'Want to ask you a couple of questions about the murder.'
'What murder?'
'The one at the bottom of your street.'
'I was in hospital at the time.'
'How's the wound?'
He lifted his shirt to show a large white compress, just above the waistband of his underpants. 'Itches like buggery,' he admitted.
Then, catching on: 'How did you know about it?'
'DI Davidson at Torphichen filled me in. Mentioned Crazy Larry, too. Bit of a tip for you, actually – before you square up to someone, always check their nickname.'
Sol Goodyear snorted at that, but still didn't show any great desire to let them in. 'My brother's a cop,' he said instead.
'Oh, yes?' Clarke tried to sound surprised. She reckoned Sol would try this line on any police officer he met.
'He's still in uniform, but not for much longer. Todd's always been a fast-track kind of guy. He was the white sheep of the family.'
He gave a little laugh at what Clarke reckoned was another of his well-rehearsed lines.
'That's a good one,' Hawes obliged, managing to sound as though
she meant the opposite. The laugh died in Sol Goodyear's throat.
'Well, anyway,' he sniffed, 'I wasn't here that night. They didn't discharge me till the evening after.'
'Did Nancy come to see you at the hospital?'
' Nancy who?'
Your girlfriend Nancy. She was on her way here when she tripped over the body. You were going to sell her some stuff for a friend of hers.'
'She's not my girlfriend,' he stated, having decided in the blinking of an eye that there was no point lying about things they already knew.
'She seems to think she is.'
'She's mistaken.'
Tou're just her dealer, then?'
He scowled as though pained by this turn in the conversation.
'What I am, officer, is the victim of a stabbing. The painkillers I'm on make it highly unlikely that anything I say could be used in a court of law.'
'Clever boy,' Clarke said, sounding admiring, 'you know your loopholes.'
'Learned the hard way.'
She nodded slowly. 'I've heard it was Big Ger Cafferty got you started on the selling – do you still see him?'
'Don't know who you're talking about.'
'Funny, I've never heard of a stabbing affecting someone's memory before…' Clarke looked to Hawes for confirmation of this.
'Think you've got the patter, don't you?' Sol Goodyear was saying.
'Well try this for a pay-off.'
And with that, he slammed the door in their faces. From behind it, as he started climbing the stairs again, could be heard a stream of invective. Hawes raised an eyebrow.
'Bitches and lesbians,' she repeated. 'Always nice to learn something new about yourself 'Isn't it?'
'So now we've got one brother involved, I suppose that means the other has to be taken off the case?'
That's a decision for DCI Macrae.'
'How come you didn't tell Sol we've got Todd working with us?'
'Need-to-know basis, Phyl.' Clarke stared at Hawes. You in a hurry to see the back of PC Goodyear?'
'Just so long as he remembers he is a PC. Now that the suite's filling up, he's looking too comfortable in that suit of his.'
'Meaning what exactly?'
'Some of us have worked our way out of uniform, Siobhan.'
'CID's a closed shop, is it?' Clarke turned away from Hawes and started moving, but stopped abruptly at the corner. From where she stood, it was about sixty feet to the spot where Alexander Todorov was murdered.
'What are you thinking?' Hawes asked.
'I'm wondering about Nancy. We're assuming she was on her way to Sol's when she found the body. But she could've walked up here, rung his bell a few times, maybe thumped on his door…'
'Not knowing he's been injured in a brawl?'
'Exactly.'
'And meantime Todorov's managed to stagger from the car park…'
Clarke was nodding.
Tou think she saw something?' Hawes added.
'Saw or heard. Maybe hid around this corner, while Todorov's attacker followed him and delivered the final blow.'
'And her reason for not telling us any of this…?'
'Fear, I suppose.'
'Fear'll do it every time,' Hawes concurred. 'What was that line from Todorov's poem…?'
'”He averted his eyesEnsuring he would not have to testify.“'
'The sort of lesson Nancy might have learned from Sol Goodyear.'
'Yes,' Clarke agreed. Tfes, she might.'
26
Rebus was eating a bag of crisps and listening again to Eddie Gentry's CD on his car stereo. Except that it wasn't stereo exactly, one of the speakers having packed in. Didn't really matter when it was just one man and his guitar. He'd already finished the first packet of crisps, plus a curried-vegetable samosa bought from a corner shop in Polwarth and washed down with a bottle of still water, which he tried to persuade himself made it a balanced meal. He was parked at the bottom end of Cafferty's street and as far as possible from any of the streetlamps. For once, he didn't want the gangster spotting him. Then again, he couldn't even be sure Cafferty was at home: the man's car was in the driveway, but that didn't mean much in itself. Some of the house lights were on, but maybe just to deter intruders. Rebus couldn't see any sign of the bodyguard who lived in the coach-house to the rear of the property. Cafferty never seemed to use him much, leading Rebus to believe he was on the payroll for reasons of vanity rather than necessity. Siobhan had texted a couple of times, ostensibly to ask if he fancied supper one night. He knew she'd be wondering what he was up to.
Two hours he'd been parked there, for no good reason. The fifteen-minute break spent at the corner shop had given Cafferty ample time to head out without Rebus being any the wiser. Maybe for once the gangster would be using his room at the Caledonian.
As a surveillance, it was laughable, but then he wasn't even sure it was a surveillance. Might be it was just a pretext for not going home, where the only thing waiting was a reissue of Johnny Cash's Live at San Quentin that he hadn't got round to playing. Kept forgetting to put it in the car, and wondered how it would sound on
a single speaker. First stereo he'd ever owned, one of the speakers had packed in after only a month. There was a track on a Velvet Underground album, all the instruments on one channel, vocals on the other, so that he couldn't listen to both together. It had taken him ages to buy his first CD player, and even now he preferred vinyl. Siobhan said it was because he was 'wilful'.
