by Ian Rankin
‘Did you know them well, Mrs Tweedie?’
She watched him take out his notebook and pen. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked.
‘Not at all, but I thought I might make us a cup of tea first. Is that all right?’
That was just fine with John Rebus.
He sat there for over half an hour. The room was so hot he thought he might nod off, but what Mrs Tweedie had to say brought him wide awake.
‘Nice lads, the pair of them. Helped me home with my shopping once, and wouldn’t stop for a cup of tea.’
‘You saw them often?’
‘Well, I saw them coming and going.’
‘Did they keep regular hours? I mean, were they active at night?’
‘I wouldn’t know. I’m not late to bed. They sometimes played their music a bit loud, but all I did was turn up the telly. If they were having a party, they always warned us in advance.’
Rebus brought out the Kirstie photograph. ‘Have you seen this girl before, Mrs Tweedie?’
‘Gracious, yes!’
‘Oh?’
‘I saw her in the Daily Record.’
Rebus felt his hopes sink. ‘But never round here?’
‘No, never. I saw their landlord often though.’
Rebus frowned. ‘I thought these houses were council-owned?’
Mrs Tweedie nodded. ‘So they are.’
Rebus started to get it. ‘But it’s not Willie’s and Dixie’s names in the rent book?’
‘They explained to me that they were … er, sub-something.’
‘Sub-letting?’
‘Aye, that’s it. From the lad who had the house before them.’
‘And what’s his name, Mrs Tweedie?’
‘Well, his first name’s Paul. I don’t know his second. Nice young lad, always smartly dressed. Only thing I didn’t like, he wore one of those …’ She tugged her ear and made a face. ‘Doesn’t look at all right on a man.’
‘Paul Duggan?’ Rebus suggested.
She tried the name out. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you could be right.’
As Rebus drove out on to Gorgie Road he had a song in his head. It was an old Neil Young number, ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’. He stopped the car in front of the jail to collect his thoughts. An access road ran from Gorgie Road up to the gatehouse, the tall fence, and the solid building behind with its massive door and large clock. Though not yet five o’clock, it was dark, but the prison was well lit. Officially it was HM Prison Edinburgh; but everyone knew it as Saughton Jail. The main building looked like a Victorian workhouse.
They’d have ended up in jail, he thought to himself. They knew even a hoax kidnapping was a serious offence.
Willie Coyle, the taller, the fair-haired of the two. Rebus was imagining what had gone through Willie’s mind in those final seconds before he took the plunge. Dixie and he would go to jail. They’d almost certainly be separated: different wings if not different jails. Dixie would have no one to look after him. Rebus thought of Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Dixie had been an injector, maybe he’d been helped off, helped by his friend Willie. But in Scotland’s jails, there were plenty of drugs. Of course, you’d have to have something to trade, and a boy Dixie’s age always had something to trade.
Had Willie weighed up the options? And had he then hugged his friend, hugged him to death? Rebus was beginning to like Willie Coyle. He was wishing he wasn’t dead.
But he was, they both were. Cold and commingled on the slab, leaving not much behind except the fact that Paul Duggan was a very cool customer indeed. Rebus would be talking to Paul Duggan, sooner rather than later. But for now he had other people to see, another appointment. It was the one appointment he’d known all day he would keep, come hell or high water.
5
There was a gas-fire, the kind that gave out actual flames, burning in what looked like the original grate; and smoke too, though the smoke came from cigarettes and pipes. The TV was on, all but drowned out by the live music. As often happened on a winter’s evening, Edinburgh’s folk musicians managed to find themselves in the same pub at the same time. They were playing in a corner: three fiddles, a squeeze-box, a bodhran, and a flute. The flautist was the only woman. The men were bearded and ruddy-cheeked and wore thick-knit jumpers. The pints on their table were three-quarters full. The woman was thin and pale with long brown hair, but her cheeks were bright from firelight.
A few customers were up dancing, arms linked and birling in what space there was. Rebus liked to think they were just keeping warm, but in fact they looked like they were having fun.
‘Three more halfs and a couple of nips,’ he told the barman.
‘And what are your friends drinking?’
‘Ha ha,’ said Rebus. He was flanked at the bar by his drinking companions, George Klasser and Donny Dougary. While Klasser was known as ‘Doc’, Dougary was called ‘Salty’. Rebus didn’t know either of them very well outside the confines of the pub, but most evenings between six and half-seven they were the best of pals. Salty Dougary was trying to be heard above the general confusion.
‘So what I’m saying is, you can go anywhere on the superhighway, anywhere, and in future it’ll be even bigger. You’ll do your shopping by computer, you’ll watch telly on it, play games, listen to music … and everything will be there. I can talk to the White House if I want: I can download stuff from all over the world. I sit there at my desk and I can travel anywhere.’
‘Can you travel to the pub by computer, Salty?’ a drinker further down the bar asked.
Salty ignored him and held his thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart. ‘Hard disks the size of credit cards, you’ll have a whole PC in the palm of your hand.’
‘You shouldn’t say that to a policeman, Salty,’ George Klasser offered, causing laughter. He turned to Rebus.
‘How’s that tooth?’
‘The anaesthetic helps,’ Rebus said, tipping the last of his whisky into his mouth.
‘I hope you’re not mixing alcohol and painkillers.’
‘Would I do that? Salty, give the man some money.’
Salty stopped talking to himself. The barman was waiting, so he pulled out a ten-pound note, watching its sad ebbing as it flowed into the till. Salty was called Salty because of salt and sauce, which were what you put on your chip-shop supper. The connection being chips, since Salty worked in an electronics factory in South Gyle. He’d been a late arrival in ‘Silicon Glen’, and was hoping the industry would continue to prosper. Six factories before this one had closed on him, leaving long periods of jobless space between them. He still remembered the days when money was tight — ‘I could have collected Social Security for Scotland’ — and watched his money accordingly. He made microchips these days, feeding an assembly plant on Clydeside and another in Gyle Park West.
‘Ye dancing?’
Rebus half turned to see a woman grinning toothlessly at him. He thought her name was Morag. She was married to the man with the tartan shoelaces.
‘Not tonight,’ he said, trying to look flattered. You could never tell with the man with the tartan shoelaces: dance with his wife and you were flirting; turn her down and you were, by implication, snubbing him. Rebus rested his foot on the polished brass bar-rail and drank his drinks.
By eight o’clock, both Doc and Salty had left, and an old guy in a shapeless bunnet was standing next to Rebus. The man had forgotten his false teeth, and his cheeks were sunken. He was telling Rebus about American history.
‘I like it, ken. Just American, not any other kind.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Eh?’
‘Why just American?’
The man licked his lips. He wasn’t focusing on Rebus, or on anything in the bar. You couldn’t be sure he was even focusing on the present day.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I suppose it’s because of the Westerns. I love Westerns. Hopalong Cassidy, John Wayne … I used to like Hopalong Cassidy.’
‘Could It Be Forever,’ sa
id Rebus, ‘that was one of his.’
Then he finished his drink and went home.
The telephone was ringing. Rebus considered not answering; resistance lasted all of ten seconds.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, Dad.’
He flopped into his chair. ‘Hello, Sammy. Where are you?’ She paused too long. ‘Still at Patience’s, eh? How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘How’s work?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘Just being polite.’ Fatherly, he thought suddenly: I should have said fatherly, not polite. Sometimes he wished life had a rewind function.
‘Well, I won’t bore you with the details then.’
‘I take it Patience is out?’ It stood to reason: Sammy never called when she was home.
‘Yes, she’s out with … I mean at something. She’s out at something.’
Rebus smiled. ‘What you really mean is that she’s out with someone.’
‘I’m not very good at this.’
‘Don’t blame yourself, blame your genes. Do you want to meet?’
‘Not tonight, I’m dog-tired. Patience asked … she wondered if you’d like to come to tea some day. She thinks we should see more of one another.’
As usual, thought Rebus, Patience was right. ‘I’d like that. When?’
‘I’ll ask Patience and get back to you. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
‘Well, I’m off for an early night. What about you?’
Rebus looked down at his chair. ‘I’m already there. Sleep tight.’
‘You too, Dad. Love you.’
‘You too, pet,’ Rebus said quietly, but only after he’d put down the phone.
He went over to the hi-fi. After a drink, he liked to listen to the Stones. Women, relationships, and colleagues had come and gone, but the Stones had always been there. He put the album on and poured himself a last drink. The guitar riff, one of easily half a dozen in Keith’s tireless repertoire, kicked the album off. I don’t have much, Rebus thought, but I have this. He thought of Lauderdale in his hospital bed; Patience out enjoying herself; Kirstie Kennedy in a Charing Cross cardboard-box. Then he saw cheap trainers, a final embrace, and Willie Coyle’s face.
Rebus just couldn’t seem to drink him off his mind.
He remembered the report he’d found hidden in Willie’s bedroom. It was on the kitchen worktop, and he went to fetch it. It was a business plan, something to do with a computer software company called LABarum. The text explained that the dictionary definition of ‘labarum’ was ‘moral standard or guide’, and the reason the company would use upper case for the first three letters was to emphasise Lothian And Borders. The business plan discussed future development, costings, projected balance sheet, employment range. It was dry, and it was couched in the conditional. Rebus got out the phone book but found no listing anywhere for LABarum.
Someone had been working on the text, underlining some phrases, circling words, doing jotted calculations beside the graphs and bar charts. Sentences had been deleted in red pen, words changed. Some points had been ticked. Rebus couldn’t know if the handwriting was Willie Coyle’s. He didn’t know if Willie had owned such a thing as a red Biro. But he did wonder what such a document was doing hidden in Willie Coyle’s bedroom. When he turned to the last sheet, there was a word scrawled diagonally across it and underlined heavily. The word was DALGETY. He flipped through the report again but found no other mention of Dalgety. Was it a person, a place, another company? The word was scored into the paper in blue ink. It was impossible to say if it was in the same hand as the amendments and marginalia.
He poured another drink — this would be his last — and flipped the album over. He was annoyed, more with himself than anyone. It was case closed after all: a couple of desperate hoaxers fell off a bridge and died. That was all. He should have cleared it from his mind by now. Yet he couldn’t.
‘Damn you, Willie,’ he said out loud. He sat down again with his drink and picked up the business plan. There were a couple of letters in the top right-hand corner, written faintly in pencil. CK. He wondered if they were an abbreviation for ‘check’.
‘Who cares?’ he said, trying to concentrate on the music. What a shambles the band were, yet sometimes they could get it so exactly right that it hurt.
‘Here’s to you, Willie,’ Rebus said, raising his glass in the air.
6
It wasn’t till he woke up in the morning freezing that he remembered the radiator key in his jacket pocket. The pipes were gurgling, the boiler roaring away, yet the radiators were barely warm.
He got coffee and a bacon roll from a cafe and had breakfast in his car on the way to work. There was a hard frost on the ground, and the sky was leaden, threatening worse. It had taken him five minutes to scrape the ice off his windscreen, and even so it was like driving a tank, peering through the one clear slit.
A message on his desk warned of a nine-thirty meeting in the Farmer’s office. Rebus felt he deserved another coffee, and made for the canteen. A lone woman sat at a table, slowly stirring a beaker of tea.
‘Gill?’
She looked up. It was Gill Templer. Rebus’s face broke into its first grin of the year. He pulled out a chair and sat down.
‘Hello, John.’ Her eyes were on her drink.
‘I thought you were in Fife.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sex Offences Unit, isn’t it?’
‘That’s it.’
He nodded, trying to ignore the coolness in her tone. ‘You look good.’ He meant it too. Her short dark hair was feather-cut, long crescents sweeping over both ears to her cheeks. Her eyes were emerald green. She hadn’t changed a bit. Gill Templer smiled an acknowledgment but didn’t say anything.
Brian Holmes put a hand on Rebus’s shoulder. ‘Those pathology tests have come in.’
‘Oh?’
Holmes went to fetch himself coffee and a dough-ring, Rebus following. ‘So what’s the news?’ he asked.
Holmes took a bite out of his dough-ring and shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he mumbled, swallowing. ‘The professor can’t confirm the presence of heroin or any other drug in the blood of either deceased. He thinks he may have a couple of jab marks on one corpse, but they’re not recent.’
‘Which body?’
‘The shorter.’
‘Dixie.’ Rebus lifted his coffee and left Holmes to pay for it. When he turned, Gill Templer wasn’t at the table any more. She had left the beaker of tea untouched.
‘Who was she?’ Holmes asked, tucking change back into his pocket.
‘Someone I used to know.’
‘Well, that narrows things down.’
Rebus picked a new table for them to sit at.
DI Alister Flower looked like he was on his way to a fashion shoot for one of the stores on Princes Street.
‘Run out of dummies, have they?’ Rebus asked, entering Farmer Watson’s office.
Flower was wearing a light blue suit with blue shirt and a black and white tie with a zig-zag motif. He’d set things off with polished brown loafers and what looked like white tennis socks. Rebus sat down next to him and realised his own shoes could do with a polish. There was a speck of grease from the bacon roll on his shirt.
‘I’ve called this meeting,’ the Farmer was saying, ‘to put your minds at rest.’
‘Inspector Flower’s mind’s always at rest, sir,’ Rebus said.
Flower attempted an unselfconscious laugh, and Rebus realised how desperate the man was.
‘See, John,’ said the Farmer, ‘you always have to make a joke of things.’
‘Leave them laughing, sir.’ But the Farmer wasn’t laughing, and Rebus knew what that silence meant — as long as Rebus maintained ‘an attitude’, he’d find promotion impossible.
Which left Alister Flower.
‘Aly,’ the Farmer began. Flower sat to attention; Rebus had never seen the trick before. ‘Aly, can I get you a refill?’
; Flower looked at his cup, then gulped the contents down. ‘Please, sir.’
The Farmer got up from his desk, took Flower’s cup, and walked to the coffee machine. He had his back to both men when he spoke.
‘The temporary replacement for Frank Lauderdale will start immediately.’
It hit Rebus then. It was like he’d assumed a new, much greater mass.
‘Her name,’ the Farmer went on, ‘is Gill Templer.’
Flower made straight for the toilets, where he could conduct a swearing match with the mirror. Rebus walked thoughtfully back to the CID room. Gill was already there, reading a pathology report.
‘Congratulations,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’ She kept on reading. He didn’t budge till she stopped and looked up at him. ‘John?’ she said quietly.
‘Yes, boss?’
‘My office.’
Lauderdale’s name was still on the door; they wouldn’t bother with a new plaque, not yet. But Rebus noticed she’d already changed a few things.
‘Don’t bother sitting,’ she said. Rebus brought out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Come on, you know the rules: no smoking.’
He put the cigarette in his mouth. ‘I’ll just suck on it then,’ he said.
She closed the door, then went to Lauderdale’s desk, resting against it, folding her arms.
‘John, there’s a lot of history here.’ Rebus looked around the office. ‘You know what I mean. I hear you and Dr Aitken have split up.’
Rebus took the cigarette out of his mouth. ‘So?’
‘So you’re on the rebound, and I don’t want you thinking I could be your springboard. Don’t go thinking you can jump me a few times before you dive back in the pool.’
Rebus smiled. ‘Did I catch you rehearsing in the canteen?’
‘All I mean is, let’s leave the past well alone, let’s keep things professional.’
‘Fine.’ He put the cigarette back in his mouth.
She went behind the desk and sat down. ‘So, what can you tell me about these two imbeciles who shut the Forth Bridge?’
‘Hoaxers, maybe with debts or a habit to finance. Desperadoes. No sign that they ever knew the girl. Howdenhall checked the car; there are none of her prints inside.’