10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (319 page)

‘I don’t understand.’

‘He thinks the driver meant to hit Sammy.’

‘I still don’t get it.’

‘Look, there are two scenarios. One, he was intent on hitting a pedestrian, and anyone would have done. Two, Sammy was his target. He’d been following her, saw his chance when she crossed the road, only the lights were against him so he had to jump them. Then she was so close to the kerb he had to switch lanes.’

‘But why?’

Rebus stared at him. ‘This is Sammy’s dad and her lover, right? For the purposes of what follows, I want you to stop being a reporter.’

Farlowe stared back, nodded slowly.

‘I’ve had a few run-ins with Tommy Telford,’ Rebus said. He was seeing teddy bears: Pa Broon, and the one Telford kept in his car. ‘This might have been a message for me.’ Telford or Tarawicz: flip a coin. ‘Or for you, if you’ve been asking questions about Telford.’

‘You think my book . . .’

‘I’m keeping an open mind. I’ve been working the Lintz case . . . and so have you.’

‘Someone warning us off Lintz?’

Rebus thought of Abernethy, shrugged. ‘Then there’s Sammy’s job, working with ex-cons. Maybe one of them had a grudge.’

‘Jesus.’

‘She hadn’t mentioned anyone following her? Nobody odd in the area?’ Same question he’d put to the Drinics, only different victim . . .

Farlowe shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘until five minutes ago I thought this was an accident. Now you’re saying it was attempted murder. Are you
sure
?’

‘I’m trusting a witness.’ But he knew what Bill Pryde thought: a drunk driver, a crazy man. And a grandstand spectator who wore glasses and had read it wrong. He took out the drawing again.

‘What’s that?’

Rebus handed it over. ‘This is what someone saw last night.’

‘What kind of car is it?’

‘Rover 600, Ford Mondeo, something like that. Dark green. Ring any bells?’

Ned Farlowe shook his head, then looked at Rebus. ‘Let me help. I can ask around.’

‘One kid in a coma’s enough.’

The rest of the office had packed up and gone home. Now there were only Rebus and Sammy’s boss, a woman called Mae Crumley. The light from half a dozen desk-lamps illuminated the haphazard office, which was on the top floor of an old four-storey building off Palmerston Place. Rebus knew Palmerston Place: there was a church there where the AA held meetings. He’d been to a couple. He could still taste whisky at the back of his throat. Not that he’d had any so far today, not in daylight hours. But then he hadn’t phoned Jack Morton either.

The address might have been posher than Rebus was expecting, but the accommodation was cramped. The office was in the eaves of the building, so that you couldn’t stand up in half the available space, which hadn’t stopped desks being sited in the most awkward corners.

‘Which is hers?’ Rebus asked. Mae Crumley pointed to the desk next to her own. There was a computer there somewhere, but only its screen was showing. Loose sheets of paper, books and pamphlets and reports, the whole lot spilled on to the chair and from there down on to the floor.

‘She works too hard,’ Crumley said. ‘We all do.’

Rebus sipped the coffee she’d made him. Cafe Hag.

‘When Sammy came here,’ she went on, ‘the first thing she said was that her father was CID. She never tried to hide it.’

‘And you’d no qualms about taking her on?’

‘None at all.’ Crumley folded her arms. They were big arms; she was a big woman. Her hair was a fiery red, long and frizzy and tied back with a black ribbon. She wore an oatmeal linen shirt with a denim jacket over the top of it. Her eyebrows had been plucked into thin arches over pale
grey eyes. Her desk was relatively tidy, but only, as she’d explained to Rebus, because she tended to stay later than anyone else.

‘What about her clients?’ Rebus asked. ‘Could any of them have held a grudge?’

‘Against her or against you?’

‘Against me
through
her.’

Crumley considered this. ‘To the extent that they’d run her over just to make a point? I very much doubt it.’

‘I’d be interested to see her client list.’

She shook her head. ‘Look . . . you shouldn’t be doing this. It’s too personal, you know that. I mean, who am I talking to here: Sammy’s father, or a copper?’

‘You think I’ve a score to settle?’

‘Well haven’t you?’

Rebus put down the coffee mug. ‘Maybe.’

‘And that’s why you shouldn’t be doing this.’ She sighed. ‘Number one on my wish list: Sammy back on her feet and back here. But what about if meantime I do a bit of poking around? I stand a better chance of getting them to talk than you do.’

Rebus nodded. ‘I’d appreciate that.’ He got to his feet. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

Outside, he checked the list the Juice Church had given him. He kept it in his pocket, didn’t refer to it often. There was a meeting at Palmerston Place in about an hour and a half. No good. He knew he’d spend the time beforehand in a pub. Jack Morton had introduced him to Al-Anon, but Rebus hadn’t really taken to it, though the stories had affected him.

‘See,’ one man had told the group, ‘I had problems at work, problems with my wife, my kids. I had money problems and health problems and everything else. Practically the only problem I didn’t have was with the drink. And that’s because I was a drunk.’

Rebus lit himself a cigarette and drove home.

He sat in his chair and thought about Rhona. They’d shared so much over so many years . . . and then it had all stopped. He’d chosen his job over his marriage, and that could not be forgiven. Last time he’d seen her had been in London, wearing her new life like armour. Nobody had warned him about Jackie Platt. His phone rang, and he snatched it from the floor.

‘Rebus.’

‘It’s Bill.’ Pryde sounded halfway to excited, which was as far as he ever ventured.

‘What have you got?’

‘Dark green Rover 600 – I think the owner called it “Sherwood Green” – stolen yesterday evening about an hour before the collision.’

‘Where from?’

‘Metered parking on George Street.’

‘What do you reckon?’

‘My advice is, keep an open mind. Having said that, at least now we’ve got a licence plate. Owner reported it at six-forty last night. It hasn’t turned up anywhere, so I’ve upped the alert status.’

‘Give me the reg.’ Pryde read out the letters and numbers. Rebus thanked him and put down the phone. He was thinking of Danny Simpson, dumped outside Fascination Street around the time Sammy was being hit. Coincidence? Or a double message, Telford and Rebus. Which put Big Ger Cafferty in the frame. He called the hospital, was told there was no change. Farlowe was in visiting. The nurse said he had his laptop with him.

Rebus recalled Sammy growing up – a series of isolated images. He hadn’t been there for her. He saw her in a series of fast jerky impressions, as if the film had been spliced. He tried not to think about the hell she had gone through at the hands of Gordon Reeve . . .

He saw good people doing bad things and bad people doing good, and he tried dividing the two into groups. He saw Candice and Tommy Telford and Mr Pink Eyes. And encompassing it all, he saw Edinburgh. He saw the mass of the people just getting on with their lives, and he saluted them. They
knew
things and felt things, things he’d never feel. He used to think he knew things. As a kid, he’d known
everything
. Now he knew differently. The only thing you could be sure of was the inside of your head, and even that could deceive you. I don’t even know myself, he thought. So how could he ever hope to know Sammy? And with each year, he understood less.

He thought of the Oxford Bar. Even on the wagon, he’d stayed a regular, drinking cola and mugs of coffee. A pub like the Ox was about so much more than just the hooch. It was therapy and refuge, entertainment and art. He checked his watch, thinking he could head down there now. Just a couple of whiskies and a beer, something to make him feel good about himself until the morning.

The phone rang again. He picked it up.

‘Evening, John.’

Rebus smiled, leaned back in his chair. ‘Jack, you must be a bloody mind reader . . .’

Mid-morning, Rebus walked through the cemetery. He’d been to the hospital to check on Sammy – no change. Now, he felt he had time to kill . . .

‘A bit cooler today, Inspector.’ Joseph Lintz rose from his knees and pushed his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. There were damp patches on his trousers from where he’d been kneeling. He dropped his trowel on to a white polythene bag. Beside the bag stood pots of small green plants.

‘Won’t the frost get them?’ Rebus asked. Lintz shrugged.

‘It gets all of us, but we’re allowed to bloom for a while.’

Rebus turned away. Today, he wasn’t in the mood for games. Warriston Cemetery was vast. In the past, it had been a history lesson to Rebus – headstones telling the story of nineteenth-century Edinburgh – but now he found it a jarring reminder of mortality. They were the only living souls in the place. Lintz had pulled out a handkerchief.

‘More questions?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly.’

‘What then?’

‘Truth is, Mr Lintz, I’ve got other things on my mind.’

The old man looked at him. ‘Maybe all this archaeology is beginning to bore you, Inspector?’

‘I still don’t get it, planting things before the first frost?’

‘Well, I can’t plant very much afterwards, can I? And at my age . . . any day now I could be lying in the ground. I like to think there might be a few flowers surviving above
me.’ He’d lived in Scotand the best part of half a century, but there was still something lurking beneath the local accent, peculiarities of phrasing and tone that would be with Joseph Lintz until he died, reminders of his far less recent history.

‘So,’ he said now, ‘no questions today?’ Rebus shook his head. ‘You’re right, Inspector, you do seem preoccupied. Is it something I can help with?’

‘In what way?’

‘I don’t really know. But you’ve come here, questions or no. I take it there’s a reason?’

A dog was bounding through the long grass, crunching on the fallen leaves, nose brushing the ground. It was a yellow labrador, short-haired and overweight. Lintz turned towards it and almost growled. Dogs were the enemy.

‘I was just wondering,’ Rebus was saying, ‘what you’re capable of.’ Lintz looked puzzled. The dog began to paw at the ground. Lintz reached down, picked up a stone, and hurled it. It didn’t reach the dog. The labrador’s owner was rounding the corner. He was young, crop-haired and skinny.

‘That thing should be kept on its lead!’ Lintz roared.

‘
Jawohl
!’ the owner snapped back, clicking his heels. He was laughing as he passed them.

‘I am a famous man now,’ Lintz reflected, back to his old self after the outburst. ‘Thanks to the newspapers.’ He looked up at the sky, blinked. ‘People send me hate by the Royal Mail. A car was parked outside my home the other night . . . they put a brick through the windscreen. It wasn’t my car, but they didn’t know that. Now my neighbours keep clear of that spot, just in case.’

He spoke like the old man he was, a little tired, a little defeated.

‘This is the worst year of my life.’ He stared down at the border he’d been tending. The earth, newly turned, looked
dark and rich, like crumbs of chocolate cake. A few worms and wood lice had been disturbed and were still looking for their old homes. ‘And it’s going to get worse, isn’t it?’

Rebus shrugged. His feet were cold, the damp seeping in through his shoes. He was standing on the rough roadway, Lintz six inches above him on the grass. And still Lintz didn’t reach his height. A little old man: that’s what he was. And Rebus could study him, talk with him, go to his home and see what few photographs remained – according to Lintz – from the old days.

‘What did you mean back there?’ he said. ‘What was it you said? Something about what I was capable of?’

Rebus stared at him. ‘It’s okay, the dog just showed me.’

‘Showed you what?’

‘What you’re like with the enemy.’

Lintz smiled. ‘I don’t like dogs, it’s true. Don’t read too much into it, Inspector. That’s the journalists’ job.’

‘Your life would be easier without dogs, wouldn’t it?’

Lintz shrugged. ‘Of course.’

‘And easier without me, too?’

Lintz frowned. ‘If it weren’t you, it would be someone else, a boor like your Inspector Abernethy.’

‘What do you think he was telling you?’

Lintz blinked. ‘I’m not sure. Someone else came to see me. A man called Levy. I refused to talk to him – one privilege still open to me.’

Rebus shuffled his feet, trying to get some warmth into them. ‘I have a daughter, did I ever tell you that?’

Lintz looked baffled. ‘You might have mentioned it.’

‘You know I have a daughter?’

‘Yes . . . I mean, I think I knew before today.’

‘Well, Mr Lintz, the night before last, someone tried to kill her, or at least do her some serious damage. She’s in hospital, still unconscious. And
that
bothers me.’

‘I’m so sorry. How did it . . . ? I mean, how do you . . . ?’

‘I think maybe someone was trying to send me a message.’

Lintz’s eyes widened. ‘And you believe
me
capable of such a thing? My God, I thought we had come to understand one another, at least a little.’

Rebus was wondering. He was wondering how easy it would be to put on an act, when you’d spent half a century practising. He was wondering how easy it would be to steel yourself to killing an innocent . . . or at least ordering their death. All it took was an order. A few words to someone else who would carry out your bidding. Maybe Lintz had it in him. Maybe it wouldn’t be any more difficult than it had been for Josef Linzstek.

‘Something you should know,’ Rebus said. ‘Threats don’t scare me off. Quite the opposite.’

‘It’s good that you are so strong.’ Rebus looked for meaning behind the words. ‘I’m on my way home. Can I offer you some tea?’

Rebus drove, and then sat in the drawing-room while Lintz busied himself in the kitchen. Started flicking through a pile of books on a desk.