This was the bookseller, proffering the bottle he’d brought himself. It wasn’t a bad little wine, actually, but the bookseller had talked about it with such unremitting pride that Rebus felt obliged to decline. The man frowned, but then was cheered to find this refusal left all the more for himself. He replenished his glass with vigour. ‘Cheers,’ he said.
The conversation returned to how busy Edinburgh seemed these days. Here was something with which Rebus could agree. This being the end of May, the tourists were almost in season. But there was more to it than that. If anyone had told him five years ago that in 1989 people would be emigrating north from the south of England to the Lothians, he’d have laughed out loud. Now it was fact, and a fit topic for the dinner table.
Later, much later, the couple having departed, Rebus helped Rian with the dishes.
‘What was wrong with you?’ she said, but all he could think about was the minister’s handshake, that confident grip which bespoke assurances of an afterlife.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave these till morning.’ Rian stared at the kitchen, counting the used pots, the half- eaten lobster carcasses, the wine glasses smudged with grease.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘What did you have in mind instead?’
He raised his eyebrows slowly, then brought them down low over his eyes. His lips broadened into a smile which had about it a touch of the leer. She became coy.
‘Why, Inspector,’ she said. ‘Is that supposed to be some kind of a clue?’
‘Here’s another,’ he said, lunging at her, hugging her to him, his face buried in her neck. She squealed, clenched fists beating against his back.
‘Police brutality!’ she gasped. ‘Help! Police, help!’
‘Yes, madam?’ he inquired, carrying her by the waist out of the kitchen, towards where the bedroom and the end of the weekend waited in shadow.
Late evening at a building site on the outskirts of Edinburgh. The contract was for the construction of an office development. A fifteen-foot-high fence separated the works from the main road. The road, too, was of recent vintage, built to help ease traffic congestion around the city. Built so that commuters could travel easily from their country-side dwellings to jobs in the city centre.
There were no cars on the road tonight. The only sound came from the slow chug-chugging of a cement mixer on the site. A man was feeding it spadefuls of grey sand and remembering the far distant days when he had laboured on a building site. Hard graft it had been, but honest.
Two other men stood above a deep pit, staring down into it.
Should do it,’ one said.
‘Yes,’ the other agreed. They began walking back to the car. an ageing purple Mercedes.
He must have some clout. I mean, to get us the keys to this place, to set all this up. Some clout.’
Ours is not to ask questions, you know that.’ The man who spoke was the oldest of the three, and the only Calvinist. He opened the car boot. Inside, the body of a frail teenager lay crumpled, obviously dead. His skin was
the colour of pencil shading, darkest where the bruises lay.
‘What a waste,’ said the Calvinist.
‘Aye,’ the other agreed. Together they lifted the body from the boot, and carried it gently towards the hole. It dropped softly to the bottom, one leg wedging up against the sticky clay sides, a trouser leg slipping to show a naked ankle.
‘All right,’ the Calvinist said to the cement man. ‘Cover it, and let’s get out of here. I’m starving.’
Monday
For dose on a generation, no one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages
What a start to the working week.
The housing estate, what he could see of it through the rain-lashed windscreen, was slowly turning back into the wilderness that had existed here before the builders had moved in many years ago. He had no doubt that in the 1960s it, like its brethren clustered around Edinburgh, had seemed the perfect solution to future housing needs. And he wondered if the planners ever learned through anything other than hindsight. If not, then perhaps today’s ‘ideal’ solutions were going to turn out the same way.
The landscaped areas comprised long grass and an abundance of weeds, while children’s tarmacadamed playgrounds had become bombsites, shrapnel glass awaiting a tripped knee or stumbling hand. Most of the terraces boasted boarded-up windows, ruptured drainpipes pouring out teeming rainwater onto the ground, marshy front gardens with broken fences and missing gates. He had the idea that on a sunny day the place would seem even more depressing.
Yet nearby, a matter of a few hundred yards or so, some developer had started building private apartments. The hoarding above the site proclaimed this a LUXURY DEVELOPMENT, and gave its address as MUIR VILLAGE. Rebus wasn’t fooled, but wondered how many young buyers would be. This was Pilmuir, and always would be. This was the dumping ground.
There was no mistaking the house he wanted. Two
police cars and an ambulance were already there, parked next to a burnt-out Ford Cortina. But even if there hadn’t been this sideshow, Rebus would have known the house. Yes, it had its boarded-up windows, like its neighbours on either side, but it also had an open door, opening into the darkness of its interior. And on a day like this, would any house have its door flung wide open were it not for the corpse inside, and the superstitious dread of the living who were incarcerated with it?
Unable to park as close to this door as he would have liked, Rebus cursed under his breath and pushed open the car door, throwing his raincoat over his head as he made to dash through the stiletto shower. Something fell from his pocket onto the verge. Scrap paper, but he picked it up anyway, screwing it into his pocket as he ran. The
