The Blood Tree Page 35
His callous tone washed over me as I tried to work out what Broadsword had been doing in Edinburgh. How did he get here so quickly? I’d seen another boat at the yard by the Kincardine Bridge, but would the man in the mask have had the authority to use it? Perhaps he’d hijacked it – he was certainly capable of putting the shits up the crew. But how had he found his way to the building Macbeth had taken refuge in? Obviously someone had opened their big mouth. Billy Geddes was the first name that sprang to mind. But why would he have put Broadsword on Macbeth’s trail? Was he after what Godwin had refused to hand over to the king?
“What’s on the disk?” I demanded. “People are dying for it.”
Macbeth looked at me then raised his shoulders. “I’m no scientist but from what my brother David told me, Godwin had been working on a method of prolonging human life.” He smiled harshly. “By replacing the human heart with a more reliable organ modified from pigs and dogs.”
“The old dream of immortality,” I said, shaking my head. Then I took in the little girl again. For me she was Caro brought back to life, immortalised – meaning that I had bought into the dream as much as anyone else. But I wasn’t going to allow Macbeth any hope of a family future. “It might interest you to know that your brother the professor has gone to the same place as Broadsword. Big Eye did for him while you were running away.”
Derek Rennie’s face hardly went a shade paler. He sat back loosely. “I wondered why he wasn’t answering his phone.” He shrugged his shoulders at me. “Oh well. His work will live on.”
I stared at him in disbelief. His brother’s death meant no more to him than Broadsword’s. What kind of man was I dealing with? The frightening potential of genetic engineering was nothing compared with this maniac’s twisted soul.
“What next?” I asked. “Are you planning on staying in Edinburgh to kill more old men?”
Macbeth shook his head. “Now I have the disk, I’ll go elsewhere to sell it.”
“Elsewhere?”
His face darkened. “I’m not sharing my plans with you, Dalrymple.”
“Why not? I’ll be coming with you, won’t I?”
He laughed. “Only as far as the Edinburgh border.”
“Let the girl go,” I said desperately. “You don’t need her now you’ve got me.” For a few seconds I thought he might accept the offer. Then his jaw tightened and he shook his head.
“Two hostages are better than one,” he said. “I imagine the people David dealt with here have run for cover. The City Guard’s already waiting downstairs.”
“They won’t bother you,” I said. “I’m in charge of this operation.”
Macbeth snorted. “You, Dalrymple? You’re not in charge of anything. I have your destiny and the girl’s in the palm of my hand.”
Sitting in the perforated leather chair and watching the familiar way he handled the silenced automatic, I couldn’t think of a way to dispute that.
Later in the afternoon Macbeth allowed me to communicate with Davie, The king had finally accepted that without my okay he wouldn’t get past the guard. He wanted safe passage for us and for two local members of his cult. I wondered if they were the two companions Broadsword had with him during the archive burglary and when he killed the auxiliaries. The arrangements were finalised. Macbeth wanted a guard vehicle outside at eight o’clock.
“And Davie?” I said urgently before I finished the last call. Rennie brandished the gun at me then turned it back on Aurora. I got the message. “Davie, whatever you do, don’t let Hamilton or anyone else in on this – especially not Billy Geddes. If you have to, threaten the guardian with the Council. You’ve got nothing to lose.” I had the feeling they would do anything to get the disk back from Macbeth – I hoped its loss hadn’t been broadcast.
“Got you, Quint,” Davie said. “We’ll be on your tail.”
“No, you won’t be on my tail,” I said clearly, looking at Macbeth. “Any sign of guard personnel and we die.” I let the words sink in.
“Aye, okay. Out.” Davie was obviously reluctant to hold back. I’d just have to trust him to remember that Aurora was in the firing line.
Macbeth relieved me of my mobile and made several calls from the far corner of the room, shielding his mouth so I couldn’t hear what he was saying. While he was doing that, I managed to attract Aurora’s attention. I smiled at her and winked in what I hoped wasn’t an off-putting way. Finally I got a brief, nervous smile out of her. That made me very happy.
Then I calculated the chances of us surviving the night. Given Macbeth’s indifference to normal human values, they were probably about as good as the odds of each Edinburgh citizen winning the compulsory lottery – that is, about 300,000 to one.
“The Land-Rover’s here,” I said from the window.
Macbeth waved me aside and watched as the driver ran off down the rain-drenched crescent under the low-powered street-lights. Earlier we’d seen Davie and the others come out of the street-door and drive away. The king didn’t seem to recognise Hel Hyslop – she had a guard beret jammed over her head.
“Move, girl,” Rennie said sharply, pointing the pistol at Aurora.
She stood up and gave him a disdainful look that almost made me burst out laughing. I frowned in an attempt to get her to be more co-operative.
“You go first, Dalrymple,” he said. “Remember, I’ve got the gun in the girl’s back.” He grabbed Aurora and held her in front of him.
“Okay, okay,” I said, arms open wide. “Nobody’s going to try anything.” I walked slowly out of the room to the flat door.
“Turn on the stairwell light,” Macbeth ordered. “Then go down very carefully with your arms outstretched.”
I nodded, breathing deeply and trying to convince myself that Davie would have cleared the area completely. I got down to the first floor without incident and walked past the open door. Fortunately Broadsword’s body wasn’t visible. Aurora had already seen enough.
In the ground-floor hall I saw no sign of the handgun I’d dropped from above. Davie had probably picked it up. Even if he’d left it, I wouldn’t have risked bending down to grab it. I pulled the heavy front door open and stuck my head out slowly. The night air was chill and the drizzle was still coming down. Outside, the guard vehicle sat under a street-lamp, the orange light showing windows with no condensation on them – that suggested there wasn’t anybody hiding behind the metal panels.
“You’re driving,” Macbeth hissed as he pushed me out into the street. “Open the passenger door, then get in and wait for us.”
I pulled the near-side door open as instructed and walked slowly round to the driver’s side, glancing both ways down the crescent as I went. No sign of anyone. Even people with a reason to be here would have been stopped on Davie’s instructions. I got in and felt for the key. It was in the ignition.
Macbeth bustled Aurora into the seat between us and slammed the door.
“Where to, guv?” I asked, smiling at the little girl. She looked at me as if I was crazy.
“Head for Muirhouse,” Macbeth said, making sure the vehicle’s phone was switched off. “I’ll give you more directions later.”
I nodded and pulled away, narrowly succeeding in engaging the gears – I was never much good with Land-Rovers. Muirhouse. The run-down citizen suburb where we came ashore. It looked like Macbeth was planning on departing from the same beach he’d arrived on.
I headed down towards the Water of Leith. There’s hardly any traffic in this part of the city as the roads are too steep for buses. There weren’t any of the normally ubiquitous guard patrols. Davie would have ordered them off.
As we headed down the slope towards the northern sector I nudged Aurora gently. She turned her head towards me slowly, trying not to attract Macbeth’s attention. I winked at her again and this time her face was wreathed by a spectacular smile that took my breath away. I remembered Caro smiling like that at special moments.
“Turn left at the roundabout,” Rennie ordere
d. Then he started giving me more complicated directions. After a few minutes of turning back on ourselves – making sure we weren’t being followed – he pointed at a narrow driveway. “In there.”
I followed the track and the headlights swung over a harled eighteenth-century villa. I hadn’t been there before but it had obviously been through a lot during the drugs wars. Some of the most destructive gangs came from the north of the city and they must have tried out their rocket launchers and grenades on this house. There were no windows or frames in the gaping holes of the façade and the rusted remains of a late-twentieth-century car were hanging crazily off the entrance steps. The Housing Directorate had evidently forgotten the villa existed.
“Good place for a meet,” I said to Macbeth, trying to put him off his guard. Then I caught a glimpse of a red pick-up at the end of the house. It looked like it had Labour Directorate markings. Could it be the one Broadsword and his friends had used at the time of the break-in?
Rennie grabbed the vehicle’s torch and got out. “Kill your lights,” he said, pulling Aurora after him roughly.
I bit my lip as I obeyed the command. Then I climbed down and followed the two of them to the entrance.
Macbeth stood listening and looking for a long time, then pushed Aurora up the steps and through the space where the door had been. He flashed the torch five times then spoke in a low voice.
“All hail Macbeth.” He repeated the line three times. Trust the self-obsessed tosser to choose that as a recognition code.
A light returned the flashes from the depths of the house.
“All hail Macbeth,” came a female voice, then a male joined in. Footsteps approached.
“There you are,” the king said. “You weren’t followed?”
Shaking of heads.
“Well, well. How are you, Bell 18?” I said, recognising the spectacular features of the Labour Directorate supervisor we’d interviewed after the first murder. “Don’t tell me? You believe in Scottish reunification too?”
She gave me a fierce glare. “Fervently, citizen.”
I looked at the man. He was wearing standard citizen-issue clothes and I’d never seen him before. While I was peering at him in the dull light, I moved closer to Aurora surreptitiously.
“The boat is standing by,” Macbeth said. “Dalrymple will drive us down to the foreshore and we’ll be away within the hour.” His tone was clinical. I was sure his plans for Aurora and me didn’t extend any further than the beach.
“Let’s get moving,” Bell 18 said, brushing past me.
I had to go for it. I slammed her into Macbeth and leaned forward to sweep Aurora off her feet. I made a good job of it. Before they could recover, we were out of the door and on to the top step.
Then, in the pitch darkness, I took a heavy blow to the jaw and felt myself fly backwards. I heard shots ring out. Aurora screamed, but I couldn’t do anything to help her. I was swallowed up in a vacuum that stifled my cries to her. Then all my systems shut down.
I wasn’t out for long. When I came round, alternately spitting blood out and gulping breath down, I made out Macbeth. He was standing in the hallway in the light from a torch – but now he wasn’t holding his pistol. He was cowering against the wall, his face finally showing some emotion. It did me a lot of good to see that the emotion concerned was abject terror. I swung my eyes round and spotted a body lying sprawled on the floor near the king. Jesus. I couldn’t see how big it was. I staggered to my feet and ascertained it was an adult – the male cult follower. I couldn’t see the female auxiliary and – thank Christ – I couldn’t see Aurora.
The person who was terrorising Macbeth could see me though.
“I thought I’d laid you out for good, Quint,” came a voice from the shadows. “Stand still, Rennie, you shite.”
“Haggs? Is that you, Tam Haggs?” I screwed my eyes up but still failed to distinguish him. I saw a brief red glow and realised that he was smoking a cigarette.
He shone a light on his face briefly. “Aye, it’s me all right. Surprised to see me in your perfect city?”
“Where’s the girl?” I asked, desperate to know if Aurora was alive but also playing for time. A cascade of jigsaw pieces had begun to fall into place.
“She ran off,” Haggs said. “Lucky for her.”
I exhaled a sigh of relief that almost tore away the lining of my throat. “What are you doing here, Tam?” I asked, my mind struggling to compute the data it had just been presented with. “How the fuck did you find us?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said with a bitter laugh. He shone the torch into Macbeth’s eyes. “And wouldn’t you like to know why I’m here, thane of fucking Glamis?”
Derek Rennie’s eyes were bulging. He looked towards me. “What’s going on, Dalrymple? What’s a Glasgow policeman doing in Edinburgh?”
I closed my eyes and got a grip. Haggs the smoker. I remembered the Glaswegian cigarette butts near the murder victims. Jesus, they must have been his.
“You didn’t just come to Edinburgh to kidnap me, Tam, did you?” I said, leaning against the rickety railing. “You know all about the murders, don’t you, you bastard?”
Haggs dropped his butt and crushed it under his boot. “Is that right, smart fuck? So what am I doing back here now? I’m bloody sure you can’t tell me that.”
I spat out more blood and wiped my mouth with my sleeve. “You came to kill the king, didn’t you?”
A guttural laugh was dredged up by the stubbled sergeant. “Not bad,” he said, stepping forward into the open doorway. “But why would I want to do that?”
Neither he nor I got the chance to answer the question. There was an ear-cracking report and Haggs rocketed back against the pocked stonework of the wall, then slumped lifeless to the floor.
Lights came on at the far end of the drive and revealed that the top of Tam’s head was no longer there. I can’t say I shed a tear.
“Quint?” Davie’s voice was loud. “It’s okay, we’ve got the girl.”
I breathed out another sigh of relief as I stepped over Tam Haggs and collared Rennie. He was looking more like Ethelred the Unready than Macbeth – obviously being up against the business end of an automatic didn’t suit him. I pocketed Haggs’s weapon in case the king got any ideas and dragged him towards the lights.
As we got closer I made out Davie standing by a guard vehicle with a wide grin on his face and an assault rifle at his shoulder. Katharine was there too, her hand on Aurora’s shoulder, and Hel Hyslop was behind them. She had the usual impassive look on her face, eyes narrowed to focus on me in the headlight beam.
Then everything, including my ravaged thought processes, went into slow motion. Haggs never did anything without Hel’s approval – the chances of him running a one-man campaign against Macbeth were non-existent. I peered into the glare and spotted the bulge made in the inspector’s breast pocket by her mobile phone. That was it. In all the confusion earlier she must have managed to send Broadsword to Grosvenor Crescent and, more recently, tell Tam where we were.
Before I could shout to Davie or duck out of the light, Hel had her police-issue pistol against his head. Now I regretted keeping Hamilton off her back when we arrived in Edinburgh – he’d definitely have confiscated it from her.
“Drop your weapons!” Hel shouted. “Both of you!”
I tossed away the pistol I’d picked up to my rear, then watched as Davie ejected the ammunition clip from the rifle and let it drop to the ground. He was shaking his head dolefully.
“You two, come closer,” Hyslop said, waving Macbeth and me forward. She shoved Davie, Katharine and Aurora into the light to join us. Then she raised her weapon and pointed it straight at my face. “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, you interfering bastard.”
I caught a glimpse of Aurora’s face. Her eyes and mouth were wide open. Caro used to look exactly like that when she was surprised. I lowered my gaze, taking that image with me and losing myself in it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The blast and then the scream to my left made me jerk my head round.
Macbeth was on his back, blood welling from his right shoulder. I could hear Aurora whimpering. Katharine drew her closer and wrapped both arms round her.
Hel Hyslop had a faint smile on her lips. “That’s just the beginning, Rennie,” she said bitterly. “Lie there and squirm. I’ll come back to you later.”
Macbeth was groaning, his hand clamped over his shoulder. From what I could see it wasn’t a life-threatening wound, but it sounded like it wasn’t the only one he was lined up for. Davie kneeled down next to him and held a handkerchief to the source of the blood.
“Let Aurora and Katharine go, Hel,” I said, taking a pace forward. “You don’t need them.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, Quint,” she said. Her face was pale and drenched in sweat. Suddenly she had the look of someone who had lost control. But the gun was levelled at me in a steady enough hand.
“You and Haggs were the ones with Broadsword in the Parliament archive and when he killed the auxiliaries here, weren’t you?” I said, getting the feeling that she might be wanting to come clean.
She stared at me dully then nodded. “The professor and this bastard so-called king . . .” she glared at Macbeth ‘. . . they set up the raid with John – or Broadsword, as he called him. They wanted the kids to be kidnapped and the file attachment to be taken from the Parliament archive. That attachment outlined research that was never fully developed – something very much ahead of its time to do with the application of animal genetics to humans. Then Duart ordered your kidnap because of Leadbelly and the Glasgow murders.” She raised her shoulders. “We combined the operations. Tam and I had known John for years. Christ,” she said with a sob. “They’re both dead. You shouldn’t have . . .”