Allan Ward asked, his voice dry and rasping.
Rebus pushed him into the room, closed the door behind them. “We need to talk,” he said. “Or rather, I need to talk, you need to listen.”
“Get the hell out of here!”
Rebus shook his head. “Your pals have blown the money,” he said.
Ward’s eyes opened a fraction wider. “Look, I don’t know what you think you’re trying to pull . . .”
“Have they told you about Marber? I don’t suppose they have. Shows how much they trust you, Allan. Who was it asked you to pump Phyllida Hawes for information? Was it Jazz? Did he say it was because he’s been slipping one to Ellen Dempsey?” Rebus shook his head slowly. “He killed Marber. Marber’s the dealer who bought and sold all those paintings for you, building the investment . . . Only Jazz decided you could make faster money playing the market. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, Allan, but the whole lot’s gone.”
“Fuck off.” But some of the force had left Ward’s voice.
“Marber decided he wanted another cut, and they didn’t have the money to pay him. They were worried he’d blab, so they killed him. And whether you like it or not,
Ward looked at him unblinking, then sat down on his unmade bed. He was dressed in a Travis T-shirt and boxer shorts. He rubbed both hands through his hair.
“I don’t know what they told you about the plan at the warehouse,” Rebus went on. “Maybe they said it would be easy money . . . But they needed it, because in under a year from now, when they started taking retirement, you were going to find out that there were no shares to divvy out. You could put all those dreams of yours on hold . . .”
Ward started shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No, no, no . . .”
Rebus opened the door an inch. “Talk to them, Allan. They’ll lie to you. Ask to see the money.” He nodded slowly. “Ask to see it . . . and look into their eyes when you do. There’s no money, Allan. Just a couple of corpses and some cops gone very, very bad.” He opened the door wider but paused again on the threshold. “You want to talk to me, you’ve got my number . . .”
He walked outside, expecting at any second to be grabbed, stabbed or bludgeoned. Saw that Siobhan was still in the car, and felt the first wave of relief. She slid over from the driver’s seat to the passenger side, and he opened the door and got in behind the wheel.
“So?” she asked, still sounding frustrated that she’d been left out.
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose all we can do now is wait and see.” He turned the ignition.
“You mean see if they try to kill us too?”
“We write up everything we know . . . every step we’ve just taken. Copies to be kept in safe places.”
“Tonight?” she frowned.
“Has to be,” Rebus said, sliding the gearshift into first. “Your place or mine?”
“Mine,” she sighed. “And you can keep me awake on the drive by telling me a story.”
“What kind would you like?”
“The kind where you walk into Tulliallan leaving me outside in the cold.”
He smiled. “You mean a courtroom drama then? So be it . . .”
31
Tuesday morning, Morris Gerald Cafferty was enjoying breakfast at his kitchen table, feeding pieces of glistening sausage to an attentive Claret. Rebus sat opposite him, nursing his second glass of orange juice. He’d managed four hours’ sleep on Siobhan’s sofa, tiptoeing out without waking her. At quarter to seven, he was at Tulliallan, and now, just over an hour later, he was having to endure the smell of Cafferty’s fry-up. A bustling middle-aged woman had cooked it and, Rebus refusing the offer of a helping, looked ready to start on the washing- up until Cafferty told her to come back later.
“See if you can hoover some of Claret’s hair off the sofa, will you, Mrs. Prentice?” Cafferty asked. She nodded brusquely and left them alone.
“You don’t get many like Mrs. Prentice to the pound,” Cafferty commented, biting into a crisp half-slice of toast. “Bring your trunks this time, Strawman?”
“I know it was you that hit the warehouse. Weasel told you about it, didn’t he?”
Rebus had worked it out. Claverhouse hadn’t just stumbled on the lorry — he’d been pointed in its direction by the Weasel, the man shopping his own son because otherwise Aly’s life would have been short indeed. But having delivered him into police custody, he’d realized that Cafferty would still want blood when he found out. Rebus had offered short-term deliverance, but in the end there was only one way to save Aly: take Cafferty out of the picture. Which meant setting him up — telling him about the drugs in the hope that he would be tempted. But Cafferty had plotted the hit without telling the Weasel, and the Weasel’s hint to Rebus that night in the tenement garden hadn’t clicked quite hard enough. The Weasel had been left out of the loop, and the heist had succeeded, leaving him — rather than his son — as the wanted man . . .
Cafferty was shaking his head. “Don’t you ever rest for a second? What about some coffee to go with that juice?”
“I even know how you did it.”
Cafferty dropped another chunk of sausage into Claret’s mouth.
“I need a favor,” Rebus continued. He took out his notebook and wrote down an address, tearing out the page and sliding it across the table. “If some of the merchandise found its way here, you might find the heat dissipating a bit.”
“I didn’t know there was any heat,” Cafferty said with a smile.
Rebus lifted his glass. “Want me to tell you something I know about claret?”
“The wine or the dog?”
“Both, I suppose. You can tell their quality by their good nose. When I saw your dog last night, nosing its way up and down the path and across the lawn, I knew.” Rebus’s eyes shifted from Claret to her owner. “She’s a sniffer dog, isn’t she?”
Cafferty’s smile broadened, and he leaned down to pat Claret’s side. “Customs and Excise pensioned her off. I don’t like my staff doing drugs, so I thought she might come in handy.”
Rebus nodded. He remembered the video footage: the van going into the warehouse . . . then a wait as they realized they didn’t know where the consignment was. A quick call, and Claret had been driven there in another van. A few minutes later, it was mission accomplished.
“You didn’t have time to steal another van,” Rebus said, “so I’m guessing you used one of your own . . . that’s why you blacked out the license plate . . .”
Cafferty waved his fork at him. “As it happens, one of my vans
“News travels.”
“It does in this city.”
Rebus thought back six years. Dickie Diamond telling him that the manse rapist was holed up in Lomax’s caravan . . . Rebus getting there too late . . . At the end of his tether, he’d torched the caravan and paid a visit to Barlinnie, not to ask Cafferty a favor but merely to tell him the story, hoping Cafferty’s contacts would succeed where he had failed. But that hadn’t happened. Instead, his men had attacked Rico Lomax, beating him mercilessly and leaving him to die. Which hadn’t been Rebus’s plan at all. Not that Cafferty had believed him. When Rebus had returned to Barlinnie to rage at him, Cafferty had laughed, sitting with arms folded.
“The Lomax case is closed,” he stated now.
Cafferty lifted the address, folded it into the pocket of his clean white shirt. “Funny the way things sometimes
