by Ian Rankin
‘What about this other friend of Ronnie’s? Neil, or Neilly. What can you tell me about him?’
‘Is that the guy who was there last night?’
‘Yes.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I never saw him before.’ She seemed interested in the book on the arm of the chair, picked it up and flipped its pages, pretending to read.
‘And Ronnie never mentioned a Neil or a Neilly to you?’
‘No.’ She waved the book at Rebus. ‘But he did talk about someone called Edward. Seemed angry with him about something. Used to shout the name out when he was alone in his room, after a fix.’
Rebus nodded slowly. ‘Edward. His dealer maybe?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Ronnie got pretty crazy sometimes after he fixed. He was like a different person. But he was so sweet at times, so gentle.…’ Her voice died away, eyes glistening.
Rebus checked his watch. ‘Okay, what about if I drive you back to the squat now? We can check that there’s no one watching.’
‘I don’t know.…’ The fear had returned to her face, erasing years from her, turning her into a child again, afraid of shadows and ghosts.
‘I’ll be there,’ Rebus added.
‘Well.… Can I do something first?’
‘What?’
She pulled at her damp clothes. ‘Take a bath,’ she said. Then she smiled. ‘I know it’s a bit brassnecked, but I really could use one, and there’s no water at all in the squat.’
Rebus smiled too, nodding slowly. ‘My bathtub is at your disposal,’ he said.
While she was in the bath, he hung her clothes over the radiator in the hall. Turning the central heating on made a sauna of the flat, and Rebus struggled with the sash windows in the living room, trying without success to open them. He made more tea, in a pot this time, and had just carried it into the living room when he heard her call from the bathroom. When he came out into the hall, she had her head around the bathroom door, steam billowing out around her. Her hair, face and neck were gleaming.
‘No towels,’ she explained.
‘Sorry,’ said Rebus. He found some in the cupboard in his room, and brought them to her, pushing them through the gap in the door, feeling awkward despite himself.
‘Thanks,’ she called.
He had swopped The White Album for some jazz – barely audible – and was sitting with his tea when she came in. One large red towel was expertly tied around her body, another around her head. He had often wondered how women could be so good at wearing towels.… Her arms and legs were pale and thin, but there was no doubting that her shape was pleasing, and the glow from the bath gave her a kind of nimbus. He remembered the photographs of her in Ronnie’s room. Then he recalled the missing camera.
‘Was Ronnie still keen on photography? I mean, of late.’ The choice of words was accidentally unsubtle, and he winced a little, but Tracy appeared not to notice.
‘I suppose so. He was quite good, you know. He had a good eye. But he didn’t get the breaks.’
‘How hard did he try?’
‘Bloody hard.’ There was resentment in her voice. Perhaps Rebus had allowed too much professional scepticism to creep into his tone.
‘Yes, I’m sure. Not an easy profession to get into, I’d imagine.’
‘Too true. And there were some who knew how good Ronnie was. They didn’t want the competition. Put obstacles in his way whenever and wherever they could.’
‘You mean other photographers?’
‘That’s right. Well, when Ronnie was going through his really keen spell, before disillusionment set in, he didn’t know quite how to get the breaks. So he went to a couple of studios, showed some of his work to the guys who worked there. He had some really inspired shots. You know, everyday things seen from weird angles. The Castle, Waverley Monument, Calton Hill.’
‘Calton Hill?’
‘Yes, the whatsit.’
‘The folly?’
‘That’s it.’ The towel was slipping a little from around her shoulders, and as Tracy sat with her legs tucked beneath her, sipping tea, it also fell away to reveal more than enough thigh. Rebus tried to concentrate his eyes on her face. It wasn’t easy. ‘Well,’ she was saying, ‘a couple of his ideas got ripped off. He’d see a photo in one of the local rags, and it’d be exactly the angle he’d used, the same time of day, same filters. Those bastards had copied his ideas. He’d see their names beneath the pictures, the same guys he’d shown his portfolio to.’
‘What were their names?’
‘I don’t remember now.’ She readjusted the towel. There seemed something defensive in the action. Was it so hard to remember a name? She giggled. ‘He tried to get me to pose for him.’
‘I saw the results.’
‘No, not those ones. You know, nude shots. He said he could sell them for a fortune to some of the magazines. But I wasn’t having it. I mean, the money would’ve been all well and good, but these mags get passed around, don’t they? I mean, they never get thrown away. I’d always be wondering if anybody could recognise me on the street.’ She waited for Rebus’s reaction, and when it was one of thoughtful bemusement, laughed throatily. ‘So, it’s not true what they say. You can embarrass a copper.’
‘Sometimes.’ Rebus’s cheeks were tingling. He put a hand self-consciously to one of them. He had to do something about this. ‘So,’ he said, ‘was Ronnie’s camera worth much then?’
She seemed nonplussed by this turn in the conversation, and pulled the towel even tighter around her. ‘Depends. I mean, worth and value, they’re not the same thing, are they?’
‘Aren’t they?’
‘Well, he might have paid only a tenner for the camera, but that doesn’t mean it was only worth a tenner to him. Do you see?’
‘So he paid a tenner for the camera?’
‘No, no, no.’ She shook her head, dislodging the towel. ‘I thought you had to be brainy to get in the CID? What I mean is …’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling, and the towel slipped from her head, so that bedraggled rat’s-tails of hair strung themselves out across her forehead. ‘No, never mind. The camera cost about a hundred and fifty quid. Okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘Interested in photography are you?’
‘Only since recently. More tea?’
He poured from the teapot, then added a sachet of sugar. She liked lots of sugar.
‘Thanks,’ she said, cradling the mug. ‘Listen.’ She was bathing her face in the steam from the surface of the tea. ‘Can I ask you a favour?’
Here it comes, thought Rebus: money. He had already made a mental note to check whether anything in the flat was missing before letting her leave. ‘What?’
Her eyes were on his now. ‘Can I stay the night?’ Her words came out in a torrent. ‘I’ll sleep on the couch, on the floor. I don’t mind. I just don’t want to go back to the squat, not tonight. It’s been getting pretty crazy lately, and those men following me.…’ She shivered, and Rebus had to admit that if this were all an act, she was a top-of-the-form drama student. He shrugged, was about to speak, but rose and went to the window instead, deferring a decision.
The orange street lamps were on, casting a Hollywood film-set glow over the pavement. There was a car outside, directly opposite the flat. Being two floors up, Rebus couldn’t quite see into the car, but the driver’s side window had been rolled down, and smoke oozed from it.
‘Well?’ the voice said behind him. It had lost all confidence now.
‘What?’ Rebus said distractedly.
‘Can I?’ He turned towards her. ‘Can I stay?’ she repeated.
‘Sure,’ Rebus said, making for the door. ‘Stay as long as you like.’
*
He was halfway down the curving stairwell before he realised that he was not wearing any shoes. He paused, considering. No, to hell with it. His mother had always warned him about catching chilblains, and he never had. Now was as good a time as any to find out whether his medical luck was hol
ding.
He was passing a door on the first floor when it rattled open and Mrs Cochrane thrust her whole frame out, blocking Rebus’s path.
‘Mrs Cochrane,’ he said after the initial shock had passed.
‘Here.’ She shoved something towards him, and he could do nothing but take it from her. It was a piece of card, about ten inches by six. Rebus read it: IT IS YOUR TURN TO WASH THE STAIRS. By the time he looked up again, Mrs Cochrane’s door was already closing. He could hear her carpet slippers shuffling back towards her TV and her cat. Smelly old thing.
Rebus carried the card downstairs with him, the cold steps penetrating his stockinged soles. The cat didn’t smell too good either, he thought maliciously.
The front door was on the latch. He eased it open, trying to keep the aged mechanism as silent as possible. The car was still there. Directly opposite him as he stepped outside. But the driver had already seen him. The cigarette stub was flicked onto the road, and the engine started. Rebus moved forward on his toes. The car’s headlamps came on suddenly, their beam as full as a Stalag searchlight. Rebus paused, screwing his eyes, and the car started forward, then swerved to the left, racing downhill to the end of the street. Rebus stared after it, trying to make out the number plate, but his eyes were full of white fuzziness. It had been a Ford Escort. Of that much he was sure.
Looking down the road, he realised that the car had stopped at the junction with the main road, waiting for a space in the traffic. It was less than a hundred yards away. Rebus made up his mind. He had been a handy sprinter in his youth, good enough for the school team when they had been a man short. He ran now with a kind of drunken euphoria, and remembered the wine he had opened. His stomach turned sour at the mere thought, and he slowed. Just then he slipped, skidding on something on the pavement, and, brought up short, he saw the car slip across the junction and roar away.
Never mind. That first glimpse as he’d opened the door had been enough. He’d seen the constabulary uniform. Not the driver’s face, but the uniform for sure. A policeman, a constable, driving an Escort. Two young girls were approaching along the pavement. They giggled as they passed Rebus, and he realised that he was standing panting on the pavement, without any shoes but holding a sign telling him it was his turn to WASH THE STAIRS. When he looked down, he saw what it was he had skidded on.
Cursing silently, he removed his socks, tossed them into the gutter, and walked back on bare feet towards the flat.
Dectective Constable Brian Holmes was drinking tea. He had turned this into something of a ritual, holding the cup to his face and blowing on it, then sipping. Blowing then sipping. Swallowing. Then releasing a steamy breath of air. He was chilled tonight, as cold as any tramp on any park bench bed. He didn’t even have a newspaper, and the tea tasted revolting. It had come out of one or other of the thermos flasks, piping hot and smelling of plastic. The milk wasn’t of the freshest, but at least the brew was warming. Not warming enough to touch his toes, supposing he still had toes.
‘Anything happening?’ he hissed towards the SSPCA officer, who held binoculars to his eyes as though to hide his embarrassment.
‘Nothing,’ the officer whispered. It had been an anonymous tip-off. The third this month and, to be fair, the first non-starter. Dog fighting was back in vogue. Several ‘arenas’ had been found in the past three months, small dirt pits enclosed by lengths of sheet tin. Scrap yards seemed the main source of these arenas, which gave an added meaning to the term ‘scrap yard’. But tonight they were watching a piece of waste ground. Goods trains clattered past nearby, heading towards the centre of the city, but apart from that and the low hum of distant traffic, the place was dead. Yes, there was a makeshift pit all right. They’d taken a look at it in daylight, pretending to walk their own alsatian dogs, which were in fact police dogs. Pit bull terriers: that was what they used in the arenas. Brian Holmes had seen a couple of ex-combatants, their eyes maddened with pain and fear. He hadn’t stuck around for the vet with his lethal injection.
‘Hold on.’
Two men were walking, hands in pockets, across the wilderness, picking their way carefully over the uneven surface, wary of sudden craters. They seemed to know where they were headed: straight towards the shallow pit. Once there, they took a final look around. Brian Holmes stared directly back at them, knowing he could not be seen. Like the SSPCA officer, he was crouching behind thick bracken, behind him one remaining wall of what had been a building of sorts. Though there was some light over towards the pit itself, there was precious little here, and so, as with a two-way mirror, he could see without being seen.
‘Got you,’ said the SSPCA man as the two men jumped down into the pit.
‘Wait …’ said Holmes, suddenly getting a funny feeling about all of this. The two men had begun to embrace, and their faces merged in a slow, lingering kiss as they sank down towards the ground.
‘Christ!’ exclaimed the SSPCA man.
Holmes sighed, staring down at the damp, rock-hard earth beneath his knees.
‘I don’t think pit bulls enter the equation,’ he said. ‘Or if they do, bestiality rather than brutality might be the charge.’
The SSPCA officer still held his binoculars to his eyes, horror-struck and riveted.
‘You hear stories,’ he said, ‘but you never … well … you know.’
‘Get to watch?’ Holmes suggested, getting slowly, painfully to his feet.
He was talking with the night duty officer when the message came through. Inspector Rebus wanted a word.
‘Rebus? What does he want?’ Brian Holmes checked his watch. It was two fifteen a.m. Rebus was at home, and he had been told to phone him there. He used the duty officer’s telephone.
‘Hello?’ He knew John Rebus of course, had worked with him on several cases. Still, middle-of-the-night calls were something else entirely.
‘Is that you, Brian?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Have you a sheet of paper? Write this down.’ Fumbling with pad and biro, Holmes thought he could hear music playing on the line. Something he recognised. The Beatles’ White Album. ‘Ready?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right. There was a junkie found dead in Pilmuir yesterday, or a couple of days ago now, strictly speaking. Overdose. Find out who the constables who found him were. Get them to come into my office at ten o’clock. Got that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Now, when you’ve got the address where the body was found, I want you to pick up the keys from whoever’s got them and go to the house. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms there’s a wall covered in photographs. Some are of Edinburgh Castle. Take them with you and go to the local newspaper’s office. They’ll have files full of photographs. If you’re lucky they might even have a little old man on duty with a memory like an elephant. I want you to look for any photographs that have been published in the newspaper recently and look to have been taken from the same angle as the ones on the bedroom wall. Got that?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Holmes, scribbling furiously.
‘Good. I want to know who took the newspaper photographs. There’ll be a sticker or something on the back of each print giving a name and address.’
‘Anything else, sir?’ It came out as sarcasm, meant or not.
‘Yes.’ Rebus seemed to drop his voice a decibel. ‘On the bedroom wall you’ll also find some photos of a young lady. I’d like to know more about her. She says her middle name is Tracy. That’s what she calls herself. Ask around, show the picture to anyone you think might have an inkling.’
‘Right, sir. One question.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Why me? Why now? What’s all this in aid of?’
‘That’s three questions. I’ll answer as many of them as I can when I see you tomorrow afternoon. Be in my office at three.’
And with that, the line went dead on Brian Holmes. He stared at the drunken rows of writing on his pad, his own shorthand of a week’s worth of work, delivered
to him in a matter of minutes. The duty officer was reading it over his shoulder.
‘Rather you than me,’ he said with sincerity.
*
John Rebus had chosen Holmes for a whole bundle of reasons, but mostly because Holmes didn’t know much about him. He wanted someone who would work efficiently, methodically, without raising too much fuss. Someone who didn’t know Rebus well enough to complain about being kept in the dark, about being used as a shunting engine. A message boy and a bloodhound and a dogsbody. Rebus knew that Holmes was gaining a reputation for efficiency and for not being a complaining sod. That was enough to be going on with.
He carried the telephone back from the hall into the living room, placed it on the bookshelves, and went across to the hi-fi, where he switched off the tape machine, then the amplifier. He went to the window and looked out on an empty street whose lamplight was the colour of Red Leicester cheese. The image reminded him of the midnight snack he had promised himself a couple of hours ago, and he decided to make himself something in the kitchen. Tracy wouldn’t be wanting anything. He was sure of that. He stared at her as she lay along the settee, her head at an angle towards the floor, one hand across her stomach, the other hanging down to touch the wool carpet. Her eyes were unseeing slits, her mouth open in a pout, revealing a slight gap between her two front teeth. She had slept soundly as he had thrown a blanket over her, and was sleeping still, her breathing regular. Something niggled him, but he couldn’t think what it was. Hunger perhaps. He hoped the freezer would yield a pleasant surprise. But first he went to the window and looked out again. The street was absolutely dead, which was just how Rebus himself was feeling: dead but active. He picked Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from the floor and carried it through to the kitchen.
Wednesday
The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.
Police Constables Harry Todd and Francis O’Rourke were standing outside Rebus’s office when he arrived next morning. They had been leaning against the wall, enjoying a lazy conversation, seemingly unconcerned that Rebus was twenty minutes late. He was damned if he was going to apologise. He noted with satisfaction that as he reached the top of the stairs they pulled themselves up straight and shut their mouths.