by Ian Rankin
The laughter came from deep within Cafferty’s chest. ‘You’re not a spectator, Strawman. It’s not in your nature.’
‘And you’re some kind of psychologist?’
‘Maybe not,’ said Cafferty. ‘But I know what gets people excited.’
Book Three
‘Cover my face as the animals cry.’
Running through the hospital, stopping nurses to ask directions. Sweat dripping off him, tie hanging loose around his neck. Taking right turns, left turns, looking for signs. Whose fault? He kept asking himself that. A message which failed to reach him. Because he was on a surveillance. Because he wasn’t in radio contact. Because the station didn’t know how important the message was.
Now running, a stitch in his side. He’d run all the way from the car. Up two flights of stairs, down corridors. The place was quiet. Middle of the night.
‘Maternity!’ he called to a man pushing a trolley. The man pointed to a set of doors. He pushed through them. Three nurses in a glass cubicle. One of them came out.
‘Can I help?’
‘I’m John Rebus. My wife . . .’
She gave him a hard look. ‘Third bed along.’ Pointing . . . Third bed along, curtains closed around it. He pulled the curtains open. Rhona lay on her side, face still flushed, hair sticking to her brow. And beside her, nuzzling into her, a tiny perfection with wisps of brown hair and black, unfocused eyes.
He touched the nose, ran a finger round the curves of an ear. The face twitched. He bent past it to kiss his wife.
‘Rhona . . . I’m really sorry. They didn’t get the message to me until ten minutes ago. How did it . . . ? I mean . . . he’s beautiful.’
‘He’s a she,’ his wife said, turning away from him.
12
Rebus was sitting in his boss’s office. It was nine-fifteen and he had slept for probably forty-five minutes the previous night. There’d been the hospital vigil and Sammy’s operation: something about a blood clot. She was still unconscious, still ‘critical’. He’d called Rhona in London. She’d told him she’d catch the first train she could. He’d given her his mobile number, so she could let him know when she arrived. She’d started to ask . . . her voice had cracked. She’d put down the receiver. He’d tried to find some feeling for her. Richard and Linda Thompson: ‘Withered and Died’.
He’d called Mickey, who said he’d drop by the hospital some time today. And that was it for the family. There were other people he could call, people like Patience, who had been his lover for a time, and Sammy’s landlady until far more recently. But he didn’t. He knew in the morning he’d call the office where Sammy worked. He wrote it in his notebook so he wouldn’t forget. And then he’d called Sammy’s flat and given Ned Farlowe the news.
Farlowe had asked a question nobody else had: ‘How about you? Are you all right?’
Rebus had looked around the hospital corridor. ‘Not exactly.’
‘I’ll be right there.’
So they’d spent a couple of hours in one another’s company, not really saying very much at first. Farlowe smoked, and Rebus helped him empty the pack. He couldn’t reciprocate with whisky – there was nothing in the bottle – but he’d bought the young man several cups of coffee, since Farlowe had spent nearly all his money on the taxi from Shandon . . .
‘Wakey-wakey, John.’
Rebus’s boss was shaking him gently. Rebus blinked, straightened in his chair.
‘Sorry, sir.’
Chief Superintendent Watson went around the desk and sat down. ‘Hellish sorry to hear about Sammy. I don’t really know what to say, except that she’s in my prayers.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Do you want some coffee?’ The Farmer’s coffee had a reputation throughout the station, but Rebus accepted a mug gladly. ‘How is she anyway?’
‘Still unconscious.’
‘No sign of the car?’
‘Not the last I heard.’
‘Who’s handling it?’
‘Bill Pryde started the ball rolling last night. I don’t know who’s taken it from him.’
‘I’ll find out.’ The Farmer made an internal call, Rebus watching him over the rim of his mug. The Farmer was a big man, imposing behind a desk. His cheeks were a mass of tiny red veins and his thin hair lay across the dome of his head like the lines of a well-furrowed field. There were photos on his desk: grandchildren. The photos had been taken in a garden. There was a swing in the background. One of the children was holding a teddy bear. Rebus felt his throat start to ache, tried to choke it back.
The Farmer put down the receiver. ‘Bill’s still on it,’ he said. ‘Felt if he worked straight through we might get a quicker result.’
‘That’s good of him.’
‘Look, we’ll let you know the minute we get something, but meantime you’ll probably want to go home . . .’
‘No, sir.’
‘Or to the hospital.’
Rebus nodded slowly. Yes, the hospital. But not right this minute. He had to talk to Bill Pryde first.
‘And meantime, I’ll reassign your cases.’ The Farmer started writing. ‘There’s this War Crimes thing, and your liaison on Telford. Are you working on anything else?’
‘Sir, I’d prefer it if you . . . I mean, I want to keep working.’
The Farmer looked at him, then leaned back in his chair, pen balanced between his fingers.
‘Why?’
Rebus shrugged. ‘I want to keep busy.’ Yes, there was that. And he didn’t want anyone else taking his work. It was his. He owned it; it owned him.
‘Look, John, you’re going to want some time off, right?’
‘I can handle things, sir.’ His gaze met the Farmer’s. ‘Please.’
Across the hall in the CID room he nodded as everyone came up to say how sorry they were. One person stayed at their desk – Bill Pryde knew Rebus was coming to see him.
‘Morning, Bill.’
Pryde nodded. They’d met in the wee small hours at the Infirmary. Ned Farlowe had been napping in a chair, so they’d stepped into the corridor to talk. Pryde looked tireder now. He had loosened the top button of his dark green shirt. His brown suit looked lived-in.
‘Thanks for sticking with it,’ Rebus said, drawing over a chair. Thinking: I’d rather have had someone else, someone sharper . . .
‘No problem.’
‘Any news?’
‘A couple of good eyewitnesses. They were waiting to cross at the lights.’
‘What’s their story?’
Pryde considered his reply. He knew he was dealing with a father as well as a cop. ‘She was crossing the road. Looked like she was heading down Minto Street, maybe making for the bus stop.’
Rebus shook his head. ‘She was walking, Bill. Going to a friend’s in Gilmour Road.’
She’d said as much over the pizza, apologising that she couldn’t stay longer. Just one more coffee at the end of the meal . . . one more coffee and she wouldn’t have been there at that moment. Or if she’d accepted his offer of a lift . . . When you thought about life, you thought of it as chunks of time, but really all it was was a series of connected moments, any one of which could change you completely.
‘The car was heading south out of town,’ Pryde went on. ‘Looks like he ran a red light. Motorist sitting behind him seemed to think so.’
‘Reckon he was drunk?’
Pryde nodded. ‘Way he was driving. I mean, could be he just lost control, but in that case why didn’t he stop?’
‘Description?’
Pryde shook his head. ‘We’ve got a dark car, a bit sporty. Nobody caught the licence plate.’
‘It’s a busy enough street, must’ve been other cars around.’
‘A couple of people have called in.’ Pryde flicked through his notes. ‘Nothing helpful, but I’m going to interview them, see if I can jog a memory or two.’
‘Could the car have been nicked? Maybe that’s why he was in a hurry.’
�
�I can check.’
‘I’ll help you.’
Pryde considered this. ‘You sure?’
‘Try and stop me, Bill.’
‘No skid marks,’ Pryde said, ‘no sign that he tried braking, either before or after.’
They were standing at the junction of Minto Street and Newington Road. The cross-streets were Salisbury Place and Salisbury Road. Cars, vans and buses queued at the traffic lights as pedestrians crossed the road.
It could have been any one of you, Rebus thought. Any one of them could have taken Sammy’s place . . .
‘She was about here,’ Pryde went on, pointing to a spot where, just past the lights, a bus lane started. The carriageway was wide, a four-lane road. She hadn’t crossed at the lights. She’d been lazy, carrying on down Minto Street a few strides, then crossing in a diagonal. When she’d been a child, they’d taught her about crossing the road. Green Cross Code, all of that. Drummed it into her. Rebus looked around. At the top of Minto Street were some private houses and Bed & Breakfasts. On one corner stood a bank, on another a branch of Remnant Kings, with a takeaway next door.
‘The takeaway would have been open,’ Rebus said, pointing. On the third corner stood a Spar. ‘That place, too. Where did you say she was?’
‘The bus lane.’ She’d crossed three lanes, been only a yard or two from safety. ‘Witnesses say she was nearly at the kerb when he hit her. I think he was drunk, lost it for a second.’ Pryde nodded towards the bank. There were two phone boxes in front of it. ‘Witness called from there.’ The wall behind the phone boxes had a poster glued to it. Grinning maniac behind a steering-wheel, and some writing: ‘So many pedestrians, so little time’. A computer game . . .
‘It would have been so easy to avoid her,’ Rebus said quietly.
‘Sure you’re okay? There’s a café up the road.’
‘I’m fine, Bill.’ He looked around, took a deep breath. ‘Looks like offices behind the Spar, doubtful anyone would have been there. But there are flats above Remnant Kings and the bank.’
‘Want to talk to them?’
‘And the Spar and the kebab shop. You take the B&Bs and the houses, meet back here in half an hour.’
Rebus talked to everyone he could find. In the Spar, there was a new shift on, but he got home phone numbers from the manager and called up the workers from the previous night. They hadn’t seen or heard anything. First they’d known had been the flashing lights of the ambulance. The kebab shop was closed, but when Rebus banged on the door a woman came through from the back, wiping her hands on a tea-towel. He pressed his warrant card to the glass door, and she let him in. The shop had been busy last night. She didn’t see the accident – she called it that, ‘the accident’. And that’s what it was: the word really hadn’t sunk in until she said it. Elvis Costello: ‘Accidents Will Happen’. Was the next line really ‘It’s only hit and run’?
‘No,’ the woman said, ‘the first thing that caught my attention was the crowd. I mean, only three or four people, but I could see they were standing around something. And then the ambulance came. Will she be all right?’
The look in her eyes was one Rebus had encountered before. It almost wanted the victim dead, because then there was a story to be told.
‘She’s in hospital,’ he said, unable to look at the woman any longer.
‘Yes, but the paper said she’s in a coma.’
‘What paper?’
She brought him the first edition of the day’s Evening News. There was a paragraph on one of the inside pages – ‘Hit and Run Coma Victim’.
It wasn’t a coma. She was unconscious, that was all. But Rebus was thankful for the story. Maybe someone would read it and come forward. Maybe guilt would begin to press down on the driver. Maybe there’d been a passenger . . . It was hard to keep secrets, usually you told someone.
He tried Remnant Kings, but of course they had been closed last night, so he climbed to the flats above. There was no one home at the first flat. He wrote a brief message on the back of a business card and pushed it through the letterbox, then jotted down the surname on the door. If they didn’t call him, he’d call them. A young man answered the second door. He was just out of his teens and pushed a thick lock of black hair away from his eyes. He wore Buddy Holly glasses and had acne scars around his mouth. Rebus introduced himself. The hand went to the hair again, a backward glance into the flat.
‘Do you live here?’ Rebus asked.
‘Mm, yeah. Like, I’m not the owner. We rent it.’
There were no names on the door. ‘Anyone else in at the moment?’
‘Nope.’
‘Are you all students?’
The young man nodded. Rebus asked his name.
‘Rob. Robert Renton. What’s this about?’
‘There was an accident last night, Rob. A hit and run.’ So many times he’d been in this situation, passing on the bland news of another changed life. It was a whole hour since he’d telephoned the hospital. In the end, they’d taken his mobile number, said it might be easier if they phoned him whenever there was news. They meant easier for them, not him.
‘Oh, yes,’ Renton was saying, ‘I saw it.’
Rebus blinked. ‘You saw it?’
Renton was nodding, hair bobbing in front of his eyes. ‘From the window. I was up changing a CD, and –’
‘Is it okay if I come in for a minute? I want to see what kind of view you had.’
Renton puffed out his cheeks, exhaled. ‘Well, I suppose . . .’
And Rebus was in.
The living-room was fairly tidy. Renton went ahead of him, crossed to where a hi-fi rack sat between two windows. ‘I was putting on a new CD, and I looked out of the window. You can see the bus stop, and I wondered if I might catch Jane coming off a bus.’ He paused. ‘Jane’s Eric’s girlfriend.’
The words washed over Rebus. He was looking down on the street, where Sammy had been walking. ‘Tell me what you saw.’
‘This girl was crossing the road. She was nice-looking . . . I thought so anyway. Then this car came through the lights, swerved and sent her flying.’
Rebus closed his eyes for a second.
‘She must have gone ten feet in the air, hit that hedge, bounced back on to the pavement. She didn’t move after that.’
Rebus opened his eyes. He was at the window, Renton standing just behind his left shoulder. Down on the street, people were crossing the road, walking over the spot where Sammy had been hit, the spot where she’d landed. Flicking ash on to the pavement where she’d lain.
‘I don’t suppose you saw the driver?’
‘Not from this angle.’
‘Any passengers?’
‘Couldn’t tell.’
He wears glasses, Rebus thought. How reliable is he?
‘When you saw it happen, you didn’t go down?’
‘I’m not a medical student or anything.’ He nodded towards an easel in the corner, and Rebus noticed a shelf of paints and brushes. ‘Someone ran to the phone box, so I knew help was coming.’
Rebus nodded. ‘Anyone else see it?’
‘They were in the kitchen.’ Renton paused. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Rebus doubted it. ‘You’re thinking I wear specs, so maybe I didn’t see it right. But he definitely swerved. You know . . . deliberately. I mean, like he was aiming for her.’ He nodded to himself.
‘Aiming for her?’
Renton made a movement with his hand, imitating a car gliding off one course and on to another. ‘He steered straight for her.’
‘The car didn’t lose control?’
‘That would have been jerkier, wouldn’t it?’
‘What colour was the car?’
‘Dark green.’
‘And the make?’
Renton shrugged. ‘I’m hopeless with cars. Tell you what though . . .’
‘What?’
Renton took off his glasses, started polishing them. ‘Why don’t I try sketching it for you?’
He
moved the easel over to the window and got to work. Rebus went into the hall and called the hospital. The person he got through to didn’t sound too surprised.
‘No change, I’m afraid. She’s got a couple of visitors with her.’
Mickey and Rhona. Rebus terminated the call, made another to Pryde’s mobile.
‘I’m in one of the flats over Remnant Kings. I’ve got an eyewitness.’
‘Yes?’
‘He saw the whole thing. And he’s an art student.’
‘Yes?’
‘Come on, Bill. Do you want me to draw it for you?’
There was silence for a moment, then Pryde said ‘Ah’.
13
Rebus held the mobile to his ear as he walked through the hospital.
‘Joe Herdman’s put together a list,’ Bill Pryde was saying. ‘Rover 600 series, the newer Ford Mondeos, Toyota Celica, plus a couple of Nissans. Rank outsider is the BMW 5-series.’
‘It narrows things down a bit, I suppose.’
‘Joe says the Rover, Mondeo and Celica are favourites. He’s given me a few more details – chrome around the number-plates, stuff like that. I’m going to call our artist friend, see if anything clicks.’
A nurse was glaring at Rebus as he walked towards her.
‘Let me know what he says. Talk to you later, Bill.’ Rebus slipped the phone back into his pocket.
‘You’re not supposed to use those things in here,’ the nurse snapped.
‘Look, I’m in a bit of a hurry . . .’
‘They can interfere with the machines.’
Rebus pulled up, colour leaving his face. ‘I forgot,’ he said. He put a shaking hand to his forehead.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine, fine. Look, I won’t do it again, okay?’ He started to move off. ‘You can rely on that.’
Rebus took a photocopy of Renton’s drawing from his pocket. Joe Herdman was a desk sergeant who knew everything about cars. He’d been useful before, turning a vague description into something more concrete. Rebus looked at the drawing as he walked. All the details were there: buildings in the background, the hedge, the onlookers. And Sammy, caught at the point of impact. She’d half-turned, was stretching out her hands as if she could push the car to a stop. But Renton had drawn fine lines issuing from the back of the car, representing the air being pushed, representing speed. Where there should have been a face, he had left a blank oval. The back half of the car was very clearly defined, the front a blur of disappearing perspective. Renton said he’d left out anything he couldn’t be sure of. He promised he hadn’t let his imagination fill in the blanks.