‘I’m buggered if I know,’ John Rebus said quietly to himself. His phone rang. He picked it up and heard pub noises, then Flower’s voice.
‘That’s some team you’ve got there, Inspector. One gets his face mashed in, and now the other falls on her arse.’ The connection was briskly severed.
‘And bugger you, too, Flower,’ Rebus said, all too aware that no one was listening.
22
Edinburgh’s public mortuary was sited on the Cowgate, named for the route cattle would take when being brought into the city to be sold. It was a narrow canyon of a street with few businesses and only passing traffic. Way up above it were much busier streets, South Bridge for instance. They seemed so far from the Cowgate, it might as well have been underground.
Rebus wasn’t sure the area had ever been anything other than a desperate meeting place for Edinburgh’s poorest denizens, who often seemed like cattle themselves, dull-witted from lack of sunlight and grazing on begged handouts from passers-by. The Cowgate was ripe for redevelopment these days, but who would slaughter the cattle?
A fine setting for the understated mortuary where, when he wasn’t teaching at the University, Dr Curt plied his trade.
‘Look on the bright side,’ he told Rebus. ‘The Cowgate’s got a couple of fine pubs.’
‘And a few more you could shave a dead man with.’
Curt chuckled. ‘Colourful, though I’m not sure the image conjured actually means anything.’
‘I bow to your superior knowledge. Now, what have you got on Mr Ringan?’
‘Ah, poor Orphan Eddie.’ Curt liked to find names for all his cadavers. Rebus got the feeling the ‘Orphan’ prefix had been used many a time before. In Eddie Ringan’s case, though, it was accurate. He had no living relations that anyone knew of, and so had been identified by Patrick Calder, and by Siobhan Clarke, since she’d been the one to find the body.
‘Yes, that’s the man I found,’ she had said.
‘Yes, that’s Edward Ringan,’ Pat Calder had said, before being led away by Toni the barman.
Rebus now stood with Curt beside the slab on which what was left of the corpse was being tidied up by an assistant. The assistant was whistling ‘Those Were the Days’ as he scraped miscellany into a bucket of offal. Rebus was reading through a list. He’d been through it three times already, trying to take his mind off the scene around him. Curt was smoking a cigarette. At the age of fifty-five, he’d decided he might as well start, since nothing else had so far managed to kill him. Rebus might have taken a cigarette from him, but they were Player’s untipped, the smoking equivalent of paint stripper.
Maybe because he’d perused the list so often, something clicked at last. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘we never found a suicide note.’
‘They don’t always leave them.’
‘Eddie would have. And he’d have had Elvis singing Heartbreak Hotel on a tape player beside the oven.’
‘Now that’s style,’ Curt said disingenuously.
‘And now,’ Rebus went on, ‘from this list of the contents of his pockets, I see he didn’t have any keys on him.’
‘No keys, eh.’ Curt was enjoying his break too much to bother trying to work it out. He knew Rebus would tell him anyway.
‘So,’ Rebus obliged, ‘how did he get in? Or if he did use his keys to get in, where are they now?’
‘Where indeed.’ The attendant frowned as Curt stubbed his cigarette into the floor.
Rebus knew when he’d lost an audience. He put the list away. ‘So what have you got for me?’
‘Well, the usual tests will have to be carried out, of course.’
‘Of course, but in the meantim…?’
‘In the meantime, a few points of interest.’ Curt turned to the cadaver, forcing Rebus to do the same. There was a cover over the charred face, and the attendant had roughly sewn up the chest and stomach, now empty of their major organs, with thick black thread. The face had been badly burnt, but the rest of the body remained unaffected. The plump flesh was pale and shiny.
‘Well,’ Curt began, ‘the burns were superficial merely. The internal organs were untouched by the blast. That made things easier. I would say he probably asphyxiated through inhalation of North Sea gas.’ He turned to Rebus. ‘That “North Sea” is pure conjecture.’ Then he grinned again, a lopsided grin that meant one side of his mouth stayed closed. ‘There was evidence of alcoholic intake. We’ll have to wait for the test results to determine how much. A lot, I’d guess.’
‘I’ll bet his liver was a treat. He’s been putting the stuff away for years.’
Curt seemed doubtful. He went to another table and returned with the organ itself, which had already been cross-sectioned. ‘It’s actually in pretty good shape. You said he was a spirits drinker?’
Rebus kept his eyes out of focus. It was something you learned. ‘A bottle a day easy.’
‘Well, it doesn’t show from this.’ Curt tossed the liver a few inches into the air. It slapped back down into his palm. He reminded Rebus of a butcher showing off to a potential buyer. ‘There was also a bump to the head and bruising and minor burns to the arms.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’d imagine these are injuries often incurred by chefs in their daily duties. Hot fat spitting, pots and pans everywher…’
‘Maybe,’ said Rebus.
‘And now we come to the section of the programme Hamish has been waiting for.’ Curt nodded towards his assistant, who straightened his back in anticipation. ‘I call him Hamish,’ Curt confided, ‘because he comes from the Hebrides. Hamish here spotted something I didn’t. I’ve been putting off talking about it lest he become encephalitic.’ He looked at Rebus. ‘A little pathologist’s joke.’
‘You’re not so small,’ said Rebus.
‘You need to know, Inspector, that Hamish has a fascination with teeth. Probably because his own as a child were terribly bad and he has memories of long days spent under the dentist’s drill.’ Hamish looked as though this might actually be true. ‘As a result, Hamish always looks in people’s mouths, and this time he saw fit to inform me that there was some damage.’
‘What sort of damage?’
‘Scarring of the tissues lining the throat. Recent damage, too.’
‘Like he’d been singing too loud?’
‘Or screaming. But much more likely that something has been forced down his throat.’
Rebus’s mind boggled. Curt always seemed able to do this to him. He swallowed, feeling how dry his own throat was. ‘What sort of thing?’
Curt shrugged. ‘Hamish suggeste…You understand, this is entirely conjecture-usually your field of expertise. Hamish suggested a pipe of some kind, something solid. I myself would add the possibility of a rubber or plastic tube.’
Rebus coughed. ‘Not anythin…er, organic then?’
‘You mean like a courgette? A banana?’
‘You know damned well what I mean.’
Curt smiled and bowed his head. ‘Of course I do, I’m sorry.’ Then he shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t rule anything out. But if you’re suggesting a penis, it must have been sheathed in sandpaper.’
Behind them, Rebus heard Hamish stifle a laugh.
Rebus telephoned Pat Calder and asked if they might meet. Calder thought it over before agreeing.
‘At the Colonies?’ Rebus asked.
‘Make it the Cafe, I’m heading over there anyway.’
So the Cafe it was. When Rebus arrived, the ‘convalescence’ sign had been replaced with one stating, ‘Due to bereavement, this establishment has ceased trading.’ It was signed Pat Calder.
As Rebus entered, he heard Calder roar, ‘Do fuck off!’ It was not, however, aimed at Rebus but at a young woman in a raincoat.
‘Trouble, Mr Calder?’ Rebus walked into the restaurant. Calder was busy taking the mementoes down off the walls and packing them in newspaper. Rebus noticed three tea chests on the floor between the tables.