A Question of Blood (2003) (8 page)

“And he’d have put you on the deck every time. This bastard had a history of thumping people. You saw his record . . .”

“That didn’t give you the right —”

“We’re not talking about rights here.” Rebus leapt from the chair and made for the dining table, helping himself to a fresh bottle. “You want one?”

“Not if I’m driving.”

“Your choice.”

“That’s right, John.
My
choice, not yours.”

“I didn’t top him, Siobhan. All I did was . . .” Rebus swallowed back the words.

“What?” She’d turned her body on the sofa to face him. “What?” she repeated.

“I went back to his house.” She just stared, mouth open a fraction. “He invited me back.”

“He
invited
you?”

Rebus nodded. The bottle opener trembled in his hand. He delegated the job to Siobhan, who returned the opened bottle to him. “Bastard liked playing games, Siobhan. Said we should go back and have a drink, bury the hatchet.”

“Bury the hatchet?”

“His exact words.”

“And that’s what you did?”

“He wanted to talk . . . not about you, about anything but. Time he’d served, cell stories, how he grew up. Usual sob story, dad who thumped him, mum who didn’t care . . .”

“And you sat there and listened?”

“I sat there thinking how badly I wanted to smack him.”

“But you didn’t?”

Rebus shook his head. “He was pretty dopey by the time I left.”

“Not in the kitchen, though?”

“In the living room . . .”

“Did you see the kitchen?”

Rebus shook his head again.

“Have you told Templer this?”

He made to rub his forehead, then remembered that it would hurt like blazes. “Just go home, Siobhan.”

“I had to pull the two of you apart. Next thing you’re back at his house sharing a drink and a chat? You expect me to believe that?”

“I’m not asking you to believe anything. Just go home.”

She stood up. “I can —”

“I know, you can look after yourself.” Rebus sounded tired all of a sudden.

“I was going to say, I can wash the dishes, if you like.”

“That’s okay, I’ll do them tomorrow. Let’s just get some sleep, eh?” He walked across to the room’s large bay window, stared down at the quiet street.

“What time do you want to be picked up?”

“Eight.”

“Eight it is.” She paused. “Someone like Fairstone, he must have had enemies.”

“Almost certainly.”

“Maybe someone saw you with him, waited till you’d left . . .”

“See you tomorrow, Siobhan.”

“He was a bastard, John. I keep expecting to hear you say that.” She deepened her voice. “‘World’s better off without him.’”

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“You would have, though, not so long ago.” She made towards the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He waited, expecting to hear the lock click shut. Instead, he could hear a background gurgling of water. He drank from the bottle of lager, staring from the window. She did not emerge onto the street. When the living-room door opened, he could hear the bath filling.

“You going to scrub my back, too?”

“Beyond the call of duty.” She looked at him. “But a change of clothes wouldn’t be a bad idea. I can help you sort some out.”

He shook his head. “Really, I can manage.”

“I’ll hang around till you’re done in the bath . . . just to make sure you can get out again.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll wait anyway.” She’d walked towards him, plucked the lager from his loose grasp. Lifted it to her mouth.

“Better keep the water tepid,” he warned her.

She nodded, swallowed. “There’s just one thing I’m curious about.”

“What?”

“What do you do when you need the toilet?”

He narrowed his eyes. “I do what a man’s got to do.”

“Something tells me that’s as much as I need to know.” She handed back the bottle. “I’ll check the water’s not too hot this time round . . .”

Afterwards, wrapped in a toweling robe, he watched as she emerged at street level, looking up and down the sidewalk before making for her car. Looking up and down the sidewalk: checking her back, even though the bogeyman had gone.

Rebus knew there were more of them out there. Plenty of men like Martin Fairstone. Teased at school, becoming the “runt,” tagging along with gangs who would make jokes about him. But growing stronger for it, graduating to violence and petty theft, the only life he would ever know. He had told his story, and Rebus had listened.

“Reckon I need to see a head doctor, get myself checked out, like? See, what’s on the inside of your head isn’t always the same as what you do on the outside. Does that sound like pish? Maybe it’s because I’m pished. There’s more whiskey when you need a top-up. Just say the word, I’m not used to doing the whole host bit, know what I’m saying? Just chantering away here, don’t pay any heed . . .”

And more . . . so much more, with Rebus listening, taking small sips of whiskey, knowing he was feeling it. Four pubs he’d been to before tracking Fairstone down. And when the monologue had finally dried up, Rebus had leaned forwards. They were seated in squishy armchairs, coffee table between them with a cardboard box beneath in place of the missing leg. Two glasses, a bottle, and an overflowing ashtray, and Rebus leaning forwards now to say his first words in nearly half an hour.

“Marty, let’s put all this shit with DS Clarke on the back burner, eh? Fact is, I couldn’t give a monkey’s. But there is a question I’ve been meaning to ask . . .”

“What’s that?” Fairstone, heavy-lidded in his chair, cigarette held between thumb and forefinger.

“I heard a story that you know Peacock Johnson. Anything you can tell me about him?”

Rebus at the window, thinking about how many painkillers were left in the bottle. Thinking about nipping out for a proper drink. Turning from the window and making for his bedroom. Opening the top drawer and pulling out ties and socks, finally finding what he’d been looking for.

Winter gloves. Black leather, nylon-lined. Never worn, until now.

DAY TWO

Wednesday

4

T
here were times when Rebus could swear he smelled his wife’s perfume on the cold pillow. Impossible: two decades of separation, not even a pillow she’d slept on or pressed her head against. Other perfumes, too—other women. He knew they were an illusion, knew he wasn’t really smelling them. Rather, he was smelling their absence.

“Penny for them,” Siobhan said, switching lanes in a halfhearted attempt to speed their progress through the morning rush hour.

“I was thinking about pillows,” Rebus stated. She’d brought coffee for both of them. He was cradling his.

“Nice gloves, by the way,” she said now, by no means for the first time. “Just the thing this time of year.”

“I can get another driver, you know.”

“But would they provide breakfast?” She floored the accelerator as the amber traffic light ahead turned red. Rebus worked hard to keep his coffee from spilling.

“What’s the music?” he asked, looking at the in-car CD player.

“Fatboy Slim. Thought it might wake you up.”

“Why’s he telling Jimmy Boyle not to leave the States?”

Siobhan smiled. “You might just be mis-hearing that particular lyric. I can put on something more laid-back . . . what about Tempus?”

“Fugit, why not?” Rebus said.

Lee Herdman had lived in a one-bedroom flat above a bar on South Queensferry’s High Street. The entrance was down a narrow, sunless vennel with an arched stone roof. A police constable stood guard by the main door, checking the names of visitors against a list of residents fixed to his clipboard. It was Brendan Innes.

“What sort of shifts are they making you work?” Rebus asked.

Innes checked his watch. “Another hour, I’ll be out of here.”

“Anything happening?”

“People heading to work.”

“How many flats apart from Herdman’s?”

“Just the two. Schoolteacher and his girlfriend in one, car mechanic in the other.”

“Schoolteacher?” Siobhan hinted.

Innes shook his head. “Nothing to do with Port Edgar. He teaches the local primary. Girlfriend works in a shop.”

Rebus knew that the neighbors would have been interviewed. The notes would be somewhere.

“You spoken to them at all?” he asked.

“Just as they come and go.”

“What do they say?”

Innes shrugged. “The usual: he was quiet enough, seemed a nice enough guy . . .”

“Quiet
enough,
rather than just quiet?”

Innes nodded. “Seems Mr. Herdman hosted a few late-nighters for his friends.”

“Enough to rile the neighbors?”

Innes shrugged again. Rebus turned to Siobhan. “We’ve got a list of his acquaintances?”

She nodded. “Probably not comprehensive as yet . . .”

“You’ll want this,” Innes was saying. He was holding up a Yale key. Siobhan took it from him.

“How messy is it up there?” Rebus asked.

“The search team knew he wasn’t coming back,” Innes answered with a smile, lowering his head as he started adding their names to his list.

The downstairs hall was cramped. No sign of any recent mail. They climbed two flights of stone steps. There were a couple of doors on the first landing, only one on the second. Nothing to identify its occupier—no name or number. Siobhan turned the key and they walked in.

“Plenty of locks,” Rebus commented. Including two bolts on the interior side. “Herdman liked his security.”

Hard to say how messy the place had been before Hogan’s team made their search. Rebus picked his way across a floor strewn with clothes and newspapers, books and bric-a-brac. They were in the eaves of the building, and the rooms seemed claustrophobic. Rebus’s head was barely two feet shy of the ceiling. The windows were small and unwashed. Just the one bedroom: double bed, wardrobe, and chest of drawers. Portable black-and-white TV on the uncarpeted floor, empty half-bottle of Bell’s next to it. Greasy yellow linoleum on the floor of the kitchen, foldaway table giving just enough room to turn. Narrow bathroom, smelling of mildew. Two hall closets, which looked to have been emptied and hastily rearranged by Hogan’s men. Leaving only the living room. Rebus went back in.

“Homey, wouldn’t you say?” Siobhan commented.

“In real estate agent parlance, yes.” Rebus picked up a couple of CDs: Linkin Park and Sepultura. “The man liked his metal,” he said, tossing them down again.

“Liked the SAS, too,” Siobhan added, holding up some books for Rebus to see. They were histories of the regiment, books about conflicts in which it had taken part, stories of survival by ex-members. She nodded to a nearby desk, and Rebus saw what she was pointing out: a scrapbook of news cuttings. These were all about soldiering, too. Whole articles discussing an apparent trend: American military heroes who were murdering their wives. Cuttings about suicides and disappearances. There was even one headed
SPACE RUNS OUT IN SAS CEMETERY,
which Rebus paid most attention to. He knew men who’d been buried in the plots set aside in St. Martin’s churchyard, not far from the regiment’s original HQ. Now a new cemetery site was being proposed near the current HQ at Credenhill. In the same piece, the deaths of two SAS soldiers were mentioned. They’d died on a “training exercise in Oman,” which could mean anything from a cock-up to assassination during covert operations.

Siobhan was peering into a supermarket shopping bag. Rebus heard the chink of empty bottles.

“He was a good host,” she said.

“Wine or spirits?”

“Tequila and red wine.”

“Judging from the empty bottle in the bedroom, Herdman was a whiskey man.”

“Like I say, a good host.” Siobhan took a sheet of paper from her pocket and unfolded it. “According to this, forensics took away the remains of a number of spliffs, plus some traces of what looked like cocaine. Took his computer, too. They also removed a number of photographs from the inside of the wardrobe.”

“What sort of photos?”

“Guns. Bit of a fetish, if you ask me. I mean . . . putting them on the wardrobe door.”

“Which makes of gun?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“What type of gun did he use again?”

She checked this. “Brocock. It’s an air gun. The ME 38 Magnum, to be precise.”

“So it’s like a revolver?”

Siobhan nodded. “You can buy one across the counter for just over a hundred quid. Powered by gas cylinder.”

“But Herdman’s had been tweaked?”

“Steel sleeving inside the chamber. Means you can use live ammo, .22. Alternative is to drill the gun out to take .38 calibers.”

“He used .22?” She nodded again. “So someone did the work for him?”

“He might’ve done it himself. Daresay he’d have had the know-how.”

“Do we know how he came by the gun in the first place?”

“As an ex-soldier, I’m guessing he had contacts.”

“Could be.” Rebus was thinking back to the 1960s and ’70s, arms and explosives walking off army bases the length and breadth of the land, mostly at the behest of both sides of the Northern Ireland Troubles . . . Plenty of soldiers had a “souvenir” tucked away somewhere; some knew places where guns could be bought and sold, no questions asked . . .

“And by the way,” Siobhan was saying, “it’s gun
s,
plural.”

“He was carrying more than one?”

She shook her head. “But one was found during a search of his boathouse.” She referred to her notes again. “Mac-10.”

“That’s a serious gun.”

“You know it?”

“Ingram Mac-10 . . . it’s American. Thousand-round-a-minute job. Not something you’d be able to walk into a shop and buy.”

“Lab seems to think it had been deactivated at one time, meaning that’s exactly what you could do.”

“He tweaked it, too?”

“Or bought it tweaked.”

“Thank Christ he didn’t take that one to the school. It would have been carnage.”

The room went quiet as they considered this. They went back to their search.

“This is interesting,” she said, waving one of the books at him. “Story of a soldier who cracked up, tried to kill his girlfriend.” She studied the jacket. “Jumped from a plane and killed himself . . . True-life, by the look of it.” Something fell from between two pages. A snapshot. Siobhan picked it up, turned it around for Rebus to see. “Tell me it’s not her again.”

But it was. It was Teri Cotter, taken fairly recently. She was outdoors, other bodies edging into the picture. A street scene, maybe in Edinburgh. She looked to be seated on a sidewalk, wearing much the same clothes as when she’d helped Rebus smoke his cigarette. She was sticking her studded tongue out towards the photographer.

“She looks cheery,” Siobhan commented.

Rebus was studying the photo. He turned it over, but the back was blank. “She said she knew the boys who died. Never thought to ask if she knew their killer.”

“And Kate Renshaw’s theory that Herdman might connect to the Cotters?”

Rebus shrugged. “Might be worth looking at Herdman’s bank account for signs of blood money.” He heard a door close downstairs. “Sounds like one of the neighbors is home. Shall we?”

Siobhan nodded and they left the flat, making sure it was locked behind them. On the landing below, Rebus put an ear first to one door and then to the other, finally nodding at the second. Siobhan banged on it with her fist. By the time the door opened, she had her ID out.

Two surnames on the door: the teacher and his girlfriend. It was the girlfriend who answered. She was short and blond, and would have been pretty were it not for a sideways jutting of her jaw, which gave her what Siobhan guessed was a semipermanent scowl.

“I’m DS Clarke, this is DI Rebus,” Siobhan said. “Mind if we ask you a couple of questions?”

The young woman looked from one to the other. “We already told the other lot everything we know.”

“We appreciate that, miss,” Rebus said. He saw her eyes drop to stare at his gloves. “But you do live here, right?”

“Aye.”

“We understand that you got on fine with Mr. Herdman, even though he could be a bit noisy sometimes.”

“Just when he had a party, like. It was never a problem—we raise the roof ourselves now and then.”

“You share his taste for heavy metal?”

She wrinkled her nose. “More of a Robbie woman myself.”

“She means Robbie Williams,” Siobhan informed Rebus.

“I’d have worked it out eventually,” Rebus sniffed.

“Good news was, he only ever played that stuff when he was partying.”

“Did you ever get an invite?”

She shook her head.

“Show Miss . . .” Rebus was talking to Siobhan but broke off and smiled at the neighbor. “Sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Hazel Sinclair.”

He added a nod to his smile. “DS Clarke, can you show Miss Sinclair . . .”

But Siobhan already had the photograph out. She handed it to Hazel Sinclair.

“It’s Miss Teri,” the young woman stated.

“You’ve seen her around, then?”

“Of course. Looks like she’s just stepped out of
The Addams Family.
I often see her down the High Street.”

“But have you seen her here?”

“Here?” Sinclair thought about it, the effort further distorting her jawline. Then she shook her head. “I always thought he was gay anyway.”

“He had kids,” Siobhan said, taking back the photo.

“Doesn’t mean much, does it? Lot of gays are married. And he was in the army, probably a ton of gays in there.”

Siobhan tried to suppress a smile. Rebus shifted his feet.

“Besides,” Hazel Sinclair was saying, “it was always guys you saw coming up and down the stairs.” She paused for effect. “Young guys.”

“Any of them look as good as Robbie?”

Sinclair shook her head dramatically. “I’d eat breakfast off his backside any day of the week.”

“We’ll try to keep that out of our report,” Rebus said, dignity intact as both women cracked up with laughter.

In the car on the way to Port Edgar marina, Rebus looked at some photos of Lee Herdman. Mostly they were copied from newspapers. Herdman seemed tall and wiry, with a mop of curly graying hair. Wrinkles around his eyes, a face lined with the years. Tanned, too, or more likely, weatherbeaten. Glancing out, Rebus saw that the clouds had gathered overhead, covering the sky like a grubby sheet. The photos had all been taken outdoors: Herdman working on his boat, or heading out into the estuary. In one, he gave a wave to whoever had been left ashore. There was a broad smile on his face, as though this was as good as life could get. Rebus had never seen the point of sailing. He supposed the boats looked pretty enough from a distance, when watched from one of the pubs on the waterfront.

“Have you ever sailed?” he asked Siobhan.

“I’ve been on a few ferries.”

“I meant on a yacht. You know, hoisting the spinnaker and all that.”

She looked at him. “Is that what you do with a spinnaker?”

“Buggered if I know.” Rebus looked up. They were passing beneath the Forth Road Bridge, the marina down a narrow road just past the huge concrete stanchions that seemed to lift the bridge skywards. This was the sort of thing that impressed Rebus: not nature, but ingenuity. He thought sometimes that all man’s greatest achievements had come from a battle with nature. Nature provided the problems, humans found the solutions.

“This is it,” Siobhan said, turning the car through an open gateway. The marina was made up of a series of buildings—some more ramshackle than others—and two long jetties jutting out into the Firth of Forth. At one of these, a few dozen boats had been moored. They passed the marina office and something called the Bosun’s Locker, and parked next to the cafeteria.

“According to the notes, there’s a sailing club, a sailmaker’s, and somewhere that’ll fix your radar,” Siobhan said, getting out. She started around to the passenger side, but Rebus was able to open his own door.

“See?” he said. “I’m not quite at the knacker’s yard yet.” But through the material of the gloves, his fingers stung. He straightened and looked around. The bridge was high overhead, the rush of cars quieter than he’d expected and almost drowned out by the clanging of whatever it was on boats that made that clanging sound. Maybe it was the spinnakers . . .