Free The Blood Tree by Paul Johnston Page A

an increase in youth crime that the welfare guardian forced his colleagues to approve computerisation of the records. I thought you’d have known that.”
    I shook my head. “I just catch the little bastards.”
    â€œAbout one in fifty of them,” Katharine said. “In a good month.”
    I couldn’t think of a reply to that so I got down to reading the file.
    After a couple of hours I’d had enough. The jackass who’d written up the minutes was fluent in the kind of civil service jargon that had a lot to do with the break-up of the old United Kingdom – if government documents had been comprehensible to the man and woman in the street, maybe people wouldn’t have taken so much pleasure in torching ministries and hanging bureaucrats from the lamp-posts.
    The gist of it was that the committee had been badly split over the granting of licences and partial funding for two new lines of research. One, which the members had decided by a narrow majority to approve, concerned the use of fetal material for transplant into adults. That was referred to in committee as “Fet-mat” and a full specification of the proposed research was contained in the first attachment. I had a go at reading that and soon gave up. Scientific English is even more tortuous than bureaucrat-speak and, anyway, there seemed no point in trying to understand it – the burglars apparently weren’t interested in it.
    Which left the research outlined in the missing second attachment. The committee members had been even more split over it, several of them arguing in an uncharacteristically resolute fashion that the procedures and ends were unethical. But that was about as much as I got from the minutes. The committee ranted on about “ethically monstrous” and “grossly immoral” but nothing was said, or at least recorded, in sufficient detail for me even to hazard a guess at what the research involved. Maybe the writer was incapable of producing transparent prose; or maybe he’d been told to make his text opaque to ensure that no hint of the research’s nature remained. My suspicious mind automatically leaned towards the latter.
    That wasn’t all. While the Fet-mat research proposal had an abbreviation drawn from the relevant terms, the work specified in the missing attachment was referred to only by the numbers “4.1.116”. That was about as much help as a citizen-issue sou’wester in a rainstorm.
    I picked up Lewis’s phone and called Davie. “You know those senior auxiliaries who’re combing the files from the archive?”
    â€œWhat about them?”
    â€œI need them to check something else.”
    â€œI’m sure they’ll be delighted to help.” His tone was unusually sharp.
    â€œHey, lay off, big man. It’s not my fault that the guardian doesn’t want you reading this file. You’re not missing much, I can tell you.”
    He was quiet for a while. “Okay. Sorry. I am a chief commander, for Christ’s sake. You’d think he could trust me.”
    â€œI would. Anyway, look, I need them to see if they can locate a copy of the missing attachment. It’s ATT2 from GEC/02/04. Maybe we’ll be lucky and it’ll turn up as a cross-reference somewhere.”
    â€œAre you relying on luck already, Quint?”
    â€œAre you in need of a pencil up your—”
    â€œNo.” There was a buzzing in my ear.
    Katharine turned round in the swivel-chair at the computer. “Boys being boys as usual?”
    â€œPathetic, isn’t it?” I said. I stood up and went over to the leaded windows. There wasn’t much to see under the dull sky – just grey-black buildings and bare trees in the gardens below.
    I found myself thinking about Caro. Hector’s faux pas had brought her back to me strongly despite the passage of time. It sometimes happened that way. She’d be absent from my thoughts