Set in Darkness

by Ian Rankin

  The van belonged to a guy Nic knew. Nic told the bloke he needed it now and again for a bit of moonlighting, helping a friend shift second-hand stuff around. The bloke took two tenners from him and didn’t want any other details. Nic had these licence plates, got them from a scrapyard. He’d fix them on with wire, covering the real plates. The van was rusty, a dull white respray. It didn’t stand out at all, not when the streets were dark and cold and you were hurrying home, maybe a bit the worse for wear.

  The worse for wear was what Nic wanted. They’d park near the nightclub, pay their money and go in. Plenty of guys turning up in pairs, nothing suspicious about them, nothing to mark them out from anyone else. Then Nic would pick out the tables with parties at them. He seemed to be able to tell which ones were singles clubs. One time, he’d even got one of the women up for a dance. Jerry had asked him afterwards, wasn’t that risky?

  ‘What’s life without a bit of risk?’

  Tonight, they drove around a bit first. Nic knew the club would be at its best come ten o’clock. The post-pub drunks wouldn’t have arrived yet, but the singles clubs would be in full swing. Most of them had work in the morning, couldn’t make too late a night of it. They’d stay till eleven, maybe, then start heading home. And by then, Nic would have picked one or two. He always had a reserve, just in case. Some nights it didn’t work out; the women all headed off together or with partners, none of them branching off on her own.

  Other nights, it worked to perfection.

  Jerry stood at the edge of the dance floor, lager in hand. Already he could feel the surge in him, the dark excited tide. But he was twitchy, too, never knew when some friend of his or Jayne’s would come wandering up. Jayne know you’re here, does she? No, she didn’t. Didn’t even ask any more. He’d get home at one or two in the morning, and she’d be asleep. Even if he woke her up coming in, she wouldn’t say much.

  ‘Hammered again?’ Something like that.

  He’d go back through to the living room, sit there with the remote in his hand, staring at the TV without switching it on. Sitting in the dark, where nobody could see him, nobody point an accusing finger.

  It was you, it was you, it was you.

  Not true. It was Nic. It was always Nic.

  He stood by the dance floor and held his drink in a hand just barely shaking. And inside he was praying: Don’t let us get lucky tonight!

  But then Nic was coming towards him, a weird gleam in his eyes.

  ‘I don’t believe it, Jer. I do not believe it!’

  ‘Calm down, man. What’s up?’

  Nic was running his hands through his hair. ‘She’s here!’

  ‘Who?’ Looking around, wondering if anyone was listening. No chance: the music was just this side of the pain barrier. Orbital, it sounded like. Jerry kept up with the latest bands.

  Nic was shaking his head. ‘She didn’t see me.’ His mind was working now. ‘We could do this.’ Looking at Jerry. ‘We could do this.’

  ‘Aw, Jesus, it’s not Cat, is it?’

  ‘Don’t be dense. It’s that slut Yvonne!’

  ‘Yvonne?’

  ‘The one Cat was with that night. The one who took her along.’

  Jerry was shaking his head. ‘No way. No way, man.’

  ‘But it’s perfect!’

  ‘Perfect’s just what it isn’t, Nic. It’s suicide.’

  ‘She could be the last one, Jerry. Think about it.’ Nic checked his watch. ‘We’ll stick around a while, see if she hooks up with anyone.’ He slapped Jerry’s shoulder. ‘I’m telling you, Jer, this’ll be wild.’

  That’s what I’m afraid of, Jerry felt like saying.

  Cat had this friend Yvonne who’d split up from her husband. Yvonne had joined a singles club. And one night she’d persuaded Cat to go with her. Jerry wasn’t too good on the background. He didn’t know why Cat had agreed. Had to mean her own marriage was rocky, but Nic had never said anything. Only things he ever said were along the lines of ‘She betrayed me, Jer,’ and ‘I never saw it coming.’ They’d gone to a nightclub – not this one, but a Thursday nighter, same sort of crowd – and one of the singles guys had taken Cat up for a dance, then another. And that was that. Basically, she’d gone off with him.

  And now Nic saw his chance for revenge, not on Cat – no way he could touch her; Christ, her uncle was Bryce Callan, her cousin was Barry Hutton – but on her friend Yvonne.

  When Nic came over again and nudged him, Jerry knew the singles group was preparing to leave. He finished his pint and followed Nic out of the club. The van was a hundred yards away. What happened was: Nic followed on foot, Jerry driving. Then Nic would find his spot, make a grab, and Jerry would pull up alongside, haul open the back doors. Then it was back on the road till they found a deserted spot, Nic in the back holding down the woman, Jerry taking care not to run any red lights or pull out in front of cop cars. The gloves and ski masks were in the glove box.

  Nic unlocked the van, stared at Jerry.

  ‘It’s got to be you on foot tonight.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yvonne knows me. If she hears something, turns her head, she’d see it was me.’

  ‘Put the mask on then.’

  ‘You thick? Following a woman down the road with a ski mask on?’

  ‘I’m not doing it.’

  Nic’s teeth were gritted in sudden anger. ‘Help me out here!’

  ‘No way, man.’ Shaking his head.

  Nic made an effort to calm himself. ‘Look, maybe she won’t be on her own anyway. I’m just asking—’

  ‘And I’m saying no. Whole thing’s way too risky, I don’t care what you say.’ Jerry was moving backwards away from the van.

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘I need some fresh air.’

  ‘Don’t be like that. Christ, Jer, when are you going to grow up?’

  ‘No way.’ It was all Jerry could think of to say. Then he turned and ran.

  26

  Rebus walked from room to room in his flat, waiting for the grill to heat up. Toasted cheese: that most solitary of meals. You never saw it on menus, never invited friends round to share a few slices. It was what you ate when you were alone. A trip to the cupboard revealing a few final slices of bread; marge and cheese in the fridge. You wanted a hot meal this winter evening.

  Toasted cheese.

  He went back into the kitchen, put the bread under the grill, started slicing the slick wedge of orange Cheddar. A refrain came into his head, something from an old Fringe revue show:

  Scottish Cheddar, it’s our kind of cheese,

  Scottish Cheddar, orange, full of grease . . .

  Back into the living room, early Bowie on the hi-fi. ‘The Man Who Sold the World.’ Life was all about commerce, no doubt about it, daily transactions with friends, enemies and strangers, each one providing a winner and a loser, a sense of something lost or gained. You might not be selling the world, but everyone was selling something, some idea of themselves. When Bowie sang of passing someone on the stairs, Rebus thought again of Derek Linford, caught on the tenement stairwell: voyeur, or just insecure? Rebus himself had done some crazy things in his younger days. One girl, when she’d chucked him he’d phoned her parents to say she was pregnant. Christ, they hadn’t even had sex together. He stood beside the window, gazing out at the flats across the way, some still with curtains or shutters open. All those other lives. Opposite him lived a family with two kids, boy and girl. He’d been watching them for so long that one Saturday morning, bumping into them outside the newsagent’s, he’d said hello. The kids, no parents to protect them, had edged past him, eyes wary, while he tried to explain that he was one of their neighbours.

  Never talk to strangers: it was advice he’d have given them himself. He might be their neighbour, but he was also a stranger. People on the pavement had looked at him oddly, standing there with his bag of rolls, his newspaper and milk, while two kids walked backwards away from him, and him calling out: ‘I live across the
road from you! You must have seen me!’

  Of course, they hadn’t seen him. Their minds were elsewhere, fixed on a world entirely separate from his. And from then on, maybe they called him the ‘creepy neighbour’, the man who lived on his own.

  Sell the world? He couldn’t even sell himself.

  But that was Edinburgh for you. Reserved, self-contained, the kind of place where you might never talk to the person next door. Rebus’s stairwell of six flats boasted only three owner-occupiers; the other three were let to students. He couldn’t have said who owned them until the statutory notice had come round for roof repairs. Absentee landlords. One of them lived in Hong Kong or somewhere, and the lack of his signature had led the council to make their own estimate of repairs – ten times the original – and pass the work on to a favoured firm.

  Not too long ago, one stairwell resident out Dalry way had had a contract taken out on him by someone else in the tenement because he wouldn’t sign his name to a repair estimate. That was Edinburgh for you: reserved, self-contained, and lethal when crossed.

  Bowie was singing ‘Changes’ now. Black Sabbath had a song with the same title, a ballad of sorts. Ozzy Osbourne singing, ‘I’m going through changes’. Me too, pal, Rebus felt like telling him.

  Back into the kitchen: turning the toast and arranging the cheese slices, then back under the grill. He put the kettle on.

  Changes: like with his drinking. A hundred pubs he could name in Edinburgh, yet here he was at home, no beer in the cupboard, and just the one bottle of malt whisky on top of the fridge, half of it gone. He would allow himself a single glass before bed, maybe top it up with water. Then under the duvet with a book. He had all these Edinburgh histories to get through, though he’d already given up on Sir Walter Scott’s Journals. Plenty of pubs in the city named after Scott’s works; probably more than he realised, seeing as how he hadn’t read any of the novels.

  Smoke from the grill told him the edges of the toast were burning. He tossed both slices on to a plate, took it back through to his chair. The TV was on with the sound muted. His chair was by the window, cordless phone and TV remote on the floor next to it. Some nights the ghosts came, settling themselves on the sofa or cross-legged on the floor. Not enough to fill the room, but more than he’d have liked. Villains, dead colleagues. And now Cafferty was back in his life, as if resurrected. Rebus, chewing, looked to the ceiling, asking God what he’d done to deserve it all. He liked a bit of a laugh, God, even if it was the laughter of cruelty.

  Toasted cheese: sometimes at weekends, when Rebus’s father had been alive and the son had headed back to Fife to visit, the old boy would be sitting at the table, munching the selfsame meal, washing down each mouthful with swilled tea. When Rebus had been a kid, they’d eaten as a family in the kitchen, bringing out the fold-down table. But in later years, Rebus senior had hauled the table into the living room, so he could eat near the fire and the television. A two-bar electric heater warming his back. There was a Calor gas heater, too. It always steamed up the windows. And then overnight in winter the condensation would freeze, so you had to scrape it off in the morning, or mop it with the kitchen flannel once the heating got going.

  A grunt from his father, Rebus settling into what had been his mother’s chair. He would say he’d eaten; no intention of joining his father at the table set for one. His mother had always laid a tablecloth, his father never did. Same plates and cutlery, but that one telling difference.

  And now, Rebus thought, I don’t even use a table.

  The ghosts of his parents never visited. Maybe they were at rest, unlike the others. No ghosts tonight, though, just shadows cast by the television screen, street light and the halogen glow of passing cars, the world presented not in terms of colour so much as of light and shade. And Cafferty’s shadow looming larger than any. What was he up to? When would he make his move, his real move, the last one of whatever game he was playing?

  Christ, he wanted a drink. But he wouldn’t have one just yet – to prove it to himself. Siobhan was right about him; he’d made a big mistake with Lorna Grieve. He didn’t think it was just the drink to blame – he’d been under the spell of the past, a past of album covers and newspaper photos – but it had played its part. Siobhan had asked when the booze would start affecting his work. He could have told her: it already has.

  He picked up his phone, thought about calling Sammy. Then he checked his watch, angling it towards the window. Gone ten. No, it was too late; it was always too late by the time he remembered. And then she’d end up calling him, and he’d apologise, and she’d say he should call anyway, no matter how late. Even so . . . he told himself it was too late. There’d be someone in the room next to hers, what if his call woke them up? And Sammy needed her sleep; it was rigorous, all the stuff she was doing: the tests, the exercises. She’d told him she was ‘getting there’, her way of saying that progress was slow.

  Slow progress: he knew all about it. But things were moving now, definitely moving. He felt as if he was in the driving seat, but blindfolded, taking directions from anyone in the car. There were probably lots of Give Way and No Entry signs ahead on the route, but he was pretty good at ignoring those. Problem was, the car had no seat belts, and Rebus’s instinct was always to go faster.

  He got up, swapped Bowie for Tom Waits. Blue Valentine, recorded just before he went ‘junkyard’. Bluesy and seamy and seamless. Waits knew the soul’s rotten marrow: the vocals might be an affectation, but the lyrics were from the heart. Rebus had seen him in concert, the actorliness all too apparent, the words still failing to ring false. Selling a version of himself, something packaged for public consumption. Pop stars and politicians did it all the time. These days the successful politicians lacked opinion and colour. They were ventriloquists’ dummies, their clothes chosen for them by others, colour-coordinated and ‘on message’. He wondered if Seona Grieve would be any different; somehow doubted it. The renegades never found progress easy, and he felt Seona Grieve was too ambitious to take that road. No blindfold for her, just careful hard work in between the mourning. He’d joked with Linford about the widow’s motives. Motive, means and opportunity: the Holy Trinity of murder. Rebus’s real problem was with the means: he didn’t see Seona Grieve as the clawhammer type. But then, if she was being clever, that’s exactly the weapon she’d have used: something people would find hard to associate with her.

  While Linford had stuck to the main road, following the signposts marked Investigative Procedure, Rebus had managed to find himself on a rutted track. What if the suicide of Freddy Hastings was unconnected to Roddy Grieve? Maybe it was even unconnected to the find in Queensberry House. Was he really chasing shadows, every bit as worthwhile as following the trail of headlamp shadows across his ceiling? His phone rang just as a track ended, startling him.

  ‘It’s me,’ Siobhan Clarke said. ‘I think somebody’s spying on me.’

  Rebus rang her buzzer. She checked it was him before letting him into the stairwell. Her door was open by the time he reached her floor.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked. She led him into the living room, looking a lot calmer than he felt. There was a bottle of wine on the coffee table: a third of it gone, a little left in the single glass. She’d eaten Indian food: he could smell it. But there were no signs of dishes, everything tidied away.

  ‘I’ve been getting these calls.’

  ‘What sort of calls?’

  ‘Hang-ups. Two or three times a day. If I’m not in, the answering machine picks them up. Whoever’s calling, they wait till the thing’s recording before putting the phone down.’

  ‘And if you’re here?’

  ‘Same thing: the line goes dead. I tried 1471, but they always withhold their number. And then tonight . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just got this feeling I was being watched.’ She nodded towards her window. ‘From across there.’

  He looked to where she’d closed her curtains. He walked over and opened t
hem, stared out at the tenement opposite. ‘Wait here,’ he said.

  ‘I could have confronted them myself,’ she said, ‘but . . .’

  ‘I won’t be a tick.’

  She stood by her window, arms folded. Heard the main door close, watched Rebus cross the road. He’d been out of breath. Was he just out of condition, or had he arrived in such a rush? Maybe afraid for her . . . She wondered now why she’d called him. Gayfield Square was five minutes away; any officer from there would have responded. Or she could have investigated for herself. It wasn’t that she was scared. But things like this . . . creeping feelings . . . once they were shared, they tended to evaporate. He’d pushed open the main door, gone straight in. She saw him pass the first-floor window, and now he was at the second. Standing there, then pressing himself to the glass and waving to let her know it was okay. Up a further flight, checking no one was hiding there, and straight back down again.

  By the time he arrived back, he was breathing harder than ever.

  ‘I know,’ he said, falling on to her sofa, ‘I should join a gym.’ He reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, then remembered that she wouldn’t let him smoke, not here. She’d fetched a tall-stemmed glass from the kitchen.

  ‘Least I can do,’ she said, pouring in some red.

  ‘Cheers.’ He took a long swallow, exhaled. ‘This your first bottle tonight?’ Trying to make a joke of it.

  ‘I’m not seeing things,’ she said. She was kneeling by the coffee table, turning the glass in her hand.

  ‘It’s just that when you’re on your own . . . I don’t mean you personally, it goes for me, too.’

  ‘What does? Imagining things?’ There was a hint of colour to either cheekbone. ‘How come you knew?’

  He looked at her. ‘Knew what?’

  ‘Tell me you’ve not been watching me.’