Rebus looked hard at the pavement and noticed the trail of splashes. There were intervals between them. The blood had lost most of its colour but was still recognisable. 'How come we didn't spot this last night?'
Duff shrugged. His car was parked kerbside, and he unlocked it long enough to stow his box of tricks.
'How far have you followed it?' Rebus asked.
'I was just about to get started when you arrived.'
'Then let's go.'
They began walking, eyes on the sporadic series of drips. Tou going to join SCRU?' Duff asked.
'Think they'd want me?' SCRU was the Serious Crime Review Unit. It consisted of three retired detectives, whose job was to look at unsolveds.
'Did you hear about that result we got last week?' Duff said.
'DNA from a sweated fingerprint. Sort of thing that can be useful on cold cases. DNA boost means we can decipher DNA multiples.'
'Shame I can't decipher what you're saying.'
Duff chuckled. 'World's changing, John. Faster than most of us can keep up with.'
'You're saying I should embrace the scrapheap?'
Duff just shrugged. They'd covered a hundred yards or so and were standing at the exit to a multistorey car park. There were two barriers; drivers could choose either one. Once you'd paid for your ticket, you slid it into a slot and the barrier would rise.
'Have you ID'd the victim?' Duff asked, looking around as he tried to pick up the trail again.
'A Russian poet.'
'Did he drive a car?'
'He couldn't change his own lightbulbs, Ray.'
'Thing about car parks, John… there's always a bit of oil left lying around.'
Rebus had noticed that there were intercoms fixed alongside either barrier. He pressed a button and waited. After a few moments, a voice crackled from the loudspeaker.
What is it?'
'Wonder if you can help me…'
“You after directions or something? Look, chief, this is a car park.
All we do here is park cars.' It took Rebus only a second to work things out.
Tou can see me,' he said. Yes: a CCTV camera high up in one
corner, pointing at the exit. Rebus gave it a wave.
'Have you got a problem with your car?' the voice was asking.
'I'm a cop,' Rebus answered. 'Want to have a word with you.'
'What about?'
'Where are you?'
'Next floor up,' the voice admitted eventually. 'Is this to do with that prang I had?'
'That depends – did you happen to hit a guy and kill him?'
'Christ, no.'
'Might be okay then. We'll be there in a minute.' Rebus moved away from the barrier towards where Ray Duff was down on all fours, peering beneath a parked BMW.
'Not keen on these new Beamers,' Duff said, sensing Rebus behind him.
'Found something?'
'I think there's blood under here… quite a bit of it. If you were asking me, I'd say this is trail's end.'
Rebus walked around the vehicle. There was a ticket on the dashboard, showing that it had entered the car park at eleven that morning.
'Next car along,' Duff was saying, 'is there something underneath it?'
Rebus did a circuit of the big Lexus but couldn't see anything.
Nothing else for it but to get down on hands and knees himself. A bit of string or wire. He reached a hand beneath the car, fingertips scrabbling at it, eventually drawing it out. Hauled himself back to his feet and held it dangling by thumb and forefinger.
A plain silver neck-chain.
'Ray,' he said, 'better go fetch your kit.'
5
Clarke decided it wasn't worth visiting the librarian, so called her from Todorov's flat while Hawes and Tibbet started the search.
Clarke had barely punched in the number for the Poetry Library when Hawes arrived back from the bedroom, waving the dead man's passport.
'Under a corner of the mattress,' Hawes said. 'First place I looked.'
Clarke just nodded, and moved into the hallway for a bit more privacy.
'Miss Thomas?' she said into her phone. 'It's Detective Sergeant Clarke here, sorry to trouble you again so soon…'
Three minutes later she was back in the living room with just a couple of names: yes, Abigail Thomas had accompanied Todorov to the pub after his recital, but she'd only stayed for the one, and knew that the poet wouldn't be satisfied until he'd sampled another four or five watering-holes.
'I reckoned he was in safe hands with Mr Riordan,' she'd told Clarke.
'The sound engineer?'
Tes.'
'No one else was there? None of the other poets?'
'Just the three of us, and as I say, I didn't stay long…'
Colin Tibbet meantime had finished rummaging through desk drawers and kitchen cupboards and was tilting the sofa to see if anything other than dust might be hidden there. Clarke lifted a book from the floor. It was another copy ofAstapovo Blues. She'd managed a couple of minutes' research on Count Tolstoy, so knew that he'd died in a railway siding, shunning the wife who
had refused to join his pared-to-the-bone lifestyle. This helped her make more sense of the collection's final poem, 'Codex Coda', with its refrain of 'a cold, cleansed death'. Todorov, she saw, had not quite finished with any of the poems in the book – there were pencilled amendments throughout. She reached into his waste-bin and uncrumpled one of the discarded sheets.
City noise invisible Havoc-crying air Congested as a
The rest of the sheet consisted of doodled punctuation marks.
There was a folder on his desk, but nothing inside it. A book of Killer Sudokus, all of them finished. Pens and pencils and an unused calligraphy set, complete with instructions. She walked over to the wall and stood in front of the Edinburgh bus map, traced a line from King's Stables Road to Buccleuch Place. There were a dozen routes he could have chosen. Maybe he was on a pub crawl, or a little bit lost. No reason to assume he'd been heading home.
He could have left his flat and crossed George Square, made for Candlemaker Row and wandered down its steep brae into the Grassmarket. Plenty of pubs there, and King's Stables Road only a right-hand fork away… Her phone rang. Caller ID: Rebus. 'Phyl found his passport,' she told him.
'And I just found his neck-chain, lying on the floor of the multistorey.'
'So he was killed there and dumped in the lane?'
'Trail of blood says so.'
'Or he staggered that far and then keeled over.'
'Another possibility,' Rebus seemed to concede. 'Thing is, though, what was he doing in the car park in the first place? Are you at his flat?'
