by Ian Rankin
Rebus was thoughtful, Siobhan watching as Rod McAllister leaned on the bartop, resting his forearms there. Deep in conversation with the blonde . . . the blonde Siobhan knew from somewhere. He looked as contented as Siobhan had ever seen him, head tilted to one side. The woman was smoking, blowing ash-gray plumes ceilingwards.
“Do me a favor, will you?” Rebus asked suddenly. “Get on the phone to Bobby Hogan.”
“Why?”
“Because he probably doesn’t want to speak to me right now.”
“And what is it I’m phoning him for?” Siobhan had her mobile out.
“To ask if Whiteread was forthcoming with Lee Herdman’s army records. The answer’s probably no, in which case he should have called the army direct. I want to know if they’ve come through.”
Siobhan was nodding, pushing buttons. The conversation from then on was one-sided.
“DI Hogan, it’s Siobhan Clarke . . .” Listening, she looked up at Rebus. “No, I’ve no idea what that was about . . . I think he was called to Fettes.” She widened her eyes questioningly, and Rebus nodded to let her know she’d said the right thing. “What I was wondering was, did you get round to asking Ms. Whiteread for the records on Herdman?” She listened to Hogan’s reply. “Well, John mentioned it to me, and I just thought I’d follow up . . .” She listened again, squeezing her eyes shut tight. “No, he’s not here listening in.” She’d opened her eyes again. Rebus winked, to let her know she was doing fine. “Mmm . . . hmm . . .” She was listening to Hogan. “Doesn’t sound like she’s being as cooperative as we’d have liked . . . Yes, I’ll bet you told her.” A smile. “What did she say?” More listening. “And did you follow her advice? . . . So what did they say down at Hereford?” Meaning SAS HQ. “So we’re denied access?” Another look at Rebus. “Well, he can be a difficult creature, we both know that.” Talking about Rebus now, Hogan probably saying that he would have told Rebus all this if the scene in the common room hadn’t imploded. “No, I’d no idea he was related to them.” Siobhan made an O of her mouth. “Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” Her turn to wink at Rebus. He drew a finger across his neck, but she shook her head. She was beginning to enjoy herself. “And I’ll bet you’ve got a few stories about him, too . . . I know he is.” A laugh. “No, no, you’re absolutely right. God, it’s just as well he’s not here . . .” Rebus made a move to snatch the phone from her, but she turned away from him. “Really? Well, thanks. No, that’s . . . Yes, yes, I’d like that. We’ll maybe . . . yes, after this has all . . . I’ll look forward to it. Bye, Bobby.”
She was smiling as she ended the call. Picked up her glass and took a sip.
“I think I got the gist of that,” Rebus muttered.
“I’m to call him ‘Bobby.’ He says I’m a good officer.”
“Jesus . . .”
“And he’s invited me for a meal, once the case is finished.”
“He’s a married man.”
“He’s not.”
“Okay, his wife left him. He’s old enough to be your dad, though.” Rebus paused. “What did he say about me?”
“Nothing.”
“You laughed when he said it.”
“I was winding you up.”
Rebus glowered at her. “I buy the drinks and you do the winding up? Is that the basis of our relationship?”
“I offered to cook you a meal.”
“So you did.”
“Bobby knows a nice restaurant in Leith.”
“Wonder which kebab shop he’s meaning . . .”
She thumped his arm. “Go get us another round.”
“After what I’ve just been through?” Rebus shook his head. “Your shout.” He sat back in his chair, as if getting comfortable.
“If that’s the way you want to play it . . .” Siobhan got to her feet. She wanted a closer look at the woman anyway. But the blonde was leaving, tucking cigarettes and lighter into her shoulder bag, head dipped so that Siobhan could make out only part of her face.
“See you later!” the woman called.
“Aye, see you,” McAllister called back. He was wiping the bartop with a damp cloth. The smile slid from his face at Siobhan’s approach. “Same again, is it?” he asked.
She nodded. “Friend of yours?”
He’d turned away to measure out Rebus’s whiskey. “In a way.”
“I seem to know her from somewhere.”
“Oh, aye?” He placed the drink in front of her. “You want the half as well?”
She nodded. “And another lime juice and . . .”
“. . . and soda. I remember. Nothing in the whiskey, ice in the lime.” Another order was already coming from farther down the bar: two lagers and a rum and black. He rang up Siobhan’s drinks, was brisk with her change, and started on the lagers, making a show of being too busy for chitchat. Siobhan stood her ground a few moments longer, then decided it wasn’t worth it. She was halfway back to the table when she remembered. Brought up short, some of Rebus’s beer trickled down the side of the glass, dripping onto the scuffed wooden floor.
“Whoa there,” Rebus cautioned, watching from his chair. She got the drinks to the table and set them down. Went to the window and looked out, but there was no sign of the blonde.
“I know who she was,” she said.
“Who?”
“The woman who just left. You must have seen her.”
“Long blond hair, tight pink T-shirt, short leather jacket? Black ski pants and heels slightly too high for their own good?” Rebus took a sip of beer. “Can’t say I noticed.”
“But you didn’t recognize her?”
“Any reason I should?”
“Well, according to today’s front page, you only went and torched her boyfriend.” Siobhan sat back, holding her own glass in front of her, waiting for her words to sink in.
“Fairstone’s girlfriend?” Rebus said, eyes narrowing.
Siobhan nodded. “I only saw her the once, the day Fairstone walked free.”
Rebus was looking towards the bar. “You’re sure it was her?”
“Fairly sure. When I heard her speak . . . Yes, I’m positive. I saw her outside the court, when the trial finished.”
“Just that once?”
Siobhan nodded again. “I wasn’t the one who interviewed her about the alibi she gave her boyfriend, and she wasn’t in court when I gave my evidence.”
“What’s her name?”
Siobhan narrowed her eyes in concentration. “Rachel something.”
“Where does Rachel something live?”
Siobhan shrugged. “I’d guess not too far from her boyfriend.”
“Making this not exactly her local.”
“Not exactly.”
“Ten miles from her local, to be precise.”
“More or less.” Siobhan was still holding the glass; had yet to take her first sip.
“You had any more of those letters?”
She shook her head.
“Think she could be following you?”
“Not every minute of the day. I’d’ve spotted her.” Now Siobhan looked towards the bar, too. McAllister’s flurry of activity had ended and he was back to washing glasses. “Of course, it might not be me she came here to see . . .”
Rebus got Siobhan to drop him off at Allan Renshaw’s house. He told her she should go home; he’d take a taxi back into town or get a patrol car to pick him up.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be,” he’d said. Not an official visit, just family. She’d nodded, driven off. He’d rung the doorbell with no success. Peered through the window. The boxes of snapshots were still spread out across the living room. No sign of life. He tried the door handle, and it turned. The door was unlocked.
“Allan?” he called. “Kate?”
He closed the door behind him. There was a buzzing noise from upstairs. He called out again, but without answer. Cautiously, he climbed the stairs. There was a metal stepladder in the middle of the upstairs hall, leading u
p through an open hatch in the ceiling. Rebus took each rung slowly.
“Allan?”
There was a light on in the attic and the buzzing was louder. Rebus stuck his head through the hatch. His cousin was seated cross-legged on the floor, a control panel in his hand, mimicking the sound the toy racing car made as it sped around the figure-eight track.
“I always let him win,” Allan Renshaw said, giving the first sign that he was aware of Rebus’s appearance. “Derek, I mean. We got him this for Christmas one year . . .”
Rebus saw the open box, lengths of unused track spilling from it. Packing boxes had been emptied, suitcases opened. Rebus saw women’s dresses, children’s clothes, a stack of old 45s. He saw magazines with long-forgotten TV stars on the front. He saw plates and ornaments, peeled from their protective newsprint. Some might have been wedding gifts, dispatched to darkness by changing fashions. A folded stroller waited to be claimed by the generation to come. Rebus had reached the top of the ladder, and settled his weight against the edge of the hatch. Somehow, amidst the clutter, Allan Renshaw had negotiated room for the racetrack, his eyes following the red plastic car as it completed its endless circuits.
“Never saw the attraction myself,” Rebus commented. “Same with train sets.”
“Cars are different. You’ve got that illusion of speed . . . and you can race against everyone else. Plus . . .” Renshaw pushed his finger down harder on the accelerator button, “if you take a bend too fast and crash . . .” His car spun from the track. He reached out for it, slid its guiding front brush into the slot on the roadway. Pressed the button and sent it on its renewed journey. “You see?” he said, glancing towards Rebus.
“You can always start again?” Rebus guessed.
“Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s broken,” Renshaw said, nodding. “It’s as if nothing happened.”
“It’s an illusion then,” Rebus intimated.
“A comforting illusion,” his cousin agreed. He paused. “Did I have a race set when I was a kid? I don’t remember . . .”
Rebus shrugged. “I know I didn’t. If they were around, they were probably too expensive.”
“The money we spend on our kids, eh, John?” Renshaw produced the glimmer of a smile. “Always wanting the best for them, never begrudging anything.”
“Must’ve been expensive, putting your two through Port Edgar.”
“Wasn’t cheap. You’ve just got the one, is that right?”
“She’s all grown now, Allan.”
“Kate’s growing, too . . . moving on to another life.”
“She’s got a head on her shoulders.” Rebus watched as the car tripped from the track again. It ended up near him, so he reached forwards to replace it. “That crash Derek was in,” he said. “It wasn’t his fault, was it?”
Renshaw shook his head. “Stuart was a wild one. We’re lucky Derek was all right.” He set the car moving again. Rebus had noticed a blue car in the box, and a spare controller sitting by his cousin’s left shoe.
“We going to have a race, then?” he asked, sliding farther into the space, picking up the small black box.
“Why not?” Renshaw agreed, placing Rebus’s car on the starting line. He brought his own car to meet it, then counted down from five. Both cars jolted towards the first bend, Rebus’s careering off straightaway. He crawled over on hands and knees and fixed it back onto the track, just as Renshaw’s car lapped him.
“You’ve had more practice than me,” he complained, sitting back down again. Drafts of warm air were gusting up through the open hatch, providing the attic with its only source of heat. Rebus knew that if he stood, there wouldn’t be quite enough room for him. “So how long have you been up here?” he asked. Renshaw ran a hand over what was now more beard than stubble.
“Since first thing,” he said.
“Where’s Kate?”
“Out helping that MSP.”
“The front door isn’t locked.”
“Oh?”
“Anyone could walk in.” Rebus had waited for Renshaw’s car to catch up with him, and now they were racing again, crossing lanes at one point in the track.
“Know what I was thinking about last night?” Renshaw said. “I think it was last night . . .”
“What?”
“I was thinking about your dad. I really liked him. He used to do tricks for me, do you remember that?”
“Producing pennies from behind your ear?”
“And making them disappear. He said he’d learned it in the army.”
“Probably.”
“He was in the Far East, wasn’t he?”
Rebus nodded. His father had never said much about his wartime exploits. Mostly, all he’d shared were anecdotes, things they could laugh at. But later on . . . towards the end of his life, he’d let slip details of some of the horrors he’d witnessed.
These weren’t professional soldiers, John, they were conscripts—men who worked in banks, shops, factories. War changed them, changed all of us. How could it not?
“Thing is,” Allan Renshaw continued, “thinking about your dad got me thinking about you. Remember that day you took me to the park.”
“The day we played football?”
Renshaw nodded, gave a weak smile. “You remember it?”
“Probably not as well as you.”
“Oh, I remember, all right. We were playing football, and then some guys you knew turned up, and I had to play by myself while you talked to them.” Renshaw paused. The cars crossed each other again. “Coming back to you?”
“Not really.” But Rebus supposed it could be true. Whenever he’d gone home on leave, there’d been friends from school to catch up with.
“Then we started walking home. Or you and your pals did, me trailing behind, carrying the ball you’d bought us . . . Now this bit, this bit I’d pushed to the back of my mind . . .”
“What bit?” Rebus was concentrating on the racetrack.
“The bit where we were passing the pub. You remember the pub on the corner?”
“The Bowhill Hotel?”
“That was it. We were passing, only then you turned to me, pointed at me, told me I’d to wait outside. Your voice was different, a lot harder, like you didn’t want your pals to know we were pals . . .”
“You sure about this, Allan?”
“Oh, I’m sure. Because the three of you went inside, and I sat at the curb and waited. I was holding on to the ball, and after a while you came out again, but just to hand me a bag of crisps. You went back inside, and then these other kids came up, and one of them kicked the ball out of my grasp, and they ran off, laughing and kicking it to each other. That’s when I started crying, and still you didn’t come out, and I knew I couldn’t go in. So I got to my feet and walked back to the house by myself. I got lost once, but I stopped and asked someone.” The racing cars were speeding towards the point at which they would switch lanes. They arrived at the same time, met and bounced off the track, landing on their backs. Neither man moved. The attic was silent for a moment. “You came home later,” Renshaw continued, breaking the silence, “and nobody said anything because I’d not said anything to them. But you know what really got me? You never asked what had happened to the ball, and I knew why you didn’t ask. It was because you’d forgotten all about it. Because it wasn’t important to you.” Renshaw paused. “And I was just some little kid again, and not your friend.”
“Jesus, Allan . . .” Rebus was trying to remember, but there was nothing there. The day he’d thought he’d known had been sunshine and football, nothing else.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last.
Tears were dripping down Renshaw’s cheeks. “I was family, John, and you treated me like I was nothing.”
“Allan, believe me, I never —”
“Out!” Renshaw yelled, sniffing back more tears. “I want you out of my house—now!” He’d risen stiffly to his feet. Rebus was up, too, the two men standing awkwardly, heads angled against the roof
beams, backs bent.
“Look, Allan, if it’s any . . .”
But Renshaw had him by the shoulder, trying to maneuver him to the hatch.
“All right, all right,” Rebus was saying. He tried yanking himself free of the other man’s grip, and Renshaw stumbled, one foot finding no purchase, sending him falling through the hatch. Rebus grabbed him by the arm, feeling his fingers burn as he tightened his grip. Renshaw scrabbled back upright.
“You okay?” Rebus asked.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Renshaw was pointing at the ladder.
“Okay, Allan. But we’ll talk again sometime, eh? That’s what I came here for: to talk, to get to know you.”
“You had your chance to get to know me,” Renshaw said coldly. Rebus was making his way back down the ladder. He peered up through the gap, but his cousin wasn’t visible.
“Are you coming down, Allan?” he called. No response. Then the buzzing sound again, as the red car recommenced its journey. Rebus turned and headed downstairs. Didn’t really know what to do, whether it was safe to leave Allan like this. He walked into the living room, through to the kitchen. Outside, the lawn mower had yet to move. There were sheets of paper on the table, computer printouts. Petitions calling for gun control, for more safety in schools. No names as yet, just row after row of blank boxes. The same thing had happened after Dunblane. A tightening of rules and regulations. Result? More illegal guns than ever out there on the street. Rebus knew that in Edinburgh, if you knew where to go asking, you could get a gun in under an hour. In Glasgow, it was reckoned to take all of ten minutes. Guns were run like rental videos: you hired them for a day. If they came back unused, you got some money back. Used, and you didn’t. A simple commercial transaction, not too far removed from Peacock Johnson’s activities. Rebus thought about signing his name to the petition but knew it would be an empty gesture. There were lots of newspaper cuttings and reprints of magazine articles: the effects of violence in the media. Knee-jerk stuff, like saying a horror video could make two kids kill a toddler . . . He had a look around, wondering if Kate had left a contact number. He wanted to talk to her about her father, maybe tell her Allan needed her more than Jack Bell did. He stood at the foot of the stairs for a few minutes, listening to the noises in the attic, then checked the phone book for a taxi firm.