He could hear voices; nothing unusual about that. But the voices grew in intensity as he climbed, and he opened the door just in time to see a man lunge at DC Petrie and butt him square on the nose. Petrie fell back against the window, knocking over the camera tripod. Blood gushed from his nostrils. Rebus only half took in that two small boys were watching, along with Siobhan Clarke and Elsa-Beth Jardine. The man was pulling Petrie upright when Rebus got an arm lock around him, pinning the man’s arms to his side. He pulled Rebus to right and left, trying to throw him off, all the time yelling so loudly it was a wonder nobody on the street below could hear the commotion.
Rebus heaved the man backwards and turned him, so that he lost balance and fell to the floor, where Rebus sat on top of him. Petrie started forward, but the man lashed out with his legs and sent Petrie back into the window, where his elbow smashed the glass. Rebus did what he had to do. He punched the man in the throat.
‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he asked. The man was gasping but still struggling. ‘You, stop it!’ Then something hit Rebus on the back of his head. It was the clenched fist of one of the boys, and it hit him right on his burnt patch of scalp. He screwed shut his eyes, fighting the stinging pain of the blow and a nausea in his gut, right where his muesli and tea with honey were sitting.
‘Leave my dad alone!’
Siobhan Clarke grabbed the boy and dragged him off.
‘Arrest that little bugger,’ Rebus said. Then, to the boy’s father: ‘I mean it, too. If you don’t calm down, I’m going to have him charged with assault. How would you like that?’
‘He’s too young,’ gasped the man.
‘Is he?’ said Rebus. ‘Are you sure?’
The man thought about it and calmed down.
‘That’s better.’ Rebus rose from the man’s chest. ‘Now is someone going to explain all this to me?’
It was quickly explained, once Petrie had been sent off to find a doctor for his nose and the boys had been sent home. The man was called Bill Chilton, and Bill Chilton didn’t like squatters.
‘Squatters?’
‘That’s what Wee Neilly told me.’
‘Squatters?’ Rebus turned to Siobhan Clarke. She’d been downstairs to check no passers-by had been injured by falling glass, and more importantly to explain the ‘accident’.
‘The two boys,’ she said now, ‘came barging in. They said they sometimes played here.’
Rebus stopped her and turned to Chilton. ‘Why isn’t Neil at school?’
‘He’s been suspended for fighting.’
Rebus nodded. ‘He’s got a fair punch on him.’ The back of his head throbbed agreement. He turned back to Siobhan.
‘They asked us what we were doing, and Ms Jardine’-at this Elsa-Beth Jardine lowered her head-‘told them we were squatters.’
‘Just joking,’ Jardine found it necessary to add. Rebus feigned surprise, and she lowered her eyes again, blushing furiously.
‘DC Petrie joined in, the boys cleared out, and we all had a laugh about it.’
‘A laugh?’ Rebus said. ‘It wasn’t a laugh, it was a breach of security.’ He sounded as furious as he looked, so that even Siobhan turned her eyes away from his. He now turned his gaze on Bill Chilton.
‘Well,’ Chilton continued, ‘Neil came home and told me there were squatters here. We’ve had a lot of that going on this past year or two, deserted tenement flats being broken open and used for all sorts of thing…drug pushing and that. Some of us are doing something about it.’
‘What are we talking about here, Mr Chilton? Vigilante tactics? Pickaxe handles at dawn?’
Chilton was unabashed. ‘You lot are doing bugger all!’
‘So you came up here looking to scare the squatters off?’
‘Before they got a toe-hold, aye.’
‘And?’
Chilton said nothing.
‘And,’ Rebus said for him, ‘you started shouting the odds at DC Petrie, who started shouting back that he was a police officer and you’d better bugger off. Only by that time you were too fired up to back off. Got a bit of a temper, Mr Chilton? Maybe it’s rubbed off on Neilly, eh? Did you get into a lot of fights at school?’
‘What the hell’s that got to do with anything?’ Chilton’s anger was rising again. Rebus raised a pacifying hand.
‘It’s a serious offence, assaulting a police officer.’
‘Mistaken identity,’ said Chilton.
‘Even after he’d identified himself?’
Chilton shrugged. ‘He never showed me any ID.’
Rebus raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re very knowledgeable about procedure. Maybe you’ve been in this sort of trouble before, eh?’ This shut Chilton’s mouth. ‘Maybe if I go down the station and look you up on the compute…what would this be, second offence? Third? Might we be talking about a wee trip to Saughton jail?’ Chilton was looking decidedly uncomfortable, which was exactly what Rebus wanted.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we could always shut the book on this one.’ Chilton looked interested. ‘If,’ Rebus warned, ‘you could keep your gob shut about it. And get Neil and his pal to forget they saw anything.’
Chilton nodded towards the camera. ‘You’re watching somebody, eh? A stake-out?’
‘Best if you don’t know, Mr Chilton. Do we have a deal?’
Chilton thought about it, then nodded.
‘Good,’ said Rebus, ‘now get the fuck out of here.’
Chilton knew when he was being made an offer. He got the fuck out of there. Rebus shook his head.
‘Sir — ’
‘Shut up and listen,’ Rebus told Siobhan Clarke. ‘This could’ve blown the whole thing. Maybe it has, we won’t know for a day or two. Meanwhile, get that camera set up again and get back to work. Phone HQ and get someone in here to board up the window, leaving a big enough hole for the camera. Either that or we need a new pane of glass.
‘And listen to me, the two of you.’ He raised a warning finger. ‘Nobody gets to know about this, nobody. It’s forgotten as of now, understand?’
They understood. What they did not understand perhaps was exactly why Rebus wanted it kept quiet. It wasn’t that he feared the early termination of Operation Moneybags-as far as he was concerned, the whole project was doomed to failure anyway. No, it was another fear altogether, the fear that Detective Inspector Alister Flower, safe and snug in the Firth Pub with his own surveillance crew, would find out. By God, that would mean trouble, more trouble than Rebus was willing to contemplate.
A pity then that he hadn’t managed to say anything to DC Peter Petrie, who went back to St Leonard’s for a change of shirt. The blood on his T-shirt might have been mistaken for tomato sauce or old tea, but there was no doubting the cause of the white gauze pad which had been taped across his nose and half his face. And when questioned, Peter Petrie quite gladly told his story, embellishing it only a little-as, for example, in exaggerating his assailant’s size, skill, and speed of attack. There were sympathetic smiles and shakes of the head, and the same comment was uttered by more than one fellow officer.
‘Wait till Flower hears about this.’
By lunchtime, Flower had heard from several sources about the giant who had wreaked such havoc to the Gorgie surveillance.
‘Dearie me,’ he said, sipping an orange juice laced with blue label vodka. ‘That’s terrible. I wonder if Chief Inspector Lauderdale knows? Ach, of course he does, Rebus wouldn’t try to keep a thing like that from him, would he?’ And he smiled so warmly at the DC seated beside him that the DC got quite worried, really quite worried about his bos…
Siobhan picked up the telephone.
‘Hello?’ She watched John Rebus staring out of the broken window. He’d been watching the taxi offices for half an hour, so deep in thought that neither she nor Jardine had uttered a word to one another above a whisper. ‘It’s for you, sir.’