Water of Death (31 page)

“Well, do you suspect me?” she demanded.

I shook my head. “No, Katharine. I trust you.”

Her mouth slackened and she gave me a brief smile. “That's big of you.”

“You're bloody right it is. I don't think even my powers of persuasion could convince the Council that you're in the clear. You were hanging around the murder scene on top of being in possession of poisoned whisky.”

Her eyes opened wide. Shit, I'd forgotten she didn't know what was in the Ultimate Usquebaugh. Or if she did, she was doing a brilliant impersonation of a woman who'd sat on a live cable.

“What? There was poison in that whisky?” She turned towards the far corner. “It's been dug up, Quint.”

We stepped round the bodies. Earth and stones had been piled up, and three spirits cartons with torn lids were protruding from a roughly excavated hole.

I looked round. “No bottles,” I said.

“Quint?” Katharine said insistently. “Tell me about the whisky.”

So I did. Her reactions were totally credible. She shook uncontrollably as she recounted how she'd almost opened a bottle to take a slug before she crossed the city line. Fortunately she'd decided she needed all her wits about her. That was a close one.

“Did you hear these guys mention the whisky when you were outside?” I asked.

“No. I told you, Quint. I couldn't make out what they were saying. But I did wonder afterwards what they were doing with it in this area. I mean, most smugglers use the coastline or hide the stuff in loads of incoming farm produce.” She shook her head. “I was going to ask Peter about that.” She glanced back at his remains and swallowed hard.

I put my arm round her. “Is there anything I should know about Peter Bryson, Katharine?”

“Such as what?” she demanded, shaking herself free. “How good he was in bed?”

“Calm down.” I touched her hand. “Such as why he left the city?”

She looked at me less aggressively. “I don't know, Quint. Why does anyone leave the city?”

“Was he on the run? Did he have any criminal record or friends the guard knew about?”

“I told you, I don't know. He never spoke about the past.” She shrugged. “None of us did. We weren't fans of the perfect city like you.”

“Katharine, the whisky's been used to murder people. Was Peter Bryson a killer?”

“No!” she screamed. “No.” Her voice lowered as she thought about it. “I saw him kill intruders on the farm.” She raised her shoulders. “We all did. It was us or them.”

That was a great help. “Davie'll be here in a minute. What are you going to do?”

She shrugged. “Go back into the city, I suppose.”

“All right, but be careful.” I scribbled my mobile number on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. “Ring me later. I'll let you know when you're in the clear. Don't go anywhere near my flat.”

She nodded then leaned forward and kissed me hard on the lips. “Don't you go anywhere near that Ice Queen woman, Quint.” She moved towards the bushes without looking back.

I rang Davie and told him where I was, then called the guard command centre. As I waited outside the ruined mill, I listened to the crows lamenting their lost meal from the branches of the surrounding trees.

The place rapidly turned from deserted sylvan glade to guard vehicle parking lot. Hamilton and Sophia arrived neck and neck, the senior guardian's Land-Rover just pipping Lewis's Jeep to the bridge. I could see how impressed he was by that. Then there was a lot of crawling around and watching Sophia work out a provisional time of death, which coincided with the attack on the female dissident last night. She also found stab wounds on all three victims. I left the guardians and the scene-of-crime squad to sift the details while I scouted around the building. A search team would be doing that soon – not before time – but I was worried about the fact that the crates Katharine had pilfered from in the mill were now completely empty. Had we found the poisoners but lost the poisoned whisky?

It didn't take me long to find at least a partial answer to that question. About fifty yards past the mill, the path swings even closer to the Water of Leith. At first I thought there were some unusually shiny stones in the flow. Then I realised that what had caught my eye were shards of glass. I called Davie then stepped gingerly into the shallow stream. The water was surprisingly cold despite its shallowness and the tropical ambient temperature. I lost my balance more than once on the moss-covered stones and in the patches of sticky reddish-brown mud. Then I reached the remains of the first bottle. The neck had been broken off but the label was clear enough. At least these bottles of the Ultimate Usquebaugh had been rendered harmless.

“What have you got?” Davie called from the bank.

I looked across at him, holding up some of the larger pieces of glass. “Last orders, gentlemen, please,” I shouted. “This was the ultimate whisky and water.”

An hour later we gathered outside the mill to compare notes. The chief toxicologist had arrived and taken possession of the fragmentary bottles that had been fished from the river. A couple had their lower parts intact and there were drops of amber liquid in them so he'd be able to confirm what the labels already made clear – that this was the poisoners' base camp.

Hamilton was wearing a self-satisfied smile. “A pretty good afternoon's work, wouldn't you say?” he asked, looking round at Sophia, Davie and me.

“It's far too early to jump to conclusions, guardian,” Sophia said, undoing her protective overalls and stepping nimbly out of them. She turned to me and gave me a look that was marginally less glacial than I'd been getting recently. Perhaps taking off her outer garments in front of me had revived a happy memory. “Citizen Dalrymple, what do you think?” she asked. We were still on last-name terms though.

I rubbed the stubble on my chin, trying to get my story organised. I had to be careful not to make any mention of Katharine and what she'd told me. “Well, we're making progress. The dead men were obviously involved in the poisonings. The bottles of the Ultimate Usquebaugh in the river show that pretty conclusively.”

“And they were connected with the woman who's still in a coma in the infirmary,” Sophia put in. “The tattoos on their arms confirm that.”

I nodded.

“That's it then,” Hamilton said, rubbing his hands. “Three bodies here plus one in the infirmary equals four. The gang is well and truly broken up.”

“Hold on, Lewis,” I said. I remembered Katharine's uncertainty about whether there had been three or four men in the mill. “It's not that simple.” I paused as a young guardsman came up and offered waterbottles. We all drank deeply. “As I was saying, it's not that simple. For a start, who killed these guys? The same people who threw the whisky into the river?”

The public order guardian was still smiling grimly. “I would guess that another gang of dissidents or smugglers disposed of them. Perhaps they strayed on to someone else's patch.”

“But why would smugglers destroy the whisky?” Davie was taking his life, or at least his career, in his hands by going up against his boss. “Surely they'd be more likely to peddle it or drink it themselves.”

“Exactly,” I said, giving him some support. “And if they'd drunk it, we'd have found more bodies.”

“Quite so.” Sophia looked dismissively at Hamilton. “The fact is, we cannot be sure all the poisoned whisky has been destroyed. There's no way of telling how many bottles were in the cases to start with.”

“And the scene-of-crime squad leader reckons that the glass in the river comes from seven or eight bottles,” Davie said, flipping pages in his notebook.

“Right,” I said. “So there could be twenty or more from this cache still at large. And who's to say there aren't other caches?”

Lewis was shaking his head but he didn't have the nerve to argue with Sophia in public.

“Anyway, there's something else.” Three pairs of eyes focused on me. “The floor in the mill house has been swept. Even the earth around the hole in the corner has no clear prints. Probably branches were used. There are leaves all over the place.”

“And what is the significance of that, Dalrymple?” Hamilton asked suspiciously.

“The significance is that the killers didn't want to leave any footprints we could trace.”

Davie nodded. “They did a good job too. The squad haven't found a single decent footprint. They're still working on fingerprints but they haven't found any yet. The pick-axe handle is clean. Whoever used that was wearing gloves.”

“Where is this leading, citizen?” Sophia looked at me with her trademark coldness.

“Well, dissidents and drugs gangs don't give a shit about prints.” I glanced around them then went for the collective jugular. “But people wearing guard boots might.”

For a few moments the only audible sounds were the hum of insects and the chatter of small birds. Presumably the crows had gone to find another source of nourishment.

Sophia turned to Davie. “Leave us please, Hume 253.” She watched as he retreated to his vehicle then turned on me. “Be very careful, citizen,” she said icily. “Do you have any hard evidence that auxiliaries carried out this crime?”

I shrugged. “You heard Davie. There are no clear prints.” Hamilton snorted angrily. As far as he was concerned, I spent my life trying to implicate the rank below his in nefarious activities. The problem was, I'd sometimes been right. “Let's face it,” I said. “Guard personnel wear nailed boots which leave distinctive marks. They're the only people in the city apart from miners who're issued with them. They're also trained in numerous forms of armed and unarmed combat, including how to use lengths of wood like pick-axe handles and knives. And don't forget – the message you got was written in copperplate.”

“The word circumstantial is ringing in my ears, Dalrymple.” Hamilton seemed to think that was a really smart comment so I ignored it.

“Also,” I continued, “auxiliaries such as guard personnel have been made aware of the poisonings. Perhaps they beat the shit out of the perpetrators and smashed the whisky bottles out of a sense of duty.”

That shut them up.

Sophia eventually gave up giving me the eye and looked at her notes. “As the guardian suggests, you have no direct evidence to make such an assertion, citizen. Besides, auxiliaries would have reported the incident.”

The way she was avoiding looking at me suggested I'd at least given her something to worry about. Or let her know that I was on to her if she had planned the whole scam to show how dangerous the Council's liberal policies could be.

“What's important now is the flag,” Sophia continued. “In the light of this development, do we go ahead and lower it at seven o'clock?”

Hamilton said no and I said yes at the same moment. Sophia looked at us with a resigned expression on her face.

“You have to,” I said emphatically. “There's someone else in on the poisonings, even if the lethal whisky has all been destroyed.”

“How do you know that?” Hamilton demanded.

“It's obvious, Lewis. The ultimatum was posted in the Direct Access box this afternoon. These guys have all been dead for over twelve hours.”

I had them there.

“You're quite right, citizen. I should have realised that,” Sophia said, embarrassed at her oversight. “So the sign of four is really the sign of five, is it?”

“Who knows?” I said. “There might be a legion of them. Until we know different, we have to go on buying time.”

Sophia nodded and looked at Lewis pointedly. “The decision taken by the Council stands.” She turned towards her vehicle.

End of chat.

Davie and I collated the reports from the scene-of-crime squad and the other guard personnel around the mill house. No one came up with anything very exciting. Inside the building we found some personal possessions that probably belonged to the dead men as they came from outside the city. There were wrappers from chocolate bars that the Supply Directorate couldn't afford to buy from the multinationals, an empty packet of cigarettes called Sauchiehall No. 6 and some cans of an orange-coloured soft drink that claimed it could cure hangovers. There were also some clothes, mainly fatigues and other combat gear, as well as a few pairs of surprisingly good-quality male underwear. I was surprised that whoever had dealt with the guys hadn't walked off with that. There was no sign of any of the packs Katharine said the dead men had been carrying when they left at dawn two days ago. There could easily have been more bottles of the Ultimate Usquebaugh in them. Where were those packs now? The scene-of-crime people hadn't found them.

Hamilton came up. “We'd better get back to the city, Dalrymple,” he said, looking at his watch. “It's not much more than half an hour before we have to lower the flag.”

“All right,” I said. “We'll meet you on the esplanade.”

The public order guardian drew himself up and turned to Davie. “Take your vehicle back to the castle, Hume 253,” he ordered. “Citizen Dalrymple is coming with me.”

Shit. It looked like I was about to be read something a lot heavier than the riot act. I followed Hamilton to his Jeep, shrugging at Davie. He had a worried look on his face.

We took off and headed down the uneven surface at speed.

“You never learn, do you, Dalrymple?” The guardian glanced at me angrily then looked back at the road, swerving to miss a wide pot-hole.

“Steady, Lewis. You don't want to wreck your beautiful vehicle.”

“Jesus Christ, man!” he shouted. “That's your problem, isn't it? You can never resist having a go. Did you have to suggest to the senior guardian that these killings might have been carried out by guard personnel?”

So that's what this was all about. “I have to act on what the crime scene suggests. There's no doubt that auxiliary involvement is a possibility.”