The Blood Tree Read online

  “Don’t worry,” said Tam. “We didn’t nick it. The Argyll’s one of ours. We just fitted it up to look like one of your rustbuckets.” He grinned at me. Getting under way seemed to have brought about an improvement in his temper. “Sergeant Tam Haggs,” he said, extending a thick-fingered hand. “All-Glasgow Major Crime . . .”

  “Isn’t kidnapping a major crime in your hell-hole?” I demanded, ignoring his hand.

  The inspector turned round at the sound of her name. “Oh, we’re not kidnapping you, Quint.” She gave me a thin smile. “We’ve got a warrant to bring you in.”

  I was about to register a formal complaint when I remembered the teenagers who’d been kidnapped from the Lauriston facility. I wondered if this pair of Glaswegian cops had anything to do with the kids’ disappearance. There wasn’t much room to hide them on the boat, but I would need to keep my eyes and ears open. Then I remembered what the inspector had said about being on the road for a few days. What else might they have been up to in my home city?

  “When you say you’ve got a warrant for me,” I said, “what am I supposed to have done?”

  “What’s the matter?” Tam Haggs said with a derisive grin. “Have you got a guilty conscience about something?”

  I definitely had one of those from my years in the Public Order Directorate, but not over anything to do with Glasgow. I shrugged and slowly moved my hands towards the pockets of my donkey jacket.

  Hel Hyslop was on the ball. “Looking for this?” she asked, holding up my mobile. “We’ll soon be out of range.” She wiped moisture from her face. “If you behave, I might think about giving it back.”

  I looked out into the fog. It was insulating us very effectively from the outside world. All I could hear was the dull thud of the engine and the splash of the waves against the hull. “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Pretty near the old rail bridge,” the inspector said. “We hid up in an inlet near Cramond overnight.”

  “Worried about the patrols?” I shook my head. “The Fisheries Guard only has a few boats these days.”

  She nodded. “We know that. But we had instructions to be very careful.” She stared at me curiously. “You’re important cargo.”

  That didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Look at the state of that,” Haggs said, pointing out through the murk.

  “God didn’t save the king,” I murmured, as we flitted past the wreck of Britannia. The former royal yacht had been moored in Leith and used as a tourist attraction at the end of the last century. When the crown prince got himself tied up with a Colombian drugs heiress, the man and woman in the street suddenly became rabidly republican. After ransacking Holyrood Palace, some of them cut Britannia loose and let her drift away – having first relieved her of every single movable object. The ship had been lying on her side on a mudbank for over twenty years, her funnel canted over her superstructure and her hull heavily pocked by machine-gun bullets from passing pirate and guard vessels. Some bright spark had picked out the words “Ship of Fools” under the name on the bow.

  “Say goodbye to the perfect city, Quint,” Hel Hyslop said as one of the supports of the Forth Rail Bridge loomed up on the starboard beam. The great stone pile shot up into the sky, but the tubular steel structures it bore for over a century had been in the water since the early years of the Enlightenment. In its wisdom the Council decided to destroy all road and rail connections with Edinburgh to safeguard our independence. So the furthest western boundary of the city’s territory is marked by the battered remains of one of the greatest engineering feats in European history – one of many monuments to the guardians’ enlightened approach.

  The fog had lifted almost completely by the time we came alongside at an improvised jetty next to the remains of the Kincardine Bridge – it hadn’t fared any better than its larger neighbours. I struggled with my memory to orientate myself and reckoned we were around thirteen miles upstream from the rail bridge. Given that I hadn’t been outside Edinburgh territory for over twenty years, I was impressed I remembered that much.

  I watched as the crew manhandled a gangway over the side. There was a flashy dark green off-road vehicle on the quay. I hadn’t seen the make before. The logo told me it was a Llama. Presumably it was South American – that part of the world has been booming recently. I pretended to take an interest in the surroundings as I ran my eyes over the hold in front of the deckhouse. No sign of any other kidnapped individuals.

  “Move, Quintilian,” Haggs said, grabbing my arm. He led me down the gangway.

  The inspector walked past us and got into the Llama’s driving seat. Haggs shoved me in the other front door and crushed up against me.

  “Tell me, do Glasgow police officers often go to Edinburgh, inspector?” I asked.

  “MC squad operations are classified,” Hyslop said, pulling away from the dock and on to a pock-marked asphalt road.

  I looked back at the boat. The crewmen were still on deck but there was no one else around. There were no cloaks or mallets in the back of the vehicle either, let alone any Labour Directorate work-boots. It didn’t look like Hyslop and Haggs had anything to do with the missing adolescents or the killings.

  “So what do you think of the real world?” the inspector asked.

  I glanced round and realised we were still very much on our own. “Where the hell is everyone, Hel?”

  “Very funny,” she said, giving her sergeant a look which wiped the smile off his face. “When you say everyone . . . ?”

  “I mean, where’s the native population? The place is completely desolate.” I looked out across overgrown fields and derelict houses. Back towards Edinburgh the shattered ruins of the oil and chemical installations in Grangemouth glinted dully in the weak sunlight. They’d been casualties of the civil disorder in the early years of the century. So far I couldn’t fault the Council’s line that the terrain west of Edinburgh was a wasteland.

  “We call these parts the desert,” Haggs said. “Anyone with any sense moved to Glasgow when the drugs wars started.” He snorted. “The brainless ones went to be abused in totalitarian Edinburgh.”

  I let that pass. It wasn’t a totally inaccurate description of the Council’s regime, even though the original guardians did try to be benevolent dictators. Some of the later ones decided the adjective was unnecessary. Anyway, I was too busy looking at the road we were driving down. Burned-out lorries and overturned cars, most of them at least twenty years old, had been bulldozed out of the way. We were moving down the single passable lane at a speed I wasn’t too happy about.

  “What happens if we meet someone coming in the opposite direction?” I asked nervously.

  Hel Hyslop laughed and hit the accelerator even harder. “What’s the matter, Quint? Scared?”

  “No,” I lied. “I’d just like to survive this excursion if at all possible.” I watched her as she concentrated on the road, her grey eyes fixed on the uneven asphalt and her expression impassive. Something about her made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t work out what it was.

  She glanced at me. “Look at this.” She tapped a small screen on the dashboard. I made out a maze of green lines and a few flashing red dots. “This tells me we’re the only vehicle moving on the road within four miles.”

  I whistled. “Nice toy.” I hadn’t seen apparatus like that since pre-Enlightenment times. The Council purports to hate modern technology – in reality, it can’t afford even bog-standard digital equipment. I was impressed that the Glasgow police had invested in it – not that I was going to tell Hyslop and Haggs. Christ, I didn’t even know that a police force existed in the west. The stories we heard gave the impression that Glasgow was Anarchy City.

  “Aye,” Tam said, “you’ll survive the drive all right, pal.” He laughed emptily. “I wouldn’t put money on you surviving Glasgow though.”

  Great. I stuck to looking out the window. Fields grown high with thistles and weeds were interspersed with devastated towns and empty villages.
My first impression was that there was no one living in the roofless houses, many of which had walls holed by the anti-tank shells favoured by the drugs gangs. Then I realised that some of the windows had been covered by plastic sheeting and that patches of land had been dug out into vegetable gardens. But the inhabitants were keeping their heads down. What Haggs called the desert was no doubt scoured by raiders desperate for anything to eat.

  I sat up with a start. “Jesus, what was that?” The sound I’d heard above the faint purr of the Llama’s engine made my hair stand on end.

  Hyslop was unperturbed. “Wolf.”

  “There are wolves out here?” I said incredulously.

  “Oh aye,” Tam Haggs put in. “They escaped from the zoos during the break-up of the UK.” He grunted. “The fighting gave them plenty to eat. I suppose you don’t have trouble with them in your perfect city.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve never heard of any, not even on the farms.”

  “Wolves know what’s good for them,” Hel Hyslop said. “They don’t bother with underfed philosophers.”

  Haggs guffawed.

  Then the sun burned off the last of the cloud and everything changed. We stopped at a checkpoint. Lines of wire fencing stretched out on both sides and there was a fortified guardpost by the roadside. That wasn’t what caught my eye though. Ahead of us a vast expanse of cultivated land stretched away. There were large modern tractors ploughing and sowing the fields all around. That was when I began to wonder how much the Council in Edinburgh really knew about the world beyond the city line. Maybe the guardians had even been spreading baseless rumours. For years we’d been told that Glasgow was falling apart, its citizens starving and all but the centre plagued by warring drugs gangs. With its supposedly reckless attempts at democracy, Glasgow was the guardians’ number one hate object, responsible for all the dissidents and criminals who sneaked into Edinburgh. Suddenly I felt more gullible than a jackass in one of Aesop’s fables.

  While Hyslop was talking to the sentry, I read the sign on the guardpost wall. “Banknock Checkpoint”, it proclaimed in green and yellow lettering. “Welcome to the Democratic Free State of Greater Glasgow – Let Glasgow Flourish!” Underneath there was a smaller sign directing prospective immigrants to a reception centre down the road. I looked ahead and saw a queue of ragged families. Apparently Glasgow was doing well enough to attract people from the outlying regions. Not many people had volunteered to enter Edinburgh in recent years.

  “Right,” said Hel. “The road’s better now. We’ll be able to go even faster.”

  “Brilliant,” I said under my breath, clutching the seat as the Llama did a passable imitation of a missile being launched at Serbia before the millennium.

  Haggs had been handed a bag at the checkpoint. “Here,” he said. “Have a sandwich.”

  I opened the package he gave me and discovered a plaited roll that smelled better than any bread I’d ever had. There was a thick layer of smoked salmon and sour cream inside. “Christ, I haven’t had salmon for a long time,” I said, taking a large bite.

  “Really?” said Hyslop. “There are fish farms in the Clyde. We can have it every day if we like.”

  I tried to hide my envy by asking about the surrounding countryside. “So how far does Glasgow territory extend?”

  “Twenty miles to the south and over thirty to the west,” she replied. “All the way to Dumbarton and Beith.”

  “We’re looking to expand as well,” Tam Haggs put in. “Except there are some serious headbangers on the coast who’re giving us a hard—”

  “That’ll do, sergeant.” The inspector gave him a look that made his ears burn. “Security information is not to be divulged to non-citizens.”

  Haggs bowed his head and bit his lip like a schoolboy who’d been caught with his hand down his shorts.

  So I was a non-citizen, was I? That didn’t make me feel optimistic about the treatment I could expect in Glasgow. Why was there a warrant out for me? It must have been something very hot for the city’s leaders to authorise a snatch mission. What did they have on me? I almost asked the inspector but stopped myself in time. I had the feeling that she’d be enormously gratified if I showed any more nerves.

  “How many people live inside the wire?” I asked. “If that information isn’t classified.”

  Hel Hyslop glanced at me. “Why should it be? The population of greater Glasgow is nearly one-and-a-half million.”

  “Jesus,” I said. Edinburgh’s population had dropped by half since the turn of the century. “And you manage to feed them all?”

  “Of course we do. Glasgow is a thriving modern state, not a decrepit tourist trap like Edinburgh.”

  I was about to argue with that description of my home town but, looking at the pristine machines in the fields and the well-maintained highway, I decided to hold my peace.

  “That’s right,” Tam Haggs said. “And you haven’t seen the half of it yet.”

  I had the feeling I was about to be even more surprised. Edinburgh already seemed to be on the other side of the world. As did my old man and Katharine. I wondered if Hector was all right. Then I remembered what Katharine had said about my last chance. I wanted to see her again very badly. But every mile that the Llama went was taking me further away.

  “What the hell . . . I mean, what are those?” I said, peering through the windscreen.

  “Thank you,” Hyslop said primly. “They’re the Glasgow balloons. Haven’t you heard of them?”

  “Obviously not.” I peered at the large coloured shapes in the sky ahead. There must have been at least thirty of them, some round, some cigar-shaped, one even fashioned like a star. I could just make out cables tethering the balloons to the ground. They were floating above the tower blocks like thought bubbles above cartoon characters’ heads.

  “Each ward of the city has its own balloon in a colour they choose themselves,” Haggs said. “In Govan it’s blue.” He nudged me in the ribs. “Remember Rangers? The football team?”

  “Vaguely,” I replied. I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of a positive answer. In fact I had very clear memories of Old Firm matches between Rangers and Celtic in the early years of the century. The riots had been so bad that the army had been sent in. The clubs claimed that drugs gangs infiltrated the grounds – maybe they did, but relations between the two sets of fans had never been what you’d call problem-free.

  “Each ward is autonomous,” the inspector said, stopping at a traffic light on the outskirts of the built-up area. “The idea came from the devolution movement at the end of the last century.”

  “I hope your system runs better than the Parliament Scotland got then,” I said. “It caused a lot more problems than it ever solved.” That reminded me of the break-in at the Parliament archive and the subsequent murders. Hamilton and Davie would have to cope with all that on their own now.

  I looked out at the street. There were plenty of cars, most of them in brighter colours than the official green of the Llama. “Citizens are allowed their own transport, are they?” I asked.

  They both looked at me as if I were crazy. “Course they are,” Tam said contemptuously.

  “And they can afford cars?”

  “The city offers low-interest loans for car and house purchase,” Hyslop said.

  I tried to hide my amazement. On the streets, people were dressed in clothes that were brightly coloured and – by Edinburgh standards – well-cut and stylish. Kids on expensive-looking bikes were riding on cycle tracks between the road and the pavement. Behind them the shops were crammed with merchandise and customers. Even the blocks of flats were in good nick, paint fresh and balconies overflowing with flowers and plants. It was hard to believe that the grimy, dilapidated citizen housing of Edinburgh was less than fifty miles away. And there weren’t any obvious signs of the crime we’d been told bedevilled Glasgow. No steel shutters, no junkies, no vandalism – and only a few officious-looking sods in green outfits and peaked caps. Even the pubs looked
salubrious.

  “Now we’re getting to the best part,” Haggs said, leaning forward in his seat.

  Hel Hyslop pointed to her left. “Just in case you were wondering, free-thinking is encouraged in this city.”

  I looked up the slope and made out the crosses and memorial stones of the necropolis, Glasgow’s version of the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. It had been fully kitted out with neo-classical temples and catacombs in the 1800s, but now it made me think of a time several centuries before that. Draped across the incline was a huge white banner which proclaimed “Macbeth Has Returned! Share the Experience!” The letters were surrounded by lifesize colour paintings. There was a saturnine Macbeth wearing a crown, a supercilious queen and several trios of witches, all of whom were younger than my readings of the play at school suggested.

  “What’s all that about?” I asked. “Have the city fathers turned the graveyard into a theme park?”

  The inspector slowed to let a group of Middle Eastern tourists in full robes and head-dress cross – a year or two ago they’d have been staying in Edinburgh.

  “That’s the kind of shite your home town unloads on its visitors, isn’t it?” Hyslop said. “We’re not like that. We assume our tourists have minds as well as wallets.”

  “Is that right?” I asked sceptically. “So what’s the game with Macbeth?”

  “It’s a cult,” Haggs said.

  “A cult?”

  “Yes, a cult,” the inspector said irritably. “Aren’t you familiar with the word? I suppose it’s been proscribed in your glorious city.”

  “True enough, the Council is pretty keen on atheism,” I said, glancing up at the necropolis again. Figures in medieval costume were dancing around the gravestones. “They do tolerate people with genuine religious beliefs though. Believe it or not.”

  Haggs swallowed a laugh when he saw the inspector’s expression.

  “In this city,” Hyslop said, “there are dozens of religious sects and cults. Some of them are versions of the organised religions of the late twentieth century and some of them are more recent. We allow people to believe what they want – no matter how off the wall it might be.”