Tooth And Nail (21 page)

When feeling depressed, be rash. He stuck a hand out into the road and at the first attempt managed to stop an empty black cab. He couldn’t remember the name of the street he wanted, but that didn’t matter.

‘Covent Garden,’ he said to the driver. As the cab did what Rebus assumed was a fairly illegal u-turn, he dipped into his bag to claim the first prize.

He wandered around Covent Garden proper for twenty minutes, enjoying an open-air magic act and a nearby fire-eater before moving off in search of Lisa’s flat. It wasn’t too difficult to find. He surprised himself by recalling a kite shop and another shop which seemed to sell nothing but teapots. Took a left and a right and another right and found himself in her street, standing outside the shoe shop. The shop itself was busy. The clientele, like the serving staff, was very young, probably not yet out of teens. A jazz saxophone played. A tape perhaps, or someone busking in the distance. He looked up at the window to Lisa’s flat, with its bright yellow roller blind. How old was she really? It was hard to tell.

And then, only then, he went to the door and pressed her buzzer. There was noise from the intercom, a crackle of movement. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s me, John.’

‘Hello? I can’t hear you!’

‘It’s John,’ he said loudly into the door frame, looking around him in embarrassment. But no one was interested. People glanced into the shop window as they passed, eating strange-looking snacks, vegetable-looking things.

‘John?’ As though she had forgotten him already. Then: ‘Oh, John.’ And the buzzer sounded beside him. ‘Door’s open. Come on up.’

The door to her flat was open, too, and he closed it behind him. Lisa was tidying the studio, as she called it. In Edinburgh it wouldn’t have been called a studio. It would have been called a bedsit. He supposed Covent Garden didn’t have such things as bedsits.

‘I’ve been trying to get in touch,’ he said.

‘Me too.’

‘Oh?’

She turned to him, noting the hint of disbelief in his voice. ‘Didn’t they tell you? I must’ve left half a dozen messages with, what was his name, Shepherd?’

‘Lamb?’

‘That’s it.’

Rebus’s hate for Lamb intensified.

‘About an hour ago,’ she went on, ‘I called and they said you’d gone back to Scotland. I was a bit miffed at that. Thought you’d gone without saying goodbye.’

Bastards, thought Rebus. They really did hate his guts, didn’t they?
Our expert from north of the border
.

Lisa had finished making a neat stack from the newspapers lying on the floor and the bed. She had straightened the duvet and the cover on the sofa. And now, a little out of breath, she was standing close to him. He slid his arm around her and pulled her to him.

‘Hello,’ he murmured, kissing her.

‘Hello,’ she said, returning the kiss.

She broke away from his hug and walked into the alcove which served as a kitchen. There was the sound of running tap-water, a kettle filling. ‘I suppose you’ve seen the papers?’ she called.

‘Yes.’

Her head came out of the alcove. ‘A friend called me up to tell me. I couldn’t believe it. My picture on the front page!’

‘Fame at last.’

‘Infamy more like: a “police psychologist” indeed! They might have done their research. One paper even called me Liz Frazier!’ She plugged the kettle in, switched it on, then came back into the room. Rebus was sitting on the arm of the sofa.

‘So,’ she asked, ‘how goes the investigation?’

‘A few interesting developments.’

‘Oh?’ She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Tell me.’

So he told her about Jan Crawford, and about his false teeth theory. Lisa suggested that Jan Crawford’s memory might be helped by hypnosis. ‘Lost memory’ she called it. But Rebus knew this sort of thing was inadmissible as evidence. Besides, he’d experienced ‘lost memory’ for himself, and shivered now at the memory.

They drank Lapsang Souchong, which he said reminded him of bacon butties, and she put on some music, something soft and classical, and they ended up somehow sitting next to one another on the Indian carpet, their backs against the sofa, shoulders, arms and legs touching. She stroked his hair, the nape of his neck.

‘What happened the other night between us,’ she said, ‘are you sorry?’

‘You mean sorry it happened?’

She nodded.

‘Christ, no,’ said Rebus. ‘Just the opposite.’ He paused. ‘What about you?’

She thought over her answer. ‘It was nice,’ she said, her eyebrows almost meeting as she concentrated on each word.

‘I thought maybe you were avoiding me,’ he said.

‘And I thought you were avoiding me.’

‘I went looking for you this morning at the university.’

She sat back, the better to study his face. ‘Really?’

He nodded.

‘What did they say?’

‘I spoke to some secretary,’ he explained. ‘Glasses on a string around her neck, hair in a sort of a bun.’

‘Millicent. But what did she tell you?’

‘She just said you hadn’t been around much.’

‘What else?’

‘That I might find you in the library, or in Dillon’s.’ He nodded over towards the door, where the carrier-bag stood propped against a wall. ‘She said you liked bookshops. So I went looking there, too.’

She was still studying his face, then she laughed and pecked him on the cheek. ‘Millicent’s a treasure though, isn’t she?’

‘If you say so.’ Why did her laugh have so much relief in it? Stop looking for puzzles, John. Just stop it right now. She was crawling away from him towards the bag.

‘So what did you buy?’

He couldn’t honestly remember, with the exception of the book he’d started reading in the taxi.
Hawksmoor
. Instead, he watched her behind and her legs as she moved away from him. Spectacular ankles. Slim with a prominent hemisphere of bone.

‘Well!’ she said, lifting one of the paperbacks from the bag. ‘Eysenck.’

‘Do you approve?’

She thought this question over, too. ‘Not entirely. Probably not at all, in fact. Genetic inheritance and all that. I’m not sure.’ She lifted out another book, and shrieked. ‘Skinner! The beast of behaviourism! But what made you –?’

He shrugged. ‘I just recognised some names from those books you loaned me, so I thought I’d –’

Another book was lifted high for him to see.
King Ludd
. ‘Have you read the first two?’ she asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, disappointed, ‘is it part of a trilogy? I just liked the title.’

She turned and gave him a quizzical look, then laughed. Rebus could feel himself going red at the neck. She was making a fool of him. He turned away from her and concentrated on the pattern of the rug, brushing the rough fibres with his hand.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, starting to crawl back. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.’ And she placed a hand on either of his legs, kneeling in front of him, angling her head until his eyes were forced to meet hers. She was smiling apologetically. ‘Sorry,’ she mouthed. He managed a smile which said: ‘that’s okay’. She leaned across him and placed her lips on his, one of her hands sliding up his leg towards the thigh, and then a little higher still.

It was evening before he escaped, though ‘escape’ was perhaps putting it too harshly. The effort of easing himself from beneath Lisa’s sleeping limbs was almost too much. Her body perfume, the sweet smell of her hair, the flawless warmth of her belly, her arms, her behind. She did not waken as he slid from the bed and tugged on his clothes. She did not waken as he wrote her another of his notes, picked up his carrier-bag of books, opened the door, cast a glance back towards the bed and then pulled the door shut after him.

He went to Covent Garden tube station, where he was offered a choice: the queue for the elevator, or the three hundred-odd spiralling stairs. He opted for the stairs. They seemed to go on forever, turning and turning in their gyre. His head became light as he thought of what it must have been like to descend this corkscrew during the war years. White tiled walls like those of public lavatories. Rumble from above. The dull echo of footsteps and voices.

He thought, too, of Edinburgh’s Scott Monument, with its own tightly winding stairwell, much more constricted and unnerving than this. And then he was at the bottom, beating the elevator by a matter of seconds. The tube train was as crowded as he had come to expect. Next to a sign proclaiming ‘Keep your personal stereo personal’, a white youth wearing a green parka with matching teeth shared his musical taste with the rest of the carriage. His eyes had a distant, utterly vacant look and from time to time he swigged from a can of strong lager. Rebus toyed with the notion of saying something, but held back. He was only travelling one stop. If the glowering passengers were content to suffer silently, that was how it should be.

He prised himself out of the train at Holborn, only to squeeze into another compartment, this time on the Central Line. Again, someone was playing a Walkman at some dizzying level, but they were somewhere over towards the far end of the carriage, so all Rebus had to suffer was the Schhch-schch-schch of what he took to be drums. He was becoming a seasoned traveller now, setting his eyes so that they focused on space rather than on his fellow passengers, letting his mind empty for the duration of the journey.

God alone knew how these people could do it every day of their working lives.

He had already rung the doorbell before it struck him that he did not have a pretext for coming here. Think quickly, John.

The door was pulled open. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ She sounded disappointed.

‘Hello, Rhona.’

‘To what do we owe the honour?’ She was standing her ground, just inside the front door, keeping him on the doorstep. She was wearing a hint of make-up and her clothes were not after-work, relaxing-at-home clothes. She was going out somewhere. She was waiting for a gentleman.

‘Nothing special,’ he said. ‘Just thought I’d pop round. We didn’t get much of a chance to talk the other night.’ Would he mention that he had seen her in the British Museum? No, he would not.

Besides, she was shaking her head. ‘Yes we did, it was just that we had nothing to talk about.’ Her voice wasn’t bitter; she was simply stating a fact. Rebus looked at the doorstep.

‘I’ve caught you at a bad time,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘No need to apologise.’

‘Is Sammy in?’

‘She’s out with Kenny.’

Rebus nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘enjoy wherever it is you’re going.’ My God, he actually felt jealous. He couldn’t believe it of himself after all these years. It was the make-up that did it. Rhona had seldom worn make-up. He half-turned to leave, then stopped. ‘I couldn’t use your loo, could I?’

She stared at him, seeking some trick or plan, but he smiled back with his best impersonation of a crippled dog and she relented.

‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘You know where it is.’

He left his carrier at the door, squeezed past her and began to climb the steep stairs. ‘Thanks, Rhona,’ he said.

She was lingering downstairs, waiting to let him out again. He walked across the landing to the bathroom, opened and closed the door loudly, then opened it again very quietly and crept back across the landing to where the telephone sat on a small and quite grotesque confection of brass, green glass and red hanging tassels. There were London phone books piled beneath this table, but Rebus went straight to the smaller ‘Telephone & Addresses’ book on the top of the table. Some of the entries were in Rhona’s writing. Who, he wondered, were Tony, Tim, Ben and Graeme? But most were in Sammy’s grander, more confident script. He flipped to the K section and found what he wanted.

‘KENNY’, printed in capitals with a seven figure number scribbled below the name, the whole enclosed by a loving ellipse. Rebus took pen and notepad from his pocket and copied down the number, then closed the book and tiptoed back to the bathroom, where he flushed the toilet, gave his hands a quick rinse and boldly started downstairs again. Rhona was looking along the street, no doubt anxious that her beau should not arrive and find him here.

‘Bye,’ he said, picking up the carrier, walking past her and setting off in the direction of the main road. He was nearly at the end of her street when a white Ford Escort turned off the main drag and moved slowly past him, driven by a canny-looking man with thin face and thick moustache. Rebus stopped at the corner to watch the man pull up outside Rhona’s building. She had already locked the door and fairly skipped to the car. Rebus turned away before she could kiss or hug the man called Tony, Tim, Ben or Graeme.

In a large pub near the tube station, a barn of a place with walls painted torrid red, Rebus remembered that he had not tried the local brews since coming south. He’d gone for a drink with George Flight, but had stuck to whisky. He looked at the row of pumps, while the barman watched him, a proprietorial hand resting on one pump. Rebus nodded towards this resting hand.

‘Is it any good?’

The man snorted. ‘It’s bloody Fuller’s, mate, of course it’s good.’

‘A pint of that then, please.’

The stuff turned out to have a watery look, like cold tea, but it tasted smooth and malty. The barman was still watching him, so Rebus nodded approval, then took his glass to a distant corner where the public telephone stood. He dialled HQ_ and asked for Flight.

‘He’s left for the day,’ he was told.

‘Well then, put me through to anyone from CID, anyone who’s helpful. I’ve got a telephone number I want tracing.’ There were rules and regulations about this sort of thing, rules at one time ignored but of late enforced. Requests had to be made and were not always granted. Some forces could pull more weight than others when it came to number tracing. He reckoned the Met and the Yard ought to carry more weight than most, but just in case he added: ‘It’s to do with the Wolfman case. It might be a very good lead.’

He was told to repeat the number he wanted tracing. ‘Call back in half an hour,’ said the voice.

He sat at a table and drank his beer. It seemed silly, but it appeared to be going to his head already, with only half a pint missing from the glass. Someone had left a folded, smudged copy of the midday
Standard
. Rebus tried to concentrate on the sports pages and even had a stab at the concise crossword. Then he made the call and was put through to someone he didn’t know, who passed him on to someone else he didn’t know. A boisterous crowd, looking like a team of bricklayers, had entered the bar. One of them made for the jukebox, and suddenly Steppenwolf’s
Born to be Wild
was booming from the walls, while the men urged the unwilling barman to ‘wick it up a bit’.