by Ian Rankin
Home at last, she had a good wash, and after that she felt a little better. She had brought in a black bin-liner from the boot of her car. It contained the clothes she had been wearing, cheap flimsy things. Tomorrow evening she would tidy the back garden and light a bonfire.
She wasn't crying any more. She had calmed down. She always calmed down afterwards. From a polythene shopping bag she removed another polythene bag, from which she removed the bloodied knife. The kitchen sink was full of boiling, soapy water. The polythene bags went into the bin-liner with the clothes, the knife went into the sink. She washed it carefully, emptying and refilling the washing bowl, all the time humming to herself. It wasn't a recognisable song, nor even really a tune. But it calmed her, it soothed her, the way her mother's hummed lullabies always had.
There, all done. It was hard work, and she was pleased to be finished with it. Concentration was the key. A lapse in concentration, and you could make a slip, then fail to spot that slip. She rinsed the sink three times, sluicing away every last speckle of blood, and left the knife to dry on the draining-board. Then she walked out into the hallway and paused at one of the doors while she found the key.
This was her secret room, her picture gallery. Inside, one wall was all but covered by oil and watercolour paintings. Three of these paintings were damaged beyond repair. A pity, since all three had been favourites. Her favourite now was a small countryside stream. Simple, pale colours and a naive style. The stream was in the foreground and beside it sat, a man and a boy, or it could have been a man and a girl. It was hard to tell, that was the problem with the naive style. It was not as though she could even ask the artist, for the artist had been dead for years.
She tried not to look at the other wall, the wall directly opposite. It was a horrid wall. She didn't like what she could see there from the corner of one eye. She decided that what she liked about her favourite painting was its size. It was about ten inches by eight, excluding the rather Baroque gilt frame (which did not suit it at all her mother had never had much taste in frames). These petite dimensions, added to the washed colours, gave the whole a subtlety and a lack of vision, a humility, a gentleness, which pleased her. Of course, it depicted no great truth, this painting. In fact, it was a monstrous lie, the absolute opposite of the facts. There had been no stream, no touching scene of father and child. There had been, only horror. That was why Velazquez was her favourite painter: shadowplay, rich shades of black, skulls and suspicion … the dark, heart exposed.
'The dark heart.' She nodded to herself. She had seen things, felt things, which few were ever privileged to witness. This was her life. This was her existence. And the painting began to mock her, the stream turning into a cruel turquoise grin.
Calmly, humming to herself again she picked up a pair of scissors from a nearby chair and began to slash at the painting with regular vertical strokes, then horizontal strokes, then vertical again, tearing and tearing its heart out until the scene disappeared forever.
Underground
'And this,' said George Flight, 'is where the Wolfman was born.'
Rebus looked. It was a depressing location for a birth. A cobblestoned alley, a cul-de-sac, the buildings three storeys high, every window either boarded up or barred and grilled. The black bags of rubbish looked to have been languishing by the side of the road for weeks. A few had been impaled on the steel spiked fencing in front of the shut-up windows, and these bags leaked their rank contents the way a cracked sewage pipe would.
'Nice,' he said.
'The buildings are mainly disused. Local bands use the basement of one of them as a practice room, and make quite a racket while they're about it.' Flight pointed to a barred and grilled window. 'And I think that's a clothing manufacturer or distributor. Anyway, he hasn't been back since we started taking an interest in the street.'
'Oh?' Rebus sounded interested, but Flight shook his head.
'Nothing suspicious in that, believe me. These guys use slave labour, Bangladeshis, mostly illegal immigrants. The last thing they want is policemen sniffing around. They'll move the machines and set up again somewhere else.'
Rebus nodded. He was looking around the cul-de-sac, trying to remember, from the photographs he had been sent, just where the body had been found.
'It was there.' Flight was pointing to a gate in the iron railings. Ah yes; Rebus remembered now. Not at street level, but down some stone steps leading to a basement. The victim had been found at the bottom of the steps, same modus operandi as last night, down to the bite marks on the stomach. Rebus opened his briefcase and brought out the manila folder, opening it at the sheet he needed.
'Maria Watkiss, age thirty-eight. Occupation: prostitute. Body found on Tuesday 16th January by council workmen. Estimated that victim had been murdered two to three days prior to being discovered. Rudimentary attempt had been made to conceal body.'
Flight nodded towards one of the impaled bin-liners. 'He emptied a bag of rubbish out over her. It pretty well covered the body. The rats alerted the workmen.'
'Rats?'
'Dozens of them, from all accounts. They'd had a bloody good feed, had those rats.'
Rebus was standing at the top of the steps. 'We reckon,' said Flight, 'the Wolfman must have paid her for a kneetrembler and, brought her down here. Or maybe, she brought him. She worked out of a pub on Old Street. It's a five minute walk. We interviewed the regulars, but nobody saw her leave with anyone.'
'Maybe he was in a car?'
'It's more than possible. Judging by the physical distance between the murder sites, he must' be pretty mobile.'
'It says in the report that she was married.'
'That's right. Her old man, Tommy, he knew she was on the game. It didn't bother him, so long as she handed over the cash.'
'And he didn't report her missing?'
Flight wrinkled his nose. 'Not Tommy. He was on a bender at the time, practically comatose with drink when we went to see him. He said later that Maria often disappeared for a few days, told us she used to go off to the seaside with one or two of her regular johns'
'I don't suppose you've been able to find these … clients?)
'Leave it out.' Flight laughed as though this were the best joke he'd heard all week. 'For the record; Tommy thought one of them might be called Bill or Will. Does that help?'
'It narrows things down,' Rebus said with a smile.
'In any event,' said Flight, 'I doubt Tommy would have come to us for help if she hadn't come back. He's got form as long as your inside leg. To tell you the truth, he was our first suspect.'
'It follows.' Every policeman knew it as a universal truth: most murders happen in the family.
'A couple of years back,' Flight was saying, 'Maria was beaten up pretty badly. A hospital case, in fact. Tommy's doing. She'd been seeing another man and he hadn't been paying for it, if you understand my meaning. And a 'couple of years before that, Tommy served time for aggravated assault. It would have been rape if we could have got the woman into the witness box, but she was scared seven colours shitless. There were witnesses, but we were never going to pin rape on him. So aggravated assault it was. He got eight months.'
'A violent man then.'
'You could say that.'
'With a record of particular violence against women.'
Flight nodded. 'It looked good at first. We thought we could pin Maria's murder on him and make it stick. But nothing added up. He had an alibi for openers. Then there were the bite marks: not his size, according to the dentist.'
'You mean Dr Morrison?'
'Yes, that's right. 'I call him the dentist to annoy Philip.' Flight scratched at his chin. The elbow of his leather jacket gave a creak. 'Anyway, nothing added up. And then when the second murder came along, well, we knew we were working in a different league from Tommy.'
'You're absolutely sure of that?'
'John, I'm not absolutely sure what colour of socks I've put on in the morning, I'm sometimes not even sure that I've
put socks on at all. But I'm fairly sure this isn't Tommy Watkiss's work. He gets his kicks from watching Arsenal, not mutilating dead women.'
Rebus's eyes had not left Flight's. 'Your socks are blue,' he said. Flight looked down, saw that this was indeed the case, and smiled broadly.
'They're also different shades,' Rebus added.
'Bloody hell, so they are.'
'I'd still like to talk to Mr Watkiss,' Rebus continued. 'No hurry, and if it's all right with you.'
Flight shrugged.' 'Whatever you say, Sherlock. Now, shall we get out of this shit-hole, or is there anything else you want to see?'
'No,' said Rebus. 'Let's get out of here.' They started back towards the mouth of the cul-de-sac, where Flight's car waited. 'What's this part of-town-called again?''
'Shoreditch. Remember your nursery rhymes? "When I am rich, say the bells of Shoreditch".'
Yes, Rebus — had a vague memory. A memory of his mother, holding him on her knee, or maybe it was his father, singing him songs' and bouncing the knee in time. It had never happened that way, but he had a memory of it all the same. They were at the end of the cul-de-sac now. A larger road flowed past, busy with daytime traffic. The buildings were black with grime, windows thick with the stuff. Offices of some kind, warehouses. No shops, save one selling professional kitchenware. No houses or even flats in the upper storeys by the look of it. No one to hear a muffled scream at the dead of night. No one to see, from an unwashed window, the killer slinking away, dappled with blood.
Rebus stared back into the cul-de-sac, then up at the corner of the first building, where a barely legible plaque bore the cul-de-sac's name: Wolf Street El.
This was the reason why the police had come to call the killer Wolfman. Nothing to do with the savagery of his attacks, or the teeth marks he left at the scene, but simply because, as Flight had said, this was so far as they could know his place of birth, the place where he had defined himself for the very first time. He was the Wolfman: He could be anywhere, but that was relatively unimportant. What was more important was that he could be anyone, anyone at all in this city of ten million faces, ten million secret lairs.
'Where next?' he said, opening the passenger door. 'Kilmore Road,' said Flight. He exchanged a glance with Rebus, acknowledging the irony.
'Kilmore Road it is,' said Rebus, getting into the car.
The day had started early. Rebus, waking after three hours sleep and unable to drop off again, switched on the radio in his room and listened to the morning news programme as he dressed. Not knowing exactly what the day would bring, he dressed casually: caramel cord trousers, light jacket; shirt. No tweeds or tie today. He wanted a bath, but the facilities on his floor of the hotel were locked. He would have to ask in reception. Near the stairs there stood an automatic shoeshine machine. He polished the toes of both well-worn black shoes before starting down to breakfast.
The restaurant area was busy, most of the customers looking like businessmen or tourists. The day's newspapers had been arranged across one vacant table and Rebus lifted a Guardian before being directed to a table laid for one by the harassed waitress.
Breakfast was mainly help yourself, with juices, cereals and fruit crammed onto a large central display. A pot of coffee appeared, unasked for, on his table, as did a toast-rack filled with cool half. slices of lightly tanned bread. Not so much toasted as wafted in front of a lightbulb, Rebus thought to himself as he smeared a portion of butter across one pitiful triangle.
The Full English Breakfast consisted of one slice of bacon, one warm tomato (from a tin), three small mushrooms, a sickly egg and a curious little sausage. Rebus wolfed down the lot. The coffee wasn't quite strong enough, but he finished the pot anyway and asked for a refill. All the time he was flicking through the paper, but only on a second examination did he find anything about the previous night's murder: a short, bare-bones paragraph near the foot of page four.
Bare bones. He looked around him. An embarrassed looking couple were trying to hush their two vociferous children. Don't, thought Rebus, don't stifle them, let them live. Who could know what might happen tomorrow? They might be killed. The parents might be killed. His own daughter was here in London somewhere, living in a flat with his ex-wife. He should get in touch. He would get in touch. A businessman at a corner table rustled his tabloid noisily, drawing Rebus's attention towards the front cover.
WOLFMAN BITES AGAIN.
Ah, that was more like it. Rebus reached for a final half-slice of toast, only to find that he'd run out of butter. A hand landed heavily on his shoulder from behind, causing him to drop the toast. Startled, he turned to see George Flight standing there.
'Morning, John.'
'Hello, George. Sleep okay?'
Flight pulled out the chair across from Rebus and sat down heavily, hands in his lap.
'Not really. What about you?'
'I managed a few hours.' Rebus was about to turn his near-arrest on Shaftesbury Avenue into a morning anecdote, but decided to save it. There might come a time when they would need a funny story. 'Do you want some coffee?'
Flight shook his head. He examined the food on display. 'Some orange juice wouldn't go amiss though.' Rebus was about to rise, but Flight waved him down and rose himself to fetch a glassful, which he promptly downed. He squeezed his eyelids' together. 'Tastes like powdered,' he said. 'Better give me some of that coffee after all.'
Rebus poured another cup. 'Seen that?' he said, nodding towards the corner table. Flight glanced at the tabloid and smiled.
'Well, it's their story now as much as ours. Only difference is, we'll keep things in perspective.'
'I'm not sure just what that perspective is.'
Flight stared at Rebus, but said nothing. He sipped at the coffee. 'There's a conference, in the Murder Room at eleven — o'clock. I didn't think we'd be able to make it, so I left Laine in charge. He likes being in charge.'
'And what are we going to be doing?'
'Well, we could go up to the Lea and check on the house-to-house. Or we could visit Mrs Cooper's place of employment.' Rebus didn't look enthusiastic. 'Or I could give you a tour of the other three murder scenes.' Rebus perked up. 'Okay,' said Flight, 'the scenic route it is. Drink up, Inspector. There's a long day ahead.'
Just one thing,' said Rebus, lifting the "cup halfway to his mouth. 'Why the nursemaid treatment? I'd have thought you'd have better things to do with your time than act as my chauffeur?'
Flight examined Rebus closely. Should he tell Rebus the real reason, or invent some story? He opted for invention and shrugged. 'Just easing you into the case, that's all.'
Rebus nodded slowly, but Flight knew he didn't wholly believe him.
Out at the car, Rebus glanced in through the back window, seeking the teddy bear.
'I killed it,' Flight said, unlocking the driver's door. 'The perfect murder.''
'So what's Edinburgh like?'
Rebus knew Flight wasn't talking about the tourist Edinburgh, home to the Festival and the Castle. He was talking about criminal Edinburgh, which was another city altogether.
'Well,' he replied, 'we've still got a drug problem, and loan sharks seem to be making a comeback, but other than that things are fairly quiet at the moment.'
'But,' Flight reminded him, 'you did have that child killer a few years back.'
Rebus nodded:
'And you solved it.' Rebus made no reply to this. They'd managed to keep out of the media the fact that it had been personal, had not exactly been 'serial'.
'Thousands of man hours solved it,' he said casually.
'That's not what the chiefs think,' said Flight. 'They think you're some kind of serial killer guru.'
'They're wrong,' said Rebus. 'I'm just a copper, the same as you are. So who exactly are the chiefs? Whose idea was it?'
But Flight shook his head. 'I'm not exactly sure. I mean, I know who the chiefs are — Laine, Chief Superintendent Pearson — but not which one of them is responsible for your being here
.'
'It was Laine's name on the letter,' said Rebus, knowing this didn't really mean anything.
Then' he watched the midday pedestrians scurrying along the pavements. The traffic was at a standstill. He and Flight had come just over three miles in the best: part of half an hour. Roadworks, double (and triple) parking, a succession of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings and some maddening tactics from selfish drivers had reduced their progress to a crawl. Flight seemed to read his mind.
'We'll be out of this in a couple of minutes,' he said. He was thinking over what Rebus had said, just a copper, the same as you are. But Rebus had caught the child killer, hadn't he? The files on the case credited him with the collar, a collar which had earned him the rank of Inspector. No, Rebus was just being modest, that was it. And you had to admire him for that.
A couple of minutes later, they had moved a further fifteen yards and were about to pass a narrow junction with a No Entry sign at its mouth. Flight glanced up this sidestreet. 'Time to take a few liberties,' he said, turning the steering-wheel hard. One side of the street was lined with market-stalls. Rebus could hear the stall-holders sharpening their patter against the whetstone of passing trade. Nobody paid the slightest attention to a car travelling the wrong way down a one-way street, until a boy pulling a mobile stall, from one side of the road to the other halted their progress. A meaty fist banged on the driver's side window. Flight rolled down the window, and a head appeared, extraordinarily pink and round and totally hairless.
'Oi, what's your fucking game then?' The words died in his throat. 'Oh, it's you Mister Flight. Didn't recognise the motor.'
'Hello, Arnold,' Flight said quietly, his eyes on the ponderous movement of the stall ahead. 'How's tricks?' The man laughed nervously. 'Keeping me nose clean, Mister Flight.'
Only now did Flight deign to turn his head towards, the man. 'That's good,' he said. Rebus had never heard those two words sound so threatening. Their road ahead was now clear. 'Keep it that way,' Flight said, moving off.
