A Good Hanging and other Stories (14 page)

‘When did he get back from Edinburgh?’

‘Couple of days ago. Think we can nail him?’

‘Maybe. We could do with some evidence though. But I think I can do something about that.’

As Rebus explained to Brian Holmes, it had been more than a ‘hunch’. A hunch was, as Dr Curt himself might put it, a stab in the dark. Rebus had a little more light to work by. He told the story as they drove through early-morning Edinburgh towards the Hermitage. The three girls had seen a man appearing from the trees. A wounded man. It seemed clear now that he’d been stabbed in some skirmish nearer to, or by the side of, Braid Hills Road. A switch of drugs from one car to another. An attempted double-cross. He’d been wounded and had fled down the hill into the Hermitage itself, coming into the clearing at the same time as the girls, making himself scarce when he saw them.

Because, of course, he had something to hide: his wound. He had patched himself up, but had stuck around Edinburgh, looking for revenge. Rab Philips had been grabbed, dismembered and his body dumped in the Hermitage as a message to Philips’ gang. The message was: you don’t mess with London.

Then the wounded villain had finally headed back south. But he was the antithesis of Philips; he wore flashy clothes. ‘Probably a white coat,’ Rebus had told George Flight. ‘White trousers. He’s got long hair and a beard.’

Flight had bettered the description. ‘It’s a white trench-coat,’ he’d said. ‘And yellow trousers, would you believe. A real old ex-hippy this one.’ His name was Shaun McLafferty. ‘Everyone on the street knows Shaun,’ Flight went on. ‘I didn’t know he’d started pushing dope though. Mind you, he’d try anything, that one.’

McLafferty. ‘He wouldn’t,’ Rebus asked, ‘be Irish by any chance?’

‘London Irish,’ said Flight. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the IRA was creaming ten per cent off his profits. Maybe more. After all, he either pays up or they take over. It happens.’

Maybe it was as simple as that then. An argument over ‘the divide’. An IRA supporter finding himself doing business with a UFF tattoo. The kind of mix old Molotov himself would have appreciated.

‘So,’ Brian Holmes said, having digested all this, ‘Inspector Flight paid a visit to McLafferty?’

Rebus nodded. ‘And he was wounded in his right side. Stab wound, according to George.’

‘So why,’ Holmes said, ‘are we here?’

They had parked the car just outside the gates and were now walking into the Hermitage.

‘Because,’ Rebus said, ‘we still lack evidence.’

‘What evidence?’

But Rebus wasn’t saying; perhaps because he didn’t know the answer himself. They were approaching the tree. There was no sign of the once ubiquitous guard, but a familiar figure was kneeling before the tree.

‘Morning, Father.’

Father Byrne looked up. ‘Good morning, Inspector. You too, Constable.’

Rebus looked around him. ‘All alone?’

Byrne nodded. ‘Enthusiasm seems to have waned, Inspector. No more megaphones, or coach parties, or cameras.’

‘You sound relieved.’

‘Believe me, I am.’ Father Byrne held out his arms. ‘I much prefer it like this, don’t you?’

Rebus was obliged to nod his agreement. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we think we can explain what the girls saw.’

Father Byrne merely shrugged.

‘No more guard-duties?’ Rebus asked.

‘The men stopped bothering us.’

Rebus nodded thoughtfully. His eyes were on the tree. ‘It wasn’t you they were after, Father. It was the tree. But not for the reason you think. Brian, give me a hand, will you
^?
’

A literal hand. Rebus wanted Holmes to form a stirrup from his hands, so that Rebus could place a foot on them and be hoisted up into the tree. Holmes steadied himself against the tree and complied, not without a silent groan. It was feasible that Rebus weighed a good three and a half stones more than him. Still, ours is not to reason why ... and heave!

Rebus scrabbled with his hands, finding knot-holes, moss, but nothing else, nothing hidden. He peered upwards, seeking any fissure in the bark, any cranny. Nothing.

‘All right, Brian.’

Gratefully, Holmes lowered Rebus groundwards. ‘Anything?’

Rebus shook his head. He was gnawing his bottom lip.

‘Are you going to tell me what we’re looking for?’

‘McLafferty had something else to hide from the girls, something on top of the fact that he’d been stabbed. Let’s think.’ McLafferty had come through the copse, the undergrowth, had rested for a second against the tree, fled back through the copse.

‘Chalk!’ Rebus thumped the tree with his fist.

‘Pardon?’

‘Chalk! That morning I came to check on you. When the cadets got up, their knees had white, powdery chalk on them.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well look!’ Rebus led Holmes into the copse. ‘There’s no white rock here. No bits of chalky stone. That wasn’t bloody chalk.’ He fell to his knees and began to burrow furiously, raking his hands through the earth.

The girls’ parents had messed up the ground, making the white powder inconspicuous. Enough to mark a trouser-knee, but hardly noticeable otherwise. Certainly, nothing a cadet would bother with. And besides, they’d been looking for something
on
the ground, not below it.

‘Ah!’ He paused, probed a spot with his fingers, then began to dig around it. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘just the one packet and it’s burst. That’s what it was. Must have burst when McLafferty was burying it. Better call for forensics, Brian. His blood and his prints will be all over it.’

‘Right, sir.’ Stunned, Brian Holmes sprinted from the clearing, then stopped and turned back. ‘Keys,’ he explained. Rebus fished his car-keys from his pocket and tossed them to him. Father Byrne, who had been a spectator throughout, came a little closer.

‘Heroin, Father. Either that or cocaine. Bigger profits than cannabis, you see. It all comes down to money in the end. They were doing a deal. McLafferty got himself stabbed. He was holding a packet when it happened. Got away somehow, ran down here before he had time to think. He knew he’d better get rid of the stuff, so he buried it. The men who were bothering you, McLafferty’s men, it was this they were after. Then they got Rab Philips instead and went home satisfied. If it wasn’t for your all-night vigil, they’d’ve had this stuff too.’

Rebus paused, aware that he couldn’t be making much sense to the priest. Father Byrne seemed to read his mind and smiled.

‘For a minute there, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I thought you were speaking in tongues.’

Rebus grinned, too, feeling breathless. With McLafferty’s prints on the bag, they would have the evidence they needed. ‘Sorry you didn’t get your miracle,’ he said.

Father Byrne’s smile broadened. ‘Miracles happen every day, Inspector. I don’t need to have them invented for me.’

They turned to watch as Holmes came wandering back towards them. But his eyes were concentrating on an area to the left of them. ‘They’re on their way,’ he said, handing Rebus’s keys back to him.

‘Fine.’

‘Who was that by the way?

‘Who?’

‘The other man.’ Holmes looked from Rebus to Byrne back to Rebus again. ‘The other man,’ he repeated. ‘The one who was standing here with you. When I was coming back, he was ...’ He was pointing now, back towards the gate, then over towards the left of the tree. But his voice died away.

‘No, never mind,’ he said. ‘I thought ... I just, no never mind. I must be -’

‘Seeing things?’ Father Byrne suggested, his fingers just touching the wooden cross around his neck.

‘That’s right, yes. Yes, seeing things.’

Ghosts, thought Rebus. Spirits of the wood. Rab Philips maybe, or the Hermitage Witch. My God, those two would have a lot to talk about, wouldn’t they?

A Good Hanging

I

It was quite some time since a scaffold had been seen in Parliament Square. Quite some time since Edinburgh had witnessed a hanging, too, though digging deeper into history the sight might have been common enough. Detective Inspector John Rebus recalled hearing some saloon-bar story of how criminals, sentenced to hang, would be given the chance to run the distance of the Royal Mile from Parliament Square to Holyrood, a baying crowd hot on their heels. If the criminal reached the Royal Park before he was caught, he would be allowed to remain there, wandering in safety so long as he did not step outside the boundary of the park itself. True or not, the tale conjured up the wonderful image of rogues and vagabonds trapped within the confines of Arthur’s Seat, Salisbury Crags and Whinny Hill. Frankly, Rebus would have preferred the noose.

‘It’s got to be a prank gone wrong, hasn’t it?’

A prank. Edinburgh was full of pranks at this time of year. It was Festival time, when young people, theatrical people, flooded into the city with their enthusiasm and their energy. You couldn’t walk ten paces without someone pressing a handbill upon you or begging you to visit their production. These were the ‘Fringe lunatics’ as Rebus had not very originally, but to his own satisfaction, termed them. They came for two or three or four weeks, mostly from London and they squeezed into damp sleeping-bags on bedsit floors throughout the city, going home much paler, much more tired and almost always the poorer. It was not unusual for the unlucky Fringe shows, those given a venue on the outskirts, those with no review to boast of, starved of publicity and inspiration, for those unfortunate shows to play to single-figure audiences, if not to an audience of a single figure.

Rebus didn’t like Festival time. The streets became clogged, there seemed a despair about all the artistic fervour and, of course, the crime rate rose. Pickpockets loved the festival. Burglars found easy pickings in the overpopulated, underprotected bedsits. And, finding their local pub taken over by the ‘Sassenachs’, the natives were inclined to throw the occasional punch or bottle or chair. Which was why Rebus avoided the city centre during the Festival, skirting around it in his car, using alleyways and half-forgotten routes. Which was why he was so annoyed at having been called here today, to Parliament Square, the heart of the Fringe, to witness a hanging.

‘Got to be a prank,’ he repeated to Detective Constable Brian Holmes. The two men were standing in front of a scaffold, upon which hung the gently swaying body of a young man. The body swayed due to the fresh breeze which was sweeping up the Royal Mile from the direction of Holyrood Park. Rebus thought of the ghosts of the royal park’s inmates. Was the wind of their making? ‘A publicity stunt gone wrong,’ he mused.

‘Apparently not, sir,’ Holmes said. He’d been having a few words with the workmen who were trying to erect a curtain of sorts around the spectacle so as to hide it from the view of the hundreds of inquisitive tourists who had gathered noisily outside the police cordon. Holmes now consulted his notebook, while Rebus, hands in pockets, strolled around the scaffold. It was of fairly ramshackle construction, which hadn’t stopped it doing its job.

‘The body was discovered at four-fifty this morning. We don’t think it had been here long. A patrol car passed this way at around four and they didn’t see anything.’

‘That doesn’t mean much,’ Rebus interrupted in a mutter.

Holmes ignored the remark. ‘The deceased belonged to a Fringe group called Ample Reading Time. They come from the University of Reading, thus the name.’

‘It also makes the acronym ART,’ Rebus commented.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Holmes. His tone told the senior officer that Holmes had already worked this out for himself. Rebus wriggled a little, as though trying to keep warm. In fact, he had a summer cold.

‘How did we discover his identity?’ They were in front of the hanging man now, standing only four or so feet below him. Early twenties, Rebus surmised. A shock of black curly hair.

‘The scaffold has a venue number pinned to it,’ Holmes was saying. ‘A student hall of residence just up the road.’

‘And that’s where the ART show’s playing?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Holmes consulted the bulky Fringe programme which he had been holding behind his notebook. ‘It’s a play of sorts called “Scenes from a Hanging”.’ The two men exchanged a look at this. ‘The blurb,’ Holmes continued, consulting the company’s entry near the front of the programme, ‘promises “thrills, spills and a live hanging on stage”.’

‘A live hanging, eh? Well, you can’t say they didn’t deliver. So, he takes the scaffold from the venue, wheels it out here — I notice it’s on wheels, presumably to make it easier to trundle on and off the stage - and in the middle of the night he hangs himself, without anyone hearing anything or seeing anything.’ Rebus sounded sceptical.

‘Well,’ said Holmes, ‘be honest, sir.’ He was pointing towards and beyond the crowd of onlookers. ‘Does anything look suspicious in Edinburgh at this time of year?’

Rebus followed the direction of the finger and saw that a twelve-foot-high man was enjoying a grandstand view of the spectacle, while somewhere to his right someone was juggling three saucepans high into the air. The stilt-man walked towards the pans, grabbed one from mid-air and set it on his head, waving down to the crowd before moving off. Rebus sighed.

‘I suppose you’re right, Brian. Just this once you may be right.’

A young DC approached, holding a folded piece of paper towards them. ‘We found this in his trousers back-pocket.’

‘Ah,’ said Rebus, ‘the suicide note.’ He plucked the sheet from the DC’s outstretched hand and read it aloud.

‘“Pity it wasn’t
Twelfth Night
”.’

Holmes peered at the line of type. ‘Is that it?’

‘Short but sweet,’ said Rebus.
‘Twelfth Night.
A play by Shakespeare and the end of the Christmas season. I wonder which one he means?’ Rebus refolded the note and slipped it into his pocket. ‘But is it a suicide note or not? It could just be a bog-standard note, a reminder or whatever, couldn’t it? I still think this is a stunt gone wrong.’ He paused to cough. He was standing beside the cobblestone inset of the Heart of Midlothian, and like many a Scot before him, he spat for luck into the centre of the heart-shaped stones. Holmes looked away and found himself gazing into the dead man’s dulled eyes. He turned back as Rebus was fumbling with a handkerchief.