“Good night, nice detectives.” A wet smile appearing on the overfed face. Peacock Johnson had joined the crowd again, head bowed as if in Christian contemplation. Bob fell in a couple of paces behind his master, for all the world like a pet being taken for a walk.
“What do we make of that?” Siobhan asked.
Rebus shook his head slowly.
“Maybe your comment about guilt isn’t wide of the mark.”
“Be nice to nail the bastard for something.”
She gave him a questioning look, but his attention had turned to Jack Bell, who was whispering something in Kate’s ear. Kate nodded, and the MSP gave her a hug.
“Reckon she’s got a future in politics?” Siobhan mused.
“I hope to Christ that’s the attraction,” Rebus muttered, showing his cigarette stub little mercy as he ground it under his heel.
DAY THREE. Thursday
8
Is this country the pits, or what?” Bobby Hogan asked. Rebus felt it was an unfair question. They were on the M74, one of the most lethal roads in Scotland. Tractor-trailers were lashing Hogan’s Passat with a spray that was nine parts grit to one of water. The wipers were on at high speed and still not coping, despite which Hogan was trying to do seventy. But doing seventy meant getting past the trucks, and the truck drivers were enjoying an extended game of leapfrog, leading to a queue of cars waiting to pass.
Dawn had brought milky sunshine to the capital, but Rebus had known it wouldn’t last. The sky had been too hazy, blurred like a drunk’s good intentions. Hogan had decided they should rendezvous at St. Leonard’s, by which time fully half of Arthur’s Seat’s great stone outcrop had vanished into the cloud. Rebus doubted David Copperfield could have pulled the trick off with any more brio. When Arthur’s Seat started disappearing, rain was sure to follow. It had started before they reached the city limits, Hogan flipping the wipers to intermittent, then to constant. Now, on the M74 south of Glasgow, they were flying to and fro like the Roadrunner’s legs in the cartoon.
“I mean, the weather… the traffic… why do we put up with it?”
“Penitence?” Rebus offered.
“Suggesting we’ve done something to deserve it.”
“Like you say, Bobby, there must be a reason we stay put.”
“Maybe we’re just lazy.”
“We can’t change the weather. I suppose it’s in our power to tweak the amount of traffic, but that never seems to work, so why bother?”
Hogan raised a finger. “Exactly. We simply can’t be arsed.”
“You think that’s a fault?”
Hogan shrugged. “It’s hardly a strength, is it?”
“I suppose not.”
“Whole country’s gone to cack. Jobs up the khyber, politicians with their snouts in the trough, kids with no… I don’t know.” He exhaled noisily.
“Touch of the Victor Meldrews this morning, Bobby?”
Hogan shook his head. “I’ve been thinking this for ages.”
“And I thank you for inviting me into the confessional.”
“Know something, John? You’re more cynical than I am.”
“That’s not true.”
“Give me a for instance.”
“For instance, I believe in an afterlife. What’s more, I think the pair of us are going to be entering it sooner than expected if you don’t ease your foot off…”
Hogan smiled for the first time that morning, signaled to pull into the middle lane. “Better?” he asked.
“Better,” Rebus agreed.
Then, a few moments later: “You really believe there’s something there after we die?”
Rebus considered his answer. “I believe it was a way of getting you to slow down.” He pushed in the button for the car’s cigarette lighter, then wished he hadn’t. Hogan noticed him flinch.
“Still hurting like hell?”
“It’s getting better.”
“Tell me again how it happened.”
Rebus shook his head slowly. “Let’s talk about Carbrae instead. How much are we really going to get from Robert Niles?”
“With a bit of luck, more than his name, rank and serial number,” Hogan said, pulling out again to pass.
Carbrae Special Hospital was sited, as Hogan himself described it, in “the sweaty armpit of who knows where.” Neither man had been there before. Hogan’s directions were to take the A711 west of Dumfries and head towards Dalbeattie. They seemed to miss a turnoff, Hogan cursing the solid wall of lorries in the inside lane, reckoning they’d hidden a signpost or access road from view. As a result, they didn’t come off the M74 till Lockerbie, heading west into Dumfries.
“Were you at Lockerbie, John?” Hogan asked.
“Just for a couple of days.”
“Remember that fuckup with the bodies? Laying them out on the ice rink?” Hogan shook his head slowly. Rebus remembered: the bodies had stuck to the ice, meaning the whole rink had to be defrosted. “That’s what I mean about Scotland, John. That just about sums us up.”
Rebus disagreed. He thought the quiet dignity of the townspeople in the aftermath of Pan Am 103 said a hell of a lot more about the country. He couldn’t help wondering how the people of South Queensferry would cope, once the three-ring circus of police, media and mouthy politicians had moved on. He’d watched fifteen minutes of morning news while slurping down a coffee but had to turn the sound off when Jack Bell appeared, snaking one arm around Kate, whose face shone a ghostly white.
Hogan had picked up a bundle of newspapers between his home and Rebus’s. Some had managed to get photos from the vigil into their later editions: the minister leading the singing, the MSP holding up his petition.
“I can’t sleep at all,” one resident was quoted as saying, “for fear of who else might be out there.”
Fear: the crucial word. Most people would live their whole lives untouched by crime, yet they still feared it, and that fear was real and smothering. The police force existed to allay such fears, yet too often was shown to be fallible, powerless, on hand only after the event, clearing up the mess rather than preventing it. Meanwhile, someone like Jack Bell began to look as if he was at least trying to do something… Rebus knew the terms they trotted out at seminars: proactive rather than reactive. One of the tabloids had latched on to this. They were backing Bell’s campaign, whatever it might be:
An easy enough editorial to write, Rebus surmised, the author merely parroting the MSP’s words. Hogan glanced at the newspaper.
“Bell’s on a roll, isn’t he?”
“It won’t last.”
“I hope not. Sanctimonious bastard gives me the boak.”
“Can I quote you on that, Detective Inspector Hogan?”
“Journalists: now there’s another reason this country’s the pits…”
