Set in Darkness

by Ian Rankin

  ‘But not you?’

  ‘Prison changes a man, surely you’ve heard that? In my case, it brought on the big C.’ He snorted.

  ‘How long do they say . . . ?’

  ‘Now don’t you go getting all maudlin on me. Here.’ He passed over the bottle, then pushed the X-rays back into the seat pocket. ‘We’re going to forget all about these. It’s good to be out, and I don’t care what got me here. I’m here, and that’s that.’ He went back to his window-gazing. ‘I hear tell there’s building work going on all over.’

  ‘See for yourself.’

  ‘I intend to.’ He paused. ‘You know, it’s very nice, just the two of us here, sharing a drink and catching up on old times . . . but what the hell were you doing in my office in the first place?’

  ‘I was asking the Weasel about Bryce Callan.’

  ‘Now there’s a name from the crypt.’

  ‘Not quite: he’s out in Spain, isn’t he?’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘I must have misheard. I thought you still passed a little percentage on to him.’

  ‘And why would I do that? He’s got family, hasn’t he? Let them look after him.’ Cafferty shifted in his seat, as though made physically uncomfortable by the mere mention of Bryce Callan.

  ‘I don’t want to spoil the party,’ Rebus said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘So if you’ll tell me what I want to know, we can drop the subject.’

  ‘Christ, man, were you always this irritating?’

  ‘I’ve been taking lessons while you were away.’

  ‘Your teacher deserves a fucking bonus. Well, if you’ve a bone stuck in your craw, spit it out.’

  ‘A builder called Dean Coghill.’

  Cafferty nodded. ‘I knew the man.’

  ‘A body turned up in a fireplace at Queensberry House.’

  ‘The old hospital?’

  ‘They’re turning it into part of the parliament.’ Rebus was watching Cafferty carefully. His body felt tired, but his mind was fizzing, still getting over the shock. ‘This body had been there twenty-odd years. Turns out there was building work going on in ’78 and ’79.’

  ‘And Coghill’s firm was involved?’ Cafferty was nodding. ‘Fair play, I can see what you’re on about. But what’s it got to do with Bryce Callan?’

  ‘It’s just that I hear Callan and Coghill might have crossed swords.’

  ‘If they had, Coghill would have gone home minus a couple of hands. Why don’t you ask Coghill himself?’

  ‘He’s dead.’ Cafferty looked round. ‘Natural causes,’ Rebus assured him.

  ‘People come and go, Strawman. But you’re always trying to dig up the corpses. One foot in the past and one in the grave.’

  ‘I can promise you one thing, Cafferty.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘When they bury you, I won’t come round after with a shovel. Yours is one corpse I’ll be happy to leave rotting.’

  Rab turned his head slowly, fixing soulless eyes on Rebus.

  ‘Now you’ve upset him, Strawman.’ Cafferty patted his henchman’s shoulder. ‘And I know I should take offence myself.’ His eyes bored into Rebus’s. ‘Maybe another time, eh?’ He leaned forward. ‘Pull over!’ he barked. The driver brought them to an immediate skidding halt.

  Rebus didn’t need to be told. He opened his door, found himself on West Port. The car sped off again, acceleration pulling the door shut. Headed for the Grassmarket . . . and Holyrood after that. Cafferty had said he wanted to see Holyrood, centre of the changing city. Rebus rubbed at his eyes. Cafferty, re-entering his life now of all times. He reminded himself that he didn’t believe in coincidence. He lit a cigarette and started in the direction of Lauriston Place. He could cut through the Meadows and be home in fifteen minutes.

  But his car was back in Gorgie. Hell, it could stay there till tomorrow; best of British to whoever wanted to steal it.

  When he reached Arden Street, however, there it was, waiting for him, double parked and with a note asking him to shift it so the note’s author could move his own blocked car. Rebus tried the driver’s door. It wasn’t locked. No keys: they were in his coat pocket.

  Cafferty’s men had done it.

  They’d done it simply to show that they could.

  He headed upstairs, poured himself a malt and sat on the edge of his bed. He’d checked his phone: no messages. Lorna hadn’t tried to get in touch. He felt relief, tinged with disappointment. He stared at the bedclothes. Bits and pieces kept coming back to him, making no particular order. And now his nemesis was back in town, ready to reclaim its streets as his own. Rebus went back to his door and put the chain on. He was halfway down the hall when he stopped.

  ‘What are you doing, man?’

  He walked back, slid the chain off again. Cafferty would have no intention of going quietly. Doubtless there were scores to be settled. Rebus didn’t doubt that he was one of them, which was fine by him.

  When Cafferty came, Rebus would be waiting . . .

  21

  ‘It’d be easier with the door open,’ Ellen Wylie said. She meant that they’d have more room to move, and more light to work by.

  ‘We’d freeze,’ Grant Hood reminded her. ‘I’ve lost all feeling in my fingers as it is.’

  They were inside the garage at the Coghill house. Another grey winter’s morning, bringing chill gusts which shook the metal up-and-over door. The ceiling light was dusty and dim, and only one small frosted window gave any natural light. Wylie held a pocket torch between her teeth as she searched. Hood had brought a plug-in lamp with him, the kind mechanics used in their work bays. But its light was too piercing, and it was awkward to manoeuvre. It sat clipped to a shelf, doing its best to throw shadows over most of the interior.

  Wylie thought she’d come prepared: not just the torch, but flasks of hot soup and tea. She was wearing two pairs of wool socks under a pair of walking boots. Her chin was tucked into a scarf. The hood of her olive-green duffel coat was covering her head. Her ears were cold. Her knees were cold. The one-bar electric heater worked to a radius of about six inches.

  ‘We’d get done a lot quicker with the door open,’ she argued.

  ‘Can’t you hear the wind? Everything would be blown halfway to the Pentlands.’

  Mrs Coghill had brought them out a pot of coffee and some biscuits. She seemed worried about them. Loo-breaks came as their only relief. Stepping into the centrally heated house, there was a strong temptation to stay put. Grant had commented on the length of Ellen’s last trip to the house. She’d snapped back that she didn’t know she was being timed.

  Then they’d drifted into this argument about the garage door.

  ‘Anything?’ he said now, for about the twentieth time.

  ‘You’ll be the first to know,’ she replied through gritted teeth. It was no good just ignoring his question: he’d go on asking, same as last time.

  ‘This stuff’s all way too recent,’ he complained, slapping a pile of paperwork down on to one of the tea chests. Unbalanced, the papers cascaded to the floor.

  ‘Well, that’s one way to organise a search,’ Wylie muttered. If they put the stuff outside when they’d finished with it, they’d have room to work in, and they’d know which files had been checked . . . And it would all blow away.

  ‘I’m no expert,’ Wylie said at last, stopping to pour out some tea from the flask, ‘but Coghill’s business affairs look pretty disorganised, if this lot’s anything to go by.’

  ‘He got in trouble over his VAT returns,’ Hood commented.

  ‘And all the casual labour he employed.’

  ‘Doesn’t make our job any easier.’ Hood came over, accepted a cup from her with a nod of thanks. There was a knock, and someone came in.

  ‘Any left in that?’ Rebus asked, nodding towards the flask.

  ‘Half a cup,’ Wylie said. Rebus looked at the coffee cups, lifted the cleanest one and held it out while she poured.

  ‘How�
�s it going?’ he asked.

  Hood made a point of closing the door. ‘You mean apart from the wind-chill factor?’

  ‘Cold’s healthy,’ Rebus said. ‘Good for you.’ He’d moved to within six inches of the heater.

  ‘It’s slow going,’ Wylie said. ‘Coghill’s biggest problem was he was a one-man band. Tried to run the whole business himself.’

  ‘Now if only he’d employed a nice personnel manager . . .’

  Wylie finished the thought: ‘We might have what we’re looking for by now.’

  ‘Maybe he chucked stuff out,’ Rebus said. ‘How far back have you found records for?’

  ‘He didn’t throw anything out, sir: that’s the real problem here. He kept every scrap of paper.’ She waved a letter at him. It was on paper headed Coghill Builders. He took it from her. The estimate for construction of a one-car garage at an address in Joppa. The estimate was in pounds, shillings and pence. The date was July 1969.

  ‘We’re looking for one year out of thirty,’ Wylie said. She drained the tea, screwed the cup back on to the Thermos. ‘A needle in a bloody haystack.’

  Rebus drained his cup. ‘Well, sooner I let you get back to it . . .’ He checked his watch.

  ‘If you’re at a loose end, sir, we can always use another pair of hands.’

  Rebus looked at Wylie. She wasn’t smiling. ‘Another appointment,’ he told her. ‘Just thought I’d drop by.’

  ‘Much appreciated, sir,’ Hood said, catching something of his partner’s tone. They went back to work, watched Rebus leave.

  Wylie heard an engine start, and flung down her sheaf of papers. ‘Do you believe that? Swans in, finishes off the tea, and swans out again. And if we’d found anything, he’d have been off back to the station with it to bag the glory.’

  Hood was staring at the door. ‘Think so?’

  She looked at him. ‘Don’t you?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not his style,’ he said.

  ‘Then why did he come?’

  Hood was still looking at the door. ‘Because he can’t let go.’

  ‘Another way of saying he doesn’t trust us.’

  Hood was shaking his head. He picked up another boxfile. ‘Seventy-one,’ he said, looking at it. ‘Year I was born.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind the choice of meeting place,’ Cammo Grieve said, picking his way over lengths of scaffolding which had either just come down or were just going up.

  ‘No problem,’ Rebus said.

  ‘Only I wanted the excuse for a poke around here.’

  Here being the temporary home of the Scottish Parliament in the General Assembly building at the top of The Mound. The builders were hard at work. Black metal lighting gantreys had already appeared amidst the wooden ceiling beams. Gyproc walls were being cut to shape, their skeletal wooden frames standing ready to receive them. A new floor was being laid on top of the existing one. It rose amphitheatre-style in a graduated semicircle. The desks and chairs hadn’t arrived yet. In the courtyard outside, the statue of John Knox had been boxed in – some said for safekeeping, some so that he could not show his disgust at the renovations to the Church of Scotland’s supreme court.

  ‘I hear Glasgow had a building ready and waiting to accommodate the parliament,’ Grieve said. He tutted, smiling. ‘As if Edinburgh would let them get away with that. All the same . . .’ He looked around. ‘Shame they couldn’t just wait for the permanent site to be ready.’

  ‘We can’t wait that long, apparently,’ Rebus said.

  ‘Only because Dewar has a bee in his bonnet. Look at the way he banjaxed Calton Hill as a site, all because he worried it was a “Nationalist symbol”. Bloody man’s an eejit.’

  ‘I’d have preferred Leith myself,’ Rebus said.

  Grieve looked interested. ‘Why’s that then?’

  ‘Traffic’s bad enough in the city as it is. Besides,’ Rebus went on, ‘it would have saved the working girls having to tramp all the way to Holyrood to ply their trade.’

  Cammo Grieve’s laughter seemed to fill the hall. Around them, carpenters were sawing and hammering. Someone had plugged a radio in. Tinny pop tunes, a couple of the workmen whistling along. Someone hit his thumb with a hammer. His blasphemies echoed off the walls.

  Cammo Grieve glanced towards Rebus. ‘You don’t have a very high opinion of my calling, do you, Inspector?’

  ‘Oh, I think politicians have their uses.’

  Grieve laughed again. ‘Something tells me I better not ask what those uses might be.’

  ‘You’re learning, Mr Grieve.’

  They walked on. Rebus, remembering snippets of information from his PPLC tours of the site, kept up a commentary for the English-based MP.

  ‘So this will just be the debating hall?’ Grieve said.

  ‘That’s right. There are six other buildings, most of them council-owned. Corporate services in one, MSPs and their staff in another. I forget the rest.’

  ‘Committee rooms?’

  Rebus nodded. ‘Other side of George IV Bridge from the MSP offices. There’s a tunnel connecting the two.’

  ‘A tunnel?’

  ‘Saves them crossing the road. We wouldn’t want accidents.’

  Grieve smiled. Rebus, despite himself, was warming to the man.

  ‘There’ll be a media centre, too,’ Grieve suggested. Rebus nodded. ‘On the Lawnmarket.’

  ‘Bloody media.’

  ‘Are they still camping outside your mother’s house?’

  ‘Yes. Every time I visit, I have to field the same questions.’ He looked at Rebus; all the humour had leaked from his features, leaving them pale and tired.

  ‘Have you still no idea who killed Roddy?’

  ‘You know what I’ll say, sir.’

  ‘Oh yes: inquiries are proceeding . . . all that guff.’

  ‘It might be guff, but it’s also true.’

  Cammo Grieve plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his black Crombie-style coat. He looked old and somehow unfulfilled; shared something of Hugh Cordover’s solemn disenchantment with life. As crisply dressed as he was, his skin and shoulders were slack. The mandatory white hard hat bothered him; he kept trying to make it fit properly. Rebus had the impression of an ill-fitting life.

  They had climbed the stairs to the gallery. Grieve dusted off one of the benches and sat down, arranging his coat around him. Below, in the middle of the amphitheatre, two men were studying plans and pointing in different directions with their fingers.

  ‘A portent?’ Grieve asked.

  The plan was spread out on a workbench, weighted each end with coffee mugs.

  ‘What can you smell?’ Rebus asked, settling himself next to the MP.

  Grieve sniffed the air. ‘Sawdust.’

  ‘One man’s sawdust is another’s new wood. That’s what I smell.’

  ‘Where I see portents, you see a fresh start?’ Grieve looked appraisingly at Rebus, who just shrugged. ‘Point taken. Sometimes it’s too easy to read meanings into things.’ Coils of electric cable sat near them. Grieve rested his feet on one, as though on a footstool. He took off the hard hat and laid it beside him, smoothing his hair back into place.

  ‘We can start any time you’re ready,’ Rebus said.

  ‘Start what?’

  ‘There’s something you want to tell me.’

  ‘Is there? What makes you so sure?’

  ‘If you brought me here as a tour guide, I’ll be less than chuffed.’

  ‘Well, yes, there was something, only now I’m not so sure it’s relevant.’ Grieve stared up at the glass windows in the roof. ‘I was getting these letters. I mean, MPs get all sorts of cranks writing to them, so I wasn’t too bothered. But I did mention them to Roddy. I suppose I was warning him what he was getting into. As an MSP, he’d probably have to put up with the selfsame thing.’

  ‘He hadn’t been getting any then?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t say he had. But there was something . . . When I told him, I got the feeling he alre
ady knew about them.’

  ‘What did these letters say?’

  ‘The ones to me? Just that I’d die for being a Tory bastard. There’d be razor blades enclosed, presumably in case I ever felt suicidal.’

  ‘Anonymous, of course?’

  ‘Of course. Various postmarks. Whoever he is, he travels.’

  ‘What did the police say?’

  ‘I didn’t tell them.’

  ‘So who knows about them, apart from your brother?’

  ‘My secretary. She opens all my mail.’

  ‘You still have them?’

  ‘No, they were binned the same day. Thing is, I contacted my office, and none have been received since Roddy’s death.’

  ‘Respect for the bereaved?’

  Cammo Grieve looked sceptical. ‘I’d’ve thought the bastard would want to gloat.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Rebus said. ‘You’re wondering if the letter writer has something against the whole family, maybe got at Roddy because he or she couldn’t get at you.’

  ‘It has to be he surely?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Rebus was thoughtful. ‘If any more letters arrive, let me know. And hang on to them this time.’

  ‘Understood.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’m off down to London again this afternoon. If you need me, you have the office number.’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Rebus showed no sign of moving.

  ‘Well, goodbye then, Inspector. And good luck.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Grieve. Mind how you go.’

  Cammo Grieve stopped for a moment, but then carried on down the stairs. Rebus sat, staring into space, letting the sounds of hammer and saw wash over him.

  Back at St Leonard’s, he made a couple of phone calls. As he sat at his desk with the receiver at his ear, he sorted through the various messages left for him. Linford communicated only by notes now, and the latest said he was out interviewing people who’d been walking along Holyrood Road on the night of the murder. Hi-Ho Silvers, in his dogged way, had now identified four pubs where Roddy Grieve had been drinking – all alone – on the night he was killed. Two were in the West End, one was in Lawnmarket, and the last was the Holyrood Tavern. There was now a list of Tavern regulars, and these were the men and women Linford was canvassing. Almost certainly a waste of time, but then what was Rebus doing that was so crucial, so wonderful? Following-up hunches.