‘So they’ve got rid of their video and their big television.’
‘I’d guess to pay off a debt or debts.’
‘And your money would be on gambling dues?’
‘If I were the betting kind, which I’m not.’
He smiled. ‘Maybe they had the stuff on tick and couldn’t keep up the payments.’
Siobhan sounded doubtful. ‘Maybe,’ she conceded.
‘Okay, well, it’s interesting so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far not yet. And it doesn’t tell us anything about Rory Kintoul, does it?’ She was frowning. ‘Remember him, Clarke? He’s the one who was stabbed in the street then wouldn’t talk about it. He’s the one we’re interested in.’
‘So what do you suggest, sir?’ There was a tinge of ire to that ‘sir’. She didn’t like it that her good detection had not been better rewarded. ‘We’ve already spoken to him.’
‘And you’re going to speak to him again.’ She looked ready to protest. ‘Only this time,’ Rebus went on, ‘you’re going to be asking about his cousin, Mr Bone the butcher. I’m not sure what we’re looking for exactly, so you’ll have to feel your way. Just see whether anything hits the marrow.’
‘Yes, sir.’ She stood up. ‘Oh, by the way, I got the files on Cafferty.’
‘Plenty of reading in there, most of it x-rated.’
‘I know, I’ve already started. And there’s no x-rating nowadays. It’s called “eighteen” instead.’
Rebus blinked. ‘It’s just an expression.’ As she was turning away, he stopped her. ‘Look, take some notes, will you? On Cafferty and his gang, I mean. Then when you’re finished you can refresh my memory. I’ve spent a long time shutting that monster out of my thoughts; it’s about time I opened the door again.’
‘No problem.’
And with that she was off. Rebus wondered if he should have told her she’d done well at Bone’s house. Ach, too late now. Besides, if she thought she were pleasing him, maybe she’d stop trying so hard. He picked up his phone and called Jack Morton.
‘Jack? Long time no hear. It’s John Rebus.’
‘John, how are you?’
‘No’ bad, how’s yourself?’
‘Fine. I made Inspector.’
‘Aye, me too.’
‘So I heard.’ Jack Morton choked off his words as he gave a huge hacking cough.
‘Still on the fags, eh, Jack?’
‘I’ve cut down.’
‘Remind me to sell my tobacco shares. So listen, what’s the problem?’
‘It’s your problem, not mine. Only I saw something from Scotland Yard about Andrew McPhail.’
Rebus tried the name out in his head. ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘you’ve got me there.’
‘We had him on file as a sex offender. He’d had a go at the daughter of the woman he was living with. This was about eight years back. But we never got the charge to stick.’
Rebus was remembering a little of it. ‘We interviewed him when those wee girls started to disappear?’ Rebus shivered at the memory: his own daughter had been one of the ‘wee girls’.
‘That’s it, just routine. We started with convicted and suspected child offenders and went on from there.’
‘Stocky guy with wiry hair?’
‘You’ve got him.’
‘So what’s the point, Jack?’
‘The point is, you really have got him. He’s in Edinburgh.’
‘So?’
‘Christ, John, I thought you’d know. He buggered off to Canada after that last time we hassled him. Set himself up as a photographer, doing shots for fashion catalogues. He’d approach the parents of kids he fancied. He had business cards, camera equipment, the works, rented a studio and used to take shots of the children, promising they’d be in some catalogue or other. They’d get to dress up in fancy dresses, or sometimes maybe just in underwea…’
‘I get the picture, Jack.’
‘Well, they nabbed him. He’d been touching the girls, that was all. A lot of girls, so they put him inside.’
‘And?’
‘And now they’ve let him out. But they’ve also deported him.’
‘He’s in Edinburgh?’
‘I started checking. I wanted to find out where he’d ended up, because I knew if it was anywhere near my patch I’d pay him a visit some dark night. But he’s on your patch instead. I’ve got an address.’
‘Wait a second.’ Rebus found a pen and copied it down.
‘How did you get his address anyway? The DSS?’
‘No, the files said he had a sister in Ayr. She told me he’d had her get a phone number for him, a boarding house. Know what else she said? She said we should lock him in a cellar and forget about the key.’
‘Sounds like a lovely lass.’
‘She’s my kind of woman, all right. Of course, he’s probably been rehabilitated.’
That word-rehabilitated. A word Vanderhyde had used about Aengus Gibson. ‘Probably,’ said Rebus, believing it about as much as Morton himself. They were professional disbelievers, after all. It was a policeman’s lot.
‘Still, it’s good to know about. Thanks, Jack.’
‘You’re welcome. Any chance we’ll be seeing you in Falkirk some day? It’d be good to have a drink.’
‘Yes, it would. Tell you what, I might be over that way soon.’
‘Oh?’
‘Dropping McPhail off in the town centre.’
Morton laughed. ‘Ya shite, ye.’ And with that he put down the phone.
Jack Morton stared at the phone for the best part of a minute, still grinning. Then the grin melted away. He unwrapped a stick of chewing gum and started gnawing it. It’s better than a cigarette, he kept telling himself. He looked at the scribbled sheet of notes in front of him on the desk. The girl McPhail had assaulted was called Melanie Maclean these days. Her mother had married, and Melanie lived with the couple in Haddington, far enough from Edinburgh so that she probably wouldn’t bump into McPhail. Nor, in all probability, would McPhail be able to find her. He’d have to know the stepfather’s name, and that wouldn’t be easy for him. It hadn’t been that easy for Jack Morton. But the name was here. Alex Maclean. Jack Morton had a home address, home phone number, and work number. He wondere…
He knew too that Alex Maclean was a carpenter, and Haddington police were able to inform him that Maclean had a temper on him, and had twice (long before his marriage) been arrested after some flare-up or other. He wondered, but he knew he was going to do it. He picked up the receiver and punched in the numbers. Then waited.
‘Hello, can I speak to Mr Maclean please? Mr Maclean? You don’t know me, but I have some information I’d like to share with you. It concerns a man called Andrew McPhai…’
Matthew Vanderhyde too made a telephone call that afternoon, but only after long thought in his favourite armchair. He held the cordless phone in his hand, tapping it with a long fingernail. He could hear a dog outside, the one from down the street with the nasal whine. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked, the tick seeming to slow as he concentrated on it. Time’s heartbeat. At last he made the call. There was no preamble.
‘I’ve just had a policeman here,’ he said. ‘He was asking about the night the Central Hotel caught fire.’ He hesitated slightly. ‘I told him about Aengus.’ He could pause now, listening with a weary smile to the fury on the other end of the line, a fury he knew so well. ‘Broderick,’ he interrupted, ‘if any skeletons are being uncloseted, I don’t want to be the only one shivering.’
When the fury began afresh, Matthew Vanderhyde terminated the call.
7
Rebus noticed the man for the first time that evening. He thought he’d seen him outside St Leonard’s in the afternoon. A young man, tall and broad-shouldered. He was standing outside the entrance to Rebus’s communal stairwell in Arden Street. Rebus parked his car across the street, so that he could watch the man in his rearview mirror. The man looked agitated, pumped up about something. Maybe he was only waiting for his date. Maybe.