A Question of Blood (2003) (27 page)

“Anyone could walk in.” Rebus had waited for Renshaw’s car to catch up with him, and now they were racing again, crossing lanes at one point in the track.

“Know what I was thinking about last night?” Renshaw said. “I think it was last night . . .”

“What?”

“I was thinking about your dad. I really liked him. He used to do tricks for me, do you remember that?”

“Producing pennies from behind your ear?”

“And making them disappear. He said he’d learned it in the army.”

“Probably.”

“He was in the Far East, wasn’t he?”

Rebus nodded. His father had never said much about his wartime exploits. Mostly, all he’d shared were anecdotes, things they could laugh at. But later on . . . towards the end of his life, he’d let slip details of some of the horrors he’d witnessed.

These weren’t professional soldiers, John, they were conscripts—men who worked in banks, shops, factories. War changed them, changed all of us. How could it not?

“Thing is,” Allan Renshaw continued, “thinking about your dad got me thinking about you. Remember that day you took me to the park.”

“The day we played football?”

Renshaw nodded, gave a weak smile. “You remember it?”

“Probably not as well as you.”

“Oh, I remember, all right. We were playing football, and then some guys you knew turned up, and I had to play by myself while you talked to them.” Renshaw paused. The cars crossed each other again. “Coming back to you?”

“Not really.” But Rebus supposed it could be true. Whenever he’d gone home on leave, there’d been friends from school to catch up with.

“Then we started walking home. Or you and your pals did, me trailing behind, carrying the ball you’d bought us . . . Now this bit, this bit I’d pushed to the back of my mind . . .”

“What bit?” Rebus was concentrating on the racetrack.

“The bit where we were passing the pub. You remember the pub on the corner?”

“The Bowhill Hotel?”

“That was it. We were passing, only then you turned to me, pointed at me, told me I’d to wait outside. Your voice was different, a lot harder, like you didn’t want your pals to know
we
were pals . . .”

“You sure about this, Allan?”

“Oh, I’m sure. Because the three of you went inside, and I sat at the curb and waited. I was holding on to the ball, and after a while you came out again, but just to hand me a bag of crisps. You went back inside, and then these other kids came up, and one of them kicked the ball out of my grasp, and they ran off, laughing and kicking it to each other. That’s when I started crying, and still you didn’t come out, and I knew I couldn’t go in. So I got to my feet and walked back to the house by myself. I got lost once, but I stopped and asked someone.” The racing cars were speeding towards the point at which they would switch lanes. They arrived at the same time, met and bounced off the track, landing on their backs. Neither man moved. The attic was silent for a moment. “You came home later,” Renshaw continued, breaking the silence, “and nobody said anything because I’d not said anything to them. But you know what really got me? You never asked what had happened to the ball, and I knew why you didn’t ask. It was because you’d forgotten all about it. Because it wasn’t important to you.” Renshaw paused. “And I was just some little kid again, and not your friend.”

“Jesus, Allan . . .” Rebus was trying to remember, but there was nothing there. The day he’d thought he’d known had been sunshine and football, nothing else.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last.

Tears were dripping down Renshaw’s cheeks. “I was family, John, and you treated me like I was nothing.”

“Allan, believe me, I never —”

“Out!” Renshaw yelled, sniffing back more tears. “I want you out of my house—now!” He’d risen stiffly to his feet. Rebus was up, too, the two men standing awkwardly, heads angled against the roofbeams, backs bent.

“Look, Allan, if it’s any . . .”

But Renshaw had him by the shoulder, trying to maneuver him to the hatch.

“All right, all right,” Rebus was saying. He tried yanking himself free of the other man’s grip, and Renshaw stumbled, one foot finding no purchase, sending him falling through the hatch. Rebus grabbed him by the arm, feeling his fingers burn as he tightened his grip. Renshaw scrabbled back upright.

“You okay?” Rebus asked.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Renshaw was pointing at the ladder.

“Okay, Allan. But we’ll talk again sometime, eh? That’s what I came here for: to talk, to get to know you.”

“You had your chance to get to know me,” Renshaw said coldly. Rebus was making his way back down the ladder. He peered up through the gap, but his cousin wasn’t visible.

“Are you coming down, Allan?” he called. No response. Then the buzzing sound again, as the red car recommenced its journey. Rebus turned and headed downstairs. Didn’t really know what to do, whether it was safe to leave Allan like this. He walked into the living room, through to the kitchen. Outside, the lawn mower had yet to move. There were sheets of paper on the table, computer printouts. Petitions calling for gun control, for more safety in schools. No names as yet, just row after row of blank boxes. The same thing had happened after Dunblane. A tightening of rules and regulations. Result? More illegal guns than ever out there on the street. Rebus knew that in Edinburgh, if you knew where to go asking, you could get a gun in under an hour. In Glasgow, it was reckoned to take all of ten minutes. Guns were run like rental videos: you hired them for a day. If they came back unused, you got some money back. Used, and you didn’t. A simple commercial transaction, not too far removed from Peacock Johnson’s activities. Rebus thought about signing his name to the petition but knew it would be an empty gesture. There were lots of newspaper cuttings and reprints of magazine articles: the effects of violence in the media. Knee-jerk stuff, like saying a horror video could make two kids kill a toddler . . . He had a look around, wondering if Kate had left a contact number. He wanted to talk to her about her father, maybe tell her Allan needed her more than Jack Bell did. He stood at the foot of the stairs for a few minutes, listening to the noises in the attic, then checked the phone book for a taxi firm.

“Be with you in ten,” the voice on the phone told him. A cheery, female voice. It was almost enough to persuade him that there was another world than this . . .

Siobhan stood in the middle of her living room and looked around her. She walked over to the window and closed the shutters against the dying light. She picked up a mug and plate from the floor: toast crumbs identifying her last meal in the flat. She checked that there were no messages on her phone. It was Friday, which meant Toni Jackson and the other female officers would be expecting her, but the last thing she felt like was girlie bonhomie and the drunken eyeing-up of pub talent. The mug and plate took half a minute to wash and place on the draining board. A quick look in the fridge. The food she’d bought, intending to cook a meal for Rebus, was still there, a few days shy of its “best before” date. She closed the door again and went into her bedroom, straightened the duvet on her bed, confirmed that doing laundry would be necessary this weekend. Then into the bathroom, a glance at herself in the mirror before heading back into the living room, where she opened the day’s mail. Two bills and a postcard. The postcard was from an old college friend. They hadn’t managed to see each other this year, despite living in the same city. Now the friend was enjoying a four-day break in Rome . . . probably already back, judging by the date on the card. Rome: Siobhan had never been there.

I walked into the travel agent, asked them what they had at short notice. Having a great time, chilling, doing the café thing, a bit of culture when the mood takes me. Love, Jackie.

She stood the card on her mantelpiece, tried remembering her last real holiday. A week with her parents? That weekend break in Dublin? It had been a hen party for one of the uniforms . . . and now the woman was expecting her first kid. She looked up at the ceiling. Her upstairs neighbor was thumping around. She didn’t think he did it on purpose, but he walked like an elephant. She’d met him on the sidewalk outside when she was coming home, complaining that he’d just had to fetch his car from the city impound.

“Twenty minutes I left it, twenty on a single yellow . . . by the time I got back, it’d been towed . . . hundred and thirty quid, can you believe it? I almost told them it was more than the bloody thing’s worth.” Then he’d stabbed a finger at her. “You should do something about it.”

Because she was a cop. Because people thought cops could pull strings, get things sorted, change things.

You should do something about it.

He was raging all around his living room, a caged animal ready to hurl itself against the bars. He worked in an office on George Street: account executive, retail insurance. Not quite Siobhan’s height, he wore glasses with narrow rectangular lenses. Had a male flatmate, but had stressed to Siobhan that he wasn’t gay, information for which she had thanked him.

Stomp, thunk, plod.

She wondered if there was any purpose to his movements. Was he opening and closing drawers? Looking for the lost remote perhaps? Or was movement itself his purpose? And if so, what did that say about her own stillness, about the fact that she was standing here listening to him? One postcard on her mantelpiece . . . one plate and mug on the draining board. One shuttered window, with a horizontal locking bar that she never bothered fastening. Safe enough in here as it was. Cocooned. Smothered.

“Sod it,” she muttered, turning to make good her escape.

St. Leonard’s was quiet. She’d intended burning off some frustration in the gym, but instead got herself a can of something cold and fizzy from the machine and headed upstairs to CID, checking her desk for messages. Another letter from her mystery admirer:

DO BLACK LEATHER GLOVES TURN YOU ON?

Referring to Rebus, she surmised. There was a note for her to call Ray Duff, but all he wanted to say was that he’d managed to test the first of her anonymous letters.

“And it’s not good news.”

“Meaning it’s clean?” she guessed.

“As the proverbial whistle.” She let out a sigh. “Sorry I can’t be more helpful. Would buying you a drink help?”

“Some other time maybe.”

“Fair enough. I’ll probably be here for another hour or two as it is.” “Here” being the forensic lab at Howdenhall.

“Still working on Port Edgar?”

“Matching blood types, see whose spatters are whose.”

Siobhan was seated on the edge of her desk, phone tucked between cheek and shoulder as she sifted through the rest of the paperwork in her in-tray. Most of it concerned cases from weeks back . . . names she could barely remember.

“Better let you get back to it, then,” she said.

“Keeping busy yourself, Siobhan? You sound tired.”

“You know what it’s like, Ray. Let’s have that drink sometime.”

“By then, I reckon we’ll both need it.”

She smiled into the phone. “Bye, Ray.”

“Take care of yourself, Shiv . . .”

She put the phone down. There it was again: somebody calling her Shiv, trying for a kind of intimacy they thought the foreshortening would bring. She’d noticed, though, that no one ever tried the same tack with Rebus, never called him Jock, Johnny, Jo-Jo, or JR. Because they looked at him or listened to him and knew he was none of those things. He was John Rebus. Detective Inspector Rebus. To his closest friends: John. Yet some of these same people would happily see her as “Shiv.” Why? Because she was a woman? Did she lack Rebus’s gravitas or sense of perpetual threat? Were they just trying to worm their way into her affections? Or would the conferring of a nickname make her seem more vulnerable, less edgy and potentially dangerous to them?

Shiv . . . It meant a knife, didn’t it? American slang. Well, right now she felt just about as blunt as she ever had. And here was another nickname walking into the room. DS George “Hi-Ho” Silvers. Looking around as if for someone in particular. Spotting her, it took him a second to make up his mind that she might suit his particular requirements.

“Busy?” he asked.

“What does it look like?”

“Fancy a wee drive, then?”

“You’re not really my type, George.”

A snort. “We’ve got a DP.” DP: deceased person.

“Where?”

“Over Gracemount way. Abandoned railway track. Looks like he fell from the footbridge.”

“An accident, then?” Like Fairstone’s chip-pan fire: another Gracemount accident.

Silvers shrugged his shoulders as far as he could within the confines of a suit jacket that had fitted him with room to spare three years before. “Story is, he was being chased.”

“Chased?”

Another shrug. “That’s as much as I know till we get there.”

Siobhan nodded. “So what are we waiting for?”

They took Silvers’s car. He asked her about South Queensferry, about Rebus and the house fire, but she kept her answers short. Eventually he got the message and turned on the radio, whistling along to trad jazz, possibly her least favorite music.

“You listen to any Mogwai, George?”

“Never heard of it. Why?”

“Just wondering . . .”

There was nowhere to park near the railway line. Silvers pulled up to the curb, behind a patrol car. There was a bus stop, and behind it an area of grassland. They crossed it on foot, approaching a low fence overgrown with thistles and brambles. The fence was broken by a short metal stairway leading to the bridge across the railway, where sightseers from the local apartment houses had gathered. A uniformed officer was asking each one if they’d seen or heard anything.

“How the hell are we supposed to get down?” Silvers growled. Siobhan pointed to the far side, where a makeshift stile had been erected from plastic milk crates and cinder blocks, an old mattress folded across the top of the fence. When they reached it, Silvers took one look and decided it wasn’t for him. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head. So Siobhan clambered up and over, skidding down the steep embankment, digging her heels as far as possible into the soft ground, feeling nettles sting her ankles, briars snag at her trousers. Several figures had gathered around the prone body on the track. She recognized faces from the Craigmillar police station, and the pathologist, Dr. Curt. He saw her and smiled a greeting.