Fleshmarket Alley

by Ian Rankin

  “We better leave you to it,” Siobhan told Kate. “Thanks for talking to us.” She made to get up from the table.

  “I’m sorry I cannot be more help.”

  “If you remember anything else about those two men . . .”

  Kate nodded. “I’ll let you know.” She paused. “The film with me in it . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “How many copies do you think there are?”

  “No way of telling. Your friend Alberta . . . does she still dance at the Nook?”

  Kate shook her head. “She left soon afterwards.”

  “You mean, soon after the film was made?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how long ago was that?”

  “Two or three weeks.”

  They thanked Kate again and headed for the door. Outside, they faced each other. Siobhan spoke first. “Donny Cruikshank must’ve just been out of jail.”

  “No wonder he looked feverish. You going to try finding Alberta?”

  Siobhan let out a sigh. “I don’t know . . . It’s been a long day.”

  “Fancy another drink someplace?” She shook her head. “Got a date with Les Young?”

  “Why? Have you got one with Caro Quinn?”

  “I was just asking.” Rebus took out his cigarettes.

  “Give you a lift?” Siobhan offered.

  “I think I’ll walk, thanks all the same.”

  “Okay then . . .” She hesitated, watched him light the cigarette. Then, when he didn’t say anything, she turned and headed for her car. He watched her go. Concentrated on smoking for a moment, then crossed the road. There was a hotel, and he loitered by its entrance. He’d just finished the cigarette when he saw Barney Grant walking downhill from the direction of the Nook. He had his hands in his pockets and was whistling: no sign that he was worried about his job or his boss. He entered the pub, and for some reason Rebus checked his watch, then noted down the time.

  And stayed where he was, in front of the hotel. Looking in through the windows, he could see its restaurant. It looked white and sterile, the sort of place where the size of each plate is in inverse proportion to the amount of food served on it. There were only a few tables in use, the staff outnumbering clients. One of the waiters gave him a look, trying to shoo him away, but Rebus just winked back at him. Eventually, just as Rebus was getting bored and deciding to leave, a car drew up outside the pub, engine roaring as it idled, the driver playing with the accelerator. The passenger was talking into a mobile phone. The pub’s door opened and Barney Grant came out, sliding his own mobile back into his pocket as the passenger folded his closed. Grant got into the backseat of the car, which was in movement again even before he’d closed the door. Rebus watched as the car raced up the hill, then began to follow on foot.

  It took him a few minutes to reach the Nook, and he arrived just as the car was taking off again. He stared at the locked door of the Nook, then across the street towards the closed-down shop. No more surveillance, no sign of the parked van. He tried the door of the Nook but it was locked tight. All the same, Barney Grant had dropped in for some reason, the car waiting for him. Rebus hadn’t recognized the driver, but he knew the face in the passenger seat, had known it ever since it had screamed at him when he’d wrestled its owner to the ground, cameras capturing the moment for tabloid posterity.

  Howie Slowther—the kid from Knoxland, the one with the paramilitary tattoo and the race hate.

  Friend of the Nook’s barman . . .

  Either that, or of its owner.

  DAY NINE

  Tuesday

  26

  Dawn raids in Knoxland, the same team who’d chased mollusk-pickers along Cramond’s seashore. Stevenson House—the one with no graffiti. Why so? Either fear or respect. Rebus knew he should have seen it right at the start. Stevenson House had looked different, and it had been treated differently, too.

  The original door-to-door teams had encountered many unanswered knocks there—almost a whole floor of them. Had they gone back and tried again? They had not. Why? Because the murder squad had been stretched . . . and maybe because the officers hadn’t been trying too hard, the victim a statistic to them, nothing more.

  Felix Storey was being more thorough. This time doors would be pounded, letter boxes peered into. This time they wouldn’t take no for an answer. The Immigration Service—as with Customs and Excise—wielded more power than the police. Doors could be kicked in without the need for search warrants. “Due cause” was the phrase Rebus had heard mentioned, and Storey was clear in his own mind that whatever else they might have, they had due cause aplenty.

  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 the 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 pummeled, 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 oversize polyethylene 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 gray coffee to his lips that he’d remembered: this was the same place he’d bought the undrinkable coffee the morning 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 realized 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.

  “We going somewhere?” Storey snapped.

  “Can’t sit in the car all day,” Rebus replied. “Not without catching our death.”

  “Two deaths,” Min Tan stressed, misunderstanding Rebus’s words.

  “One of them was the Kurd?” Rebus asked. “Stef Yurgii?”

  The Chinaman frowned. “Who?”

  “The man who was stabbed. He was one of your lot, wasn’t he?” Rebus had turned in his seat, but Min Tan was shaking his head.

  “I do not know this person.”

  Which served Rebus right for jumping to conclusions. “Peter Hill and Stuart Bullen, they didn’t kill Stef Yurgii?”

  “I tell you, I do not know this man!” Min Tan’s voice had risen.

  “You saw them kill two people,” Storey interrupted. Another shake of the head. “But you just said you did . . .”

  “Everyone knows about it—we all are told about it.”

  “About what?” Rebus persisted.

  “The two . . .” Words seemed to fail Min Tan. “Two bodies . . . you know, after they die.” He pinched the skin of the arm which held his mug. “It all goes, none left.”

  “No skin left?” Rebus guessed. “Bodies with no skin. You mean skeletons?”

  Min Tan wagged a finger triumphantly.

  “And people talk about them?” Rebus went on.

  “One time . . . man not want to work for so low pay. He was loud. He told people not to work, to go free . . .”

  “And he was killed?” Storey interrupted.

  “Not killed!” Min Tan cried in frustration. “Just listen, please! He was taken to a place, and they showed him bodies with no skin. Told him this would happen to him—to everybody—unless he obeyed, did good work.”

  “Two skeletons,” Rebus said quietly, talking to himself. But Min Tan had heard him.

  “Mother and child,” he said, eyes widening in remembered horror. “If they can kill mother and child—not arrested, not found out—they can do anything, kill anyone . . . anyone who disobeys!”

  Rebus nodded his understanding.

  Two skeletons.

  Mother and child.

  “You’ve seen these skeletons?”

  Min Tan shook his head. “Others saw. One a baby, wrapped in newspaper. They showed it in Knoxland, showed the head and hands. Then buried mother and baby in . . .” He sought the words he needed. “Place underground . . .”

  “A cellar?” Rebus suggested.

  Min Tan nodded eagerly. “Buried them there, with one of us watching. He told us the story.”

  Rebus stared out through the windscreen. It made sense: using the skeletons to terrify the immigrants, keep them in fear. Stripping away the wires and screws to make them more authentic. And for a final flourish, pouring concrete over them in front of a witness, that man returning to Knoxland, spreading the story.

  They can do anything, kill anyone . . . anyone who disobeys . . .

  It was half an hour till opening when he knocked on the door of the Warlock.

  Siobhan was with him. He’d called her from his car, after dropping Storey and Min Tan at Torphichen, the Immigration man armed with a few more questions for Bullen and the Irishman. Siobhan hadn’t quite woken up, Rebus having to go over the story more than once. His central point—how many pairs of skeletons have popped up in recent months?

  Her eventual answer: just the one that she could think of.

  “I need to speak to Mangold anyway,” she said now, as Rebus kicked at the door of the Warlock, his polite knock having been ignored.

  “Any particular reason?” he asked.

  “You’ll find out when I question him.”

  “Thanks for sharing.” One final kick and he took a step
back. “Nobody home.”

  She checked her watch. “Cutting it fine.”

  He nodded. Usually there’d be someone inside this close to opening—if only to prime the pumps and fill the till. Cleaner might have come and gone, but whoever was manning the bar should have been limbering up.

  “What did you get up to last night?” Siobhan asked, trying for a conversational tone.

  “Not much.”

  “Not like you to refuse the offer of a lift.”

  “I felt like walking.”

  “So you said.” She folded her arms. “Stop off at any watering holes on route?”

  “Despite what you think, I can go whole hours at a time without a drink.” He busied himself lighting a cigarette. “What about you? Was it another rendezvous with Major Underpants?” She stared at him, and he smiled. “Nicknames have a habit of traveling.”

  “Maybe so, but you’ve got it wrong—it’s Captain, not Major.”

  Rebus shook his head. “Might’ve been that originally, but I can assure you it’s Major now. Funny things, nicknames . . .” He walked to the top of Fleshmarket Alley, blew smoke down it, then noticed something. Walked to the cellar door.

  The cellar door standing ajar.

  Pushed it open with his fist and stepped inside, Siobhan following.

  Ray Mangold was staring at one of the interior walls, hands in his pockets, lost in thought. He was on his own, surrounded by the half-finished building work. The concrete floor had been lifted in its entirety. The rubble had gone, but there was still plenty of dust in the air.

  “Mr. Mangold?” Rebus said.

  Spell broken, Mangold swiveled his head. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, sounding less than thrilled.

  “Nice bruises,” Rebus commented.

  “Healing,” Mangold said, touching his cheek.

  “How did you get them?”

  “Like I told your colleague . . .” Mangold nodded towards Siobhan. “I had a bust-up with a punter.”

  “Who won?”

  “He won’t be drinking in the Warlock again, that’s for sure.”

  “Sorry if we’re interrupting anything,” Siobhan said.