by Ian Rankin
‘That hurts.’
Dr Klasser smiled.
‘So,’ Rebus said, easing his shirt back on, ‘what’ve I got?’
Klasser found a pen that worked and scribbled something on his clipboard. ‘By my estimate, the way you’re going, you’ve got a year, maybe two.’
The two men stared at one another. Rebus knew precisely what the doctor was talking about.
‘I’m serious, John. You smoke, you drink like a fish, and you don’t exercise. Since Patience stopped feeding you, your diet’s gone to hell. Starch and carbohydrate, saturated fat . . .’
Rebus tried to stop listening. He knew his drinking was a problem these days precisely because he’d learned self-control. As a result, few people noticed that he had a problem. He was well dressed at work, alert when the occasion demanded, and even visited the gym some lunchtimes. He ate lazily, and maybe too much, and yes, he was back on the cigs. But then nobody was perfect.
‘An uncanny prognosis, Doctor.’ He finished buttoning his shirt, started tucking it into his waistband, then thought better of it. He felt more comfortable with the shirt outside his trousers. He knew he’d feel even more comfortable with his trouser button undone. ‘And you can tell that just by prodding my back?’
Dr Klasser smiled again. He was folding up his stethoscope. ‘You can’t hide that sort of thing from a doctor, John.’
Rebus eased into his jacket. ‘So,’ he said, ‘see you in the pub later?’
‘I’ll be there around six.’
‘Fine.’
Rebus walked out of the hospital and took a deep breath.
It was two-thirty in the morning, about as cold and dark as the night could get. He thought about checking on Lauderdale, but knew it could wait till morning. His flat was just across The Meadows, but he didn’t fancy the walk. The sleet was still falling, beginning to turn to snow, and there was that stabbing wind, like a thug you meet in a narrow lane, one who won’t let you go.
Then a car horn sounded. Rebus saw a cherry-red Renault 5, and inside it DC Siobhan Clarke, waving towards him. He almost danced to the car.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I heard,’ she said.
‘How come?’ He opened the passenger-side door.
‘I was curious. I wasn’t on shift, but I kept in touch with the station, just to find out what happened at the meet. When I heard about the crash, I got dressed and came down here.’
‘Well, you’re a sight for sore teeth.’
‘Teeth?’
Rebus rubbed his jaw. ‘Sounds crazy, but I think that dunt has given me toothache.’
She started the car. It was lovely and warm. Rebus could feel himself drifting off.
‘Bit of a disaster then?’ she said.
‘A bit.’ They turned out of the gates, heading left towards Tollcross.
‘How’s the CI?’
‘I don’t know. They’re X-raying him. Where are we going?’
‘I’m taking you home.’
‘I should go back to the station.’
She shook her head. ‘I called in. They don’t want you till morning.’
Rebus relaxed a little more. Maybe the painkillers were kicking in. ‘When’s the post-mortem?’
‘Nine-thirty.’ They were on Lauriston Place.
‘There was a shortcut you could have taken back there,’ Rebus told her.
‘It was a one-way street.’
‘Yes, but nobody uses it this time of night.’ He realised what he’d said. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered, rubbing his eyes.
‘So what was it?’ Siobhan Clarke asked. ‘I mean, was it an accident, or were they looking to escape?’
‘Neither,’ Rebus said quietly. ‘If I’d to put money on it, I’d say suicide.’
She looked at him. ‘Both of them?’
He shrugged, then shivered.
At the Tollcross lights they waited in silence until red turned to green. A couple of drunks were walking home, bodies tilted into the wind.
‘Horrible night,’ Clarke said, moving off. Rebus nodded, saying nothing. ‘Will you attend the post-mortem?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t say I’d fancy it.’
‘Do we know who they were yet?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘I keep forgetting, you’re off-duty.’
‘That’s right, I’m off-duty.’
‘What about the car, have we traced that?’
She turned towards him and laughed. It sounded odd to him, there in that stuffy overheated car, that time of night, with all that had gone before. Sudden laughter, as strange a sound as you’d ever hear. He rubbed his jaw and pushed an exploratory finger into his mouth. The teeth he touched seemed solid enough.
Then he saw feet suddenly sweeping out from under two young bodies, the bodies leaning back into space and disappearing. They hadn’t made a sound. No accident, no escape attempt; something fatalistic, something agreed between them.
‘Cold?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not cold.’
She signalled to turn off Melville Drive. To the left, what he could see of The Meadows was covered in a fresh glaze of slow. To the right was Marchmont, and Rebus’s flat.
‘She wasn’t in the car,’ he said flatly.
‘There was always that possibility,’ Siobhan Clarke said. ‘We don’t even know she’s missing, not for a fact.’
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘we don’t.’
‘Just two daft laddies.’ She’d picked up the expression, but it sounded awkward given her English accent. Rebus smiled in the dark.
And then he was home.
She dropped him outside his tenement door, and refused a half-hearted offer of coffee. Rebus didn’t want her to see the dump he called home. The students had moved out in October, leaving the place not quite his. There were things not quite right, not quite the way he remembered. Cutlery was missing, and had been replaced with stuff he hadn’t seen before. It was the same with the crockery. When he’d moved back here from Patience’s, he’d brought his stuff back in boxes. Most of the boxes were in the hall, still waiting to be unpacked.
Exhausted, he climbed the stairs, opened his door, and walked past the boxes, making straight for the living room and his chair.
His chair was much the same as ever. It had remoulded itself quickly to his shape. He sat down, then got up again and checked the radiator. The thing was barely warm, and there was a racking noise from within. He needed a special key, some tool that would open the valve and let it bleed. The other radiators were the same.
He made himself a hot drink, put a tape into the cassette deck, and got the duvet off his bed. Back at his chair he took off some of his clothes and covered himself with the duvet. He reached down, unscrewed the top from a bottle of Macallan, and poured some into his coffee. He drank the first half of the mug, then added more whisky.
He could hear car engines, and metal twisting, and the wind whistling all around. He could see feet, the soles of cheap trainers, something close to a smile on the lips of a fair-haired teenager. But then the smile became darkness, and everything disappeared.
Slowly, he hugged himself to sleep.
3
Down at the City Mortuary in the Cowgate Dr Curt was nowhere to be seen, but Professor Gates was already at work.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you can fall from any height you want; it’s just that last damned half-inch that’s fatal.’
With him around the slab were Inspector John Rebus, Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes, another doctor, and a pathology assistant. The Preliminary Notification of Sudden Death had already been submitted to the Procurator-Fiscal, and now the Sudden Death Report was being prepared on two deceased males, probable identities William David Coyle and James Dixon Taylor.
James Taylor – Rebus looked at the mess over which Professor Gates was fussing and remembered that final embrace. Ain’t it good to know that you’ve got a friend.
The force of the imp
act of the bodies upon the steel deck of Her Majesty’s naval frigate Descant had turned them from human beings into something more like hairy jam. There was some on the slab – the rest sat in gleaming steel buckets. No next of kin was going to be asked to participate in a formal identification. It was the sort of thing they could just about accomplish by DNA-testing, if such proved necessary.
‘Flatpacks, we call them,’ Professor Gates said. ‘Saw a lot at Lockerbie. Scraped them off the ground and took them to the local ice rink. Handy place, an ice rink, when you suddenly find yourself with two hundred and seventy bodies.’
Brian Holmes had seen bad deaths before, but he was not immune. He kept shuffling his feet and shifting his shoulders, and glaring with hard, judgmental eyes at Rebus, who was humming scraps of ‘You’re So Vain’.
Establishing time, date and place of death was straight-forward. Certified cause of death was easy too, though Professor Gates wasn’t sure of the precise wording.
‘Blunt force trauma?’
‘How about boating accident?’ Rebus offered. There were some smiles at that. Like most pathologists, Professor Alexander Gates MD, FRC Path, DMJ (Path), FRCPE, MRCPG, was possessed of a sense of humour as wide as his letter-heading. A quite necessary sense of humour. He didn’t look like a pathologist. He wasn’t tall and cadaverously grey like Dr Curt, but was a bossy, shuffling figure, with the physique of a wrestler rather than an undertaker. He was broad-chested, bull-necked, and had pudgy hands, the fingers of which he delighted in cracking, one at a time or all together.
He liked people to call him Sandy.
‘I’m the one issuing the death certificate,’ he told Brian Holmes, who filled in the relevant box on the rough-up Sudden Death Report. ‘My address care of Police Surgeoncy, Cowgate.’
Rebus and the others watched as Gates made his examination. He was able to confirm the existence of two separate corpses. Samples were taken of veinous blood for grouping, DNA, toxicology, and alcohol. Usually urine samples would be taken also, but that just wasn’t possible, and Gates was even doubtful about the efficacy of blood testing. Vitreous humour and stomach contents were next, along with bile and liver.
Before their eyes, he started to reconstruct the bodies: not so they became identifiable as humans, not entirely, but just so he could be satisfied he had everything the bodies had once had. Nothing missing, and nothing extraneous.
‘I used to love jigsaws when I was a youngster,’ the pathologist said quietly, bent over his task.
Outside it was a dry, freezing day. Rebus remembered liking jigsaws too. He wondered if kids still played with them. The post-mortem over, he stood on the pavement and smoked a cigarette. There were pubs to left and right of him, but none were yet open. His breakfast tot of whisky had all but evaporated.
Brian Holmes came out of the mortuary stuffing a green cardboard file into his briefcase. He saw Rebus rubbing at his jaw.
‘You all right?’
‘Toothache, that’s all.’
It was, too; it was definitely toothache, or at least gum-ache. He couldn’t positively identify any one tooth as the culprit: the pain was just there, swelling below the surface.
‘Give you a lift?’
‘Thanks, Brian, but I’ve got my car.’
Holmes nodded and tugged up his collar. His chin was tucked into a blue lambswool scarf. ‘The bridge is open again,’ he said, ‘one lane southbound.’
‘What about the Cortina?’
‘Howdenhall have it. They’re fingerprinting, just in case she ever was in the car.’
Rebus nodded, saying nothing. Holmes said nothing back.
‘Something I can do for you, Brian?’
‘No, not really. I was just wondering . . . weren’t you supposed to be at the station first thing?’
‘So?’
‘So why come here instead?’
It was a good question. Rebus looked back at the mortuary doors, remembering the scene all over again. The artic, assuming the crash position, Lauderdale spread across the bonnet, then seeing the other car . . . a final embrace . . . a fall.
He shrugged non-committally and made for his car.
Chief Inspector Frank Lauderdale was going to be all right.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that DI Alister Flower was looking for temporary promotion to fill Lauderdale’s shoes.
‘And with the funeral meats not yet cold,’ said Chief Superintendent ‘Farmer’ Watson. He blushed, realising what he’d said. ‘Not that there’s . . . I mean, no funeral or . . .’ He coughed into his bunched fist.
‘Flower’s got a point though, sir,’ said Rebus, covering his boss’s embarrassment. ‘It’s just that he’s got the tact of a tomcat. I mean, somebody’ll have to fill in. How long’s Frank going to be out of the game?’
‘We don’t know.’ The Farmer picked up a sheet of paper and read from it. ‘Both legs broken, two broken ribs, broken wrist, concussion: there’s half a page of diagnosis here.’
Rebus rubbed his bruised cheekbone, wondering if it was responsible for the broken wrist.
‘We don’t even know,’ the Farmer went on quietly, ‘whether he’ll walk again. The breaks were pretty severe. Meantime, the last thing I need is Flower and you vying for any temporary promotion it may or may not be in my power to give.’
‘Understood.’
‘Good.’ The Farmer paused. ‘So what can you tell me about last night?’
‘It’ll be in my report, sir.’
‘Of course it will, but I’d prefer the truth. What was Frank playing at?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean driving around like the Dukes of Hazzard. We’ve got expendables for that sort of escapade.’
‘We were just maintaining a pursuit, sir.’
‘Of course you were.’ Watson studied Rebus. ‘Nothing you’d like to add to that?’
‘Not much, sir. Except that it was no accident, and they’d no intention of getting away. It was a suicide pact: unspoken, but suicide all the same.’
‘And why would they do that?’
‘I’ve no idea, sir.’
The Farmer sighed and sat back in his chair. ‘John, I think you should know my feelings on all of this.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘It was an utter balls-up from start to finish.’
. . . And that was putting it mildly.
They were only there because of power, because of influence, because a favour was asked. That was how it had started: with a discreet call from the city’s Lord Provost to the deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, requesting that his daughter’s disappearance be investigated.
Not that anything unlawful was hinted at. It wasn’t that she’d been abducted, assaulted, murdered, nothing like that. It was just that she’d walked out of the house one morning and not come back. Yes, she’d left a note. It was addressed to her father and the message was simple: ‘Arseholes, I’m off.’ It was unsigned, but was in the daughter’s handwriting.
Had there been a disagreement? An argument? Strong words? Well, it was impossible to have a teenager in the house without the occasional difference of view. And how old was the Lord Provost’s daughter, little Kirstie Kennedy? There came the crux: she was seventeen, and a mature, well-educated seventeen at that, well able to look after herself and old enough legally to leave home any time she wished. Which should have taken the matter out of the police’s hands, except . . . except that it was the Lord Provost asking, the Right Honourable Cameron McLeod Kennedy, JP, Councillor for South Gyle.
So the message filtered down from the DCC: take a look for Kirstie Kennedy, but keep it quiet.
Which was, everyone agreed, next to impossible. You didn’t ask questions on the street without rumours starting, people fearing the worst for the subject of your questions. This was the excuse given when the media got hold of the story.
There was a photograph of the daughter, a photo police had been given and which
somehow the media got their paws on. The Lord Provost was furious about that. It proved to him that he had enemies within the force. As Rebus could have told him, if you went demanding a favour, someone down the line could come to resent it.
So there she was, on TV and in the papers: little Kirstie Kennedy. Not a very recent photo, maybe two or three years out of date; and the difference between fourteen or fifteen and seventeen was crucial. Rebus, father of a onetime teenage daughter, knew that. Kirstie was grown up now, and the photo would be next to useless in helping trace her.
The Lord Provost quietened the media hubbub by giving a press conference. His wife was with him – his second wife, not Kirstie’s mother; Kirstie’s mother was dead – and she was asked what she’d like to say to the runaway.
‘I’d just like her to know we’re praying for her, that’s all.’
And then came the first phone call.
It wasn’t hard to phone the Lord Provost. He was in the phone book, plus his appointments number was listed alongside every other councillor in a useful pamphlet handed out to tens of thousands of Edinburgh residents.
The caller sounded young, a voice not long broken. He hadn’t given a name. All he’d said was that he had Kirstie, and that he wanted money for her return. He’d even put a girl on the phone. She’d squealed a couple of words before being pulled away. The words had been ‘Dad’ and ‘I’.
The Lord Provost couldn’t be sure it was Kirstie, but he couldn’t not be sure either. He wanted the police’s help again, and they told him to set up a drop with the kidnappers; only there wouldn’t be money waiting for them, there’d be police officers and plenty of them.
The intention wasn’t to confront but to tail. A police helicopter was brought into play, along with four unmarked cars. It should have been easy.
It should have been. But the caller had selected as drop zone a bus stop on the busy Queensferry Road. Lots of fast-moving traffic, and nowhere to stop an unmarked car inconspicuously. The caller had been clever. When it came time for the pick-up, the Cortina had stopped on the other side of the road from the bus stop. The passenger had come hurtling across the road, dodging traffic, picked up the bag full of wads of newspaper, and taken it back to the waiting car.
