10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (206 page)

‘Bitter outside, isn’t it?’ Dr Klasser said.

‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

‘Just making conversation, John. How do you feel?’

‘I think I’m getting toothache.’

‘Anything else?’ Dr Klasser was fussing with the tools of his trade: penlight and stethoscope, a clipboard and nonworking Biro. Eventually he was ready to examine the patient. Rebus didn’t put up much of a fight. He was thinking of drinking: the creamy, almost gas-free head on a pint of eighty-bob. The warming aroma from a glass of malt.

‘How’s my chief inspector?’ Rebus asked when the nurse returned.

‘They’re taking X-rays,’ she told him.

‘Car chases at your age,’ Dr Klasser muttered. ‘I blame television.’

Rebus took a good look at him, and realised he hadn’t ever really looked at the man before, not properly. Klasser was in his early forties, steel-haired with a tanned and prematurely ageing face. If you only had head and shoulders to go on, you’d guess he was taller than was actually the case. He looked quite distinguished, which was why Rebus had pegged him for a senior consultant, something like that.

‘I thought only lackeys and L-plates worked nights,’ Rebus commented, while Klasser shone a light in his eyes.

Klasser put down the light and started to squeeze Rebus’s back, prodding it like he was plumping up a cushion.

‘Any pain there?’

‘No.’

‘What about there?’

‘No more than usual.’

‘Hmm . . . In answer to your question, John, I notice
you’re
working nights. Does that make you lackey or L-plate?’

‘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.

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 impact 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.’