Let It Bleed

‘You bet I did. I couldn’t stand to live here any longer.’

He nodded. ‘Are you surprised Maisie stayed on, knowing McAnally would be back?’

She shook her head. ‘Maisie’s mum would never move. Besides, Maisie and Tresa, they’ve always been close, especially so since the …’

Rebus tried to imagine walking out of prison and into a situation like that. How much closer had Tresa and the younger woman grown in McAnally’s absence?

‘Tell me what happened that night.’

‘What?’ She tucked the hankie back into her sleeve.

‘The night of the assault.’

‘What’s it to you?’ Her cheeks were reddening with anger. ‘It’s none of your business. It’s long past, long forgotten.’

‘Forgotten, Miss Profitt?’ Rebus shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, not by a long chalk.’

Then he turned from her and left the room.

He looked into the living room. Smoke hung in the air like winter fog. He saw Maisie, perched on the arm of the widow’s fat armchair, one slim leg crossed over the other. She was holding Tresa McAnally’s hand and giving it a pat, and Tresa, head bowed, was listening to whatever Maisie was telling her. Listening to it, and managing to smile. Rebus would have called Tresa McAnally ‘feisty’; maybe even ‘brassy’. But neither description fitted her just now. Maybe it was just the circumstances, the funeral, but he didn’t think so.

‘Car’s here,’ someone at the window said, meaning that the hearse was arriving. The minister got to his feet to say a few words, a tumbler of whisky in one hand, cheeks redder than they had been. Rebus pushed his way back into the hall, slipped out of the open door, and made his way down the tenement stairs. The man in the braces leaned over the guard-rail.

‘I hope we meet again, pal, some place where there are no witnesses.’

The threat echoed down the stairwell. Rebus kept walking. When he drove off, he left a space kerbside for the hearse.

15

Rebus wasn’t the only one interested in Shug McAnally’s suicide. He’d read the newspaper article, scanning it quickly first to see if he was mentioned. He wasn’t, which was a relief. Mairie Henderson’s was one of three names sharing the by-line. It was impossible to see where her contribution started and ended except, of course, that she’d interviewed Rebus’s daughter Sammy; and though Sammy wasn’t mentioned by name, the outfit she worked for was: Scottish Welfare for Ex-Prisoners, or SWEEP as it preferred to be known.

The police called it Sooty.

SWEEP, like the other care agencies mentioned in the piece, was concerned that Hugh McAnally’s suicide only a week after his release from prison was evidence of a problem of readjustment and a lack of real concern ‘within the system’ — Sammy’s words to be sure. Police, prison staff, and Social Services were marked out for criticism. The governor of HM Prison Edinburgh could do no more than explain to the journalists how inmates were prepared for release back into society. A ‘spokesman for SWEEP’ insisted that ex-prisoners — SWEEP never called them ‘offenders’ — suffered the same psychological problems as released kidnap victims or hostages. Rebus could hear the words in Sammy’s mouth; he’d heard them from her before.

He’d been surprised to get a letter from his daughter a couple of months back, saying she’d got a job in Edinburgh and was ‘coming home’. He’d phoned her to check what this meant, and found it only meant she was returning to Edinburgh.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told him, ‘I don’t expect you to put me up.’

The job she’d landed was with SWEEP. She’d been working for some time with inmates and ex-prisoners in London, ever since she’d visited a friend in jail and had seen the conditions and, as she put it, ‘the loneliness’.

‘This friend,’ Rebus had unwisely said, ‘what were they in for?’

After which their conversation had become stilted to say the least.

She didn’t want to be met off the train, but he went to Waverley anyway. She didn’t see him watching as she flung her army-style kitbag and scuffed red rucksack on to the platform. He wanted to walk forwards to greet her, maybe throw his arms around her, or more likely stand there in the hope that she’d throw her arms around him. But she hadn’t wanted to be met, so he stood his ground, half hoping she’d see him anyway.

She didn’t; she just looked around the concourse with a good deal of pleasure, swung the rucksack on to her back, and picked up her kitbag. She was thin, dressed in clingy black leggings, Doc Marten shoes, a baggy grey T- shirt and black waistcoat. Her hair was long these days, ponytailed with pieces of bright cotton threaded through it. She sported several earrings in either ear, and a nose-stud. She was twenty years old, a woman, and her own woman at that, striding with confidence from the platform. He followed her up the ramp out of the station. A bright winter day was waiting for her. He didn’t suppose she’d worry about the cold.

Later, she’d come to Patience’s flat for a meal. Rebus had suggested vegetarian to Patience, just to be on the safe side.

‘I always cook vegetarian for the teens and twenties,’ she’d replied.

‘I might have guessed you would.’

After that visit, there had been others, Sammy and Patience growing closer as Patience and Rebus moved even further apart. Until one day Rebus had left, giving the students who rented his flat their marching orders and moving himself back in.

Two days later, his set of keys to Patience’s flat had been handed over to Sammy, and she’d moved her stuff into the guest bedroom. Not a permanent arrangement, as both women said; just something they wanted to do for now.

Sammy was still there.

That first evening, the evening of the stuffed red peppers, Rebus and Sammy had argued about prison and ex-prisoners, right and wrong, society versus the individual. Sammy kept using the words ‘the system’; Rebus niggled her by using the term ‘con’. Although he agreed with at least some of her points — well thought out, persuasively argued — he found himself setting up in opposition to her. It was something he did, not just with her. Glancing across the table at Patience, he’d seen a weary smile. She’d told him before: he liked to antagonise just to get a response.

‘Know why?’ she’d said. ‘Because conflict is more fun for you than consensus.’

‘No it isn’t,’ he’d told her. ‘I’m just the devil’s advocate, that’s all.’

So he’d ignored the weary smile and continued his joust with his daughter …

He closed the paper, folded it, and tossed it into a wastepaper-bin. Gill Templer came into the office. He’d been waiting there for her for close to fifteen minutes. She didn’t apologise.

‘You forgot to tell me,’ she said, ‘that your daughter works for SWEEP.’

‘It’s not an issue.’

‘You should have told me.’

He saw what she meant. ‘You mean, before you gave an interview?’

‘Some woman reporter, nice as ninepence until the end of the session, then: “and tell me, what is your feeling about one of your inspectors having a close relative so involved with SWEEP?” ’

Mairie Henderson, thought Rebus. Probably not interested in the answer either, just trying to discomfit the interviewee, see if anything shook loose.

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I told her no comment. Then I went straight to Chief Superintendent Watson and asked him who the hell she’d meant.’ She paused. ‘It had to be you.’

‘Is that my cue for a song?’

She slammed a hand down on her desk. ‘It’s your cue to get the hell out of my office!’

Rebus got the hell out.