Standing in another's man grave

II

He shook himself free of his overcoat and let it drip across the floor of the office to the hook on the far wall.

‘Thanks for taking the trouble,’ Cowan said.

‘Apologies, Danny.’

‘Daniel,’ Cowan corrected him.

‘Sorry, Dan.’

Cowan was seated on one of the desks, his feet not quite reaching the floor, exposing a pair of red paisley- pattern socks above gleaming black leather shoes. He kept polish and brushes in the bottom drawer of his desk. Rebus knew this because he’d opened the drawer one day when Cowan was out of the room, having already checked the two drawers above it.

‘What are you looking for?’ Elaine Robison had asked.

‘Clues,’ Rebus had replied.

Robison was standing in front of him now, handing him a mug of coffee. ‘How did it go?’ she asked.

‘It was a funeral,’ Rebus answered, placing the mug to his lips.

‘If we can get started,’ Cowan snapped. The grey suit didn’t look right on him. Its shoulders seemed over- padded and the lapels too wide. He pushed a hand defiantly through his hair.

Rebus and Robison took their seats alongside Peter Bliss, whose breathing sounded laboured even when at rest. But he’d had the same wheeze twenty years ago, and maybe the twenty before that, too. He was just a shade older than Rebus and had been in the unit longer than any of them. He sat with his hands clasped across his prodigious stomach, as if daring the universe to spring on him something he hadn’t seen before. He’d certainly seen plenty like Detective Sergeant Daniel Cowan, and had told Rebus as much on Rebus’s first day with the unit: ‘Thinks we’re beneath his station. Reckons he’s too good, and the bosses know it and have shunted him here to take him down a peg or three.’

Prior to retirement, Bliss had reached the rank of detective inspector — same as Rebus. Elaine Robison had been a detective constable, and blamed the lack of higher achievement on the fact that she’d always put family before career.

‘Quite right too,’ Rebus had told her, adding (after he’d known her a few more weeks) that his own marriage had lost its fight with the job early on.

Robison had only just turned fifty. Her son and daughter had left home, graduated from college and moved south for work. There were framed portraits of them on her desk, alongside other photos showing Robison herself posing at the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and seated at the controls of a light aeroplane. She had recently started to dye her hair, not that Rebus saw anything wrong in that. Streaked grey, she would still have looked ten years younger than her age and might even pass for thirty-five — same as Cowan.

Cowan, he reckoned, had arranged the chairs. They sat in a straight line in front of his desk, so that they all had to look up at him.

‘Wearing those socks for a bet, Danny?’ Rebus asked from behind the mug.

Cowan deflected the comment with a thin smile. ‘Do I hear right, John? You’ve applied to rejoin?’ He waited for Rebus to acknowledge the truth of this. The retirement age had been raised, meaning those of Rebus’s vintage could reapply. ‘Thing is,’ Cowan continued, leaning forward a little, ‘they’ll come to me for a reference. Way you’re going, it won’t be a fan letter.’

‘You can have my autograph anyway,’ Rebus assured him.

It was hard to tell if Peter Bliss’s wheezing had just taken on a different timbre or whether he was stifling a laugh. Robison looked down into her lap and smiled. Cowan shook his head slowly.

‘Can I remind you all,’ he said quietly, ‘that this unit is jeopardised? And if it closes down, only one of us will be welcomed back into the body of the kirk.’ He pointed a finger at his own chest. ‘A result would be nice. Progress of any kind would be nice.’

They all knew what he was talking about. The Crown Office was setting up a specialist Cold Case Unit for the whole of Scotland. If it scooped up their workload, their jobs would be history. The CCU would have at its heart a database of ninety-three cases dating back to the 1940s, including all the ones from the Lothian and Borders police authority. With the CCU up and running, questions were bound to be asked about the usefulness of the smaller Edinburgh team. Money was tight. There were already mutterings that dusting off old unsolveds did little but drain cash from current (and more urgent) inquiries in and around the city.

‘A result would be nice,’ Cowan repeated. He leapt from the desk, strode around it and plucked a newspaper cutting from the wall, brandishing it for effect. ‘Cold Case Unit in England,’ he intoned. ‘Suspect charged for the murder of a teenager committed almost fifty years ago.’ He paraded the clipping in front of their faces. ‘DNA. . crime-scene analysis. . witnesses whose consciences have been gnawing away at them. We know how this works, so how about making it work?’

He seemed to require an answer, but none was forthcoming. The silence lengthened until Robison broke it.

‘We don’t always have the resources,’ she countered, ‘never mind the evidence. Hard to apply DNA tests to anything when the victim’s clothing got lost somewhere down the line.’

‘There are plenty of cases where we do have clothing, though, aren’t there?’

‘And can we demand that every male in a town gives us a DNA sample so we can try for a match?’ Bliss added. ‘How about the ones who’ve died or moved away in the interim?’

‘That positive outlook of yours is why I warm to you, Peter.’ Cowan placed the cutting on the desk and folded his arms. ‘For your own sakes,’ he said. ‘Not mine — I’ll be fine and dandy — but for your sakes.’ He paused for effect. ‘For your sakes, we need to make this work.’

There was silence in the room again, broken only by Bliss’s breathing and a sigh from Robison. Cowan’s eyes were on Rebus, but Rebus was busy draining the last of the coffee from his mug.

III

Bert Jansch was dead, too. Rebus had seen him play a few solo gigs in Edinburgh down the years. Jansch had been born in the city but made his name in London. After work that evening, alone in his flat, Rebus played a couple of Pentangle albums. He was no expert, but he could tell Jansch’s playing from the other guitarist in the band, John Renbourn. As far as he knew, Renbourn was still around — maybe living in the Borders. Or was that Robin Williamson? He had taken his colleague Siobhan Clarke to a Renbourn/Williamson concert once, driving her all the way to Biggar Folk Club without telling her why. When the two musicians stepped on to the stage — looking as though they’d just roused themselves from armchairs by a roaring fire — he’d leaned in towards her.

‘One of them played Woodstock, you know,’ he’d whispered.

He still had the ticket to the Biggar gig somewhere. Tended to keep them, though he knew it was just one more thing that would need to be binned when he was no longer around. Next to his record deck lay a plastic guitar pick. He had bought it years back, after wandering through a music shop, telling the young guy behind the till that he might be back later for an actual guitar. The assistant had mentioned that the pick was manufactured by a Scotsman called Jim Dunlop, who also made effects pedals. In the years since, Rebus had rubbed all the writing from the pick, but had never used it on a guitar of any kind.

‘Never learned to fly a plane, either,’ he said to himself.

He studied the cigarette he was holding. He’d undergone a medical a few months back and received the usual warnings. His dentist, too, was always checking for the first signs of anything nasty. So far so good.

‘Every lucky streak comes to an end, John,’ his dentist had told him. ‘Trust me.’

‘Can I get an each-way bet on that?’ Rebus had replied.

He stubbed the cigarette into an ashtray and counted how many were left in the packet. Eight, meaning he’d smoked twelve so far today. That wasn’t bad, was it? Time was, he’d have finished one lot and broken open another. He wasn’t drinking as much either: couple of beers of an evening, with maybe a tot or three of whisky