Mortal Causes

by Ian Rankin

  Ah, thought Rebus, so that was why the Farmer was being a bit more thorough than usual. Normally, he’d just let Lauderdale get on with it. Lauderdale was good at running an office. You just didn’t want him out there on the street with you. Watson was shuffling the papers on his desk.

  ‘I see the Can Gang have been at it again.’

  It was time to move on.

  Rebus had had dealings in Pilmuir before. He’d seen a good policeman go wrong there. He’d tasted darkness there. The sour feeling returned as he drove past stunted grass verges and broken saplings. Though no tourists ever came here, there was a welcome sign. It comprised somebody’s gable-end, with white painted letters four feet high: ENJOY YOUR VISIT TO THE GAR-B.

  Gar-B was what the kids (for want of a better term) called the Garibaldi estate. It was a mish-mash of early-’60s terraced housing and late-’60s tower blocks, everything faced with grey harling, with boring swathes of grass separating the estate from the main road. There were a lot of orange plastic traffic cones lying around. They would make goalposts for a quick game of football, or chicanes for the bikers. Last year, some enterprising souls had put them to better use, using them to divert traffic off the main road and into the Gar-B, where youths lined the slip-road and pelted the cars with rocks and bottles. If the drivers ran from their vehicles, they were allowed to go, while the cars were stripped of anything of value, right down to tyres, seat-covers and engine parts.

  Later in the year, when the road needed digging up, a lot of drivers ignored the genuine traffic cones and as a result drove into newly dug ditches. By next morning, their abandoned vehicles had been stripped to the bone. The Gar-B would have stripped the paint if they could.

  You had to admire their ingenuity. Give these kids money and opportunity and they’d be the saviours of the capitalist state. Instead, the state gave them dole and daytime TV. Rebus was watched by a gang of pre-teens as he parked. One of them called out.

  ‘Where’s yir swanky car?’

  ‘It’s no’ him,’ said another, kicking the first lazily in the ankle. The two of them were on bicycles and looked like the leaders, being a good year or two older than their cohorts. Rebus waved them over.

  ‘What is it?’ But they came anyway.

  ‘Keep an eye on my car,’ he told them. ‘Anyone touches it, you touch them, okay? There’s a couple of quid for you when I get back.’

  ‘Half now,’ the first said quickly. The second nodded. Rebus handed over half the money, which they pocketed.

  ‘Naebody’d touch that car anyway, mister,’ said the second, producing a chorus of laughter from behind him.

  Rebus shook his head slowly: the patter here was probably sharper than most of the stand-ups on the Fringe. The two boys could have been brothers. More than that, they could have been brothers in the 1930s. They were dressed in cheap modern style, but had shorn heads and wide ears and sallow faces with dark-ringed eyes. You saw them staring out from old photographs wearing boots too big for them and scowls too old. They didn’t just seem older than the other kids; they seemed older than Rebus himself.

  When he turned his back, he imagined them in sepia.

  He wandered towards the community centre. He’d to pass some lock-up garages and one of the three twelve-storey blocks of flats. The community centre itself was no more than a hall, small and tired looking with boarded windows and the usual indecipherable graffiti. Surrounded by concrete, it had a low flat roof, asphalt black, on which lay four teenagers smoking cigarettes. Their chests were naked, their t-shirts tied around their waists. There was so much broken glass up there, they could have doubled as fakirs in a magic show. One of them had a pile of sheets of paper, and was folding them into paper planes which he released from the roof. Judging by the number of planes littering the grass, it had been a busy morning at the control tower.

  Paint had peeled in long strips from the centre’s doors, and one layer of the plywood beneath had been punctured by a foot or a fist. But the doors were locked fast by means of not one but two padlocks. Two more youths sat on the ground, backs against the doors, legs stretched in front of them and crossed at the ankles, for all the world like security guards on a break. Their trainers were in bad repair, their denims patched and torn and patched again. Maybe it was just the fashion. One wore a black t-shirt, the other an unbuttoned denim jacket with no shirt beneath.

  ‘It’s shut,’ the denim jacket said.

  ‘When does it open?’

  ‘The night. No polis allowed though.’

  Rebus smiled. ‘I don’t think I know you. What’s your name?’

  The smile back at him was a parody. Black t-shirt grunted an undeveloped laugh. Rebus noticed flecks of white scale in the youth’s hair. Neither youth was about to say anything. The teenagers on the roof were standing now, ready to leap in should anything develop.

  ‘Hard men,’ said Rebus. He turned and started to walk away. Denim jacket got to his feet and came after him.

  ‘What’s up, Mr Polisman?’

  Rebus didn’t bother looking at the youth, but he stopped walking. ‘Why should anything be up?’ One of the paper planes, aimed or not, hit him on the leg. He picked it up. On the roof, they were laughing quietly. ‘Why should anything be up?’ he repeated.

  ‘Behave. You’re not our usual plod.’

  ‘A change is as good as a rest.’

  ‘Arrest? What for?’

  Rebus smiled again. He turned to the youth. The face was just leaving acne behind it, and would be good looking for a few more years before it started to decline. Poor diet and alcohol would be its undoing if drugs or fights weren’t. The hair was fair and curly, like a child’s hair, but not thick. There was a quick intelligence to the eyes, but the eyes themselves were narrow. The intelligence would be narrow too, focusing only on the main chance, the next deal. There was quick anger in those eyes too, and something further back that Rebus didn’t like to think about.

  ‘With an act like yours,’ he said, ‘you should be on the Fringe.’

  ‘I fuckn hate the Festival.’

  ‘Join the club. What’s your name, son?’

  ‘You like names, don’t you?’

  ‘I can find out.’

  The youth slipped his hands into his tight jeans pockets. ‘You don’t want to.’

  ‘No?’

  A slow shake of the head. ‘Believe me, you really don’t want to.’ The youth turned, heading back to his friends. ‘Or next time,’ he said, ‘your car might not be there at all.’

  Sure enough, as Rebus approached he saw that his car was sinking into the ground. It looked like maybe it was taking cover. But it was only the tyres. They’d been generous; they’d only slashed two of them. He looked around him. There was no sign of the pre-teen gang, though they might be watching from the safe distance of a tower-block window.

  He leaned against the car and unfolded the paper plane. It was the flyer for a Fringe show, and a blurb on the back explained that the theatre group in question were uprooting from the city centre in order to play the Garibaldi Community Centre for one night.

  ‘You know not what you do,’ Rebus said to himself.

  Some young mothers were crossing the football pitch. A crying baby was being shaken on its buggy springs. A toddler was being dragged screaming by the arm, his legs frozen in protest so that they scraped the ground. Both baby and toddler were being brought back into the Gar-B. But not without a fight.

  Rebus didn’t blame them for resisting.

  4

  Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes was in the Murder Room, handing a polystyrene cup of tea to Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke, and laughing about something.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ asked Rebus.

  ‘The one about the hard-up squid,’ Holmes answered.

  ‘The one with the moustache?’

  Holmes nodded, wiping an imaginary tear from his eye. ‘And Gervase the waiter. Brilliant, eh, sir?’

  ‘Brilliant.’ Rebus looked ar
ound. The Murder Room was all purposeful activity. Photos of the victim and the locus had been pinned up on one wall, a staff rota not far from it. The staff rota was on a plastic wipe-board, and a WPC was checking names from a list against a series of duties and putting them on the board in thick blue marker-pen. Rebus went over to her. ‘Keep DI Flower and me away from one another, eh? Even if it means a slip of the pen.’

  ‘I could get into trouble for that, Inspector.’ She was smiling, so Rebus winked at her. Everyone knew that having Rebus and Flower in close proximity, two detectives who hated one another, would be counter productive. But of course Lauderdale was in charge. It was Lauderdale’s list, and Lauderdale liked to see sparks fly, so much so that he might have been happier in a foundry.

  Holmes and Clarke knew what Rebus had been talking about with the WPC, but said nothing.

  ‘I’m going back down Mary King’s Close,’ Rebus said quietly. ‘Anyone want to tag along?’

  He had two takers.

  Rebus was keeping an eye on Brian Holmes. Holmes hadn’t tendered his resignation yet, but you never knew when it might come. When you joined the police, of course, you signed on for the long haul, but Holmes’s significant other was pulling on the other end of the rope, and it was hard to tell who’d win the tug o’ war.

  On the other hand, Rebus had stopped keeping an eye on Siobhan Clarke. She was past her probation, and was going to be a good detective. She was quick, clever and keen. Police officers were seldom all three. Rebus himself might pitch for thirty per cent on a good day.

  The day was overcast and sticky, with lots of bugs in the air and no sign of a dispersing breeze.

  ‘What are they, greenfly?’

  ‘Maybe midges.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what they are, they’re disgusting.’

  The windscreen was smeared by the time they reached the City Chambers, and there being no fluid in the wiper bottle, the windscreen stayed that way. It struck Rebus that the Festival really was a High Street thing. Most of the city centre streets were as quiet or as busy as usual. The High Street was the hub. The Chambers’ small car park being full, he parked on the High Street. When he got out, he brought a sheet of kitchen-towel with him, spat on it, and cleaned the windscreen.

  ‘What we need is some rain.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  A transit van and a flat-back trailer were parked outside the entrance to Mary King’s Close, evidence that the builders were back at work. The butcher’s shop would still be taped off, but that didn’t stop the renovations.

  ‘Inspector Rebus?’

  An old man had been waiting for them. He was tall and fit looking and wore an open cream-coloured raincoat despite the day’s heat. His hair had turned not grey or silver but a kind of custard yellow, and he wore half-moon glasses most of the way down his nose, as though he needed them only to check the cracks in the pavement.

  ‘Mr Blair-Fish?’ Rebus shook the brittle hand.

  ‘I’d like to apologise again. My great-nephew can be such a –’

  ‘No need to apologise, sir. Your great-nephew did us a favour. If he hadn’t gone down there with those two lassies, we wouldn’t have found the body so fast as we did. The quicker the better in a murder investigation.’

  Blair-Fish inspected his oft-repaired shoes, then accepted this with a slow nod. ‘Still, it’s an embarrassment.’

  ‘Not to us, sir.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘Now, if you’ll lead the way …?’

  Mr Blair-Fish led the way.

  He took them in through the door and down the flights of stairs, out of daylight and into a world of low-wattage bulbs beyond which lay the halogen glare of the builders. It was like looking at a stage-set. The workers moved with the studied precision of actors. You could charge a couple of quid a time and get an audience, if not a Fringe First Award. The gaffer knew police when he saw them, and nodded a greeting. Otherwise, nobody paid much attention, except for the occasional sideways and appraising glance towards Siobhan Clarke. Builders were builders, below ground as above.

  Blair-Fish was providing a running commentary. Rebus reckoned he’d been the guide when the constable had come on the tour. Rebus heard about how the close had been a thriving thoroughfare prior to the plague, only one of many such plagues to hit Edinburgh. When the denizens moved back, they swore the close was haunted by the spirits of those who had perished there. They all moved out again and the street fell into disuse. Then came a fire, leaving only the first few storeys untouched. (Edinburgh tenements back then could rise to a precarious twelve storeys or more.) After which, the city merely laid slabs across what remained and built again, burying Mary King’s Close.

  ‘The old town was a narrow place, you must remember, built along a ridge or, if you enjoy legend, on the back of a buried serpent. Long and narrow. Everyone was squeezed together, rich and poor living cheek by jowl. In a tenement like this you’d have your paupers at the top, your gentry in the middle floors, and your artisans and commercial people at street level.’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Holmes, genuinely interested.

  ‘The gentry got fed up,’ said Blair-Fish. ‘When the New Town was built on the other side of Nor’ Loch, they were quick to move. With the gentry gone, the old town became dilapidated, and stayed that way for a long time.’ He pointed down some steps into an alcove. ‘That was the baker’s. See those flat stones? That’s where the oven was. If you touch them, they’re still warmer than the stones around them.’

  Siobhan Clarke had to test this. She came back shrugging. Rebus was glad he’d brought Holmes and Clarke with him. They kept Blair-Fish busy while he could keep a surreptitious eye on the builders. This had been his plan all along: to appear to be inspecting Mary King’s Close, while really inspecting the builders. They didn’t look nervous; well, no more nervous than you would expect. They kept their eyes away from the butcher’s shop, and whistled quietly as they worked. They did not seem inclined to discuss the murder. Someone was up a ladder dismantling a run of pipes. Someone else was mending brickwork at the top of a scaffold.

  Further into the tour, away from the builders, Blair-Fish took Siobhan Clarke aside to show her where a child had been bricked up in a chimney, a common complaint among eighteenth-century chimney sweeps.

  ‘The Farmer asked a good question,’ Rebus confided to Holmes. ‘He said, why would you bring anyone down here? Think about it. It shows you must be local. Only locals know about Mary King’s Close, and even then only a select few.’ It was true, the public tour of the close was not common knowledge, and tours themselves were by no means frequent. ‘They’d have to have been down here themselves, or know someone who had. If not, they’d more likely get lost than find the butcher’s.’

  Holmes nodded. ‘A shame there’s no record of the tour parties.’ This had been checked, the tours were informal, parties of a dozen or more at a time. There was no written record. ‘Could be they knew about the building work and reckoned the body would be down here for weeks.’

  ‘Or maybe,’ said Rebus, ‘the building work is the reason they were down here in the first place. Someone might have tipped them off. We’re checking everyone.’

  ‘Is that why we’re here just now? Giving the crew a once-over?’ Rebus nodded, and Holmes nodded back. Then he had an idea. ‘Maybe it was a way of sending a message.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been wondering. But what kind of message, and who to?’

  ‘You don’t go for the IRA idea?’

  ‘It’s plausible and implausible at the same time,’ Rebus said. ‘We’ve got nothing here to interest the paramilitaries.’

  ‘We’ve got Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, the Festival …’

  ‘He has a point.’

  They turned towards the voice. Two men were standing in torchlight. Rebus recognised neither of them. As the men came forwards, Rebus studied both. The man who had spoken, the slightly younger of the two, had an English accent a
nd the look of a London copper. It was the hands in the trouser pockets that did it. That and the air of easy superiority that went with the gesture. Plus of course he was wearing old denims and a black leather bomber-jacket. He had close cropped brown hair spiked with gel, and a heavy pockmarked face. He was probably in his late-thirties but looked like a fortysomething with coronary problems. His eyes were a piercing blue. It was difficult to meet them. He didn’t blink often, like he didn’t want to miss any of the show.

  The other man was well-built and fit, in his late-forties, with ruddy cheeks and a good head of black hair just turning silver at the edges. He looked as if he needed to shave two or even three times a day. His suit was dark blue and looked straight off the tailor’s dummy. He was smiling.

  ‘Inspector Rebus?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘I’m DCI Kilpatrick.’

  Rebus knew the name of course. It was interesting at last to have a face to put to it. If he remembered right, Kilpatrick was still in the SCS, the Scottish Crime Squad.

  ‘I thought you worked out of Stuart Street, sir,’ Rebus said, shaking hands.

  ‘I moved back from Glasgow a few months ago. I don’t suppose it made the front page of the Scotsman, but I’m heading the squad here now.’

  Rebus nodded. The SCS took on serious crimes, where cross-force investigations were necessary. Drugs were their main concern, or had been. Rebus knew men who’d been seconded to the SCS. You stayed three or four years and came out two things: unwillingly, and tough as second-day bacon. Kilpatrick was introducing his companion.

  ‘This is DI Abernethy from Special Branch. He’s come all the way from London to see us.’

  ‘That takes the biscuit,’ said Rebus.

  ‘My grandad was a Jock,’ Abernethy answered, gripping Rebus’s hand and not getting the joke. Rebus introduced Holmes and, when she returned, Siobhan Clarke. From the colouring in Clarke’s cheeks, Rebus reckoned someone along the way had made a pass at her. He decided to rule out Mr Blair-Fish, which still left plenty of suspects.