Rebus thought for a moment. “Nazareth, Alex Harvey, Deacon Blue.”
“Not Rod Stewart?”
“He’s not Scottish.”
“You’re still allowed him if you want.”
“Then I’ll get to him eventually, probably right after Ian Stewart. But first I need to go through John Martyn, Jack Bruce, Ian Anderson… not forgetting Donovan and the Incredible String Band… Lulu and Maggie Bell…”
Siobhan rolled her eyes. “Is it too late for me to say I wish I’d never asked?”
“Far too late,” Rebus said, getting into the passenger side. “Frankie Miller’s another… Simple Minds in their heyday… I always had a soft spot for Pallas…”
Siobhan stood by the driver’s-side door, gripping the handle but making no further effort. From inside, she could hear the catalogue continuing, Rebus’s voice rising, making sure she didn’t miss a single name.
“Not the sort of place where I’d normally drink,” Dr. Curt muttered. He was tall and thin, often described behind his back as “funereal.” Late fifties, with a long, slack face and baggy eyes. He reminded Rebus of a bloodhound.
A funereal bloodhound.
Which was apt in its way, considering that he was one of Edinburgh’s most highly respected pathologists. Under his guidance, corpses could tell their stories, sometimes revealing secrets: suicides who turned out to be murder victims, bones that turned out not to be human. Curt’s skill and intuition had helped Rebus solve dozens of cases down through the years, so it would have been churlish to turn the man down when he called and asked Rebus to join him for a drink, adding, as a postscript: “Somewhere quiet, mind. Somewhere we can talk without tongues wagging all around us.”
Which was why Rebus had suggested his regular haunt, the Oxford Bar, tucked away in an alley behind George Street and a long way from both Curt’s office and St. Leonard’s.
They were seated in the back room, at the table at the far end. No one else about. Midweek and mid-evening, the main bar boasting only a couple of suits who were about to go home, and one regular who’d just come in. Rebus brought the drinks to the table: a pint for him, gin and tonic for the pathologist.
“Slainte,” Curt said, raising his glass.
“Cheers, Doc.” Rebus still couldn’t lift his beer with just the one hand.
“It’s like you’re holding a chalice,” Curt commented. Then: “Do you want to talk about how it happened?”
“No.”
“The rumors are flying.”
“They can be stacking up frequent flier miles for all I care. What’s intriguing me is your phone call. Do you want to talk about that?”
Rebus had arrived home, soaked in a tepid bath, and phoned out for a curry. Jackie Leven on the hi-fi, singing about the romantic hard men of Fife-how could Rebus have forgotten to put him on the list? And then Curt’s phone call.
No hint as to why, just an arrangement to be in the Oxford Bar at half past seven.
Curt savored his drink. “How’s life been treating you, John?”
Rebus stared at him. With some men, men of a certain age and class, there had to be this preamble. He offered a cigarette, which the pathologist accepted.
“Take one out for me, too,” Rebus asked. Curt did so, and both men smoked in silence for a moment.
“I’ve been hunky-dory, Doc. How about yourself? Often get this urge to phone cops up of an evening and arrange assignations in dingy back rooms?”
“I believe the ‘dingy back room’ was your choice rather than mine.”
Rebus acknowledged as much with a slight bow of the head.
Curt smiled. “You’re not a man of great patience, John…”
Rebus shrugged. “Actually, I can sit here all night, but I’ll be a lot more relaxed once I know what this is about.”
“It’s about what’s left of a man called Martin Fairstone.”
“Oh, yes?” Rebus moved a little in his chair, crossing one leg over the other.
“You know him, of course?” When Curt sucked on the cigarette, his whole face seemed to collapse inward. He’d become a smoker only in the past five years, as if keen to test his own mortality.
“I knew him,” Rebus said.
“Ah, yes… past tense, unfortunately.”
“Not too unfortunate. I can’t see him being missed.”
“Be that as it may, Professor Gates and myself… well, we think there are gray areas.”
“Ash and bone, you mean?”
Curt shook his head slowly, refusing to see the joke.
“Forensics will tell us more…” His voice drifted off. “DCS Templer has been persistent. I think Gates will talk to her tomorrow.”
“And what’s this got to do with me?”
“She thinks you may have been involved in some way in this man’s murder.”
The final word lay in the smoky air between them. Rebus didn’t need to repeat it aloud; Curt heard the unspoken question.
“We think maybe murder,” he said, nodding slowly. “Some evidence that he was tied to the chair. I have photos…” He reached into a briefcase that was on the floor next to him.
“Doc,” Rebus was saying, “you probably shouldn’t be showing me these.”
“I know, and I wouldn’t if I thought there was the slightest chance that you were involved.” He looked up. “But I know you, John.”
Rebus was looking towards the briefcase. “People have been wrong about me before.”
“Maybe.”
The manila file was on the table between them, resting on damp coasters. Rebus picked it up, opened it. There were a couple of dozen photographs of the kitchen, wisps of smoke still evident in the background. Martin Fairstone was barely recognizable as human. More like a blackened, blistered store mannequin. He was lying facedown. A chair lay behind him, reduced to a couple of stumps and part of the seat. What got Rebus was the oven. For some reason, its surface had been left mostly untouched. He could see the chip pan sitting on one of its rings. Christ, clean it up and it might still be useable… Hard to think that a chip pan could survive where a human couldn’t.
“What you’ll see from this is the way the chair has fallen. It’s tipped forwards, taking the victim with it. It’s almost like he fell on his knees, pitched that way, and then later slid into a completely prone position. And you see how his arms are positioned? Flat by his sides?”
Rebus saw, but wasn’t sure what he was supposed to take from any of it.
“We think we found the remains of some rope… a plastic clothesline. The covering has melted, but the nylon was pretty resilient.”
“You often get a clothesline in a kitchen,” Rebus said, playing devil’s advocate now because suddenly he knew where this was leading.
“Agreed. But Professor Gates… well, he’s got the forensics people looking at it…”
“Because he thinks Fairstone was tied to the chair?”
Curt just nodded. “The other photos, in some of them… the close-ups… you can see the bits of rope.”
Rebus saw.
“And there’s this train of events, you see. A man is unconscious, tied to a chair. He wakes up, fire is raging around him, the fumes already deep in his lungs. He’s trying to wrestle himself free, the chair tips, and he starts to suffocate. It’s the smoke that’s killing him… he’s dead before the flames can break his bonds…”
“It’s a theory,” Rebus said.
“Yes, it is,” the pathologist said quietly.
Rebus sorted through the pictures again. “So suddenly it’s murder?”
“Or culpable homicide. I suppose a lawyer could argue that tying him up wasn’t what killed him… that it was meant merely as a warning, say.”
