Mortal Causes

by Ian Rankin

  ‘The Floating Anarchy Factfile.’

  Frankie Bothwell took off his sunglasses and squinted at Rebus. Then he ground his cigarette-end under the heel of a cowboy boot. ‘That was a lifetime ago. How do you know about it?’ Rebus shrugged. Frankie Bothwell grinned. He was perking up again. ‘Christ, that was a long time ago. Up in the Orkneys, peace and love, I had some fun back then. But what’s it got to do with anything?’

  ‘Do you know this man?’ Rebus handed over a copy of the photo Murdock had given him, the one from the party. It had been cropped to show Billy Cunningham’s face only. ‘His name’s Billy Cunningham.’

  Bothwell took a while studying the photo, then shook his head.

  ‘He came here to see a country and western show a couple of weeks back.’

  ‘We’re packed most nights, Inspector, especially this time of year. I can ask the bar staff, the bouncers, see if they know him. Is he a regular?’

  ‘We don’t know, sir.’

  ‘See, if he’s a regular, he’ll carry the Cowpoke Card. You get one after three visits in any one month, entitles you to thirty per cent off the admission.’ Rebus was shaking his head. ‘What’s he done anyway?’

  ‘He’s been murdered, Mr Bothwell.’

  Bothwell screwed up his face. ‘Bad one.’ Then he looked at Rebus again. ‘Not the kid in that underground street?’

  Rebus nodded.

  Bothwell stood up, brushing dirt from his backside. ‘Floating Anarchy hasn’t been in circulation for twenty years. You say this kid had a copy?’

  ‘Issue number three,’ Siobhan Clarke confirmed.

  Bothwell thought about it. ‘Number three, that was a big printing, a thousand or so. There was momentum behind number three. After that … not so much momentum.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Can I keep the photo? Like I say, I’ll ask around.’

  ‘Fine, Mr Bothwell. We’ve got copies.’

  ‘Secondhand shops maybe.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The magazine, maybe he got it secondhand.’

  ‘That’s a thought.’

  ‘A kid that age, Christ.’ He shook his head. ‘I love kids, Inspector, that’s what this place is all about. Giving kids a good time. There’s nothing like it.’

  ‘Really, sir?’

  Bothwell spread his hands. ‘I don’t mean anything … you know … nothing like that. I’ve always liked kids. I used to run a football team, local youth club thing. Anything for kids.’ He smiled again. ‘That’s because I’m still a kid myself, Inspector. Me, I’m Peter bloody Pan.’

  Still holding the photo, he invited them in for a drink. Rebus was tempted, but declined. The bar would be an empty barn; no place for a drink. He handed Bothwell a card with his office number.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Bothwell said.

  Rebus nodded and turned away. He didn’t say anything to Siobhan Clarke till they were back in her car.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’

  ‘Creepy,’ she said. ‘How can he dress like that?’

  ‘Years of practice, I suppose.’

  ‘So what do you reckon to him?’

  Rebus thought about this. ‘I’m not sure. Let me think about it over a drink.’

  ‘That’s very kind, sir, but I’m going out.’ She made a show of checking her watch.

  ‘A Fringe show?’ She nodded.

  ‘Early Tom Stoppard,’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ Rebus sniffed, ‘I didn’t say you were invited anyway.’ He paused. ‘Who are you going with?’

  She looked at him. ‘I’m going on my own, not that it’s any of your business … sir.’

  Rebus shifted a little. ‘You can drop me off at the Ox.’

  As they drove past, there was no sign of Frankie Bothwell on the steps of the Crazy Hose Saloon.

  The Ox gave Rebus a taste. He phoned Patience, but got the answer-phone. He seemed to remember she was going out tonight, but couldn’t recall where. He took the slow route home. In Daintry’s Lounge, he stood at the bar listening in on its tough wit. The Festival only touched places like Daintry’s insofar as providing posters to advertise the shows. These were as much decoration as the place ever had. He stared at a sign above the row of optics. It said, ‘If arseholes could fly, this place would be an airport’.

  ‘Ready for take-off,’ he said to the barmaid, proffering his empty glass.

  A little later, he found himself approaching Oxford Terrace from Lennox Street, so turned into Lennox Street Lane. What had once been stables in the Lane had now become first floor homes with ground floor garages. The place was always dead. Some of the tenements on Oxford Terrace backed onto the lane. Rebus had a key to Patience’s garden gate. He’d let himself in the back door to the flat. As shortcuts went, it wasn’t much of one, but he liked the lane.

  He was about a dozen paces from the gate when somebody grabbed him. They got him from behind, pulling him by the coat, keeping the grip tight so that he might as well have been wearing a straitjacket. The coat came up over Rebus’s head, trapping him, binding his arms. A knee came up into his groin. He lashed out with a foot, which only made it all the easier to unbalance him. He was shouting and swearing as he fell. The attacker had released his grip on the coat. While Rebus struggled to get out of it, a foot caught him on the side of the head. The foot was wearing a plimsoll, which explained why Rebus hadn’t heard his attacker following him. It also explained why he was still conscious after the kick.

  Another kick dug into his side. And then, just as his head was emerging from his coat, the foot caught him on the chin, and all he could see were the setts beneath him, slick and shining from what light there was. The attacker’s hands were on him, rifling pockets. The man was breathing hard.

  ‘Take the money,’ Rebus said, trying to focus his eyes. He knew there wasn’t much money to take, less than a fiver, all of it in small change. The man didn’t seem happy with his haul. It wasn’t much for a night’s work.

  ‘A’m gonny put you in the hospital.’ The accent was Glaswegian. Rebus could make out the man’s build – squat – but not yet his face. There was too much shadow. He was rearing up again, coins spilling from his hands to rain down on Rebus.

  He’d given Rebus just enough time to shake off the alcohol. Rebus sprang from his crouch and hit the man square in the stomach with his head, propelling his assailant backwards. The man kept his balance, but Rebus was standing too now, and he was bigger than the Glaswegian. There was a glint in the man’s hand. A cutthroat razor. Rebus hadn’t seen one in years. It flashed in an arc towards him, but he dodged it, then saw that there were two other figures in the lane. They were watching, hands in pockets. He thought he recognised them as Cafferty’s men, the ones from the churchyard.

  The razor was swinging again, the Glaswegian almost smiling as he went about his business. Rebus slipped his coat all the way off and wrapped it around his left arm. He met the blade with his arm, feeling it cut into the cloth, and lashed out with the sole of his right foot, connecting with the man’s knee. The man took a step back, and Rebus struck out again, connecting with a thigh this time. When the man attempted to come back at him, he was limping and easy to sidestep. But instead of aiming with the razor he barrelled into Rebus, pushing him hard against some garage doors. Then he turned and ran.

  There was only one exit from the alley, and he took it, running past Cafferty’s men. Rebus took a deep breath, then sank to his knees and threw up onto the ground. His coat was ruined, but that was the least of his problems. Cafferty’s men were strolling towards him. They lifted him to his feet like he was a bag of shopping.

  ‘You all right?’ one asked.

  ‘Winded,’ Rebus said. His chin hurt too, but there was no blood. He puked up more alcohol, feeling better for it. The other man had stooped to pick up the money. Rebus didn’t get it.

  ‘Your man?’ he said. They were shaking their heads. Then the bigger one spoke.

  ‘He just saved us the bother.’

  �
�He was trying to hospitalise me.’

  ‘I think I’d have done the same,’ said the big man, holding out Rebus’s coins. ‘If this is all I’d found.’

  Rebus took the money and pocketed it. Then he took a swing at the man. It was slow and tired and didn’t connect. But the big man connected all right. His punch took all the remaining fight out of Rebus. He fell to his knees again, palms on the cold ground.

  ‘That’s by way of an incentive,’ the man said. ‘Just in case you were needing one. Mr Cafferty’ll be talking to you soon.’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ spat Rebus, sitting with his back to the garage. They were walking away from him, back towards the mouth of the lane.

  ‘He’ll be talking to you.’

  Then they were gone.

  A Glaswegian with a razor, Rebus thought to himself, happy to sit here till the pain went away. If not Cafferty’s man, then whose?

  And why?

  14

  Rebus struggled towards consciousness, even as he picked up the telephone.

  ‘Heathen!’ he gasped into it.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘To call at this ungodly hour.’ He’d recognised DCI Kilpatrick’s voice. He ran the palm of his hand down his face, pulling open his eyelids. When he could focus, he tried finding the time on the clock, but in his struggle for the receiver he’d knocked it to the floor. ‘What do you want … sir?’

  ‘I was hoping you could come in a bit early.’

  ‘What? Cleaners on strike and you’re looking for a relief?’

  ‘He sounds like the dead, but he’s still cracking jokes.’

  ‘When do you want me?’

  ‘Say, half an hour?’

  ‘You say it, I’ll do what I can.’ He put down the receiver and found his watch. It was on his wrist. The time was five past six. He hadn’t so much slept as drifted into coma. Maybe it was the drink or the vomiting or the beating. Maybe it was just too many late nights catching up with him. Whatever, he didn’t feel the worse for it. He checked his side: it was bruised, but not badly. His chin and face didn’t feel too bad either, just grazed.

  ‘Who the hell was that?’ Patience growled sleepily from beneath her pillow.

  ‘Duty calls,’ said Rebus, swinging his unwilling legs out of bed.

  *

  They were seated in Kilpatrick’s office, Rebus and Ken Smylie. Rebus held his coffee cup the way a disaster victim would, cradling this smallest of comforts. He couldn’t have looked worse if there’d been a blanket around his shoulders and a reporter in front of him asking how he felt about the plane crash. His early morning buzz had lasted all the way from the bed to the bathroom. It had been an effort to look in the mirror. Unshaven, you hardly noticed the bruises, but he could feel them on the inside.

  Smylie seemed alert enough, not needing the caffeine. And Rebus shouldn’t have been drinking it either; it would play merry hell with him later.

  It was a minute short of seven o’clock, and they were watching Kilpatrick pretend to reread some fax sheets. At last he was ready. He put down the sheets and interlocked the fingers of both hands. Rebus and Smylie were trying to get a look at what the fax said.

  ‘I’ve heard from the United States. You were right, Ken, they’re quick workers. The gist is, there are two fairly widespread but above board organisations in the US, one’s called the Scottish Rites Temple.’

  ‘That’s a kind of masonic lodge for Scots,’ Rebus said, remembering Vanderhyde’s words.

  Kilpatrick nodded. ‘The other is called Scottish Sword and Shield.’ He watched Rebus and Smylie exchange a look. ‘Don’t get excited. It’s much more low-key than Scottish Rites, but it’s not into the financing of gun-running. However,’ he picked up the fax again, ‘there’s one final group. It has its main headquarters in Toronto, Canada, but also has branches in the States, particularly in the south and the north-west. It’s called The Shield, and you won’t find it in any phone book. The FBI have been investigating the US operation for just over a year, as have the American tax people. I had a chat with an FBI agent at their headquarters in Washington.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, the Shield is a fund-raiser, only nobody’s quite sure what for. Whatever it is, it isn’t Catholic. The FBI agent said he’d already passed a lot of this information on to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, in the event of their becoming cognisant of the organisation.’

  Ten minutes on the phone to Washington, and already Kilpatrick was aping American speech.

  ‘So,’ Rebus said, ‘now we talk to the RUC.’

  ‘I already have. That’s why I called this meeting.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They were pretty damned cagey.’

  ‘No surprises there, sir,’ said Smylie.

  ‘They did admit to having some information on what they called Sword and Shield.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘But they won’t release it. Usual RUC runaround. They don’t like sharing things. Their line is, if we want to see it, we have to go there. Those bastards really are a law unto themselves.’

  ‘No point going higher up with this, sir? Someone could order the information out of them.’

  ‘Yes, and it could get lost, or they could lift out anything they didn’t feel like letting us see. No, I think we show willing on this.’

  ‘Belfast?’

  Kilpatrick nodded. ‘I’d like you both to go, it’ll only be a day trip.’ Kilpatrick checked his watch. ‘There’s a Loganair flight at seven-forty, so you’d best get going.’

  ‘No time to pack my tour guides,’ said Rebus. Inside, two old dreads were warming his gut.

  They banked steeply coming down over Belfast harbour, like one of those fairground rides teenagers take to prove themselves. Rebus still had a hum of caffeine in his ears.

  ‘Pretty good, eh?’ said Smylie.

  ‘Aye, pretty good.’ Rebus hadn’t flown in a few years. He’d had a fear of flying ever since his SAS training. Already he was dreading the return trip. It wasn’t when he was high up, he didn’t mind that. But the take-off and landing, that view of the ground, so near and yet far enough to kill you stone dead if you hit it. Here it came again, the plane dropping fast now, too fast. His fingers were sore against the armrests. There was every chance of them locking there. He could see a surgeon amputating at the wrists …

  And then they were down. Smylie was quick to stand up. The seat had been too narrow for him, with not enough legroom. He worked his neck and shoulders, then rubbed his knees.

  ‘Welcome to Belfast,’ he said.

  ‘We like to give visitors the tour,’ Yates said.

  He was Inspector Yates of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and both he and his car were in mufti. He had a face formed of fist-fights or bad childhood infections, scar tissue and things not quite in their right place. His nose veered leftwards, one earlobe hung lower than the other, and his chin had been stitched together not altogether successfully. You’d look at him in a bar and then look away again quickly, not risking the stare he deserved. He had no neck, that was another thing. His head sat on his shoulders like a boulder on the top of a hill.

  ‘That’s very kind,’ said Smylie, as they sped into town, ‘but we’d –’

  ‘Lets you see what we’re dealing with.’ Yates kept looking in his rearview, conducting a conversation with the mirror. ‘The two cities. It’s the same in any war zone. I knew this guy, height of the trouble in Beirut, he was recruited as a croupier there. Bombs falling, gunmen on the rampage, and the casinos were still open. Now these,’ he nodded out of the windscreen, ‘are the recruiting stations.’

  They had left the City Airport behind, shaved the city’s commercial centre, and were passing through a wasteland. Until now, you couldn’t have said which British city you were in. A new road was being built down by the docks. Old flats, no worse than those in the Gar-B, were being demolished. As Yates had commented, sometimes the divide was hidden.

  Not far away
, a helicopter hovered high in the sky, watching someone or something. Around them, whole streets had been bulldozed. The kerbstones were painted green and white.

  ‘You’ll see red, white and blue ones in other areas.’

  On the gable-end of a row of houses was an elaborate painting. Rebus could make out three masked figures, their automatic weapons raised high. There was a tricolour above them, and a phoenix rising from flames above this.

  ‘A nice piece of propaganda,’ said Rebus.

  Yates turned to Smylie. ‘Your man knows what he’s talking about. It’s a work of art. These are some of the poorest streets in Europe, by the way.’

  They didn’t look so bad to Rebus. The gable-end had reminded him again of the Gar-B. Only there was more rebuilding going on here. New housing developments were rising from the old.

  ‘See that wall?’ said Yates. ‘That’s called an environmental wall built and maintained by the Housing Executive.’ It was a red brick wall, functional, with a pattern in the bricks. ‘There used to be houses there. The other side of the wall is Protestant, once you get past the wasteland. They knock down the houses and extend the wall. There’s the Peace Line too, that’s an ugly old thing, made from iron rather than bricks. Streets like these, they’re meat and drink to the paramilitaries. The loyalist areas are the same.’

  Eyes were following their slow progress, the eyes of teenagers and children grouped at street corners. The eyes held neither fear nor hate, only mistrust. On a wall, someone had daubed painted messages, old references to the H Block and Bobby Sands, newer additions in praise of the IRA, and promising revenge against the loyalist paramilitaries, the UVF and UFF predominantly. Rebus saw himself patrolling these streets, or streets like them, back when there had been more houses, more people on the move. He’d often been the ‘back walker’, which meant he stayed at the back of the patrol and faced the rear, his gun pointing towards the people they’d just passed, men staring at the ground, kids making rude gestures, shows of bravado, and mothers pushing prams. The patrol moved as cautiously as in any jungle.

  ‘See, here we are,’ Yates was saying, ‘we’re coming into Protestant territory now.’ More gable-ends, now painted with ten-foot-high Williams of Orange riding twenty-foot-high white horses. And then the cheaper displays, the graffiti, exhorting the locals to ‘Fuck the Pope and the IRA’. The letters FTP were everywhere. Five minutes before, they had been FKB: Fuck King Billy. They were just routine, a reflex. But of course they were more. You couldn’t laugh them off as name-calling, because the people who’d written them wouldn’t let you. They kept shooting each other, and blowing each other up.