by Ian Rankin
‘Nice day for a drive.’
Tracy was doing her best to ignore him. She stared from her passenger side window, seemingly interested in the passing parade of shops and shoppers, tourists, kids with nothing to do now the schools had broken up for summer.
She’d been keen enough to get out of the station though. He’d held the car door open for her, dissuading her from just walking away. And she’d complied, but silently, sullenly. Okay, she was in the huff with him. He’d get over it. So would she.
‘Point taken,’ he said. ‘You’re pissed off. But how many times do I have to tell you? It was for your own safety, while I was doing some checking up.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Do you know this part of town?’
She was silent. There was to be no conversation. Only questions and answers: her questions.
‘We’re just driving,’ he said. ‘You must know this side of town. A lot of dealing used to go on around here.’
‘I’m not into that!’
It was Rebus’s turn to be silent. He wasn’t too old to play a game or two himself. He took a left, then another, then a right.
‘We’ve been here already,’ she commented. She’d noticed then, clever girl. Still, that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that slowly, by degrees, by left and right then left and right again, he was guiding them towards the destination.
He pulled into the kerb abruptly and yanked on the handbrake.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’re here.’
‘Here?’ She looked out of the side window, up at the tenement building. The red stone had been cleaned in the past year, giving it the look of a child’s plasticine, pinky ochre and malleable. ‘Here?’ she repeated, the word choking off as she recognised the exact address, and then tried not to let that recognition show.
The photograph was on her lap when she turned from the window. She flicked it from her with a squeal, as though it were an insect. Rebus plucked the photo from the floor of the car and held it out to her.
‘Yours, I believe.’
‘Where the hell did you get that?’
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
Her face was as red as the stonework now, her eyes flitting in panic like a bird’s. She fumbled with the seatbelt, desperate to be out of the car, but Rebus’s hand on the catch was rock hard.
‘Let me go!’ she yelled, thumping down on his fist. Then she pushed open the door, but the camber of the road pulled it shut again. There was not enough give in the seatbelt anyway. She was securely bound.
‘I thought we’d pay Mr Hutton a call,’ Rebus was saying, his voice like a blade. ‘Ask him about this photo. About how he paid you a few quid to model for him. About how you brought him Ronnie’s pictures. Looking for a few bob more maybe, or just to spite Ronnie. Is that how it was, Tracy? I’ll bet Ronnie was pissed off when he saw Hutton had stolen his ideas. Couldn’t prove it though, could he? And how was he to know how the hell Hutton got them in the first place? I suppose you put the blame on Charlie, and that’s why the two of you aren’t exactly on speaking terms. Some friend to Ronnie you were, sweetheart. Some friend.’
She broke down at that, and gave up trying to free herself from the seatbelt. Her head angled forward into her hands, and she wept, loudly and at length. While Rebus caught his breath. He wasn’t proud of himself, but it had needed saying. She had to stop hiding from the truth. It was all conjecture, of course, but Rebus was sure Hutton could confirm the details if pressed. She had modelled for money, maybe happened to mention that her boyfriend was a photographer. Had taken the photos to Hutton, giving away Ronnie’s glimmer of a chance, his creativity, for a few more pound notes. If you couldn’t trust your friends, who could you trust?
He had left her overnight in the cells to see if she would crack. She hadn’t, so he supposed she must be clean. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have some kind of habit. If not needles, then something else. Everybody needed a little something, didn’t they? And the money was needed, too. So she had ripped off her boyfriend.…
‘Did you plant that camera in Charlie’s squat?’
‘No!’ It was as though, after all that had gone before, the accusation still hurt. Rebus nodded. So Charlie had taken the camera, or someone else had planted it there. For him to find. No … not quite, because he hadn’t found it: McCall had. And very easily at that, the way he had blithely found the dope in the sleeping bag. A true copper’s nose? Or something else? A little information perhaps, inside information? If you can’t trust your friends.…
‘Did you see the camera the night Ronnie died?’
‘It was in his room, I’m sure it was.’ She blinked back the tears and wiped her nose on the handkerchief Rebus gave her. Her voice was cracked still, her throat a little clogged, but she was recovering from the shock of the photo, and the greater shock that Rebus knew now of her betrayal.
‘That guy who came to see Ronnie, he was in Ronnie’s room after me.’
‘You mean Neil?’
‘I think that was his name, yes.’
Too many cooks, Rebus was thinking. He was going to have to revise his definition of ‘circumstantial’. He had very little so far that wasn’t circumstantial. It felt like the spiral was widening, taking him further and further away from the central, crucial point, the point where Ronnie lay dead on a damp, bare floor, flanked by candles and dubious friends.
‘Neil was Ronnie’s brother.’
‘Really?’ Her voice was disinterested. The safety curtain between her and the world was coming down again. The matinee was over.
‘Yes, really.’ Rebus felt a sudden chill. If nobody, nobody cares what happened to Ronnie except Neil and me, why am I bothering?
‘Charlie always thought they had some kind of gay thing going. I never asked Ronnie. I don’t suppose he would have told me.’ She rested her head against the back of the seat, seeming to relax again. ‘Oh God.’ She released a whistle of breath from her lungs. ‘Do we have to stick around here?’
Her hands were rising slowly, ready to clasp her head, and Rebus was beginning to answer in the negative, when he saw those same hands come swiftly down, curling into tiny fists. There was no room to escape them, and so they hit him full in the groin. A flashgun exploded somewhere behind his eyes, the world turning into nothing but sound and blinding pain. He was roaring, doubled up in agony, head coming to rest on the steering wheel, which was also the car’s horn. It was blaring lazily as Tracy undid her seatbelt, opened the door, and swivelled out of the car. She left the door wide open as she ran. Rebus watched through eyes brimming with tears, as if he were in a swimming pool, watching her running along the edge of the pool away from him, chlorine stinging his pupils.
‘Jesus Almighty Christ,’ he gasped, still hunched over the wheel, and not about to move for some considerable time.
Think like Tarzan, his father had told him once: one of the old man’s few pieces of advice. He was talking about fights. About one-to-one scrapes with the lads at school. Four o’clock behind the bike shed, and all that. Think like Tarzan. You’re strong, king of the jungle, and above all else you’re going to protect your nuts. And the old boy had raised a bent knee towards young John’s crotch.…
‘Thanks, Dad,’ Rebus hissed now. ‘Thanks for reminding me.’ Then the reaction hit his stomach.
By lunchtime he could just about walk, so long as he kept his feet close to the ground, moving as though he had wet himself. People stared, of course, and he tried to improvise a limp specially for them. Ever the crowd pleaser.
The thought of the stairs to his office was too much, and driving the car had been excruciating, the foot pedals impossible to operate. So he had taken a taxi to the Sutherland Bar. Three quarter-gill measures of whisky later, he felt the pain replaced by a drowsy numbness.
‘“As though of hemlock …”,’ he muttered to himself.
He wasn’t worried about Tracy. Anyone with a punch like that could look after herself. Th
ere were probably kids on the street harder than half the bloody police force. Not that Tracy was a kid. He still hadn’t found out anything about her. That was supposed to be Holmes’s department, but Holmes was off on a wild dog chase in Fife. No, Tracy would be all right. Probably there had been no men chasing her. But then why come to him that night? There could be a hundred reasons. After all, she’d conned a bed, the best part of a bottle of wine, a hot bath and breakfast out of him. Not bad going that, and him supposed to be a hardened old copper. Too old maybe. Too much the ‘copper’, not enough the police officer. Maybe.
Where to next? He already had the answer to that, legs permitting and pray God he could drive.
He parked at a distance from the house, not wanting to scare off anyone who might be there. Then he simply walked up to the door and knocked. Standing there, awaiting a response, he remembered Tracy opening that door and running into his arms, her face bruised, her eyes welling with tears. He didn’t think Charlie would be here. He didn’t think Tracy would be here. He didn’t want Tracy to be here.
The door opened. A bleary teenage boy squinted up at Rebus. His hair was lank, lifeless, falling into his eyes.
‘What is it?’
‘Is Charlie in? I’ve got a bit of business with him.’
‘Naw. Havenae seen him the day.’
‘All right if I wait a while?’
‘Aye.’ The boy was already closing the door on Rebus’s face. Rebus stuck a hand up against the door and peered round it.
‘I meant, wait indoors.’
The boy shrugged, and slouched back inside, leaving the door ajar. He slipped back into his sleeping bag and pulled it over his head. Just passing through, and catching up on lost sleep. Rebus supposed the boy had nothing to lose by letting a stranger into this way station. He left him to his sleep, and, after a cursory check that there was no one else in the downstairs rooms, climbed the steep staircase.
The books were still slewed like so many felled dominoes, the contents of the bag McCall had emptied still lying in a clutter on the floor. Rebus ignored these and went to the desk, where he sat, studying the pieces of paper in front of him. He had flicked on the light switch beside the door of Charlie’s room, and now switched on the desk lamp, too. The walls were miraculously free from posters, postcards and the like. It wasn’t like a student’s room. Its identity had been left suspended, which was probably exactly the way Charlie wanted it. He didn’t want to look like a student to his drop-out friends; he didn’t want to look like a drop-out to his student friends. He wanted to be all things to all people. Chameleon, then, as well as tourist.
The essay on Magick was Rebus’s main interest, but he gave the rest of the desk a good examination while he was here. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest that Charlie was pushing bad drugs around the city streets. So Rebus picked up the essay, opened it, and began to read.
Nell liked the library when it was quiet like this. During term time, a lot of the students used it as a meeting place, a sort of glorified youth club. Then, the first-floor reading room was filled with noise. Books tended to be left lying everywhere, or to go missing, to be shifted out of their proper sections. All very frustrating. But during the summer months, only the most determined of the students came in: the ones with a thesis to write, or work to catch up on, or those precious few who were passionate about their chosen fields, and who were giving up sunshine and freedom to be here, indoors, in studied silence.
She got to know their faces, and then their names. Conversations could be struck up in the deserted coffee shop, authors’ names swopped. And at lunchtime, one could sit in the gardens, or walk behind the library building onto The Meadows, where more books were being read, more faces rapt in thought.
Of course, summer was also the time for the library’s most tedious jobs. The check on stock, the rebinding of misused volumes. Reclassification, computer updating, and so on. The atmosphere more than made up for all this. All traces of hurry and haste were gone. No more complaints about there being too few copies of this or that title, desperately needed by a class of two hundred for some overdue essay. But after the summer there would be a new intake, and with every year’s fresh intake, she felt that whole year older, and more distanced from the students. They already seemed hopelessly young to her, a glow surrounding them, reminding her of something she could never have.
She was sorting through request forms when the commotion began. The guard on the library entrance had stopped someone who was trying to get in without any identification. Normally, Nell knew, the guard wouldn’t have worried, but the girl was so obviously distraught, so obviously not a reader, not even a student. She was loudly argumentative, where a real student would have quietly explained that they had forgotten to bring their matriculation card with them. There was something else, too … Nell frowned, trying to place the girl. Catching her profile, she remembered the photograph in Brian’s briefcase. Yes, it was the same girl. No girl, really, but a fully grown, if youthful, woman. The lines around the eyes were the giveaway, no matter how slender the body, how fashionably young the clothes. But why was she making this fuss? She’d always gone to the coffee shop, had never, to Nell’s knowledge, tried to get into the library proper before now. Nell’s curiosity was aroused.
The guard was holding Tracy by the arm, and she was shrieking abuse at him, her eyes frantic. Nell tried to be authoritarian in her walk as she approached the pair of them.
‘Is there some problem, Mr Clarke?’
‘I can handle it, miss.’ His eyes betrayed his words. He was sweating, past retirement age, neither used to this sort of physical struggle nor knowing what to do about it. Nell turned to the girl.
‘You can’t just barge in here, you know. But if you want a message passed on to one of the students inside, I’ll see what I can do.’
The girl struggled again. ‘I just want to come in!’ All reasoning had gone now. She knew only that if someone was stopping her getting in, then she had to get in somehow.
‘Well you can’t,’ Nell said angrily. She should not have interfered. She was used to dealing with quiet, sane, rational people. Okay, some of them might lose their tempers momentarily when frustrated in their search for a book. But they would always remember their place. The girl stared at her, and the stare seemed absolutely malevolent. There was no trace of human kindness in it at all. Nell felt the hairs on her neck bristle. Then the girl gave a banshee wail, throwing herself forward, loosing the guard’s grip. Her forehead smashed into Nell’s face, sending the librarian flying, feet rooted to the spot, so that she fell like so much timber. Tracy stood there for a moment, seeming to come to herself. The guard made to grab her, but she gave another yell, and he backed off. Then she pushed past him out of the library doors and started running again, head down, arms and legs uncoordinated. The guard watched her, fearful still, then turned his attention to the bloody and unconscious face of Nell Stapleton.
The man who answered the door was blind.
‘Yes?’ he asked, holding the door, sightless eyes discernible behind the dark green lenses of his glasses. The hallway behind him was in deep shadow. What need had it of light?
‘Mr Vanderhyde?’
The man smiled. ‘Yes?’ he repeated. Rebus couldn’t take his own eyes off those of the elderly man. Those green lenses reminded him of claret bottles. Vanderhyde would be sixty-five, maybe seventy. His hair was silvery yellow, thick, well groomed. He was wearing an open-necked shirt, brown waistcoat, a watch chain hanging from one pocket. And he was leaning ever so slightly on a silver-topped stick. For some reason, Rebus had the idea that Vanderhyde would be able to handle that cane swiftly and effectively as a weapon, should anyone unpleasant ever come calling.
‘Mr Vanderhyde, I’m a police officer.’ Rebus was reaching for his wallet.
‘Don’t bother with identification, unless it’s in braille.’ Vanderhyde’s words stopped Rebus short, his hand frozen in his inside jacket pocket.
; ‘Of course,’ he mumbled, feeling ever so slightly ridiculous. Funny how people with disabilities had that special gift of making you seem so much less able than them.
‘You’d better come in, Inspector.’
‘Thank you.’ Rebus was in the hall before it hit him. ‘How did you –?’
Vanderhyde shook his head. ‘A lucky guess,’ he said, leading the way. ‘A shot in the dark, you might say.’ His laughter was abrasive. Rebus, studying what he could see of the hall, was wondering how even a blind man could make such a botched job of interior decoration. A stuffed owl stared down from its dusty pedestal, next to an umbrella stand which seemed to consist of a hollowed elephant’s foot. An ornately carved occasional table boasted a pile of unread mail and a cordless telephone. Rebus gave this latter item most attention.
‘Technology has made such progress, don’t you agree?’ Vanderhyde was saying. ‘Invaluable for those of us who have lost one of the senses.’
‘Yes,’ Rebus replied, as Vanderhyde opened the door to another room, almost as dark to Rebus’s eyes as the hall.
‘In here, Inspector.’
‘Thank you.’ The room was musty, and smelled of old people’s medicaments. It was comfortably furnished, with a deep sofa and two robust armchairs. Books lay behind glass along one wall. Some uninspired watercolours stopped the other walls from seeming bare. There were ornaments everywhere. Those on the mantelpiece caught Rebus’s eye. There wasn’t a spare centimetre of space on the deep wooden mantelpiece, and the ornaments were exotic. Rebus could identify African, Caribbean, Asian and Oriental influences, without being able to pinpoint any one country for any one piece.
Vanderhyde flopped into a chair. It struck Rebus that there were no occasional tables scattered through the room, no extraneous furniture into which the blind man might bump.
‘Nick-nacks, Inspector. Gewgaws collected on my travels as a younger man.’
‘Evidence of a lot of travel.’
‘Evidence of a magpie mind,’ Vanderhyde corrected. ‘Would you care for some tea?’