`Well, actually—'
Flight himself interrupted. `Inspector Rebus came straight here, sir, as soon as he heard about the murder. He's only just arrived in London.'
'Is that, so?' Laine sounded impressed, but Rebus could see that the man was growing restless. This was smalltalk, and he did not like to think he had time for smalltalk. His eyes sought some escape. `Well, Inspector,' he said, `I'm sure we'll meet again.' And turning to Flight: `I'd better be off, George. Everything under control?' Flight merely nodded. `Good, fine, well . . . ' And with that the Chief Inspector started back towards his car, accompanied, by Flight. Rebus exhaled noisily. He felt completely out of his territory here. He knew when he was not wanted and wondered just whose idea it had been to second him to the Wolfman case. Someone with a warped sense of humour, that was for sure. His boss had passed the letter over to him.
`It seems,' he had said, `you've become an expert on serial killers, John, and they're a bit short on those in the Met just now. They'd like you to go down to London for a few days, see if you can come up with anything, maybe give them a few ideas.'
Rebus had read the letter through in growing disbelief. It referred to a case from a few, years before, the case of a child murderer, a case Rebus had cracked. But that had been personal, not really a serial killer at all.
`I don't know anything, about serial killers,' Rebus had protested to his boss.
`Well then, it seems like you'll be in good company, doesn't it?'
And now look at him, standing on a stretch of ground in north-east London, a cup of unspeakably bad tea nursed in both hands, his stomach churning, nerves buzzing, his bags looking as lonely and out of place as he felt. Here to help solve, the insoluble, our man from north of the border. Whose idea, had it been to bring him here? No police force in the country liked to admit failure; yet by lugging Rebus down here the Met was doing precisely that.
Laine had gone and Flight seemed a little more relaxed. He even found time to smile reassuringly across to Rebus before giving orders to two men who, Rebus knew, would be from a funeral parlour. The men went back to their. vehicle and returned with a large folded piece of plastic. They crossed the cordon and stopped at the body, laying the plastic out beside it. It was a translucent bag, over six feet long with a zip running from head to toe, Dr Cousins was in, close attendance as the two men opened the bag and lifted the body into it, closing the zipper. One photogra?pher had decided to shoot off a few more flash photographs of the spot where the body had lain, while the attendants carried the corpse back through the cordon and up to their vehicle.
Rebus noticed that the crowd of onlookers had disap?peared, and only a few curious souls remained. One of them, a young, man, was carrying a crash helmet and wore a shiny black leather jacket with shinier silver zips. A very tired constable was trying to move him on.
Rebus felt like an onlooker himself and thought of all the TV dramas, and films he'd seen, with detectives swarming over the murder site in minute one (destroying any forensic evidence in the process) and solving the murder by minute fifty-nine or eighty-nine. Laughable, really. Police work was just that work. Relentless, routine, dull, frustrating, and above all time-consuming. He checked his watch. It was exactly 2 am. His hotel was back in central London, tucked somewhere behind Piccadilly Circus. It would take another thirty to forty minutes to get back there, always supposing a spare patrol car was available.
`Coming?'
It was Flight, standing a few yards in front of him.
`Might as well,' said Rebus, knowing exactly what Flight was talking about, or more accurately where he was talking about.
Flight smiled. `I'll give you this, Inspector Rebus, you don't give up.'
`The famous tenacity of the Scots,' said Rebus, quoting from one of Sunday's newspaper rugby reports. Flight actually laughed. It didn't last long, but it made Rebus feel glad that he'd come here tonight. The ice hadn't been broken completely perhaps, but an important chunk had been chipped away from one corner of the berg.
`Come on then. I've got my car. I'll get one of the drivers to put your bags in his boot. The lock's stuck on mine. Somebody tried to crowbar it open a few weeks back.' He glanced towards Rebus, a rare moment of eye contact. `Nowhere is safe these days,' he said. `Nowhere.'
There was already a lot of commotion up at road level. Voices and the slamming shut of car doors. Some officers would stay behind, of course, guarding the site. And a few might be going back to the warmth of the station or — luxury hardly to be imagined! — their own beds. But a few of the cars would be following the funeral van, following it all the way to the mortuary.
Rebus travelled in the front of Flight's own car. Both men spent the journey in desperate pursuit of a conversational opening and as a result said very little until they were near their destination.
`Do we know who she was?' asked Rebus.
`Jean Cooper,' said Flight. `We found ID in her handbag.'
`Any reason for her to be on that path?'
`She was going home from work. She worked in an off-licence nearby. Her sister tells us she finished work at seven.'
'When was the body found?'
`Quarter to ten.'
`That's a fair gap.'
`We've got witnesses who saw her in the Dog and Duck. That's a pub near where she works. She used to go in there for a drink some evenings. The barmaid reckons she left at nine or thereabouts.'
Rebus stared out of the windscreen. The roads were still fairly busy considering the time of night and they passed groups of youthful and raucous pedestrians.
`There's a club in Stokie,' Flight explained. `Very popular, but the buses have stopped by the time it comes out so everyone walks home.'
Rebus nodded, then asked: 'Stokie?'
Flight smiled. `Stoke Newington. You probably passed through it on your way from King's Cross.'
`God knows,' said Rebus. `It all looked the same to me. I think my taxi driver had me down as a tourist. We took so long from King's Cross I think we might have come via the M25.' Rebus waited for Flight to laugh, but all he raised was a sliver of a smile. There was another pause. `Was this Jean Cooper single?' Rebus asked at last.'
`Married.'
`She wasn't wearing a wedding, ring.'
Flight nodded. 'Separated. She lived with her sister. No kids.'
`And she went drinking by herself.'
Flight glanced towards Rebus. `What are you saying?' Rebus shrugged. `Nothing. It's just that if she liked a good time, maybe that's how she met her killer.'
`It's possible.'
`At any rate, whether she knew him or not, the killer could have followed her from the pub.'
`We'll be talking to everybody who was there, don't worry.'
`Either that,' said Rebus, thinking aloud, `or the killer was waiting by the river for anyone who happened along. Somebody might have seen him.'
`We'll be asking around,' said Flight. His voice had taken on a much harder edge.
`Sorry,' said Rebus. `A severe case of teaching my granny to suck eggs.'
Flight turned to him again. They were about to take a left through some hospital gates. `I am not your granny,' he said. `And any comments you have to make are welcome. Maybe eventually you'll come up with something I haven't already thought of.'
`Of course,' said Rebus, `this couldn't have happened in Scotland.'
'Oh?' Flight had a half-sneer on his face. 'Why's that then? Too civilised up there in the frozen north? I remember when you had the worst football hooligans in the world. Maybe you still do, only these days they look like butter wouldn't melt in their underpants.'
But Rebus was shaking his head. `No, it wouldn't have happened to Jean Cooper, that's all I meant. Our off-licences don't open on Sunday.'