by Ian Rankin
‘We check the car and the garage,’ Laidlaw intoned, ‘see if there’s maybe a knife missing from the kitchen drawer.’
‘When I want your advice, I’ll request it in writing.’
‘It’s Ernie Milligan you should be talking to. He’s the one who could have had this done and dusted if he possessed even half an ounce of savvy.’
‘Instead of which,’ Bob Lilley added, ‘we’ve had days of escalation, two gangs ready to lay waste to each other—’
‘I get that, Bob,’ the Commander broke in. ‘But does your pal here get that his methods might have jeopardised any prosecution?’
‘I did what needed doing,’ Laidlaw said, meeting the Commander’s gaze.
Robert Frederick leaned back in his chair, shaking his head slowly, looking suddenly weary. There was a knock at the door. Without waiting to be asked, a head appeared. It was Frederick’s secretary.
‘Sorry, sir,’ she said.
‘Can’t it wait, Sally?’
‘I’m not sure it can, sir. Woman at the front desk by the name of Carter. Says she’s here to make a confession. Thing is, it’s DC Laidlaw she’s asking to see. Says she’ll talk to him and him alone . . .’
38
At the Top Spot, drinks were on the Commander. There was no sign of the women shoppers or the self-important suits. A game of darts had been convened, two competing teams assembled, Laidlaw and Lilley content to prop up the bar while they watched. The room was wreathed in smoke. Lilley knew he would pay for it when he got home. Margaret would insist he put everything in the laundry and head to the shower, the shower itself a rubber hose pushed onto the two taps in the bath. The hose had never fitted properly and one side or the other would invariably become dislodged, so that you ended up with scalding or freezing water, usually timed to coincide with a head covered in soap suds.
‘Can we appear for the defence, do you think?’ Laidlaw was asking, not for the first time. His eyes were slightly glazed as he attempted to deal with the constant stream of drinks placed in front of him. ‘I mean, are there precedents?’
‘Will Colvin settle for the result, that’s what I’m wondering?’
‘He better, or else he’ll have me to deal with, and now that we’ve done away with hanging, I’m more sanguine about the consequences of doing him in.’
‘Would your philosophers say the same thing?’
‘I’d happily argue my case in front of them.’ Laidlaw stared at the bottom of his emptied glass. ‘She’s about to serve a second sentence, Bob, the first being her marriage. She played that role as best she could until she had to disrupt the performance. Or maybe she was a skater, the ice breaking under her, the depths below dark as sin. Didn’t matter how well she skated, how balletically and confidently she moved, the darkness was there waiting for her. Whatever else happens, the dark remains.’
‘Lucky for us that it does, or we’d be down the dole office.’
Laidlaw gave a twitch of the mouth and eased himself away from the bar, walking with the stiff uprightness of the lightly inebriated towards the toilets. The Commander approached Lilley, clapping him on the shoulder.
‘Your boy did all right in the end, almost despite himself,’ he said.
‘He defused your city, if that’s what you mean.’
‘If he doesn’t manage to detonate himself in the near future, he might be in line for a swift promotion.’
‘That’s bound to please DI Milligan.’ Lilley looked around the bar. ‘Where is he anyway?’
‘Licking his wounds elsewhere. Though if you ask him, he’ll say he’s swotting up on the case, preparatory to interviewing the family members.’
‘I hear the mother has engaged the services of Bryce Mundell.’
The Commander nodded. ‘Though with her confession, all he’s going to be doing is scratching around for mitigating circumstances.’
‘Plenty of those, I would think.’
‘So what do you reckon to Jack Laidlaw, Bob? Truthfully, I mean, just between the two of us.’
Lilley didn’t have to think about it. ‘He’s the business.’
‘Meaning?’
‘He’s a one-off in a world of mass production. He’s not a copper who happens to be a man. He’s a man who happens to be a copper, and he carries that weight with him everywhere he goes.’ His words were surprising him while he spoke them aloud. He hadn’t realised until this moment how strongly he agreed with them. ‘Mind you,’ he felt it necessary to qualify, ‘he can be a pain in the bahookie, too, but it’s a price worth paying.’
The words seemed to percolate, the Commander nodding slowly afterwards. ‘Noted,’ he said, pretending to watch the darts game. ‘Not exactly a team player, though.’
‘I wouldn’t say darts is his forte.’
There was a cheer and a victorious raising of arms as one team checked out. Lilley and his boss watched as the scores were immediately wiped from the chalkboard with a cloth. Laidlaw was checking his fly as he returned to the bar.
‘Good work, Jack,’ the Commander said, handing him a fresh tumbler of Antiquary.
‘It’s not difficult – doesn’t everyone check afterwards that they’ve zipped up?’
‘That’s not what I was talking about.’
‘I know,’ Laidlaw said, clinking his glass against the Commander’s before taking another large swallow.
39
The blood had dried to a crust on Malky Chisholm’s face. The damage was superficial: just a couple of blows to the nose. Those punches could hurt, though. They could crush cartilage and send tears streaming from your eyes. One of Chisholm’s teeth had been loosened, too. He both knew and didn’t know where he was. It was a lock-up garage. That much had been evident from the moment the hessian sack had been removed from his head. And the fact that John Rhodes was pacing the floor in front of him meant it was probably in the Calton somewhere. Could be any one of a dozen streets, anonymous as well as private. Chisholm had heard no traffic going past, no snatches of conversation between pedestrians from beyond the breeze-block walls. This was one of those places where Rhodes could conduct his business without fear of interruption or consequence.
‘I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out sooner,’ Rhodes was saying. He was dressed in a zipped jacket, roomy denims and cheap canvas shoes. Chisholm didn’t need to be told what the outfit meant. All of it was disposable, and it would be disposed of later that night. The man with the scarred face was standing guard by the door to the outside world. Fumes lingered in the air, hinting that a vehicle of some kind had been moved out just prior to Chisholm’s enforced arrival. He’d been grabbed on the street, a hood pulled over his head before he was thrown into the back of a van. It had all been very professional. Chisholm liked to think that his crew would be as slick a machine in the circumstances, though he doubted it. John Rhodes, he was beginning to realise, was the real deal, and, moreover, a man you crossed at your peril, that peril being imminent extinction.
‘I mean,’ Rhodes went on, ‘it was a matter of elimination. Did it make sense for it to be Cam Colvin? Of course it did. It made too much sense, that was the problem. But then when the taxis got hit, well, I knew I’d not ordered that, so who had? And did that mean someone was attacking both of us in the hope of the conflict escalating?’ He stopped and bent a little, the better to be at eye level with his prisoner. Chisholm was seated on a wooden chair of the type more commonly found at a school desk, his hands tied behind him, ankles bound to the chair legs with twine. The knots were tight, producing pins and needles in his feet. There was electrical tape across his mouth, meaning he had to breathe through his bloodied nostrils.
‘You see what I’m saying?’ Rhodes went on. ‘That meant my next port of call was Matt Mason, who denied having anything to do with it. He could have been lying, of course. You never know with a bastard like him. But he sounded genuine enough, and he’s had other things on his mind, with the hospital and everything.’
He broke off, strai
ghtening up and beginning to pace again, like some caged predator. It was a narrow space. Four strides and he was at the tool-strewn workbench. When he turned, a few further paces took him to the wall opposite, where a selection of electrical leads hung from rusted nails.
‘Then,’ he continued, ‘I started thinking about you. I started thinking about you long and hard. A junior with his eyes on the boardroom. Whose boardroom, though? I’m not sure that even matters. But Bobby Carter’s death was like you’d been picked for The Golden Shot. The bolt was already loaded. You just had to aim it at the thread connecting me and Cam Colvin.’
Yes, Chisholm could have told him, and it was Jack Laidlaw who planted the seed that day in the interview room. Attack both fiefdoms, ramp up the chaos, watch them tear one another apart. As all hell breaks loose on the streets, the Cumbie sits there waiting to come crawling out once the dust settles on the battlefield. It had seemed almost too easy, and it had almost worked.
Almost.
The pacing had stopped again. Rhodes stood less than a yard from the seated figure and seemed to study him before walking behind Chisholm and placing his hands firmly on the younger man’s shoulders. With infinite slowness, the chair was tipped back until Chisholm could do nothing but stare at the face poised above him. Rhodes’s tone when speaking had been relaxed, almost laconic, but his look now was one of pure and unbridled malevolence.
‘So do I skin you myself or hand you over to Cam Colvin?’ he asked, teeth bared.
Behind the gag, Chisholm was trying to speak. Rhodes considered for a moment, then ripped the tape off, causing the young man to screw shut his eyes in momentary pain.
‘Your decision,’ he managed eventually, hoping he sounded less panicked than he felt. He was having to work hard at stopping his bladder and bowels from emptying. ‘But there’s a third option, too.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘I could be an asset to you, a real asset. I bring a whole squad with me who’ll do whatever they’re told.’
‘Whack guys on the street? Firebomb a pub? Batter the windscreens out of a fleet of taxis?’ Rhodes took a moment to consider this. ‘And you’d be willing to work for me, follow my orders?’
‘Seems to me it beats the alternatives. Look, whether or not I had anything to do with the Gay Laddie and the beatings and the damage to the cabs, I can be useful to—’
Rhodes had heard enough. The tape was stuck back over Malky Chisholm’s mouth, Rhodes squeezing it hard beneath the heel of his hand to ensure it was secure. The chair was dropped back onto all four legs again. Chisholm watched as Rhodes approached the door where the scarred man stood. The two exchanged a few muttered words. Then the scarred man nodded, his eyes on Chisholm, as John Rhodes opened the door and stepped out briskly into the sodium night. The scarred man walked towards the workbench and ran his fingers over some of the tools lying there.
He seemed to be looking for something in particular. Eventually he found it. It was wrapped in an oily-looking piece of muslin cloth. Slowly and surely he began to peel the layers of cloth away while Malky Chisholm watched, the blood pounding in his ears. He felt like he was falling with infinite slowness from a very great height, though in the full and certain knowledge that the fall itself was not going to be the death of him.
The revealed revolver, however, was another story entirely.
40
That night, Laidlaw lay in his bed at the Burleigh Hotel, Jan asleep in his wakeful arms. With the case closed, he knew he could be at home, but he needed one more night on this life raft. The Commander had hinted at a promotion, but Laidlaw couldn’t help thinking a leper’s bell might prove more appropriate. He turned his thoughts to Monica Carter. She would shift all the weight to her own broad shoulders. Her children would visit her in prison. He realised he would like to visit her, too, but he knew he never would. Such a visit might salvage something for him but would be poison to her, once the other inmates worked out what he was. He had known good people go bad before, had visited his fair share of toxic relationships, marriages seemingly fine on the outside but rotting from the core. Abusive partners, mental and physical cruelty, children little more than cannon fodder, themselves growing up damaged and ready to repeat the mistakes of their parents, knowing no other way of living and being. He wondered about Stella and Peter and Chris. What did the future hold for them? His mind was on Peter especially, with his ready knife and his eyes ablaze. Had he just got away with murder? If so, where might that eventually lead?
He tried not to think of his own wife and children. That way led to a deeper, darker ocean of hurt. Instead, he felt his arms envelop Jan. I’m clinging on for dear life, he thought to himself. Please let me see the morning . . .
The Laidlaw Trilogy – the masterful series that launched a genre
‘The pure distilled essence of Scottish crime writing’
Peter May
The dark and thrilling Harry McCoy series – ‘So noir he makes most other Scottish cops seem light grey’ The Times
‘Gripping, utterly authentic and nerve-jangling’
Daily Mail
Family secrets, sinister murders, a divided Edinburgh – this city will bleed you dry
‘Parry’s Victorian Edinburgh comes vividly alive – and it’s a world of pain’
Val McDermid
