Water of Death (17 page)

I got up and stuck my head round the bedroom door. It was four a.m. and in the faint light from the windows I made out that Katharine was comatose, her arms flung wide and her forehead lined even in sleep. I looked around for something to drink but all I saw was whisky. That wasn't what I was after. I could have done with some water, but there wouldn't be any of that available until the drinking tank on the street corner was unlocked at six a.m. It struck me that I was also in need of what the bluesmen called “water of love”. There was precious little of that in the city either.

After writhing around in my sweat-stained sheets, I finally dropped into a dreamless sleep so deep that a bathyscaph would have had trouble reaching me. Then I woke up with a jolt in bright sunlight. My watch told me it was after nine.

I stumbled into the living room and discovered an array of full waterbottles on the table. Beside them was a note imparting the complex message: “Back later, K.” Katharine had obviously found a way of talking the waterman into letting her fill up without a local resident's card. She'd always been good at that kind of thing. I got dressed as quickly as I could after calling Davie to send down a vehicle. There were things I needed to check. On my way out I noticed Katharine had left her backpack inside the door. That definitely suggested she would return, something I found curiously comforting.

I went to Napier Barracks and tried to find out more about Frankie Thomson. I didn't get very far. There had been a change of commander since the dead man's demotion and the new guy and his team didn't know the former Napier 25 well. I found a couple of veteran auxiliaries who'd served with him but they didn't do much except confirm what I already knew. Frankie T. had kept himself to himself and in later years was hardly ever in barracks – he'd told one of them he was working double shifts at the Finance Directorate. One thing was interesting. Like me, both auxiliaries were puzzled about the demotion charge. As far as they were concerned, he'd never been much interested in sex. And even if he had harboured secret urges to stick his hands down women's tops, he could easily have satisfied those in the weekly sex session. Why do something as crazy as that in public and to an important foreign visitor's wife? Which begged another question – had he been set up in some way? They stared at me stonily when I asked that. Auxiliaries have never been much good at conspiracy theories.

I headed to the Finance Directorate. The great dome-topped block at the top of the Mound used to be the headquarters of one of Scotland's banks before the crash and its present occupants are no more forthcoming than their predecessors. The directorate archive is in the depths of the ornate structure and I was eventually allowed in to it after sticking my Council authorisation under a dozen auxiliaries' noses. Information was apparently subject to the same level of security as the city's foreign currency reserves. No one I asked admitted to any recollection of Napier 25. Even the deputy guardian, who headed the Strategic Planning Department where Frankie T. used to work, claimed not to know him. I wasn't buying it.

I had other ways to get what I wanted – one of which was checking files that the city's overworked bureaucrats produce then forget. In the former bank's musty basement I pulled the dead man's records and got down to some creative cross-referencing and indexing. Pretty soon I realised that someone had been there before me, though the consultation forms didn't contain any giveaway barracks numbers. Napier 25's existence in the directorate was documented as regards dates and worthless information like the rooms he'd worked in and the days he'd missed because of illness, but everything about what he'd actually done and which projects he'd worked on had been weeded – as with his file in the DM archive. What the hell was going on? The guy was just a heavy drinker who squeezed a tourist's tits and ended up as a bog cleaner, wasn't he? Why mess with his records? Then, when I was about to start banging my head on the desk, I found something that made me blink. His main service file was about as useful as a Supply Directorate sunshade, but in the directorate's staff transportation dockets I came across frequent references to a particular destination Frankie had been ferried to during the year before his demotion. And that was the Culture Directorate.

I went up the stairs to the opulent main hall scratching my head. Had the dead man been working on a project over there? There was no mention of that in any other folders I consulted. Then the timing locked in. Two years ago, when Frankie first started going regularly to the Culture Directorate, they'd been in the throes of Lewis Hamilton's favourite initiative, the one that now had hoardings all over the city, the one that fuelled ordinary citizens' desperate dreams and dressed up its winners as famous figures from history – the one called Edlott. I didn't know what to make of that.

“Nothing, Dalrymple.” Hamilton's face was as grim as a martyr's when the fire began nibbling at his feet. “Nothing's been discovered by the search teams. No more poisoned whisky, no more Ultimate Usquebaugh labels, no more victims.”

I nodded, blinking in the sunlight that was pouring through the windows of Lewis's office in the castle. I'd been having more worrying thoughts about Frankie Thomson's death. “We'll have to commence controlled whisky distribution if we don't find something soon.”

“Surely you wouldn't go along with that?” he said, staring at me as if I'd just suggested that Council members should wear codpieces and carnival masks in the street.

“Obviously it's a risk,” I said, looking across the table at Davie. He was trying not to get involved.

“Hume 253?” Hamilton wasn't letting him off the hook.

“Em, yes,” Davie said, glancing at me. “As the citizen says, it's definitely a risk  . . . a big risk  . . .”

The public order guardian waited for him to go on then snorted when he realised Davie had nothing else to add. “What are we saying then?” Hamilton asked. “That the DM's death was a one-off? An accident?”

I shook my head. “Whatever way you look at it, someone put a lethal dose of nicotine in the whisky. The most pessimistic way of looking at it is that this is just the beginning. Whoever killed Frankie Thomson went to a hell of a lot of trouble, not just to organise his death but to leave the bottles of the Ultimate Usquebaugh in a very obvious place.”

Hamilton had been scrutinising me as I spoke. “What do you mean, ‘organise his death'? Isn't there still a chance that the citizen came across the bottles fortuitously?”

“I've been thinking about that. There are plenty of indications against it. For a start, as you've confirmed, no other bottles with that label or any other adulterated brands have been found.”

“Which isn't to say that no others exist,” Davie interjected. “We may just not have got to them yet.”

“Possibly,” I said, nodding. “But there's more to it than that. We've got a guy, the skinhead man, who was heard inside Frankie's flat and seen outside it. Think about the set-up in the Colonies. The dead man's sprawled on the river bank – but where's the poisoned whisky?”

“On the kitchen table fifty yards away.” The guardian's brow was furrowed. “And nicotine in that strength acts very quickly. So the victim was either rushed out of the house or  . . .”

“Or he was given the whisky on the bank of the Water of Leith and the killer took the bottle back to the flat afterwards,” I said.

“Why would he do that?” Davie asked.

“And why would he make so much noise in the flat and on the street?” I asked.

Hamilton looked at me. “They were singing drunken songs, weren't they?”

I nodded. “But why would the mystery man join in to the extent that the neighbour heard another voice? He could just have let Frankie get on with it and make us think no one else was there. The same thing with showing himself in the street. He could have done away with Frankie inside.”

“What are you saying, Dalrymple?” the guardian asked slowly. “That the killer wanted to make it clear that someone else was present? Why would he do that? He made bloody sure he left no fingerprints.”

“There's a difference between making an appearance and leaving traces that could lead to his identification,” Davie pointed out.

“Correct, guardsman.” I grinned at him then glanced back at Hamilton. He looked like a kid who'd just discovered that he's got ten pages of algebra problems for homework.

“You mean there's more to this than meets the eye,” he said slowly.

“Could be,” I replied. What my father said about drugs traffickers had come back to me. “Let's face it, you need reasonably sophisticated equipment to produce pure nicotine. Maybe we've got a drugs gang playing games with us.”

The guardian's eyes widened. “Good God, man. That's a hell of a theory.” He wiped his brow and thought about it. I could see he was keen. “I knew it, Dalrymple. We should never have relaxed the original Council's hard line on drugs and allowed the tourists marijuana and hashish. It's an open invitation for criminals across the border to get involved.”

He might be right. I thought of Sophia. She shared Hamilton's views on the drugs policy. It might be in her interest to encourage a conspiracy like this to discredit that policy. Tightening up on drugs for tourists would inevitably lead to the repeal of those small citizen freedoms that had been approved recently. That would be a hell of an agenda. But I couldn't see how it tied in directly with Frankie Thomson's death.

The guardian's voice broke into my thoughts. “You are coming to the Council meeting, aren't you, citizen?” It sounded like Hamilton was living in hope rather than expectation. I took advantage of that.

“Davie can stand in for me,” I said.

“But  . . .” They both spoke at the same time.

“Very good,” I said, giving them an encouraging smile. “With a little more rehearsing you'll be able to get the Public Order Directorate view across in perfect harmony.”

“And where exactly are you going?” Hamilton shouted as I reached the door.

I'd suddenly thought of a very sensitive source of information. “I'll be sure to tell you if I find out anything useful,” I replied.

That left me some room for manoeuvre. Because the person I was going to visit was as likely to headbutt me as he was to talk.

I got into a Land-Rover on the esplanade and asked the middle-aged guardswoman to take the road through the Enlightenment Park. In the old days it was Holyrood Park but the party was quick to change the name. The road circling the crags and the leonine mounds of Arthur's Seat used to be called the Queen's Drive until widespread disillusion with the monarchy made the pre-Enlightenment city council revamp that in the early years of the century. Now it's known as Citizens' Walk – appropriate enough in a city where private cars have been banned for decades. As we swung round the road's gentle bends, I looked out over the desiccated parkland. A cloud of dust was hanging over the slopes, churned up by the buses that take tourists up a dirt track to within a hundred yards of the summit on the other side. A few defeated-looking sheep were chewing what must have been meagre mouthfuls of grass, their spare flanks promising us locals thin soup and gristly stew. It was enough to make you turn vegetarian, except there was limited nutritional value in city farm cereals and root crops because of the Big Heat.

We negotiated the roundabouts and joined the road leading to Duddingston behind the city's biggest swimming-pool. It had been finished seventeen years before I was born in advance of the 1970 Commonwealth Games – when there was still such a thing as a Commonwealth and countries had funds to spare for sporting events. There would be a massive queue of citizens outside the pool on a day as hot as this, waiting for the quarter of an hour each individual is allotted in the eye-scorching, throat-burning water. Of course, the tourists don't have to stand in line. They have all sorts of aquatic delights in their hotels, from jacuzzis to showers with underdressed attendants for both sexes. I scratched an armpit, suddenly aware that I was in serious need of a wash. The way the driver moved her nose suggested she'd noticed too.

Crows rose up from the road ahead and we passed over the tangled remains of a lamb. Which, as the rooftops of the rehab centre came into sight, inevitably made me think of the man I was going to visit. Billy Geddes used to be my closest friend – my contemporary at school and university, fellow blues lover, the guy who joined the Enlightenment Party the same day as I did in the year before the last election and who went through auxiliary training with me. Then we'd gone in different directions. While my interest in crime led me to the Public Order Directorate, he was posted to the Finance Directorate and was soon the mover behind the city's most important deals. He reached as high as deputy guardian before he got his hands dirty and ended up in seriously deep shit five years ago. I had a hand in his downfall. I wondered if he'd remember Frankie Thomson – and, if he did, whether he'd tell me.

The Council turned the former Duddingston village into a centre for the rehabilitation of selected bent auxiliaries about a year ago. Until then even the idea that the rank between guardians and ordinary citizens might be susceptible to bribery, corruption, large-scale thieving and contact with criminal gangs beyond the border was totally unpalatable to the guardians. It was easier just to consign DMs like Frankie Thomson, Katharine and me to the rank of ordinary citizen. At least now they've admitted that bad boys and girls exist. Of course, they don't try to rehabilitate everyone – only those regarded as potentially useful to the Council.

Duddingston was the perfect place to put them. It's not too far from the city centre but remote enough to keep the inmates out of ordinary citizens' view. The fact that the village has high stone walls round most of its edges no doubt appealed as well. In pre-Enlightenment times there was a nature reserve and bird sanctuary by the small loch and the smart Victorian houses were priced beyond the range of even well-off professional types. These days the place is home to deviants instead of rare birds and what used to be a trendy pub houses the guard command post.