Let It Bleed

inconsistencies.’

‘You mean you don’t know why he did it?’

‘That’s what I mean.’

‘Well, I can’t help you, I’m afraid.’ Gillespie got to his feet, making ready to leave.

‘Can’t or won’t?’

Gillespie glared at Rebus, then sat down again. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I think you’re hiding something.’

‘Such as?’

‘That’s what I have to find out … before I can finish my report.’

‘Are all policeman like you?’

‘No. Some of them you wouldn’t want to meet.’

‘I meet quite a few actually. A colleague of mine — regional councillor rather than district, but the same party — is chair of Lothian and Borders Joint Police Board.’ Gillespie drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke out in a thin stream. ‘He’s quite a good friend.’

‘It’s always nice to have friends.’ Rebus said.

Gillespie got to his feet again. ‘Look,’ he began. He swung his arms, as if he was deciding to say something he’d rather not say. ‘I promised …’ He sighed and sat down yet again. ‘This may mean something or nothing, Inspector.’ Rebus busied himself tidying the end of his cigarette against the ashtray. ‘It’s Helena, Helena Profitt.’

‘Your ward secretary?’

‘She … she told me she knew him.’

‘McAnally?’

Gillespie nodded. ‘When McAnally came into the room and saw her … there was a moment when he just stared. I asked her about it afterwards, and she told me she’d known him a long time ago. She wouldn’t say any more than that.’

12

‘What’s wrong with your mouth?’

‘Huh.’

‘You keep poking it with your finger.’

‘Nothing’s wrong with it.’ But Rebus knew something was wrong; he was just hoping it would go away. There was pressure inside his gum and top lip, a dull, unpleasant sensation that was now spreading either side of his nose. It felt as if his whole face should be swollen, but it was just a little red beneath the nose — and that could have been the drink or the weather.

‘Whose idea was this?’ he said, folding his arms around himself. They were walking on Portobello beach, the only souls mad enough in this seizure-inducing wind.

‘Mine,’ said Mairie Henderson.

Rebus had turned up at her flat expecting a hot drink and a soft couch, but instead she’d dragged him out for what she euphemistically called her ‘constitutional’.

‘You’d have to have the constitution of an ox to survive this,’ Rebus muttered to himself. The blasts of air against his ears meant he could barely hear what Mairie was saying, and every time he opened his mouth to yell something back, the malevolent air flooded in and attacked his tooth again. Mairie ran to a wall and hunkered down with her back against it. Her cheeks looked as if they’d been sandblasted; which in a sense they had.

Rebus crouched beside her, thankful for the shelter. He liked to take an interest in Mairie, especially now she was a freelance journalist. He worried about that lack of salary, but she seemed to be doing all right.

‘So,’ he asked, ‘what exactly did you come up with?’

She smiled. ‘You forget, I used to cover local government, regional and district councils. It was my first job on the paper. I didn’t have to do much digging.’ She leaned forward and drew a circle in the sand. ‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘Give me some background.’

‘District council, not regional?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, about the only glamorous angle attached to district councildom is the fact of a big budget, which means only the four major cities are worth the candle.’

‘From a journalist’s perspective?’

‘It’s the only perspective I can give.’ She pushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘Therefore, being a district councillor is not an attractive proposition. You’ve got long, boring working hours, requiring you to take time off from your daytime job, plus eating into your evening hours, since a lot of the meetings are evening affairs, as are surgeries if they’re not on a Saturday.’

‘OK, so I won’t be standing for councillor, unless the money compensates.’

Mairie shook her head. ‘It’s not great for such a thankless task. Of course, you can claim expenses, plus if you chair a committee there’s a bonus, but even so … For all these reasons and others, you find that councillors tend to fall into one of several groups: retired, unemployed, self-employed, or with an affluent spouse.’

‘The first two because they’ve got lots of time, the last two because they can make time?’

She nodded. ‘Result? A lot of councils are not what you’d call dynamic. Edinburgh’s more interesting than most.’

‘So tell me about Edinburgh.’ Rebus stared out towards Inchkeith Island.

‘Well, we’ve sixty-two wards, Labour holding most of them.’

‘No surprise.’

‘But there isn’t much of a gap between Labour and the Tories, only about seven seats. The Lib-Dems have a few, and the SNP a couple. As to what the council does, if you’d ever had to sit in on their meetings and then write them up as even vaguely interesting prose, you’d know.’

‘Boring?’

‘Most councillors could bore for Britain at the World Ennui Cup.’

‘So that’s how you pronounce that word.’ This got him a smile. She didn’t smile much these days, not since she’d led Rebus to a horror above the Crazy Hose Saloon. Rebus looked out to sea. It seemed all whitecaps as far as the horizon.

‘There are all sorts of committees and sub-committees,’ she went on, ‘and the full district council meets once a month. But despite all that, what the council basically does is house people. Glasgow District Council is the biggest landlord in Britain — one hundred and seventy thousand houses. It’s rumoured the district councils were only given the housing portfolio after local government reorganisation so they’d have something to do.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘The Tories wanted to keep housing out of regional council control.’ She sighed at his puzzled look. ‘It’s all to do with politics and it’s all intensely dull.’

‘And the councillors are dull too?’

‘Almost of necessity. Maybe “worthy” would be a better word.’ She looked at him. ‘We’re focusing in nicely on Councillor Tom Gillespie. He chairs an industrial planning committee, looking at economic and property development. The council has its own department — Economic Development and Estates — and mostly the committee would be checking to ensure that the department is working hard and not trying to fix anything.’

‘Fix? You don’t mean as in repair?’

‘I don’t. Land deals and building contracts can be worth millions. Even repairs to buildings can be worth hundreds of thousands. Suppose I handed you the contract to clean the windows of every council building in the city?’

‘I’d have to buy a new chamois.’

‘You could afford it. The only thing about Gillespie is that he’s ambitious, but that’s nothing new. Twenty years ago, just before the corporation became the district council, Malcolm Rifkind, George Foulkes, and Robin Cook