Water of Death

by Paul Johnston

  I pulled up on the esplanade, the sun beating down on the raised open space like it had been insulted by the asphalt and was now taking its revenge. On my way to what had once been the military prison, I wondered where Katharine was. I’d have heard if the guard had picked her up. What the hell had she been doing with two bottles of the Ultimate Usquebaugh in her bag? Surely she wasn’t involved in the poisonings? Jesus. The thought ripped into me like a bayonet. She knew where my father lived. I stopped dead in the unshaded area between the command centre and the dungeons, my legs frozen despite the heat, and thought it through. No, I didn’t believe it. Katharine knew Hector, she was fond of him. She wouldn’t harm him. And besides, she didn’t need to use the old man to get at me – she had direct access already. Or rather, she did have until the guard started watching my flat. I shook my head and walked on. No, Katharine wasn’t behind the poisonings. I knew her better than that. Or did I?

  I went down the steep steps to the additional dungeons Hamilton had prisoners excavate for themselves during the height of the drugs wars. They hadn’t been much used in recent years except by rats but they were always good for scaring the shit out of people with guilty secrets. I showed ID to the overweight guardsman sitting at the end of the dimly lit passage. He’d spent so many years on duty down here that even the guardian didn’t have the nerve to expose him to the outside world.

  “Number thirteen,” he said hoarsely. “Lucky for some.” He started panting with excitement as I headed for the cell.

  I struggled with the key and eventually swung the barred door open. The female auxiliary was cowering in the corner, her nurse’s uniform stained by the filthy bedding and her white shoes badly scuffed. I brought my hand to my face when the stench from the waste bucket and the damp stone walls washed over me.

  “Simpson 426?” I said, watching her as she drew herself up and wiped the sweat from her forehead.

  The auxiliary eyed me nervously. She was young, only in her mid-twenties. Her light brown hair had once been in a tight plait but now it looked like a large bird had been trampling it into a nest. She looked even more worried when I showed her my authorisation.

  “What’s . . . what’s this all about?” she asked in a faint voice. “The guardsmen who brought me here wouldn’t say anything.”

  I sat down at the other end of the uneven mattress from her, keeping away from the wall of the narrow cell. Leaning against it was a bad idea unless you wanted your clothing to be impregnated by the rank liquid dribbling down from the roughly hewn roof.

  “What’s this all about?” I said, repeating her question with maximum incredulity. “How many derelictions of duty have you committed, auxiliary?”

  “I . . .” She shook her head weakly. “None.”

  “None apart from this one?”

  Her head made a couple of feeble movements sideways.

  “This one being unauthorised absence from your post.” I pulled out my notebook. “Now let me see. Who was it gave you the order to stay with the Kennedy family yesterday?” I looked down at her and smiled encouragingly. “Can’t remember? It doesn’t matter. I’m sure I’ve got it written down here.”

  I don’t particularly like taunting people, especially young, frightened people. Unfortunately it’s one of the few ways to handle auxiliaries, and even then their training often enables them to stand up to it.

  “Ah, here it is,” I said, pointing to the page and then looking more closely. “Fuck me, Simpson 426.” Unexpected crudity is another handy weapon with the Council’s servants. “You disobeyed an order from the medical guardian? The medical guardian who is currently senior guardian?” I inhaled the fetid air ostentatiously then wished I hadn’t. “You must really love the smell of raw sewage in the morning.” Disobedient auxiliaries are sometimes sent to the shit farm in Portobello.

  “No, no, I . . .” The nurse broke off and shook her head, this time even more desperately.

  I moved closer to her. She pulled her knees up to her chest and jammed herself as far as she could into the corner.

  “There’s some information I must have,” I said quietly. “If you help me, I’ll get you out of here.”

  The nurse’s light brown eyelashes quivered. “I . . . I can’t . . .”

  “Yes you can,” I insisted. “Alexander Kennedy, known as Allie. The son. Did he come to the flat when you were there?”

  She stared at me, first with surprise then with relief. Maybe she thought she was in the clear. “Yes. He arrived in the middle of the evening.”

  “How did he come into the flat?”

  She looked at me uncomprehendingly.

  I spelled it out. “Did you see him come in the front door?”

  She still found the question puzzling. “No,” she answered after some thought. “No, I was making tea at the time. The daughter asked me to do that while she went out to tell the neighbours about her father’s death.”

  “Describe the brother to me.”

  The young woman let go of her knees and leaned forward from the wall. “Medium height, pretty slim. Smooth complexion.”

  “What about his hair?”

  “I didn’t see it. He was wearing a sunhat pulled down low.”

  “What else was he wearing?”

  “A really horrible string vest with big holes in it and a pair of standard citizen-issue shorts.”

  I scribbled notes. “What did he do?”

  “He was closing the door of his mother’s room when I came out of the kitchen. He stared at me.” The nurse looked away, her lips quivering. “Then he asked me who the . . . who the fuck I was and what the fuck I was doing there.”

  She was a bit of a sensitive soul to be an auxiliary. I wondered how she coped with Sophia in full Ice Queen mode. “What did he do after that?” I asked.

  “He said I should take the tea into the sitting room. And that his mother wouldn’t be wanting any since she’d dropped off to sleep.”

  I nodded. “What happened after that?”

  “I don’t know.” Simpson 426 pulled her knees close to her chest again. “I . . . I left.”

  I gave her a few seconds to squirm then brought my face close and locked my eyes on to hers. “You don’t know because you left your post,” I said in a steely voice. “Someone countermanded the medical guardian’s order. Who was it?”

  The nursing auxiliary slumped forward like a Homeric hero whose sinews had been terminally loosened by a sword stroke.

  “Who was it?” I repeated.

  The crumpled figure started jerking backwards and forwards. “I can’t . . . I can’t say,” she sobbed.

  “Yes, you can,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Who told you to leave the flat? Who told you to keep the whole thing to yourself?”

  No reply. She’d had her chance.

  I moved closer to her and put an arm round her thin shoulders. “Come on,” I said, less menacingly. “You’ve got to tell me.” I put my fingers under her chin and slowly forced her head up. “Because if you don’t, I’ll order the animal at the end of the corridor to come in here and get the answer out of you any way he chooses.”

  She froze, her eyes springing open. “You can’t do that,” she gasped.

  “Try me.”

  Simpson 426 summoned up the strength to push me away, a look of extreme disgust on her face. “It was Nasmyth 05,” she said in a low, empty voice.

  Bull’s-eye. I kept quiet as the nurse continued, her head bowed.

  “He arrived at the flat at nine o’clock and sent me back to barracks. He told me he’d have me demoted if I ever said anything to anyone.” She buried her face in her hands.

  I stepped back from her. “It was vital information,” I said weakly. “I had to find a way of making you talk. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t move. For a moment I even thought she’d stopped breathing.

  I’d reached the heavy steel door when the nursing auxiliary’s voice stopped me.

  “Citizen,” she said, her voice close
to a shout. “Fuck you.”

  That took the shine off having my suspicions about Nasmyth 05 confirmed.

  It was only as I climbed out of the dungeons’ Stygian darkness that the discrepancy struck me. Agnes Kennedy told me that the nursing auxiliary had received a call. She hadn’t said anything about Nasmyth 05 actually being at her family’s flat. Then I realised what that meant. If the nursing auxiliary was to be believed, Nasmyth 05 had been there at the same time as Allie Kennedy. I needed to question the Edlott controller even more than I’d previously thought.

  I drove back to the Culture Directorate’s headquarters at speed. Since my last visit a large stall had been erected outside the main entrance. It rather detracted from the building’s grandiose façade as it consisted of a bright yellow tent and a series of full-length mirrors framed in imitation leopard skin. They matched the women in bikinis made of the same material who were handing out promotional material for the lottery. God knows where they came up with that marketing idea. Maybe the Prostitution Services Department lent them it.

  The silver writing on a large black banner blinded me for a few seconds. I eventually managed to read “EDLOTT – THE FAIREST IN THE WORLD”. Underneath it a girl a in a black Snow White wig stood pretending to eat an apple. The seven dwarves, a group of lucky boy winners, were clustered around her, peering at the ample breasts her cutaway bodice revealed. And I thought the Council disapproved of American cultural icons. The Culture Directorate might have been aiming at irony, though that’s never been an Enlightenment strong point.

  I remembered Nasmyth 05’s lack of enthusiasm when I’d last been in the building and decided not to use the main entrance. Perhaps he’d told the sentries to advise him if I turned up. So I drove past the block and turned left at the service entrance, pulling on to the pavement near where an avant-garde theatre company had its base before independence. Now the place is given over to a floorshow featuring tourists who perform sex acts with their partners in public. It’s known as “fucking karaoke”.

  I went towards a staircase that dropped at a steep angle into the building’s foundations. Waste-disposal squads are notorious for leaving doors open and I reckoned this was my best way in. There was a sign reading “Refuse Only”. I wasn’t going to refuse an invitation like that but I had to take my handkerchief out and put it over my nose and mouth. Blocking the entrance was a vat of swill that no self-respecting pig would have had anything to do with. I pushed it back on its rollers and moved quickly through the cellar. Just as I reached the door at the far end, I spotted something I could use. My mother taught me that a small gift always makes a good impression.

  I headed up the dim stairs, hearing the sounds of numerous pairs of auxiliary boots on the floor surfaces above. I wasn’t too bothered about being clocked by the sentries now. As well as what I was carrying for Nasmyth 05, I’d taken a broom from the stores. I moved out into the open concourse. There were Culture Directorate staff all over the place but they paid no attention. If anything, they looked right through me. That’s the way ordinary citizens are treated in places like this nowadays. Auxiliaries have to try so hard to be pleasant to us in public because of the user-friendly policies that they turn their noses up at us in restricted areas even more than before. Still, in my particular case that was understandable.

  I made it past the defunct lift shafts with their elegant glass tracery without being questioned. I climbed the stairs and got the same lack of reaction from the auxiliaries I met on the first floor. By the time I reached the far end, I was lonelier than a 1990s American president in a ladies’ seminary.

  Then I bumped into the man I was looking for. Literally. He wasn’t overjoyed to see me and he was even less impressed by what I was carrying.

  “Oh, my God,” he said, his voice shrill. “What is that?”

  I looked down at the stripped calf’s head I’d picked up in the basement. It was covered in a noxious slime.

  “This is your lunch from last week, pal,” I said, pushing it into his mock leopard-skin waistcoat and driving him into the office behind. “You forgot to eat the brains.”

  It wasn’t long before Nasmyth 05 started to talk. The proximity of the calf’s head to his face may have had something to do with that.

  “Where was I last night?” he asked, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief, then remembering he’d already used it on his soiled waistcoat. “Oh, my God.” He threw the stinking cloth down and rubbed his hands frantically over his face.

  “Yes, Nasmyth 05, where were you last night?”

  “Last night,” he repeated. This was getting boring. “Last night?” he said, registering the look I gave him. “I was in barracks.”

  “Bollocks,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?” He gave himself away by gulping like a dipsomaniac frog.

  “I run two kinds of interrogation,” I said. “One when I don’t have a clue of the answer to my question and one when all I need is confirmation of something I already know.” I let that sink in for a bit. “Guess what kind this is.”

  The corpulent auxiliary was suddenly sweating even more than the temperature in his office merited. The blinds had been partially closed and the spacious room was about as cool as it gets in the city at this time of year because the fat shite had equipped himself with one of the city’s few fans. So why was he shaking so much that his waved hair had lost its carefully sculpted shape? I let him sweat some more. Eventually he summoned up enough courage to look at me.

  “What is it you want confirmation of, citizen?” He glanced at the calf s head again. I knew he’d rather have mine on the desk in front of him.

  “All right, here’s how we’ll do this,” I said, smiling at him malevolently. “You tell me where you really were last night and I’ll think about keeping the public order guardian off your back.”

  He swallowed again and looked hopelessly at the door. I’d secured it by jamming my broom through the handles. He was on his own.

  “I told you.” His voice was suddenly shrill. “I was in Nasmyth Barracks.”

  “No doubt you did get your bloated carcass over there at some stage,” I said, moving closer to the reeking object on the desk. “But where else did you go?”

  The auxiliary drew his upper body back as if he expected me to throw the calf s head at him. He was on the right lines.

  “I . . . I went to offer my condolences to the bereaved family of the dead lottery-winner,” he said, looking as relieved as a dying man who’s been told he’s on for reincarnation as Casanova.

  “And I’m the love child of Margaret Thatcher and Frank Sinatra.”

  I thought that was pretty neat but Nasmyth 05 was looking at me in bewilderment. He was probably one of those auxiliaries who got good marks in the training programme by erasing all pre-Enlightenment data from their memory banks. Not a bad idea with the duo I’d mentioned.

  “I look after my winners,” he said in pompous tones. “And their families,” he added rapidly.

  “And why do you do that?”

  “Because . . . because citizens invest all their hopes in Edlott.”

  A lot of them did, unfortunately. It showed how little they believed in the new Council’s policies if all they could dream about was a cushy number dressed up in a spurious historical costume.

  “Wonderful,” I said, putting both hands on the sticky surface of the calf’s head. “But there’s a lot more to it than that, isn’t there, Nasmyth 05?”

  He stepped back and rested his heavy body against the windowledge. “No . . . no, there isn’t.”

  “Why did you countermand the nursing auxiliary’s order? You realise it came from the senior guardian herself?”

  He went a paler shade of white. “No,” he gasped, “no, I didn’t. I . . . I didn’t want the family’s grief to be disturbed by one of us.” He looked at my clothes. “I mean, by an auxiliary.”

  I believed that about as much as I believe in the divine right of kings. I wanted to ask what Nasmy
th 05 had been doing in the flat with Allie Kennedy and I wanted even more to ask him if he’d told Allie Kennedy, or anyone else, where my father lived. But I reckoned I’d find out more by keeping tabs on him than I would by passing him to Davie. Besides, the fat man would be a lot harder to break than the nursing auxiliary. He was hiding something all right but even if he had been involved, I couldn’t see him putting any more poison in the city’s whisky and water now that he knew I was on his case. I needed to check a couple of other things though.

  “Speaking of auxiliaries,” I said, “or rather, of demoted auxiliaries . . .” I paused to watch his reactions. Nothing so far. “Did you ever have anything to do with a Finance Directorate operative whose barracks number was Napier 25?”

  I reckoned his eyebrows moved more than he would have liked. “Napier 25?” he repeated. “I don’t think so. Most of my dealings with that directorate have been at guardian and deputy guardian level.”

  Arrogant tosser. “He worked in the Strategic Planning Department and I think he was seconded here a couple of years ago.”

  “You think he was, citizen? Don’t you know for sure?” Nasmyth 05 smiled mockingly then shrugged. “I have no recollection of him. You say he was demoted? What for?”

  I didn’t answer. I could have tried to strongarm him into letting me search the directorate records but I had the feeling that all traces of Napier 25 would have been removed, as in the other archives. Better to let the fat controller think I’d bought his story.

  “Okay. There’s just one more thing.” I leaned forward before he could move and tugged his hair hard. Most of it stayed attached to his scalp.

  “Ow!” he squealed. “What did you do that for?”

  “None of your business,” I replied. Now I knew he wasn’t clippered underneath like the guy seen outside Frankie Thomson’s flat. He was the wrong build anyway.

  “Are you finished with me?” Nasmyth 05 asked, a tremor of hope in his voice.

  “For the time being,” I said. As I turned to go, I tossed the calf’s head at his midriff. “Really, auxiliary. Your clothes are a disgrace.”