the floor. I don’t mind. I just don’t want to go back to the squat, not tonight. It’s been getting pretty crazy lately, and those men following me….’ She shivered, and Rebus had to admit that if this were all an act, she was a top-of- the-form drama student. He shrugged, was about to speak, but rose and went to the window instead, deferring a decision.
The orange street lamps were on, casting a Hollywood film-set glow over the pavement. There was a car outside, directly opposite the flat. Being two floors up, Rebus couldn’t quite see into the car, but the driver’s side window had been rolled down, and smoke oozed from it.
‘Well?’ the voice said behind him. It had lost all confidence now.
‘What?’ Rebus said distractedly.
‘Can I?’ He turned towards her. ‘Can I stay?’ she repeated.
‘Sure,’ Rebus said, making for the door. ‘Stay as long as you like.’
He was halfway down the curving stairwell before he realised that he was not wearing any shoes. He paused, considering. No, to hell with it. His mother had always warned him about catching chilblains, and he never had. Now was as good a time as any to find out whether his medical luck was holding.
He was passing a door on the first floor when it rattled open and Mrs Cochrane thrust her whole frame out, blocking Rebus’s path.
‘Mrs Cochrane,’ he said after the initial shock had passed.
‘Here.’ She shoved something towards him, and he could do nothing but take it from her. It was a piece of card, about ten inches by six. Rebus read it: IT IS YOUR TURN TO WASH THE STAIRS. By the time he looked up again, Mrs Cochrane’s door was already closing. He could hear her carpet slippers shuffling back towards her TV and her cat. Smelly old thing.
Rebus carried the card downstairs with him, the cold steps penetrating his stockinged soles. The cat didn’t smell too good either, he thought maliciously.
The front door was on the latch. He eased it open, trying to keep the aged mechanism as silent as possible. The car was still there. Directly opposite him as he stepped outside. But the driver had already seen him. The cigarette stub was flicked onto the road, and the engine started. Rebus moved forward on his toes. The car’s headlamps came on suddenly, their beam as full as a Stalag searchlight. Rebus paused, screwing his eyes, and the car started forward, then swerved to the left, racing downhill to the end of the street. Rebus stared after it, trying to make out the number plate, but his eyes were full of white fuzziness. It had been a Ford Escort. Of that much he was sure.
Looking down the road, he realised that the car had stopped at the junction with the main road, waiting for a space in the traffic. It was less than a hundred yards away. Rebus made up his mind. He had been a handy sprinter in his youth, good enough for the school team when they had been a man short. He ran now with a kind of drunken euphoria, and remembered the wine he had opened. His stomach turned sour at the mere thought, and he slowed. Just then he slipped, skidding on something on the pavement, and, brought up short, he saw the car slip across the junction and roar away.
Never mind. That first glimpse as he’d opened the door had been enough. He’d seen the constabulary uniform. Not the driver’s face, but the uniform for sure. A policeman, a constable, driving an Escort. Two young girls were approaching along the pavement. They giggled as they passed Rebus, and he realised that he was standing panting on the pavement, without any shoes but holding a sign telling him it was his turn to WASH THE STAIRS. When he looked down, he saw what it was he had skidded on.
Cursing silently, he removed his socks, tossed them into the gutter, and walked back on bare feet towards the flat.
Dectective Constable Brian Holmes was drinking tea. He had turned this into something of a ritual, holding the cup to his face and blowing on it, then sipping. Blowing then sipping. Swallowing. Then releasing a steamy breath of air. He was chilled tonight, as cold as any tramp on any park bench bed. He didn’t even have a newspaper, and the tea tasted revolting. It had come out of one or other of the thermos flasks, piping hot and smelling of plastic. The milk wasn’t of the freshest, but at least the brew was warming. Not warming enough to touch his toes, supposing he still had toes.
‘Anything happening?’ he hissed towards the SSPCA officer, who held binoculars to his eyes as though to hide his embarrassment.
‘Nothing,’ the officer whispered. It had been an anonymous tip-off. The third this month and, to be fair, the first non-starter. Dog fighting was back in vogue. Several ‘arenas’ had been found in the past three months, small dirt pits enclosed by lengths of sheet tin. Scrap yards seemed the main source of these arenas, which gave an added meaning to the term ‘scrap yard’. But tonight they were watching a piece of waste ground. Goods trains clattered past nearby, heading towards the centre of the city, but apart from that and the low hum of distant traffic, the place was dead. Yes, there was a makeshift pit all right. They’d taken a look at it in daylight, pretending to walk their own alsatian dogs, which were in fact police dogs. Pit bull terriers: that was what they used in the arenas. Brian Holmes had seen a couple of ex-combatants, their eyes maddened with pain and fear. He hadn’t stuck around for the vet with his lethal injection.
‘Hold on.’
Two men were walking, hands in pockets, across the wilderness, picking their way carefully over the uneven surface, wary of sudden craters. They seemed to know where they were headed: straight towards the shallow pit. Once there, they took a final look around. Brian Holmes stared directly back at them, knowing he could not be seen. Like the SSPCA officer, he was crouching behind thick bracken, behind him one remaining wall of what had been a building of sorts. Though there was some light over towards the pit itself, there was precious little here, and so, as with a two-way mirror, he could see without being seen.
‘Got you,’ said the SSPCA man as the two men jumped down into the pit.
‘Wait …’ said Holmes, suddenly getting a funny feeling about all of this. The two men had begun to embrace, and their faces merged in a slow, lingering kiss as they sank down towards the ground.
‘Christ!’ exclaimed the SSPCA man.
Holmes sighed, staring down at the damp, rock-hard earth beneath his knees.
‘I don’t think pit bulls enter the equation,’ he said. ‘Or if they do, bestiality rather than brutality might be the charge.’
The SSPCA officer still held his binoculars to his eyes, horror-struck and riveted.
‘You hear stories,’ he said, ‘but you never … well … you know.’
‘Get to watch?’ Holmes suggested, getting slowly, painfully to his feet.
He was talking with the night duty officer when the message came through. Inspector Rebus wanted a word.
‘Rebus? What does he want?’ Brian Holmes checked his watch. It was two fifteen a.m. Rebus was at home, and he had been told to phone him there. He used the duty officer’s telephone.
‘Hello?’ He knew John Rebus of course, had worked with him on several cases. Still, middle-of-the-night calls were something else entirely.
‘Is that you, Brian?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Have you a sheet of paper? Write this down.’ Fumbling with pad and biro, Holmes thought he could hear music playing on the line. Something he recognised. The Beatles’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right. There was a junkie found dead in Pilmuir yesterday, or a couple of days ago now, strictly speaking. Overdose. Find out who the constables who found him were. Get them to come into my office at ten o’clock. Got that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Now, when you’ve got the address where the body was found, I want you to pick up the keys from whoever’s got them and go to the house. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms there’s a wall covered in photographs. Some are of Edinburgh Castle. Take them with you and go to the local newspaper’s office. They’ll have files full of
