It was on Rose Street, started to get busy around ten thirty each evening. There’d been a stabbing in the back alley the previous summer, the owner complaining of blood on his Merc.
Rebus was seated in a small uncomfortable chair in a small dimly lit room. In the other chair, hand on the video’s remote, sat DC Phyllida Hawes.
‘Here we go again,’ she said. Rebus leaned forward a little. The view jumped from back alley to dancefloor. ‘Any second.’ Another cut: main bar, punters queuing three deep. She froze the picture. It wasn’t so much black and white as sepia, the colour of dead photographs. Interior light, she’d explained earlier. She moved the action along one frame at a time as Rebus moved in on the screen, bending so one knee touched the floor. His finger touched a face.
‘That’s him,’ she agreed.
On the desk was a slim file. Rebus had taken from it a photograph, which he now held to the screen.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Forward at half-speed.’
The security camera stayed with the main bar for another ten seconds, then switched to second bar and all points on the compass. When it returned to the main bar, the crush of drinkers seemed not to have moved. She froze the tape again.
‘He’s not there,’ Rebus said.
‘No chance he got served. The two ahead of him are still waiting.’
Rebus nodded. ‘He should be there.’ He touched the screen again.
‘Next to the blonde,’ Hawes said.
Yes, the blonde: spun-silver hair, dark eyes and lips. While those around her were intent on catching the eyes of the bar staff, she was looking off to one side. There were no sleeves to her dress.
Twenty seconds of footage from the foyer showed a steady stream entering the club, but no one leaving.
‘I went through the whole tape,’ Hawes said. ‘Believe me, he’s not on it.’
‘So what happened to him?’
‘Easy, he walked out, only the cameras didn’t pick him up.’
‘And left his pals gasping?’
Rebus studied the file again. Damon Mee had been out with two friends, a night in the big city. It had been Damon’s shout — two lagers and a Coke, this last for the designated driver. They’d waited for him, then gone looking. Initial reaction: he’d scored and slunk off without telling them. Maybe she’d been a dinosaur, not something to brag about. But then he hadn’t turned up at home, and his parents had started asking questions, questions no one could answer.
Simple truth: Damon Mee had, as the timer on the camera footage showed, vanished from the world between 11.44 and 11.45 p.m. the previous Friday night.
Hawes switched off the machine. She was tall and thin and knew her job; hadn’t liked Rebus appearing at Gayfield cop shop like this; hadn’t liked the implication.
‘There’s no hint of foul play,’ she said defensively. ‘Quarter of a million MisPers every year, most turn up again in their own sweet time.’
‘Look,’ Rebus assured her, ‘I’m doing this for an old friend, that’s all. He just wants to know we’ve done all we can.’
‘What’s to do?’
Good question, and one Rebus was unable to answer right that minute. Instead, he brushed dust from the knees of his trousers and asked if he could look at the video one last time.
‘And something else,’ he said. ‘Any chance we can get a print-out?’
‘A print-out?’
‘A photo of the crush at the bar.’
‘I’m not sure. It’s not going to be much use though, is it? And we’ve decent photos of Damon as it is.’
‘It’s not him I’m interested in,’ Rebus said as the tape began to play. ‘It’s the blonde who watched him leave.’
That evening, he drove north out of Edinburgh, paid his toll at the Forth Road Bridge, and crossed into Fife. The place liked to call itself ‘the Kingdom’ and there were those who would agree that it was another country, a place with its own linguistic and cultural currency. For such a small place, it seemed almost endlessly complex, had seemed that way to Rebus even when he’d been growing up there. To outsiders the place meant coastal scenery and St Andrews, or just a stretch of motorway between Edinburgh and Dundee, but the west central Fife of Rebus’s childhood had been very different, ruled by coal mines and linoleum, dockyard and chemical plant, an industrial landscape shaped by basic needs and producing people who were wary and inward-looking, with the blackest humour you’d ever find.
They’d built new roads since Rebus’s last visit, and knocked down a few more landmarks, but the place didn’t feel so very different from thirty-odd years before. It wasn’t such a great span of time after all, except in human terms, and maybe not even then. Entering Cardenden — Bowhill had disappeared from road-signs in the 1960s, even if locals still knew it as a village distinct from its neighbour — Rebus slowed to see if the memories would turn out sweet or sour. Then he caught sight of a Chinese takeaway and thought: both, of course.
Brian and Janice Mee’s house was easy enough to find: they were standing by the gate waiting for him. Rebus had been born in a pre-fab but brought up in a terrace much like this one. Brian Mee practically opened the car door for him, and was trying to shake his hand while Rebus was still undoing his seat-belt.
‘Let the man catch his breath!’ his wife snapped. She was still standing by the gate, arms folded. ‘How have you been, Johnny?’
And Rebus realised that Brian had married Janice Playfair, the only girl in his long and trouble-strewn life who’d ever managed to knock John Rebus unconscious.
The narrow low-ceilinged room was full to bursting — not just Rebus, Brian and Janice, but Brian’s mother and Mr and Mrs Playfair, plus a billowing three-piece suite and assorted tables and units. Introductions had to be made and Rebus guided to ‘the seat by the fire’. The room was overheated. A pot of tea was produced, and on the table by Rebus’s armchair sat enough slices of cake to feed a football crowd.
‘He’s a brainy one,’ Janice’s mother said, handing Rebus a framed photograph of Damon Mee. ‘Plenty of certificates from school. Works hard. Saving to get married.’
The photo showed a smiling imp, not long out of school.
‘We gave the most recent pictures to the police,’ Janice explained. Rebus nodded: he’d seen them in the file. All the same, when a packet of holiday snaps was handed to him, he went through them slowly: it saved having to look at the expectant faces. He felt like a doctor, expected to produce both immediate diagnosis and remedy. The photos showed a face more careworn than in the framed print. The impish smile remained, but noticeably older: some effort had gone into it. There was something behind the eyes, disenchantment maybe. Damon’s parents were in a few of the photos.
‘We all went together,’ Brian explained. ‘The whole family.’
Beaches, a big white hotel, poolside games. ‘Where is it?’
‘Lanzarote,’ Janice said, handing him his tea. ‘Do you still take sugar?’
‘Haven’t done for years,’ Rebus said. In a couple of the pictures she was wearing her bikini: good body for her age, or any age come to that. He tried not to linger.
‘Can I take a couple of the close-ups?’ he asked. Janice looked at him. ‘Of Damon.’ She nodded and he put the other photos back in the packet.
‘We’re really grateful,’ someone said: Janice’s mum? Brian’s? Rebus couldn’t tell.