10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (177 page)

He didn’t bother stopping the car. He’d only be in the way of the other sight-seers and the media. With not much happening on the IRA story, reporters were here in numbers. Plus he knew he wasn’t the Gar-B’s most popular tourist. Though the constables couldn’t swear who’d thrown the ghetto-blaster, they knew the most likely suspect. Rebus had seen the description back at Drylaw. It was Davey Soutar of course, the boy who couldn’t afford a shirt. One of the CID men had asked Rebus what his interest was.

‘Personal,’ he’d said. A few years back, a riot like this would have prompted the permanent closure of the community hall. But these days it was more likely the Council would bung some more cash at the estate, guilt money. Shutting the hall down wouldn’t do much good anyway. There were plenty of empty flats on the estate – flats termed ‘unlettable’. They were kept boarded up and padlocked, but could soon be opened. Squatters and junkies used them; gangs could use them too. A couple of miles away in different directions, middle class Barnton and Inverleith were getting ready for work. A world away. They only ever took notice of Pilmuir when it exploded.

It wasn’t much of a drive to Fettes either, even with the morning bottlenecks starting their day’s business. He wondered if he’d be first in the office; that might show
too
willing. Well, he could check, then nip out to the canteen until everyone started arriving. But when he pushed open the office door, he saw that there was someone in before him. It was Smylie.

‘Morning,’ Rebus said. Smylie nodded back. He looked tired to Rebus, which was saying something, the amount of sleep Rebus himself had had. He rested against one of the desks and folded his arms. ‘Do you know an Inspector called Abernethy?’

‘Special Branch,’ said Smylie.

‘That’s him. Is he still around?’

Smylie looked up. ‘He went back yesterday, caught an evening plane. Did you want to see him?’

‘Not really.’

‘There was nothing here for him.’

‘No?’

Smylie shook his head. ‘We’d know about it if there was. We’re the best, we’d’ve spotted it before him. QED.’

‘
Quod erat demonstrandum
.’

Smylie looked at him. ‘You’re thinking of Nemo, aren’t you? Latin for nobody.’

‘I suppose I am.’ Rebus shrugged. ‘Nobody seems to think Billy Cunningham knew any Latin.’ Smylie didn’t say anything. ‘I’m not wanted here, am I?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, you don’t need me. So why did Kilpatrick bring me in? He must’ve known it’d cause nothing but aggro.’

‘Best ask him yourself.’

‘Maybe I will. Meantime, I’ll be at St Leonard’s.’

‘We’ll be pining away in your absence.’

‘I don’t doubt it, Smylie.’

‘What does the woman do?’

‘Her name’s Millie Docherty,’ said Siobhan Clarke. ‘She works in a computer retailer’s.’

‘And her boyfriend’s a computer consultant. And they shared their flat with an unemployed postie. An odd mix?’

‘Not really, sir.’

‘No? Well, maybe not.’ They were in the canteen, facing one another across the small table. Rebus took occasional bites from a damp piece of toast. Siobhan had finished hers.

‘What’s it like over at Fettes?’ she asked.

‘Oh, you know: glamour, danger, intrigue.’

‘Much the same as here then?’

‘Much the same. I read some of Cafferty’s notes last night. I’ve marked the place, so you can take over.’

‘Three’s more fun,’ said Brian Holmes, dragging over a chair. He’d placed his tray on the table, taking up all the available room. Rebus gave Holmes’s fry-up a longing look, knowing it wouldn’t square with his diet. All the same . . . Sausage, bacon, eggs, tomato and fried bread.

‘Ought to carry a government health warning,’ said the vegetarian Clarke.

‘Hear about the riot?’ Holmes asked.

‘I went out there this morning,’ Rebus admitted. ‘The place looked much the same.’

‘I heard they threw an amplifier at a couple of our lads.’

The process of exaggeration had begun.

‘So, about Billy Cunningham,’ Rebus nudged, none too subtly.

Holmes forked up some tomato. ‘What about him?’

‘What have you found out?’

‘Not a lot,’ Holmes conceded. ‘Unemployed deliverer of the royal mail, the only regular job he’s ever had. Mum was overfond of him and kept gifting him money to get by on. Bit of a loyalist extremist, but no record of him belonging to the Orange Lodge. Son of a notorious gangster, but didn’t know it.’ Holmes thought for a second, decided this was all he had to say, and cut into his sliced sausage.

‘Plus,’ said Clarke, ‘the anarchist stuff we found.’

‘Ach, that’s nothing,’ Holmes said dismissively.

‘What anarchist stuff?’ asked Rebus.

‘There were some magazines in his wardrobe,’ Clarke explained. ‘Soft porn, football programmes, a couple of those survivalist mags teenagers like to read to go with their diet of
Terminator
films.’ Rebus almost said something, but stopped himself. ‘And a flimsy little pamphlet called . . .’ She sought the title. ‘
The Floating Anarchy Factfile
.’

‘It was years old, sir,’ said Holmes. ‘Not relevant.’

‘Do we have it here?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Siobhan Clarke.

‘It’s from the Orkneys,’ said Holmes. ‘I think it’s priced in old money. It belongs in a museum, not a police station.’

‘Brian,’ said Rebus, ‘all that fat you’re eating is going to your head. Since when do we dismiss
anything
in a murder inquiry?’ He picked a thin rasher of streaky from the plate and dropped it into his mouth. It tasted wonderful.

The Floating Anarchy Factfile
consisted of six sheets of A4 paper, folded over with a single staple through the middle to keep it from falling apart. It was typed on an old and irregular typewriter, with hand printed titles to its meagre articles and no photographs or drawings. It was priced not in old money but in new pence: five new pence to be exact, from which Rebus guessed it to be fifteen to twenty years old. There was no date, but it proclaimed itself ‘issue number three’. To a large extent Brian Holmes was right: it belonged in a museum. The pieces were written in a style that could be termed ‘Celtic hippy’, and this style was so uniform (as were the spelling mistakes) that the whole thing looked to be the work of a single individual with access to a copying machine, something like an old Roneo.

As for the content, there were cries of nationalism and individualism in one paragraph, philosophical and moral lethargy the next. Anarcho-syndicalism was mentioned, but so were Bakunin, Rimbaud and Tolstoy. It wasn’t, to Rebus’s eye, the sort of stuff to boost advertising revenue. For example:

‘What Dalriada needs is a new commitment, a new set of mores which look to the existent and emerging youth culture. What we need is action by the individual without recourse or prior thought to the rusted machinery of law, church, state.

‘We need to be free to make our own decisions about our nation and then act self-consciously to make those decisions a reality. The sons and daughters of Alba are the future, but we are living in the mistakes of the past and must change those mistakes in the present. If you do not act then remember: Now is the first day of the rest of your strife. And remember too: inertia corrodes.’

Except that ‘mores’ was spelt ‘moeres’ and ‘existent’ as ‘existant’. Rebus put the pamphlet down.

‘A psychiatrist could have a field day,’ he muttered. Holmes and Clarke were seated on the other side of his desk. He noticed that while he’d been at Fettes, people had been using his desktop as a dumping ground for sandwich wrappers and polystyrene cups. He ignored these and turned the pamphlet over. There was an address at the bottom of the back page: Zabriskie House, Brinyan, Rousay, Orkney Isles.

‘Now that’s what I call dropping out,’ said Rebus. ‘And look, the house is named after
Zabriskie Point
.’

‘Is that in the Orkneys too?’ asked Holmes.

‘It’s a film,’ said Rebus. He’d gone to see it a long long time ago, just for the ’60s soundtrack. He couldn’t remember much about it, except for an explosion near the end. He tapped his finger against the pamphlet. ‘I want to know more about this.’

‘You’re kidding, sir,’ said Holmes.

‘That’s me,’ said Rebus sourly, ‘always a smile and a joke.’

Clarke turned to Holmes. ‘I think that means he’s serious.’

‘In the land of the blind,’ said Rebus, ‘the one-eyed man is king. And even
I
can see there’s more to this than meets your eyes, Brian.’

Holmes frowned. ‘Such as, sir?’

‘Such as its provenance, its advanced years. What would you say, 1973? ’74? Billy Cunningham wasn’t even born in 1974. So what’s this doing in his wardrobe beside up-to-date scud mags and football programmes?’ He waited. ‘Answer came there none.’

Holmes looked sullen; an annoying trait whenever Rebus showed him up. But Clarke was ready. ‘We’ll get Orkney police to check, sir, always supposing the Orkneys possess any police.’

‘Do that,’ said Rebus.

Like a rubber ball, he thought as he drove, I’ll come bouncing back to you. He’d been summoned back to Fettes by DCI Kilpatrick. In his pocket there was a message from Caroline Rattray, asking him to meet her in Parliament House. He was curious about the message, which had been taken over the phone by a Detective Constable in the Murder Room. He saw Caroline Rattray as she’d been that night, all dressed up and then dragged down into Mary King’s Close by Dr Curt. He saw her strong masculine face with its slanting nose and high prominent cheekbones. He wondered if Curt had said anything to her about him . . . He would definitely make time to see her.

Kilpatrick had an office of his own in a corner of the otherwise open-plan room used by the SCS. Just outside it sat the secretary and the clerical assistant, though Rebus couldn’t work out which was which. Both were civilians, and both operated computer consoles. They made a kind of shield between Kilpatrick and everyone else, a barrier you passed as you moved from your world into his. As Rebus passed them, they were discussing the problems facing South Africa.

‘It’ll be like on Uist,’ one of them said, causing Rebus to pause and listen. ‘North Uist is Protestant and South Uist is Catholic, and they can’t abide one another.’

Kilpatrick’s office itself was flimsy enough, just plastic partitions, see-through above waist height. The whole thing could be dismantled in minutes, or wrecked by a few judicious kicks and shoulder-charges. But it was definably an office. It had a door which Kilpatrick told Rebus to close. There was a certain amount of sound insulation. There were two filing-cabinets, maps and print-outs stuck to the walls with Blu-Tak, a couple of calendars still showing July. And on the desk a framed photograph of three grinning gap-toothed children.

‘Yours, sir?’

‘My brother’s. I’m not married.’ Kilpatrick turned the photo around, the better to study it. ‘I try to be a good uncle.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Rebus sat down. Beside him sat Ken Smylie, hands crossed in his lap. The skin on his wrists had wrinkled up like a bloodhound’s face.

‘I’ll get straight to the point, John,’ said Kilpatrick. ‘We’ve got a man undercover. He’s posing as a long-distance lorry driver. We’re trying to pick up information on arms shipments: who’s selling, who’s buying.’

‘Something to do with The Shield, sir?’

Kilpatrick nodded. ‘He’s the one who’s heard the name mentioned.’

‘So who is he?’

‘My brother,’ Smylie said. ‘His name’s Calumn.’

Rebus took this in. ‘Does he look like you, Ken?’

‘A bit.’

‘Then I dare say he’d pass as a lorry driver.’

There was almost a smile at one corner of Smylie’s mouth.

‘Sir,’ Rebus said to Kilpatrick, ‘does this mean you think the Mary King’s Close killing had something to do with the paramilitaries?’

Kilpatrick smiled. ‘Why do you think you’re here, John?
You
spotted it straight off. We’ve got three men working on Billy Cunningham, trying to track down friends of his. For some reason they had to kill him, I’d like to know why.’

‘Me too, sir. If you want to find out about Cunningham, try his flatmate first.’

‘Murdock? Yes, we’re talking to him.’

‘No, not Murdock, Murdock’s girlfriend. I went round there when they reported him missing. There was something about her, something not quite right. Like she was holding back, putting on an act.’

Smylie said, ‘I’ll take a look.’

‘Her and her boyfriend both work with computers. Think that might mean something?’

‘I’ll take a look,’ Smylie repeated. Rebus didn’t doubt that he would.

‘Ken thinks you should meet Calumn,’ Kilpatrick said.

Rebus shrugged. ‘Fine by me.’

‘Good,’ said Kilpatrick. ‘Then we’ll take a little drive.’

Out in the main office they all looked at him strangely, like they knew precisely what had been said to him in Kilpatrick’s den. Well, of course they knew. Their looks told Rebus he was resented more than ever. Even Claverhouse, usually so laid back, was managing a snide little grin.

DI Blackwood rubbed a smooth hand over the hairless crown of his head, then tucked a stray hair back behind his ear. His tonsure was positively monasterial, and it bothered him. In his other hand he held his telephone receiver, listening to someone on the line. He ignored Rebus as Rebus walked past.

At the next desk along, DS Ormiston was squeezing spots on his forehead.

‘You two make a picture,’ Rebus said. Ormiston didn’t appear to get it, but that wasn’t Rebus’s problem. His problem was that Kilpatrick was taking him into his confidence, and Rebus still didn’t know why.

There are lots of warehouses in Sighthill, most of them anonymous. They weren’t exactly advertising that one of them had been leased by the Scottish Crime Squad. It was a big old prefabricated building surrounded by a high wire fence and protected by a high barred gate. There was barbed wire strung out across the top of the fence and the gate, and the gatehouse was manned. The guard unlocked the gate and swung it open so they could drive in.

‘We got this place for a song,’ Kilpatrick explained. ‘The market’s not exactly thriving just now.’ He smiled. ‘They even offered to throw in the security, but we didn’t think we’d need any help with that.’