feet. Rebus was up, too, the two men standing awkwardly, heads angled against the roofbeams, backs bent.
“Look, Allan, if it’s any…”
But Renshaw had him by the shoulder, trying to maneuver him to the hatch.
“All right, all right,” Rebus was saying. He tried yanking himself free of the other man’s grip, and Renshaw stumbled, one foot finding no purchase, sending him falling through the hatch. Rebus grabbed him by the arm, feeling his fingers burn as he tightened his grip. Renshaw scrabbled back upright.
“You okay?” Rebus asked.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Renshaw was pointing at the ladder.
“Okay, Allan. But we’ll talk again sometime, eh? That’s what I came here for: to talk, to get to know you.”
“You had your chance to get to know me,” Renshaw said coldly. Rebus was making his way back down the ladder. He peered up through the gap, but his cousin wasn’t visible.
“Are you coming down, Allan?” he called. No response. Then the buzzing sound again, as the red car recommenced its journey. Rebus turned and headed downstairs. Didn’t really know what to do, whether it was safe to leave Allan like this. He walked into the living room, through to the kitchen. Outside, the lawn mower had yet to move. There were sheets of paper on the table, computer printouts. Petitions calling for gun control, for more safety in schools. No names as yet, just row after row of blank boxes. The same thing had happened after Dunblane. A tightening of rules and regulations. Result? More illegal guns than ever out there on the street. Rebus knew that in Edinburgh, if you knew where to go asking, you could get a gun in under an hour. In Glasgow, it was reckoned to take all of ten minutes. Guns were run like rental videos: you hired them for a day. If they came back unused, you got some money back. Used, and you didn’t. A simple commercial transaction, not too far removed from Peacock Johnson’s activities. Rebus thought about signing his name to the petition but knew it would be an empty gesture. There were lots of newspaper cuttings and reprints of magazine articles: the effects of violence in the media. Knee-jerk stuff, like saying a horror video could make two kids kill a toddler… He had a look around, wondering if Kate had left a contact number. He wanted to talk to her about her father, maybe tell her Allan needed her more than Jack Bell did. He stood at the foot of the stairs for a few minutes, listening to the noises in the attic, then checked the phone book for a taxi firm.
“Be with you in ten,” the voice on the phone told him. A cheery, female voice. It was almost enough to persuade him that there was another world than this…
Siobhan stood in the middle of her living room and looked around her. She walked over to the window and closed the shutters against the dying light. She picked up a mug and plate from the floor: toast crumbs identifying her last meal in the flat. She checked that there were no messages on her phone. It was Friday, which meant Toni Jackson and the other female officers would be expecting her, but the last thing she felt like was girlie bonhomie and the drunken eyeing-up of pub talent. The mug and plate took half a minute to wash and place on the draining board. A quick look in the fridge. The food she’d bought, intending to cook a meal for Rebus, was still there, a few days shy of its “best before” date. She closed the door again and went into her bedroom, straightened the duvet on her bed, confirmed that doing laundry would be necessary this weekend. Then into the bathroom, a glance at herself in the mirror before heading back into the living room, where she opened the day’s mail. Two bills and a postcard. The postcard was from an old college friend. They hadn’t managed to see each other this year, despite living in the same city. Now the friend was enjoying a four-day break in Rome… probably already back, judging by the date on the card. Rome: Siobhan had never been there.
She stood the card on her mantelpiece, tried remembering her last real holiday. A week with her parents? That weekend break in Dublin? It had been a hen party for one of the uniforms… and now the woman was expecting her first kid. She looked up at the ceiling. Her upstairs neighbor was thumping around. She didn’t think he did it on purpose, but he walked like an elephant. She’d met him on the sidewalk outside when she was coming home, complaining that he’d just had to fetch his car from the city impound.
“Twenty minutes I left it, twenty on a single yellow… by the time I got back, it’d been towed… hundred and thirty quid, can you believe it? I almost told them it was more than the bloody thing’s worth.” Then he’d stabbed a finger at her. “You should do something about it.”
Because she was a cop. Because people thought cops could pull strings, get things sorted, change things.
You should do something about it.
He was raging all around his living room, a caged animal ready to hurl itself against the bars. He worked in an office on George Street: account executive, retail insurance. Not quite Siobhan’s height, he wore glasses with narrow rectangular lenses. Had a male flatmate, but had stressed to Siobhan that he wasn’t gay, information for which she had thanked him.
Stomp, thunk, plod.
She wondered if there was any purpose to his movements. Was he opening and closing drawers? Looking for the lost remote perhaps? Or was movement itself his purpose? And if so, what did that say about her own stillness, about the fact that she was standing here listening to him? One postcard on her mantelpiece… one plate and mug on the draining board. One shuttered window, with a horizontal locking bar that she never bothered fastening. Safe enough in here as it was. Cocooned. Smothered.
“Sod it,” she muttered, turning to make good her escape.
St. Leonard’s was quiet. She’d intended burning off some frustration in the gym, but instead got herself a can of something cold and fizzy from the machine and headed upstairs to CID, checking her desk for messages. Another letter from her mystery admirer:
DO BLACK LEATHER GLOVES TURN YOU ON?
Referring to Rebus, she surmised. There was a note for her to call Ray Duff, but all he wanted to say was that he’d managed to test the first of her anonymous letters.
“And it’s not good news.”
“Meaning it’s clean?” she guessed.
“As the proverbial whistle.” She let out a sigh. “Sorry I can’t be more helpful. Would buying you a drink help?”
“Some other time maybe.”
“Fair enough. I’ll probably be here for another hour or two as it is.” “Here” being the forensic lab at Howdenhall.
“Still working on Port Edgar?”
“Matching blood types, see whose spatters are whose.”
Siobhan was seated on the edge of her desk, phone tucked between cheek and shoulder as she sifted through the rest of the paperwork in her in-tray. Most of it concerned cases from weeks back… names she could barely remember.
“Better let you get back to it, then,” she said.
“Keeping busy yourself, Siobhan? You sound tired.”
“You know what it’s like, Ray. Let’s have that drink sometime.”
“By then, I reckon we’ll both need it.”
She smiled into the phone. “Bye, Ray.”
“Take care of yourself, Shiv…”
She put the phone down. There it was again: somebody calling her Shiv, trying for a kind of intimacy they thought the foreshortening would bring. She’d noticed, though, that no one ever tried the same tack with Rebus, never called him Jock, Johnny, Jo-Jo, or JR. Because they looked at him or listened to him and knew he was none of those things. He was John Rebus. Detective Inspector Rebus. To his closest friends: John. Yet some of these same people would happily see her as “Shiv.” Why? Because she was a woman? Did she lack Rebus’s gravitas or sense of perpetual threat? Were they just trying to worm their way into her affections? Or would the conferring of a nickname make her seem more vulnerable, less edgy and potentially dangerous to them?
Shiv… It meant a knife, didn’t it? American slang. Well, right now she felt just about as blunt as she ever had. And here was another nickname walking into the room. DS George “Hi-Ho” Silvers. Looking around as if for someone
