Caro Quinn — threatened when she tried taking photos in and around Stevenson House.
Mo Dirwan — attacked when his door-to-door activities took him to Stevenson House.
Rebus had been awake at four, listening to Storey’s pep-talk at five — surrounded by bleary eyes and the smells of breath-freshener and coffee.
In his car soon afterwards, heading to Knoxland, giving lifts to four others. They didn’t say much, windows down to stop the Saab misting up. Passing darkened shops, then bungalows where a few bedroom lights were just starting to come on. A convoy of cars, not all of them unmarked. Taxi-drivers staring at them, knowing something was up. The birds would be awake, but there was no sound of them as the cars pulled to a stop in Knoxland.
Only car doors opening and closing — quietly.
Whispers and gestures, a few muffled coughs. Someone spat on the ground. An inquisitive dog was shooed away before it could start barking.
Shoes moving up the stairwell, making a sound like sandpaper.
More gestures, whispers. Taking up position all along the third floor.
The floor where so few doors had been answered, first time the police had come calling.
They stood and waited, three to each door. Watches were checked: quarter to six, they’d start pounding and shouting.
Thirty seconds to go.
And then the stairwell door had opened, a foreign boy standing there wearing a long smock over his trousers, a grocery bag in one hand. The bag falling, milk bursting from it. One of the officers was just placing a finger to his lips as the boy filled his lungs.
Let out an almighty cry.
Doors pummelled, letter-boxes rattled. The boy lifted from his feet and carried downstairs. The cop who carried him left milky footprints.
Doors answered; others shoulder-charged. Revealing:
Domestic scenes — families gathered around the breakfast table.
Living rooms where people lay in sleeping-bags, or beneath blankets. As many as seven or eight to a room, sometimes spilling into the hallway.
Kids screaming in terror, wide-eyed. Mothers reaching for them. Young men pulling on clothes, or gripping the edges of their sleeping-bags, fearful.
Elders remonstrating in a clatter of languages, hands busy as if in mime. Grandparents inured to this new humiliation, half-blind without their spectacles but determined to muster whatever dignity the situation would allow.
Storey moving from room to room, flat to flat. He’d brought three interpreters, not nearly enough. One of the officers handed him a sheet of paper torn from a wall. Storey passed it on to Rebus. It looked like a work roster — addresses of food-processing factories. A roll-call of surnames with the shifts they’d be filling. Rebus passed it back. He was interested in the oversized polythene bags in one hallway, filled with headbands and wands. He switched one of the headbands on, its small twin spheres flashing red. He looked around but couldn’t see the kid from Lothian Road, the one who’d been selling the same sort of stuff. In the kitchen, a sink full of decomposing roses, their buds still tightly closed.
The translators were holding up surveillance photos of Bullen and Hill, asking people to identify them. Shakes of the head and pointed fingers, but a few nods, too. One man — he looked Chinese to Rebus — was shouting in fractured English:
‘We pay much money come here... much money! Work hard... send money home. Work we want to! Work we want to!’
A friend snapped back at him in their native language. This friend’s eyes locked on Rebus, and Rebus nodded slowly, knowing the gist of his message.
Save your breath.
They’re not interested.
Not interested in us... not for who we are.
This man started walking towards Rebus, but Rebus shook his head, gestured towards Felix Storey. The man stopped in front of Storey. The only way he could get his attention was to tug on the sleeve of his jacket, something the man probably hadn’t done since he was a kid.
Storey glared at him, but the man ignored this.
‘Stuart Bullen,’ he said. ‘Peter Hill.’ He knew he had Storey’s attention now. ‘These are the men you want.’
‘Already in custody,’ the Immigration man assured him.
‘That is good,’ the man said quietly. ‘And you have found the ones they murdered?’
Storey looked to Rebus, then back to the man.
‘Would you mind repeating that?’ he asked.
The man’s name was Min Tan and he was from a village in central China. He sat in the back of Rebus’s car, Storey alongside him, Rebus in the driver’s seat.
They were parked outside a bakery on Gorgie Road. Min Tan took loud sips from a beaker of sugary black tea. Rebus had already ditched his own drink. It wasn’t until he’d lifted the weak grey coffee to his lips that he’d remembered: this was the same place he’d bought the undrinkable coffee the afternoon Stef Yurgii’s body had been found. Yet the bakery was doing good business: commuters at the nearby bus-stop all seemed to be holding beakers to their faces. Others munched on breakfast rolls of scrambled egg and sausage.
Storey had taken a break from the questioning, so he could hold another conversation with whoever was on the other end of his mobile phone.
Storey had a problem: Edinburgh’s police stations could not accommodate the immigrants from Knoxland. There were too many of them, and not nearly enough cells. He’d tried asking the courts, but they had accommodation problems of their own. For now, the immigrants were being held in their flats, the third floor of Stevenson House blocked off to visitors. But now manpower was the issue: the officers Storey had commandeered were needed for their day-to-day duties. They couldn’t play at being glorified guards. At the same time, Storey was in no doubt that without adequate provision, there was nothing to stop the illegals in Stevenson House charging past any skeleton crew and making a run to freedom.
He’d called his superiors in London and elsewhere, requested aid from Customs and Excise.
‘Don’t tell me there aren’t a few VAT inspectors twiddling their thumbs,’ Rebus had heard him say. Meaning the man was clutching at straws. Rebus wanted to ask why they couldn’t just let the poor buggers go. He’d seen the fatigue on those faces. They’d been working so hard, it had drilled its way into the marrow of their bones. Storey would argue that most — maybe even all — had entered the country illegally, or had overstayed their visas and permits. They were criminals, but it was obvious to Rebus that they were victims, too. Min Tan had been talking about the grinding poverty of the life he’d left in the province, of his ‘duty’ to send money home.
Duty — not a word Rebus came across too often.
Rebus had offered the man some food from the bakery, but he’d wrinkled his nose, not being quite desperate enough to partake of the local cuisine. Storey, too, had passed, leaving Rebus to purchase a reheated bridie, most of which now lay in the gutter alongside the beaker of coffee.
Storey snapped shut his mobile with a growl. Min Tan was pretending to concentrate on his tea, but Rebus had no such scruples.
‘You could always concede defeat,’ he offered.
Storey’s narrowed eyes filled the rearview mirror. Then he turned his attention to the man beside him.
‘So we’re talking about more than one victim?’ he asked.
Min Tan nodded and held up two fingers.
‘Two?’ Storey coaxed.
‘At least two,’ Min Tan said. He seemed to shiver, and took another sip of tea. Rebus realised that the clothes the Chinaman was wearing weren’t quite enough to ward off the morning chill. He turned on the ignition and adjusted the heat.