Water of Death

by Paul Johnston

  “What?” For a couple of seconds he looked like he’d seen an unfriendly ghost.

  I inclined my head towards the book that was lodged behind a file at the front of his desk.

  Ray leaned forward and took it clumsily. “Wilfred Owen.” He repeated the name slowly. “He really was a great poet, you know.” He didn’t sound all that convinced.

  I had the glass halfway to my lips when my mobile rang. I put the glass down and eventually got the contraption out of my bag.

  “Dalrymple.”

  “Quint, listen to this.” Sophia’s voice was at a higher pitch than normal. I even thought I heard it waver, which was definitely a first. “What the dead man drank . . . it wasn’t straight whisky.”

  “What do you mean? It’s not illegal to add water.”

  “This is serious,” Sophia said, with what almost amounted to a scream. “The whisky he drank was lethal.”

  “Lethal? How?”

  “I can’t talk now. This connection may not be secure.” There had been a few cases of dissidents listening in to guard communications but I wasn’t worrying about them at this point. I’d just got the message. “There’s an emergency Council meeting in a quarter of an hour. Be there. Out.”

  “Put it down, Ray!” I yelled.

  He froze, the measure of whisky he’d just poured himself an inch from his lips.

  “The glass! Put it down!”

  This time he did what I said.

  “What the fuck . . . ?”

  I plugged the cork back in the bottle and stuck it in my bag.

  “Here, that’s mine,” Ray said weakly.

  “Trust me,” I said. “Don’t drink any unfamiliar brands of whisky till you hear from me again. And don’t talk to anyone about the dead man, Ray.” I leaned over and relieved him of Frankie Thomson’s file.

  As I reached the door, I glanced back. Ray was standing with his mouth open, his single arm clutching the book of Great War poetry to his chest.

  My mobile went three more times when I was on the street. I told Davie and Hamilton to meet me on the Lawnmarket and the chief toxicologist to get himself down to the Council chamber at maximum speed. It turned out he was already there.

  “This is a nightmare, Dalrymple,” Hamilton said as Davie floored the Jeep’s accelerator. Tourists on the High Street suddenly got very close to the shopfronts.

  “Not yet it isn’t but it may well turn into one. I presume you’re arranging searches of all stocks of spirits for the Ultimate Usquebaugh?”

  He nodded. “The command centre’s on that, pending Council approval. Guard personnel are going to contact every bar in the tourist zone.”

  “I suppose they’ll get round to the citizen outlets eventually,” I said ironically. It was typical of a guardian to safeguard the city’s customers before its local population.

  “The Supply Directorate’s going to do that, Quint,” Davie said, giving me an angry glance.

  “Okay.” I nodded at the guardian. “Sorry.”

  He ignored that. “The bonded warehouses are also being advised,” he said. “And the Transport Directorate is vetting all deliveries.”

  “What else?” I grabbed the bottom of my seat as Davie skidded round the corner at the bottom of the Canongate and roared into the yard outside the Council chamber. I had a sudden vision of my father. “Jesus, the retirement homes.” The city’s pensioners get a dram every day to keep them sweet.

  “Done,” Davie said. “I told the supervisor at Hector’s place to keep the whisky supply locked up.”

  I smiled at him lamely, embarrassed that he’d remembered the old man before I had.

  We juddered to a halt.

  “Come on, Dalrymple. We’ll be late.”

  “All right, Lewis.” I looked back at Davie. “Keep on top of all this while we’re tied up here.”

  He nodded. “I’ll be in the command centre till you’re finished.”

  I followed the public order guardian up the steps and into the meeting place. The building was in the shape of an upturned boat. It was the only one of a cluster of similar structures that had survived the wave of destruction before the last election. Behind us a convoy of Land-Rovers and stationwagons carrying guardians had blocked the entrance to the car park. You don’t get many traffic jams in Enlightenment Edinburgh. Then again, it isn’t every day that someone puts something lethal in a bottle of whisky. The Ultimate Usquebaugh my arse.

  We were admitted to the Council chamber. In the old days, when the guardians weren’t interested in openness, they were happy to use the Assembly Hall on the Mound – it’s nearer the castle and most of the guardians’ directorate headquarters. But they were forced to make an effort at public accountability in the wake of the “iron boyscouts” and the unrest caused by their harsh regime a couple of years ago. So some bright spark came up with the idea of moving the location of the Council’s daily meeting to what used to be the Scottish Parliament – as if that ever had much to do with open government, with its carefully selected party lists and craven protection of vested interests.

  I walked into the main hall and looked around the rows of leather seats and pine desks. No expense had been spared when the place was built on a site previously occupied by a brewery. Fluids of various kinds were apparently a major interest of the architect – it did rain a lot more then, I suppose. In addition to the boat design, there were pools of water placed inside and outside the structures to reflect the walls and sky. They don’t do much of that these days as water’s so precious that even the Council chamber has to do without it. The pools have been filled in with earth and layers of maroon and white pebbles laid over. During the civil disorder in 2003 some bent former policemen started stealing the furnishings and fittings, including the hundreds of computers and other electronic equipment. Unfortunately for them, the Enlightenment won power and declared that looting was punishable by death. The walls round the back which were pockmarked by the firing squad’s bullets are a tourist attraction now.

  The parliament chamber itself was decorated with as many native Scottish materials as the designers could think of – granite slabs, red sandstone facings, tapestries spun in the Outer Hebrides, chandeliers of Cairngorm quartz and the like. It was a pity the original occupants hadn’t been worth as much. They spent their time abusing each other, extolling the supposed virtues of their socially divided land and claiming gigantic expenses. Unlike the building, they did not escape the wrath of the indigenous population.

  “Take your seats, please.” The senior guardian was the chief of the Tourism Directorate. That explained why he looked like he’d recently had several heart attacks. If a tourist went the way of Frankie Thomson, the city’s finances would be on a one-way trip to the centre of the earth. He looked around nervously then nodded to the sentry to pull shut the shining steel door that bore the Council arms superimposed over the St Andrew’s cross. “This session will be in camera,” he announced, his voice unsteady. “Ordinary citizens are not attending.”

  I’d been wondering where the citizen observers were. Ten of them are chosen by lot to oversee every Council meeting and one of them even gets the privilege of being elected honorary guardian for a day. The Council got the idea from the ancient Athenian constitution. Not that it stops them running the city how they see fit. They’re just more careful about covering their traces now.

  “Before we move to the main business of this emergency session, I am required to step down from the position of acting senior guardian. My tenure of thirty meetings is concluded.”

  I swore under my breath. Typical bloody Council. If they’d been on the Titanic, they’d have spent the minutes before the ship went rudder-up discussing the details of the next three-year plan. The idea behind the rotation of the senior guardian was reasonable enough – to stop individual guardians gathering too much personal power. I just wished the expiry of his term had fallen on a different day.

  The worst was yet to come.

  “The rota
shows that the medical guardian will take over.” He beckoned to Sophia to come to the rostrum and receive the official gold badge adorned with the city’s maroon heart emblem. She didn’t look too keen. Neither was I. Her workload had just gone up by the power of ten and overnight sessions in my bed would be very difficult for her to fit in.

  Sophia pinned the insignia on her blouse and accepted the thick file that her predecessor passed to her. Then she pulled out a handkerchief and wiped her forehead. Like her colleagues she’d turned up in formal dress for the meeting, as if the Big Heat didn’t exist. They were all sweltering, the men in tweed jackets and corduroy trousers and the women in starched blouses and thick skirts. It wasn’t long before they began to discard outer garments.

  The new senior guardian took a deep breath and got going. “I must report to colleagues that we are facing a potentially dangerous situation. As you will have heard, a citizen was found dead on the bank of the Water of Leith this morning. Normal procedures were followed.” She broke off her address that was in the stilted diction still favoured by the Council and glanced at me. “Citizen Dalrymple, the Council’s special investigator, was involved from the outset.”

  I felt fifteen pairs of eyes on me. Fourteen of them belonged to guardians – there are fifteen members of their rank but Sophia was no longer on for eye contact. The other pair were the chief toxicologist’s. Lister 25 pressed his lips together and nodded at me. His skin was wrinkled like a pachyderm’s and he had a worrying habit of pouting at members of his own sex, but he was a secret blues freak who regarded Robert Johnson as a genius so I had no problem with him.

  “Citizen?” Sophia’s voice was sharp.

  I smiled at her. “Senior guardian?” The title flowed from my tongue like peat.

  “Kindly favour us with your report.”

  “Right,” I said, pulling my thoughts together. It would have helped if Sophia gave the post-mortem results first but she had even more on her mind than I did. “The dead man Frankie – Francis Dee Thomson – was a demoted auxiliary.”

  A series of deep breaths was taken around the chamber. The guardians sat motionless. Lewis Hamilton was glaring at me, his cheeks darkening. I should have let him know about that on the way down. “His barracks number was Napier 25.” I looked at the guardians. “Did any of you know him?”

  They all shook their heads, some quicker than others. I wasn’t too convinced. Then again, they were hardly likely to own up in front of their colleagues. The finance guardian looked blank – he’d taken over the directorate after Frankie Thomson’s demotion.

  I filled the guardians in about the dead man’s background then turned to the physical evidence. “He seems to have had a pretty heavy alcohol problem. Three bottles of whisky with a label that hasn’t previously been seen in the city were found in his flat. A small amount had been taken from one of them.” I looked over at Sophia but she kept silent, wanting me to finish before we got into the technicalities. “Although the dead man seems to have been a solitary type, there’s evidence from a witness that he had company last night. Apparently a thin man of average height with close-cropped hair. I’ve tried to identify potential contacts in the archives, without success as yet. Frankie Thomson was a cleaner at the Smoke on the Water marijuana club but the auxiliary in charge knows nothing about his private life.”

  “If I might come in here.” Hamilton was eager to muscle in on my patch. “This afternoon I reviewed the statements taken by Raeburn Barracks personnel. I can confirm that the dead man’s neighbours are unable or unwilling to supply any information about his activities or contacts. It may be necessary to press them harder.”

  “Did the scene-of-crime personnel turn anything up?” I asked.

  Hamilton shook his head. “Not yet. No decent prints from the flat. No traces or prints around the body. We may still be lucky but . . .” His voice trailed off.

  When the public order guardian starts talking about luck you know you’re in big trouble.

  I looked back at Sophia. So did everyone else.

  “Your turn,” I said encouragingly.

  She wasn’t impressed. “Thank you, citizen,” she said icily, opening a large spiral notebook and running her finger down a page. “Very well. The post-mortem results are as yet incomplete but events are in danger of getting ahead of us. What I know so far is that death occurred between three and five o’clock this morning. I will be able to narrow that down further when my technicians complete other tests.”

  I was getting impatient. Judging by the rustling of papers and the shifting of backsides, I wasn’t the only one. “The cause of death, guardian?” I asked. “Please.”

  She caught the desperation in my voice and blushed enough for me to notice. Maybe it reminded her of another place – one where she was wearing a lot less clothing than now. “I’m coming to that,” she said hurriedly. “Anoxic anoxia.” She glanced around at the mainly blank faces. “Asphyxia due to paralysis of the respiratory system.”

  I had to ask a leading question. Like most scientists, she was reluctant to report until she’d finished all her tests. “And the paralysis was caused by?”

  Sophia looked over at the chief toxicologist. “The indications are that it was caused by nicotine poisoning.”

  There was a brief silence while the guardians took this in. It wasn’t long before puzzled expressions began to develop. I was probably exhibiting one myself.

  “Nicotine poisoning?” repeated the information guardian, the only other one apart from Hamilton who’d survived since before the “iron boyscouts”. She tugged nervously at the plait she always made of her red hair. “Nicotine as in cigarettes?”

  Sophia managed to nod and shake her head at the same time. “The same alkaloid substance, yes. But it is present in minuscule quantities in smoking tobacco.”

  “Is there any doubt about this?” Hamilton asked.

  Sophia shook her head. “We were fortunate to locate the poison so quickly. Chief toxicologist?”

  Lister 25 got to his feet with difficulty, the folds of flesh on his face vibrating. “Thank you, acting senior guardian. As you say, we were lucky. As soon as I received the bottles of the Ultimate Usquebaugh . . .”

  “The Ultimate Usquebaugh?” The culture guardian gave an uncertain laugh. He was tall and thin, an expert in late-twentieth-century sensationalist art. No doubt that helped him in the running of Edlott. “Is that some kind of joke?”

  “If so, it’s not a particularly funny one,” the toxicologist said, nettled by the interruption. “Something about the colour of the liquid immediately made me think of nicotine. In its pure form, it’s a pale yellow oil but light makes it turn dark brown. Of course, it was entirely fortuitous that I formed the connection. The quantity of nicotine in the whisky is lethal but it has no effect on the whisky’s overall colouring. All three bottles are contaminated.”

  “And you informed the medical guardian?” I asked.

  “Correct,” Sophia said, cutting in. “And when we looked for it, we found traces of nicotine in the oesophagus, stomach and other tissue.”

  “If you hadn’t known what you were looking for you wouldn’t have come across the nicotine so quickly.”

  She nodded. “Correct, citizen. There are no specific post-mortem pointers. After drinking the poisoned whisky the victim would have experienced painful burning in the mouth and oesophagus, then vomiting and diarrhoea. Death would have been preceded by violent spasms—”

  “Whence the odd angle of the legs,” I put in. “How long would it have taken for him to die?”

  “As little as a minute or two.”

  I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the blue and white inlaid ceiling. The fact that the opened bottle of poisoned whisky was in Frankie Thomson’s flat while the body was over fifty yards away bothered me.

  “Are we dealing with a case of accidental death here?” The question came from the labour guardian, a middle-aged woman with an unusually fat face for a member of her as
cetic rank. “Or of murder?”

  Hamilton snorted to show what he thought of that, but his colleague had a point.

  “Theoretically it could have been accident, suicide or murder,” Sophia said. “But that doesn’t change much regarding the measures that will need to be taken to prevent other deaths.”

  “What about the man who was with the victim?” Hamilton demanded, looking at me.

  I shrugged. “He might have panicked and done a bunk.” I shook my head. “I’m not convinced. I reckon suicide’s a non-starter. How would Frankie Thomson have known there was poison in the whisky? And how many people commit suicide when they’ve got company? He was an alcoholic. He’d have drunk anything for a hit. No, the whole set-up is strange – no fingerprints, the bottles sitting dead centre on the table with the labels facing the door, a slug taken from only one. My money’s on murder.”

  “Pretty elaborate way to kill someone,” the culture guardian muttered.

  “That’s what worries me,” I said. “We’ve got to track down the source of the bottles as well as the guy who was with the victim.”

  Sophia cleared her throat. “Assuming it was murder, how would the killer obtain pure nicotine? Chief toxicologist?”

  “He’d need a lab or a contact who had access to a lab. You can extract nicotine from chemical compounds. It’s used in insecticides, for example. I can check how many such compounds are in the city.”

  I nodded slowly. This was getting worse by the minute. “But there’s no public access to labs in Edinburgh. So we’re either up against a corrupt auxiliary . . .” I glanced round at their faces, which were suitably shocked and horrified “ . . . or someone from outside the border.”

  No one spoke for a while.

  “Dissidents.”

  I was glad Hamilton had supplied the word. It’s not one that guardians appreciate hearing from the likes of me. Dissidents officially don’t exist but everyone knows someone who deserted and is trying to get back in. Some of them want to destabilise the Council, but a lot of them are just headbangers who’ve discovered how unpleasant life is in the so-called free states outside the border. They’re usually after easy pickings from the tourists. The City Guard catches the overwhelming majority of them.