Black Book

‘Any room in the car?’

‘There’s just me.’

‘Then you won’t mind giving me a lift.’

She looked startled. ‘Not at all. Where to?’

‘Pittodrie.’

Now she looked even more surprised. ‘I wouldn’t have taken you for a Hibs fan, sir.’

Rebus screwed up his face. ‘No, you’re all alone in that category. I just need a lift, that’s all.’

‘Fine.’

‘And on the way, you can tell me what you’ve learned from the files on Big Ger.’

8

By Saturday, Rebus had argued three times with Michael (who was talking about moving out anyway), once with the students (also talking about moving), and once with the receptionist at Patience’s surgery when she wouldn’t put Rebus through. Brian Holmes had opened his eyes briefly, and it was reckoned by the doctors that he was on his way to recovery. None of them, however, hazarded the phrase ‘full recovery’. Still, the news had cheered Siobhan Clarke, and she was in a good mood when she arrived at Rebus’s Arden Street flat. He was waiting for her at street level. She drove a two-year-old cherry-red Renault 5. It looked young and full of life, while Rebus’s car (parked next to it) looked to be in terminal condition. But Rebus’s car had been looking like this for three or four years now and just when he’d determined to get rid of it it always seemed to go into remission. Rebus had the feeling the car could read his mind.

‘Morning, sir,’ said Siobhan Clarke. There was pop music coming from the stereo. She saw Rebus cringe as he got into the passenger seat, and turned the volume down. ‘Bad night?’

‘People always seem to ask me that.’

‘Now why could that be?’

They stopped at a bakery so Rebus could buy some breakfast. There had been nothing in the flat worth the description ‘food’, but then Rebus couldn’t really complain. His contribution to the larder so far had filled a single shopping basket. And most of that had been meat, something the students didn’t touch. He noticed Michael had gone vegetarian too, at least in public.

‘It’s healthier, John,’ he’d told his brother, slapping his stomach. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Rebus had snapped.

Michael had merely shaken his head sadly. ‘Too much caffeine.’

That was another thing, the kitchen cupboards were full of jars of what looked like coffee but turned out to be ‘infusions’ of crushed tree bark and chicory. At the bakery, Rebus bought a polystyrene beaker of coffee and two sausage rolls. The sausage rolls turned out to be a bad mistake, the flakes of pastry breaking off and covering the otherwise pristine car interior-despite Rebus’s best attempts with the paper bag.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ he offered to Siobhan, who was driving with her window conspicuously open. ‘You’re not vegetarian, are you?’ She laughed. ‘You mean you haven’t noticed?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

She nodded towards a. sausage roll. ‘Well, have you heard of mechanically recovered meat?’

‘Don’t,’ warned Rebus. He finished the sausage rolls quickly, and cleared his throat.

‘Anything I should know about between you and Brian?’

The look on her face told him this was not the year’s most successful conversational gambit. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘It’s just that he and Nell wer…well, there’s still a good chance — ’

‘I’m not a monster, sir. And I know the score between Brian and Nell. Brian’s just a nice guy. We get along.’ She glanced away from the windscreen. ‘That’s all there is to it.’ Rebus was about to say something. ‘But if there was more to it than that,’ she went on, ‘I don’t see that it would be any of your business, with respect, sir. Not unless it was interfering with our work, which I wouldn’t let happen. I don’t suppose Brian would either.’

Rebus stayed silent.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘What you said was fair enough. The problem was the way you said it. A police officer’s never off duty, and I’m your boss-even on a jaunt like this. Don’t forget that.’

There was more silence in the car, until Siobhan broke it. ‘It’s a nice part of town, Marchmont.’

‘Almost as nice as the New Town.’

She glared at him, her grip on the steering-wheel as determined as any strangler’s.

‘I thought,’ she said slyly, ‘you lived in Oxford Terrace these days, sir.’

‘You thought wrong. Now, what about turning that bloody music off? After all, we’ve got a lot to talk about.’

The ‘lot’, of course, being Morris Gerald Cafferty.

Siobhan Clarke hadn’t brought her notes with her. She didn’t need them. She could recite the salient details from memory, along with a lot of detail that might not be salient but was certainly interesting. Certainly she’d done her homework. Rebus thought how frustrating the job could be. She’d swotted up on Big Ger as background to Operation Moneybags, but Operation Moneybags almost certainly wouldn’t trap Cafferty. And she’d spent a lot of hours on the Kintoul stabbing, which might also turn out to be nothing.

‘And another thing,’ she said. ‘Apparently Cafferty’s got a little diary of sorts, all of it in code. We’ve never been able to crack his code, which means it must be highly personal.’

Yes, Rebus remembered. Whenever they brought Big Ger into custody, the diary would be collected along with his other possessions. Then they’d photocopy the pages of the diary and try to decipher them. They’d never been successful.

‘Rumour has it,’ Siobhan was saying, ‘the diary’s a record of bad debts, debts Cafferty takes care of personally.’

‘A man like that garners a lot of rumours. They help make him larger than life. In life, he’s just another witless gangster.’

‘A code takes wits.’

‘Maybe.’

‘In the file, there’s a recent clipping from the Sun. It’s all about how bodies keep washing up on the coastline.’

Rebus nodded. ‘On the Solway coast, not far from Stranraer.’

‘You think it’s Cafferty’s doing?’

Rebus shrugged. ‘The bodies have never been identified. Could be anything. Could be people pushed off the Lame ferry. Could be some connection with Ulster. There are some weird currents between Lame and Stranraer.’ He paused. ‘Could be anything.’

‘Could be Cafferty, in other words.’

‘Could be.’

‘It’s a long way to go to dispose of a body.’

‘Well, he’s not going to shit in his own nest, is he?’

She considered this. ‘There was mention in one of the papers of a van spotted on that coastline, too early in the morning to be delivering anything.’

Rebus nodded. ‘And there was nowhere along the road for it to be delivering to. I read the papers sometimes, Clarke. The Dumfries and Galloway Police have patrols along there now.’

Siobhan drove for a while, gathering her thoughts. ‘He’s just been lucky so far, hasn’t he, sir? I mean, I can understand that he’s a clever villain, and clever villains are harder to catch. But he has to delegate, and usually even though a villain’s clever his underlings are so stupid or lazy they would shit in the nest.’

‘Language, Clarke, language.’ He got a smile from her. ‘Point taken, though.’