just in case. He had a bottle of whisky, too – eighteenyear-old Highland Park, bought the previous weekend and with a couple of good hits left in it. Ciggies and booze and a little night music. At one time, they would have provided enough consolation, but he wondered if they would sustain him once the job was behind him. What else did he have?
A daughter down in England, living with a college lecturer.
An ex-wife who'd moved to Italy.
The pub.
He couldn't see himself driving cabs or doing precognitions for defence lawyers. Couldn't see himself 'starting afresh' as others
had done – retiring to Marbella or Florida or Bulgaria. Some had sunk their pensions into property, letting flats to students – a chief inspector he knew had made a mint that way, but Rebus didn't want the hassle. He'd be nagging the students all the time about cigarette burns in the carpet or the washing-up not being done.
Sports? None.
Hobbies and pastimes? Just what he was doing right now.
'Bit maudlin tonight, are we, John?' he asked himself out loud.
Then gave a little chuckle, knowing he could maudle for Scotland, gold medal a nap at the Grump Olympics. At least he wasn't being sewn together again and slid back into drawer number three.
He'd gone through a list in his mind – offenders he knew who'd go overboard on a beating. Most were in jail or under sedation on the psycho ward. Gates himself had said it – “There's a fury here.'
'Or furies plural,' Curt had added.
True, they could be looking for more than one attacker. The victim had been whacked on the back of the head with enough force to fracture the skull. Hammer, cosh or baseball bat – or anything else resembling them. Rebus was guessing that this had been the first blow. The victim would have been poleaxed, meaning he posed no threat to his attacker. So why then the prolonged beating to the face? As Gates had speculated, no ordinary mugger would have bothered. They'd have emptied the pockets and fled. A ring had been removed from one finger, and there was a line on the left hand wrist, indicating that the victim had been wearing a watch.
A slight nick on the back of the neck showed that the chain might have been snapped off.
'Nothing left at the scene?' Curt had asked, reaching for the chest-cutters.
Rebus had shaken his head.
Say the victim had put up some sort of struggle… maybe he'd Ipushed a button too many. Or could there be a racism angle, his snt giving him away?
The condemned ate a hearty meal,' Gates had eventually rerked, opening the stomach. 'Prawn bhuna, if I'm not mistaken, rashed down with lager. And do you detect a whiff of brandy or rhisky, Dr Curt?'
Unmistakably.'
And so it had progressed, with Siobhan Clarke fighting to stay irake and Rebus seated next to her, watching as the pathologists it about their business.
fNo grazes on the knuckles or shreds of skin under the finger
nails – nothing to suggest that the victim had been able to defend himself. The clothing was chain-store stuff and would be sent to the forensic lab. With the blood washed off, the face more clearly resembled the one on the poetry book. During one of her short naps, Rebus had removed the volume from Siobhan Clarke's pocket and found a potted biography of Todorov on the flyleaf. Born 1960 in the Zhdanov district of Moscow, former literature lecturer, winner of numerous awards and prizes, author of six poetry collections for adults and one for children.
Seated now in his chair by the window, Rebus tried to think of Indian restaurants near King's Stables Road. Tomorrow, he would try looking in the phone book.
'No, John,' he told himself, 'it's already tomorrow.'
He'd picked up an Evening News at the all-night petrol station, so he could check the headlines again. The Marmion trial was continuing at the Crown Court – pub shooting in Gracemount, one dead, one lucky to be alive. The Sikh teenager had escaped with bumps and bruises, but hair was sacred to his religion, something the attackers must have known or guessed.
And Jack Palance was dead. Rebus didn't know what he'd been like in real life, but he'd always played tough guys in his films.
Rebus poured another Highland Park and raised his glass in a toast.
'Here's to the hard men,' he said, knocking the drink back in one.
Siobhan Clarke got to the end of the phone book's listing for restaurants.
She'd underlined half a dozen possibles, though really all the Indian restaurants were possible – Edinburgh was a small city and easy to get around. But they would start with the ones closest to the locus and work their way outwards. She had logged on to her laptop and searched the Web for mentions of Todorov – there were thousands of hits. He even featured in Wikipedia. Some of the stuff she found was written in Russian. A few essays came from the USA, where the poet featured on various college syllabuses. There were also reviews of Astapovo Blues, so she knew now that the poems were about Russian authors of the past, but also critiques of the current political scene in Todorov's home country – not that Mother Russia had actually been his home, not for the past decade.
He'd been right to term himself an exile, and his views on post glasnost Russia had earned him a good deal of Politburo anger and
derision. In one interview, he'd been asked if he considered himself a dissident. 'A constructive dissident,' he had replied.
Clarke took another gulp of lukewarm coffee. This is your case, girl, she told herself. Rebus would soon be gone. She was trying not to think about it too much. All these years they'd worked together, to the point where they could almost read one another's mind. She knew she would miss him, but knew, too, that she had to start planning for a future without him. Oh, they would meet for drinks and the occasional dinner. She'd share gossip and titbits with him.
Maybe he would nag her about those cold cases, the ones he was trying to dump on her…
BBC News 24 was playing on the TV, but with the sound turned off. She'd made a couple of calls to check that no one as yet had reported the poet missing. Not much else to be done, so eventually she turned off the TV and computer both, and went through to the bathroom. The lightbulb needed changing, so she undressed in the dark, brushed her teeth, and found she was rinsing the brush under the hot tap instead of the cold. With her bedside light on, a pale pink scarf draped over it, she plumped up the pillows, and raised her knees so she could rest Astapovo Blues against them.
It was only forty-odd pages, but had still cost Chris Simpson a tenner.
Keep the faith, as I have and have not…
The first poem in the collection ended with the lines:
As the country bled and wept, wept and bled, He averted his eyes, Ensuring he would not have to testify.
Flicking back to the title page, she saw that the collection had been translated from the Russian by Todorov himself, 'with the assistance of Scarlett Colwell'. Clarke settled back and turned to the second poem. By the third of its four stanzas, she was asleep.
Day Two. Thursday 16 November 2006
3
The Scottish Poetry Library was located down one of innumerable pends and wynds leading off the Canongate. Rebus and Clarke managed to miss it, and ended up at the Parliament and the Palace of Holyrood. Driving more
