“Today,” Rebus corrected her, tapping his watch. She checked her own.
“Is that really the time?” She sounded exhausted. “I’ll be back here in six hours.”
“I’d offer to buy you a drink if the pubs were still open.”
“I don’t need a drink.”
“A lift home?”
“My car’s outside.” She thought for a moment. “No, it’s not-didn’t bring it in today.”
“Good move, considering.”
“We were warned not to.”
“Foresight is a wonderful thing. And it means I can give you that lift home after all.” Rebus waited until her eyes met his. He was smiling. “You still haven’t asked what I want.”
“I know what you want.” She bristled slightly, and he raised his hands in surrender.
“Easy now,” he told her. “Don’t want you getting all…”
“All what?”
Walking straight into his punch line. “Torn up inside,” he obliged.
Ellen Wylie shared a house with her divorced sister.
It was a terrace in Cramond. The back garden ended in a sheer drop to the River Almond. The night being mild, and Rebus needing to smoke, they sat at a table outside. Wylie kept her voice low-didn’t want the neighbors complaining, and besides, her sister’s bedroom window was open. She brought out mugs of milky tea.
“Nice spot,” Rebus told her. “I like that you can hear the water.”
“There’s a stream just over there.” She pointed into the darkness. “Masks the noise of the planes.”
Rebus nodded his understanding: they were directly under the flight path into Turnhouse Airport. This time of night, it had only taken them fifteen minutes from Torphichen Place. On the way, she’d told him her story.
“So I wrote something for the Web site…not against the law, is it? I was just so pissed off at the system. We bust a gut to get these animals to court, and then the lawyers do their damnedest to get their sentences whittled away to nothing.”
“Is that all it was?”
She’d shifted in the passenger seat. “What else?”
“Tornupinside-sounds like it was more personal.”
She’d stared through the windshield. “No, John, just angry…Too many hours spent on rape cases, sexual assault, domestic abuse-maybe it takes a woman to understand.”
“Which is why you phoned Siobhan back? I recognized your voice straight off.”
“Yes, that was particularly devious of you.”
“My middle name…”
Now, seated in her garden with a cold breeze blowing, Rebus buttoned his jacket and asked about the Web site. How did she find it? Did she know the Jensens? Had she ever met with them…?
“I remember the case” was all she said.
“Vicky Jensen?” She nodded slowly. “Did you work on it?”
A shake of the head. “But I’m glad he’s dead. Show me where he’s buried and I’ll dance a little jig.”
“Edward Isley and Trevor Guest are dead, too.”
“Look, John, all I did was write a bit of a blog…I was letting off steam.”
“And now three of the men listed on the site are dead. A blow to the head and a smack overdose. You’ve worked murders, Ellen…what does that MO tell you?”
“Someone with access to hard drugs.”
“Anything else?”
She thought for a moment. “You tell me.”
“Killer didn’t want a face-to-face with the victims. Maybe because they were bigger and stronger. Didn’t really want them to suffer either-a straight KO and then the injection. Doesn’t that sound like a woman to you?”
“How’s your tea, John?”
“Ellen…”
She slapped a palm against the tabletop. “If they were listed on BeastWatch, they were grade-A scumbags… don’t expect me to feel sorry for them.”
“What about catching the killer?”
“What about it?”
“You want them to get away with it?”
She was staring into the darkness again. The wind was rustling the trees nearby. “Know what we had today, John? We had a war, cut-and-dried-good guys and bad…”
Rebus’s thought: Tell that to Siobhan.
“But it isn’t always like that, is it?” she went on. “Sometimes the line blurs.” She turned her gaze on him. “You should know that better than most, number of corners I’ve seen you cut.”
“I make a lousy role model, Ellen.”
“Maybe so, but you’re planning to find him, aren’t you?”
“Him or her. That’s why I need to get a statement from you.” She opened her mouth to complain, but he held up a hand. “You’re the only person I know who used the site. The Jensens have closed it down, so I can’t be sure what might have been on there.”
“You want me to help?”
“By answering a few questions.”
She gave a harsh, quiet laugh. “You know I’ve got court later today?”
Rebus was lighting another cigarette. “Why Cramond?” he asked. She seemed surprised by the change of subject.
“It’s a village,” she explained. “A village inside a city-best of both worlds.” She paused. “Has the interview already started? Is this you getting me to drop my guard?”
Rebus shook his head. “Just wondered whose idea it was.”
“It’s my house, John. Denise came to live with me after she…” She cleared her throat. “Think I swallowed a bug,” she apologized. “I was going to say, after her divorce.”
Rebus nodded at the explanation. “Well, it’s a peaceful spot, I’ll give you that. Easy out here to forget all about the job.”
The light from the kitchen caught her smile. “I get the feeling it wouldn’t work for you. I’m not sure anything short of a sledgehammer would.”
“Or a few of those,” Rebus countered, nodding toward the row of empty wine bottles lined up beneath the kitchen window.
He took it slow, driving back into town. Loved the city at night, the taxicabs and lolling pedestrians, warm sodium glare from the streetlamps, darkened shops, curtained tenements. There were places he could go-a bakery, a night watchman’s desk, a casino-places where he was known and where tea would be brewed, gossip exchanged. Years back, he could have stopped for a chat with the working girls on Coburg Street, but most of them had either moved on or died. And after he, too, was gone, Edinburgh would remain. These same scenes would be enacted, a play whose run was never ending. Killers would be caught and punished; others would remain at large. The world and the underworld, coexisting down the generations. By week’s end, the G8 circus would have trundled elsewhere. Geldof and Bono would have found new causes. Richard Pennen would be in his boardroom, David Steelforth back at Scotland Yard. Sometimes it felt to Rebus that he was close to seeing the mechanism that connected everything.
Close…but never quite close enough.
The Meadows seemed deserted as he turned up Marchmont Road. Parked at the top of Arden Street and walked back downhill to his tenement. Two or three times a week he got flyers through his mailbox, firms eager to sell his apartment for him. The one upstairs had gone for two hundred K. Add that sort of money to his CID pension and he was, as Siobhan herself had said, “on Easy Street.” Problem was, it wasn’t a destination that appealed. He stooped to pick up the mail from inside the door. There was a menu from a new Indian take-out. He’d pin it up in the kitchen, next to the others. Meantime, he made himself a ham sandwich, ate it standing in the kitchen, staring at the array of empty cans on the work surface. How many bottles had there been in Ellen Wylie’s garden? Fifteen, maybe twenty. A lot of wine. He’d seen an empty Tesco’s bag in the kitchen. She probably did a regular recycling
