Let It Bleed ir-7

by Ian Rankin

  Kennedy gasped when he saw her.

  ‘I said I’d bring her,’ Rebus told him. ‘Now get in.’

  The Lord Provost’s face was like chiselled stone as they drove towards the Forth Bridges, the same route Rebus had taken that night with Lauderdale. He told himself he’d chosen the meeting place because it was nearby, open and private. But he thought maybe he had a deeper motive.

  They came off the A90 and went three-quarters round the roundabout, then headed towards the Moat House Hotel, whose huge, desolate car park overlooked the Forth. At this time of day, this time of year, the car park was deserted save for a Ford Capri which looked as if it had been abandoned after a joyride. Rebus stopped the car and turned off the ignition.

  ‘This is where we get out,’ he told Paul Duggan.

  Duggan squeezed Kirstie’s hand. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said coolly, watching her father in the rearview mirror, just as he was watching her.

  So Rebus and Duggan got out.

  Rebus walked across the tarmac and stood at the furthest edge. You got a great view of both bridges, and of the Fife coast beyond. You also took a beating from the wind, which blew from all directions. Rebus rode with it, swaying a little from the ankles. With his head tucked into his overcoat, he managed to light a cigarette at the sixth attempt. The smell of butane caused momentary nausea.

  Paul Duggan was a little way off, resting one arm on a dull metal pay-view telescope. Rebus left him alone and just stared at the scenery. The clouds crawled past, looking as if they’d been hurt in too many bar room brawls. Beneath them, Fife was a slab of grey-green pavement.

  Paul Duggan had finally arrived beside him. ‘Thinking about Willie and Dixie?’ he suggested. Rebus glanced at him but said nothing.

  ‘I’m not just a pretty face, Inspector.’

  ‘I was thinking that they got me into this. Their suicide. They got me thinking about things … asking myself questions. When McAnally killed himself, I was interested enough to want to know why.’ He smiled. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about.’

  Duggan just shrugged. ‘I’m listening though.’ There was silence between them for a while. Duggan scuffed his toes against the kerb. ‘See this trouble I’m in, with the police and council and that …?’

  ‘You think I can help?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It was strange that Kirstie should have run away from one smothering household only to end up in another, but Rebus thought he knew the reason why. After the deaths of Willie and Dixie, she’d disintegrated. To her, they had represented ‘real life’, a life well away from her father and his political conspiracies. Willie and Dixie had been the other side of the coin, a side she’d come to like, maybe even admire. And she’d killed them, after which she’d spiralled downwards until she realised she needed shelter and comfort, or she too might die. Paul Duggan had been there for her, and so had his parents.

  ‘You know,’ Rebus said, thinking aloud, ‘I think I know why she scrawled “Dalgety” on that document. If her father had paid the ransom — maybe even if he hadn’t — she was planning to send the LABarum plan back to him. It was a warning, a message that she knew something, and that he should leave her alone if he didn’t want her to reveal it to the world.’

  ‘Never mind Kirstie for the moment, what about me?’

  ‘Everybody’s got to pay, Paul,’ Rebus said, not looking at him. ‘That’s the way it works.’

  ‘Aye, right,’ Duggan said dismissively. ‘And if I was some rich bastard that had been to Fettes, I’d have to pay too, is that right? I’d be treated the same as an Oxgangs drop-out? Come on, Inspector, Kirstie’s told me the way it works, the whole system.’

  He turned and shuffled away.

  He had a point, one Rebus would happily concede, only he had other things to think about right now. The wind had finished his cigarette in double-quick time, so he lit another. Duggan was over at the abandoned car, peering in. He tried a door, opened it, and got in. Shelter accomplished. Some people said the weather made the Scots: long drear periods punctuated by short bursts of enlightenment and cheer. There was almost certainly something to the theory. It was hard to believe this winter would end, yet he knew that it would: knew, but almost didn’t believe. A matter of faith, as the old priest would say, or maybe the reverse of faith. Rebus hadn’t been to church in a while, and missed his conversations with Father Leary. But he didn’t miss the church, or even the Church. Leary would have no problem with suicide, in either concept or practice: it was a great sin, full stop. Assisted suicide, too, was a sin, every bit as heinous.

  But when Rebus’s mother had been ill that last time, she’d begged his father for release. And one day, young John had walked in and had seen his father on the edge of her bed. She was asleep, her chest making awful, liquid sounds, and his father sat there with a pillow in his hands … looking at that pillow, then up at his son, asking to be told what to do.

  Rebus knew if he hadn’t walked in, his father might have done it, might have put her out of her misery.

  Instead of which, she lingered for weeks.

  He turned away from the Forth and found his vision blurred. He angled his head upwards, swallowing back the tears, and walked over to the abandoned car. Inside, Paul Duggan was crying.

  ‘They were my friends, too,’ he bawled. ‘And her stupid plan killed them! And yet I can’t hate her for it … can’t even get angry with her.’

  Rebus put a hand on Duggan’s shoulder.

  ‘Nobody killed them,’ he said quietly. ‘They chose for themselves.’

  The two of them sat there for a while, out of the wind, in shelter that wasn’t theirs.

  Afterwards, Rebus drove them back into town. The teenagers in the back were both pink-eyed from crying; the two men in the front were not. He didn’t feel proud of the fact. He drove past the turn-off to Kennedy’s estate, and the Lord Provost still said nothing. Eventually, Rebus pulled the car on to the kerb outside Duggan’s Abbeyhill home.

  ‘Where are we?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘Kirstie’s staying with some nice people,’ Rebus explained.

  The Lord Provost turned to his daughter. ‘You’re not coming home?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, as if each word was costing her something.

  ‘You said you’d bring her back.’

  ‘I didn’t say she’d stay,’ Rebus said. ‘Kirstie’s got to decide if and when.’

  She was already getting out of the car, as was Duggan. On the pavement, she doubled over and dry-heaved, spitting up foamy saliva.

  ‘Something’s wrong with her,’ Kennedy said. He made to open his door, but Rebus pulled the car abruptly off the kerb and into traffic.

  ‘You know what’s wrong with her,’ he said. ‘Now she’s coming off, and I think she’ll be all right.’

  ‘You infer,’ Kennedy said coldly, ‘that she wouldn’t be “all right” at home.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Rebus said, and he left it at that.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘One good thing about Edinburgh, Lord Provost — there’s always a quiet spot nearby. You and me are going to have a talk. At least, you’ll be talking, I’ll be listening.’

  He directed them around the base of Salisbury Crags and up to a car park near the summit of Arthur’s Seat. There were a few cars already there, parents and children out braving the gale. They would probably call it ‘blowing away the cobwebs’.

  But Rebus and the Lord Provost stayed in the car, and the Lord Provost did the talking — that had been their bargain, after all. And afterwards, with the silence between them like an extra seat, Rebus drove the Lord Provost home.

  There was a man at the top of the hill. He was mending a wall.

  Rebus followed the line of the dry-stane dyke, climbing slowly. He was between Edinburgh and Carlops, in the foothills of the Pentland range. There was no escape from the wind and the cold up here, b
ut Rebus was sweating as he neared the top. The man saw him coming, but didn’t stop working. He had three piles of stones close to him, varying in sizes and shapes. He would pick one up, feel it, study it, then either put it back in the pile or else add it to the wall. And with a fresh stone placed in the wall, a new challenge presented itself, and he had to study his mounds of stones all over again. Rebus stopped to catch his breath, and watched the man. It was the most painstaking work imaginable, and at the end of it the wall would be held together by nothing more than the artful arrangement of its constituent parts.

  ‘It must be a dying craft,’ Rebus said, having gained the summit.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ The man seemed amused.

  Rebus shrugged. ‘Electric fences, barbed wire; not many farmers depend on dry-stane dykes.’ He paused. ‘Or dry-stane dykers, come to that.’

  The man turned to look at him. He was ruddy-cheeked with a thick red beard and fair hair turning grey at the temples. He wore a baggy Aran sweater and green combat jacket, cord trousers and black boots. He wasn’t wearing gloves, and kept blowing on his hands.

  ‘I need to keep them bare,’ he explained. ‘I feel the stones better that way.’

  ‘Is your name Dalgety?’

  ‘Aidan Dalgety, at your service.’

  ‘Mr Dalgety, I’m Detective Inspector Rebus.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘You don’t sound surprised.’

  ‘In a job like this, you don’t get many visitors. That’s one of the things I like about it. But since I started this wall, it’s been like a main thoroughfare rather than a deserted hillside.’

  ‘I know Councillor Gillespie visited you.’

  ‘Several times.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And that’s why you’re not surprised to see a detective?’

  Dalgety smiled to himself and judged another stone, turning it in his hand, weighing it in his palm, feeling for its centre of gravity. He placed it on the wall, then thought better of it and moved it to another spot. The process took a couple of minutes.

  Rebus looked back the way he’d come, following the wall down to the by-road where he’d parked his car. ‘Tell me, how many stones go into a wall like this?’

  ‘Tens of thousands,’ Dalgety said. ‘You could spend years counting them. Men took years building them.’

  ‘It’s a far cry from computers.’

  ‘Do you think so? Maybe it is. But then again, maybe there’s some connection.’

  ‘I understand you were Robbie Mathieson’s partner, back in the early days of PanoTech.’

  ‘It wasn’t called PanoTech in my day. The name belongs to Robbie.’

  ‘But the early designs … the early work was yours?’

  ‘Maybe it was.’ Dalgety tossed a stone from one pile to another.

  ‘That’s what I hear. He ran the company, but you designed the circuits. Your ideas made the company work.’ Dalgety didn’t say anything. ‘And then he bought you out.’

  ‘And then he bought me out,’ Dalgety echoed.

  ‘Is that the way it happened?’

  ‘It happened just the way I told it to the councillor. I had a … I’d been working too hard for too long. I had a breakdown. And when I came out of it, the company wasn’t mine any longer. Robbie had kissed me goodbye. And all the designs were his, too. The whole company was his. Dalmat, we were called — Dalgety and Mathieson. That was the first thing he changed.’ Dalgety was weighing another stone.

  ‘How did he find the money to buy you out? I take it you were bought out?’

  ‘Oh yes, it was all above board. He had some money invested somewhere: it paid a handsome profit and he used it to buy my share.’ He paused. ‘That’s what the lawyers told me afterwards. I didn’t remember any of it — discussions, signing the papers, none of it.’

  ‘You must have been bitter.’

  Dalgety laughted. ‘I had another breakdown. They put me in a private nursing home. That took care of a lot of the pay-off money. When I came out, I didn’t want anything to do with the industry, or any industry like it. End of story.’

  ‘PanoTech’s grown since.’

  ‘Robbie Mathieson is good at what he does. Do you know about him?’ Rebus shook his head. ‘His family moved to the States when Robbie was eighteen. He joined one of the big boys, IBM or Hewlett Packard, someone like that. The company had operations in Europe, and Robbie was posted here. He liked Scotland. I was working on my own at the time, designing stuff, messing about with ideas, most of them impractical. We met, got to like one another, and he told me he was resigning and starting up his own computer business right here. He persuaded me along with him. We had a couple of good years …’ Dalgety seemed to have forgotten about the stone he was holding. The wind was hurting Rebus’s ears, but he didn’t let it show.

  ‘I’m not telling you the whole truth,’ Aidan Dalgety said at last. ‘I was an alcoholic; or, at least, I was on the verge of becoming one. I think that’s why Robbie wanted rid of me. Seemed to me afterwards that he must have been planning it for a while. I signed away the rights to a couple of components which went on to make PanoTech a lot of money.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But that was then and this is now.’

  ‘This money Mathieson used to buy you out, where did it come from again?’

  ‘There was a man called Derwood Charters. He got to know Robbie early on. I think he wanted to become company secretary, something like that. He had a lot of money-making schemes. Or should I say scams. Robbie told me about a couple of them. Charters would set up paper companies and then screw grants from all over the place — local authority, SDA, European Community. He had a genius for that sort of thing. I think he must have wangled development money for PanoTech somewhere down the line — the company grew so fast so quickly.’

  ‘And you’ve never said anything about any of this?’

  ‘Why should I? Good luck to them.’

  ‘But Mathieson practically robbed you!’

  ‘And now he keeps a lot of people in employment. I’m not such a high price to pay for an outcome like that.’

  Rebus sat down on the cold earth, his back against the wall, and ran his hands over his head.

  ‘You know,’ Dalgety said. ‘I still take an interest in the industry. I don’t mean to, but I do. Thirty-five per cent of all the PCs manufactured in Europe are manufactured here, twenty-four per cent of all semi-conductors. Two million computers a year come out of IBM’s Greenock plant — that includes their world supply of screens and every IBM computer sold in Europe.’ He was laughing. ‘Fifty thousand people in the industry, and it’s growing. The Japanese come here because productivity’s so high — can you believe that?’ He stopped laughing abruptly. ‘But the root system’s shallow, Inspector. We’re big in hardware, but we need software, too, and we need to start sourcing — we source only fifteen per cent of all our components. We’re an assembly line. Maybe PanoTech can change that.’ He shrugged. ‘Good luck to them.’

  ‘So why did you talk to Gillespie?’

  ‘Maybe to get it off my chest.’ He examined the stone in his hand a final time, then threw it far into the distance. ‘Maybe because nothing I say can make any difference. No investigation of PanoTech is going to get very far.’

  ‘The councillor found that out.’ Aidan Dalgety looked at him, but said nothing. ‘You’re not scared?’

  ‘No,’ Dalgety used both hands to lift a larger rock on to the wall. ‘I’m not scared at all. This wall will be here after I’m gone, whether I live to be a hundred or drop dead tomorrow.’ He patted the wall with his hands. ‘I know what lasts.’

  Rebus got to his feet. ‘Well, thanks for talking to me.’

  ‘No problem. I get bored sometimes just talking to the wall.’ He was laughing again as Rebus headed downhill. ‘You know that old saying about walls having ears …?’

  It was a day for open spaces. In the late afternoon, Rebus walked in the Bot
anic Gardens with Sir lain Hunter.

  ‘I like this place,’ Sir lain said, striding gamely with his rolled umbrella across the grass towards Inverleith House. ‘Of course, it’s lost something since they moved the Gallery of Modern Art. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’re stalling.’

  Sir lain smiled. ‘I’ve conducted meetings here before, Inspector. It’s my open-air office. I choose the Botanies for some meetings precisely because they are so open. No chance of being overheard.’ He stopped, looking around. The city centre was a panorama before them. ‘Marvellous view,’ he said.

  ‘Nobody’s listening in on us, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘Well, the thought had crossed my mind. Nowhere is safe in this age of electronic eavesdropping.’

  ‘I don’t need to bug conversations,’ Rebus said. ‘I’ve got Gillespie’s files.’

  ‘Poor Councillor Gillespie.’

  ‘Yes, poor Councillor Gillespie, lured to an alley and then stabbed in the guts by an ex-con hired by Derwood Charters, just as Charters paid McAnally to put a scare into Gillespie. I don’t suppose he knew how far Wee Shug would go, what he’d do … He went too far.’

  ‘And brought you scurrying to the scene, Inspector. Yes, perhaps that was a mistake. Well, I’m going to trust you. I’m going to assume you’re not recording this little tete-a-tete.’ Sir lain tucked his cashmere scarf a little tighter around his neck. ‘Now, why did you want to meet?’

  ‘Because you’re at the centre of it all.’

  ‘Can you prove that?’

  ‘Like I say, I’ve got — ’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’ve got Gillespie’s files, but what do they prove?’

  ‘You should know. The Lord Provost told you everything Gillespie told him. They prove that Charters’ various companies existed only as shells for the most part. The front company was legit, but the others … well, if anyone decided to check, Charters would rent short-term office space, pay someone to take in mail addressed to Mensung House … that sort of thing. And I’m assuming he had someone at the Scottish Office tipping him off about any forthcoming investigations — he couldn’t have run his scams so well for so long without help. How am I doing so far?’