thin then as well, his features weaselly, and his eyes seemed to look at the lens reluctantly. I went back to the sex sessions reports I’d scanned earlier and confirmed what I thought I’d registered – that he was so lukewarm in his relations with female auxiliaries that several of them had filed complaints about his “lack of zeal”,
as the barracks phrase goes. So what the hell was he suddenly doing grabbing the fifty-nine-year-old breasts of a Lebanese casino owner’s wife?

  Before I got any further, my mobile rang.

  “Dalrymple? Where are you?” The public order guardian sounded unusually mellow. Perhaps the Council had voted to reinstate flogging.

  “Checking some records.” Never be any more specific than you have to when reporting to guardians.

  “Are you any further on with the dead man?”

  “Getting there. I need a bit more time.”

  There was a pause and I thought I was about to be blasted. “I hope it’s worth it,” Hamilton said threateningly.

  “Catch you later, Lewis. Out.”

  I looked down at the photograph of Frankie Thomson – Napier 25 as was – and rubbed my cheek. Time was beginning to press and I knew where I wanted to go next. I punched Davie’s number.

  “I thought you were meant to be distracting you know who.”

  “I tried, Quint. I thought he’d got sidelined laying into a guardsman who was caught listening to Radio Free Glasgow.”

  “That explains why he sounded cheerful.”

  “Yeah, well, the guardsman answered him back and that reminded the guardian of you.”

  “Brilliant.” I headed for the desk to return the file. “Fancy spending some time in a smoke-filled room?”

  The elderly auxiliary took the file and gave me the eye.

  “Frankie Thomson’s place of work?”

  “Well spotted, guardsman. Can you find something appropriate to wear? Your uniform won’t go down too well with the tourists.”

  “And your festering T-shirt and stained shorts will?” Davie said sarcastically. “And stop calling me guardsman. You’re the only person who still does.”

  “I haven’t got used to you being a commander,” I said. “We can go via my place so I can change, guardsman.”

  “What difference will that make?” he asked, laughing and then breaking the connection.