Authors: Ian Rankin
‘Ach, it’s a few days since I made it, it’s probably a bit dry by now.’
Rebus shook his head and gulped at the tea, hoping to wash the crumbs down his throat. But they merely formed into a huge solid lump which he had to force down by degrees, and without a public show of gagging.
There was a bird-cage standing in one corner of the room, boasting mirrors and cuttle-fish and millet spray. But no sign of any bird. Maybe it had escaped.
He left his card with Mrs MacKenzie, telling her to pass it on to Mr McPhail when she saw him. He didn’t doubt that she would. It had been unfair of him to introduce himself as a policeman to the landlady. She would probably become suspicious, and might even give McPhail a week’s notice on the strength of those suspicions. That would be a terrible shame.
Actually, it didn’t look to Rebus as though Mrs MacKenzie would twig. And McPhail would doubtless come up with some reason for Rebus’s visit. Probably the City of Edinburgh Police were about to award him a commendation for saving some puppies from the raging torrents of the Water of Leith. McPhail was good at making up stories, after all. Children just loved to hear stories.
Rebus stood outside Mrs MacKenzie’s house and looked across the road. It had to be coincidence that McPhail had chosen a boarding house within ogling distance of a primary school. Rebus had seen it on his arrival; it had been enough to decide him on identifying himself to the landlady. After all, he didn’t believe in coincidence.
And if McPhail couldn’t be persuaded to move, well, maybe the neighbours would find out the true story of Mrs MacKenzie’s lodger. Rebus got into his car. He didn’t always like himself or his job.
But some bits were okay.
Back at St Leonard’s, Siobhan Clarke had nothing new to report on the stabbing. Rory Kintoul was being very cagey about another interview. He’d cancelled one arranged meeting, and she’d not been able to contact him since.
‘His son’s seventeen and unemployed, spends most of the day at home, I could try talking to him.’
‘You could.’ But it was a lot of trouble. Maybe Holmes was right. ‘Just do your best,’ said Rebus. ‘After you’ve talked with Kintoul, if we’re no further forward we’ll drop the whole thing. If Kintoul wants to get himself stabbed, that’s fine with me.’
She nodded and turned away.
‘Any news on Brian?’
She turned back. ‘He’s been talking.’
‘Talking?’
‘In his sleep. I thought you’d know.’
‘What’s he been saying?’
‘Nothing they can make out, but it means he’s slowly regaining consciousness.’
‘Good.’
She started to turn away again, but Rebus thought of something. ‘How are you getting to Aberdeen on Saturday?’
‘Driving, why?’
‘Any room in the car?’
‘There’s just me.’
‘Then you won’t mind giving me a lift.’
She looked startled. ‘Not at all. Where to?’
‘Pittodrie.’
Now she looked even more surprised. ‘I wouldn’t have taken you for a Hibs fan, sir.’
Rebus screwed up his face. ‘No, you’re all alone in that category. I just need a lift, that’s all.’
‘Fine.’
‘And on the way, you can tell me what you’ve learned from the files on Big Ger.’
By Saturday, Rebus had argued three times with Michael (who was talking about moving out anyway), once with the students (also talking about moving), and once with the receptionist at Patience’s surgery when she wouldn’t put Rebus through. Brian Holmes had opened his eyes briefly, and it was reckoned by the doctors that he was on his way to recovery. None of them, however, hazarded the phrase ‘full recovery’. Still, the news had cheered Siobhan Clarke, and she was in a good mood when she arrived at Rebus’s Arden Street flat. He was waiting for her at street level. She drove a two-year-old cherry-red Renault 5. It looked young and full of life, while Rebus’s car (parked next to it) looked to be in terminal condition. But Rebus’s car had been looking like this for three or four years now, and just when he’d determined to get rid of it it always seemed to go into remission. Rebus had the feeling the car could read his mind.
‘Morning, sir,’ said Siobhan Clarke. There was pop music coming from the stereo. She saw Rebus cringe as he got into the passenger seat, and turned the volume down. ‘Bad night?’
‘People always seem to ask me that.’
‘Now why could that be?’
They stopped at a bakery so Rebus could buy some breakfast. There had been nothing in the flat worth the description ‘food’, but then Rebus couldn’t really complain. His contribution to the larder so far had filled a single shopping basket. And most of that had been meat, something the students didn’t touch. He noticed Michael had gone vegetarian too, at least in public.
‘It’s healthier, John,’ he’d told his brother, slapping his stomach.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Rebus had snapped.
Michael had merely shaken his head sadly. ‘Too much caffeine.’
That was another thing, the kitchen cupboards were full of jars of what looked like coffee but turned out to be ‘infusions’ of crushed tree bark and chicory. At the bakery, Rebus bought a polystyrene beaker of coffee and two sausage rolls. The sausage rolls turned out to be a bad mistake, the flakes of pastry breaking off and covering the otherwise pristine car interior – despite Rebus’s best attempts with the paper bag.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ he offered to Siobhan, who was driving with her window conspicuously open. ‘You’re not vegetarian, are you?’
She laughed. ‘You mean you haven’t noticed?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
She nodded towards a sausage roll. ‘Well, have you heard of mechanically recovered meat?’
‘Don’t,’ warned Rebus. He finished the sausage rolls quickly, and cleared his throat.
‘Anything I should know about between you and Brian?’
The look on her face told him this was not the year’s most successful conversational gambit. ‘Not that I know of.’
‘It’s just that he and Nell were … well, there’s still a good chance –’
‘I’m not a monster, sir. And I know the score between Brian and Nell. Brian’s just a nice guy. We get along.’ She glanced away from the windscreen. ‘That’s all there is to it.’ Rebus was about to say something. ‘But if there
was
more to it than that,’ she went on, ‘I don’t see that it would be any of your business, with respect, sir. Not unless it was interfering with our work, which I wouldn’t let happen. I don’t suppose Brian would either.’
Rebus stayed silent.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘What you said was fair enough. The problem was the
way
you said it. A police officer’s never off duty, and I’m your boss – even on a jaunt like this. Don’t forget that.’
There was more silence in the car, until Siobhan broke it. ‘It’s a nice part of town, Marchmont.’
‘Almost as nice as the New Town.’
She glared at him, her grip on the steering-wheel as determined as any strangler’s.
‘I thought,’ she said slyly, ‘you lived in Oxford Terrace these days, sir.’
‘You thought wrong. Now, what about turning that bloody music off? After all, we’ve got a lot to talk about.’
The ‘lot’, of course, being Morris Gerald Cafferty.
Siobhan Clarke hadn’t brought her notes with her. She didn’t need them. She could recite the salient details from memory, along with a lot of detail that might not be salient but was certainly interesting. Certainly she’d done her homework. Rebus thought how frustrating the job could be. She’d swotted up on Big Ger as background to Operation Moneybags, but Operation Moneybags almost certainly wouldn’t trap Cafferty. And she’d spent a lot of hours on the Kintoul stabbing, which might also turn out to be nothing.
‘And another thing,’ she said. ‘Apparently Cafferty’s got a little diary of sorts, all of it in code. We’ve never been able to crack his code, which means it must be highly personal.’
Yes, Rebus remembered. Whenever they brought Big Ger into custody, the diary would be collected along with his other possessions. Then they’d photocopy the pages of the diary and try to decipher them. They’d never been successful.
‘Rumour has it,’ Siobhan was saying, ‘the diary’s a record of bad debts, debts Cafferty takes care of personally.’
‘A man like that garners a lot of rumours. They help make him larger than life. In life, he’s just another witless gangster.’
‘A code takes wits.’
‘Maybe.’
‘In the file, there’s a recent clipping from the
Sun
. It’s all about how bodies keep washing up on the coastline.’
Rebus nodded. ‘On the Solway coast, not far from Stranraer.’
‘You think it’s Cafferty’s doing?’
Rebus shrugged. ‘The bodies have never been identified. Could be anything. Could be people pushed off the Larne ferry. Could be some connection with Ulster. There are some weird currents between Larne and Stranraer.’ He paused. ‘Could be anything.’
‘Could be Cafferty, in other words.’
‘Could be.’
‘It’s a long way to go to dispose of a body.’
‘Well, he’s not going to shit in his own nest, is he?’
She considered this. ‘There was mention in one of the papers of a van spotted on that coastline, too early in the morning to be delivering anything.’
Rebus nodded. ‘And there was nowhere along the road for it to be delivering
to
. I read the papers sometimes, Clarke. The Dumfries and Galloway Police have patrols along there now.’
Siobhan drove for a while, gathering her thoughts. ‘He’s just been lucky so far, hasn’t he, sir? I mean, I can understand that he’s a clever villain, and clever villains are harder to catch. But he has to delegate, and usually even though a villain’s clever his underlings are so stupid or lazy they
would
shit in the nest.’
‘Language, Clarke, language.’ He got a smile from her. ‘Point taken, though.’
‘Reading all about Cafferty’s “associates” I didn’t get an impression of many “O” Grades. They’ve all got names like Slink and Codge and the Radiator.’
Rebus grinned. ‘Radiator McCallum, I remember him. He was supposed to be descended from a family of Highland cannibals. He did research and everything, he was so proud of his ancestors.’
‘He disappeared from the scene, though.’
‘Yes, three or four years ago.’
‘Four and a half, according to the records. I wonder what happened to him.’
Rebus shrugged. ‘He tried to doublecross Big Ger, got scared and ran off.’
‘Or didn’t get the chance to run off.’
‘That too, of course. Or else he just got fed up, or had another job offer. It’s a very mobile profession, being a thug. Wherever the work is …’
‘Cafferty certainly gets through the personnel. McCallum’s cousins disappeared from view just before McCallum himself did.’
Rebus frowned. ‘I didn’t know he had any cousins.’
‘Known colloquially as the Bru-head Brothers. Something to do with a penchant for Irn-Bru.’
‘Altogether understandable. What were their real names, though?’
She thought for a moment. ‘Tam and Eck Robertson.’
Rebus nodded. ‘Eck Robertson, yes. I didn’t know about the other one, though. Hang on a minute …’
Tam and Eck Robertson. The R. Brothers. Which would mean that Mork was …
‘Morris bloody Cafferty!’ Rebus slapped the dashboard. Brian shortened the name and used a k for the c. Christ … If Brian Holmes was on to something involving Cafferty and his gang, no wonder he was scared. Something to do with the night the Central Hotel caught fire. Did they start the blaze because the hotel hadn’t been paying its protection dues? What about the body, maybe it’d been some debtor or other. And soon afterwards, Radiator McCallum and his cousins left the scene. Bloody hell.
‘If you’re going to have a seizure,’ said Siobhan, ‘I’m trained in cardiac resuscitation.’
Rebus wasn’t listening. He stared at the road ahead, one fist around the coffee cup, the other pounding his knee. He was thinking of Brian’s note. He hadn’t said for sure that Cafferty was there that night, only that the brothers were. And something about a poker game. He was going to try to find the Robertson brothers; that was his final comment. After which, someone came along and hit him on the head. Maybe it was beginning to come together.
‘I’m not sure I can deal with catatonia though.’
‘What?’
‘Was it something that I said?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘The Bru-Head Brothers?’
‘The very same. What else can you tell me about them?’
‘Born in Niddrie, petty thieves from the time they left the pram –’
‘They probably stole the pram, too. Anything else?’
Siobhan knew that she’d hit some nerve. ‘Plenty. Both had long records. Eck liked flashy clothes, Tam always wore jeans and a T-shirt. The funny thing is, though, Tam kept scrupulously clean. He even took his own soap everywhere with him. I thought that was strange.’
‘If I were the gambling kind,’ said Rebus, ‘I’d bet the soap was lemon-scented.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Instinct. Not mine, someone else’s.’ Rebus frowned. ‘How come I never heard of Tam?’
‘He moved to Dundee when he left school, or rather when he was
asked
to leave school. He only came back to Edinburgh years later. The records have him down as working for the gang for about six months, maybe even less.’ She waited. ‘Are you going to tell me what this is all about?’
‘It’s all about a hotel fire.’
‘You mean those files on the floor behind your desk?’
‘I mean those files on the floor behind my desk.’
‘I couldn’t help taking a peek.’
‘They might tie in with the attack on Brian.’ She turned to him. ‘Keep your eyes on the road. You concentrate on the driving, and I’ll tell you a story. It might even keep us going till Aberdeen.’
And it did.
‘In ye come, Jock. My, my, I wouldn’t have recognised ye.’
‘I was in shorts the last time you saw me, Auntie Ena.’
The old woman laughed. She used a zimmer frame to walk back through the narrow musty hall and into a small back room. The room was crammed with furniture. There would be a front room, too, another lounge kept for the most special occasions. But Rebus was family, and family were greeted in the back room.