The Blood Tree (34 page)

She looked at me dubiously. “What is it, Quint?”

“Can I talk to Leadbelly in private?” I watched as her face set back into its usual hard expression. “Give the guy a break,” I pleaded. “He's in a foreign city, he's had a near-death experience and you want him to have another one. At least he knows me.”

She wasn't impressed but, to my surprise, she went along with it. That's what you get when you ask someone about themselves – however much they try not to, they end up trusting you more than they did before. Not that I did it only to get a few minutes on my own with Leadbelly.

I went into the room. The patient was lying on a high bed surrounded by machines that bleeped and hummed.

“Leadbelly?” I said quietly.

There was a bandage round his neck and various leads and wires ran in and out of him. The skin on his face and arms was clammy despite the air-conditioning. He had his eyes closed.

I tried again. “Leadbelly? It's Quint. I'm on my own.”

That did the trick. His crusted eyelids came apart. He nodded his head at the jug of water on the bedside table.

I held a plastic glass to his scabby lips. “There you are, man. Now you can tell me all about it.”

“All . . . about . . . what?” He was wheezing like an Edinburgh coal miner.

I leaned closer. “All about what happened in the holding cell.” I looked over my shoulder. “We haven't got much time.”

Leadbelly blinked a couple of times.

To my surprise I saw that his eyes were damp. I clutched his bony arm. “Come on. Tell me who put the lace round your neck and I'll nail the bastard.”

He was staring past me, his eyes bulging. “No . . .” He looked back at me helplessly. “No . . .”

“You can tell me, Lead,” I said. “You're safe in here. I'll make sure they don't get to you.”

Leadbelly shook his head. “No . . . they . . . they . . . didn't . . .” His voice trailed away.

I shook his arm. “Tell me, Leadbelly. Was it Hyslop's people? Tell me.”

“Christ,” he gasped. “What . . . what if . . . what if I really did kill her?”

I looked at him. Was that what was bothering him? Did he think that he really did murder the pregnant woman?

Suddenly Leadbelly started jerking his head from side to side. “The bastards . . .” he said, his cracked voice louder. “What they did to those poor fuckers . . .”

“Who are you talking about, Lead?”

He stared up at me. “The poor fuckers,” he said, his words almost inaudible. “The poor, tortured fuckers . . .” He closed his eyes.

“Who?” I said, trying to keep the volume down. “Tell me, Leadbelly, for Christ's sake. It's the only way we'll ever get out of Glasgow.”

But he wouldn't open his eyes again. By the time the nurse came in, he was sobbing. That got me a disapproving glare.

I walked out with my head in a spin. What the hell had happened to the hard man who used to run with the Howlin' Wolf? And who was tormenting him so badly?

Leadbelly wouldn't talk to Hyslop – no surprise there – so we headed out of the hospital.

“That was a complete waste of time,” she said as we hit the car park.

I glanced at her. If she'd been behind Leadbelly's supposed suicide, she'd have been worried that he might have said something incriminating to me. All I could see was irritation that she'd been distracted from the main thread of the investigation.

“What now?” I asked as we got back into the Llama.

“I'm going back to the chambers. You?”

“I'm so knackered that a squad of naked nuns couldn't keep me awake.” I saw her look of distaste. I'd been hoping to provoke a response as I still wasn't sure if Hel Hyslop was a fully functioning human being. “Can you drop me at the hotel?”

She nodded. “You're lucky it's on my way. Otherwise you'd be hoofing it.”

When we got to the St Vincent she kept the engine running.

“I don't suppose you fancy a second breakfast,” I asked as I opened the door.

She gave me a cool look. “I thought you were ready to crash out, nude nuns notwithstanding.” She smiled primly. “Anyway, you don't suppose correct,” she said, turning to the front. “Too much to do.”

I shrugged. “Okay. Can you send me round copies of the interrogation reports as soon as they're completed?”

Hel nodded. “All right. When are you planning on gracing us with your presence again?”

“I'll let you know, inspector,” I said with a laugh. “Good night.”

I slammed the door and walked away across the sunlit pavement.

I thought I'd got away with it. Wrong. Hel was way ahead of me. A hotel security guy joined me in the lift, followed me down the corridor to my room and locked me in. Bollocks. I'd been thinking about going on an unguided tour of a certain research facility in Kelvingrove. It looked like I'd have to crash out after all. So, after calling reception and telling them not to disturb me, I did.

Not that the sleep I got was particularly restful. I had a lot of visitors from out of town. First there was the old man, lying on a bed in the infirmary back home, his face drained of colour and his mouth slack. Then there was Sophia, the bulge in her midriff pushing out her surgical robe. She was saying something to me but I couldn't hear any words, just the incessant hum of hospital monitors like the ones attached to Leadbelly. Then I saw Hamilton and Katharine and Davie. The guardian was tearing a strip off the others, his finger wagging and his face purple. Again, I couldn't hear what he was saying but this time the background noise was a deafening racket, that of an industrial plant working full out. Katharine was reacting to authority as she always did – with extreme disdain. Davie was being a bit more respectful but he didn't look too impressed either.

Suddenly everything went black. The clatter disappeared and was replaced by a gentle hissing, the breath of a light breeze over a heather-carpeted hillside. Then a face flew out of the darkness. I recognised it immediately. It was Caro, long-lost Caro. The dark hair was loose around her face, not drawn back in a grip as it had been the last time I saw her on the drugs gang raid that led to her death. And her expression was joyous, her moist lips parted and the straight white teeth visible between them. She kept smiling at me, mouthing words which I wished I could hear. But the wind was blowing stronger now, carrying everything she said away. Then she too was gone, back into the void.

I woke up in a sweat, the bedcovers all over the place. It took me a long time to get my breathing back under control. A couple of mouthfuls of malt whisky helped. Christ. Caro. She'd been coming back to me a lot recently. As for the others, I didn't usually dream about them – certainly not Lewis Hamilton. What was going on? Being away from Edinburgh was getting to me in a big way.

It was three in the afternoon. The best way to banish the past was to work. I called the desk and asked if anything had been delivered. There was a package from the Major Crime Squad. I asked for it to be sent up, along with a double order of bacon rolls and coffee. Then I had a bath and got down to the files.

Which weren't particularly revealing. The interrogations of the twenty-two
Macbeth
performers didn't give us anything about the cult's funding or any links with the Rennie Institute. At least I found out the name of the masked man with the cloak. He was called John Breck. Not to his face though – the culties had to address him as Broadsword, or else. The other two missing actors, the ones I assumed were the bogeyman's side-kicks, had been Joseph Graham and Eric Nigg before they metamorphosed into medieval men-at-arms with the monikers MacAlpine and Aidan. No one seemed to know much about any of them – cult members were encouraged to cast off their past existences like snakeskins.

As for the men who'd been guarding the adolescents, they claimed they had no idea what was going on. When Haggs applied what the file described as “firm questioning” – which I took to involve electrical equipment – they only repeated that they were nothing more than sentries and that Broadsword was in charge.

I sat back amidst the debris of crockery and green folders and tried to make sense of what was going on. I was the only person who had the full range of information, stretching from the burglary, kidnappings and murders in Edinburgh to the dead adolescent near the Baby Factory and the suspected involvement of the Macbeth cult in Glasgow. The question was, did I have too much material? Was everything connected? I took a gulp of what was by now very cold coffee and thought about it. Was there a thread, a line that ran through the apparently disparate crimes? Every instinct I had told me there was. One thing my years in the Public Order Directorate taught me was “always keep sight of the beginning”. And the beginning of this convoluted case or cases was the break-in at the old Parliament archive. A trio of men who I reckoned were now on the loose in Glasgow had taken a Genetic Engineering Committee file attachment. That had to be the key.

I followed the line from there. The burglars – Broadsword the Bogeyman, MacAlpine and Aidan, I was pretty sure – had connections in Edinburgh with Knox 43, the first victim. But who would have sent them to get the file attachment? Professor Rennie was the obvious answer. Perhaps there was something in that document that he needed. Perhaps he also needed the missing adolescents – their high intelligence might play a part in his research into the human potential referred to in his mission statement. It could be that Knox 43 was killed to keep him quiet, while the physical training instructor was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then I remembered the modus operandi. I could understand why the
Macbeth
trio would have worn their costumes in Edinburgh. There are plenty of Tourism Directorate operatives wandering around every day in festival production get-up, making it as good a disguise as any. But why leave branches over the victims' faces? They may not have been a very obvious link to
Macbeth
, but I reckoned they were a link all the same. Except the eight Glasgow victims before Dougal Strachan had been found without branches over them.

The phone rang.

“You awake, shite?” Haggs asked.

“Evidently, Tam. What do you want?”

“You. I'll be round in ten minutes. Make sure you're ready.” The connection was cut.

While I was shaving, I followed the thread of the case through to Glasgow. What was behind the killings here? I was still sure Leadbelly wasn't a murderer, even though he'd behaved strangely in the hospital in the morning. But he was employed at the Rennie so he was involved in some way. The fact that Macbeth was the professor's brother and the fact that Andrew Duart and Hel Hyslop were suspicious of the institute made me sure that the line ended there. But the Baby Factory was a no-go area. The Baby Factory. What exactly was the significance of the name? I remembered Crummett, the American businessman Rennie had with him at the banquet. Exactly what kind of deal did they have going?

The door was unlocked as I was pulling up my trousers.

“Come on,” Big Tam said impatiently.

“You need some beauty sleep,” I said, taking in his bloodshot eyes and pale skin. “A couple of hundred years ought to do it.”

“Fuck you, Embra wanker,” he said, stepping forward with his fist raised.

I walked past him, allowing the sleeve of my leather jacket to slap him lightly on the face. “You're not my type, darling,” I said, heading rapidly for the lift.

We worked the prisoners and the files into the evening – and reached the big nowhere. Searches of the cult's numerous premises hadn't turned up anything incriminating either.

“We'll have to let them walk,” Hel said around ten p.m.

I shrugged. “Why not? Either they're in the dark about what Macbeth's been up to or the bastard's made them learn their lines perfectly.”

She nodded, scribbled on a form and handed it to Haggs. “Get the Cult Squad duty officer to countersign that and let the culties go. Grade 2 surveillance is approved.”

He walked off without a word.

“What next?” I asked her.

She stared at me, her face wan. “God knows. I've just about had it.” Her expression hardened. “I know you're keeping things from me, Quint.”

I tried to look surprised. “What things?”

“Don't fuck about. What did Leadbelly tell you this morning?”

“Nothing,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. Lies were unnecessary. “He was still out of it.”

I could see she didn't believe me, but she was too tired to argue. “I'm packing it in for the day. Come on, I'll drive you back to the hotel.” She moved to the door.

“Hel?” I asked, flicking back pages in my notebook. “Is it normal practice in Glasgow for murder victims' backgrounds to be ignored?”

She gave me a curious look. “What do you mean?” Her eyes flashed. “Are you criticising our working methods?”

“No,” I said appeasingly. “But you've got eight sources of potentially useful information on motive and you haven't investigated more than the last few months of their lives.” I glanced round the large squadroom. “You're not short of manpower, are you?”

Hel headed for the lift. “Not particularly. But you said it yourself. We've had eight violent deaths – nine including the adolescent – over a relatively short period. Every time we get into the victims' past histories, another corpse turns up.”

I nodded as the doors closed and we moved downwards. Series of murders do put investigating teams under heavy pressure, but something about her answer didn't ring true.

“You've been sleeping all day,” Hel said as we reached the ground floor. “What are you going to do now?”

“What choice have I got?” I said ironically. “Your flunkies in the St Vincent will lock me in as soon as I arrive.”