by Ian Rankin
‘The ACC says different.’ The Farmer sat back in his chair. ‘Bit of jealousy there, John? Younger man speeding through the ranks . . . ?’
‘Oh aye, I’ve always been gasping for a promotion.’ Rebus turned to leave.
‘Just this once, John, play for the team. It’s that or the sideline . . .’
Rebus closed the door on his boss’s words. Linford was waiting for him at the end of the corridor, mobile pressed to his ear.
‘Yes, sir, we’re headed there next.’ He listened, raised a hand to let Rebus know he’d only be a minute. Rebus ignored him, stalked past and down the stairs. Linford’s voice carried down a few moments later.
‘I think he’ll be fine, sir, but if not . . .’
Rebus dismissed the nightwatchman, but the man stayed in his seat, eyes shifting nervously between Rebus and Linford.
‘I said you can go.’
‘Go where?’ the watchman asked at last, voice trembling. ‘This is my office.’
Which was true: the three men were seated in the gatehouse of the parliament site. There was a thick register lying on the table, being pored over by Linford. It listed all the visitors to the site since work had begun. Linford had his notebook out, but hadn’t jotted a single name into it.
‘I thought you might want to go home,’ Rebus told the watchman. ‘Shouldn’t you be asleep or something?’
‘Aye, sure,’ the man mumbled. He probably reckoned he wouldn’t have the job much longer. Bad PR for the security firm, a body finding its way on to the premises. It was a low-pay job, being a security guard, and the hours tended to suit loners and the desperate. Rebus had told the man that they’d be checking up on him – you found a lot of ex-cons in his line of work. The man had admitted to spending some time at what he called the Windsor Hotel Group, meaning in jail. But he swore no one had asked him for copies of his keys. He wasn’t protecting anybody.
‘On you go then,’ Rebus said. The guard left. Rebus let out a long whistle of breath and stretched his vertebrae. ‘Anything?’
‘A few suspicious names,’ Linford announced. He turned the ledger so Rebus could see. The names were their own, along with Ellen Wylie, Grant Hood, Bobby Hogan and Joe Dickie: the group who’d toured Queensberry House. ‘Or how about the Scottish Secretary and the Catalan President?’
Rebus blew his nose. There was a one-bar electric fire in the room, but the heat was having no difficulty escaping through the cracks in the door and window. ‘What did you reckon to our nightwatchman?’
Linford closed the register. ‘I think if my two-year-old nephew asked for the gate keys, he’d hand them over rather than risk a bite to the ankles.’
Rebus went to the window. It was crusted with dirt. Outside, everyone was busy knocking things down and putting things up. An investigation was like that, too: sometimes you were demolishing an alibi or story, sometimes building up the case, each new piece of information another brick in the often unlovely edifice.
‘But is that what happened?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Let’s see what the background check digs up.’
‘I think we’re wasting our time. I don’t think he knows anything.’
‘Oh?’
‘I don’t even think he was here. Remember how vague he was about the weather that night? He couldn’t even be sure which route he took when he patrolled.’
‘He’s not the brightest of specimens, John. We still have to do the check.’
‘Because it’s procedure?’
Linford nodded. Outside, something was making a noise: rugga rugga rugga rugga rugga.
‘Has that thing been going all the time?’ Rebus asked.
‘What thing?’
‘That noise, the cement mixer or whatever it is.’
‘I don’t know.’
There was a knock at the door. The site manager came in, holding his yellow hard hat by its rim. He wore a yellow oilskin jacket over brown cord trousers. His walking boots were covered in glaur.
‘Just a few follow-up questions,’ Linford informed him, gesturing for the man to sit.
‘I’ve inventoried the tools,’ the site manager said, unfolding a sheet of paper. ‘Of course, things do go walkabout on any job.’
Rebus looked at Linford. ‘You take this one. I need some fresh air.’
He stepped out into the cold and breathed deeply, then searched his pockets for cigarettes. He’d been going off his head in there. Christ, and a drink would go down too well. There was a mobile van parked outside the gates, selling burgers and tea to the construction workers.
‘Double malt,’ Rebus said to the woman.
‘And do you take water with that?’
He smiled. ‘Just a tea, thanks. Milk, no sugar.’
‘Right, love.’ She kept rubbing her hands together between tasks.
‘Must get pretty cold, working here.’
‘Perishing,’ she admitted. ‘I could do with a tot now and again myself.’
‘What sort of hours are you open?’
‘Andy opens at eight, does breakfasts and things. I usually take over at two, so he can hit the cash and carry.’
Rebus checked his watch. ‘It’s just gone eleven.’
‘Sure you don’t want anything else? I’ve just cooked a couple of burgers.’
‘Go on then. Just the one.’ He patted his midriff.
‘You need feeding up, you do,’ she told him, winking as she spoke.
Rebus took the tea from her, then the burger. There were sauce bottles on a ledge. He spiralled some brown on to the contents of the roll.
‘Andy’s not been too good,’ she said. ‘So it’s down to me just now.’
‘Nothing serious?’ Rebus took a bite of scalding meat and melting onions.
‘Just flu, and maybe not even that. You men are all hypochondriacs.’
‘Can’t blame him for trying, this weather.’
‘Don’t see me complaining, do you?’
‘Women are made of stronger stuff.’
She laughed, rolled her eyes.
‘What time do you finish?’
She laughed again. ‘You chatting me up?’
He shrugged. ‘I might want another of these later.’ He held up the burger.
‘Well, I’m here till five. But they go quick, come lunchtime.’
‘I’ll risk it,’ Rebus said. It was his turn to wink, as he headed back through the gate. He drank the tea as he walked. When the roof workers started to winch another load of slates down towards the waiting skip, he remembered he wasn’t wearing a hard hat. There were some in the gatehouse, but he didn’t want to go back there. Instead, he headed into Queensberry House. The stairs down to the basement were unlit. He could hear voices echoing at the end of the hall. Shadows were moving in the old kitchen. When he stepped into the room, Ellen Wylie glanced towards him and nodded a greeting. She was listening to an elderly woman speak. They’d found a chair for her to sit in. It was one of those director’s chairs with a canvas seat and back, and it complained every time its occupant moved, which she did often and in animated fashion. Grant Hood was standing by a side wall, taking notes. He was keeping out of the woman’s eyeline, so as not to distract her.
‘It was always covered in wood,’ the woman was saying. ‘That’s my recollection.’ She had one of those high-pitched, authoritative accents.
‘This sort of stuff?’ Wylie asked. She pointed to a section of tongue-and-groove, still fixed to the wall near the door.
‘I believe so, yes.’ The woman noticed Rebus, gave him a smile.
‘This is Detective Inspector Rebus,’ Wylie said.
‘Good morning, Inspector. My name is Marcia Templewhite.’
Rebus stepped forward, took her hand for a moment.
‘Miss Templewhite worked for the Health Board back in the seventies,’ Wylie explained.
‘And for many years before that, too,’ Miss Templewhite added.
‘She remembers some building work,’ Wyli
e went on.
‘Lots of work,’ Miss Templewhite corrected. ‘The whole basement was gutted. New heating system, floor repairs, pipework . . . It was quite a guddle, I can tell you. Everything had to be moved upstairs, and then we didn’t know where to put it. Went on for weeks.’
‘And the wooden sections were removed?’ Rebus asked.
‘Well, I was just telling . . .’
‘DS Wylie,’ Wylie reminded her.
‘I was just telling DS Wylie, if they’d found these fireplaces, surely they’d have said something?’
‘You didn’t know about them?’
‘Not until DS Wylie told me.’
‘But the building work’, Grant Hood said, ‘coincides fairly well with the skeleton’s age.’
‘You don’t suppose one of the workers could have got himself bricked up?’ Miss Templewhite asked.
‘I think he’d have been noticed,’ Rebus told her. All the same, he knew they’d be asking the builders that very question. ‘Who were the contractors?’
Miss Templewhite threw up her hands. ‘Contractors, subcontractors . . . I could never really keep up with them.’
Wylie looked at Rebus. ‘Miss Templewhite thinks there’ll be records somewhere.’
‘Oh yes, most definitely.’ She looked around her at her surroundings. ‘And now Roddy Grieve’s dead, too. It was never a lucky place this. Never was, never will be.’ She nodded at all three of them, her confident words accompanied by a solemn, knowing face, as if she took no comfort from the truth.
Back at the snack van, he paid for the teas.
‘Guilty conscience?’ Wylie said, accepting hers. A patrol car had arrived to take Miss Templewhite home. Grant Hood was seeing her safely into the back of it, waving her off.
‘Why should I feel guilty?’ Rebus asked.
‘Story is, it was you that put our names down for this.’
‘Who told you that?’
She shrugged. ‘Word gets around.’
‘Then you should be thanking me,’ Rebus said. ‘High-profile case like this could make your career.’
‘Not as high profile as Roddy Grieve.’ She was staring at him.
‘Spit it out,’ he said. But she shook her head. He handed the spare styrofoam beaker to Grant Hood. ‘Seemed like a nice old sort.’
‘Grant likes the more mature woman,’ Wylie said.
‘Get lost, Ellen.’
‘Him and his pals go to Grab-a-Granny night at the Marina.’
Rebus looked at Hood, who was blushing. ‘That right, Grant?’
Hood just looked at Wylie, concentrated on his tea.
Seemed to Rebus they were getting on okay, felt comfortable enough to talk about their private lives, then to joke about it. ‘So,’ he said, ‘getting back to business . . .’ He moved away from the van, where workers were queuing for lunchtime treats of crisps and chocolate bars, their eyes roving towards Ellen Wylie. Wylie and Hood were both wearing hard hats, but didn’t look right in them. The line of workers knew they were just visiting. ‘What have we got so far?’
‘Skelly’s gone to some specialist lab down south,’ Wylie said. ‘They reckon they can give us a more accurate date of death. But meantime the thinking is ’79 to ’81.’
‘And we know building work was going on down there in 1979,’ Hood added. ‘Which I’d say is our best bet.’
‘Based on what?’ Rebus asked.
‘Based on the fact that if you’re going to hide a body down there, you need the means and the opportunity. Most of the time, the basement was off-limits. And who’d dump a body there unless they knew about the fireplace? They knew it was going to be blocked up again, probably thought it would stay that way for a few more hundred years.’
Wylie was nodding agreement. ‘Has to be tied in to the refit work.’
‘So we need to know which companies were involved, and who was working for them at the time.’ The two junior officers shared a look. ‘I know, it’s a big job. Firms could have gone to the wall. Maybe they’re not as good at keeping old paperwork as Miss Templewhite. But they’re all we’ve got.’
‘Personnel records will be a nightmare,’ Wylie said. ‘A lot of the building trade, they take people on for a job, lay them off again afterwards. Builders move on, don’t always stay in the business.’
Rebus was nodding. ‘You’re going to have to depend on goodwill a lot of the time.’
‘Meaning what, sir?’ Hood asked.
‘Meaning you have to be nice and polite. That’s why I chose you. Someone like Bobby Hogan or Joe Dickie, they’d go barging in demanding answers. Play it like that, suddenly the person you’re talking to could become forgetful. Like the song says, nice and easy does it.’ He was looking at Wylie.
Through the gate behind her, he glimpsed the site manager emerging from the gatehouse, slipping his hard hat back on. Linford came out, hard hat in hand, and looked around, seeking Rebus. Saw him and came out of the gate.
‘Missing tools?’ Rebus asked.
‘A few bits and pieces.’ Linford nodded across the road. ‘Any news from the search parties?’ Two groups of uniforms were checking the area for the murder weapon.
‘I don’t know,’ Rebus said. ‘I haven’t seen them.’
Linford looked at him. ‘But you’ve got time to stop for tea?’
‘Just keeping my junior officers happy.’
Linford was still staring. ‘You think this is a waste of time, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mind if I ask why?’ He folded his arms.
‘Because it’s all arse-backwards,’ Rebus said. ‘Does it really matter how he got into the site or what he was killed with? We should be looking at the who and why. You’re like one of those office managers who worries about paperclips when the case-files are ten feet high on everybody’s desk.’
Linford glanced at his watch. ‘Bit early in the day for character assassination.’ Trying to make a joke of it, aware that others were listening.
‘You can interview the site manager as much as you like,’ Rebus went on, ‘but even if you narrow it down to a missing claw hammer, how much further on will you be? Let’s face it, whoever killed Roddy Grieve knew what they were doing. If they’d been caught nicking slates, they might have thumped him, but more likely they’d just have run off. They certainly wouldn’t have kept hitting him after he was down. He knew his killer, and it wasn’t by chance that he was here. It’s to do with what he was or who he was. That’s what we should be concentrating on.’ He paused, aware that the line of workers was watching the performance.
‘Here endeth the lesson,’ Ellen Wylie said, smiling into her cup.
10
Roddy Grieve’s election agent was called Josephine Banks. Sitting in one of the interview rooms at St Leonard’s, she explained that she’d known Grieve for about five years.
‘We were pretty active in New Labour, right from the start. I did some canvassing for John Smith, too.’ Her eyes lost their focus for a moment. ‘He’s still missed.’
Rebus sat across from her, fingers busy exploring a cheap pen. ‘When did you last see Mr Grieve?’
‘The day he died. We met in the afternoon. Only five months till the election, there was a lot of work to get through.’
She was five and a half feet tall and carried most of her weight at the stomach and hips. Her face was small and round with the beginnings of a double chin. She’d pulled back her thick black hair and tied it at the nape of her neck. She wore half-moon glasses with Dalmatian-spotted frames.
‘You never thought of standing?’ Rebus asked.
‘What? As an MSP?’ She smiled at the suggestion. ‘Maybe next time.’
‘You’ve ambitions that way?’
‘Of course.’
‘So what made you want to help Roddy Grieve, as opposed to any other candidate?’
She wore black mascara and eyeshadow. Her eyes were green. They seemed to sparkle when she moved them.
‘I like
d him,’ she said, ‘and I trusted him. He still had ideals, unlike his brother, say.’
‘Cammo?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t get on?’
‘No reason why we should.’
‘What about Cammo and Roddy?’
‘Oh, they argued politics whenever they could, but that wasn’t often. They only met at family occasions, and then they had Alicia and Lorna to stop them.’
‘What about Mr Grieve’s wife?’
‘Which one?’
‘Roddy’s.’
‘Yes, but which one? He had two, you know.’
Rebus was confused momentarily.
‘First one didn’t last long,’ Josephine Banks said, crossing her legs. ‘It was a teenage thing.’
Rebus turned his pen the right way round and opened his notebook. ‘What was her name?’
‘Billie.’ She spelled it for him. ‘Her maiden name’s Collins. But maybe she’s remarried.’
‘Is she still around?’
‘Last I heard she was teaching somewhere in Fife.’
‘Did you ever meet her?’
‘God no, she was long gone by the time I met Roddy.’ She looked at him. ‘You know there’s a son?’
None of the family had mentioned it. Rebus shook his head. Banks looked disappointed in him.
‘His name’s Peter. He uses the surname Grief. Ring any bells?’
Rebus was busy writing. ‘Should it?’
She shrugged. ‘He’s in a pop group. The Robinson Crusoes.’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘Some of your younger colleagues may have.’
‘Ouch.’ Rebus winced; it made her smile.
‘But Peter’s almost beyond the pale.’
‘Because of what he does?’
‘Oh no, not that. I think his grandmother’s thrilled to have a pop star in the family.’
‘What then?’
‘Well, he chooses to make his home in Glasgow.’ She paused. ‘You have spoken to the family, haven’t you?’ He nodded. ‘Only I’d have thought Hugh would have mentioned him.’
‘I haven’t actually met Mr Cordover yet. He’s the band’s producer, is he?’
‘He’s their manager. Dear me, do I have to tell you everything? Hugh’s got this thing about young bands now – Vain Shadows, Change and Decay . . .’ She smiled at his lack of recognition.