When he reached Arden Street, however, there it was, waiting for him, double parked and with a note asking him to shift it so the note's author could move his own blocked car. Rebus tried the driver's door. It wasn't locked. No keys: they were in his coat pocket.
Cafferty's men had done it.
They'd done it simply to show that they could.
He headed upstairs, poured himself a malt and sat on the edge of his bed. He'd checked his phone: no messages. Lorna hadn't tried to get in touch. He felt relief, tinged with disappointment. He stared at the bedclothes. Bits and pieces kept coming back to him, making no particular order. And now his nemesis was back in town, ready to reclaim its streets as his own. Rebus went back to his door and put the chain on. He was halfway down the hall when he stopped.
'What are you doing, man?'
He walked back, slid the chain off again. Cafferty would have no intention of going quietly. Doubtless there were scores to be settled. Rebus didn't doubt that he was one of them, which was fine by him.
When Cafferty came, Rebus would be waiting...
'It'd be easier with the door open,' Ellen Wylie said. She meant that they'd have more room to move, and more light to work by.
'We'd freeze,' Grant Hood reminded her. 'I've lost all feeling in my fingers as it is.'
They were inside the garage at the Coghill house. Another grey winter's morning, bringing chill gusts which shook the metal up-and-over door. The ceiling light was dusty and dim, and only one small frosted window gave any natural light. Wylie held a pocket torch between her teeth as she searched. Hood had brought a plug-in lamp with him, the kind mechanics used in their work bays. But its light was too piercing, and it was awkward to manoeuvre. It sat clipped to a shelf, doing its best to throw shadows over most of the interior.
Wylie thought she'd come prepared: not just the torch, but flasks of hot soup and tea. She was wearing two pairs of wool socks under a pair of walking boots. Her chin was tucked into a scarf. The hood of her olive-green duffel coat was covering her head. Her ears were cold. Her knees were cold. The one-bar electric heater worked to a radius of about six inches.
'We'd get done a lot quicker with the door open,' she argued.
'Can't you hear the wind? Everything would be blown halfway to the Pentlands.'
Mrs Coghill had brought them out a pot of coffee and some biscuits. She seemed worried about them. Loo-breaks came as their only relief. Stepping into the centrally heated house, there was a strong temptation to stay put. Grant had commented on the length of Ellen's last trip to the house. She'd snapped back that she didn't know she was being timed.
Then they'd drifted into this argument about the garage door.
'Anything?' he said now, for about the twentieth time.
'You'll be the first to know,' she replied through gritted teeth. It was no good just ignoring his question: he'd go on asking, same as last time.
'This stuff's all way too recent,' he complained, slapping a pile of paperwork down on to one of the tea chests. Unbalanced, the papers cascaded to the floor.
'Well, that's one way to organise a search,' Wylie muttered. If they put the stuff outside when they'd finished with it, they'd have room to work in, and they'd know which files had been checked... And it would all blow away.
'I'm no expert,' Wylie said at last, stopping to pour out some tea from the flask, 'but Coghill's business affairs look pretty disorganised, if this lot's anything to go by.'
'He got in trouble over his VAT returns,' Hood commented.
'And all the casual labour he employed.'
'Doesn't make our job any easier.' Hood came over, accepted a cup from her with a nod of thanks. There was a knock, and someone came in.
'Any left in that?' Rebus asked, nodding towards the flask.
'Half a cup,' Wylie said. Rebus looked at the coffee cups, lifted the cleanest one and held it out while she poured.
'How's it going?' he asked.
Hood made a point of closing the door. 'You mean apart from the wind-chill factor?'
'Cold's healthy,' Rebus said. 'Good for you.' He'd moved to within six inches of the heater.
'It's slow going,' Wylie said. 'Coghill's biggest problem was he was a one-man band. Tried to run the whole business himself.'
'Now if only he'd employed a nice personnel manager Wylie finished the thought: 'We might have what we're looking for by now.'
'Maybe he chucked stuff out/ Rebus said. 'How far back have you found records for?'
'He didn't throw anything out, sir: that's the real problem here. He kept every scrap of paper.' She waved a letter at him. It was on paper headed Coghill Builders. He took it from her. The estimate for construction of a one-car garage at an address in Joppa. The estimate was in pounds, shillings and pence. The date was July 1969.
'We're looking for one year out of thirty,' Wylie said. She drained the tea, screwed the cup back on to the Thermos. 'A needle in a bloody haystack.'
Rebus drained his cup. 'Well, sooner I let you get back to it...' He checked his watch.
'If you're at a loose end, sir, we can always use another pair of hands.'
Rebus looked at Wylie. She wasn't smiling. 'Another appointment,' he told her. 'Just thought I'd drop by.'
'Much appreciated, sir,' Hood said, catching something of his partner's tone. They went back to work, watched Rebus leave.
Wylie heard an engine start, and flung down her sheaf of papers. 'Do you believe that? Swans in, finishes off the tea, and swans out again. And if we'd found anything, he'd have been off back to the station with it to bag the glory.'
Hood was staring at the door. 'Think so?'
She looked at him. 'Don't you?'
He shrugged. 'Not his style,' he said.
'Then why did he come?'
Hood was still looking at the door. 'Because he can't let go-'
'Another way of saying he doesn't trust us.' Hood was shaking his head. He picked up another box- file. 'Seventy-one,' he said, looking at it. 'Year I was born.'
'I hope you don't mind the choice of meeting place,' Cammo Grieve said, picking his way over lengths of scaffolding which had either just come down or were just going up.
'No problem,' Rebus said.
'Only I wanted the excuse for a poke around here.'
Here being the temporary home of the Scottish Parliament in the General Assembly building at the top of The Mound. The builders were hard at work. Black metal lighting gantreys had already appeared amidst the wooden ceiling beams. Gyproc walls were being cut to shape, their skeletal wooden frames standing ready to receive them. A new floor was being laid on top of the existing one. It rose amphitheatre-style in a graduated semicircle. The desks and chairs hadn't arrived yet. In the courtyard outside, the statue of John Knox had been boxed in - some said for safekeeping, some so that he could not show his disgust at the renovations to the Church of Scotland's supreme court.
'I hear Glasgow had a building ready and waiting to accommodate the parliament,' Grieve said. He tutted, smiling. 'As if Edinburgh would let them get away with that. All the same...' He looked around. 'Shame they couldn't just wait for the permanent site to be ready.'
'We can't wait that long, apparently,' Rebus said.
'Only because Dewar has a bee in his bonnet. Look at the way he banjaxed Calton Hill as a site, all because he worried it was a 'Nationalist symbol'. Bloody man's an eejit.'
