offices.
“Do?” Rebus echoed. He was saved from answering by Siobhan’s phone. She put it to her ear.
“Mum?” she said. “Yes, we’re watching it right now.” She paused, listening. “I’m sure they’re fine…Yes, you could call the number. Might take a while to get through though.” Another pause to listen. “What? Today? They might have locked down King’s Cross…” She’d half turned from Rebus. He decided to leave the room, let her say whatever needed saying. In the kitchen, he ran the tap, filled the kettle. Listened to the water running: such a basic sound, he almost never heard it. It was just there…
Normal.
Everyday.
And when he closed the tap, there was a faint gurgle. Funny how he couldn’t remember having caught it before. When he turned, Siobhan was standing there.
“Mum wants to go home,” she said, “make sure the neighbors are okay.”
“I don’t even know where they live.”
“Forest Hill,” she told him. “South of the Thames.”
“No lunch then?”
She shook her head. He handed a strip of paaper towel to her and she blew her nose.
“Puts things in perspective, something like this,” she said.
“Not really. It’s been in the air all week. There were times I could almost taste it.”
“That’s three tea bags,” she said.
“What?”
“You’ve just put three tea bags in that mug.” She handed him the teapot. “This what you were thinking of?”
“Maybe,” he conceded. In his mind he was seeing a statue in the desert, smashed to smithereens…
Siobhan had gone home. She would help her parents, maybe take them to the train if that was still the plan. Rebus watched TV. The red double-decker had been ripped apart, its roof lying in the road in front of it. And yet there were survivors. A small miracle, it seemed to him. His instinct was to open the bottle and pour, but so far he’d resisted. Eyewitnesses were telling their stories. The prime minister was on his way south, leaving the foreign secretary in charge at Gleneagles. Blair had made a statement before leaving, flanked by his G8 colleagues. You could just make out the Band-Aids on President Bush’s knuckles. Back on the news, people were talking about crawling over body parts to get out of the trains. Crawling through smoke and blood. Some had used their camera phones to capture the horror. Rebus wondered what instinct had kicked in to make them do that, turning them into war correspondents. The bottle was on the mantelpiece. The tea was cold in his hand. Three bad men had been chosen for death by a person or persons unknown. Ben Webster had fallen to his doom. Big Ger Cafferty and Gareth Tench were squaring up for violence. Puts things in perspective-Siobhan’s words. Rebus wasn’t so sure. Because now more than ever he wanted answers to questions, wanted faces and names. He couldn’t do anything about London or suicide bombers or casual carnage on the scale in front of him. All he could do was lock up a few bad people now and then. Results that didn’t seem to change the bigger picture. Another image came to mind: Mickey as a kid, maybe Kirkcaldy Beach or some holiday in St. Andrews or Blackpool. Frantically scooping up lines of damp sand, creating a barrier against the creeping sea. Working as if his life depended on it. And big brother John, too, using the small plastic shovel to pile the sand on, Mickey patting it down. Twenty, thirty feet long, maybe six inches high…But the first flecks of foam would be arriving before they had a chance, and they’d have to watch their edifice melt, becoming one with its surroundings. Squealing in defeat, stamping their feet and waving their tiny fists at the lapping water and the treacherous shore and the unmoved sky.
And God.
God above all else.
The bottle seemed to be swelling in size, or maybe it was that he was growing smaller. He thought of some lines in a Jackie Leven song: But my boat is so small, and your sea is so immense. Immense, yes, but why did it have to be so full of bloody sharks? When the phone started ringing, he considered not answering. Considered for all of ten seconds. It was Ellen Wylie.
“Any news?” he asked. Then he barked out a short laugh and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Apart from the obvious, I mean.”
“State of shock here,” she told him. “Nobody’s about to figure out that you copied all that stuff and took it home. I doubt anyone’s going to look twice at anything until this week’s over. I thought I might head back to Torphichen, see how my team is doing.”
“Good idea.”
“London contingent are being sent home. Could be we’ll need all available hands.”
“I won’t be holding my breath.”
“Actually, even the anarchists seem to be stunned. Word from Gleneagles is, it’s all gone quiet. A lot of them just want to go home.”
Rebus had risen from his chair. He was standing by the mantelpiece. “Time like this, you want to be near your loved ones.”
“John, are you all right?”
“Just dandy, Ellen.” He drew a finger down the bottle’s length. It was Dewar’s, pale gold in color. “You get yourself back to Torphichen.”
“Do you want me to drop by later?”
“I don’t think we’ll have accomplished much.”
“Tomorrow then?”
“Sounds good. Talk to you then.” He cut the connection, leaned both hands against the edge of the mantelpiece.
Could have sworn the bottle was staring back at him.
20
There were buses heading south, and Siobhan’s parents had decided to catch one of them.
“We’d have been leaving tomorrow anyway,” her father had said, giving her a hug.
“You never did get to Gleneagles,” she’d told him. He’d pecked her on the cheek, right on the line of her jaw, and for a few seconds she’d been a kid again. Always the same spot, be it Christmas or a birthday, good grades at school, or just because he was feeling happy.
And then another embrace from her mother, and whispered words: “It doesn’t matter.” Meaning the damage to her face; meaning finding the culprit. And then, pulling free of the embrace but still holding her at arm’s length: “Come see us soon.”
“Promise,” Siobhan had said.
The apartment seemed empty without them. She realized that she lived most of her time there in silence. Well, not silence-there was always music or the radio or TV. But not many visitors, nobody whistling as they walked down the hall, or humming as they washed up.
Nobody but her.
She’d tried calling Rebus, but he wasn’t answering. The TV was on; she couldn’t bring herself to switch it off. Thirty dead…forty dead…maybe fifty. The mayor of London had made a good speech. Al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility. The queen was “deeply shocked.” London’s commuters were starting the long march home from work. Commentators were asking why the terror alert had been downgraded from severe general to substantial. She wanted to ask them: What difference would it have made?
She went to the fridge. Her mother had been busy at the local shops: duck fillets, lamb chops, a slab of cheese, organic fruit juice. Siobhan tried the freezer compartment and hauled out a frosted tub of Mackie’s vanilla ice cream. Got herself a spoon and went back through to the living room. For want of anything else to do, she booted up her computer. Fifty-three e-mails. A quick glance told her she could delete the vast bulk of them. Then she remembered something, reached into her pocket. The CD-ROM. She slotted it into her hard drive. A few clicks of the mouse and she was studying a screen’s worth of thumbnails. Stacey Webster had taken a few of the young mother and her
