The Blood Tree (14 page)

“Not one of your favourite people, was he?” I said, holding up the Barracks Commander's Notes sheet at the front of the file. Auxiliaries have no chance of promotion without a positive endorsement from their commander.

Knox 01 looked across the desk. “‘More enthusiasm required,'” he read. “‘Insufficient zeal displayed.'” He sat back, shaking his head. “To be honest, citizen, I'd have recommended demotion for him. But you know how it is. We need every serving auxiliary we've got. Every year it's harder to fill the auxiliary training programme.” His face set in a bitter expression. “Edinburgh's young people don't seem to care any more.”

Whose fault was that, I wondered. If the Council could make up its collective mind whether to set the guard on to kids or let the Welfare Directorate pamper them – or even find a third way between the two extremes – then maybe there would be more co-operation. I kept those thoughts to myself. I had something else to needle the commander about.

“From what I've seen, there wasn't any suspicion that Knox 43 was dirty.” I made the comment as innocently as I could. Staying cool tends to make senior auxiliaries lose their rag even more comprehensively.

“Dirty?” Knox 01 looked at me like a virgin who'd spotted the vampire's dental horrors too late. “You mean corrupt?” He stood up and pushed his chair back so hard that it toppled over with a crash. “How dare you, Dalrymple? How dare you suggest that I allowed a rotten apple to remain in my barracks?”

I shrugged. “If you did, I'll find out about it, commander,” I said, gathering up the dead man's file. “You can be sure of that.” I didn't think that an ultra-conscientious specimen like him would have connived at anything criminal that Knox 43 had been up to, but there was no harm in making him squirm.

“What are you doing with that?” Knox 01 asked, the outrage suddenly absent from his voice. “That's barracks property.”

“Don't worry,” I said, “you'll get it back.” I gave him a cold smile. “When I've finished with it.”

I met Katharine as I was crossing the main hall. She'd just flashed her “ask no questions” at a sentry who wasn't concealing his interest in her anatomy very well.

“There you are,” I said. “Come down to the canteen. Davie's down there.”

“I hope he's left something for us,” she said.

“There's always enough food and drink in an auxiliaries' mess hall.”

“Unlike in the ordinary citizens' stores.”

We went into the basement and entered the cavernous refectory. Heads turned immediately and auxiliaries started examining our citizen-issue clothes dubiously, but no one tried to throw us out. They knew that we must have had authorisations to get past the sentry. That didn't make us look any better in their eyes. If they didn't recognise me, they would assume we were undercover operatives – auxiliaries are almost as suspicious of them as citizens are.

Katharine took a plate of vegetable stew. Before Sophia became medical guardian the only kind of stew you could get contained lumps of bony meat, but she programmed healthier options. That didn't stop your average guardsman stuffing his face with all the meat he could get. I stuck to what the menu board called “Edinburgh Broth” and piled up barracks bread, which is a sight better than what you get in citizen bakeries.

We went to join Davie. He'd covered most of a corner table with empty plates and bowls. The Knox personnel on the neighbouring tables began to move away as soon as we approached. That suited me – I didn't want anyone to hear us talking about their dead colleague.

“Had enough, big man?” I asked.

Davie was clearing away the remains of his banquet. “It'll do me for a while, Quint.” He turned to Katharine. “Slumming, are you?”

She had her mouth full so all he got was a glare.

As I spooned soup into my mouth, I looked around the mess hall and tried vainly to get a feel for the dead man. He'd have eaten thousands of meals in the basement, drunk buckets of barracks tea. But already he had disappeared, his involvement with the place gone and nothing left to suggest he'd ever passed through it.

When we'd finished eating, I opened Knox 43's file. “Right, let's split this up.” I undid the binding and extracted sections. “Katharine, I'll give you the pages on the dead man's social and sexual activities. I see he was registered as hetero.”

“Women's business then,” Davie said ironically.

“Shut up, guardsman.” I turned back to Katharine. “See if any of the people he was close to are in barracks at the moment and talk to them.”

She nodded.

“What about me?” Davie asked.

“You can have the sections on his auxiliary training and his barracks duty rosters. Talk to his contemporaries and try to trace any pattern of abnormal behaviour.”

Katharine laughed. “You're an expert on abnormal behaviour, aren't you, Davie?”

“Grow up, you two,” I said. “We're investigating a murder, remember.”

Davie's face took on a more sombre expression. “What about you, Quint?”

“Knox 43 was nearly thirty when the Enlightenment won the last election. I'm going to concentrate on his life before he was an auxiliary.” I looked at my watch. “We'll meet back here in two hours, okay?”

They both nodded.

“And children?” I said.

They froze.

“Try not to get in each other's way.”

Katharine left via one exit and Davie via another. It's always good to have a team that gets on.

My mobile rang a few minutes before the two hours were up.

“Quint? Sophia.”

I'd forgotten about my old man. “Is Hector all right?” I asked in alarm.

“Calm down,” she said, her voice warmer than usual. “That's why I'm calling. I've had the cardiologist's latest report. Your father's doing well. Barring unforeseen circumstances, he'll be moved from the ICU tomorrow morning.”

I took a couple of deep breaths. “Brilliant. Is he conscious?”

“He has been, but he's sleeping now.”

“Okay. I'll be round later.” I looked down at the papers on the table. “Have you got anything more on Knox 43?”

“We're still waiting for the full test results. I don't expect anything radically different to what we know already.”

I failed to suppress a laugh.

“What's so funny, Quint?”

“I'm just trying to remember when I last heard a member of the Council use the word ‘radically' about anything.”

“Oh for goodness' sake,” Sophia said, sighing. “What about you? Are you any further on?”

“A bit.”

“Well? What have you found out?”

“You'll have to wait for the next Council meeting to find that out. Out.”

Katharine sat down opposite me. “Who was that?”

“No one you're interested in.” I picked up my notebook and looked at what I'd scrawled on the top page.

“It was her, wasn't it?” Katharine said, keeping her eyes off Davie as he sat down next to her. “The frigid one in the infirmary.”

I gave her a cautionary look. “She told me that Hector's condition is improving. That's all that matters to me at the moment, okay?”

Her face slackened. “Sorry.”

“Forget it.” I took out the dead man's file photo. It wasn't a recent one. A younger Knox 43 stared out at us, his expression a combination of exhaustion and resentment. “What have you got on the deceased, guardsman?”

Davie was shaking his head. “Nothing much. He seems to have been seriously lacking in any kind of drive from the day he applied to become an auxiliary. One of the guys who went through the training programme with him told me he reckoned Knox 43 joined because he didn't fancy life as an ordinary citizen.”

“He wasn't the only person who did that,” Katharine said.

“No, but the selection panels usually spotted that type from several miles' distance,” I said. “What else, Davie?”

Before he could answer, my mobile went off again.

“Dalrymple? Public order guardian.” Hamilton still hadn't got used to the Council's ruling that guardians can use their names instead of their titles.

“Yes, Lewis.”

“Get yourself over to the Council building. I've decided to call an emergency meeting.”

“What brought this on?” I asked suspiciously. Council meetings take place every day at twelve noon but Hamilton, in his capacity as acting senior guardian, had the power to call additional gatherings.

“Well, some of my colleagues are disturbed by the murder of an auxiliary . . .” His voice trailed away.

I wasn't buying it. “Since when did you care what your colleagues think, Lewis? Have you got something up your guardian-issue shirtsleeve?”

“Just get over there, man. At the double.”

“All right.” I glanced at my companions. “But Davie and Katharine will have to attend. They haven't had time to brief me yet.”

“Very well,” Hamilton conceded after a pause. “Out.”

The rain was coming down in sheets when we emerged from Knox Barracks. By the time we got to the Land-Rover our clothes were soaked through.

“Bloody hell,” Davie said, starting the engine and turning on the lights. “I can hardly see the road.”

“Didn't you want me to drive?” I asked.

“No way,” Davie said, shaking his head.

“Why not?” I asked innocently. The Council's ban on private cars meant that I hadn't had much opportunity to drive over the last twenty years. Davie had experienced my skills in the past, though I was on my own the time a barracks vehicle I was driving ended up in Leith docks. Nothing to do with me – the brakes were faulty.

Davie pulled away from Knox.

“Don't you want me to tell you what I found out about the dead man?” Katharine asked.

“Aye. You didn't hear everything I got either,” Davie said, manoeuvring expertly between a tourist bus and a maroon bollard.

“No point,” I said, shrugging. “You'll have to repeat it all for the guardians.”

Katharine glanced at me. “Have you discovered something juicy, Quint?”

“Wait and see,” I said, trying to draw my thoughts together. Council meetings are tricky – some things you can tell them, others you definitely want to keep to yourself.

“It's years since I've been to a meeting,” Katharine mused. “The last one was when they offered me a job.”

“Which you, being a totally loyal citizen, turned down,” Davie said, peering through the curtain of water that was cascading past the ineffective windscreen wipers.

“That didn't get me off working with you though, did it, Hume 253?” Katharine said bitterly.

“I can drop you at the next corner, Citizen Kirkwood,” he replied.

I grinned. Their double act would liven up the Council meeting, as well as give me the chance to concentrate on how the guardians reacted to the murder. Some of my biggest cases turned out to have links with the city's rulers.

The Council meets in an upturned boat. Given the amount of water that was falling from the heavens, I could hardly make out the home of the former Scottish Parliament, but the architectural metaphor was obvious enough – what we had here was the Edinburgh version of Noah's Ark, housing the survivors of the pre-Enlightenment political system. I hoped it wasn't about to be turned upright by another massive crime wave.

The courtyard was jammed with guardian vehicles. They weren't in much better nick than the City Guard's contraptions, and certainly in much worse nick than the taxis provided for the tourists. Davie got as close to the entrance as he could and we made a dash for it. Another cold shower.

“Go straight into the chamber,” a helpful male auxiliary said. “The guardians are all present.”

I led the others through the ornate doorway. The Council meeting place was still decked out in its original munificent trappings. The Parliament buildings had been funded by a Westminster government desperate to give the impression that it was handing over the reins of power. Then the riots came. Only this building of the cluster making up the seat of government was left in reasonable shape. The original fittings were beginning to suffer from a serious lack of maintenance.

Three chairs had been put out in the middle of the wooden floor. As we occupied them, the fifteen guardians looked down on us from their seats in the large chamber. Hamilton was in the centre of a dais in what had originally been the presiding officer's throne. The computers and sophisticated communications systems that each member of the Parliament had been provided with had been removed long ago. But they weren't all that was missing. Now I realised at least one reason for Hamilton's sudden desire for an emergency meeting. The ordinary citizens who, in the drive for openness a few years ago were allowed to act as observers and even provide a daily honorary guardian, were nowhere to be seen. The old bugger was using the provision in the City Regulations which denies citizens access to unscheduled gatherings.

The public order guardian frowned at me and my companions then got the proceedings under way. “You will be aware of the reason for this emergency meeting, colleagues. Citizen Dalrymple and his fellow investigators—” He broke off and gave Katharine a sceptical look after he'd spoken the last word. “Citizen Dalrymple's team are investigating the murder of an auxiliary in the Botanic Gardens last night.”

The guardians' faces bore the horrified expressions they reserved for violent attacks on the city's servants. As far as they were concerned, people who lay a finger on auxiliaries should be put up against a wall, as many were during the drugs wars. Things had been a lot quieter on that front; until recently, when the youth gangs started to carry knives and clubs.

Hamilton glanced around his colleagues. “This was a particularly brutal killing, as the medical guardian will shortly describe.”