by Ian Rankin
'You think the patients might have noticed?'
It was Rebus's turn to smile. 'It will mean a bit of digging.'
'Your forte, I believe?'
Rebus shook his head. 'I've had enough of all that.'
'What do you mean?'
He meant ghosts, but wasn't about to try to explain.
'What about Grant Hood and Ellen Wylie?' he said instead.
'Will they want it?'
'They won't have any choice. Ever heard the phrase pulling rank?'
Linford nodded thoughtfully, then got into his car, but Rebus's hand stopped him pulling the door closed.
'Just one other thing. Siobhan Clarke is a friend of mine. Anyone makes her unhappy makes me unhappy.'
'Don't tell me: I wouldn't like you when you're angry?' Linford smiled again, but coldly this time. 'I get the feeling Siobhan wouldn't thank you for fighting her battles for her. Especially when they're all in your head. Goodbye, John.'
Linford started the engine, then let it idle as he took a call on his mobile. After listening for a few seconds, he stared out at Rebus and slid his window down.
'Where's your car?'
'Two rows back.'
'You'd better follow me then.' Linford terminated the call and tossed the mobile on to his passenger seat.
'Why? What's happened?'
Linford slid both hands around the steering wheel. "Another body at Queensberry House.' He stared through the windscreen. 'Only a bit fresher this time.'
They'd passed the summer house the previous Friday. It was a flimsy wooden affair which had belonged to the hospital and stood inside the grounds, next to Her Majesty's cherry tree. Like the tree, the summer house was for the chop. But for now it was a handy storage area; nothing valuable, there was no lock on the door. And even a lock would have been ineffective, since most of the windows were broken.
This was where the body had been found, lying amidst old paint tins, bags of rubble and broken tools.
'Probably not the way he'd have chosen to go,' Iinford muttered, looking around him at the chaos of the site. Uniforms were erecting a cordon around the summer house and its vicinity. Workers in hard hats were being told to disperse. A crowd of them had gathered on the roof of one of the buildings under demolition, from where they had a grandstand view of proceedings. Maybe their fellow workers would join them. Maybe the roof would cave in. Not yet midday and Rebus was conjuring up worst-case scenarios, while praying this would be as bad as it got. The site manager was being interviewed in the security hut, complaining that all the police officers needed to be issued with hard hats. Rebus and Linford had filched a couple from the hut. SOCOs were unpacking the arcana of their craft. A doctor had pronounced death; the call had gone out to the available pathologists. All the building work on Holyrood Road had reduced it to a single lane, controlled by traffic lights. Now, with police cars and vans on the scene (including a grey one from the mortuary, Dougie behind the wheel) queues were forming and tempers fraying. The sound of horns was growing into a chorus, rising into the braised-looking sky.
'Snow's on the way,' Rebus commented. 'It's cold enough for it.' Yet the previous day had started mild, and even the rain had been like an April shower. Twelve degrees.
'The weather's not exactly a consideration,' Linford snapped. He wanted to get closer to the body, wanted to be inside the summer house, but the locus had to be secured. He knew the rules: barging in meant leaving traces.
'Doctor says the back of the skull was cracked open.' He nodded to himself, looked towards Rebus. 'Coincidence?'
Hands in pockets, Rebus shrugged. He was sucking on only his second cigarette of the morning. He knew Linford was tasting something: he was tasting fast-track. Not content with his own momentum, he was seeing a case, a big case. He was seeing himself at its heart, with media attention, the public clamouring for a result. A result he thought he could deliver.
'He was running in my constituency,' Linford was saying. 'I've got a flat in Dean Village.'
'Very nice.'
Linford stifled an embarrassed laugh.
'It's okay,' Rebus assured him. 'Times like this, we all tend to talk crap. It fills the spaces.'
Linford nodded.
'Tell me,' Rebus went on, 'just how many murders have you worked?'
'Is this where you pull the old I've-seen-more-corpses-than-you've-had-hot-dinners routine?'
Rebus shrugged again. 'Just interested.'
'I wasn't always at Fettes, you know.' Linford shuffled his feet. 'Christ, I wish they'd get on with it.' The body was still in situ, the body of Roddy Grieve. They knew his identity because a gentle search of his pockets had produced a wallet. But they knew, too, because his face was recognisable, even though the light had gone from its eyes. They knew because Roddy Grieve was somebody, and seemed so even in death.
He was a Grieve, part of 'the clan', as they'd come to be called. Once, a keen interviewer had gone so far as to name them Scotland's first family. Which was nonsense.
Everyone knew Scotland's first family was the Broons.
'What are you smiling at?'
'Nothing.' Rebus nipped his cigarette and returned it to the packet. He couldn't know for sure whether stubbing it out would have contaminated the crime scene. But he knew the importance of Scene of Crime work. And he felt the sudden pang of desire for a drink, the drink he'd arranged with Bobby Hogan just before Friday's discovery. A long bar-room session of reminiscence and tall tales, with no bodies buried in walls or dumped in summer houses. A drink in some parallel universe where people had stopped being cruel to each other.
And speaking of mental torture, here came Chief Superintendent Farmer Watson. He had Rebus in his sights, and his eyes had narrowed, as though taking aim.
'Don't blame me, sir,' Rebus said, getting his retaliation in first.
'Christ, John, can't you stay out of trouble for one minute?' It was only half a joke. Watson's retirement was a couple of months away. He'd already warned Rebus that he wanted a quiet canter downhill. Rebus held up his hands in surrender and introduced his boss to Derek Linford.
'Ah, Derek.' The Chief Super held out a hand. 'Heard of you, of course.' The two men shook; kept shaking as they sized one another up.
'Sir,' Rebus interrupted, 'DI Linford and I... we feel this should be our case. We're looking at parliamentary security, and this is a prospective MSP who's been killed.'
Watson seemed to ignore him. 'Do we know how he died?'
'Not yet, sir,' Linford was quick to answer. Rebus was impressed at the way he had changed. He was all fawning inferior now, eager to please the Big Chief. It was calculated, of course, but Rebus doubted Watson would notice, or even want to notice.
'Doctor mentioned head trauma,' Linford added. 'Curiously, we're getting a similar result from the body in the fireplace. Skull fracture and stab wound.'
Watson nodded slowly. 'No stab wounds here, though.'
'No, sir,' Rebus said. 'But all the same.'
Watson looked at him. 'You think I'd let you near a case like this?'
Rebus shrugged.
I can show you the fireplace,' Linford told Watson. Rebus wondered if he was trying to defuse the situation. Linford could get the case only through the PPLC, which meant not without Rebus.
'Maybe later, Derek,' the Farmer was saying. 'Nobody's going to bother much about a mouldy old skeleton when we've got Roddy Grieve on our hands.'
'It wasn't that mouldy, sir,' Rebus felt bound to say. 'And it'll still need investigating.'
'Naturally,' Watson snapped. 'But there are priorities, John. Even you've got to see that.' Watson held a hand out, palm upwards. 'Hell, is it starting to snow?'
'Might persuade some of the audience to head indoors,' Rebus said.
The Farmer grunted in agreement. 'Well, if it's going to start snowing, Derek, you might as well show me this fireplace of yours.'
Derek Linford looked as though he'd melt with pleasure, and started leading the Farmer indoo
rs, leaving Rebus out in the cold, where he allowed himself a cigarette and a little smile. Let Linford work on the Farmer... that way they might get both cases, a workload to keep Rebus busy through the winter's darkest weeks, and the perfect excuse to ignore Christmas for another year.
Identification was a formality, albeit a necessary one. The public entered the mortuary by a door in High School Wynd, and were immediately faced by a door marked Viewing Room. There were chairs for them to sit in. If they chose to wander, they'd come across a desk with a department store mannequin seated behind it. The mannequin was dressed in a white lab coat and had a moustache pencilled below its nose - a rare, if bizarre, example of humour, given the surroundings.
It would be some time before Gates and Curt could get round to doing an autopsy, but, as Dougie reassured Rebus, there was 'plenty of room in the fridge'. There wasn't nearly so much space in the reception area outside the Viewing Room. Roddy Grieve's widow was there. So were his mother and sister. His brother Cammo was flying up from London. An unwritten rule stated that the media kept clear of the mortuary, no matter how juicy the story. But a few of the most rapacious vultures had gathered on the pavement across the road. Rebus, stepping outside for a cigarette, approached them. Two journalists, one photographer. They were young and lean and had little or no respect for old rules. They knew him, shuffled their feet but made no attempt to move.
'I'm going to ask nicely,' Rebus said, shaking a cigarette from its pack. He lit it, then offered the pack around. The three shook their heads. One was fiddling with his mobile phone, checking messages on its tiny screen.
'Anything for us, DI Rebus?' the other reporter asked.
Rebus stared at him, seeing immediately that it was no good appealing to reason.
'Off the record, if you like,' the reporter persisted.
'I don't mind being quoted,' Rebus said quietly. The reporter lifted a tape-recorder from his jacket pocket.
'Bit closer, please.'
The reporter obliged, switched the machine on.
Rebus was careful to enunciate slowly and clearly. After eight or nine words, the reporter flicked the machine off, the look on his face somewhere between a sneer and a grudging smile. Behind him, his colleagues were staring at their shoes.
'Need a spell-check for any of that?' Rebus asked. Then he crossed the road and headed back into the mortuary.
The ID was over, the paperwork complete. The family members looked numb. Even Linford looked a bit shaken: maybe it was another of his acts. Rebus approached the widow.
'We can arrange for a couple of cars She sniffed back tears. 'No, that's all right. Thanks anyway.' She blinked, eyes finally focusing on him. 'A taxi should be coming.' The deceased's sister came across, leaving her mother stony-faced and straight-backed on one of the chairs.
'Mum has a funeral home she wants to use, if that's all right with you.' Lorna Cordover was speaking to the widow, but it was Rebus who answered.
'You realise we can't release the body just yet.'
She stared at him with eyes he'd stared at a thousand times in newspapers and magazines. Lorna Grieve: her modelling name. She wasn't yet fifty, but was closing in on it fast. Rebus had first come across her towards the end of the sixties, when she'd have been in her late teens. She'd dated rock stars, was rumoured to have caused the break-up of at least one successful band. She'd been in Melody Maker and NME. Long straw-blond hair back then, and thin to the point of emaciation. She'd filled out quite a bit, and her hair was shorter, darker. But there was still something about her, even in this place, at this time.
'We're his bloody family,' she snapped.
'Please, Lorna,' her sister-in-law cautioned.
'Well, we are, aren't we? Last thing we need is some jumped-up little squirt with a clipboard telling us--'
'I think maybe you're confusing me with the staff here,' Rebus cut in.
She looked at him again, eyes narrowing. 'Then just who the hell are you?'
'He's the policeman,' Seona Grieve explained. 'He'll be the one who looks into...' But she couldn't find the words, and the sentence died softly with an exhalation.
Lorna Grieve snorted, pointed towards Derek Linford, who had seated himself next to the mother, Alicia. He was leaning towards her, his hand touching the back of hers. 'That', Lorna informed them, 'is the officer who'll be investigating Roddy's murder.' She squeezed Seona's shoulder. 'He's the one we should be talking to,' she said. Then, with a final glance towards Rebus, 'Not his monkey.'
Rebus watched her move back towards the chairs. Beside him, the widow spoke so softly he didn't catch it.
'Sorry,' she repeated.
He smiled, nodded. There were a dozen platitudes scrawled and waiting in his head. He rubbed a hand across his forehead to erase them.
'You'll want to ask us questions,' she said.
'When you're ready.'
'He didn't have any enemies... not really.' She seemed to be speaking to herself. 'That's what they always ask on TV, isn't it?'
'We'll get round to it.' He was watching Lorna Grieve, who was crouched in front of her mother. Linford was looking at her, drinking her in. The main door opened, a head appearing.
'Somebody order a taxi?'
Rebus watched as Derek Linford escorted Alicia Grieve all the way out. It was a shrewd move: not the widow, but the matriarch. Linford knew power when he saw it.
They gave the family a few hours, then drove to Ravelston Dykes.
'What do you reckon then?' Linford asked. From his tone, he might have been asking what Rebus thought of the BMW.
Rebus just shrugged. Between them, they'd managed to sort out a Murder Room at St Leonard's, it being the closest station to the locus. Not that it was a murder inquiry yet,, but they knew it would be, just as soon as the autopsy was finished. Calls had gone out to Joe Dickie and Bobby Hogan. Rebus had also hooked up with Grant Hood and Ellen Wylie, neither of whom objected to the idea of working together on the Skelly case.
'It'll be a challenge,' both had said, independently of one another. Their bosses would have the final say, but Rebus didn't foresee problems. He'd told Hood and Wylie to get together, thrash out a plan of attack.
'And who do we report to?' Wylie had asked.
'Me,' he'd told her, making sure Linford wasn't in earshot.
The BMW eased down into second as they approached an amber light. Had Rebus been driving, he'd have accelerated, probably just missing red. Maybe not on his own, but with a passenger - he'd have done it to impress. He'd have laid money on Linford doing it, too. The BMW stopped at the lights. Linford applied the handbrake and turned towards him.
'Investment analyst, Labour candidate, high-profile family. What do you think?'
Rebus shrugged again. 'I've seen the newspaper stories, same as you. Some people haven't always liked the way candidates were selected.'
Linford was nodding. 'Maybe some bad blood there?'
'We'll ask. Could just be a mugging gone wrong.'
'Or a liaison.'
Rebus glanced at him. Linford was staring at the lights, fingers poised on the handbrake. 'Maybe the SOCOs will work their magic'
'Fingerprints and fibres?' Linford sounded sceptical.
'Lot of mud around. Could be we'll find footprints.'
The light turned green. With an empty road ahead, the BMW quickly changed up through its gears.
'The boss has already been on to me,' Linford told his passenger. Rebus knew that by boss he didn't mean anything as middle-management as a chief super. 'The ACC,' Linford explained: Colin Carswell, Assistant Chief Constable (Crime). 'He wanted to bring in a special team, something as high profile as this.'
'Crime Squad?'
It was Linford's turn to shrug. 'Hand picked. I don't know who he had in mind.'
'What did you tell him?'
'I said with me in charge, he didn't have to worry.' Linford couldn't help it, had to turn towards Rebus to enjoy his reaction. Rebus was trying to look unmoved by it all
. All his years on the force, he'd probably spoken with the ACC no more than two or three times.
Linford smiled, knew he'd hit some soft, fleshy part beneath Rebus's shell-like exterior.
'Of course,' he went on, 'when I mentioned that DI Rebus would be assisting 'Assisting?' Rebus bristled, and only now recollected that Linford had also spoken of being in charge.
'He was a bit more dubious,' Linford went on, ignoring the outburst. 'But I told him you'd be fine, said we were working well together. That's what I mean by assisting -you helping me, me helping you.'
'But with you in charge?'
Hearing his own phrase thrown back at him seemed to please Linford: another palpable hit. 'Your own chief super doesn't want you on the case, John. Why is that?'
'None of your business.'
'Everyone knows about you, John. I could say that your reputation precedes you.'
'But it'll be different with you in charge?' Rebus guessed.
Linford shrugged and was silent for a moment, then shifted in his seat. 'While we're enjoying this time together,' he said, 'maybe I should throw in that I'm seeing Siobhan tonight. But don't worry, I'll have her home by eleven.'
Roddy Grieve and his wife had lived together somewhere in Cramond, but Seona Grieve had intimated that she would be with Roddy's mother. Situated at the end of a short narrow street, the huge detached house had a jagged feel to it. Maybe it was to do with the several crow-step gables, or the stone relief thistle set into the wall above the front door. There were no cars in the drive, and curtains had been drawn closed in every window - a sensible precaution: the reporters and cameraman were back, parked kerbside in a silver Audi 80. TV crews were probably on their way. Rebus had no doubt the Grieves would cope with the attention.
Grieve: the resonance of the name hit him for the first time. The grieving Grieves.
Linford rang the doorbell. 'Nice place,' he said.
'I was brought up in something similar,' Rebus told him. Then, after a pause: 'Well, we lived in a cul-de-sac'
'And there', Linford guessed, 'the comparison ends.'
The door was opened by a man dressed in a camel-hair coat with dark brown lapels. The coat was unbuttoned. Beneath it could be glimpsed a tailored pinstripe suit and white shirt. The shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. In his left hand, the man carried a plain black tie.