It was Flight, standing a few yards in front of him.
'Might as well,' said Rebus, knowing exactly what Flight was talking about, or more accurately where he was talking about.
Flight smiled. 'I'll give you this, Inspector Rebus, you don't give up.'
'The famous tenacity of the Scots,' said Rebus, quoting from one of Sunday's newspaper rugby reports. Flight actually laughed. It didn't last long, but it made Rebus feel glad that he'd come here tonight. The ice hadn't been broken completely perhaps, but an important chunk had been chipped away from one corner of the berg.
'Come on then. I've got my car. I'll get one of the drivers to put your bags in his boot. The lock's stuck on mine. Somebody tried to crowbar it open a few weeks back.' He glanced towards Rebus, a rare moment of eye contact. 'Nowhere is safe these days,' he said. 'Nowhere.'
There was already a lot of commotion up at road level. Voices and the slamming shut of car doors. Some officers would stay behind, of course, guarding the site. And a few might be going back to the warmth of the station- or luxury hardly to be imagined! their own beds. But a few of the cars would be following the funeral van, following it all the way to the mortuary.
Rebus travelled in the front of Flight's own car. Both men spent the journey in desperate pursuit of a conversational opening and as a result said very little until they were near their destination.
'Do we know who she was?' asked Rebus.
'Jean Cooper,' said Flight. 'We found ID in her handbag.'
'Any reason for her to be on that path?'
'She was going home from work. She worked in an off-licence nearby. Her sister tells us she finished work at seven.'
'When was the body found?'
'Quarter to ten.'
'That's a fair gap.'
'We've got witnesses who saw her in the Dog and Duck. That's a pub near where she works. She used to go in there for a drink some evenings. The barmaid reckons she left at nine or thereabouts.'
Rebus stared out of the windscreen. The roads were still fairly busy considering the time of night and they passed groups of youthful and raucous pedestrians.
'There's a club in Stokie,' Flight explained. 'Very popular, but the buses have stopped by the time it comes out so everyone walks home.'
Rebus nodded, then asked: 'Stokie?'
Flight smiled.' 'Stoke Newington. You probably passed through it on your way from King's Cross.'
'God knows,' said Rebus. 'It all looked the same to me. I think my taxi driver had me down as a tourist. We took so long from King's Cross I think we might have come via the M25.' Rebus waited for Flight to laugh, but all he raised was a sliver of a smile. There was another pause. 'Was this Jean Cooper single?' Rebus asked at last.'
'Married.'
'She wasn't wearing a wedding, ring.'
Flight nodded. 'Separated. She lived with her sister. No kids.'
'And she went drinking by herself.'
Flight glanced towards Rebus. 'What are you saying?' Rebus shrugged. 'Nothing. It's just that if she liked a good time, maybe that's how she met her killer.' 'It's possible.'
'At any rate, whether she knew him or not, the killer could have followed her from the pub.'
'We'll be talking to everybody who was there, don't worry.'
'Either that,' said Rebus, thinking aloud, 'or the killer was waiting by the river for anyone who happened along. Somebody might have seen him.'
'We'll be asking around,' said Flight. His voice had taken on a much harder edge.
'Sorry,' said Rebus. 'A severe case of teaching my granny to suck eggs.'
Flight turned to him again. They were about to take a left through some hospital gates. 'I am not your granny,' he said. 'And any comments you have to make are welcome. Maybe eventually you'll come up with something I haven't already thought of'
'Of course,' said Rebus, 'this couldn't' have happened in Scotland.'
'Oh?' Flight had a half-sneer- on his face. 'Why's that then? Too civilised up there in the frozen north? I remember when you had the worst football hooligans in the world. Maybe you still do, only these days they look like butter wouldn't melt in their underpants.'
But Rebus was shaking his head. 'No, — it wouldn't have happened to Jean Cooper, that's all I meant. Our off-licences don't open on Sunday.'
Rebus fell silent and stared fixedly at the windscreen, keeping his thoughts to himself, thoughts which ran along a very simple plane: fuck you, too, pal. Over the years, those four words had become his mantra. Fuck you, too, pal. FYTP. It had taken the Londoner only the length of a twenty-minute car ride to show what he really thought of the Scots.
As Rebus got out of the car, he glanced in through the rear window and saw, for the first time, the contents of the back seat. He opened his mouth to speak, but Flight raised a knowing hand.
'Don't even ask,' he growled, slamming shut the driver's-side door. 'And listen, I'm sorry about what I said'
Rebus merely shrugged, but his eyebrows descended in a private and thoughtful frown. After all, there had to be some logical explanation as to why a Detective Inspector would have a huge stuffed teddy bear in the back of his car at the scene of a murder. It was just that Rebus was damned if he could think of one right this second …
Mortuaries were places where the dead stopped being people and turned instead into bags of meat, offal, blood and bone. Rebus had never been sick at the scene of a crime, but the first few times he had visited,a mortuary the contents of his stomach had fairly quickly been rendered up for examination.
The mortuary technician was a gleeful little man with a livid birthmark covering a full quarter of his face. He seemed to know Dr Cousins well enough and had prepared everything for the arrival of the deceased and the usual retinue of police officers. Cousins checked the post-mortem room, while Jean Cooper's sister was taken quietly into an ante-room, there to make the formal identification. It took only a tearful few seconds, after which she was escorted well away from the scene by consoling officers. They would take her home, but Rebus doubted if she would get any sleep. In fact, knowing how long a scrupulous pathologist could take, he was beginning to doubt that any of them would get to bed before morning.
Eventually, the body bag was brought into the post-mortem room and the corpse of Jean Cooper placed on a slab, beneath the hum and glare of powerful strip lighting. The room was antiseptic but antique. Its tiled walls were cracking and there was a stinging aroma of chemicals. Voices were kept muffled, not so much out of respect but from a strange kind of fear. The mortuary, after all, was one vast memento mori, and what was about to happen to Jean Cooper's body would serve to remind each and every one of them that if the body were a temple, then it was possible to loot that temple, scattering its, treasures, revealing its precious secrets.
A hand landed gently on Rebus's shoulder, and he turned, startled, towards the man who was standing there. 'Man' was by way of simplification. This tall and unsmiling individual had cropped fair hair and the acne-ridden face of an adolescent. He looked about fourteen, but Rebus placed him in his mid-twenties.
'You're the Jock, aren't you?' There was interest in the voice, but little emotion. Rebus said nothing. FYTP. 'Yeah, thought so. Cracked the case yet, have you?' The grin accompanying this question was three-quarters sneer and one-quarter scowl. 'We don't need any help.'
'Ah,' said George Flight, 'I see you've already met D C Lamb. I was just about to- introduce you.'
'Delighted,' said Rebus, gazing stonily at the join-the-dots pattern of spots on Lamb's forehead. Lamb! No surname in history, Rebus felt, had ever been less deserved, less accurate. Over by the slab, Dr Cousins cleared his, throat noisily.
'Gentlemen,' he said to the room at large. It was little more than an indication that he was about to start work.
The room fell quiet again. A microphone hung down from the ceiling to within a few feet of the slab. Cousins turned to the technician. 'Is this thing on now?' The technician nodded keenly from between arranging a row of clanging metallic instruments along a tray.
Rebus knew all the instruments, had seen them all in action. The cutters and the saws and the drills. Some of
