“I didn’t mean . . .”
Hynds’s apology was cut short when the door burst open. He stood up, thinking it would be Siobhan.
It wasn’t.
“Well now,” John Rebus said, “isn’t this a surprise?” He looked at Hynds. “Where’s DS Clarke?”
Hynds frowned. “Isn’t she out there?” He thought for a moment. “DCS Templer wanted her. Maybe they’re in her office.”
Rebus put his face close to Hynds’s. “What’re you looking so guilty about?” he asked.
“I’m not.”
Rebus nodded towards Cafferty. “He’s the serpent in the tree, DC Hynds. Whatever he says, it isn’t worth hearing. Got that?”
Hynds gave a vague nod.
“Got that?” Rebus repeated, baring his teeth. The nod this time was vigorous. Rebus patted Hynds’s shoulder, then took the seat he’d just vacated. “Morning, Cafferty.”
“Long time, no see.”
“You just keep popping up, don’t you?” Rebus said. “Like a greasy spot on some adolescent’s arse.”
“Would that make you the adolescent or the arse?” Cafferty asked. He was leaning back in his chair, spine straight, arms by his sides. Hynds noticed that the two men’s postures were almost identical.
Rebus was shaking his head. “It would make me the man with the Clearasil,” he said, causing Hynds to smile. He was the only man in the room who did. “You’re in this up to your neck, aren’t you?” Rebus went on. “Circumstantial evidence alone would see you in a courtroom.”
“And out again the same afternoon,” Cafferty countered. “This is harassment, plain and simple.”
“DS Clarke isn’t that way inclined.”
“No, but you are. I wonder who it was put her up to dragging me in here.” He raised his voice a little. “Are you a betting man, DC Hynds?”
“Nobody in their right mind would bet with the devil,” Rebus stated, closing Hynds’s mouth almost before he’d opened it. “Tell me, Cafferty, what’s the Weasel going to do without his chauffeur?”
“Get a new one, I expect.”
“Donny was a bouncer for you, too, wasn’t he? Probably handy for selling stuff to all those young clubgoers.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You didn’t just lose a driver, did you? You didn’t even just lose some muscle.” Rebus paused. “You lost a dealer.”
Cafferty laughed drily. “I’d love to spend twenty minutes in your head, Rebus. It’s a regular fun house.”
“Funny you should mention that,” Rebus said. “It’s the title of a Stooges album: Fun House . . .” Cafferty turned to stare at Hynds, as if offering him the chance to concur that Rebus was a couple of waltzers shy of a fairground.
“It’s got a track on it that just about sums you up,” Rebus was saying.
“Oh aye?” Cafferty winked in Hynds’s direction. “What’s that then?”
“Just a one-word title,” Rebus informed him. “ ‘Dirt.’ ”
Cafferty turned his attention slowly towards the man seated opposite him. “Do you know the only thing that’s stopping me reaching across this desk and crushing your windpipe like an empty fucking chip bag?”
“Do tell.”
“It’s the feeling I get that you’d actually enjoy it. Would I be correct in that assumption?” He turned his head towards Hynds again. “What do you reckon, Davie? Think DI Rebus here likes a bit of domination? Maybe that piece of his in Portobello does the leather and stilettos routine . . .”
The chair crashed as Rebus flew to his feet. Cafferty rose too. Rebus’s arms had snaked across the space between them, grabbing the narrow lapels of Cafferty’s black leather jacket. One of Cafferty’s own hands had a grip on Rebus’s shirtfront. Hynds took a step forwards, but knew it would be like a toddler refereeing a cockfight. None of them noticed the door opening. Siobhan plunged in, taking hold of both men’s arms.
“That’s enough! Break it up, or I hit the panic button!”
Cafferty’s face seemed to have drained of blood, while Rebus’s had filled, almost as if there’d been a transfusion of sorts between the two men. Siobhan couldn’t tell who eased off first, but she managed to separate them.
“You better get out of here,” she told Cafferty.
“Just when I’m starting to enjoy myself?” Cafferty looked confident enough, but his voice was shaky.
“Out,” Siobhan ordered. “Davie, make sure Mr. Cafferty doesn’t hang around.”
“Unless it’s by his neck,” Rebus spat. Siobhan slapped him on the chest but didn’t say anything until Cafferty and Hynds had left the room.
Then she exploded.
“What the hell are you playing at?”
“Okay, I lost the rag at him . . .”
“This was my interview! You had no right to interfere.”
“Jesus, Siobhan, listen to yourself, will you?” Rebus picked up his chair and slumped back down onto it. “Every time Gill talks to you, you come out sounding like you’ve just left the college.”
“I’m not going to let you twist this around, John!”
“Then sit down and let’s talk about it.” He had a thought. “Maybe in the car park . . . I could do with a smoke.”
“No,” she said determinedly, “we’ll talk here.” She sat down in Cafferty’s chair, pulled it in towards the desk. “What did you say to him anyway?”
“It was what he said to me.”
“What?”
“He knows about Jean . . . knows where she lives.” Rebus saw the effect of his words on Siobhan. What he couldn’t tell her was that Cafferty’s utterance had been only part of the problem. There was also the small matter of a message from the comms room. The note was folded in Rebus’s breast pocket. It told him that Dickie Diamond’s car had been spotted parked in the New Town, already with a ticket on its windshield and looking abandoned . . . So Diamond, wherever he was, hadn’t obeyed orders.
The real catalyst, however, was Rebus’s own sense of frustration. He’d wanted Cafferty in St. Leonard’s so he could probe how much the man knew about the SDEA’s secret cache. But when it had come down to it, there’d been no way of asking, not without coming straight out with it.
The only person who might know . . . who might have access . . . was the Weasel. But the Weasel was no snitch — he’d said it himself. And he’d also confided that Cafferty and him were not as close as had once been the case.
There was, quite simply, no way for Rebus to know . . .
And that sense of impotence had boiled up within him, finally gushing out when Cafferty had mentioned Jean.
The bastard had played his trump card, knowing the effect it would have. The feeling I get that you’d actually enjoy it . . . a bit of domination . . .
“Gill wants to bring in Malcolm Neilson,” Siobhan was saying.
Rebus raised an eyebrow. “We’re charging him?”
“Looks like.”
“In which case, Cafferty’s off the hook?”
“Not until we cut the line. Problem is, if we do that we might lose a man overboard.”
Rebus smiled. “Don’t be so melodramatic.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “Go read Moby-Dick some time.”
“I don’t really see myself as Captain Ahab. He was Gregory Peck in the film, wasn’t he?”
Siobhan started shaking her head, eyes never leaving his. Rebus didn’t think she was disagreeing with the casting . . .
There was a noise in the corridor, then a knock at the door. Not Gill Templer this time, but a grinning Tam Barclay.
“Hynds said we’d find you here,” he told Rebus. “Want to come and take a look at what we found down in Leith?”
“I don’t know,” Rebus said. “Is it contagious?” But he allowed himself to be taken out of the room, past Ward and Sutherland, who were sharing a joke in the corridor, and into IR1, where Jazz McCullough and Francis Gray were standing, almost like zoologists studying some new and exotic creature in their midst.