all. So you stuck some paper into a bottle of cleaner, lit it, and walked away.'
'This is nonsense,' Janney said in a voice cracking with emotion.
'Problem was,' Clarke went on, ignoring him, 'all that acoustic baffling proved to be a fire hazard… With Riordan dead, we were looking for a suspect in both killings – and Andropov still seemed to fit the bill. So all your hard work was in vain, Mr Janney. Charles Riordan died – and died for nothing.'
'I didn't do it.'
'Is that the truth?'
Janney nodded, eyes everywhere but on either detective.
'Okay, then,' Clarke told him. “You've nothing to worry about.'
She closed the folder and gathered together the photos. Janney could hardly believe it. Clarke was getting to her feet. 'That pretty much takes care of it,' she confirmed. 'We'll just head along to processing and then you'll be on your way.'
Janney was standing, but with his hands pressing against the tabletop, helping him stay upright. 'Processing?' he queried.
'Just a formality, sir,' Rebus assured him. 'We need to take your fingerprints.'
Janney had made no attempt to move. 'Whatever for?'
Clarke supplied the answer. 'There was a print left on the bottle of solvent. It has to belong to whoever started the fire.'
'But it can't be yours, Stuart, can it?' Rebus asked. You were out enjoying a drive down our beautiful coastline in the crisp pre-dawn air…'
'Fingerprint.' The word slid out of Janney's mouth like a small, scuttling creature.
'I like to do a bit of motoring myself,' Rebus was saying. 'Today's my retirement – means I can do a lot more of it in the future.
Maybe you'll show me the route you took… Why are you sitting down again, Stuart?'
'Is there anything we can get you, Mr Janney?' Clarke asked solicitously.
Stuart Janney looked at her and then at Rebus before deciding that the ceiling merited his full attention. When he spoke, his throat was so stretched neither detective could quite make out the words.
'Mind repeating that?' Clarke asked politely.
You can get me a lawyer,' Janney duly obliged.
45
'Whenever anyone retires or resigns in the movies,' Siobhan Clarke said, 'they always seem to carry a box out of the building.'
'That's true,' Rebus agreed. He'd been through his desk and found precisely nothing of a personal nature. Turned out he didn't even have a mug of his own, just drank from whichever one was available at the time. In the end, he pocketed a couple of cheap ballpoint pens and a sachet of Lemsip a full year past its sell-by.
“You had the flu last December,' Clarke reminded him.
'Still dragged my sorry carcass into work, though.'
'And sneezed and groaned for a full week,' Phyllida Hawes added, hands on hips.
'Passing the germs to me,' Colin Tibbet stated.
'Ah, the fun we've had,' Rebus said with an affected sigh. There was no sign of DCI Macrae, though he'd left a note telling Rebus to leave his warrant card on the desk in his office. Derek Starr was absent, too. Gone six o'clock, meaning he'd be in a club or wine bar, celebrating the day's results and trying the usual chat-up lines. Rebus looked around the CID suite. 'You really didn't buy me anything, you miserable shower of bastards?'
'Have you seen the price of gold watches?' Clarke said with a smile. 'On the other hand, the back room of the Ox has been reserved for the night, and there's a hundred quid's worth of a tab – what we don't get through tonight is yours for afterwards.'
Rebus considered this. 'So that's what it comes down to after all these years – you want me drinking myself to death?'
'And we've booked the Cafe St Honore for nine o'clock – staggering distance from the Ox.'
'And staggering distance back again,' Hawes added.
'Just the four of us?' Rebus asked.
'A few more faces might drop by – Macrae's promised to look in.
Tarn Banks and Ray Duff… Professor Gates and Dr Curt… Todd and his girlfriend…'
'I hardly know them,' Rebus complained.
Clarke folded her arms. 'He needed a bit of persuading, so don't think I'm suddenly going to uninvite them!'
'My party, but your rules, eh?'
'And Shug Davidson's coming, too,' Hawes reminded Clarke.
Rebus rolled his eyes. I'm still a bloody suspect for the assault on Cafferty!'
'Shug doesn't seem to think so,' Clarke said.
'What about Calum Stone?'
'Didn't think he'd want to come.'
You know full well what I mean.'
'Are we ready for the off?' Hawes asked. They all looked at Rebus and he nodded. Really, he wanted five minutes on his own, to say a proper goodbye to the place. But he didn't suppose it mattered. Gayfield Square was just another cop-shop. This old priest Rebus had known, dead several years back, had said that cops were like the priesthood, the world their confessional. Stuart Janney had yet to confess. He would have a night in the cells to consider his options. Tomorrow or Monday, with a lawyer present and Siobhan Clarke seated opposite, he would lay out his version of the story. Rebus didn't suppose Siobhan saw herself as any kind of a priest. He watched her now as she slipped her arms into her coat and made sure everything she needed was in her shoulder bag. Their eyes met for a moment and they shared a smile. Rebus walked into Macrae's office and placed his warrant card on the corner of the desk. He thought back to all the police stations he'd known: Great London Road, St Leonard's, Craigmillar, Gayfield Square. Men and women he'd worked with, most retired, some of them long dead. Cases solved and left unresolved, days in court, hours spent waiting to give testimony. Paperwork and legal wrangling and cock-ups. Tear-stained evidence from victims and their families. Sneers and denials from the accused. Human folly exposed, all those biblical deadly sins laid bare, with a few more besides.
Monday morning, his alarm clock would be redundant. He could spend all day over breakfast, stick his suit back in the wardrobe, to be pulled out again only for funerals. He knew all the scare stories – people who left work one week and were in a wooden box by the
next, loss of work equalling loss of purpose in the great scheme of things. He'd wondered often if the only thing for it was to clear out of the city altogether. His flat would buy him a fair-sized house elsewhere – the Fife coastline, or west to one of the distillery-strewn islands, or south into reiver country. But he couldn't see himself ever leaving Edinburgh. It was the oxygen in his bloodstream, but still with mysteries to be explored. He'd lived there for as long as he'd been a cop, the two – job and city – becoming intertwined.
Each new crime had added to his understanding, without that understanding ever coming near to completion. Bloodstained past mingling with bloodstained present; Covenanters and commerce; a city of banking and brothels, virtue and vitriol…
Underworld meeting overworld…
'Penny for them.' It was Siobhan, standing in the doorway.
“You'd be wasting your money,' he told her.
'Somehow I very much doubt that. Are you ready?' Hoisting her bag on to her shoulder.
'As I'll ever be.'
He decided this much was true.
There were just the four of them at the Oxford Bar to start with.
The back room had indeed been set aside for their use – with the help of strips of crime-scene tape.
'Nice touch,' Rebus admitted, hoisting his first pint of the evening.
After the best part of an hour, they headed to the restaurant. A bag of gifts was waiting there. From Siobhan, an iPod. Rebus protested that he would never master the technology.
'I've already loaded it,' she told him. 'The Stones, Who, Wishbone Ash… you name it.'