“At last,” I said. “Didn’t you see me arrive?”
“I had to be sure you weren’t a guardsman,” she said, keeping close to the ground.
I got down beside her in the knee-high grass. “Do I look like a guardsman?” I demanded, opening my waterbottle and handing it to her.
She drank thirstily. “No,” she said, wiping her mouth. “You look more like a mobile scarecrow.”
“Thanks a lot. You seem to have done a pretty good job of keeping the carrion birds away yourself.”
“There are only old bodies here, Quint,” she said. “So what’s happening?”
I told her there had been no further ultimatum.
“That’s good. That means I’m in the clear.”
I looked at her. “How do you work that out?”
“If I was a poisoner, surely I’d have struck again by now.” She smiled at me innocently.
“It’s not quite as simple as that. The senior guardian—”
“Your girlfriend, you mean.”
“My ex-girlfriend, Katharine. She seems to have lost all interest in my body.”
She laughed. “How sad.”
“The senior guardian still regards you as a prime suspect. You’d better keep out of the way till things develop further. Here, I got you this.” I handed her a bag full of waterbottles and food I’d got at Napier Barracks on the way.
“Thank you, kind sir.” Her voice was ironic.
“Katharine,” I said, catching her eye. “What exactly have you been doing all day?”
She pulled a book out of her pocket. “As it happens, I’ve got a good read.” She held up my copy of the collected Sherlock Holmes. “I borrowed this from your flat the last time I was there. You don’t mind, do you?”
“As long as I get it back. You mean you haven’t left the cemetery?”
She shook her head. “Where would I go? Half the bloody city’s looking for me.” I believed her, but I had a track record of believing what Katharine told me.
“Are you all right?” I laid my hand on her forearm. “I mean, it was a hell of a shock you got at the mill.”
She looked at me then nodded slowly. The skin round her eyes creased only very slightly. “I’m used to shocks, Quint. What else is there to life?”
I couldn’t think of a reply to that. She’d been through much more than I had in the past. It had hardened her but not to the extent other people thought.
Katharine touched my hand with hers briefly. “I wasn’t that close to Peter,” she said, pursing her lips. “Not that it’s any business of yours.”
I stayed a bit longer. We didn’t talk much, just sat in the heat and listened to the faint noise of the city’s limited number of vehicles in the distance. It was good to be with her.
“Keep in touch,” I said as I got up to go.
“I might do,” she said, looking up and smiling enigmatically. “And then again I might not.”
I hate it when women play hard to get.
I passed the early evening in the command centre with Davie. For all his interrogation skills, he hadn’t managed to get much else out of the drugs prisoners. They were shit-scared of Allie Kennedy but they didn’t know anything about who he worked with or where he operated from. I tried to make sense of where that led us. We’d established a sexual connection between Allie and the Edlott controller. Allie apparently had his finger in the grass trade. Did that mean the fat auxiliary was into illicit drugs too? Somewhere in the distance I thought I could hear Victoria Spivey singing the “Dope Head Blues”.
“What about the surveillance on Nasmyth 05?” I asked as we headed to Hamilton’s quarters to report.
“Bugger all,” Davie replied. “He’s suddenly turned into a model auxiliary. All day and all evening at the Culture Directorate. No unusual contacts.”
“Great. This is turning into a regular bloody ghost hunt.”
“The public order guardian won’t mind. He reckons the threat’s passed.”
There was a clatter of boots at the far end of the corridor. Lewis Hamilton appeared, his face red and contorted above the white of his beard.
“Are you sure about that, Davie?” I asked.
The guardian reached us and tried without success to catch his breath. “Death,” he gasped eventually. “Suspicious death. In Buccleuch Place.”
“Another one?” I groaned.
Then I felt my stomach turn over. There was a Nasmyth Barracks annexe in Buccleuch Place, and one of its residents was the man I’d seen in the afternoon with his head resting on his single hand – my friend Ray.
Chapter Sixteen
The twilight was well advanced as we ran out on to the esplanade, the western sky glowing soft and red. From the gardens below came the discordant sounds of competing bands interspersed with the screams of winners and losers in the tourist gaming tents.
“Why aren’t they giving us an ID?” I demanded as we piled into Hamilton’s Jeep.
Davie had his mobile to his ear and was straining to hear what was being said. He shook his head. “It’s chaos over there. Everyone seems to have lost it completely.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.” I crashed into the guardian’s side as he wrenched the wheel hard to the right and accelerated away.
“Auxiliaries have feelings too, Dalrymple,” Hamilton said brusquely. “Or have you forgotten?”
I sat in silence, my heart pounding and my breathing quick. As we drove past the central archive I thought again of Ray. The lights in his office were on, thank Christ. There was a chance that he was working late. Then I remembered the dust in the corner behind his desk. What the hell was that from? Could it have something to do with the strange way Ray had been behaving? Why had he been avoiding me?
We reached what used to be the university area. I tried to distract myself by looking out at the buildings. The student union was turned into a tourist facility years ago and the great D-shaped hall where degrees were conferred is now a debating chamber devoted to Platonic philosophy. The Enlightenment’s view of education never involved lectures and seminars – too much danger of freethinking there. The city’s children have the basics drilled into them at school and those of them who are compliant enough undergo the auxiliary training programme. I was one of the last to go to the university and I only managed one year before the ultimate election and Edinburgh’s declaration of independence.
The guardian slowed down behind a Water Department tractor, no doubt worried about scratching his pride and joy.
“Come on, Lewis, get past him,” I said desperately.
The guardian hit the siren and swerved past the slow-moving vehicle, managing to acknowledge the salute from the guardsman who was riding shotgun on the water tank. “Calm down, man,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
We turned into Buccleuch Place and drove down the cobbles to number 14. In the old days the street had been filled with university departments. I could remember coming to some interesting sessions on the social anthropology of the criminal here. Now it was in a state of advanced disrepair, a lot of the four-storey buildings boarded up. Nasmyth Barracks extension took up three houses halfway down. They had a delightful north-facing view over the blown-out remains of the David Hume Tower and other architectural monstrosities of the 1960s which had been devastated during the drugs wars. There were no funds for rebuilding – the Council’s priorities lie elsewhere.
Outside number 14 a collection of guard vehicles was arrayed unevenly along the kerb. A crowd of unusually grey-faced auxiliaries had gathered outside the pilastered doorway.
“What is this?” I demanded. “Street theatre? Get rid of them, Davie. Apart from any witnesses.”
He nodded and jumped down. Lewis and I followed him. It was remarkable how quickly the auxiliaries got a grip on themselves when they saw the guardian. The noise of agitated voices faded and a gap immediately opened up in the mass of bodies. Council members have some uses after all.
“Where’s the deceased?” I
asked a middle-aged guardsman who seemed to be in the know.
“Out the back. He took a dive from an upper-storey window.”
My gut twisted. So it was a male. That wasn’t all. I’d been in Ray’s room a couple of times. It was on the third floor. I went down the corridor, past barracks notices and what the Interior Decoration Department imagines is inspiring artwork. The heavy door into the rear garden was open, not that you could call what was out back a garden during the Big Heat. It looked more like a patch of uneven brown concrete. A pair of auxiliaries stepped aside and I was confronted with the body.
At first it was impossible even to make out that it was a man, let alone one that I could recognise. The head was severely damaged, a wide pool of blood around it. The victim had apparently hit the ground face first, the rest of the body crumpling into the hard surface with enough force to break the spine and leave the lower part of the trunk pointing upwards in a parody of a Moslem at prayer. The legs were bent at the knees and partially splayed. I had difficulty finding the arms. The corpse was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt that was now soaked in blood. The upper limbs had been crushed beneath the chest.
I kneeled down by the body and looked up at Davie and Lewis. “Here goes,” I said, biting my lip. I slid my hand slowly under the right side and felt for the arm. It didn’t take long to ascertain that it was only a stump.
“Shit,” I said, pulling away. “Fucking shit. It’s Ray all right.”
We followed standard suspicious-death procedures – cordoning off the garden, Ray’s room and the stairwell; taking statements from witnesses; photographing the body and getting a preliminary report from the scene-of-crime team. Sophia arrived not long after we did and oversaw the medical side.
“Is there any doubt about the cause of death?” Hamilton asked as she was preparing to leave for the infirmary with the body. “It looks pretty obvious to me.”
“I would remind you that four citizens have died of nicotine poisoning, guardian,” Sophia said, giving him an icy glance. “Besides, nothing is ever obvious with suspicious deaths. That’s why they’re called suspicious.”
She was right there, even though Lewis had a point in this particular case. At this stage, what bothered me more than the cause of death was whether my friend jumped or was pushed.
“I’ll perform the p-m immediately,” Sophia said, turning her eyes to me. “Are you going to attend, citizen?”
So I was still “citizen”, was I? “Lewis can send one of his people to observe, guardian,” I said, giving her a humourless smile. “I trust you.”
Hamilton took a deep breath but Sophia just pretended I’d become invisible – which was probably the case as regards my status in her affections.
“What are you playing at, Dalrymple?” Hamilton hissed after she’d gone, his eyes bulging. “You can’t talk to the senior guardian like that.”
“Can’t I?” I brushed past him and headed up the worn wooden staircase.
We spent the next hour examining Ray’s room. He was unusual among auxiliaries in having private quarters. No formal reason was ever given, but I remembered Ray telling me that he thought the barracks commander didn’t want his mutilated arm on display in a dormitory. Bad for morale or some such bollocks. That was probably why he’d been packed off to the barracks extension. Still, Ray hadn’t complained. He got a pleasant room with a bay window that looked out over the Meadows. There were bookshelves all round the walls – it had probably been a departmental library back when the building was part of the university – and Ray had filled them with the volumes he’d collected over the years. Books, as long as they’re not on the banned list, are one of the few things that the Council allows people to accumulate. The founders of the Enlightenment were rabidly opposed to personal property, seeing it as one of the main factors in the self-obsession that led to the break-up of the old United Kingdom. With Edlott, the current Council has actively encouraged citizens to be acquisitive. There’s progress for you.
I spent some time crawling round the bare floorboards with magnifying glass and evidence bags but found very little to go on. The room was extremely tidy, as in all auxiliary barracks, bed covers folded perfectly and papers aligned carefully on the desk.
However, there were two things that made me stop and think. The first was under the bed, near the wall in the far left corner. It was an area of floorboards covered with a pale, gritty dust. I was pretty sure it was the same dust I’d seen in the corner of Ray’s office. It looked like he’d moved something from his room to his place of work or vice versa. Maybe it was just a heap of files or books but I was still dubious. That dust wasn’t like any I’d ever seen in the archives or in any bookstore. So where did it come from?
The other thing that caught my eye was also on the floor, near the open window that Ray had gone through. His books were arranged in alphabetical order, as you’d expect with an archivist. In that corner were those written by authors whose surnames began with the letters “L” to “O”. And here was the striking point. There was a heap of what I counted to be fifteen volumes on the floor. They’d been pulled from the shelves in what looked very like a rushed and careless fashion, but that wasn’t the strangest thing. They were all copies of poetry by, and studies of, one “Owen, Wilfred E. S.” – as the shelf label written in Ray’s delicate hand proclaimed. I squatted on the boards by the pile of books and tried to work out if there was any significance to that. Without success.
Eventually Hamilton called Davie and me into an adjoining room. The building was quiet now, the various investigating teams beginning to stand down.
“What have we got then?” I asked.
Davie looked at his boss, unwilling to speak first even though the public order guardian had been wandering around ineffectually for some time.
“Well, get on with it, Hume 253,” Hamilton said impatiently.
“Yes, guardian.” Davie flipped the pages of his notebook. “What I’ve got isn’t much. There was hardly anyone else around earlier in the evening. Most of them were out on watch.” He shrugged. “The continuous shifts.”
I nodded. “Which Ray’s seniority would have excused him from. He wasn’t on his own in the building, was he?”
“Just about. The only others were a female auxiliary who was washing her clothes in the basement and a guardsman who came in to change his uniform a few minutes after eight. He went back on patrol almost immediately.”
“And neither of them saw or heard anything out of the ordinary,” I said, realising from his expression that we were out of luck.
He nodded. “’Fraid not.”
“Who found the body?”
“A trainee auxiliary on barracks immersion. She came back from duty at . . .” he checked his notes “ . . . at eight fifty and happened to glance out of her dorm window. She isn’t taking it too well.”
“She’ll have to get used to that kind of thing,” Hamilton said.
“Thank you for that compassionate observation, Lewis,” I said. “She didn’t see him fall?”
Davie shook his head. “I noticed the dead man’s watch was smashed. It shows eight forty-three.”
“Very good, guardsman. Have you been reading Agatha Christie?” Both of them scowled at me. “Sorry. So we’re tending towards suicide, are we?”
“Certainly seems that way to me, Dalrymple,” the guardian said. He gave me a suspicious look as if he already knew I was going to disagree.
“And to me,” Davie said, earning himself an approving nod from his chief. “The scene-of-crime people didn’t find any prints apart from Ray’s and those of other barracks residents who weren’t around this evening.”
I went over to the window and thought about Ray’s room next door, visualising the Owen books scattered on the floor. Something about that corner was nagging me and it wasn’t just the uncharacteristic lack of order. I let the line of thought go reluctantly and turned back to the others. “You’re ignoring something,” I said.
A w
ry look appeared on the guardian’s bearded face. “Of course we are, Dalrymple. We’re just a pair of clodhopping auxiliaries.”
“Your words, not mine.” I flashed him a smile. “What you’re ignoring is the question why.”
“Why the auxiliary would commit suicide, you mean?” Davie asked.
“Exactly.”
“I would have thought that’s clear enough, Dalrymple,” Hamilton said. “He was burdened by the loss of his arm.”
“Lewis,” I demanded, “have you forgotten that suicide’s illegal in this city? In particular for serving auxiliaries. You’d need to have a bloody good reason to allow your name and number to be expunged from the records and sanctions to be taken against your next of kin.” The Council has always taken an adamantine stand against self-murderers, regarding them as arch-betrayers of the Enlightenment. I shook my head at them. “And that’s not all. I know . . . knew Ray. I knew him well. He wasn’t suicidal.”
Hamilton hadn’t given up. “Are you sure, Dalrymple? He could have been hiding it, especially from his friends.”
I thought about how weirdly Ray had been behaving in the last couple of days – slumped at his desk with his head in his hand, keeping away from me. Then the look of abject horror I’d seen on his face came up before me again. Something had definitely been hurting him badly. But could that have made him throw himself out of the window? Christ, I’d offered to help. He turned me down, but I could have pressed him harder.
“Ray was a fighter!” I shouted, guilt eating into me. “You shouldn’t be accusing him, Lewis. You should be proud that someone who sustained a major injury in the guard still managed to be a productive auxiliary.”
The guardian took a step back. “All right, Dalrymple. Calm down.”
I eventually got a grip, feeling Davie’s eyes on me. I lost so many friends in the early years of the Enlightenment, I lost the woman I loved ten years ago. I suppose I should have got used to it by now, but it gets worse. You’d think as you grow older that absences would be easier to handle. They aren’t. I still find myself fighting for the people who’ve disappeared, the people who can’t fight for themselves any more – like Ray.
Water of Death Page 28
