“People heading to work.”
“How many flats apart from Herdman’s?”
“Just the two. Schoolteacher and his girlfriend in one, car mechanic in the other.”
“Schoolteacher?” Siobhan hinted.
Innes shook his head. “Nothing to do with Port Edgar. He teaches the local primary. Girlfriend works in a shop.”
Rebus knew that the neighbors would have been interviewed. The notes would be somewhere.
“You spoken to them at all?” he asked.
“Just as they come and go.”
“What do they say?”
Innes shrugged. “The usual: he was quiet enough, seemed a nice enough guy…”
“Quiet
Innes nodded. “Seems Mr. Herdman hosted a few late-nighters for his friends.”
“Enough to rile the neighbors?”
Innes shrugged again. Rebus turned to Siobhan. “We’ve got a list of his acquaintances?”
She nodded. “Probably not comprehensive as yet…”
“You’ll want this,” Innes was saying. He was holding up a Yale key. Siobhan took it from him.
“How messy is it up there?” Rebus asked.
“The search team knew he wasn’t coming back,” Innes answered with a smile, lowering his head as he started adding their names to his list.
The downstairs hall was cramped. No sign of any recent mail. They climbed two flights of stone steps. There were a couple of doors on the first landing, only one on the second. Nothing to identify its occupier-no name or number. Siobhan turned the key and they walked in.
“Plenty of locks,” Rebus commented. Including two bolts on the interior side. “Herdman liked his security.”
Hard to say how messy the place had been before Hogan’s team made their search. Rebus picked his way across a floor strewn with clothes and newspapers, books and bric-a-brac. They were in the eaves of the building, and the rooms seemed claustrophobic. Rebus’s head was barely two feet shy of the ceiling. The windows were small and unwashed. Just the one bedroom: double bed, wardrobe, and chest of drawers. Portable black-and-white TV on the uncarpeted floor, empty half-bottle of Bell’s next to it. Greasy yellow linoleum on the floor of the kitchen, foldaway table giving just enough room to turn. Narrow bathroom, smelling of mildew. Two hall closets, which looked to have been emptied and hastily rearranged by Hogan’s men. Leaving only the living room. Rebus went back in.
“Homey, wouldn’t you say?” Siobhan commented.
“In real estate agent parlance, yes.” Rebus picked up a couple of CDs: Linkin Park and Sepultura. “The man liked his metal,” he said, tossing them down again.
“Liked the SAS, too,” Siobhan added, holding up some books for Rebus to see. They were histories of the regiment, books about conflicts in which it had taken part, stories of survival by ex-members. She nodded to a nearby desk, and Rebus saw what she was pointing out: a scrapbook of news cuttings. These were all about soldiering, too. Whole articles discussing an apparent trend: American military heroes who were murdering their wives. Cuttings about suicides and disappearances. There was even one headed SPACE RUNS OUT IN SAS CEMETERY, which Rebus paid most attention to. He knew men who’d been buried in the plots set aside in St. Martin’s churchyard, not far from the regiment’s original HQ. Now a new cemetery site was being proposed near the current HQ at Credenhill. In the same piece, the deaths of two SAS soldiers were mentioned. They’d died on a “training exercise in Oman,” which could mean anything from a cock-up to assassination during covert operations.
Siobhan was peering into a supermarket shopping bag. Rebus heard the chink of empty bottles.
“He was a good host,” she said.
“Wine or spirits?”
“Tequila and red wine.”
“Judging from the empty bottle in the bedroom, Herdman was a whiskey man.”
“Like I say, a good host.” Siobhan took a sheet of paper from her pocket and unfolded it. “According to this, forensics took away the remains of a number of spliffs, plus some traces of what looked like cocaine. Took his computer, too. They also removed a number of photographs from the inside of the wardrobe.”
“What sort of photos?”
“Guns. Bit of a fetish, if you ask me. I mean… putting them on the wardrobe door.”
“Which makes of gun?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“What type of gun did he use again?”
She checked this. “Brocock. It’s an air gun. The ME 38 Magnum, to be precise.”
“So it’s like a revolver?”
Siobhan nodded. “You can buy one across the counter for just over a hundred quid. Powered by gas cylinder.”
“But Herdman’s had been tweaked?”
“Steel sleeving inside the chamber. Means you can use live ammo,.22. Alternative is to drill the gun out to take.38 calibers.”
“He used.22?” She nodded again. “So someone did the work for him?”
“He might’ve done it himself. Daresay he’d have had the know-how.”
“Do we know how he came by the gun in the first place?”
“As an ex-soldier, I’m guessing he had contacts.”
“Could be.” Rebus was thinking back to the 1960s and ’70s, arms and explosives walking off army bases the length and breadth of the land, mostly at the behest of both sides of the Northern Ireland Troubles… Plenty of soldiers had a “souvenir” tucked away somewhere; some knew places where guns could be bought and sold, no questions asked…
“And by the way,” Siobhan was saying, “it’s gun
“He was carrying more than one?”
She shook her head. “But one was found during a search of his boathouse.” She referred to her notes again. “Mac- 10.”
“That’s a serious gun.”
“You know it?”
“Ingram Mac-10… it’s American. Thousand-round-a-minute job. Not something you’d be able to walk into a shop and buy.”
“Lab seems to think it had been deactivated at one time, meaning that’s exactly what you could do.”
“He tweaked it, too?”
“Or bought it tweaked.”
“Thank Christ he didn’t take that one to the school. It would have been carnage.”
The room went quiet as they considered this. They went back to their search.
“This is interesting,” she said, waving one of the books at him. “Story of a soldier who cracked up, tried to kill his girlfriend.” She studied the jacket. “Jumped from a plane and killed himself… True-life, by the look of it.” Something fell from between two pages. A snapshot. Siobhan picked it up, turned it around for Rebus to see. “Tell me it’s not her again.”
But it was. It was Teri Cotter, taken fairly recently. She was outdoors, other bodies edging into the picture. A street scene, maybe in Edinburgh. She looked to be seated on a sidewalk, wearing much the same clothes as when she’d helped Rebus smoke his cigarette. She was sticking her studded tongue out towards the photographer.
“She looks cheery,” Siobhan commented.
Rebus was studying the photo. He turned it over, but the back was blank. “She said she knew the boys who died. Never thought to ask if she knew their killer.”
“And Kate Renshaw’s theory that Herdman might connect to the Cotters?”
Rebus shrugged. “Might be worth looking at Herdman’s bank account for signs of blood money.” He heard a door close downstairs. “Sounds like one of the neighbors is home. Shall we?”
