one night she'd persuaded Cat to go with her. Jerry wasn't too good on the background. He didn't know why Cat had agreed. Had to mean her own marriage was rocky, but Nic had never said anything. Only things he ever said were along the lines of 'She betrayed me, Jer,' and 'I never saw it coming.' They'd gone to a nightclub - not this one, but a Thursday nighter, same sort of crowd - and one of the singles guys had taken Cat up for a dance, then another. And that was that. Basically, she'd gone off with him.
And now Nic saw his chance for revenge, not on Cat -no way he could touch her; Christ, her uncle was Bryce Callan, her cousin was Barry Hutton - but on her friend Yvonne.
When Nic came over again and nudged him, Jerry knew the singles group was preparing to leave. He finished his pint and followed Nic out of the club. The van was a hundred yards away. What happened was: Nic followed on foot, Jerry driving. Then Nic would find his spot, make a grab, and Jerry would pull up alongside, haul open the back doors. Then it was back on the road till they found a deserted spot, Nic in the back holding down the woman, Jerry taking care not to run any red lights or pull out in front of cop cars. The gloves and ski masks were in the glove box.
Nic unlocked the van, stared at Jerry.
'It's got to be you on foot tonight.'
'What?'
' Yvonne knows me. If she hears something, turns her head, she'd see it was me.'
'Put the mask on then.'
'You thick? Following a woman down the road with a ski mask on?'
'I'm not doing it.'
Nic's teeth were gritted in sudden anger. 'Help me out here!'
'No way, man.' Shaking his head.
Nic made an effort to calm himself. 'Look, maybe she won't be on her own anyway. I'm just asking--'
'And I'm saying no. Whole thing's way too risky, I don't care what you say.' Jerry was moving backwards away from the van.
'Where you going?'
'I need some fresh air.'
'Don't be like that. Christ, Jer, when are you going to grow up?'
'No way.' It was all Jerry could think of to say. Then he turned and ran.
Rebus walked from room to room in his flat, waiting for the grill to heat up. Toasted cheese: that most solitary of meals. You never saw it on menus, never invited friends round to share a few slices. It was what you ate when you were alone. A trip to the cupboard revealing a few final slices of bread; marge and cheese in the fridge. You wanted a hot meal this winter evening.
Toasted cheese.
He went back into the kitchen, put the bread under the grill, started slicing the slick wedge of orange Cheddar. A refrain came into his head, something from an old Fringe revue show: Scottish Cheddar, it's our kind of cheese, Scottish Cheddar, orange, full of grease.,.
Back into the living room, early Bowie on the hi-fi. 'The Man Who Sold the World.' Life was all about commerce, no doubt about it, daily transactions with friends, enemies and strangers, each one providing a winner and a loser, a sense of something lost or gained. You might not be selling the world, but everyone was selling something, some idea of themselves. When Bowie sang of passing someone on the stairs, Rebus thought again of Derek Linford, caught on the tenement stairwell: voyeur, or just insecure? Rebus himself had done some crazy things in his younger days. One girl, when she'd chucked him he'd phoned her parents to say she was pregnant. Christ, they hadn't even had sex together. He stood beside the window, gazing out at the flats across the way, some still with curtains or shutters open. All those other lives. Opposite him lived a family with two kids, boy and girl. He'd been watching them for so long that one Saturday morning, bumping into them outside the newsagent's, he'd said hello. The kids, no parents to protect them, had edged past him, eyes wary, while he tried to explain that he was one of their neighbours.
Never talk to strangers: it was advice he'd have given them himself. He might be their neighbour, but he was also a stranger. People on the pavement had looked at him oddly, standing there with his bag of rolls, his newspaper and milk, while two kids walked backwards away from him, and him calling out: 'I live across the road from you! You must have seen me!'
Of course, they hadn't seen him. Their minds were elsewhere, fixed on a world entirely separate from his. And from then on, maybe they called him the 'creepy neighbour', the man who lived on his own.
Sell the world? He couldn't even sell himself.
But that was Edinburgh for you. Reserved, self-contained, the kind of place where you might never talk to the person next door. Rebus's stairwell of six flats boasted only three owner-occupiers; the other three were let to students. He couldn't have said who owned them until the statutory notice had come round for roof repairs. Absentee landlords. One of them lived in Hong Kong or somewhere, and the lack of his signature had led the council to make their own estimate of repairs - ten times the original - and pass the work on to a favoured firm.
Not too long ago, one stairwell resident out Dairy way had had a contract taken out on him by someone else in the tenement because he wouldn't sign his name to a repair estimate. That was Edinburgh for you: reserved. self-contained, and lethal when crossed.
Bowie was singing 'Changes' now. Black Sabbath had a song with the same title, a ballad of sorts. Ozzy Osbourne singing, 'I'm going through changes'. Me too, pal, Rebus felt like telling him.
Back into the kitchen: turning the toast and arranging the cheese slices, then back under the grill. He put the kettle on.
Changes: like with his drinking. A hundred pubs he could name in Edinburgh, yet here he was at home, no beer in the cupboard, and just the one bottle of malt whisky on top of the fridge, half of it gone. He would allow himself a single glass before bed, maybe top it up with water. Then under the duvet with a book. He had all these Edinburgh histories to get through, though he'd already given up on Sir Walter Scott's Journals. Plenty of pubs in the city named after Scott's works; probably more than he realised, seeing as how he hadn't read any of the novels.
Smoke from the grill told him the edges of the toast were burning. He tossed both slices on to a plate, took it back through to his chair. The TV was on with the sound muted. His chair was by the window, cordless phone and TV remote on the floor next to it. Some nights the ghosts came, settling themselves on the sofa or cross-legged on the floor. Not enough to fill the room, but more than he'd have liked. Villains, dead colleagues. And now Cafferty was back in his life, as if resurrected. Rebus, chewing, looked to the ceiling, asking God what he'd done to deserve it all. He liked a bit of a laugh, God, even if it was the laughter of cruelty.
Toasted cheese: sometimes at weekends, when Rebus's father had been alive and the son had headed back to Fife to visit, the old boy would be sitting at the table, munching the selfsame meal, washing down each mouthful with swilled tea. When Rebus had been a kid, they'd eaten as a family in the kitchen, bringing out the fold-down table. But in later years, Rebus senior had hauled the table into the living room, so he could eat near the fire and the television. A two-bar electric heater warming his back. There was a Calor gas heater, too. It always steamed up the windows. And then overnight in winter the condensation would freeze, so you had to scrape it off in the morning, or mop it with the kitchen flannel once the heating got going.
A grunt from his father, Rebus settling into what had been his mother's chair. He would say he'd eaten; no intention of joining his father at the table set for one. His mother had always laid a tablecloth, his father never did. Same plates and cutlery, but that one telling difference.
And now, Rebus thought, I don't even use a table.
The ghosts of his parents never visited. Maybe they were at rest, unlike the others. No ghosts tonight, though, just shadows cast by the television screen, street light and the halogen glow of passing cars, the world presented not in terms of colour so much as of light and shade. And Cafferty's shadow looming larger than any. What was he up to? When would he make his move, his real move, the last one of whatever game he was playing?
Christ, he wanted a drink. But he wouldn't have one just yet - to prove it to himself. Siobhan was right about him; he'd made a big mistake with Lorna Grieve. He didn't think it was just the drink to blame - he'd been under the spell of the past, a past of album covers and newspaper photos - but it had played its part. Siobhan
