Authors: Ian Rankin
R
ebus sat by the bedside of Morris Gerald Cafferty.
He’d shown his warrant card and asked the day shift if Cafferty had had any other visitors. The nurse had shaken her head.
No, because—despite his goading of Rebus—Cafferty had no friends. His wife was dead, his son murdered years back. His trusted lieutenant of long standing had “disappeared” after a falling-out. There was just the one bodyguard at the house, and right now
his
main concern was probably where his next paycheck was coming from. Doubtless there would be accountants and lawyers—Stone would have the details—but these weren’t the sort of men to pay respects. Cafferty was still in intensive care, but Rebus had heard two staff members discussing a looming bed crisis. Maybe they would move him back to an open ward. Or, if his finances could be unlocked, a private room. As of now, he seemed content with the tubes, machines, and flickering screens. There were wires attached to his skull, measuring brain activity. Fluids were being drip-fed into one arm. Cafferty seemed to be wearing some sort of gown with a front but, Rebus guessed, no back. His arms were bare, and the hairs covering them were like silver wires. Rebus stood up and leaned down over Cafferty’s face, wondering if the machine might suddenly register awareness of his proximity, but there was no change in the readout. He traced the route from Cafferty’s body to the machines and from there to the wall sockets. Cafferty wasn’t dying; the doctor had confided that much. Another reason to move him from intensive care. How intensively did you have to tend a vegetable? Rebus looked at Cafferty’s knuckles and fingernails, the thick wrists, the dry white skin on each elbow. He was a large man, yes, but not particularly muscular. There were lines around the neck, like the circles on a freshly felled tree. The jaw was slack, the mouth open to accommodate a tube. There was a single track down the side of the face where some saliva had dried to a crust. With eyes closed, Cafferty looked harmless enough. What little hair there was on his scalp needed a wash. The charts at the end of the bed had told Rebus nothing. They were just a way of reducing the patient’s life to a series of numbers and graphs. Impossible to tell if a line angling upwards was a good sign or a bad . . .
“Wake up, you old bastard,” Rebus whispered into the gangster’s ear. “Playtime’s over.” Not a flicker. “No point you hiding there inside that thick skull of yours. I’m waiting for you out
here
.”
Nothing apart from a gurgling in the throat, and Cafferty was making that same sound every thirty seconds or so. Rebus slumped back into his chair. When he’d arrived, a nurse had asked if he was the patient’s brother.
“Does it matter?” he’d asked her.
“It’s just that you do look like him,” she’d said, waddling away. He decided that it was a story worth sharing with the patient, but before he could start there was a trembling in his shirt pocket. He took his mobile out, checking to left and right for anyone who might disapprove.
“What’s up, Shiv?” he asked.
“Andropov and his driver were in the audience at the Poetry Library. Todorov made up a poem on the spot, and I think Andropov was its target.”
“Interesting.”
“Have they given you a break?”
It took a moment for Rebus to realize what she meant. “I’m not being grilled. Nothing on the overshoe but blood—same type as Cafferty.”
“So where are you now?”
“Visiting the patient.”
“Christ, John, how’s that going to look?”
“I wasn’t planning on sticking a pillow over his face.”
“But say he snuffs it while you’re there?”
“Not a bad point, DS Clarke.”
“So walk away.”
“Where do you want to meet?”
“I have to get back to Gayfield Square.”
“I thought we were going to pick up the chauffeur?”
“
We
are doing no such thing.”
“Meaning you’re going to run it past Derek Starr?”
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t know this case like we do, Siobhan.”
“John, as of now we’ve got precisely nothing.”
“I disagree. The connections are beginning to come together . . . don’t tell me you can’t sense it?” He’d risen from his chair again, but only to bend over Cafferty’s face. One of the machines gave a loud beep, to which Clarke added a voluble sigh.
“You’re still by his bed,” she stated.
“Thought I saw his eyelids flicker. So where is it we’re going to meet?”
“Let me talk it through with Starr and Macrae.”
“Give it to Stone instead.”
She was silent for a moment. “I must have misheard.”
“SCD has more clout than us. Give him the Todorov-Andropov connection.”
“Why?”
“Because it might help Stone build his case against Cafferty. Andropov’s a businessman . . . businessmen like to cut deals.”
“You know that’s not going to happen.”
“Then why am I wasting my breath?”
“Because you think I need Stone to be my friend. He’s got it in mind that I helped you get to Cafferty. Only way I can show him otherwise is to give him this.”
“Sometimes you’re too clever for your own good.” He paused. “But you should still talk to him. If the consulate starts pleading diplomatic immunity, SCD’s got a stronger hand than us.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning channels to Special Branch and the spooks.”
“Are you going all James Bond on me?”
“There’s only one James Bond, Shiv,” he told her, hoping for a laugh, which didn’t come.
“I’ll mull it over,” she conceded instead, “if you promise to be out of that hospital in the next five minutes.”
“Already on my way,” he lied, ending the call. His mouth was dry, and he didn’t reckon the patient would mind if he borrowed some of the water on the bedside cabinet. There was a clear plastic jug with a tumbler next to it. Rebus drank two glasses, then decided to take a look inside the cabinet itself.
He wasn’t expecting to find Cafferty’s watch, wallet, and keys. But since they were there, he flipped open the wallet and found that it contained five ten-pound notes, a couple of credit cards, and some scraps of paper with phone numbers—none of them meaning anything to Rebus. The watch was a Rolex, naturally, and he weighed it in his hand to confirm that it was the real deal. Then he picked up the keys. There were half a dozen of them. They chinked and clinked as he rolled them between palm and fingers.
House keys.
Chinked them and clinked them and kept staring at Cafferty.
“Any objections?” he asked quietly. And then, after a further moment: “Didn’t think so . . .”
His luck just kept getting better and better: no one had bothered to set the alarm, and Cafferty’s bodyguard was elsewhere. Having entered by the front door, the first thing Rebus did was check the corners of the ceiling for security cameras. There weren’t any, so he padded into the drawing room. The house was Victorian, the ceilings high with ornate cornicing. Cafferty had started collecting art, big splashy paintings that hurt Rebus’s eyes. He wondered if any of them were by Roddy Denholm. The curtains were closed, and he left them that way, turning on the lights instead. TV and hi-fi and three sofas. Nothing on the marble-topped coffee table but a couple of old newspapers and a pair of spectacles—the gangster too vain to wear them anywhere outside the privacy of his home. There was a door to the right of the fireplace, and Rebus opened it. Cafferty’s booze cupboard, big enough to contain a double fridge and assorted wine racks, with bottles of spirits lining a shelf. Resisting temptation, he closed the door again and headed back into the hall. More doors off: a huge kitchen; a conservatory with a pool table; laundry room; bathroom; office; yet another, less formal, living room. He wondered if the gangster really enjoyed rattling around in a place this size.
“Course you do,” he said, answering his own question. The stairs were wide and carpeted. Next floor up: two bedrooms with bathrooms attached; a home cinema, forty-two-inch plasma screen flush with the wall; and what seemed to be a storeroom, filled with boxes and tea chests, most of them empty. There was a woman’s hat on the top of one box, photo albums and shoes beneath. This, Rebus guessed, was all that remained of the late Mrs. Cafferty. There was a dartboard on one wall, with puncture marks around its circumference, evidence that someone needed to improve his throwing. Rebus guessed that the dartboard would have fallen into disuse once the room changed identity.
The last door off the landing led to a narrow, winding stairwell. More rooms at the top of the house: one containing a full-size snooker table covered with a dustsheet, the other a well-stocked library. Rebus recognized the shelves—he’d bought the same ones from Ikea. The books were mostly dusty paperbacks, thrillers for the gentleman and romances for the lady. There were also some children’s books, which had probably belonged to Cafferty’s son. The house felt little used, the floorboards creaking underfoot. He reckoned the gangster seldom took the trouble to climb this final set of stairs.
Heading back down, Rebus returned to Cafferty’s office. It was a good-sized room with a window looking onto the back garden. Again, the curtains were closed, but Rebus risked easing them open so he could take a look at the coach house. Two cars parked in front of it—the Bentley and an Audi—and no sign of the bodyguard. Rebus closed the curtains again and switched on the light. There was an old bureau in the center of the room, covered with paperwork—domestic bills, by the look of it. Rebus sat in the leather chair and started opening drawers. The first thing he came across was a gun, a pistol of some kind with what looked like Russian lettering along the barrel.
“Little present from your pal?” Rebus guessed. There was, however, no ammo in the clip, and no sign of any bullets in the drawer. It had been a long time since Rebus had held a firearm. He tested it for weight and balance, then used his handkerchief to place it back where he’d found it. Financial statements in the next drawer down. Cafferty had sixteen grand in his current account and a further quarter of a million earning him interest on the money market. His portfolio of shares added another hundred thousand to the pot. Rebus saw no sign of any mortgage payments, meaning Cafferty probably owned the house outright. This part of town, it had to be worth a million and a half. Nor would this be the end of the gangster’s wealth; Stone had hinted at various shell companies and offshore holdings. Cafferty owned bars, clubs, the lettings agency, and a snooker hall. He was rumored to hold a stake in a cab company. Rebus suddenly noticed something in the corner: a venerable safe with a tumbler lock. It was the color of verdigris and came from Kentucky. Walking over to it, he was unsurprised to find it locked. The only combination he could think of to try was Cafferty’s birthday. Eighteen, ten, forty-six. Rebus pulled the handle, and the heavy door swung open.
He allowed himself a smile. Couldn’t think why he had memorized that number, but it hadn’t been wasted.
Inside the safe: two boxes of nine-mil ammo, four thick wads of notes, twenties and fifties, some business ledgers, computer disks, a jewelry box containing the late wife’s necklaces and earrings. Rebus lifted out Cafferty’s passport and flicked through it: no visits to Russia. Birth certificate for the man himself, birth and death for the wife and son. The wedding certificate showed that Cafferty had married in 1973 at the registry office in Edinburgh. He replaced each item and studied the disks—no labels, no writing. There wasn’t even a computer in the office . . . point of fact, he hadn’t seen one anywhere in the house. On the bottom shelf of the safe sat a small cardboard box. Rebus lifted it out and opened it. It contained two dozen shiny silver discs. CDs, he thought at first. But holding one up to the light, he saw that it was marked DVD-R, 4.7G. Rebus was no technophile, but he reckoned whatever this was, it would play on the system upstairs. There was no writing on any of the discs, but colored dots had been added to each one—some green, some blue, some red, some yellow.
Rebus closed the safe and spun the dial, then switched off the light and padded back upstairs, the box of discs in his hand. The home cinema boasted shuttered windows and a row of leather recliners, behind which was a further row comprising two double-seater sofas. He crouched down in front of the battery of machines and slotted the DVD home, then switched on the screen and retreated to one of the chairs. It took him three different remotes to get everything—screen, DVD player, and loudspeakers—working. Seated on the edge of the black leather chair, he began to watch what appeared to be surveillance footage . . .
A room. A living room. Untidy, and with bodies sprawled. Two of the bodies disentangled themselves and headed elsewhere, holding hands. There was a sudden cut to a bedroom, the same two figures appearing, peeling off their clothes as they started to kiss. Teenagers. Rebus recognized neither of them; didn’t recognize the setting either—somewhere a lot tattier than Cafferty’s own house.
Okay, so the gangster got his jollies from amateur porn . . . Rebus skipped ahead, but the action stayed with the couple and their coupling. They were filmed from above and from the side. Another skip and the girl was in a bathroom, seated on the pan and then stripping off again to take a shower. She was skinny, almost emaciated, and had bruises on her arms. He skipped again, but there was nothing else on the disc.
Next one—with a blue dot rather than a green. Different yet similar location, different yet all-too-familiar action.
“Showing your pervy side, Cafferty,” Rebus muttered, ejecting the disc. He tried another green dot—back to the characters from the first disc. Pattern emerging, John. . . . Red dot: another flat, some communal dope-smoking, a girl having a bath, a guy pleasuring himself in his bedroom.
Rebus wasn’t looking for any surprises from the yellow dot. Immediately, he was launched into the same setups as previously, but with one important difference—he knew both the flat and the actors.
Nancy Sievewright, Eddie Gentry. The flat on Blair Street. The flat that belonged to MGC Lettings.