The Blood Tree Read online

  That only made me more determined. “She’s helping me out, Lewis. If you don’t like it, find another investigator.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, man.” He turned away and went to the large central table which was his base camp. “Very well,” he said unwillingly. “I suppose we need all the help we can get.” He pointed up at the daily situation report board. “Look at that. Two sightings of unauthorised vessels off the coast, three gaping holes cut in the wire on the city line, four youth gangs rampaging in the suburbs—”

  “And a partridge in a pear tree,” I put in. “Any sign of the bogus workmen or the vehicle they used?”

  The guardian shook his head. “All barracks and guard patrols have drawn a blank.”

  Davie came up. “And no sign of any discarded workmen’s gear or clothes,” he said. “Morning, Quint.” He didn’t offer the same courtesy to my companion.

  “Katharine’s working with us on this today,” I said.

  “Great,” he mumbled.

  “What about the scene-of-crime squad and forensics?” I asked, raising my voice above the ringing of numerous phones and the clatter of typewriters – even in the command centre there aren’t many computers. “Have they found anything hot?”

  “Not really.” Davie ran his eye down a clipboard. “The traces of blood you found on the floor and the file are both group O. They haven’t found any fingerprints on the file covers or in the archive generally.”

  “All our burglars were wearing gloves,” I said. “Anything on the footprints?”

  Davie shrugged. “Three different sets under the rubble from the roof. All standard-issue work-boots, sizes seven, ten and eleven.” He looked up. “Only prints from the size eleven boots were found in the stack where the file was taken, and not many clear ones there.”

  “He was trying to cover his tracks,” I said. “Lucky we found the blood spots.” I rubbed the stubble on my jaw. “And maybe he was the only one who knew what they were after.”

  “You keep saying ‘he’.” Katharine’s voice was sharp. “How do you know it wasn’t a woman?”

  “With size eleven feet?” Hamilton scoffed.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a woman’s disguised herself by wearing over-size footwear,” Katharine replied. She was right. That reference to one of the city’s worst murder cases back in 2020 didn’t exactly lighten the atmosphere.

  “How about the files?” I asked. “Any others missing?”

  “We’ve only just started checking that,” Hamilton said. “I had to ring round my colleagues in advance of the Council meeting to obtain authorisation for these restricted files to be seen by people beneath the rank of guardian. A team of senior guard personnel is going through them now. When they’ve finished checking the files we took from the shelves close to the one that was tampered with, they’ll go down to the archive and start on the other stacks.”

  “Hell of a job,” I said.

  “It’s a sealed archive,” the guardian said. “We have to know if anything else has been taken.” He glanced at me. “Speaking of authorisation, you’ve been given permission to examine the file with the attachment missing.” He looked at Katharine and Davie. “You and no one else.”

  I nodded, feeling Katharine stiffen beside me. Davie didn’t look too impressed either.

  “How about the job authorisation?” I asked.

  “Fake,” Davie put in. “There’s no duplicate copy in the Labour Directorate.”

  “Aren’t those forms numbered?”

  “They are, Quint,” Davie replied. “Unfortunately the sentry didn’t note the number.”

  “No, but the likelihood is that someone took a form from a block.”

  Davie nodded. “I’ve got the Labour Directorate checking their unused blocks. They’re also compiling a list of everyone who had access to their stationery stores.”

  “Good enough.” I turned to the guardian. “Any sightings of the pick-up and the equipment taken from the depot?”

  His lower jaw jutted forward. That was never a good sign. “I’ve dragged the auxiliaries in charge over the coals. I don’t think any of them were involved.” He glowered at me. “I think I’ve motivated them sufficiently to ensure they squeeze their subordinates hard.” No doubt he’d reminded them of the joys of picking potatoes at this time of year.

  “Right,” I said. “Where’s that file?”

  “In my quarters,” the guardian said. “It’s not to be moved from there.”

  “What do you want me to do, Quint?” Katharine asked.

  “Well,” I replied, smiling thinly at Lewis and Davie. “You can either stay here with these gentlemen . . .” I broke off as their eyes opened wide in horror at the idea of a DM like Katharine remaining in the command centre “. . . or you can come with me and check the whereabouts of various individuals we want to talk to.”

  “She’s not to see the contents of that folder, Dalrymple,” the guardian warned.

  “Don’t worry, Lewis,” I said over my shoulder. “You can trust me.”

  As we walked out into heavier drizzle, I remembered Hamilton’s unease about the subject of genetic engineering. And wondered exactly how much I could trust him.

  Chapter Four

  There was another of the public order guardian’s thin-faced, middle-aged secretaries in his outer office. She took one look at my authorisation, one look at Katharine and got on the phone to her boss. While she was doing that, I relieved her of the key to his main office and let us in. Then I locked the door on her – well, Hamilton was very uptight about security.

  Katharine raised an eyebrow. “Why did you do that, Quint?”

  “Because I want to ravish you on Lewis’s conference table.” I pulled her towards the glistening mahogany surface and got a slap that made my ear ring. “Shit, I was only joking.”

  Katharine’s eyes flashed. “Ha-ha. I am definitely not in the mood, Quint.”

  “I noticed.” I went over to Hamilton’s desk. It was in its usual pristine condition, the pens and pencils neatly lined up and the furniture polish glinting under the bright fluorescent light the guardian favoured. No grey areas in his office – or in his life. The dark blue folder, sheathed in a clear plastic bag, was sitting in the in-tray. I took it out. “Right, this is for you, Katharine,” I said, extracting the cover sheet.

  She looked at it. “What do you want me to do?”

  “See the list of committee members? I need to know which of them are still in the city. They might be able to tell us why the file attachment was stolen.”

  Katharine frowned. “Is this another joke? The list’s twenty-five years old. Most of the people on it are probably dead.” She ran her finger down the page, counting under her breath. “Fifteen names. Only two women, of course.” She gave me an acid smile. “Can I use the guardian’s computer?”

  I looked at the pre-Enlightenment machine in the corner. “Of course. Why do you think I locked the door?” The guardians have always restricted access to the Council’s limited databanks – supposedly because computers are too expensive for the city to afford, but in reality so that they can control the flow of information. Lewis Hamilton detested the machines and he’d let me use his in the past. I’d omitted to ask him this time, though.

  Katharine went over and switched the computer on. “Do you know the passwords?”

  I nodded. “He never changes them like he’s supposed to. Try ‘colonel’ every time you’re asked.” I looked up from the file. “You do know how to work one of those, don’t you?”

  Katharine let out a sigh. “What do you think I do most days?”

  “Interview male young offenders?”

  “That – and then write up their profiles.”

  “The Welfare Directorate has computers for that?” I asked in surprise. Most of the city’s bureaucracy is driven by pencil power.

  Katharine looked over her shoulder. “There’s been such an increase in youth crime that the welfare guardian forced his colleagues t
o approve computerisation of the records. I thought you’d have known that.”

  I shook my head. “I just catch the little bastards.”

  “About one in fifty of them,” Katharine said. “In a good month.”

  I couldn’t think of a reply to that so I got down to reading the file.

  After a couple of hours I’d had enough. The jackass who’d written up the minutes was fluent in the kind of civil service jargon that had a lot to do with the break-up of the old United Kingdom – if government documents had been comprehensible to the man and woman in the street, maybe people wouldn’t have taken so much pleasure in torching ministries and hanging bureaucrats from the lamp-posts.

  The gist of it was that the committee had been badly split over the granting of licences and partial funding for two new lines of research. One, which the members had decided by a narrow majority to approve, concerned the use of fetal material for transplant into adults. That was referred to in committee as “Fet-mat” and a full specification of the proposed research was contained in the first attachment. I had a go at reading that and soon gave up. Scientific English is even more tortuous than bureaucrat-speak and, anyway, there seemed no point in trying to understand it – the burglars apparently weren’t interested in it.

  Which left the research outlined in the missing second attachment. The committee members had been even more split over it, several of them arguing in an uncharacteristically resolute fashion that the procedures and ends were unethical. But that was about as much as I got from the minutes. The committee ranted on about “ethically monstrous” and “grossly immoral” but nothing was said, or at least recorded, in sufficient detail for me even to hazard a guess at what the research involved. Maybe the writer was incapable of producing transparent prose; or maybe he’d been told to make his text opaque to ensure that no hint of the research’s nature remained. My suspicious mind automatically leaned towards the latter.

  That wasn’t all. While the Fet-mat research proposal had an abbreviation drawn from the relevant terms, the work specified in the missing attachment was referred to only by the numbers “4.1.116”. That was about as much help as a citizen-issue sou’wester in a rainstorm.

  I picked up Lewis’s phone and called Davie. “You know those senior auxiliaries who’re combing the files from the archive?”

  “What about them?”

  “I need them to check something else.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be delighted to help.” His tone was unusually sharp.

  “Hey, lay off, big man. It’s not my fault that the guardian doesn’t want you reading this file. You’re not missing much, I can tell you.”

  He was quiet for a while. “Okay. Sorry. I am a chief commander, for Christ’s sake. You’d think he could trust me.”

  “I would. Anyway, look, I need them to see if they can locate a copy of the missing attachment. It’s ATT2 from GEC/02/04. Maybe we’ll be lucky and it’ll turn up as a cross-reference somewhere.”

  “Are you relying on luck already, Quint?”

  “Are you in need of a pencil up your—”

  “No.” There was a buzzing in my ear.

  Katharine turned round in the swivel-chair at the computer. “Boys being boys as usual?”

  “Pathetic, isn’t it?” I said. I stood up and went over to the leaded windows. There wasn’t much to see under the dull sky – just grey-black buildings and bare trees in the gardens below.

  I found myself thinking about Caro. Hector’s faux pas had brought her back to me strongly despite the passage of time. It sometimes happened that way. She’d be absent from my thoughts for months and, suddenly, something unexpected would remind me of my first lover. Her dark hair and brown eyes, her glowing face and her beautiful smile would return vividly for a short time, then disappear back into the void. The break-in and the file had already conspired to resurrect her, prompting memories of the time when we were first together in 2002.

  I wondered how Edinburgh would strike her now. She’d been a fervent supporter of the Enlightenment – Christ, we all were in the old days – but I was pretty sure she wouldn’t approve of the way things were coming apart. The problems with the city’s young people would have depressed her. She always loved kids, although we never considered having any of our own. We’d already broken the regulations by committing ourselves to each other in secret. Like ordinary citizens, auxiliaries at that time were supposed to take a different partner at the weekly sex session and pregnancy was controlled by the Medical Directorate’s worryingly named and now disbanded Auxiliary Reproduction Department.

  “Quint?” Katharine’s voice brought me back to the present.

  I went over to her. “What have you found?”

  She held up several pages of print-out with a lot of red ink on them. “Not very much. There were fifteen names on the list, right? Eight were full committee members with voting rights – that is, Members of the Scottish Parliament. In addition to them, there were five scientific advisers, a senior official from the English and Welsh Ministry of Health and a civil servant who took the minutes.”

  “Okay.” I pulled a chair over from the conference table and sat down beside Katharine in front of the screen. “Have you manage to track any of them down?”

  She nodded. “It’s not good news though. None of the eight MSPs is in Edinburgh now. Six of them had constituencies elsewhere—”

  “Where exactly?” I interrupted.

  Katharine looked at her list. “Three in Glasgow, one in the Borders, one in Fife and one in Shetland.”

  “We can write all of them off,” I said. “The democrats in Glasgow would have strung up anyone tainted by membership of the Scottish Parliament. The others will either be long dead or standing guard over their crofts.” Over the years we occasionally got reports of traditional farming methods being used in the outlying areas where the marauding gangs couldn’t be bothered to swing their battle-axes on a daily basis.

  “The two from Edinburgh are no use either. One was killed in a drugs gang attack on the Parliament buildings in 2003—”

  “There were plenty MSPs who went that way,” I interjected.

  “And the other died of food poisoning in 2012.”

  “Another victory for the Medical Directorate.”

  Katharine nodded. “That leaves the scientists and the bureaucrats.”

  “We can forget the guy from the Sassenach ministry. He’d have gone scuttling back to London as soon as the riots started. Not that he’d have been any better off there.”

  “I got excited when I checked the minute-taker’s records,” Katharine said.

  “Did you now?”

  She gave me a cool look. “Not that excited. George Darling was his name. He joined the Enlightenment Party a month before the last election.”

  “No doubt he saw which way the wind was blowing.”

  “No doubt. Later he was an auxiliary in the Science and Energy Directorate.”

  I sat up straight. “Oh aye. What was he involved in there?” I’d come across some nasty secrets in that directorate in the past.

  Katharine was aware of that. “Calm down. He was nailed for possession of cigarettes in 2006. They sent him down the mines for a month, but he collapsed and died after two weeks.” She shook her head. “Bastard Council.”

  I touched her arm. She’d been on the receiving end of the guardians’ hard-line corrective policies herself and it didn’t take much to bring back the three years she’d spent on Cramond Island, Edinburgh’s version of Alcatraz.

  “That leaves the five scientists,” she said after a few moments. “They aren’t much use to you either.”

  I groaned.

  “Two were from the University of St Andrews and one from the University of Glasgow.” Katharine pointed to three large red crosses she’d put on her print-out. “There’s no record of any of them being present in Edinburgh after the Council came to power.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “Prof
essor Dorothy Taylor from the University of Edinburgh and Doctor Gavin Godwin from Heriot-Watt.”

  “Ah-ha.” I looked at her expectantly. “And?”

  “Well, you’re half in luck. One of them’s still in the city.” She glanced at her list and the notes she’d added in the margin. “Doctor Godwin. He’s in a retirement home in Royal Terrace. He was an auxiliary after independence – he was granted exemption from the training programme because of his age. He worked in the Animal Resources Centre at King’s Buildings until 2020.”

  “What age is he?” I asked.

  “Eighty-five.”

  “Christ. I hope his memory’s still in action.” I looked at the print-out. “And the professor?”

  Katharine twitched her head. “Nope. Deserted in 2009. Never been seen or heard of since.”

  “What was she doing until then?”

  She gave a brief laugh. “Making meat pies.”

  “Making meat pies,” I repeated. “You don’t need to be a professor to do that.”

  “Anything goes in this city,” Katharine said sarcastically. “The professor refused to acknowledge the Council or co-operate with the Science and Energy Directorate. So she stayed an ordinary citizen and was assigned work in the Food Production Department. Her last place of work was a factory in Saughton.”

  “Conveniently located near the city line,” I said. “Back then the wire fences weren’t the height they are now.”

  Katharine pushed back her chair and stood up. “That’s it, I’m afraid.” She bent over me. “Are you going to tell me what’s in that file now?” she asked in a low voice.

  “No.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “I feel a bit more in the mood now.”

  I looked round and caught her sizing up the guardian’s conference table. “You don’t catch me with that old—”

  Her mouth came over mine and her hand moved down my chest.

  Then the key rattled in the lock and there was a thumping on the door.

  “Dalrymple?” Hamilton shouted. “Open this bloody door!” The pounding started again.

  “Saved by the bang,” Katharine said, giving me a wistful smile.