Water of Death (2 page)

Bad idea.

After fifty yards they were still going away from me, dust rising from their feet and hanging in the air to coat my tongue and eyes. But after a hundred yards, when my lungs were clogging and my legs had decided enough was enough, the little sods had slowed to not much more than a stride: evidence of loading up on illicit ale and black-market grass, I reckoned. Then I cut my speed even more. People who get into those commodities at an early age usually learn how to look after themselves.

They turned to face me and started to laugh in between gasping for breath.

“Hey, look, Tommy, it's the Good fucking Samaritan,” the redhead said. Obviously he'd learned something in school, though the Education Directorate would have preferred something more in line with the Council's atheist principles to have stuck.

Tommy was rifling through the woman's bag, tossing away paper hankies and the Supply Directorate's version of cosmetics and stuffing food and clothing vouchers into his pocket. When he'd finished, he looked up at me and smiled threateningly. The teeth he revealed were uneven and discoloured.

“Get away, ya wanker,” he hissed, raising his left fist. It had the letters D-E-A-D tattooed amateurishly on the lower finger joints. I was betting the right one had the word “YOU'RE” on it, spelled wrong. “Come on, Col. We're gone.”

He'd got that right. I took my mobile phone from the back pocket of my shorts and called the guard command centre in the castle. As soon as I started to speak, the two of them turned back towards me, their eyes empty and their fists drawn right back.

Like I said – bad idea.

“Are you all right, Quint?”

“What does it look like, Davie?” I took a break from flexing my right wrist and stood up to face the heavily built guard commander who'd just arrived in a Land-Rover and a dust storm.

“Bloody hell, what did you do to those guys?”

I walked over to the bagsnatchers. The carrot-head was leaning forward on both hands, carrying out a detailed examination of what had been his lunch. Tommy the hard man was still on his arse. Unfortunately he'd turned out to have a jaw that really was hard. I had a handkerchief wrapped round my seeping knuckles.

“Where did you learn to fight like that, ya bastard?” he demanded, trying to get to his feet. Then he ran his eye over Davie's uniform. “I might have fuckin' known. You're an Alsatian like him.” The city's lowlife refer to the guard as dogs when they're feeling brave.

Davie grabbed the kid's arm and pulled him upright. “What was that, sonny?”

Tommy decided bravery was surplus to requirements. “Nothing,” he muttered.

“Nothing what?” Davie shouted into his ear.

“Nothing, Hume 253.” Tommy pronounced Davie's barracks number with exaggerated respect, his eyes to the ground.

“That's better, wee man. And for your information, this citizen is not a member of the City Guard.”

“He fuckin' puts himself about like one,” Tommy said under his breath.

Davie grinned at me. “And there was me thinking you'd forgotten your auxiliary training, Quint.”

“Quint?” the boy said with a groan. “Aw, no. You're no' that investigator guy, are you? The one wi' the stupid name?”

Davie found all this highly amusing. “Quintilian Dalrymple?” he asked.

“Aye, the one who's in the paper every time you bitches cannae do your job.”

Too much adulation isn't good for you. “So what are you going to do with this pair of scumbags, Hume 253?” I asked.

Colin the carrot finally managed to get to his feet.

“Cramond Island, I reckon,” Davie replied. “The old prison'll be a great place to give them a hiding.”

The carrot hit the dust again.

“You cannae do that,” Tommy whined. “We've got rights. The Council's set up special centres for kids like us.”

He was right. In their desperation to be seen as having citizens' best interests at heart, the latest guardians, or at least a majority of them, haven't only given citizens more personal freedom – apart from anything involving the use of water – and a lottery, but they've organised a social welfare system that treats anyone who steps out of line as an honoured guest. To no one in the guard's surprise, petty crime has risen even faster than the temperature.

“Who are the Southside Strollers?” I asked.

“What's it to you?” Tommy said, giving me the eye.

Davie grabbed his arm and stuck his face up close to the boy's. “Answer the man, sonny.”

“Awright, awright.” Tommy had gone floppy again. “It's our gang. We all come from the south side of the city.”

“And you spend your time strolling around nicking whatever you can?” I said.

Tommy shrugged nonchalantly, his eyes lowered.

A couple of auxiliaries from the Welfare Directorate looking desperately eager to please turned up to collect the boys. Colin the carrot was busy holding on to his gut but Tommy flashed a triumphant look at us.

“Just a minute, you,” I said, moving over to him. I stuck my hand into his pocket and relieved him of the vouchers he'd taken, leaving a streak of blood from my knuckles on his shorts as a souvenir. “Oh, aye, what's this then?”

The pair of them suddenly started examining the ground.

“What do you think, Davie?” I said, opening the scrap of crumpled paper and sniffing the small quantity of dried and shredded leaves.

Davie shook his head. “If it was up to me  . . .”

“But it isn't,” the female auxiliary from the Welfare Directorate's Youth Development Department said, stepping forward and looking at the twist of grass. “Underage citizens are our responsibility, not the City Guard's. We'll see they're rehabilitated.”

Davie looked at her disbelievingly. Like most of his colleagues, he had serious difficulty in accepting the Council's recent caring policies. Not that he had any choice.

Tommy smirked then bared his teeth at me again. “You're dead, pal.”

“Oh, aye, Tommy?” I said. “And what does that make you?”

I handed the grass to Davie. We watched the miscreants get into the Youth Development Department van then I turned back to get my gear.

“The future of the city,” Davie said morosely as he caught up with me. “Giving these headbangers special treatment is only going to make them harder to control later. Anyone caught with black-market drugs should be nailed to the floor like in the old days.”

“Hand that stuff over for analysis, will you?” We both knew that wouldn't make any difference. The guard's no longer permitted to give underage citizens the third degree so they probably wouldn't find out where the grass came from. I shrugged. “Stupid bastards. I told them to keep their distance but they had to have a go.”

Davie laughed. “They weren't the only ones. You sorted them out pretty effectively, Quint.”

“I'll probably end up on a charge. Unwarranted force.”

“I don't think so. I'll be writing the report, remember.”

The citizens under the trees were pretending they'd gone back to sleep. Davie's presence was making them shy. Even in the recently approved informal shirtsleeve order, the grey City Guard uniform isn't the most popular apparel in Edinburgh. The woman came to reclaim her vouchers, flashing me a brief smile of thanks. She probably thought I was an undercover guard operative.

“I'll give you a lift home,” Davie said as we headed for his vehicle. “What were you doing here anyway?”

“Trying unsuccessfully to find somewhere cool in this sweat pit to read my book.”

“What have you got?” Davie took the volume from under my arm and laughed. “
Black and Blue
? Just like the state of your knuckles tomorrow morning.”

“Very funny, guardsman.”

“Isn't it that book on the proscribed list?” he asked dubiously.

“The Council lifted the ban on pre-Enlightenment Scottish crime fiction at the end of last year. Don't you remember?”

“I just put a stop to crime,” he said pointedly. “I don't read stories about it.”

“That'll be right. You said something about taking me to my place?”

Davie wrenched open the passenger door of one of the guard's few surviving Land-Rovers. “At your service, sir,” he said with fake deference. “Number 13 Gilmore Place it is, sir.”

But as things turned out, we didn't make it.

Tollcross is as busy a junction as you get in Edinburgh. A guard vehicle on watch, a couple of Supply Directorate delivery vans, the ubiquitous Water Department tractor and a flurry of citizens on bicycles constitute traffic congestion these days. There was even a Japanese tourist in one of the hire cars provided by an American multinational that the Council did a deal with. He was scratching his head. The lack of other private cars in the streets was obviously worrying him.

“Why were you frying yourself in the Meadows, Quint?” Davie asked. “There are bits of grass around the castle that actually get watered. It's quieter there too.”

I looked at the burly figure next to me. He was still wearing the beard that used to be required of male auxiliaries even though the current Council's made it optional. God knows what the temperature was beneath the matted growth.

“Quiet if you don't mind being stared at by sentries,” I replied. “Since they moved the auxiliary training camp away from the Meadows, it's become a much more relaxing place.”

“Arsehole.” Davie was shaking his head. “Anyone would think you hadn't spent ten years as one of us.” He laughed. “Till they saw how handy you are with your fists.”

My mobile rang before I could tell him how proud I was to have been demoted from the rank of auxiliary.

“Is that you, Dalrymple?”

I let out a groan. I might have known the public order guardian would get his claws into me late on a Friday afternoon. Not that his rank take weekends off.

“Lewis Hamilton,” I said. “What a surprise.”

“Where are you, man?” he demanded. “And don't address me by name.” Lewis was one of the old school, a guardian for twenty years. He didn't go along with the new Council's decision allowing citizens to use guardians' names instead of their official titles.

“I'm at Tollcross with Hume 253.”

“Distracting my watch commander from his duties again?” Davie had been promoted a few months ago, though that didn't stop him helping me out whenever something interesting came up.

“And the reason for your call is  . . . ?” I asked.

“The reason for my call is that the people who run the lottery need your services.”

I pointed to Davie to pull in to the kerbside. “Don't tell me. They've lost one of their winners again.”

“I know, I know, he'll probably turn up drunk in a gutter after a couple of days  . . .”

“With his prizes missing and his new clothes covered in other people's vomit. Jesus, Lewis, can't you find someone else to look for the moron? Like, for instance, a guardsman who started his first tour of duty this morning?”

Hamilton gave what passes for a laugh in his book. “No, Dalrymple. As you know very well, this is a high-priority job. One for the city's freelance chief investigator. After tourists my fellow guardians' favourite human beings are lottery-winners.” I knew he had other ideas about that himself. As far as he was concerned, Edlott was yet another disaster perpetrated by the reforming guardians who made up the majority of the current Council. Hamilton particularly despised the culture guardian whose directorate runs the lottery for what he called his “lack of Platonic principles”, whatever that means. I don't think he was too keen on his colleague's eye for a quick buck either. The underlying idea of Edlott was to reduce every citizen's voucher entitlement for the price of a few relatively cheap prizes. Still, the public order guardian's aversion to the lottery was nothing compared with the contempt he reserved for the Council members who forced through the measure permitting the supply of marijuana and other soft drugs to tourists. As I saw in the park, foreign visitors weren't the only grass consumers in the city.

“Any chance of you telling Edlott I'm tied up on some major investigation, Lewis? I mean, it's Friday night and the bars are—”

There was a monotonous buzzing in my ear.

“Bollocks!” I shouted into the mouthpiece.

Davie looked at me quizzically. “Bit early to hit a sex show, isn't it?”

I got the missing man's name and address from a new generation auxiliary in the Culture Directorate who oozed bonhomie like a private pension salesman in pre-Enlightenment times.

“Guess what, Davie? We're off to Morningside.”

“What?” Davie turned on me with his brow furrowed. “
You're
off to Morningside, you mean.”

“Your boss just told me this is a high-priority job. The least you can do is ferry me out.”

Davie looked at his watch and gave me a reluctant nod. “Okay, but I'm on duty tonight and I want to eat before that.”

“You pamper that belly of yours, Davie.”

He gave me a friendly scowl.

We came down to what was called Holy Corner before the Enlightenment. The four churches were turned into auxiliary accommodation blocks soon afterwards. They form part of Napier Barracks, the guard base controlling the city's central southern zone. The checkpoint barrier was quickly raised for us.

“Where to then?” Davie asked.

I looked at the note I'd scribbled. “Millar Crescent. Number 14.”

He headed down the main road, the Land-Rover's bodywork juddering as he accelerated. Ahead of us, a thick layer of haze and dust obscured the Pentland Hills and the ravaged areas between us and them. What were once pretty respectable suburbs became the home of streetfighting man in the time leading up to independence. They had only been used again in the last couple of years and the part beyond the heavily fortified city line a few hundred yards further south was still an urban wasteland. It was haunted by black marketeers and the dissidents who've been trying and failing to overturn the Council since it came to power. On this side of the line, the Housing Directorate has settled a lot of the city's problem families into flats that used to be occupied by Edinburgh's blue-rinse and pearl-necklace brigade. The Southside Strollers were the tip of a very large iceberg.