Water of Death (45 page)

I shrugged. If she didn't like what I was doing now, she'd hate what I was planning for later.

It was almost time for the emergency Council meeting. We dropped Katharine off at my place. It wasn't worth going into battle with the guardians over allowing her to attend and, besides, I didn't particularly want her to hear what I was going to propose.

Sophia walked up to the senior guardian's throne and the whispering that had been going on among her colleagues stopped immediately. They looked as nervous as a group of auxiliary trainees before their first delousing.

“This emergency meeting is in session.” Sophia's voice had a hoarseness to it that I used to find alluring. Now it made me realise how much pressure she was under. I wondered if she would have been coping any better if Katharine hadn't appeared on the scene.

“The public order guardian has informed you of the message received from the poisoners,” she continued, running her eyes round her colleagues. “It is essential that we do not allow ourselves to be diverted by threats. Do you agree?”

There was only muted support from most of the guardians. The tourism chief made his approval clear but he would – he had a lot to lose if services to the city's visitors were affected.

“Very well,” Sophia said. “All directorates will take measures to function as normal and extra events will go ahead as planned. Reports, please.” She turned to Hamilton, who gave a detailed list of the City Guard's updated deployment. Then she called on the culture guardian.

“Tomorrow's inauguration of the Edlott tourist facility is fully prepared,” he said, rising to his feet. “Extra guard personnel in plain clothes have been drafted in, as my colleague noted, and all stocks of food and drink will have been vetted by midnight.” The guardian was trying to sound confident but he wouldn't have won any prizes for amateur dramatics. His face was pasty and his hands seemed to have acquired their very own version of the shakes. “Senior guardian, are you still planning to make the draw?”

“Certainly,” Sophia said. “I will be there at midday. Chief toxicologist?”

The pachydermic scientist got up and ran through a long list of checks on the whisky and the water that were now complete, and others that would be by tomorrow. He glanced at me as he drew to a close and raised his shoulders. His blank look suggested that the secret blues lover had been listening to Tommy McClennan's “Whiskey Head Man” more often than he should have recently.

“Can you guarantee that no tourist will consume a poisoned drink, Lister 25?” the tourism guardian demanded. He never showed much interest in anything outside his own directorate's remit.

The chemist's jowls flapped as he shook his head vigorously. “No such guarantee is possible, guardian.” He glanced up at Sophia for support.

“Quite so,” she said. Scientists sticking together is such an inspiring sight, especially when they've got about as much grip on things as a tourist in a city-centre gaming tent has on his wallet.

“I don't suppose there's any chance of postponing Edlott's greed initiative?” I asked in a quiet voice. I knew there wasn't but I wanted to soften them up.

They must have been practising the simultaneous heavy intake of breath.

“The initiative is worth a huge amount of foreign exchange to the city,” the tourism guardian said firmly. “We've been planning it for months.”

“And have you planned what you'll do if some poor sod clutches his throat and dies in agony in the middle of Princes Street?” I asked.

“That will do, citizen.” Sophia's tone was dictatorial. “The decision to proceed is irrevocable.” She gave me a hard stare. “Do you have any practical suggestions to minimise the risk?”

“I do.” I smiled as I looked round the circle of apprehensive faces. “We need to find Alexander Kennedy, the prime suspect.”

Silence. Stating the obvious often has that effect.

The culture guardian's hands were still shaking. “And how do you propose to catch that individual?”

I was tempted to tell him that his senior auxiliary Nasmyth 05 might be involved, but I wanted the fat man to be left alone in case Allie got in touch. Besides, I'd suddenly realised that all the Council members were staring at me expectantly. Now I knew how it feels to be the saviour – seriously shitty. I'm not cut out for it temperamentally. But I could still give them a push on the road to enlightenment.

“By using his mother and sister as bait,” I said.

That got them going. The whispering started up again and I was treated to a series of filthy looks.

“How exactly would you use them?” Sophia asked.

“By putting them up on the platform with you and the rest of the VIPs and surrounding them with guards. I think Allie Kennedy will get the message.”

“Which is?” the culture guardian asked.

“Which is – if anyone is poisoned, Agnes and Hilda will pay the price.”

The whispering turned to scandalised babbling.

“You can't treat citizens like that!” shouted the welfare guardian. The bulky middle-aged woman had been behind many of the Council's more liberal projects. “We have a responsibility to protect them.”

“I didn't say anything about actually harming the female citizens. But Allie Kennedy is probably the kind of screwed-up individual whose mind will work that way.”

“Rubbish,” the welfare guardian said dismissively. “How can you possibly know how his mind works? He may not even
be
the poisoner.”

“He's the poisoner, all right,” I said. “I'm sure of it.”

“Are there no other ways of dealing with him?” Sophia asked. I suspected that she wasn't too concerned about using the women in the way I'd suggested, but she had to appear sympathetic to the less hardline guardians' views.

“Not that I can think of in the small amount of time we have,” I said, flipping the pages of my notebook to give the impression I had dozens of other options that I'd weighed up carefully and rejected. “The all-barracks search for Allie Kennedy is still in force but he's managed to evade us so far. We have to assume that he'll carry on doing so. We're maintaining full surveillance on his home in case he shows up there.”

“Also unlikely,” Hamilton put in.

I shrugged. “All we can do is keep up the toxicological checks and hope some eagle-eyed guard spots the bugger.” It was a mark of how worried the guardians were that none of them raised an eyebrow at my use of a proscribed word in the Council chamber. “And tomorrow we have to hope that the sight of his mother and sister puts him off whatever horrors he's got in store for your precious tourists.”

There was silence again. It looked like I'd helped them to see the light. It's amazing how quickly the Council's moral precepts about citizen welfare are subordinated to the city's main source of income. Or rather, it's not amazing at all.

“One question, citizen,” the tourism guardian said. “How do we know the poisoner's target will be the Edlott ceremony?”

I gave him a loose smile. “We don't.”

The meeting ended shortly afterwards.

I went back to the castle with Hamilton to check his directorate's preparations.

“Are you sure you know what you're doing, Dalrymple?” he asked as he drove the Jeep to the far side of the esplanade. “It all seems a bit random.”

“Look, Lewis, you know about needles and haystacks,” I said, opening the door. “Trying to find a few drops of nicotine is God knows how many times worse, even in a city that rations water and booze. If the chief toxicologist doesn't turn anything up in the tourist whisky and water supplies by tomorrow morning, what else can we do? At least the sight of his mother and sister might make the lunatic think twice.”

“What if he's already put the poison somewhere he can't get back to in time?”

I closed the door and looked at him over the bonnet. “Then we're fucked, Lewis. Or rather, the poor bastard who drinks the stuff is.” I stamped off up the narrow causeway to the gatehouse.

Davie appeared in the public order guardian's quarters soon after. “Barracks” and chemists' reports,” he said, laying a pile of folders on the conference table. “No sign of any contaminated liquid.” He shook his head dispiritedly. “And no sign of the suspect.”

I shuffled through the papers. The guard and toxicologist squads were spreading out in an expanding radius from the middle of the tourist zone but they'd never manage to check every bar, hotel, nightclub, whorehouse and snack trolley by the next day. I'd been trying to think of other locations that Allie Kennedy might target. The marijuana clubs were a possibility but all of them had already been scrutinised. It was equally possible that he'd aim at somewhere with a lower profile. In this tourist mecca there were hundreds of target zones.

“What about Nasmyth 05?” I asked.

“Still in the Culture Directorate,” Davie replied. “No suspicious contacts or calls.”

“Christ, he must be breaking all records for devotion to duty,” I said. “Maybe that's what Edlott does to you.”

Hamilton stirred behind his desk. “Shouldn't we bring him in and interrogate him again?”

I shook my head. “He's more use on the street. If he ever gets to it.”

We sat and tossed more ideas round, put some of them into action and drove the command centre mad with orders and countermands. It was about as much fun as playing poker at a chimpanzees' tea party. I gave up at around nine o'clock and got Davie to run me back to my place.

“See you in the morning, guardsman,” I said, yawning. “Six o'clock, okay?”

“Will you have finished with the Kirkwood woman by then?” he asked ironically.

“The Kirkwood woman? What kind of bollocks is that? You sound like the senior guardian.”

He shook his head. “I hope you know what you're doing, Quint. Hell hath no fury like—”

“Oh for fuck's sake. Good night.” I slammed the Land-Rover door behind me.

I climbed the stairs in the dim light, my interest in seeing Katharine not completely blown away by Davie's worrying mutation into Sophia. I opened my door and stood in the darkness for a few seconds. Then I turned on the light and took in the living room. No one there. I found that the bedroom was also unoccupied and felt my heart begin to pound in my chest. Where the hell had she got to? A vision of a short-haired guy with staring eyes flew up before me.

I pulled out the mobile I'd drawn earlier in the castle and got Davie to turn back. Maybe I wasn't the only smartarse who'd come up with the idea of using people as bait.

“What's going on?” Davie shouted as he skidded to a halt in Gilmore Place.

“Katharine's gone.” I pulled open the passenger door and piled in. “Get moving.”

“Where to?”

“The Kennedy place. I think Allie might have got her.”

Davie turned the Land-Rover round, sticking his hand out of the side window to stop a tractor towing a water tank on the other side of the road. “Allie Kennedy?” he said dubiously. “Why would he have gone to your flat, Quint? Even if he did, he's hardly likely to have taken Katharine back to Millar Crescent.”

“I haven't got any better ideas, pal.” I grabbed the vehicle's phone, my gut writhing under a major acid attack. “Allie Kennedy might have been there since we last were.”

I called the undercover team. “Shit. Something's not right in Morningside. The surveillance guys in front of the tenement aren't answering.”

Davie had his foot to the floor as we ground up Bruntsfield Place past the citizen pitch-and-putt facility. “Have you tried the team at the rear?” he asked.

I punched the buttons. This time there was a response.

“Unit 35.”

“This is Dalrymple. What the fuck's happening up there?”

“What do you mean, citizen?” The voice was male, young and surprised. “We've seen no movement on this side of the target area for over an hour.”

“When did you last talk to your mates at the front?”

“Em  . . . about forty-five minutes ago.”

“Jesus. All right, maintain your position. And don't take your eyes off those windows for a second. Out.”

Davie leaned over and took the phone from me. He called ahead to Napier Barracks and got the barriers raised. We steamed through them like an All Black on the way to the try line in the days before sheep racing became the number-one sport in New Zealand. A couple of guard vehicles moved off and followed us down the hill to Morningside.

Davie heaved the wheel round. He entered Millar Crescent at speed and a crazy angle.

“Christ, where is everybody?” he gasped.

The place was completely deserted, the underpowered streetlights casting patches of yellow over the pitted asphalt. Normally during the Big Heat, evening is the best time of the day. People enjoy it like the Mediterraneans used to before the sea covered their coastal cities. The temperature drops to a more or less tolerable level and citizens congregate in the streets until curfew. I glanced at the water tank and felt a cold fist clench the base of my spine.

“Oh my God.”

Davie finished standing on the brakes and followed the direction of my gaze. “You don't think the bastard's poisoned the whole street?”

“You do get that impression, don't you?”

A guard Land-Rover passed us and pulled up at the hole in the ground that was the surveillance team's cover. I watched as a bear-like guardsman went behind the maroon and white striped screen that had been erected. A couple of seconds later he reappeared, waving his arm frantically.

“What next?” I muttered, pushing the door open and running after Davie.

The undercover operatives had done a good job of establishing their credentials as road diggers. There was a large mound of shattered asphalt and earth in front of the screen. I noticed that there were a lot a recent footprints on it. There was also a partially deflated football at the kerb.