Fleshmarket Alley

by Ian Rankin

  “Try using your horn,” Siobhan suggested. He did, but the bus paid no heed until it came to a temporary stop outside the Tolbooth. Drivers coming the opposite way protested as Young swept into their lane and past the obstruction. Mangold’s car was way ahead. As it reached the roundabout outside Holyrood Palace, it took a right, making for Horse Wynd.

  “You were right,” Young admitted, while Siobhan called in this new information. Holyrood Park was crown property, and as such had its own police force, but Siobhan knew protocol could wait for later. For now, the Jag was racing away, rounding Salisbury Crags.

  “Where next?” Young asked.

  “Well, he either circles the park all day, or else he comes off. That means Dalkeith Road or Duddingston. My money’s on Duddingston. Once he’s past there, he’s within a gear-change of the A1—and he’ll definitely outrun us there, all the way to Newcastle if need be.”

  There were a couple of roundabouts to be negotiated first, however, Mangold nearly losing control on the second, the Jaguar mounting the curb. He was passing the back of Pollock Halls, engine roaring.

  “Duddingston,” Siobhan commented, calling it in again. This part of the road was all twists and turns and they finally lost sight of Mangold completely. Then, from just past a stone outcrop, Siobhan could see dust billowing upwards.

  “Oh, hell,” she said. As they rounded the bend, they saw tire tracks veering crazily across the highway. There were iron railings on the right-hand side of the road, and the Jaguar had crashed through these, rolling down the steep slope towards Duddingston Loch. Ducks and geese were flapping out of harm’s way, while swans glided across the water’s surface, seemingly unworried. The Jaguar kicked up stones and old feathers as it bounced downhill. The brake lights glowed red, but the car seemed to have other ideas. Finally it slewed sideways and then another ninety degrees, its back half plunging into the water, resting there, the front wheels hanging in the air, spinning slowly.

  There were people farther along the water’s edge: parents and their offspring, feeding bread crusts to the birds. Some of them started running towards the car. Young had pulled the Daewoo up onto what sidewalk there was, so as not to block the highway. Siobhan skidded down the slope. The doors of the Jaguar were open, figures emerging from either side. But then the car jerked backwards again and started to sink. Mangold was out, up to his chest in water, but Ishbel had been thrown back into her seat, and the pressure was pushing her door closed again as the interior started to fill with water. Mangold saw what was happening and reached inside, starting to haul her across to the driver’s side. But she was caught somehow, and now only the windscreen and roof were showing. Siobhan waded into the foul-smelling water. Steam was rising from the submerged and super-heated engine.

  “Give me a hand!” Mangold was yelling. He had hold of both Ishbel’s arms. Siobhan took a deep breath and plunged beneath the surface. The water was murky and bubbling, but she could see the problem: Ishbel’s foot was wedged between the passenger seat and the handbrake. And the harder Mangold pulled, the faster it would hold. She surfaced again.

  “Let go!” she told him. “Let her go or she’ll drown!” Then she took another breath and ducked back beneath the surface, where she came face-to-face with Ishbel, whose features had taken on an unexpected calmness, surrounded by the loch’s flotsam and jetsam. There were tiny bubbles escaping from her nostrils and the sides of her mouth. Siobhan reached past her to release the foot, and felt arms wrap around her. Ishbel was drawing her closer, as if determined that the two of them should stay there. Siobhan tried wriggling free, all the time working on the trapped foot.

  But it was no longer trapped.

  And still Ishbel stayed there.

  And held her.

  Siobhan tried grabbing at the hands, but it was difficult: they were locked behind her back. The last of her air was leaving her lungs. Movement was growing almost impossible, Ishbel trying to draw her further into the car.

  Until Siobhan kneed her in the solar plexus, and felt the embrace loosen. This time she was able to wrench herself free. She grabbed Ishbel by the hair and kicked upwards, hands immediately finding her—not Ishbel’s this time, but Mangold’s. With her face above water, Siobhan’s mouth opened to suck in air. Then she spat water from her mouth, wiped it from her eyes and nose. Pushed the hair back out of her face.

  “You stupid bloody bitch!” she screamed, as Ishbel, gasping and spluttering, was led to the bank by Ray Mangold. Then, to a gawping Les Young: “She was going to take me with her!”

  He helped her out of the water. Ishbel was lying a few yards away, a group of onlookers gathering around her. One of them had a video camera out, recording the event for posterity. When he pointed it at Siobhan, she slapped it away and bore down on the prone, drenched figure.

  “What the hell did you do that for?”

  Mangold was kneeling, trying to cradle Ishbel in his arms. “I don’t know what happened,” he said.

  “I don’t mean you, I mean her!” She prodded Ishbel with a toe. Les Young was trying to lead her away by the arm, mouthing words she couldn’t hear. There was a raging in her ears, a fire in her lungs.

  Ishbel eventually turned her head to look up at her rescuer. Her hair was plastered to her face.

  “I’m sure she’s grateful,” Mangold was saying, while Young added something about it being an automatic reflex . . . something he’d heard about before.

  Ishbel Jardine, however, didn’t say anything. Instead, she bowed her head and spewed a mixture of bile and water onto damp earth stained white with feather-down.

  “I was bloody well fed up with you lot, if you want to know.”

  “And that’s your excuse, is it, Mr. Mangold?” Les Young asked. “That’s your whole explanation?”

  They were seated in Interview Room 1, St. Leonard’s police station—no distance at all from Holyrood Park. A few of the uniforms had expressed surprise at Siobhan’s return to her old stomping ground, her humor not improved by a call on her mobile from DCI Macrae at Gayfield Square, asking where the hell she was. When she’d told him, he’d started a long complaint about attitude and teamwork and the apparent disinclination of former St. Leonard’s officers to show anything other than contempt for their new billet.

  All the time he was talking, Siobhan was having a blanket wrapped around her, a mug of instant soup pressed into her hand, her shoes removed to be dried on a radiator . . .

  “Sorry, sir, I didn’t catch all of that,” she was forced to admit, once Macrae had stopped talking.

  “You think this is funny, DS Clarke?”

  “No, sir.” But it was . . . in a way. She just didn’t think Macrae would share her sense of the absurd.

  She sat now, braless in a borrowed T-shirt and wearing black standard-issue trousers three sizes too large. On her feet: a pair of men’s white sports socks, covered by the polyethylene slip-ons used at crime scenes. Around her shoulders: a gray woolen blanket, the kind provided in each holding cell. She hadn’t had a chance to wash her hair. It felt thick and dank and smelled of the loch.

  Mangold was wrapped in a blanket, too, hands cupped around a plastic mug of tea. He’d lost his tinted glasses, and his eyes were reduced to slits in the glare of the strip lighting. The blanket, Siobhan couldn’t help noticing, was exactly the same color as the tea. There was a table between them. Les Young sat next to Siobhan, pen poised above an A4 pad of paper.

  Ishbel was in one of the holding cells. She would be interviewed later.

  For now, they were interested in Mangold. Mangold, who hadn’t said anything for a couple of minutes.

  “That’s the story you’re sticking with,” Les Young commented. He’d started doodling on the pad. Siobhan turned to him.

  “He can give us any drivel he feels like; it doesn’t alter the facts.”

  “What facts?” Mangold asked, feigning only the faintest interest.

  “The cellar,” Les Young told him.

  “Christ, a
re we back to that again?”

  It was Siobhan who answered. “Despite what you told me last time round, Mr. Mangold, I think you do know Stuart Bullen. I think you’ve known him for a while. He had this notion of a mock burial—pretending to bury those skeletons to show the immigrants what would happen to them if they didn’t toe the line.”

  Mangold had pushed back so that the front two legs of his chair were off the floor. His face was angled ceilingwards, eyes closed. Siobhan kept talking, her voice quiet and level.

  “When the skeletons were concreted over, that should have been the end of that. But it wasn’t. Your pub’s on the Royal Mile, you see the tourists every day. Nothing they like better than a bit of atmosphere—that’s why the ghost walks are so popular. You wanted some of that for the Warlock.”

  “No secret there,” Mangold said. “It’s why I was having the cellar renovated.”

  “That’s right . . . but think what a boost you’d get if a couple of skeletons were suddenly discovered under the floor. Plenty of free publicity, especially with a local historian stoking the fires . . .”

  “I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “The thing is, Ray, you weren’t seeing the bigger picture. Last thing Stuart Bullen wanted was those skeletons coming to light. People were bound to start asking questions, and those questions might lead back to him and his little slave empire. Is that why he slapped you about a bit? Maybe he got the Irishman to do it for him.”

  “I’ve told you how I got the bruises.”

  “Well, I’m choosing not to believe you.”

  Mangold started laughing, still facing the ceiling. “Facts, you said. I’m not hearing anything you can even begin to prove.”

  “The thing I’m wondering is . . .”

  “What?”

  “Look at me and I’ll tell you.”

  Slowly, the chair returned to the ground. Mangold fixed his slitted eyes on Siobhan.

  “What I can’t decide,” she told him, “is whether you did it out of anger—you’d been beaten up and shouted at by Bullen, and you wanted to mete that out on someone else . . .” She paused. “Or, whether it was more in the nature of a gift to Ishbel—not wrapped in ribbons this time, but a gift all the same . . . something to make her life that bit easier.”

  Mangold turned to Les Young. “Help me out here: do you have any idea what she’s on about?”

  “I know exactly what she’s on about,” Young told him.

  “See,” Siobhan added, shifting slightly in her chair, “when DI Rebus and I came to see you that last time . . . found you in the cellar . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “DI Rebus started playing around with a chisel: you remember that?”

  “Not really.”

  “It was in Joe Evans’s toolbox.”

  “Hold the front page.”

  Siobhan smiled at the sarcasm; knew she could afford to. “There was a hammer there too, Ray.”

  “A hammer in a toolbox: what will they think of next?”

  “Last night, I went to your cellar and removed that hammer. I told the forensics team it was a rush job. They worked through the night. It’s a bit soon for the DNA results, but they found traces of blood on that hammer, Ray. Same group as Donny Cruikshank.” She shrugged. “So much for the facts.” She waited for Mangold’s reply, but his mouth was clamped shut. “Now,” she went on, “here’s the thing . . . If that hammer was used in the killing of Donny Cruikshank, then I’m thinking there are three possibilities.” She held up one finger at a time. “Evans, Ishbel, or yourself. It had to be one of you. And I think, realistically, we can leave Evans out of it.” She lowered one of the fingers. “So it’s down to you or Ishbel, Ray. Which is it to be?”

  Les Young’s pen was poised once more above the pad.

  “I need to see her,” Ray Mangold said, voice suddenly dry and brittle-sounding. “Just the two of us . . . five minutes is all I need.”

  “Can’t do it, Ray,” Young said firmly.

  “I’m giving you nothing till you let me see her.”

  But Les Young was shaking his head. Mangold’s gaze shifted to Siobhan.

  “DI Young’s in charge,” she told him. “He calls the shots.”

  Mangold leaned forward, elbows on the table, head in hands. When he spoke, his words were muffled by his palms.

  “We didn’t catch that, Ray,” Young said.

  “No? Well, catch this!” And Mangold lunged across the table, swinging a fist. Young jerked back. Siobhan was on her feet, grabbed the arm and twisted. Young dropped his pen and was around the table, putting a headlock on Mangold.

  “Bastards!” Mangold spat. “You’re all bastards, the whole bloody lot of you!”

  And then, a minute or so later, and with backup arriving, restraints at the ready: “Okay, okay . . . I did it. Happy now, you shower of shite? I stuck a hammer in his head. So what? Doing the world a huge bloody favor, that’s what it was.”

  “We need to hear it from you again,” Siobhan hissed in his ear.

  “What?”

  “When we let go of you, you’ll need to say it all again.” She released her grip as the officers moved in.

  “Otherwise,” she explained, “people might think I’d twisted your arm.”

  They took a coffee break eventually, Siobhan standing with eyes closed as she leaned against the drinks machine. Les Young had opted for the soup, despite her warnings. He now sniffed the contents of his cup and winced.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  Siobhan opened her eyes. “I think you chose badly.”

  “I meant Mangold.”

  Siobhan shrugged. “He wants to go down for it.”

  “Yes, but did he do it?”

  “Either him or Ishbel.”

  “He loves her, doesn’t he?”

  “I get that impression.”

  “So he could be covering for her?”

  She shrugged again. “Wonder if he’ll end up on the same wing as Stuart Bullen. That would be a kind of justice, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.” Young sounded skeptical.

  “Cheer up, Les,” Siobhan told him. “We got a result.”

  He made a show of studying the drinks machine’s front panel. “Something you don’t know, Siobhan . . .”

  “What?”

  “This is my first time leading a murder team. I want to get it right.”

  “Doesn’t always happen in the real world, Les.” She patted his shoulder. “But at least now you can say you’ve dipped a toe in the water.”

  He smiled. “While you headed for the deep.”

  “Yes . . .” she said, voice trailing off, “and nearly didn’t come up again.”

  32

  Edinburgh Royal Infirmary was situated just outside the city, in an area called Little France. At night, Rebus thought it resembled Whitemire, the car park lit but the world around it in darkness. There was a starkness to the design, and the compound seemed self-contained. The air as he stepped from his Saab felt different from the city center: fewer poisons, but colder, too. It didn’t take him long to find Alan Traynor’s room. Rebus himself had been a patient here not so long ago, but in an open ward. He wondered if someone was paying for Traynor’s privacy: his American employers maybe.

  Or the UK’s own Immigration Service.

  Felix Storey sat dozing by the bedside. He’d been reading a women’s magazine. From its frayed edges, Rebus guessed it had come from a pile in another part of the hospital. Storey had removed his suit jacket and placed it over the back of his chair. He still wore his tie, but with the top button of his shirt undone. For him it was a casual look. He was snoring quietly as Rebus entered. Traynor, on the other hand, was awake but looked dopey. His wrists were bandaged, and a tube led into one arm. His eyes barely focused on Rebus as he entered. Rebus gave a little wave anyway, and kicked one of the chair legs. Storey’s head jerked up with a snort.

  “Wakey-wakey,” Rebus said.


  “What time is it?” Storey ran a hand down his face.

  “Quarter past nine. You make a lousy guard.”

  “I just want to be here when he wakes up.”

  “Looks to me like he’s been awake awhile.” Rebus nodded toward Traynor. “Is he on painkillers?”

  “A hefty dose, so the doctor said. They want a shrink to look at him tomorrow.”

  “Get anything out of him today?”

  Storey shook his head. “Hey,” he said, “you let me down.”

  “How’s that?” Rebus asked.

  “You promised you’d go with me to Whitemire.”

  “I break promises all the time,” Rebus said with a shrug. “Besides, I had some thinking to do.”

  “About what?”

  Rebus studied him. “Easier if I show you.”

  “I don’t . . .” Storey looked towards Traynor.

  “He’s not fit to answer any questions, Felix. Anything he gives you would be thrown out of court . . .”

  “Yes, but I shouldn’t just . . .”

  “I think you should.”

  “Someone has to keep watch.”

  “In case he tries topping himself again? Look at him, Felix, he’s in another place.”

  Storey looked, and seemed to concede the point.

  “Won’t take long,” Rebus assured him.

  “What is it you want me to see?”

  “That would spoil the surprise. Do you have a car?” Rebus watched Storey nod. “Then you can follow me.”

  “Follow you where?”

  “Got any trunks with you?”

  “Trunks?” Storey’s eyebrows furrowed.

  “Never mind,” Rebus said. “We’ll just have to improvise . . .”

  Rebus drove carefully, keeping an eye on the headlights in his rearview. Improvisation, he couldn’t help thinking, was at the heart of everything he was about to do. Halfway, he called Storey on his mobile, told him they were nearly there.

  “This better be worth it,” came the tetchy reply.