by Ian Rankin
He didn’t have many pals left in Edinburgh. Some of his one-time friends resented him, the money he still made. He didn’t have any family, hadn’t had for as long as he could remember. The two men were company. He didn’t quite know why he came home, or even why he called Edinburgh ‘home’. He had a flat with a mortgage on it, but hadn’t decorated it yet or put in any furniture. It was just a shell, nothing worth coming back for. But everyone went home, that was the thing. The sixteen days straight that you worked, you were supposed to think about home. You talked about it, spoke of all the things you’d do when you got there – the booze, the minge, clubbing. Some of the men lived in or near Aberdeen, but a lot still had homes further away. They couldn’t wait for the sixteen days to end, the fourteen-day break to begin.
This was the first night of his fourteen days.
They passed slowly at first, then more quickly towards the end, until you were left wondering why you hadn’t done more with your time. This, the first night, this was the longest. This was the one you had to get through.
They moved on to another bar. One of his new friends was carrying an old-style Adidas bag, red plastic with a side pocket and a broken strap. He’d had one just like it at school, back when he was fourteen, fifteen.
‘What have you got in there,’ he joked, ‘your games kit?’
They laughed and slapped him on the back.
At the new place, they moved to shorts. The pub was heaving, wall-to-wall minge.
‘You must think about it all the time,’ one of his friends said, ‘on the rigs. Me, I’d go off my head.’
‘Or blind,’ said the other.
He grinned. ‘I get my share.’ Downed another Black Heart. He didn’t used to drink dark rum. A fisherman in Stonehaven had introduced him to the stuff. OVD or Black Heart, but he liked Black Heart best. He liked the name.
They needed a carry-out, keep the party going. He was tired. The train from Aberdeen had taken three hours, and there’d been the paraffin budgie before that. His friends were ordering over the bar: a bottle of Bell’s and one of Black Heart, a dozen cans, crisps and smokes. It cost a fortune, buying that way. They split it three ways even, so they weren’t after his cash.
Outside, there was trouble finding a taxi. Plenty about, but already taken. They had to pull him out of the road when he tried to flag one down. He stumbled a bit and went down on one knee. They helped him back up.
‘So what do you do exactly on the rigs?’ one of them asked.
‘Try to stop them falling down.’
A taxi had stopped to let a couple out.
‘Is that your mother or are you just desperate?’ he asked the male passenger. His friends told him to shut up, and pushed him into the back. ‘Did you see her?’ he asked them. ‘Face like a bag of marbles.’ They weren’t going to his flat, there was nothing there.
‘We’ll go back to our place,’ his friends had said. So there was nothing to do but sit back and watch all the lights. Edinburgh was like Aberdeen – small cities, not like Glasgow or London. Aberdeen had more money than style, and it was scary, too. Scarier than Edinburgh. The trip seemed to take for ever.
‘Where are we?’
‘Niddrie,’ someone said. He couldn’t remember their names, and was too embarrassed to ask. Eventually the taxi stopped. Outside, the street was dark, looked like the whole fucking estate had welshed on the lecky bill. He said as much.
More laughter, tears, hands on his back.
Three-storey tenements, pebble-dashed. Most of the windows were blocked with steel plates or had been infilled with breeze blocks.
‘You live here?’ he said.
‘We can’t all afford mortgages.’
True enough, true enough. He was lucky in so many ways. They pushed hard at the main door and it gave. They went in, one friend either side of him with a hand on his back. Inside, the place was damp and rotten, the stairs half-blocked with torn mattresses and lavatory seats, runs of piping and lengths of broken skirting-board.
‘Very salubrious.’
‘It’s all right once you get up.’
They climbed two storeys. There were a couple of doors off the landing, both open.
‘In here, Allan.’
So he walked in.
There was no electricity, but one of his friends had a torch. The place was a midden.
‘I wouldn’t have taken youse for down and outs, lads.’
‘The kitchen’s OK.’
So they took him through there. He saw a wooden chair which had once been padded. It sat on what was left of the linoleum floor. He was sobering up fast, but not fast enough.
They hauled him down on to the chair. He heard tape being ripped from a roll, binding him to the chair, around and around. Then around his head, covering his mouth. His legs next, all the way down to the ankles. He was trying to cry out, gagging on the tape. A blow landed on the side of his head. His eyes and ears went fuzzy for a moment. The side of his head hurt, like it had just connected with a girder. Wild shadows flew across the walls.
‘Looks like a mummy, doesn’t he?’
‘Aye, and he’ll be crying for his daddy in a minute.’
The Adidas bag was on the floor in front of him, unzipped.
‘Now,’ one of them said, ‘I’ll just get out my games kit.’
Pliers, claw-hammer, staple-gun, electric screwdriver, and a saw.
Night sweat, salt stinging his eyes, trickling in, trickling out again. He knew what was happening, but still didn’t believe it. The two men weren’t saying anything. They were laying a sheet of heavy-duty polythene out on the floor. Then they carried him and the chair on to the sheet. He was wriggling, trying to scream, eyes screwed shut, straining against his bonds. When he opened his eyes, he saw a clear polythene bag. They pulled it down over his head and sealed it with tape around his neck. He breathed in through his nostrils and the bag contracted. One of them picked up the saw, then put it down and picked up the hammer instead.
Somehow, fuelled by sheer terror, Allan Mitchison got to his feet, still tied to the chair. The kitchen window was in front of him. It had been boarded up, but the boards had been torn away. The frame was still there, but only fragments of the actual window panes remained. The two men were busy with their tools. He stumbled between them and out of the window.
They didn’t wait to watch him fall. They just gathered up the tools, folded the plastic sheet into an untidy bundle, put everything back in the Adidas bag, and zipped it shut.
‘Why me?’ Rebus had asked when he’d called in.
‘Because,’ his boss had said, ‘you’re new. You haven’t been around long enough to make enemies on the estate.’
And besides, Rebus could have added, you can’t find Maclay or Bain.
A resident walking his greyhound had called it in. ‘A lot of stuff gets chucked on to the street, but not like this.’
When Rebus arrived, there were a couple of patrol cars on the scene, creating a sort of cordon, which hadn’t stopped the locals gathering. Someone was making grunting noises in imitation of a pig. They didn’t go much for originality around here; tradition stuck hard. The tenements were mostly abandoned, awaiting demolition. The families had been relocated. In some of the buildings, there were still a few occupied flats. Rebus wouldn’t have wanted to stick around.
The body had been pronounced dead, the circumstances suspicious to say the least, and now the forensic and photography crews were gathering. A Fiscal Depute was in conversation with the pathologist, Dr Curt. Curt saw Rebus and nodded a greeting. But Rebus had eyes only for the body. An old-fashioned spike-tipped set of railings ran the length of the tenement, and the body was impaled on the fence, still dripping blood. At first, he thought the body grossly deformed, but as he stepped closer he saw what it was. A chair, half of it smashed in the fall. It was attached to the body by runs of silver tape. There was a plastic bag over the corpse’s head. The bag, once translucent, was now half-filled with blood.
&n
bsp; Dr Curt walked over. ‘I wonder if we’ll find an orange in his mouth.’
‘Is that supposed to be funny?’
‘I’ve been meaning to phone. I was sorry to hear about your … well …’
‘Craigmillar’s not so bad.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘I know you didn’t.’ Rebus looked up. ‘How many storeys did he fall?’
‘Looks like a couple. That window there.’
There was a noise behind them. One of the woolly suits was vomiting on to the road. A colleague had an arm around his shoulders, encouraging the flow.
‘Let’s get him down,’ Rebus said. ‘Get the poor bastard into a body bag.’
‘No electricity,’ someone said, handing Rebus a torch.
‘Are the floors safe to walk on?’
‘Nobody’s fallen through yet.’
Rebus moved through the flat. He’d been in dens like it a dozen times. Gangs had been in and sprayed their names and their urine around the place. Others had stripped out anything with even a whiff of monetary value: floor coverings, interior doors, wiring, ceiling roses. A table, missing one leg, had been turned upside down in the living room. There was a crumpled blanket lying on it, and some sheets of newspaper. A real home from home. There was nothing in the bathroom, just holes where the fittings had been. There was a large hole, too, in the bedroom wall. You could look right through into the adjoining flat, and see an identical scene.
The SOCOs were concentrating on the kitchen.
‘What have we got?’ Rebus asked. Someone shone their torch into a corner.
‘Bag full of booze, sir. Whisky, rum, some tinnies and nibbles.’
‘Party time.’
Rebus walked to the window. A woolly suit was standing there, looking down on to the street, where a team of four were trying to manoeuvre the body from the railings.
‘That’s just about as potted heid as you can get.’ The young constable turned to Rebus. ‘What’s the odds, sir? Alky commits suicide?’
‘Get used to that uniform, son.’ Rebus turned back into the room. ‘I want prints from the bag and its contents. If it’s from an off-licence, you’ll probably find price stickers. If not, could be from a pub. We’re looking for one, more likely two people. Whoever sold them the hooch might give a description. How did they get here? Their own transport? Bus? Taxi? We need to know. How did they know about this place? Local knowledge? We need to ask the neighbours.’ He was walking through the room now. He recognised a couple of junior CID from St Leonard’s, plus Craigmillar uniforms. ‘We’ll split the tasks later. It could all be some hideous accident or joke gone wrong, but whatever it was the victim wasn’t here on his tod. I want to know who was here with him. Thank you and good night.’
Outside, they were taking final photographs of the chair and the bonds around it, before separating chair from body. The chair would be bagged, too, along with any splinters they found. Funny how orderly it all became; order out of chaos. Dr Curt said he’d do the post mortem in the morning. That was fine by Rebus. He got back into the patrol car, wishing it were his own: the Saab had a half bottle of whisky tucked under the driver’s seat. Many of the pubs would still be open: midnight licences. Instead, he drove back to the station. It was less than a mile away. Maclay and Bain looked like they’d just got in, but they’d already heard the news.
‘Murder?’
‘Something like it,’ Rebus said. ‘He was tied to a chair with a plastic bag over his head, mouth taped shut. Maybe he was pushed, maybe he jumped or fell. Whoever was with him left in a rush – forgot to take their carry-out.’
‘Junkies? Dossers?’
Rebus shook his head. ‘New jeans by the look of them, and new Nikes on his feet. Wallet with plenty of cash, bank card and credit card.’
‘So we’ve got a name?’
Rebus nodded. ‘Allan Mitchison, address off Morrison Street.’ He shook a set of keys. ‘Anybody want to tag along?’
Bain went with Rebus, leaving Maclay to ‘hold the fort’ – a phrase overused at Fort Apache. Bain said he didn’t make a good passenger, so Rebus let him drive. DS ‘Dod’ Bain had a rep; it had followed him from Dundee to Falkirk and from there to Edinburgh. Dundee and Falkirk weren’t exactly spa towns either. He sported a nick in the skin beneath his right eye, souvenir of a knife attack. Every so often, his finger strayed to the spot; it wasn’t something he was conscious of. At five-eleven he was a couple of inches shorter than Rebus, maybe ten pounds lighter. He used to box middleweight amateur, southpaw, leaving him one ear which hung lower than the other and a nose which covered half his face. His shorn hair was salt-and-pepper. Married, three sons. Rebus hadn’t seen much at Craigmillar to justify Bain’s hardman rep; he was a regular soldier, a form-filler and by-the-book investigator. Rebus had just dispatched one nemesis – DI Alister Flower, promoted to some Borders outpost, chasing sheep-shaggers and tractor racers – and wasn’t looking to fill the vacancy.
Allan Mitchison’s flat was in a designer block in what wanted to be called ‘the Financial District’. Scrapland off Lothian Road had been transformed into a conference centre and ‘apartments’. A new hotel was in the offing, and an insurance company had grafted its new headquarters on to the Caledonian Hotel. There was room for more expansion, more road-building.
‘Desperate,’ Bain said, parking the car.
Rebus tried to remember the way the area had looked before. He only had to think back a year or two, but found the process difficult nonetheless. Was it just a big hole in the ground, or had they knocked things down? They were half a mile, maybe less, from Torphichen cop-shop; Rebus thought he knew this whole hunting-ground. But now he found that he didn’t know it at all.
There were half a dozen keys on the chain. One of them opened the main door. In the well-lit lobby there was a whole wall of letter-boxes. They found the name Mitchison – flat 312. Rebus used another key to open the box and remove the mail. There was some junk – ‘Open Now! You Could Have Scooped Life’s Jackpot!’ – and a credit-card statement. He opened the statement. Aberdeen HMV, an Edinburgh sports shop – £56.50, the Nikes – and a curry house, also in Aberdeen. A gap of just under two weeks, then the curry house again.
They took the narrow lift to the third floor, Bain shadow-boxing the full-length mirror, and found flat 12. Rebus unlocked the door, saw that an alarm panel was flashing on the wall in the small hallway, and used another key to disable it. Bain found the light-switch and closed the door. The flat smelled of paint and plaster, carpets and varnish – new, uninhabited. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the place, just a telephone on the floor beside an unrolled sleeping-bag.
‘The simple life,’ Bain said.
The kitchen was fully equipped – washing machine, cooker, dishwasher, fridge – but the seal was still across the door of the washer-drier and the fridge contained only its instruction manual, a spare lightbulb, and a set of risers. There was a swing-bin in the cupboard beneath the sink. When you opened the door, the lid of the bin opened automatically. Inside, Rebus saw two crushed beer cans and the red-stained wrappings from what smelled like a kebab. The flat’s solitary bedroom was bare, no clothes in the built-in wardrobe, not even a coat-hanger. But Bain was dragging something out of the tiny bathroom. It was a blue rucksack, a Karrimor.
‘Looks like he came in, had a wash, changed clothes and buggered off out again pronto.’
They started emptying the rucksack. Apart from clothing, they found a personal stereo and some tapes – Soundgarden, Crash Test Dummies, Dancing Pigs – and a copy of Iain Banks’s Whit.
‘I meant to buy that,’ Rebus said.
‘Take it now. Who’s watching?’
Rebus looked at Bain. The eyes seemed innocent, but he shook his head anyway. He couldn’t go handing anyone any more ammunition. He pulled a carrier bag out of one of the side pockets: new tapes – Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Dancing Pigs again. The receipt was from HMV in Aberdeen.
‘My guess
,’ Rebus said: ‘he worked in Furry Boot town.’
From the other side pocket, Bain produced a pamphlet, folded in four. He unfolded it, opened it, and let Rebus see what it was. There was a colour photograph of an oil platform on the front, beneath a headline: ‘T-BIRD OIL – STRIKING THE BALANCE’, and a sub-head: ‘Decommissioning Offshore Installations – A Modest Proposal’. Inside, besides a few paragraphs of writing, there were colour charts, diagrams and statistics. Rebus read the opening sentence:
‘“In the beginning there were microscopic organisms, living and dying in the rivers and seas many millions of years ago.”’ He looked up at Bain. ‘And they gave their lives so that millions of years on we can tank around in cars.’
‘I get the feeling Spike maybe worked for an oil company.’
‘His name was Allan Mitchison,’ Rebus said quietly.
It was getting light when Rebus finally arrived home. He turned the hi-fi on so that it was just audible, then rinsed a glass in the kitchen and poured an inch of Laphroaig, adding a dribble of water from the tap. Some malts demanded water. He sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the newspapers laid out there, cuttings from the Johnny Bible case, photocopies of old Bible John stuff. He’d spent a day in the National Library, fast-tracking the years 1968–70, winding a blur of microfilm through the machine. Stories had leapt out at him. Rosyth was to lose its Royal Navy Commander; plans were announced for a £50 million petrochemical complex at Invergordon; Camelot was showing at the ABC.
A booklet was advertised for sale – ‘How Scotland Should be Governed’ – and there were letters to the editor concerning Home Rule. A Sales and Marketing Manager was wanted, salary of £2,500 p.a. A new house in Strathalmond cost £7,995. Frogmen were searching for clues in Glasgow, while Jim Clark was winning the Australian Grand Prix. Meantime, members of the Steve Miller Band were being arrested in London on drug charges, and car parking in Edinburgh had reached saturation point …
1968.
Rebus had copies of the actual newspapers – purchased from a dealer for considerably more than their sixpenny cover price. They continued into ’69. August. The weekend that Bible John claimed his second victim, the shit was hitting the fan in Ulster and 300,000 pop fans were turning up (and on) at Woodstock. A nice irony. The second victim was found by her own sister in an abandoned tenement … Rebus tried not to think of Allan Mitchison, concentrated on old news instead, smiled over an August 20 headline: ‘Downing Street Declaration’. Trawler strikes in Aberdeen … an American film company seeking sixteen sets of bagpipes … dealings in Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon suspended. Another headline: ‘Big drop in Glasgow crimes of violence’. Tell that to the victims. By November, it was reported that the murder rate in Scotland was twice that of England and Wales – a record fifty-two indictments in the year. A debate on capital punishment was taking place. There were anti-war demos in Edinburgh, while Bob Hope entertained the troops in Vietnam. The Stones did two shows in Los Angeles – at £71,000 the most lucrative one-night stand in pop.