Water of Death Read online

  Davie laughed. “They weren’t the only ones. You sorted them out pretty effectively, Quint.”

  “I’ll probably end up on a charge. Unwarranted force.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll be writing the report, remember.”

  The citizens under the trees were pretending they’d gone back to sleep. Davie’s presence was making them shy. Even in the recently approved informal shirtsleeve order, the grey City Guard uniform isn’t the most popular apparel in Edinburgh. The woman came to reclaim her vouchers, flashing me a brief smile of thanks. She probably thought I was an undercover guard operative.

  “I’ll give you a lift home,” Davie said as we headed for his vehicle. “What were you doing here anyway?”

  “Trying unsuccessfully to find somewhere cool in this sweat pit to read my book.”

  “What have you got?” Davie took the volume from under my arm and laughed. “Black and Blue? Just like the state of your knuckles tomorrow morning.”

  “Very funny, guardsman.”

  “Isn’t it that book on the proscribed list?” he asked dubiously.

  “The Council lifted the ban on pre-Enlightenment Scottish crime fiction at the end of last year. Don’t you remember?”

  “I just put a stop to crime,” he said pointedly. “I don’t read stories about it.”

  “That’ll be right. You said something about taking me to my place?”

  Davie wrenched open the passenger door of one of the guard’s few surviving Land-Rovers. “At your service, sir,” he said with fake deference. “Number 13 Gilmore Place it is, sir.”

  But as things turned out, we didn’t make it.

  Tollcross is as busy a junction as you get in Edinburgh. A guard vehicle on watch, a couple of Supply Directorate delivery vans, the ubiquitous Water Department tractor and a flurry of citizens on bicycles constitute traffic congestion these days. There was even a Japanese tourist in one of the hire cars provided by an American multinational that the Council did a deal with. He was scratching his head. The lack of other private cars in the streets was obviously worrying him.

  “Why were you frying yourself in the Meadows, Quint?” Davie asked. “There are bits of grass around the castle that actually get watered. It’s quieter there too.”

  I looked at the burly figure next to me. He was still wearing the beard that used to be required of male auxiliaries even though the current Council’s made it optional. God knows what the temperature was beneath the matted growth.

  “Quiet if you don’t mind being stared at by sentries,” I replied. “Since they moved the auxiliary training camp away from the Meadows, it’s become a much more relaxing place.”

  “Arsehole.” Davie was shaking his head. “Anyone would think you hadn’t spent ten years as one of us.” He laughed. “Till they saw how handy you are with your fists.”

  My mobile rang before I could tell him how proud I was to have been demoted from the rank of auxiliary.

  “Is that you, Dalrymple?”

  I let out a groan. I might have known the public order guardian would get his claws into me late on a Friday afternoon. Not that his rank take weekends off.

  “Lewis Hamilton,” I said. “What a surprise.”

  “Where are you, man?” he demanded. “And don’t address me by name.” Lewis was one of the old school, a guardian for twenty years. He didn’t go along with the new Council’s decision allowing citizens to use guardians’ names instead of their official titles.

  “I’m at Tollcross with Hume 253.”

  “Distracting my watch commander from his duties again?” Davie had been promoted a few months ago, though that didn’t stop him helping me out whenever something interesting came up.

  “And the reason for your call is . . . ?” I asked.

  “The reason for my call is that the people who run the lottery need your services.”

  I pointed to Davie to pull in to the kerbside. “Don’t tell me. They’ve lost one of their winners again.”

  “I know, I know, he’ll probably turn up drunk in a gutter after a couple of days . . .”

  “With his prizes missing and his new clothes covered in other people’s vomit. Jesus, Lewis, can’t you find someone else to look for the moron? Like, for instance, a guardsman who started his first tour of duty this morning?”

  Hamilton gave what passes for a laugh in his book. “No, Dalrymple. As you know very well, this is a high-priority job. One for the city’s freelance chief investigator. After tourists my fellow guardians’ favourite human beings are lottery-winners.” I knew he had other ideas about that himself. As far as he was concerned, Edlott was yet another disaster perpetrated by the reforming guardians who made up the majority of the current Council. Hamilton particularly despised the culture guardian whose directorate runs the lottery for what he called his “lack of Platonic principles”, whatever that means. I don’t think he was too keen on his colleague’s eye for a quick buck either. The underlying idea of Edlott was to reduce every citizen’s voucher entitlement for the price of a few relatively cheap prizes. Still, the public order guardian’s aversion to the lottery was nothing compared with the contempt he reserved for the Council members who forced through the measure permitting the supply of marijuana and other soft drugs to tourists. As I saw in the park, foreign visitors weren’t the only grass consumers in the city.

  “Any chance of you telling Edlott I’m tied up on some major investigation, Lewis? I mean, it’s Friday night and the bars are—”

  There was a monotonous buzzing in my ear.

  “Bollocks!” I shouted into the mouthpiece.

  Davie looked at me quizzically. “Bit early to hit a sex show, isn’t it?”

  I got the missing man’s name and address from a new generation auxiliary in the Culture Directorate who oozed bonhomie like a private pension salesman in pre-Enlightenment times.

  “Guess what, Davie? We’re off to Morningside.”

  “What?” Davie turned on me with his brow furrowed. “You’re off to Morningside, you mean.”

  “Your boss just told me this is a high-priority job. The least you can do is ferry me out.”

  Davie looked at his watch and gave me a reluctant nod. “Okay, but I’m on duty tonight and I want to eat before that.”

  “You pamper that belly of yours, Davie.”

  He gave me a friendly scowl.

  We came down to what was called Holy Corner before the Enlightenment. The four churches were turned into auxiliary accommodation blocks soon afterwards. They form part of Napier Barracks, the guard base controlling the city’s central southern zone. The checkpoint barrier was quickly raised for us.

  “Where to then?” Davie asked.

  I looked at the note I’d scribbled. “Millar Crescent. Number 14.”

  He headed down the main road, the Land-Rover’s bodywork juddering as he accelerated. Ahead of us, a thick layer of haze and dust obscured the Pentland Hills and the ravaged areas between us and them. What were once pretty respectable suburbs became the home of streetfighting man in the time leading up to independence. They had only been used again in the last couple of years and the part beyond the heavily fortified city line a few hundred yards further south was still an urban wasteland. It was haunted by black marketeers and the dissidents who’ve been trying and failing to overturn the Council since it came to power. On this side of the line, the Housing Directorate has settled a lot of the city’s problem families into flats that used to be occupied by Edinburgh’s blue-rinse and pearl-necklace brigade. The Southside Strollers were the tip of a very large iceberg.

  “Ten minutes, Quint,” Davie said as he manoeuvred round the water tank and the citizens’ bicycle shed at the end of Millar Crescent. “That’s all I’m giving you.” Then his jaw dropped.

  I followed the direction of his gaze. A young woman was on her way into the street entrance of number 14. She was wearing a citizen-issue T-shirt and work trousers that were unusually well pressed despite the spatters of pain
t on them. She also had a mauve chiffon scarf round her neck which had never seen the inside of a Supply Directorate store. She had light brown hair bound up in a tight plait and a self-contained look on her face. Oh, and she was built like the Venus de Milo with a full complement of limbs.

  Davie already had his door open. “Well,” he said, “make it half an hour.”

  We climbed the unlit, airless stairs to the third floor. The name Kennedy had been carved very skilfully in three-inch-high letters on the surface of a blue door on the right side of the landing. The incisions in the wood looked recent.

  “This is the place,” I said, raising my hand to knock.

  “Where did she go?” Davie asked, looking up and down the stairwell.

  “Will you get a grip?” I thumped on the door. “Exert some auxiliary self-control.”

  “Ah, but we’re supposed to come over like human beings these days,” he said with a grin.

  “Exactly. Like human beings, guardsman. Not like dogs after a . . .”

  Then the door opened very quickly. The woman we’d seen stood looking at us with her eyes wide open and a faint smile on her lips.

  “Dogs after a . . . ?” she asked in a deep voice, her dark brown eyes darting between us. A lot of citizens would have made the most of that canine reference in the presence of a guardsman, but there didn’t seem to be any irony in her tone.

  There was a silence that Davie and I found a lot more awkward than she did.

  “Em . . . I’m looking for Citizen Kennedy,” I said, pulling out my notebook and trying to make out my scribble in the dim light. “Citizen Fordyce Kennedy.”

  “My father,” she said simply.

  “And you are . . . ?”

  She looked at me blankly for a couple of seconds then smiled, this time with a hint of mockery. “I’m his daughter.” She hesitated then shrugged. “Agnes is my name.”

  “Right,” I said. “So is he in?”

  “Of course he isn’t in,” she said, her voice hardening. “That’s why we called you.” She leaned forward on the balls of her feet and examined my clothes. I breathed in a chemical smell from her. “You are from the guard, aren’t you?” Then she turned her eyes on to Davie’s uniform. “I can see the big man is.”

  Something about the way she spoke the last words made Davie, who’s never been reticent with women, look away uncomfortably.

  “I’m Dalrymple, special investigator,” I said. “Call me Quint.” I registered the reserve in her eyes. “If you want.”

  She didn’t reply, just looked at me intensely like an artist eyeing up a new model. I resisted the urge to check if my clothes had suddenly become transparent.

  “Who’s that?” The voice that came from the depths of the flat was faint and uncertain, the accent stronger than the young woman’s. “Who’s that out there?”

  “Is that your mother?” I asked.

  “My mother,” Agnes Kennedy agreed, nodding slowly. “Her name’s Hilda. She’s a bit upset. And . . . and her mind wanders.” She looked at me and succeeded in imparting a curious hybrid of appeal and threat. “Be sure you don’t upset her.” She held her eyes on me for a few moments then turned abruptly and led us down the dimly lit corridor.

  “It’s the men from the guard, Mother,” she said to the thin figure that was leaning against the wall. Then she took her arm and pushed open the door at the far end of the passage. I heard her continue talking in a smooth, low voice, as if she were the parent having to comfort a frightened child. “They’re going to find Dad for us . . .”

  Before I got to the door, I heard the sound of curtains being drawn rapidly. I came into the room and blinked in the subdued light, trying to make out the bent woman who stood moving her head from side to side like a lost sheep. She relaxed a bit when Agnes came back from the windows and took her arm.

  “You don’t like strong sunlight, do you, Mother?” the young woman said. “It’s all right. Agnes has fixed it for you.”

  My eyes accustomed themselves to the crepuscular gloom. The women sat down on the sofa, the senior of them looking at her daughter with a confused expression that only gradually faded from her features. Like many Edinburgh citizens, she’d been adversely affected by twenty years of what the Medical Directorate regards as a satisfactory diet. At least there’s been a massive reduction in the heart disease resulting from the garbage we used to eat before the Enlightenment. These days people are more likely to die of respiratory failure or skin cancer brought about by the climate change. But this woman looked like she’d been gnawed by mental as well as physical demons.

  “How long’s your husband been missing, citizen?” Davie asked with customary City Guard forthrightness.

  Agnes glared at him angrily then glanced back at her mother, who showed no sign of having heard the question. “Since yesterday morning,” Agnes answered.

  “Under thirty-six hours?” Davie was unimpressed. “That’s not long.”

  Hilda Kennedy suddenly came to life. She stood up with surprising speed and moved in front of Davie. She stooped and the top of the ragged scarf covering her long grey hair reached not much more than halfway up his chest. “It’s maybe not long to you, laddie, but my man’s never late for his tea.” Then she stepped back, the surge of energy already gone.

  I nudged Davie with my elbow. Although the guard usually don’t check out missing persons for at least three days, lottery-winners are special cases.

  “When did he leave the house, Hilda?” I asked.

  She inspected me before answering, trying to work out whether to treat me as an auxiliary or an ordinary citizen. My use of her first name seemed to get me off the hook. “First thing in the morning,” she said.

  Agnes was standing next to her mother now. She took her arm again and tried to make her sit down, but the older woman wasn’t having it.

  “He went to work?” I continued.

  Hilda looked at me like I was a backward child. “What work? He won the top prize in the lottery, son.”

  “It was six weeks ago,” Agnes put in. “He was exempted from work for life. Apart from two afternoons and two evenings a week publicity for Edlott.”

  So the Culture Directorate had chosen Fordyce Kennedy to advertise the lottery like the citizen dressed up as John Knox on the poster I’d seen earlier.

  “Which character did he get assigned?” I asked.

  “That writer fella,” Hilda said. “The one who did Treasure Island.”

  “Robert Louis Stevenson.”

  “Aye.” She shook her head. “He looked like a right idiot with his false moustache and bloodstained hankie.”

  I looked round the room in the light that was coming in at the sides of the curtains. The furniture was dark-stained wood, the sideboard, dresser and table beautifully carved. They were about as far from the standard citizen-issue sticks as you can get.

  “Did your husband make all this?” I asked.

  Hilda nodded, smiling unevenly. “Aye, he’s a cabinet-maker. Used to make stuff for the tourist hotels till he won the lottery. He did all this in his spare time.”

  I went over to the dresser and looked at the photographs arrayed on it. There were individual shots of a washed-out man in his fifties, of Agnes and of a sullen young man with hair at what used to be the regulation citizen length of under an inch. There was also a family group. Hilda must have moved when the flash went off, blurring the shot and giving her the look of a corpse that had just jerked up on the sofa. Her daughter had the same faint smile that she’d greeted us with when she opened the door, while the son was frowning. Fordyce Kennedy just looked exhausted. Like many citizens, the family had taken advantage of the Council’s loosening of the ruling that banned photos. The original guardians regarded them as socially divisive – they reckoned one of the main reasons for the disorder leading to the break-up of the United Kingdom had been the cult of the individual. Apparently we can be trusted with a few snapshots now.

  “How old’s your son?” I as
ked.

  “Allie? He’s . . .” Hilda broke off. She gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head but didn’t say anything else.

  “Twenty-six,” Agnes said, completing the sentence. “A year older than me.”

  “At work, is he?” Davie asked.

  “Him? At work?” Agnes laughed humourlessly. “He spends most of his time with his lunatic friends. Too keen on drinking and messing about.”

  He wasn’t the only young man like that in the city.

  “How about you?” I asked Agnes. “What do you do?”

  She looked at me coolly like she was wondering whether I was entitled to ask that question. “I’m an interior decorator,” she said. That explained the paint on her clothing and the smell of a chemical like turpentine. “I spend most of my free time looking after Mother.” She glanced at the woman beside her, who didn’t seem to be following the conversation. “She began to lose it last year,” Agnes added in a low voice.

  “And your father?”

  Her eyes flashed at me aggressively. “What about my father?”

  I smiled nervously. “Did he have any lunatic friends like your brother?”

  “My father doesn’t go out much,” Agnes said, her eyes fierce. “He’s a missing person. He hasn’t committed any crime.”

  “All right,” I said quietly. “I wasn’t implying anything.”

  I pulled out my notebook and sat down. You usually run the risk of getting a broken spring up your arse from a Supply Directorate sofa but the lottery-winner must have fixed his.

  Hilda Kennedy suddenly twitched her head and looked at me. Maybe she had been following the talk after all. “Fordyce was never the pally sort. He liked to stay in and work wi’ the wood.” She let out a sudden sob and dropped her chin to her flat chest.

  “My father loved his work,” Agnes said, stroking her mother’s arm.

  “So how’s he been spending his days since he won the lottery?” I asked.

  Hilda looked up again, her eyes taking time to focus on me. “I wish I knew, son. Like I say, he’s always back for his tea. But during the day he just disappears. I’ve asked him what he does but he wouldn’t answer. Said something about walking the streets once.” She stared at me. “He wasn’t happy. They shouldn’t have taken his work away.” She sobbed again and bent her head.