Water of Death Read online

  “I still don’t see why you’re coming with me,” the guardian said testily. “The chances that this is your missing Edlott winner can’t be very great.”

  I shrugged. “So we rule out this guy and I get back to the search.”

  Hamilton glanced at me. “You can’t resist a body, can you, Dalrymple?”

  “And you can, can you, Lewis?” I asked with an ironic grin. “You were out of your office like a vulture in the mating season.”

  I heard the guardswoman stifle a laugh and the conversation rapidly terminated.

  In a few minutes we reached the guard checkpoint at the bottom of Dundas Street and moved into the citizen residential area of Stockbridge. The surroundings were immediately less salubrious, the road surface uneven and buildings stained black by the coal we’ve been burning in winter since the electricity restrictions bit years ago. Citizens working here don’t have to bother with the uniforms they wear in the centre, so the streets were filled with people in dirty T-shirts and faded shorts. I felt at home again.

  Just before the bridge there was a maroon and white striped Edlott booth with a queue of citizens snaking away from it. A character wearing an eighteenth-century coat and what was probably a false paunch was giving them a speech. The billiard cue he was carrying told me who he was meant to be – David Hume, Edinburgh philosopher and bon viveur. Christ knows what the old sceptic would think of his home town’s condition in the twenty-first century. Maybe he’d be amused that a lottery-winner was impersonating him. He might even be impressed that a fair number of the populace was well read enough to recognise him.

  “I sincerely hope it isn’t the lottery-winner who’s dead, Dalrymple,” Hamilton said, staring past me at the booth. “The Culture Directorate will make my life hell.”

  He was probably right. Since the success of Edlott, the directorate handling it had become one of the most influential in the Council. Even the once all-powerful Finance Directorate had to listen to the culture guardian and his gang of smartarse senior auxiliaries – especially since they’d started developing initiatives with the Tourism Directorate, the city’s other hotbed of money-grabbing schemers.

  I smiled. The guardian was quite capable of looking after himself in Council meetings. “What’s your problem, Lewis?” I asked. “You don’t even approve of Edlott. You once told me it was run by fools for fools.”

  He stared at me with hostile intentions. I shouldn’t have wound him up by talking down the lottery in front of the guardswoman. Not that she gave any sign of having noticed – personnel who work in the proximity of the public order guardian learn to turn off their hearing regularly.

  “I don’t know what you mean, man,” Hamilton said unconvincingly. “Citizens deserve to have the chance to change their lives. They need to know that their dreams might come true. Anyway, the Council approved the setting up of Edlott unanimously.”

  The Council always approves measures unanimously, or says it does. And the reason the guardians went for Edlott was because they were desperate to calm citizens down when food and power shortages threatened to cause major disorder.

  “Here we are.” The guardian pointed ahead. A roadblock had been set up at the junction of St Bernard’s Street and the main road. A couple of glowering guardsmen were holding some disaffected locals at bay. We were waved through, my citizen-issue clothes getting a dubious look from one of the auxiliaries.

  “Where exactly are we headed?” I asked.

  “The Colonies,” the guardian replied. “The barracks commander’s waiting for us in Bell Place.”

  We drove past the local citizens’ bathhouse in what was once a swimming-pool and reached the Colonies, a housing scheme started in the 1860s by a group of stonemasons. As many as 10,000 people lived in the closely built streets at first, but the houses went upmarket in the second half of the twentieth century and the number of residents dropped. We took a left turn and found the road full of guard vehicles.

  A careworn auxiliary appeared at the Jeep door. “Good morning, guardian.”

  “Raeburn 01.” Hamilton acknowledged the commander of the local guard barracks and nudged me impatiently. “Come on then, Dalrymple. No time to lose.”

  I stepped reluctantly into the heat then took in the neat lines of houses to our right and left. By Housing Directorate standards they were in unusually good condition. The railings running up to the first-floor entrances had been repainted recently. There was even the occasional flowerbox, water for them presumably taken illicitly from the river at the road end.

  “Where’s the body?” I asked.

  “Follow me.” Raeburn 01 led us down the street. A guard had been placed outside each front door. Through the windows I could see anxious citizens looking out at us, in one house a mother standing with her arm round her daughter’s back. The little girl gave me a cautious smile. I winked back and her eyes opened wide in surprise. She probably thought from my appearance that I was a clown the guard had brought along to cheer themselves up.

  “Down here.” The commander took us through a small garden and down to the river bank. Then he raised his arm and pointed.

  There were a few moments of silence as we focused on the Water of Leith. In the nineteenth century the river had been the sewer of the New Town and it didn’t smell too healthy now. Water was running sluggishly through a narrow central channel, the rest of the river bed made up of bone-hard dried mud and stones that hadn’t been submerged since last winter. By the end of the Big Heat there wouldn’t be much more than a trickle in the channel.

  Not that the guy lying on his front with his head in the flow cared about that any more. The hot wind gusted from the east down the river bed and billowed his shirt up from his back, baring pale, unwashed skin. The legs in frayed dark blue work trousers were spread wide open at a disturbing angle. There was a shoe missing from the man’s right foot and the skin on the underside was covered in dried blood.

  Then the silence was broken by a sound that’s become common at this time of year in the few parts of the city where there’s even a dribble of water. Our very own version of the “Bullfrog Blues”.

  “Have your people touched anything?” I asked the barracks commander after I’d had a quick look around the site.

  “Certainly not,” he replied with an affronted look. “We know the procedures.”

  I got a glare from Hamilton for my trouble as well. “Okay, okay. Who found the body?”

  An eager guardsman who couldn’t have been long out of the auxiliary training programme stepped up. “I did, citizen. I was on foot patrol on the other side of the water. I called in immediately.”

  “Right.” I took the pair of protective gloves offered by a scene-of-crime squad auxiliary, pulled them on and kneeled down by the body. Flies rose up angrily and cannoned off me. The shallow river was washing over the dead man’s face and forehead, sluicing past the head with a gentle gurgling noise.

  I twisted round towards the guardsman. “Are you sure you didn’t touch anything?”

  He shifted his weight uneasily.

  “Only I’d have expected you to check whether this citizen was alive and getting his mouth and nose out of the water would have been a perfectly natural reaction.”

  The guardsman looked at his commander, keeping his eyes off the guardian, then nodded. “I . . . I did lift his head out for a short time. But I put it back again as soon as I ascertained he wasn’t breathing.”

  I nodded at him, giving his superiors a tight smile. “Just so we’re clear on that. Anyone else touch anything? Check in his pockets?”

  There was a collective shaking of heads. I didn’t believe them – the guardian had asked if there was any ID when he was contacted on the phone – but I’d made my point. It’s always a good idea to impose yourself on auxiliaries.

  “Can we get on, Dalrymple?” Hamilton demanded.

  I lifted the dead man’s head and looked at his face. The unshaven skin was only slightly wrinkled, suggesting he hadn’t
been in the water for long. Initially it was difficult to be sure from the photographs I’d seen of the missing lottery-winner. He was around the same age. But I soon realised the build and weight were different. The man at the riverside was pretty short and his face looked markedly thinner than Fordyce Kennedy’s.

  “I reckon you’re in the clear with the Culture Directorate, Lewis,” I said. “The question is, who’s this guy?”

  I checked the dead man’s pockets: a heavily stained handkerchief and a lottery ticket stub, but no sign of the identity card citizens have to carry at all times. There were no obvious injuries so murder didn’t look like a banker. Suicide wasn’t too likely either – he’d have had a hell of a job drowning himself in the Water of Leith’s less-than-raging torrent. Natural causes was still the best bet. He might have suffered a heart attack while he was walking by the river, or maybe succumbed to heatstroke. But the angle of his legs and the missing shoe made me wonder. Walking with only one shoe? Hit by a spasm that jerked the legs out at such an extreme angle? I twitched my head and tried to restrain my imagination.

  I stepped back and let the Public Order Directorate photographers get stuck in. While they were busy, I took a walk around. Auxiliaries in protective suits had already sectioned off the stretch of ground from the road end to the river. Three of them were crawling around looking for prints or traces. A small group of local residents, those who obviously worked earlier or later shifts, had gathered behind the tape that had been run between the flaky trunks of two trees. I went over to them.

  “We’ll need one of you to have a go at identifying the dead man,” I said.

  They looked at me doubtfully, trying to work out what one of their rank was doing in the middle of a guard operation. Eventually a tall, gangly guy in his fifties with a badly set broken nose and thick grey hair nodded.

  “All right, son. I’ll help you out.”

  I lifted the tape and led him down, skirting the area the scene-of-crime squad were scrutinising.

  “Here,” the man said in a low voice, “what’s in it for me?”

  I looked round at him. He was wearing brown overalls bearing the badge of a Supply Directorate storeman. His kind was on the take years before the Council relaxed the penalties for involvement in the black market. Now they only get six months in the mines.

  I gave him an encouraging smile. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Angus Drem.” He returned my smile, sensing a payoff.

  “Well, Angus, here’s the deal. See the old fellow with the beard over there?”

  His smile faded. “That’s the public order guardian, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. He’s the one who negotiates payments to citizens.” I headed towards Lewis Hamilton. “I’ll just let him know you’re in the market, shall I?”

  “No!”

  The citizen’s shout made everyone turn towards us.

  “No, son, I was just kidding,” he said hastily. “After all, this is a public duty. You must’ve misunderstood me.”

  “Uh-huh.” I kneeled down by the dead man again and lifted his head out of the water. “So do you know him, Angus?”

  The man’s face had gone white. “Oh fuck, aye,” he said in a whisper. “It’s Frankie Thomson, the poor bugger. He lives in number 19.”

  I beckoned to the commander. “Get one of your people to take a statement from Citizen Drem here. Everything he knows about the dead man, when he last saw him, any visitors to his . . .”

  “I know the procedure, citizen,” the auxiliary interrupted, leading the citizen away.

  “What have we got then?” asked a cool voice from behind me.

  I turned to find the medical guardian kneeling on the other side of the body.

  “Sophia,” I said, unable to keep the surprise from my voice. “I didn’t expect to see you down here.”

  If she was unimpressed by my use of her name in front of auxiliaries, she didn’t show it. “You know how it is. There are so few sudden deaths in the city . . .”

  Not so few during the Big Heat that the medical guardian checks each one out personally, I thought.

  “Also,” she said, head bent over the corpse, “I was informed that both the public order guardian and you were attending. That piqued my curiosity.”

  I still wasn’t convinced. Maybe she’d just wanted some fresh air – in which case she was in the wrong place. Frankie Thomson was in need of cold storage.

  “Have the scene-of-crime people finished with the body?” she asked.

  I looked round at the auxiliary in white plastic who was hovering behind us. He nodded.

  “So it seems. What do you think then?”

  Sophia lifted the dead man’s head and examined the mouth and nostrils. “No sign of the foam that drowning would produce, but then the flow of water would have washed that away. Flesh beginning to whiten. The goose bumps on his cheeks show the onset of cutis anserina.” She felt the limbs. “Rigor mortis is under way in the arms and legs but he hasn’t been here for too long. Twelve hours maximum, I’d say provisionally, though the high ambient temperature complicates things.” Now she was at the lower half of the body. “Curious angle of the legs, don’t you think?”

  I nodded.

  She leaned closer and sniffed. “I can smell faecal matter. He lost control of his bowels.”

  I looked closer. The dead man’s trousers had a stain on the backside which the sun had dried. “Significant?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Don’t get your hopes up though. He may just have eaten something bad.”

  “Never. Your directorate’s dietary planning doesn’t allow for that.”

  Sophia ignored my sarcasm. “Abrasions on the sole of the foot but not elsewhere. So he walked here, he wasn’t dragged.”

  “Can we get his head out of the water now?” I asked.

  “Why not?” Sophia stood up and wiped sweat from her brow. Even the Ice Queen must have been boiling in the protective suit she was wearing over her clothes.

  Scene-of-crime personnel lifted the body away from the water. Sophia signalled to them to turn it over on its back. Then she kneeled down by the upper abdomen and undid the buttons of the citizen-issue shirt.

  “No signs of any bruising or abrasions here.” She looked at the fabric of the shirt.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Look at these patches.” She put her nose up to them and inhaled. “Vomit. He definitely had something that didn’t agree with him.”

  “For example?”

  She shrugged. “There are plenty of possibilities.”

  “But you’ll narrow them down in the post-mortem?”

  She gave me the hint of a smile. “We’ll narrow them down all right, citizen,” she replied in a cold voice, glancing up at Lewis Hamilton who’d just joined us.

  I swallowed a bitter laugh. I’d been in bed with her a few hours ago, but as far as she was concerned I was nothing more than a demoted auxiliary on special investigation duties.

  “What next?” the public order guardian asked.

  “The medical guardian takes the body to the morgue,” I said. “And we stick our noses into Frankie Thomson’s flat.”

  I was standing outside number 19 Bell Place gulping water from a bottle I’d got from Hamilton’s driver. The sun was at its zenith and the heat was as big as it gets. A guard Land-Rover came round the corner at speed and screeched to a halt six inches from the guardian’s Jeep.

  “Well parked, Davie,” I called.

  “What are you doing here, Hume 253?” Hamilton asked, peering at the gap between the bumpers.

  “Good morning, guardian,” Davie said, trying to pretend that his driving was beyond criticism. “I heard from the command centre that a body had been discovered.” He looked at me hopefully. “I thought you and citizen Dalrymple might need some help.”

  “Oh, you did, did you? So you drove down here like a madman and . . .” The guardian finally took his gaze from the back end of his Jeep. “Anyway, what
makes you think Citizen Dalrymple has any involvement in this case?” He glared at me. “You wanted to know if this body was that of the missing Edlott winner. It isn’t. Why are you still here?”

  Typical Hamilton. For him, things were either black or white. I’ve always tended to operate in grey areas.

  “Look,” I said, “the missing guy will probably turn up with a hangover any time now. That poor sod over there’s had his last hair of the dog and I’m not convinced he just dropped dead on the river bank. I’m your special investigator, for God’s sake. Let me confirm this isn’t a suspicious death.”

  For a few moments it seemed Hamilton wasn’t going to buy it, then he nodded reluctantly. “Oh, very well. But I want you back on the Edlott case as soon as possible.” Before I could celebrate my minor victory his lower jaw jutted forward aggressively. “Don’t think you can use any guard personnel you want, Dalrymple. In case it’s escaped your attention, Hume 253 is a guard commander and as such is subject to my orders.”

  “I know,” I said, playing it cool. “That’s why I’m asking you to let him assist me here. It’ll mean I get things finished quicker.”

  The guardian couldn’t really argue with that. “Now I suppose I’m going to have to rearrange the watch commanders’ rota,” he grumbled, looking round for a minion to bawl out.

  I led Davie up the steps to the dead man’s front door. “Next time pull up further away from his precious Jeep,” I suggested.

  “Did I hit it?” Davie demanded. “Did I?”

  “Calm down.” I handed him a pair of rubber gloves and led him inside. Scene-of-crime people were already at work finger-printing and taking photographs.

  “Not bad,” Davie said, taking in the living room and separate kitchen from the hall. “You could have a whole family in here.”

  “Yes, you could.” I put in a call to the Housing Directorate and discovered that Thomson, Francis Dee, had lived here on his own for fourteen months. They weren’t able to tell me why he hadn’t been allocated single-citizen accommodation. It may simply have been that the bureaucracy had fouled up.

  “Right, where do we start?” Davie said, going into the living room.