Fleshmarket Alley

by Ian Rankin

  “Lucky you.”

  Greenlaw stuck out her bottom lip. “What about later?”

  “I’ll let you into a secret: Lex is going to be at the Opal Lounge at nine.”

  “Is he?”

  “I’m sure he’d buy you a drink.”

  “But that’s hours away,” Greenlaw protested.

  “Tough it out,” Siobhan advised, rising to her feet. “And thanks for talking to me.”

  She was ready to leave, but Greenlaw gestured for her to sit down again. She started rummaging in the desk drawers, finally producing a pad of paper and a pen.

  “That gun you were talking about,” she said, “what was it called again . . . ?”

  At Knoxland, the Portakabin was being lifted by crane onto the back of a lorry. Heads were at windows, the tower-block residents watching the maneuver. More graffiti had been added to the Portakabin since Rebus’s last visit, its window had been smashed further, and someone had tried setting fire to its door.

  “And the roof,” Shug Davidson added for Rebus’s benefit. “Lighter fluid, newspapers, and an old car tire.”

  “That amazes me.”

  “What does?”

  “Newspapers—you mean someone in Knoxland actually reads?”

  Davidson’s smile was short-lived. He folded his arms. “I wonder sometimes why we bother.”

  As he spoke, Gareth Baird was being led from the nearest tower block by the same two uniforms. All three looked numb with exhaustion.

  “Nothing?” Davidson asked. One of the uniforms shook his head.

  “Forty or fifty flats, we got no answer.”

  “No way I’m coming back!” Gareth complained.

  “You will if we want you to,” Rebus warned him.

  “Should we drop him home?” the uniform asked.

  As Rebus shook his head, his eyes were on Gareth. “Nothing wrong with the bus. There’s one every half hour.”

  Gareth’s eyebrows dipped in disbelief. “After everything I’ve done.”

  “No, son,” Rebus corrected him, “because of everything you’ve done. You’ve only just started paying for that. Bus stop’s over that way, I think.” Rebus pointed towards the highway. “Through the underpass, if you’re brave enough.”

  Gareth looked around him, seeing not one sympathetic face. “Thanks a bunch,” he muttered, stomping off.

  “Back to the station, lads,” Davidson told the uniforms. “Sorry you drew today’s short straw . . .”

  The uniforms nodded and headed for their patrol car.

  “Nice little surprise for them,” Davidson told Rebus. “Someone’s smashed a whole carton of eggs on their windscreen.”

  Rebus shook his head in mock disbelief. “You mean someone in Knoxland buys fresh food?” he said.

  Davidson didn’t smile this time. He was reaching for his mobile. Rebus recognized the ring tone: “Scots Wha Hae.” Davidson shrugged. “One of my kids was mucking around last night . . . I forgot to change it back.” He answered the call, Rebus listening.

  “Speaking . . . Oh yes, Mr. Allan.” Davidson rolled his eyes. “Yes, that’s right . . . He did?” Davidson locked eyes with Rebus. “That’s interesting. Any chance I could speak to you in person?” He glanced at his watch. “Sometime today ideally . . . happens I’m free right now if you can spare . . . No, I’m sure it won’t take long . . . we could be there in twenty minutes . . . Yes, I’m sure of that. Thanks then. Cheers . . .” Davidson ended the call and stared at his handset.

  “Mr. Allan?” Rebus prompted.

  “Rory Allan,” Davidson said, still distracted.

  “The Scotsman editor?”

  “One of his news team’s just told him they took a phone call a week or so back from a foreign-sounding guy calling himself Stef.”

  “As in Stef Yurgii?”

  “Sounds likely . . . said he was a reporter and had a story he wanted to write.”

  “What about?”

  Davidson shrugged. “That’s why I’m meeting Rory Allan.”

  “Need some company, big boy?” Rebus gave his most winning smile.

  Davidson thought for a moment. “It should be Ellen, really . . .”

  “Except she’s not here.”

  “But I could call her.”

  Rebus tried for a look of outrage. “Are you spurning me, Shug?”

  Davidson hesitated a few more moments, then put the mobile back into his pocket. “Only if you’re on your best behavior,” he said.

  “Scout’s honor.” Rebus gave a salute.

  “God help me,” Davidson said, as if he already regretted his momentary weakness.

  Edinburgh’s daily broadsheet was housed in a new building opposite the BBC on Holyrood Road. There was a good view of the cranes which still dominated the sky above the emerging Scottish Parliament complex.

  “Wonder if they’ll finish it before the cost finishes us,” Davidson mused, walking into the Scotsman building. The security guard let them through a turnstile and told them to take the lift to the first floor, from where they could look down onto the journalists in their open-plan environment below. To the rear was a glass wall, offering views onto Salisbury Crags. Smokers were puffing away on a balcony outside, letting Rebus know that he wouldn’t be able to indulge in this place. Rory Allan came towards them.

  “DI Davidson,” he said, instinctively homing in on Rebus.

  “I’m actually DI Rebus. Just because I look like his dad doesn’t mean he’s not the boss.”

  “Guilty of ageism as charged,” Allan said, shaking first Rebus’s hand and then Davidson’s. “There’s a meeting room free . . . follow me.”

  They entered a long narrow room with an elongated oval table at its center.

  “Smells brand-new,” Rebus commented of the furnishings.

  “Place doesn’t get used much,” the editor explained. Rory Allan was in his thirties, with rapidly receding hair, prematurely silver, and John Lennon-style glasses. He’d left his jacket back in his own office and wore a pale blue shirt with red silk tie, sleeves rolled up in workmanlike fashion. “Sit down, won’t you? Can I get either of you a coffee?”

  “We’re fine, thanks, Mr. Allan.”

  Allan nodded his satisfaction with this. “To business then . . . You’ll appreciate that we could have gone to print with this and let you find out for yourselves?”

  Davidson bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment. There was a knock at the door.

  “Come!” Allan barked.

  A smaller version of the editor seemed to appear: same hairstyle, similar glasses, sleeves rolled up.

  “This is Danny Watling. Danny’s one of our news staff. I asked him to join us so he could tell you himself.” Allan gestured for the journalist to sit.

  “Not much to tell,” Danny Watling said, in a voice so quiet Rebus, seated across the table from him, strained to catch it. “I was working the desk . . . picked up a phone call . . . guy said he was a reporter, had a story he wanted to write.”

  Shug Davidson sat with his fingers pressed together on the table. “Did he say what it was about?”

  Watling shook his head. “He was cagey . . . and his English wasn’t great. It was like the words had come from a dictionary.”

  “Or he was reading them out?” Rebus interrupted.

  Watling considered this. “Maybe reading them out, yes.”

  Davidson asked for an explanation. “Girlfriend might have written them,” Rebus explained. “Her English is supposed to be better than Stef’s.”

  “He told you his name?” Davidson asked the reporter.

  “Stef, yes.”

  “No surname?”

  “I don’t think he wanted me to know.” Watling looked to his editor. “Thing is, we get dozens of crank calls . . .”

  “Danny perhaps didn’t take him as seriously as he might have,” Allan commented, picking at an invisible thread on his trousers.

  “No, well . . .” Watling blushed at the throat. “I said we didn
’t normally use freelancers, but if he wanted to talk to someone, we might give him a share of the byline.”

  “What did he say to that?” Rebus asked.

  “Didn’t seem to understand. That made me a bit more suspicious.”

  “He didn’t know what ‘freelance’ meant?” Davidson guessed.

  “Or maybe he just didn’t have an equivalent in his own language,” Rebus argued.

  Watling blinked a few times. “With benefit of hindsight,” he told Rebus, “I think that may be right . . .”

  “And he gave you no inkling what this story of his might be?”

  “No. I think he wanted a face-to-face with me first.”

  “An offer you turned down?”

  Watling’s back stiffened. “Oh no, I agreed to see him. Ten o’clock that night outside Jenner’s.”

  “Jenner’s department store?” Davidson asked.

  Watling nodded. “It was about the only place he knew . . . I tried a few pubs, even the really well known ones that only tourists would be seen dead in. But he hardly seemed to know the city at all.”

  “Did you ask him to name a meeting place?”

  “I said I’d go anywhere he wanted, but he couldn’t think of a single place. Then I mentioned Princes Street, and he knew that, so I decided on the biggest landmark I knew.”

  “But he didn’t show up?” Rebus guessed.

  The reporter shook his head slowly. “That was probably the night before he died.”

  The room was quiet for a moment. “Could be something or nothing,” Davidson felt compelled to spell out.

  “It might give you a motive, though,” Rory Allan added.

  “Another motive, you mean,” Davidson corrected him. “The papers—including your own, I think, Mr. Allan—have been happy till now to focus on it as a race crime.”

  The editor shrugged. “I’m just speculating . . .”

  Rebus was staring at the reporter. “Have you got any notes?” he asked. Watling nodded, then looked to his boss, who granted permission with a nod. Watling handed Davidson a single folded sheet of notepaper, torn from a lined pad. Davidson took only a few seconds to digest the contents and slide the sheet across the table to Rebus.

  Steph . . . East European???

  Journ. story

  10 2nite Jenrs

  “Doesn’t add what I’d call a new dimension,” Rebus stated blandly. “He didn’t call again?”

  “No.”

  “Not even to one of the other staffers?” A shake of the head. “And when he spoke to you, that was the first call he’d made?” A nod. “I don’t suppose you thought to get a phone number from him, or trace where he was calling from?”

  “Sounded like a call box. Traffic was close by.”

  Rebus thought of the bus stop on the edge of Knoxland . . . There was a phone box about fifteen yards from it, next to the roadway. “Do we know where the nine-nine-nine call came from?” he asked Davidson.

  “Phone box near the underpass,” Davidson confirmed.

  “Maybe the same one?” Watling guessed.

  “Almost a news story in itself,” his editor joked. “‘Working phone box found in Knoxland.’”

  Shug Davidson was looking at Rebus, who offered a twitch of one shoulder, indicating that he’d run out of questions. Both men started to rise.

  “Well, thanks for getting in touch, Mr. Allan. We do appreciate it.”

  “I know it’s not much . . .”

  “Still, it’s another piece of the jigsaw.”

  “And how’s that jigsaw progressing, Inspector?”

  “I’d say we’ve finished the border, just got to fill in the middle.”

  “The most difficult part,” Allan offered, his voice sympathetic. There were handshakes all round. Watling bustled back to his desk. Allan waved to the two detectives as the lift doors closed. Out on the street, Davidson pointed to a café across the road.

  “My treat,” he said.

  Rebus was lighting a cigarette. “Fine, but give me a minute to smoke this . . .” He took in a lungful and exhaled through his nostrils, picked a loose shred of tobacco from his tongue. “So it’s a jigsaw, eh?”

  “Man like Allan works with clichés . . . thought I’d give him one to chew over.”

  “Thing about jigsaws,” Rebus commented, “is that they all depend on the number of pieces.”

  “That’s true, John.”

  “And how many pieces have we got?”

  “To be honest, half are lying on the floor, maybe even a few under the sofa and the edge of the carpet. Now will you hurry up and smoke that bastard? I need an espresso pronto.”

  “It’s a terrible thing to see someone so addicted to their fix,” Rebus said, before drawing more deeply on his cigarette.

  Five minutes later, they were sitting stirring their coffees, Davidson chewing on sticky gobbets of cherry cake.

  “By the way,” he said between mouthfuls, “I’ve got something for you.” He patted his jacket pockets, and produced a cassette tape. “It’s a recording of the emergency call.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I let Gareth Baird hear it.”

  “And was it Yurgii’s girlfriend?”

  “He wasn’t sure. Like he said, it’s not exactly Dolby Pro Logic.”

  “Thanks anyway.” Rebus pocketed the tape.

  14

  He played it in his car on the way home. Fiddled with the controls for bass and treble, but wasn’t able to improve much on the quality. The voice of a frantic woman, counterpointed by the professional calm of the emergency operator.

  Dying . . . he’s dying . . . oh my God . . .

  Can you give us an address, madam?

  Knoxland . . . between the buildings . . . the tall buildings . . . he is . . . sidewalk . . .

  You need an ambulance?

  Dead . . . dead . . . Collapsing into shrieks and sobs.

  The police have been alerted. Can you stay there till they arrive, please? Madam? Hello, madam . . . ?

  What? What?

  Can I take your name, please?

  They’ve killed him . . . he said . . . oh my God . . .

  We’ll send an ambulance. Is that the only address you can give? Madam? Hello, are you still there . . . ?

  But she wasn’t. The line was dead. Rebus wondered again if she’d used the same phone box as Stef when he’d called Danny Watling. He wondered, too, what the story might be, the one which necessitated a face-to-face . . . Stef Yurgii with his own journalistic instincts, talking to Knoxland’s immigrants . . . reluctant to see his story stolen by others. Rebus wound the tape back.

  They’ve killed him . . . he said . . .

  Said what? Warned her this would happen? Told her his life was in danger?

  Because of a story?

  Rebus signaled and pulled over to the side of the road. He played the tape one more time, all the way through and with the volume up. The background hiss seemed still to be there once the tape had been stopped. He felt like he was at altitude, needing his ears to pop.

  It was a race crime, a hate crime. Ugly but simple, the killer bitter and twisted, his act earthing all that anger.

  Well, wasn’t it?

  Kids without a father . . . guards brainwashed into a fear of toys . . . tires burning on a roof . . .

  “What in Christ’s name is happening here?” he found himself asking. The world passed by, determined not to notice: cars grinding homewards; pedestrians making eye contact only with the sidewalk ahead of them, because what you didn’t see couldn’t hurt you. A fine, brave world awaiting the new parliament. An aging country dispatching its talents to the four corners of the globe . . . unwelcoming to visitor and migrant alike.

  “What in Christ’s name?” he whispered, hands strangling the steering wheel. He noticed there was a pub just a few yards farther on. His car might get a ticket, but he could always risk it.

  But no . . . if he’d wanted a drink, he’d have headed to the Ox. Instead he was goin
g home, same as the other workers. A long hot bath and maybe one or two nips from a bottle of malt. There was a new batch of CDs he hadn’t listened to yet, picked up the weekend before: Jackie Leven, Lou Reed, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers . . . Plus the ones Siobhan had loaned him: Snow Patrol and Grant-Lee Phillips . . . He’d promised them back by last week.

  Maybe he could give her a call, see if she was busy. They didn’t have to go drinking: curry and beer at his place or hers, some music and chat. Things had been a bit awkward since the time he’d wrapped her in his arms and kissed her. Not that they’d talked about it; he reckoned she just wanted to put it behind them. But it didn’t mean they couldn’t sit in a room together, sharing curry.

  Did it?

  But then she’d probably have other plans. She had friends, after all. And what did he have? All his years in this city, doing the job he did, and what was waiting for him back home?

  Ghosts.

  Vigils at his window, staring past his reflection.

  He thought of Caro Quinn, surrounded by pairs of eyes . . . her own ghosts. She interested him in part because she represented a challenge: he had his own prejudices, and she had hers. He was wondering how much common ground they might turn out to share. She had his number, but he doubted she would call. And if he did go drinking, he would drink alone, turning into what his dad had called a “barley king”—the soured hardmen who drank at the bar, facing the row of bottles, supping the cheapest brand of whiskey. Speaking to no one, because they’d stepped away from society, away from dialogue and laughter. The kingdoms they ruled had populations of one.

  Finally, he ejected the tape. Shug could have it back. It wasn’t going to reveal any sudden secrets. All it told him was that a woman had cared about Stef Yurgii.

  A woman who might know why he’d died.

  A woman who’d gone to ground.

  So why worry? Leave the job at the office, John. That’s all it should be to you: a job. The bastards who’d found him a lowly corner at Gayfield Square merited nothing more. He shook his head, scrubbed at his scalp with his hands, trying to clear everything out of there. Then he signaled back into the stream of traffic.

  He was going home, and the world could go shaft itself.