Authors: Ian Rankin
“I didn’t even
know
Charles Riordan!”
“Funny,” Rebus said, mock-casually, “your bank’s the main sponsor of an art installation he was doing at the Parliament. I reckon if we ask around, we’ll find that you’d met him at some point . . .”
“I don’t think you meant to kill him,” Clarke added, trying to add some empathy to her voice. “You just wanted that recording destroyed. You knocked him out and looked for the tape, but it was hopeless . . . thousands upon thousands of tapes and CDs in that house of his. So then you set that little fire—not the kind that would consume a building and turn anyone inside into crispy strips. It was just the tapes you wanted—too many for you to cart them away, and not enough time to go through them all. So you stuck some paper into a bottle of cleaner, lit it, and walked away.”
“This is nonsense,” Janney said in a voice cracking with emotion.
“Problem was,” Clarke went on, ignoring him, “all that acoustic baffling proved to be a fire hazard. . . . With Riordan dead, we were looking for a suspect in both killings—and Andropov still seemed to fit the bill. So all your hard work was in vain, Mr. Janney. Charles Riordan died—and died for nothing.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Is that the truth?”
Janney nodded, eyes everywhere but on either detective.
“Okay, then,” Clarke told him. “You’ve nothing to worry about.” She closed the folder and gathered together the photos. Janney could hardly believe it. Clarke was getting to her feet. “That pretty much takes care of it,” she confirmed. “We’ll just head along to processing, and then you’ll be on your way.”
Janney was standing, but with his hands pressing against the tabletop, helping him stay upright. “Processing?” he queried.
“Just a formality, sir,” Rebus assured him. “We need to take your fingerprints.”
Janney had made no attempt to move. “Whatever for?”
Clarke supplied the answer. “There was a print left on the bottle of solvent. It has to belong to whoever started the fire.”
“But it can’t be yours, Stuart, can it?” Rebus asked. “You were out enjoying a drive down our beautiful coastline in the crisp predawn air . . .”
“Fingerprint.” The word slid out of Janney’s mouth like a small, scuttling creature.
“I like to do a bit of motoring myself,” Rebus was saying. “Today’s my retirement—means I can do a lot more of it in the future. Maybe you’ll show me the route you took. . . . Why are you sitting down again, Stuart?”
“Is there anything we can get you, Mr. Janney?” Clarke asked solicitously.
Stuart Janney looked at her and then at Rebus before deciding that the ceiling merited his full attention. When he spoke, his throat was so stretched that neither detective could quite make out the words.
“Mind repeating that?” Clarke asked politely.
“You can get me a lawyer,” Janney duly obliged.
W
henever anyone retires or resigns in the movies,” Siobhan Clarke said, “they always seem to carry a box out of the building.”
“That’s true,” Rebus agreed. He’d been through his desk and found precisely nothing of a personal nature. Turned out he didn’t even have a mug of his own, just drank from whichever one was available at the time. In the end, he pocketed a couple of cheap ballpoint pens and a sachet of decongestant a full year past its sell-by.
“You had the flu last December,” Clarke reminded him.
“Still dragged my sorry carcass into work, though.”
“And sneezed and groaned for a full week,” Phyllida Hawes added, hands on hips.
“Passing the germs to
me,
” Colin Tibbet stated.
“Ah, the fun we’ve had,” Rebus said with an affected sigh. There was no sign of DCI Macrae, though he’d left a note telling Rebus to leave his warrant card on the desk in his office. Derek Starr was absent, too. Gone 6:00, meaning he’d be in a club or wine bar, celebrating the day’s results and trying the usual chat-up lines. Rebus looked around the CID suite. “You really didn’t buy me anything, you miserable shower of bastards?”
“Have you seen the price of gold watches?” Clarke said with a smile. “On the other hand, the back room of the Ox has been reserved for the night, and there’s a hundred quid’s worth of a tab—what we don’t get through tonight is yours for afterwards.”
Rebus considered this. “So that’s what it comes down to after all these years—you want me drinking myself to death?”
“And we’ve booked the Café St. Honoré for nine o’clock—staggering distance from the Ox.”
“And staggering distance back again,” Hawes added.
“Just the four of us?” Rebus asked.
“A few more faces might drop by—Macrae’s promised to look in. Tam Banks and Ray Duff . . . Professor Gates and Dr. Curt . . . Todd and his girlfriend . . .”
“I hardly know them,” Rebus complained.
Clarke folded her arms. “He needed a bit of persuading, so don’t think I’m suddenly going to
un
invite them!”
“My party, but your rules, eh?”
“And Shug Davidson’s coming, too,” Hawes reminded Clarke.
Rebus rolled his eyes. “I’m still a bloody suspect for the assault on Cafferty!”
“Shug doesn’t seem to think so,” Clarke said.
“What about Calum Stone?”
“Didn’t think he’d want to come.”
“You know full well what I mean.”
“Are we ready for the off?” Hawes asked. They all looked at Rebus, and he nodded. Really, he wanted five minutes on his own, to say a proper good-bye to the place. But he didn’t suppose it mattered. Gayfield Square was just another cop shop. This old priest Rebus had known, dead several years back, had said that cops were like the priesthood, the world their confessional. Stuart Janney had yet to confess. He would have a night in the cells to consider his options. Tomorrow or Monday, with a lawyer present and Siobhan Clarke seated opposite, he would lay out his version of the story. Rebus didn’t suppose Siobhan saw herself as any kind of a priest. He watched her now as she slipped her arms into her coat and made sure everything she needed was in her shoulder bag. Their eyes met for a moment, and they shared a smile. Rebus walked into Macrae’s office and placed his warrant card on the corner of the desk. He thought back to all the police stations he’d known: Great London Road, St. Leonard’s, Craigmillar, Gayfield Square. Men and women he’d worked with, most retired, some of them long dead. Cases solved and left unresolved, days in court, hours spent waiting to give testimony. Paperwork and legal wrangling and cock-ups. Tear-stained evidence from victims and their families. Sneers and denials from the accused. Human folly exposed, all those biblical deadly sins laid bare, with a few more besides.
Monday morning, his alarm clock would be redundant. He could spend all day over breakfast, stick his suit back in the wardrobe, to be pulled out again only for funerals. He knew all the scare stories—people who left work one week and were in a wooden box by the next, loss of work equaling loss of purpose in the great scheme of things. He’d wondered often if the only thing for it was to clear out of the city altogether. His flat would buy him a fair-sized house elsewhere—the Fife coastline, or west to one of the distillery-strewn islands, or south into reiver country. But he couldn’t see himself ever leaving Edinburgh. It was the oxygen in his bloodstream, but still with mysteries to be explored. He’d lived there for as long as he’d been a cop, the two—job and city—becoming intertwined. Each new crime had added to his understanding, without that understanding ever coming near to completion. Bloodstained past mingling with bloodstained present; Covenanters and commerce; a city of banking and brothels, virtue and vitriol . . .
Underworld meeting overworld . . .
“Penny for them.” It was Siobhan, standing in the doorway.
“You’d be wasting your money,” he told her.
“Somehow I very much doubt that. Are you ready?” Hoisting her bag onto her shoulder.
“As I’ll ever be.”
He decided this much was true.
There were just the four of them at the Oxford Bar to start with. The back room had indeed been set aside for their use—with the help of strips of crime-scene tape.
“Nice touch,” Rebus admitted, hoisting his first pint of the evening. After the best part of an hour, they headed to the restaurant. A bag of gifts was waiting there. From Siobhan, an iPod. Rebus protested that he would never master the technology.
“I’ve already loaded it,” she told him. “The Stones, the Who, Wishbone Ash . . . you name it.”
“John Martyn? Jackie Leven?”
“Even a bit of Hawkwind.”
“My exit music,” Rebus commented with a look close to contentment.
From Hawes and Tibbet, a bottle of twenty-five-year-old malt and a book of historical walks through Edinburgh. Rebus kissed the bottle and patted the book, then insisted on wearing headphones for the first part of the meal.
“Listening to Jack Bruce beats you lot any day,” he explained.
Just the two bottles of wine with dinner, then back to the Ox, where Gates, Curt, and Macrae had arrived, the bar providing a couple of bottles of champagne. Todd Goodyear and his girlfriend Sonia were the last to arrive. It was almost 11:00, and Rebus was on his fourth pint. Colin Tibbet was outside, taking gulps of fresh air while Phyllida Hawes rubbed his back encouragingly.
“Looks in a bad way,” Goodyear commented.
“Seven double brandies will do that to a man.”
There was no music, but then it wasn’t needed. The various conversations were unforced and full of laughter. Anecdotes were recounted, with the two pathologists telling the best of them. Macrae shook Rebus’s hand warmly and told him he had to get home.
“Remember to drop by and see us” were his parting words.
Derek Starr was standing in a corner, discussing work with a bored-looking Shug Davidson. The fact he’d come at all meant his wine bar chat-ups had failed yet again. Each time Davidson glanced over, Rebus offered him a winced commiseration. When a tray appeared with the next round of drinks, Rebus found himself next to Sonia.
“Todd tells me you work scene-of-crimes,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Sorry I don’t recognize the face.”
“I’ve usually got a hood over my head,” she said with a shy smile. She was short, maybe five feet, with cropped blond hair and green eyes. The dress she was wearing looked Japanese and suited her slight, thin-boned figure.
“How long have you and Todd been an item?”
“A year and a bit.”
Rebus looked over to where Goodyear was handing out drinks. “Must be doing something right,” he commented.
“He’s quite brilliant, you know. CID’s got to be the next step.”
“Might be a vacancy,” Rebus conceded. “So how do you like scene-of-crimes?”
“It’s all right.”
“I heard you were at Raeburn Wynd the night Todorov was killed.”
She nodded. “And at the canal, too. I was on call-out.”
“Mucked up your plans with Todd,” Rebus sympathized.
“How do you mean?” Her eyes had narrowed.
“Nothing,” Rebus said, wondering if maybe he’d started slurring his words.
“It was me who found the overshoe,” she added. Then her eyes widened, and she put her free hand to her mouth.
“Don’t worry about it,” Rebus assured her. “I’m no longer in the frame, apparently.”
She relaxed and gave a little laugh. “But it says a lot about Todd’s skills, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” Rebus agreed.
“Anything floating in that part of the canal, chances are it would end up getting stuck under the bridge—that’s what he said.”
“And he was right,” Rebus admitted.
“Which is why CID would be mad not to take him.”
“Our sanity’s often been questioned,” Rebus warned her.
“But you got a result on Todorov,” she stated.
“Yes, we did,” Rebus agreed with a tired smile. Goodyear was chatting to Siobhan Clarke now. Whatever he said made her laugh. Rebus decided it was time for a cigarette break and reached out to take Sonia’s hand, planting a kiss on the back of it.
“The perfect gentleman,” she was saying as he moved towards the door.
“If only you knew, kid . . .”
Hawes and Tibbet were at the far end of the street, Tibbet with his back to the wall, Hawes in front of him, stroking the hair back from his forehead. A couple of other smokers were watching the show.
“A while since that happened to me,” one said.
“Which?” his neighbor asked. “Feeling like spewing or having a woman run her fingers through your hair?”
Rebus joined in the laughter and then busied himself with the cigarette. At the other end of the street, the lights were on in the First Minister’s residence. A Labour enclave since devolution, it was now under threat from the Nationalists. In fact, Rebus couldn’t think of a time when Scotland hadn’t returned a Labour majority. He had voted only three times in his life, each for a different party. By the time of the devolution referendum, he’d lost all interest. He’d met plenty of politicians since—Megan Macfarlane and Jim Bakewell were merely the latest examples—but reckoned half the regulars in the Ox would make better legislators. The likes of Bakewell and Macfarlane were a constant, and though Stuart Janney would go to prison, Rebus doubted it would have any real effect on First Albannach. They would continue to work with people like Sergei Andropov and Morris Gerald Cafferty, continue to rake in the bad money with the good. Jobs and prosperity: the majority didn’t care how they came into being or were sustained. Edinburgh had been built on the invisible industries of banking and insurance. Who cared if a few bribes oiled the wheels? What did it matter if some men got together to watch secretly filmed videos? Andropov had said something about poets seeing themselves as unacknowledged legislators, but surely that title belonged to the men in the pin-striped suits?
“Reckon she’s trying to kiss it better?” one of the smokers asked.
Hawes and Tibbet were now in an embrace of sorts, faces pressed together. Good luck to them, Rebus thought to himself. Police work had wedged itself into his own marriage, cracking it wide open, but that didn’t have to be the case—he knew plenty of cops who were still married, some of them even wedded to other cops. They seemed to make it work.
“She’s doing a good job of it,” the other smoker was answering his neighbor. The door was pulled open behind them, and Siobhan Clarke appeared.
“There you are,” she said.
“Here I am,” Rebus agreed.
“We were worried you’d sloped off.”
“I’ll just be a minute,” he said, showing her the remaining inch of cigarette.
She had wrapped her arms around herself, protection against the cold. “Don’t worry,” she said, “we’re not having speeches or anything.”
“You’ve judged it just right, Shiv,” he assured her. “Thanks.”
She accepted the praise with a twitch of her mouth. “How’s Colin doing?”
“I think Phyl’s resuscitating him.” Rebus nodded in the direction of the two figures, who had now more or less merged into one.
“I hope they don’t regret it in the morning,” she muttered.
“What’s life without a few regrets?” one of the smokers challenged her.
“They’ll put that on my headstone,” his companion stated.
Rebus and Clarke locked eyes again for a few silent moments. “Come back into the warm,” she told him. He gave her a slow nod, stubbed out the remains of his cigarette, and did as he was told.
It was gone midnight when his taxi pulled up outside the Western General Hospital. He got as far as the corridor to Cafferty’s ward before one of the nurses stopped him.
“You’ve been drinking,” she scolded him.
“Since when did nurses start making diagnoses?”
“I’ll have to call security.”
“What for?”
“You can’t go visiting a patient in the middle of the night. Not in that state.”
“Why not?”
“Because people are sleeping.”
“I’m not going to start playing the drums,” he protested.
She pointed to the ceiling. Rebus looked, too, and saw that a camera was trained on them. “You’re being monitored,” she warned him. “A guard will be here any moment.”
“Christ’s sake . . .”
The doors behind her—the doors to Cafferty’s ward—swung open. A man was standing there.
“I’ll handle this,” he said.
“Who are you?” she asked, turning to him. “Who gave you permission to . . . ?” But his warrant card silenced her.
“DI Stone,” he explained. “This man’s known to me. I’ll see he doesn’t cause further disturbance.” Stone nodded towards a row of chairs, meant for visitors. Rebus decided he could do with a sit-down, so didn’t argue. When he was seated, Stone nodded, letting the nurse know everything was under control. As she headed off, he sat beside Rebus, leaving one of the chairs empty between them. He started to tuck his ID back into his pocket.
“I used to have one of those,” Rebus told him.
“What’s in the bag?” Stone asked.
“My retirement.”
“That explains a lot.”
Rebus tried focusing on him. “Such as?”