Black Book

This quietened Holmes, as Rebus had hoped it would. Bring him down slowly, then drop the real news into his lap. ‘For the meantime. Nell’…well, she says she’s not quite ready yet.’

Rebus knew the feeling; he wondered when Patience would be ready. for that drink. ‘Still,’ he offered, ‘things sound a bit brighter between the two of you.’

‘Ach.’ Holmes sat down opposite his superior. ‘She wants me to leave the police.’

‘That’s a bit drastic.’

‘So is separation.’

Rebus exhaled. ‘I suppose so, but all the sam…What are you going to do?’

‘Think it over, what else can I do?’ He got back to his feet. ‘Listen, I’d better get going. I only came in to — ’

‘Brian, sit down.’ Holmes, recognising Rebus’s tone, sat. ‘I’ve got some bad news about Eddie.’

‘Chef Eddie?’ Rebus nodded. ‘What about him?’

‘There’s been an accident. Well, sort of. Eddie was involved.’

There was no mistaking Rebus’s meaning. He’d become good at this sort of speech through repetition over the years to the families of car crash victims, accidents at work, murders …

‘He’s dead?’ Holmes asked quietly. Rebus, lips pursed, nodded. ‘Christ, I was going to drop in and see him. What happened?’

‘We’re not sure yet. The post-mortem will probably be this afternoon.’ Holmes was no fool; again he caught the gist. ‘Accident, suicide or murder?’

‘One of those last two.’

‘And your money’d be on murder?’

‘My money stays in my pocket till I’ve spoken to the tipster.’

‘Meaning Dr Curt?’

Rebus nodded. ‘Till then, there’s not much we can do. Listen, let me get a car to take you hom…’

‘No, no, I’ll be all right.’ He rose to his feet slowly, as though checking his bones for solidity. ‘I’ll be fine really. It’s jus…poor Eddie. He was a friend of mine, you know?’

‘I know,’ said Rebus.

After Holmes had gone, Rebus was able to reflect that he’d gotten off lightly. Brian still wasn’t operating at full throttle; partly the convalescence, partly the shock. So he hadn’t asked Rebus any difficult questions. Questions like, does Eddie’s death have anything to do with the person who nearly killed me? It was something Rebus had been wondering himself. Last night Eddie was missing, and Rebus had gone to see Cafferty. Today, first thing, Eddie was dead. Meaning one less person who could say anything about the night the Central burnt down; one less person who’d been there. But Rebus still had the gut feeling Cafferty had been surprised to learn of Holmes’ attack. So what was the answer?

‘I’m buggered if I know,’ John Rebus said quietly to himself. His phone rang. He picked it up and heard pub noises, then Flower’s voice.

‘That’s some team you’ve got there, Inspector. One gets his face mashed in, and now the other falls on her arse.’ The connection was briskly severed.

‘And bugger you, too, Flower,’ Rebus said, all too aware that no one was listening.

22

Edinburgh’s public mortuary was sited on the Cowgate, named for the route cattle would take when being brought into the city to be sold. It was a narrow canyon of a street with few businesses and only passing traffic. Way up above it were much busier streets, South Bridge for instance. They seemed so far from the Cowgate, it might as well have been underground.

Rebus wasn’t sure the area had ever been anything other than a desperate meeting place for Edinburgh’s poorest denizens, who often seemed like cattle themselves, dull-witted from lack of sunlight and grazing on begged handouts from passers-by. The Cowgate was ripe for redevelopment these days, but who would slaughter the cattle?

A fine setting for the understated mortuary where, when he wasn’t teaching at the University, Dr Curt plied his trade.

‘Look on the bright side,’ he told Rebus. ‘The Cowgate’s got a couple of fine pubs.’

‘And a few more you could shave a dead man with.’

Curt chuckled. ‘Colourful, though I’m not sure the image conjured actually means anything.’

‘I bow to your superior knowledge. Now, what have you got on Mr Ringan?’

‘Ah, poor Orphan Eddie.’ Curt liked to find names for all his cadavers. Rebus got the feeling the ‘Orphan’ prefix had been used many a time before. In Eddie Ringan’s case, though, it was accurate. He had no living relations that anyone knew of, and so had been identified by Patrick Calder, and by Siobhan Clarke, since she’d been the one to find the body.

‘Yes, that’s the man I found,’ she had said.

‘Yes, that’s Edward Ringan,’ Pat Calder had said, before being led away by Toni the barman.

Rebus now stood with Curt beside the slab on which what was left of the corpse was being tidied up by an assistant. The assistant was whistling ‘Those Were the Days’ as he scraped miscellany into a bucket of offal. Rebus was reading through a list. He’d been through it three times already, trying to take his mind off the scene around him. Curt was smoking a cigarette. At the age of fifty-five, he’d decided he might as well start, since nothing else had so far managed to kill him. Rebus might have taken a cigarette from him, but they were Player’s untipped, the smoking equivalent of paint stripper.

Maybe because he’d perused the list so often, something clicked at last. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘we never found a suicide note.’

‘They don’t always leave them.’

‘Eddie would have. And he’d have had Elvis singing Heartbreak Hotel on a tape player beside the oven.’

‘Now that’s style,’ Curt said disingenuously.

‘And now,’ Rebus went on, ‘from this list of the contents of his pockets, I see he didn’t have any keys on him.’

‘No keys, eh.’ Curt was enjoying his break too much to bother trying to work it out. He knew Rebus would tell him anyway.

‘So,’ Rebus obliged, ‘how did he get in? Or if he did use his keys to get in, where are they now?’

‘Where indeed.’ The attendant frowned as Curt stubbed his cigarette into the floor.

Rebus knew when he’d lost an audience. He put the list away. ‘So what have you got for me?’

‘Well, the usual tests will have to be carried out, of course.’

‘Of course, but in the meantim…?’

‘In the meantime, a few points of interest.’ Curt turned to the cadaver, forcing Rebus to do the same. There was a cover over the charred face, and the attendant had roughly sewn up the chest and stomach, now empty of their major organs, with thick black thread. The face had been badly burnt, but the rest of the body remained unaffected. The plump flesh was pale and shiny.

‘Well,’ Curt began, ‘the burns were superficial merely. The internal organs were untouched by the blast. That made things easier. I would say he probably asphyxiated through inhalation of North Sea gas.’ He turned to Rebus. ‘That “North Sea” is pure conjecture.’ Then he grinned again, a lopsided grin that meant one side of his mouth stayed closed. ‘There was evidence of alcoholic intake. We’ll have to wait for the test results to determine how much. A lot, I’d guess.’

‘I’ll bet his liver was a treat. He’s been putting the stuff away for years.’

Curt seemed doubtful. He went to another table and returned with the organ itself, which had already been cross-sectioned. ‘It’s actually in pretty good shape. You said he was a spirits drinker?’