The Blood Tree (11 page)

I nodded and accepted a pair of rubber gloves from one of Hamilton's team.

“My hero,” Katharine whispered as she pulled on hers.

“My arse in the fire if you screw up,” I hissed.

“Go on, man,” Hamilton said brusquely. “Get inside. My people are waiting.”

“Not coming, Lewis?” I asked.

The guardian shook his head. “I've seen quite enough.” He'd never been good at dealing with corpses. You'd have thought the drugs wars would have acclimatised him.

I opened the flap in the canvas and dropped to my knees to examine the ground inside the tent. A large battery-powered light had been hung from the apex. The grass was sparse around the trunk of the copper beech and there were some scuffed prints. I avoided the clearest ones and moved further in.

The auxiliary was dressed in a standard-issue grey suit and black shoes. He was lying on his left side, knees and arms bent uniformly. It looked like the body had been left in a carefully arranged pose, an impression strengthened by what was in the right hand. A branch had been cut from the beech and the fingers folded round it. The purple-red foliage was covering the dead man's arm and face. There was a lot of blood on the leaves.

“I told you it was bad,” Davie called.

I turned round and saw Hamilton shaking his head.

“Can I come in?” Sophia asked.

“How about me?” Katharine added.

“Hold on a minute,” I said. “I haven't even seen the face yet.”

I edged forward till I was kneeling by the upper abdomen. I didn't want to move anything before photographs were taken so I bent down and peered through the leaves. What I saw made me jerk back uncontrollably.

“God almighty,” I gasped.

“What is it, Quint?” Davie asked.

I looked again to make sure. No, I wasn't imagining it.

“Quint?” Sophia said.

“Someone thought this guy didn't see well enough,” I said, rocking back on my heels. “So they gave him a third eye.”

I finished my preliminary examination and let the scene-of-crime squad get on with photos, sketches, prints and so on. We watched as the branch was removed from the corpse's grip – it was loose, suggesting the branch had been put there after death. Then Sophia and I went back inside the tent.

“What do you reckon?” I asked after she'd inspected the dead man's face.

She sat back, her midriff bulging under the protective tunic. “Very curious. I won't be able to tell for sure until the postmortem—”

“Of course.”

She gave me a disparaging look. “But it would appear that what you described as a third eye is in fact the dead man's own left eye. There's a lot of blood about but if you look carefully you can see that the left eye's been torn out and forced into the cavity that was opened in the frontal bone.”

I felt my stomach churn. “You're kidding. Why would anyone want to do that?”

“I'm a doctor, not a psychologist,” Sophia said distractedly. “At first I wondered if the wound came from a bullet.”

“Not many of those in Enlightenment Edinburgh,” I said. “Only the city line and border guards have guns.”

She glanced up at me. “Always quick to assume that auxiliaries are the criminals, aren't you, Quint?” She shook her head. “This is no bullet wound. Look at the ragged edges. This was done by a sharp instrument.” She pursed her lips. “Wielded by someone with considerable strength. The bone is thick there.”

“Jesus,” I gasped, “this gets worse by the minute. What kind of sharp instrument? Don't tell me – wait for the p-m.”

She nodded. “Exactly. But it would have been something at least six inches long to allow for the leverage required to gouge out the hole. The rough edges suggest it didn't have honed edges and I don't think it would have been pointed – the leading edge would have been at least half-an-inch wide to make that hole.”

“A chisel?”

“Mm, possible.”

I looked at her. “Not much doubt that this was murder.”

“None at all, Quint. He could hardly have committed suicide like this. Or got that hole in his forehead and had his eye moved by accident.”

“What about the time of death?”

Sophia put her hands on the head and neck, then ran them down the arms and legs. “Rigor's almost complete. That and the temperature reading makes me say around twelve hours ago. To be confirmed.”

“So an hour or two after midnight?” I asked.

Sophia stood up. “Something like that.” She stepped over the markers to the tent flap. “I'll be waiting for the body,” she said over her shoulder. “The Council will want the p-m to be done as soon as possible.”

“I know.” I moved over to the body and tried to make out the barracks number on the left side of the suit jacket. It was pressing into the ground. “Davie! I need a hand.”

He appeared, Katharine not far behind him.

“Lift him up from the other side.”

Davie did so.

“That's interesting,” I said, touching a tear in the jacket fabric. “The barracks number's been torn off.”

“Why would the killer do that?” Davie asked.

“Maybe he wanted to keep a trophy,” Katharine said, her eyes locked on the mutilated face.

“Or maybe it just got lost in the struggle,” I said. “There are some ritualistic elements here – the branch over the face, the third eye. Jesus, look at the side of his head.”

I leaned forward again. There was a mass of pulped bone and blood above the ear he'd been lying on.

“Looks like someone smashed his head in,” Davie said.

“Before or after the eye was taken out?”

I shrugged, briefly wondering about Sophia's failure to spot that injury.

“Meanwhile we have the problem of identifying this guy. I don't fancy getting everyone of auxiliary rank to look at these features and see if they recognise him.” I slid my hand into the inside jacket pocket. “Hang on.” I pulled out a black leather wallet. “This might help.” I opened it and took out a Knox Barracks ID card.

Davie let the body back down on to the ground and leaned across. “It's not a very recent photo but it looks pretty like him.”

“Knox 43,” Katharine read.

“Date of birth 10.10.75,” I continued, “height five feet ten, weight ten stone three—”

“Seems about right,” Davie said.

“Hair grey—”

“Check,” Katharine said.

“Eyes brown.”

Neither of them volunteered to confirm that. The right eyelids were gummed together with dried blood. I had to force myself to look at the eyeball that had been moved from its socket and stuffed into the hole in the forehead. Lidless and not exactly free of blood, it stared out like one of the large, sticky sweets that kids used to suck before the Council banned confectionery on health grounds.

“That one's brown,” I said. “Who knows about the other?”

“It must be the same,” Katharine said, looking away.

“I'm not sure if we can be sure of anything in this case yet,” I said. “But, yeah, the likelihood is that this is Knox 43.”

Davie got up. “I'll go and find out about him.”

I nodded and ran my fingers into the other pockets. A pristine handkerchief, an auxiliary-issue condom (unused), a pencil and a notebook were my haul. I put them into separate clear plastic bags.

“What do you think, Quint?” Katharine asked. Her face was pale and her hands were quivering. She'd seen plenty of dead bodies in her time, but this one wasn't easy to live with.

I got to my feet and was immediately attacked by pins and needles. Heavy rain began to drum on the canvas above. “What I think is that our friend here needs to be taken to the morgue sharpish. Then we'll have to look for witnesses – not that there would have been too many of them after curfew. Check the guard patrols, check—”

“I don't mean all that procedural stuff,” Katharine interrupted. “I mean what do you think about this killing? It's giving me a really bad feeling.” She twitched her head. “Reminds me of the scumbags in the drugs gangs who used to mutilate people for fun.” Her eyes flashed at me. “I thought you'd got rid of all those animals.”

I took her arm and led her to the tent flap. “So did I, Katharine. So did I.”

The rain was coming down in torrents so we ran to the gatehouse where a temporary operations room had been set up. I hoped the forensics people had got all the traces and prints they needed from the vicinity of the body because the Botanics were about to be turned into a titanic sunken garden.

A pimply trainee auxiliary who looked well out of his depth handed us mugs of oily tea. As usual there was no milk. Outside, the pile-up of guard vehicles had dissipated. Hamilton had no doubt told them to get about their business in words of one syllable. An ambulance moved slowly past the checkpoint – Knox 43's last ride.

“Does this place have a sentry overnight?” I asked Davie.

He nodded. “Because of the child care facility at the Botanics.” He looked at his notebook. “Raeburn 266 was the sentry on the nightshift. I've already questioned her. She's an experienced guardswoman.” He shrugged. “She saw nothing out of the ordinary all night. There was a mist and visibility was poor.”

“Also,” I said, “the railings were removed for resmelting during the drugs wars so getting in and out of here anywhere along the boundary isn't too difficult.”

Hamilton glared at me. “We needed all the iron we could get at that time, Dalrymple. You know that.”

“Uh-huh.” I turned to Davie. “Any other witnesses?”

“None has come forward yet. I've got auxiliaries from Scott Barracks knocking on all the doors in the area.”

“How about the child care facility?” I asked.

“Ah.” Davie's cheeks coloured. “I haven't got round to that yet.”

It was unlike Davie to overlook a place in close proximity to the scene. That showed how much the body had affected him.

“Don't worry,” I said. “We've got the perfect person to handle this. Katharine works in the Welfare Directorate.” I looked at her. “Can you go and check the facility out?”

She nodded. “Anyone got an umbrella?”

Hamilton reluctantly handed over his. “Make sure you bring it back,” he said.

Katharine peered at it. The words “Public Order Guardian” had been stencilled over the maroon and white fabric. “What possible reason would I have for keeping it?” she asked, then left.

“Don't say a word, Lewis,” I warned.

There was a buzz from Davie's mobile. He answered and listened intently, making notes before he rang off.

“That was the command centre. They've pulled the dead man's file.” He was suddenly breathless. “Listen to this.”

Hamilton and I stepped closer.

“As Knox 43's low barracks number suggests, he was a fairly senior auxiliary,” Davie said. The twenty auxiliary barracks were originally set up with fifty members each – they have five hundred-plus now.

The guardian nodded impatiently. “We know that, commander. Continue.”

Davie nodded, a faint smile on his lips. “He was also a civil engineer – in charge of the Roads and Power Maintenance Department.”

I had a flash of the skeletal figures in workmen's protective overalls outside the Assembly Hall. “Shit. That department's in the Labour Directorate, isn't it?”

“It is,” Davie confirmed. “Interesting, eh?”

Hamilton was following the exchange, his head moving from side to side. “Wait a minute, you two. What are you getting so excited about?”

“The break-in at the Scottish Parliament archive, Lewis,” I said. “Remember the job authorisation form that your sentry omitted to check up on?”

The guardian's face went as white as his beard. “It came from the Labour Directorate.”

“Correct,” I said.

“And the pick-up and equipment were taken from a Labour Directorate depot,” Davie added.

Hamilton looked at us dubiously. “Aren't you jumping to conclusions? It could just be a coincidence.”

“It could be,” I admitted. “We'll need to question his colleagues in the directorate and in Knox Barracks – see if there's any evidence that he was unreliable.”

“Or that he had any very nasty friends,” Davie said, pulling out his mobile. “I'll start lining up people who knew him.”

I nodded and looked at the plastic bags I'd spread out on the table earlier. The forensics team would be taking them off to check for fingerprints soon. There wasn't much to go on – apart from the dead man's notebook. I picked it up and slipped it out of the bag.

“Looking for the killer's name and address?” the guardian asked.

I flicked through the pages. The poor-quality recycled Supply Directorate paper was grey, the lines on it almost invisible. Knox 43's handwriting wasn't exactly the copperplate taught in the city's schools but he'd grown up in pre-Enlightenment times. I managed to decipher most of what he'd written – locations he'd been working on (nothing about the Assembly Hall), reports to be completed, that kind of thing. I'd get Hamilton's people to follow up the notes but none of them looked too hot. For one thing, the notebook was new and he'd only written on five pages.

My mobile rang.

“Are you coming to the post-mortem or not, Quint?” Sophia asked. “The body's arrived.”

“Right, I'll be up as quickly as I can. Sophia? Anything more on my father?

“He's still stable.” She paused. “Don't worry. I think he's past the worst.”

“Thanks. I don't think we are though.”

“What do you mean?”

“This killing, Sophia,” I said. “There are some very worrying aspects to it.”

“For instance?”

“I'll tell you later.” I wasn't going to talk about a potential link with the break-in on the phone. “Out.”