Water of Death (27 page)

I'd reached the heavy steel door when the nursing auxiliary's voice stopped me.

“Citizen,” she said, her voice close to a shout. “Fuck you.”

That took the shine off having my suspicions about Nasmyth 05 confirmed.

It was only as I climbed out of the dungeons' Stygian darkness that the discrepancy struck me. Agnes Kennedy told me that the nursing auxiliary had received a call. She hadn't said anything about Nasmyth 05 actually being at her family's flat. Then I realised what that meant. If the nursing auxiliary was to be believed, Nasmyth 05 had been there at the same time as Allie Kennedy. I needed to question the Edlott controller even more than I'd previously thought.

I drove back to the Culture Directorate's headquarters at speed. Since my last visit a large stall had been erected outside the main entrance. It rather detracted from the building's grandiose façade as it consisted of a bright yellow tent and a series of full-length mirrors framed in imitation leopard skin. They matched the women in bikinis made of the same material who were handing out promotional material for the lottery. God knows where they came up with that marketing idea. Maybe the Prostitution Services Department lent them it.

The silver writing on a large black banner blinded me for a few seconds. I eventually managed to read “
EDLOTT
–
THE FAIREST IN THE WORLD
”. Underneath it a girl a in a black Snow White wig stood pretending to eat an apple. The seven dwarves, a group of lucky boy winners, were clustered around her, peering at the ample breasts her cutaway bodice revealed. And I thought the Council disapproved of American cultural icons. The Culture Directorate might have been aiming at irony, though that's never been an Enlightenment strong point.

I remembered Nasmyth 05's lack of enthusiasm when I'd last been in the building and decided not to use the main entrance. Perhaps he'd told the sentries to advise him if I turned up. So I drove past the block and turned left at the service entrance, pulling on to the pavement near where an avant-garde theatre company had its base before independence. Now the place is given over to a floorshow featuring tourists who perform sex acts with their partners in public. It's known as “fucking karaoke”.

I went towards a staircase that dropped at a steep angle into the building's foundations. Waste-disposal squads are notorious for leaving doors open and I reckoned this was my best way in. There was a sign reading “Refuse Only”. I wasn't going to refuse an invitation like that but I had to take my handkerchief out and put it over my nose and mouth. Blocking the entrance was a vat of swill that no self-respecting pig would have had anything to do with. I pushed it back on its rollers and moved quickly through the cellar. Just as I reached the door at the far end, I spotted something I could use. My mother taught me that a small gift always makes a good impression.

I headed up the dim stairs, hearing the sounds of numerous pairs of auxiliary boots on the floor surfaces above. I wasn't too bothered about being clocked by the sentries now. As well as what I was carrying for Nasmyth 05, I'd taken a broom from the stores. I moved out into the open concourse. There were Culture Directorate staff all over the place but they paid no attention. If anything, they looked right through me. That's the way ordinary citizens are treated in places like this nowadays. Auxiliaries have to try so hard to be pleasant to us in public because of the user-friendly policies that they turn their noses up at us in restricted areas even more than before. Still, in my particular case that was understandable.

I made it past the defunct lift shafts with their elegant glass tracery without being questioned. I climbed the stairs and got the same lack of reaction from the auxiliaries I met on the first floor. By the time I reached the far end, I was lonelier than a 1990s American president in a ladies' seminary.

Then I bumped into the man I was looking for. Literally. He wasn't overjoyed to see me and he was even less impressed by what I was carrying.

“Oh, my God,” he said, his voice shrill. “What is that?”

I looked down at the stripped calf's head I'd picked up in the basement. It was covered in a noxious slime.

“This is your lunch from last week, pal,” I said, pushing it into his mock leopard-skin waistcoat and driving him into the office behind. “You forgot to eat the brains.”

It wasn't long before Nasmyth 05 started to talk. The proximity of the calf's head to his face may have had something to do with that.

“Where was I last night?” he asked, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief, then remembering he'd already used it on his soiled waistcoat. “Oh, my God.” He threw the stinking cloth down and rubbed his hands frantically over his face.

“Yes, Nasmyth 05, where were you last night?”

“Last night,” he repeated. This was getting boring. “Last night?” he said, registering the look I gave him. “I was in barracks.”

“Bollocks,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?” He gave himself away by gulping like a dipsomaniac frog.

“I run two kinds of interrogation,” I said. “One when I don't have a clue of the answer to my question and one when all I need is confirmation of something I already know.” I let that sink in for a bit. “Guess what kind this is.”

The corpulent auxiliary was suddenly sweating even more than the temperature in his office merited. The blinds had been partially closed and the spacious room was about as cool as it gets in the city at this time of year because the fat shite had equipped himself with one of the city's few fans. So why was he shaking so much that his waved hair had lost its carefully sculpted shape? I let him sweat some more. Eventually he summoned up enough courage to look at me.

“What is it you want confirmation of, citizen?” He glanced at the calf s head again. I knew he'd rather have mine on the desk in front of him.

“All right, here's how we'll do this,” I said, smiling at him malevolently. “You tell me where you really were last night and I'll think about keeping the public order guardian off your back.”

He swallowed again and looked hopelessly at the door. I'd secured it by jamming my broom through the handles. He was on his own.

“I told you.” His voice was suddenly shrill. “I was in Nasmyth Barracks.”

“No doubt you did get your bloated carcass over there at some stage,” I said, moving closer to the reeking object on the desk. “But where else did you go?”

The auxiliary drew his upper body back as if he expected me to throw the calf s head at him. He was on the right lines.

“I  . . . I went to offer my condolences to the bereaved family of the dead lottery-winner,” he said, looking as relieved as a dying man who's been told he's on for reincarnation as Casanova.

“And I'm the love child of Margaret Thatcher and Frank Sinatra.”

I thought that was pretty neat but Nasmyth 05 was looking at me in bewilderment. He was probably one of those auxiliaries who got good marks in the training programme by erasing all pre-Enlightenment data from their memory banks. Not a bad idea with the duo I'd mentioned.

“I look after my winners,” he said in pompous tones. “And their families,” he added rapidly.

“And why do you do that?”

“Because  . . . because citizens invest all their hopes in Edlott.”

A lot of them did, unfortunately. It showed how little they believed in the new Council's policies if all they could dream about was a cushy number dressed up in a spurious historical costume.

“Wonderful,” I said, putting both hands on the sticky surface of the calf's head. “But there's a lot more to it than that, isn't there, Nasmyth 05?”

He stepped back and rested his heavy body against the windowledge. “No  . . . no, there isn't.”

“Why did you countermand the nursing auxiliary's order? You realise it came from the senior guardian herself?”

He went a paler shade of white. “No,” he gasped, “no, I didn't. I  . . . I didn't want the family's grief to be disturbed by one of us.” He looked at my clothes. “I mean, by an auxiliary.”

I believed that about as much as I believe in the divine right of kings. I wanted to ask what Nasmyth 05 had been doing in the flat with Allie Kennedy and I wanted even more to ask him if he'd told Allie Kennedy, or anyone else, where my father lived. But I reckoned I'd find out more by keeping tabs on him than I would by passing him to Davie. Besides, the fat man would be a lot harder to break than the nursing auxiliary. He was hiding something all right but even if he had been involved, I couldn't see him putting any more poison in the city's whisky and water now that he knew I was on his case. I needed to check a couple of other things though.

“Speaking of auxiliaries,” I said, “or rather, of demoted auxiliaries  . . .” I paused to watch his reactions. Nothing so far. “Did you ever have anything to do with a Finance Directorate operative whose barracks number was Napier 25?”

I reckoned his eyebrows moved more than he would have liked. “Napier 25?” he repeated. “I don't think so. Most of my dealings with that directorate have been at guardian and deputy guardian level.”

Arrogant tosser. “He worked in the Strategic Planning Department and I think he was seconded here a couple of years ago.”

“You
think
he was, citizen? Don't you know for sure?” Nasmyth 05 smiled mockingly then shrugged. “I have no recollection of him. You say he was demoted? What for?”

I didn't answer. I could have tried to strongarm him into letting me search the directorate records but I had the feeling that all traces of Napier 25 would have been removed, as in the other archives. Better to let the fat controller think I'd bought his story.

“Okay. There's just one more thing.” I leaned forward before he could move and tugged his hair hard. Most of it stayed attached to his scalp.

“Ow!” he squealed. “What did you do that for?”

“None of your business,” I replied. Now I knew he wasn't clippered underneath like the guy seen outside Frankie Thomson's flat. He was the wrong build anyway.

“Are you finished with me?” Nasmyth 05 asked, a tremor of hope in his voice.

“For the time being,” I said. As I turned to go, I tossed the calf's head at his midriff. “Really, auxiliary. Your clothes are a disgrace.”

Maybe the germs would extend his already liberal conception of “culture' even further.

“You didn't take him in?” Davie asked disbelievingly when I called from the ground level of the echoing atrium.

“No, I didn't. I'm going to get Hamilton to put an undercover team on him.”

“Isn't that a hell of a risk if he's involved in the poisonings?”

“Maybe. We're getting to the stage of desperate measures. Anyway, I'm not convinced he's got anything to do with the murders. But he's got his fingers into something dirty, I'm pretty sure of that.”

“Something to do with Edlott?”

“Maybe.” I scratched my cheek. Could the lottery-winners be the answer? After all, they had more freedom of movement than ordinary citizens and Fordyce Kennedy had been found in an out-of-the-way spot. Was that the connection?

“Are you still there, Quint?”

I lost my train of thought. “Yeah.”

“You will be discussing this with the Council, won't you?” Davie said sternly.

“Oh, aye,” I said, signing off. I wasn't going to tie myself down to a time for that.

I went out of the front entrance to avoid the stinking basement. I was glad to see that Snow White had done one of her buttons up. There are some places you don't want to get sunburned during the Big Heat. A crowd of Edinburgh citizens had gathered round the stall, avidly listening to the spiel and exchanging salary vouchers for extra tickets. The scene struck me as very sad.

On the way to the Land-Rover a pair of crows swooped over me from the rocks under the castle. I remembered the harsh cawing I'd heard in the woods beyond the city line. I had unfinished business out there.

I called Hamilton and set up surveillance on the fat man, telling him not to wait for Council clearance. Normally the public order guardian would have dragged my arse over a grill for suggesting that a senior auxiliary was up to no good, but the poisonings seemed finally to have got to him. Anyway, he'd have no compunction about nailing Edlott personnel.

“Where are you going now, Dalrymple?” he asked.

Before I crossed the city line again, I wanted to check someone else's story. “That would be telling, Lewis,” I said secretively. “Out.”

Chapter Twelve

The building off Nicolson Street to the east of the university had once been a school. Despite the original Council's commitment to education, more recently some schools in the city centre have been converted to tourist accommodation – making money from visitors takes priority these days. The granite façade of the three-storey block had been cleaned, and it stood out from the soot-blackened buildings around it like a crown in an old man's mouth. The scaffolding had been removed and a sign declared “The St Leonard's Hostel Will Welcome Foreign Visitors in July 2025”. There weren't many days of the month left for that to happen. Lines of hard-pressed citizens in workclothes were passing in and out of the main entrance rapidly, suggesting that final preparations were being made in an atmosphere of controlled panic. The facility was clearly aimed at the cheap end of the tourist market as it was outside the central zone, but the quality of workmanship was still a lot higher than the Housing Directorate's standards for ordinary citizens' homes.