by Ian Rankin
There was a whole side to Ellen Dempsey which she kept away from the world. Siobhan wondered what it might consist of. Would she find any answers in Dundee? Dempsey had friends, people even Cafferty was wary of. Was she fronting for some Dundee villains? Where had the money come from to kick-start her business? A fleet of cars didn’t exactly come cheap, and it was a bit of a step up from “a couple of taxis in Dundee” to the operation she now ran at Lochend. A woman with a past . . . a woman who could spot CID and gave work to ex-cons . . .
Ellen Dempsey didn’t just have a past, Siobhan realized. She had a police record of her own. It was the simplest explanation. What was it Eric Bain had told her? Reduce it to binary. His way of saying, keep it simple. Maybe she was trying to make everything too complex. Maybe the Marber case was simpler than it seemed.
“Reduce it to binary, Siobhan,” she told herself. Then she started the car and headed for the bridge.
By the time Rebus drove home, it was almost half past seven. His mobile had stored a couple of messages: Gill and Siobhan. Then it started ringing.
“Gill,” he said, “I was just about to call you.” He was in a queue at traffic lights.
“Have you seen tonight’s final edition?” He knew what she was going to say. “You made the front page, John.”
Bingo . . .
“You mean they got a picture of me?” he pretended to guess. “Hope it was my good side.”
“I wasn’t aware that you had a good side.” A low blow, but he let her get away with it.
“Look,” he said, “it was my own stupid fault. I wanted out of the station for an hour, and they were all heading for the cars. I insisted on going, so don’t go blaming anyone else.”
“I’ve already spoken to Siobhan.”
“She told me to clear off, and that’s pretty much what I did.”
“Which is almost exactly what she told me, except that in her version it was you who decided to leave voluntarily.”
“She’s trying to make me look good, Gill. You know what Siobhan’s like.”
“You’re supposed to be off the Marber inquiry, John: remember that.”
“I’m also supposed to be the sort of cop who can’t take a telling: do you want me to blow my cover at Tulliallan?”
She sighed. “No luck so far then?”
“There’s a ray of light in the tunnel,” he admitted. The lights had changed, and he drove across the junction into Melville Drive. “Problem is, I’m not sure I want to go anywhere near it.”
“Dangerous?”
“I won’t know that till I get there.”
“For Christ’s sake, be careful.”
“It’s nice to know you care.”
“John . . .”
“Speak to you later, Gill.”
He didn’t bother responding to Siobhan, knew now what her message had been.
Gray, Jazz and Allan Ward would be waiting for him as arranged, but he’d already prepared his story. He didn’t want them hitting the warehouse . . . not because it would or wouldn’t work, but because it was wrong. He knew now that he could go to Strathern, tell him that he was able to lead the three men into a trap. He still doubted Strathern would go for it. It wasn’t clean; it didn’t answer the question. All the trio had to do was say they’d merely been following Rebus’s lead.
He’d parked at the top end of Arden Street, but the trio had found a space right outside his tenement door. The headlamps flashed at him, letting him know they were there. One of the rear doors opened on his approach.
“Let’s go for a drive, John,” Gray said from the front. Jazz was driving, leaving Allan Ward in the rear beside Rebus.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“How did it go at the compound?”
Rebus looked into the rearview, where he could connect with Jazz’s eyes. “It’s a non-starter, lads,” he sighed.
“Tell us.”
“For a start, they’ve got twenty-four-hour security on the gate. Plus there’s an alarm system on the fence as well as some serious-looking razor wire. Then there’s the warehouse itself, which is locked tight and almost certainly alarmed, too. But Claverhouse has been cleverer than I’d have credited. He’s filled the interior with packing crates, dozens of them.”
“And the merchandise is in one of them?” Jazz guessed.
Rebus nodded, aware of the driver’s eyes still on him. “And he’s not about to say which one.”
“So all it needs is a lorry,” Gray piped up. “Take the whole damned lot of them.”
“Takes time to load a lorry, Francis,” Jazz told his friend.
“We don’t need a lorry,” Ward pitched in, leaning forward. “We just take whichever case feels the heaviest.”
“That’s good thinking, Allan,” Jazz said.
“It still takes time,” Rebus argued. “A hellish lot of time.”
“And meantime the forces of law and order are streaming towards the scene?” Jazz guessed.
Rebus knew he hadn’t quite managed to dissuade them. His head was swimming. They don’t have Bernie Johns’s money, always supposing there was any money to begin with. All they’ve got is this dream I’ve offered them, and they want to make it real. Which makes me the mastermind . . . He started shaking his head without realizing he was doing it. But Jazz noticed.
“You don’t rate our chances, John?”
“There’s one more problem,” Rebus said, thinking fast. “They’re moving the stuff over the weekend. Claverhouse is antsy that Cafferty will try something.”
“Tomorrow’s Friday,” Ward said unnecessarily.
“Not much time to procure a lorry,” Gray grumbled. He pulled down on his seat belt, making some slack so he could turn to face Rebus. “You come to us with this big fucking plan of yours, and this is what it turns into?”
“It’s not John’s fault,” Jazz said.
“Then whose is it?” Ward asked.
“It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t to be,” Jazz told him.
“It was a half-cocked idea that we should have kiboshed from the start,” Gray snarled, still giving Rebus the full force of his scowl. Rebus turned to peer out of the window.
“Where are we going?”
“Back to Tulliallan,” Ward explained. “Tennant gave the word: that’s the end of our wee holiday.”
“Hang on, I haven’t got any of my stuff with me.”
“So?”
“So there are things I need . . .”
Jazz signaled, pulled over. They were approaching Haymarket. “All right making your own way back from here, John?”
“If that’s what’s on offer,” Rebus said, opening his door. Gray’s hand closed like a vise around his forearm.
“We’re very disappointed in you, John.”
“I thought we were a team, Francis,” Rebus told him, twisting free of his grip. “You want to walk into that warehouse, it’s fine by me. But they’ll catch you and they’ll put you away.” He paused. “Maybe another scheme will come along.”
“Aye, right,” Gray said. “Don’t call us and we won’t call you . . .” He leaned back and pulled Rebus’s door closed. The car took off again, leaving Rebus watching from the pavement.
That was it then. He’d blown it. He was never going to win them back, never going to find out the truth about Bernie Johns. And on top of all that, it might just turn out that they were on to him . . .
“Fuck it,” he said, wishing he’d never said yes to Strathern. He’d never meant for them to agree to his scheme. It was a way of getting them to open up about themselves. Instead of which, they were closing ranks, excluding him. The course had one more week to run. He could pull out now, or see it through to the end. It was something he’d have to consider. If he failed to see it through, whatever suspicions the trio harbored would appear confirmed. He turned and found that he was standing outside a pub. What better way to ponder the conundrum than over a pint and a double malt? With any luck, the place would do food to
o. They’d call him a cab afterwards to see him home. His problems would all have disappeared . . .
“I’ll drink to that,” he told himself, pushing open the door.
24
It was two in the morning when the phone woke him. He was lying on the living room floor, next to the hi-fi, CD cases and album sleeves spread around him. He crawled on hands and knees to his chair and picked up the receiver.
“Yes?” he croaked.
“John? It’s Bobby.”
Rebus took a moment to realize who Bobby was: Bobby Hogan, Leith CID. He tried focusing on his watch.
“How soon can you get down here?” Hogan was asking.
“Depends where ‘here’ is.” Rebus was doing a stock check: head cloudy but bearable; stomach queasy.
“Look, you can go back to bed if you like.” Hogan starting to sound aggrieved. “I thought maybe I was doing you a favor . . .”
“I’ll know that when you tell me what it is.”
“A floater. Pulled him out of the docks not fifteen minutes ago. And though I haven’t seen him in a while, he looks awfully like our old pal the Diamond Dog . . .”
Rebus stared down at the album sleeves, not really seeing them.
“You still awake, John?”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes, Bobby.”
“He’ll be on his way to the mortuary by then.”
“Even better. I’ll meet you there.” Rebus paused. “Any chance of this being an accident?”
“At this stage, we’re supposed to be keeping an open mind.”
“You won’t be too bothered if I don’t do the same?”
“I’ll see you at the Dead Center, John . . .”
“Dead Center” was what they called the mortuary. One of the workers there had come up with the phrase, telling everyone that he was proud to work “at the dead center of Edinburgh.” The building was tucked away on the Cowgate, one of the city’s more secretive streets. Few pedestrians ever found themselves there, and the traffic was intent on being elsewhere. Things might change when the parliament opened its new building, less than a ten-minute walk away. More traffic, more tourists. At this time of night, Rebus knew the drive would take him five minutes. He wasn’t sure his blood alcohol level would pass muster, but after a quick shower he made for his car anyway.
He didn’t know what he was thinking or how he was feeling about Dickie Diamond’s death. Hard to say how many enemies had been harboring their festering thoughts, just waiting for the night when they clapped eyes on Diamond again.
He cut across to Nicolson Street and headed for the city center, turning right at Thin’s Bookshop and taking the steep turn down to the Cowgate. A couple of taxis: a few drunks. Dead center, he was thinking. He knew the easiest way into the mortuary this time of night was the staff entrance, so he parked outside, making sure he wasn’t blocking the loading bay. For a long time, they’d had to carry out actual autopsies at one of the city’s hospitals, due to the lack of a decent air-filtering system in the mortuary’s autopsy suite, but that had been remedied now. Rebus walked into the building and saw Hogan in the corridor ahead of him.
“He’s in here,” Hogan said. “Don’t worry, he wasn’t long in the water.” Good news: the body underwent terrible changes after lengthy submersion. The short corridor led directly into the loading area, which itself led directly to the holding area — a wall of little doors, each one opening to reveal a trolley. One trolley was sitting out, a polythene-wrapped body lying on it. Dickie Diamond was still wearing the same clothes. His wet hair was slicked back from his face, and there was some kind of algae stuck to one cheek. His eyes were closed, mouth open. The attendants were readying to take him upstairs in the elevator.
“Who’s doing the cutting?” Rebus asked.
“They’re both on tonight,” Hogan told him. Meaning: Professor Gates and Dr. Curt, the city’s chief pathologists. “It’s been a busy one: drug overdose in Muirhouse, fatal fire in Wester Hailes.”
“And four naturals,” an attendant reminded him. People dying of old age, or in the hospital. Mostly they ended up here.
“Shall we go up?” Hogan asked.
“Why not?” Rebus said.
As they climbed the stairs, Hogan asked about Diamond. “You lot were just interrogating him, weren’t you?”
“Interviewing him, Bobby.”
“As a suspect or a witness?”
“The latter.”
“When did you let him go?”
“This afternoon. How long had he been dead when you fished him out?”
“I’d say about an hour. Question is: did he drown?”
Rebus shrugged. “Do we know if he could swim?”
“No.”
They’d entered a glass-fronted viewing area. There were a couple of benches for them to sit on. On the other side of the glass, people moved around in surgical gowns and green Wellingtons. There were two stainless-steel slabs, with drainage holes and old-fashioned wooden blocks for the head to rest on. Gates and Curt waved a greeting, Curt gesturing for the two detectives to come join the fun. They shook their heads, pointing to the benches to let him know they were fine where they were. The body bag had been removed, and now Dickie Diamond’s clothes were being discarded, placed in their own plastic bags.
“How did you ID him?” Rebus asked.
“Phone numbers in his pocket. One was for his sister. I recognized him anyway, but she did the formal ID downstairs just before you got here.”
“How was she?”
“She didn’t seem too surprised, to be honest. Maybe she was just in shock.”
“Or maybe she’d been expecting it?”
Hogan looked at him. “Something you want to tell me, John?”
Rebus shook his head. “We reopened the case, went sniffing. Malky, the nephew, told Dickie what was happening. He came haring up here. We picked him up.” He shrugged. “End of story.”
“Not as far as someone was concerned,” Hogan said, peering through the glass as one of the attendants lifted something from the clothing. It was the revolver Diamond had pointed at Rebus. The attendant held it up for them to see.
“Managed to miss that in your search, Bobby,” Rebus said.
Hogan stood up, called out through the glass. “Where was it?”
“Down the back of his underpants,” the attendant called back, voice muffled by the face mask he was wearing.
“Can’t have been too comfortable,” Professor Gates added. “Maybe he’d a bad case of piles and was resorting to threats.”
When Hogan sat down again, Rebus noticed that he had reddened slightly at the neck.
“These things happen, Bobby,” Rebus sought to reassure him. He was wondering now if the gun had been tucked into Diamond’s waistband when he’d been answering their questions in IR1 . . .
With the body stripped of its clothing, the autopsy proper was beginning with the taking of body temperature. Rebus and Hogan knew what the pathologists would be looking for: alcohol levels; signs of injuries; head trauma . . . They would want to know whether Diamond had been alive or dead when he’d entered the water. Alive, and it could have been an accident — too much booze, maybe. Dead, and there was foul play involved. Everything from the state of the eyeballs to the contents of the lungs provided little clues. The body temperature would be used to calculate time of death, though immersion would make any exact calculations problematic.
After twenty minutes as spectator, Rebus said he needed a cigarette. Hogan decided to join him. They went to the staff room and helped themselves to mugs of tea, then walked outside. The night was clear and chilly. An undertaker’s car had arrived to take charge of one of the “naturals.” The driver bowed his head to them in sleepy acknowledgment. At this time of night, in this location, you had a bond of sorts. You were dealing with things most people — those with their heads warm against pillows, dreaming the time away until morning — shied away from.
“Undertaker,” Hogan mused. “
You ever thought it a bloody odd word to use in the circumstances? Funeral director, I can understand, but undertaker . . . ?”
“You getting philosophical on me, Bobby?”
“No, I’m just saying . . . ach, forget it.”
Rebus smiled. His own thoughts were of Dickie Diamond. Dickie had gifted them Chib Kelly’s name. They could have accepted his gift, presented the case to Tennant and left it at that. But Gray and Jazz — Jazz in particular — hadn’t been satisfied. Rebus was wondering if they’d decided to press Dickie further. They’d dumped Rebus at Haymarket, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t turned back. In fact, he was a damned good alibi. When last seen, the trio had been heading west out of town, while Dickie was found in the northeast corner of the city. The Wild Bunch had started life looking like an uneasy alliance of insubordinate officers who didn’t like authority and were as likely to ignore an order as carry it out. But now Rebus was wondering if there was something more dangerous, more lethal at work. Gray, Jazz and Ward had been all too ready to help rip off the warehouse consignment. Force would have been necessary, but that hadn’t seemed to bother them. Were they capable of killing Dickie Diamond? Then again, why would they have killed him? Rebus didn’t have an answer for that, not yet.
He was leaning over the wall, watching the roadway, when he spotted the parked car. Movement within it. As the driver’s door opened and the interior light came on, he recognized Malky. He looked for Malky’s mother but didn’t see her. Malky was making to cross the road towards Rebus, but stopped at the centerline and stretched his arm, pointing.
“You fucking killed him, ya bastard!”
Hogan was at the wall now, too. “Calm down, Malky,” he called.
