‘He only slept on my couch, Tom. It’s not like I gave him a gam or anything.’ Rebus flicked his third cigarette on to the ground, stubbed it out. Only half-smoked, so he’d count two and a half; round it down to two.
‘We still haven’t turned up the kid.’
‘How’s his mother doing?’
Jackson knew the question’s subtext, answered accordingly. ‘Nobody seems to think she’s a suspect.’
‘What’s her history?’
‘Billy’s her only kid. Had him at nineteen.’
‘Is the father around?’
‘Did the usual vanishing act before the baby was born. Ran off to Ulster to join the paramilitaries.’
‘He’ll be running for office now then.’
Jackson snorted. ‘She’s had half a dozen blokes since; been living with the latest for the past few weeks.’
‘The three of them in the flat together?’
Jackson nodded. ‘He’s being interviewed. We’re digging into his history.’
‘A fiver says he’s got form.’
‘What? Living in Greenfield?’ Jackson smiled. ‘Keep your money in your pocket.’ He paused. ‘You really don’t think this connects to our deceased friend?’
‘It might do, Tom. But just maybe not in the way we think.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Be seeing you,’ Rebus said, moving away.
Thinking of an old Gravy Train song: ‘Won’t Talk About It’.
He told Patience he wouldn’t be seeing her. There must have been something in his tone of voice.
‘Out on the ran-dan?’ she said.
‘You know me too well.’ He put the receiver down before she could say anything else. He started at The Maltings, headed up Causewayside to Swany’s, then took a taxi to the Ox. His car was back at St Leonard’s: no problem, he could walk into work next morning. Salty Dougary, one of the Young Street regulars, had just been in hospitaclass="underline" a coronary; they’d operated, angioplasty or something like that. He was telling the bar all about it. For some reason Rebus couldn’t fathom, the operation had apparently started at Dougary’s groin.
‘Way to a man’s heart,’ Rebus commented, sinking another whisky. He was diluting them with water, but not overly so. He felt fine, as in not drunk; mellow, kind of. But he knew if he walked out of the bar, he’d start to feel the alcohol. A good excuse to stay put, like that character in Apocalypse Now: ‘Never get out of the boat.’ It was only when you left the boat that you got into trouble. The same thing, in Rebus’s experience, was true of pubs, which was why he was still in the Ox at half past midnight. The back room had been taken over by musicians, a dozen or more of them; guitars mostly, twelve-bar blues. One guy with a beard was playing the harmonica like he was in front of a Madison Garden crowd. Janis Joplin: ‘Buried Alive in the Blues’.
Rebus was talking with George Klasser, a doctor at the Infirmary. Klasser usually left early — sevenish or a little after. When he stayed late, it was a sign things were fraught at home. He’d started the evening advising Salty Dougary to regulate his alcohol intake.
‘The pot calling the kettle black,’ had been Dougary’s riposte. Dougary looking like he’d just been on holiday rather than in surgery: face tanned, ciggies cut down from forty a day to ten. Klasser with dark shadows under his eyes, a slight trembling to the hand when he picked up his glass. Rebus had had an uncle who’d smoked a pack of cigarettes every day of his life and lived to be eighty. His own father had died younger, having given up cigarettes two decades previously.
You never could tell.
There were only four of them in the front bar, five including Harry. Dougary, who’d drunk in every pub in the city, reckoned Harry was Edinburgh’s rudest barman, which was quite a feat, considering the competition.
‘I wish youse lot would bugger off home,’ Harry said, not for the first time that evening.
‘Night’s young yet, Harry,’ Dougary said.
‘How come they let you out of intensive care?’
Dougary winked. ‘Intensive care’s what I come in here for.’ He toasted them with his glass and raised it to his lips. Twenty minutes before, Rebus had told Klasser about Darren Rough. Now Klasser turned to him, eyes heavy-lidded.
‘There was a famous murder case. Turn of the century, I think it was. German couple came here on their honeymoon, only it turned out he wanted her money rather than love. He planned to kill her, make it look like suicide. So they went for a walk up on Arthur’s Seat, and he pushed her off the Crags.’
‘But he didn’t get away with it?’
‘Obviously not, or there’d be no story to tell.’
‘So how was he caught?’
Klasser stared into his glass. ‘I can’t recall.’
Dougary laughed. ‘Don’t let him start telling any jokes, he always forgets the punchline.’
‘I’ll punch you in a minute, Salty.’
‘Get in the queue,’ Harry commented.
Some nights it was like that in the Oxford Bar. When the guitar-players packed up, Rebus put his coat on. There was a stiff breeze outside, and it had been raining again, the streets black and shiny as a beetle’s back. He’d meant to phone Janice, but what would he have said? There was no news of Damon. He walked along Princes Street, deciding he liked the city best like this: all the visitors tucked up in bed. Outside the Balmoral Hotel, a line of Jags and Rovers sat, their chauffeurs waiting for some function to finish. A young couple walked past, sharing a bottle of cheap cider. The male wore a jacket with a badge on it. The badge said Stockholm Film Festival. Rebus had never heard of it. Maybe it was the name of a band: you couldn’t be sure these days.
He walked up the Bridges, stopped at some railings so he could look down on to the Cowgate. There were clubs still open down there, teenagers spilling on to the road. The police had names for the Cowgate when it got like this: Little Saigon; the blood bank; hell on earth. Even the patrol cars went in twos. Whoops and yells: a couple of girls in short dresses. One lad was down on his knees in the road, begging to be noticed.
Pretty Things: ‘Cries from the Midnight Circus’.
In Edinburgh, sometimes it could be midnight in the middle of the day...
He didn’t know where he was going, what he was doing. If he was going home, he was doing so only by degrees. When a taxi came, he flagged it down. On sudden impulse, he named his destination.
‘The Shore.’
29
The idea was...
The idea was to stand in the freezing cold outside the hotel, call up to Oakes’s room on the mobile. Get him downstairs... no crack to the back of the head this time. Face to face. But it was the drink, that was all. Rebus knew he wouldn’t do it; knew Oakes wouldn’t fall for it anyway. Looking across from The Shore, he saw there were lights from the Clipper, and a minder on the door. So Rebus crossed the bridge, introduced himself. The minder was wiping sweat from his face. From within, Rebus could hear raised voices, laughter.
‘Party?’ he asked.
‘Don’t tell me there’ve been complaints,’ the minder growled. His accent was Liverpudlian. From his size, Rebus would bet his family had worked dockside. ‘That’s all I need right now.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Buggers don’t want to leave, do they?’
‘Have you tried asking nicely?’
The man snorted.
‘Nobody here to help you?’
‘When we turned the music off, looked like they weren’t going to stick around. DJ packed up and sodded off home. So did Mr Frost — my boss. Told me all I had to do was switch off the lights and lock up after me.’
‘You’re new to this game.’
The bouncer smiled. ‘Does it show?’