Rebus and Sutherland were both Lothian and Borders, but the town of Livingston was F Division, known to anyone in Edinburgh as “F Troop.” Sutherland was just waiting for Rebus to say something to the others, something disparaging. He had the look of a haunted man.
The six men shared only one characteristic: they were at Tulliallan because they’d failed in some way. Mostly it was an issue with authority. Much of their free time the previous two days had been spent sharing war stories. Rebus’s tale was milder than most. If a young officer, fresh out of uniform, had made the mistakes they had made, he or she would probably not have been given the Tulliallan lifeline. But these were lifers, men who’d been in the force an average of twenty years. Most were nearing the point where they could leave on full pension. Tulliallan was their last-chance saloon. They were here to atone, to be resurrected.
As Rebus and McCullough took their seats, a uniformed officer walked in and marched briskly to the head of the oval table where his chair was waiting. He was in his mid-fifties and was here to remind them of their obligation to the public at large. He was here to train them to mind their p’s and q’s.
Five minutes into the lecture, Rebus let his eyes and mind drift out of focus. He was back on the Marber case . . .
Edward Marber had been an Edinburgh art and antiques dealer. Past tense, because Marber was now dead, bludgeoned outside his home by assailant or assailants unknown. The weapon had not yet been found. A brick or rock was the best guess offered by the city pathologist, Professor Gates, who had been called to the scene for a PLE: Pronouncement of Life Extinct. Brain hemorrhage brought on by the blow. Marber had died on the steps of his Duddingston Village home, front-door keys in his hand. He had been dropped off by taxi after the private viewing night of his latest exhibition: New Scottish Colorists. Marber owned two small, exclusive galleries in the New Town, plus antiques shops in Dundas Street, Glasgow, and Perth. Rebus had asked someone why Perth, rather than oil- rich Aberdeen.
“Because Perthshire’s where the wealth goes to play.”
The taxi driver had been interviewed. Marber didn’t drive, but his house was at the end of an eighty-meter driveway, the gates to which had been open. The taxi had pulled up at the door, activating a halogen light to one side of the steps. Marber had paid and tipped, asking for a receipt, and the taxi driver had U-turned away, not bothering to look in his mirror.
“I didn’t see a thing,” he’d told the police.
The taxi receipt had been found in Marber’s pocket, along with a list of the sales he’d made that evening, totaling just over £16,000. His cut, Rebus learned, would have been twenty percent, £3,200. Not a bad night’s work.
It was morning before the body was found by the postman. Professor Gates had given an estimated time of death of between nine and eleven the previous evening. The taxi had picked Marber up from his gallery at eight- thirty, so must have dropped him home around eight forty-five, a time the driver accepted with a shrug.
The immediate police instinct had screamed robbery, but problems and niggles soon became apparent. Would someone have clobbered the victim with the taxi still in sight, the scene lit by halogen? It seemed unlikely, and yet by the time the taxi turned out of the driveway, Marber should have been safely on the other side of his door. And though Marber’s pockets had been turned out, cash and credit cards evidently taken, the attacker had failed to use the keys to unlock the front door and trawl the house itself. Scared off perhaps, but it still didn’t make sense.
Muggings tended to be spontaneous. You were attacked on the street, maybe just after using a cash machine. The mugger didn’t hang around your door waiting for you to come home. Marber’s house was relatively isolated: Duddingston Village was a wealthy enclave on the edge of Edinburgh, semi-rural, with the mass of Arthur’s Seat as its neighbor. The houses hid behind walls, quiet and secure. Anyone approaching Marber’s home on foot would have triggered the same halogen security light. They would then have had to hide — in the undergrowth, say, or behind one of the trees. After a couple of minutes, the lamp’s timer would finish its cycle and go off. But any movement would trigger the sensor once again.
The Scene of Crime officers had looked for possible hiding places, finding several. But no traces of anyone, no footprints or fibers.
Another scenario, proposed by DCS Gill Templer:
“Say the assailant was already inside the house. Heard the door being unlocked and ran towards it. Smashed the victim on the head and ran.”
But the house was high-tech: alarms and sensors everywhere. There was no sign of a break-in, no indication that anything was missing. Marber’s best friend, another art dealer called Cynthia Bessant, had toured the house and pronounced that she could see nothing missing or out of place, except that much of the deceased’s art collection had been removed from the walls and, each painting neatly packaged in bubble wrap, was stacked against the wall in the dining room. Bessant had been unable to offer an explanation.
“Perhaps he was about to reframe them, or move them to different rooms. One
She’d toured every room, paying particular attention to Marber’s bedroom, not having seen inside it before. She called it his “inner sanctum.”
The victim himself had never been married, and was quickly assumed by the investigating officers to have been gay.
“Eddie’s sexuality,” Cynthia Bessant had said, “can have no bearing on this case.”
But that would be something for the inquiry to decide.
Rebus had felt himself sidelined in the investigation, working the telephones mostly. Cold calls to friends and associates. The same questions eliciting almost identical responses. The bubble-wrapped paintings had been checked for fingerprints, from which it became apparent that Marber himself had packaged them up. Still no one — neither his secretary nor his friends — could give an explanation.
Then, towards the end of one briefing, Rebus had picked up a mug of tea — someone else’s tea, milky gray — and hurled it in the general direction of Gill Templer.
The briefing had started much as any other, Rebus washing down three aspirin caplets with his morning latte. The coffee came in a paper cup. It was from a concession on the corner of the Meadows. Usually his first and last decent cup of the day.
“Bit too much to drink last night?” DS Siobhan Clarke had asked. She’d run her eyes over him: same suit, shirt and tie as the day before. Probably wondering if he’d bothered to take any of it off betweentimes. The morning shave erratic, a lazy runover with an electric. Hair that needed washing and cutting.
She’d seen just what Rebus had wanted her to see.
“And a good morning to you too, Siobhan,” he’d muttered to himself, crushing the empty beaker.
Usually he stood towards the back of the room at briefings, but today he was nearer the front. Sat there at a desk, rubbing his forehead, loosening his shoulders, as Gill Templer spelled out the day’s mission.
More door-to-door; more interviews; more phone calls.
His fingers were around the mug by now. He didn’t know whose it was, the glaze cold to the touch — could even have been left from the day before. The room was stifling and already smelled of sweat.
“More bloody phone calls,” he found himself saying, loud enough to be heard at the front. Templer looked up.
“Something to say, John?”
“No, no . . . nothing.”
Her back straightening. “Only if you’ve anything to add — maybe one of your famous deductions — I’m all ears.”
“With respect, ma’am, you’re not all ears — you’re all talk.” Noises around him: gasps and looks. Rebus rising slowly to his feet.
“We’re getting nowhere fast.” His voice was loud. “There’s nobody left to talk to, and nothing worth them saying!”
The blood had risen to Templer’s cheeks. The sheet of paper she was holding — the day’s duties — had become a cylinder, which her fingers threatened to crush.
“Well, I’m sure we can all learn something from
