Let It Bleed

Then he saw feet suddenly sweeping out from under two young bodies, the bodies leaning back into space and disappearing. They hadn’t made a sound. No accident, no escape attempt; something fatalistic, something agreed between them.

‘Cold?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not cold.’

She signalled to turn off Melville Drive. To the left, what he could see of The Meadows was covered in a fresh glaze of slow. To the right was Marchmont, and Rebus’s flat.

‘She wasn’t in the car,’ he said flatly.

‘There was always that possibility,’ Siobhan Clarke said. ‘We don’t even know she’s missing, not for a fact.’

‘No,’ he agreed, ‘we don’t.’

‘Just two daft laddies.’ She’d picked up the expression, but it sounded awkward given her English accent. Rebus smiled in the dark.

And then he was home.

She dropped him outside his tenement door, and refused a half-hearted offer of coffee. Rebus didn’t want her to see the dump he called home. The students had moved out in October, leaving the place not quite his. There were things not quite right, not quite the way he remembered. Cutlery was missing, and had been replaced with stuff he hadn’t seen before. It was the same with the crockery. When he’d moved back here from Patience’s, he’d brought his stuff back in boxes. Most of the boxes were in the hall, still waiting to be unpacked.

Exhausted, he climbed the stairs, opened his door, and walked past the boxes, making straight for the living room and his chair.

His chair was much the same as ever. It had remoulded itself quickly to his shape. He sat down, then got up again and checked the radiator. The thing was barely warm, and there was a racking noise from within. He needed a special key, some tool that would open the valve and let it bleed. The other radiators were the same.

He made himself a hot drink, put a tape into the cassette deck, and got the duvet off his bed. Back at his chair he took off some of his clothes and covered himself with the duvet. He reached down, unscrewed the top from a bottle of Macallan, and poured some into his coffee. He drank the first half of the mug, then added more whisky.

He could hear car engines, and metal twisting, and the wind whistling all around. He could see feet, the soles of cheap trainers, something close to a smile on the lips of a fair-haired teenager. But then the smile became darkness, and everything disappeared.

Slowly, he hugged himself to sleep.

3

Down at the City Mortuary in the Cowgate Dr Curt was nowhere to be seen, but Professor Gates was already at work.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘you can fall from any height you want; it’s just that last damned half-inch that’s fatal.’

With him around the slab were Inspector John Rebus, Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes, another doctor, and a pathology assistant. The Preliminary Notification of Sudden Death had already been submitted to the Procurator- Fiscal, and now the Sudden Death Report was being prepared on two deceased males, probable identities William David Coyle and James Dixon Taylor.

James Taylor — Rebus looked at the mess over which Professor Gates was fussing and remembered that final embrace. Ain’t it good to know that you’ve got a friend.

The force of the impact of the bodies upon the steel deck of Her Majesty’s naval frigate Descant had turned them from human beings into something more like hairy jam. There was some on the slab — the rest sat in gleaming steel buckets. No next of kin was going to be asked to participate in a formal identification. It was the sort of thing they could just about accomplish by DNA-testing, if such proved necessary.

‘Flatpacks, we call them,’ Professor Gates said. ‘Saw a lot at Lockerbie. Scraped them off the ground and took them to the local ice rink. Handy place, an ice rink, when you suddenly find yourself with two hundred and seventy bodies.’

Brian Holmes had seen bad deaths before, but he was not immune. He kept shuffling his feet and shifting his shoulders, and glaring with hard, judgmental eyes at Rebus, who was humming scraps of ‘You’re So Vain’.

Establishing time, date and place of death was straightforward. Certified cause of death was easy too, though Professor Gates wasn’t sure of the precise wording.

‘Blunt force trauma?’

‘How about boating accident?’ Rebus offered. There were some smiles at that. Like most pathologists, Professor Alexander Gates MD, FRC Path, DMJ (Path), FRCPE, MRCPG, was possessed of a sense of humour as wide as his letter-heading. A quite necessary sense of humour. He didn’t look like a pathologist. He wasn’t tall and cadaverously grey like Dr Curt, but was a bossy, shuffling figure, with the physique of a wrestler rather than an undertaker. He was broad-chested, bull-necked, and had pudgy hands, the fingers of which he delighted in cracking, one at a time or all together.

He liked people to call him Sandy.

‘I’m the one issuing the death certificate,’ he told Brian Holmes, who filled in the relevant box on the rough- up Sudden Death Report. ‘My address care of Police Surgeoncy, Cowgate.’

Rebus and the others watched as Gates made his examination. He was able to confirm the existence of two separate corpses. Samples were taken of veinous blood for grouping, DNA, toxicology, and alcohol. Usually urine samples would be taken also, but that just wasn’t possible, and Gates was even doubtful about the efficacy of blood testing. Vitreous humour and stomach contents were next, along with bile and liver.

Before their eyes, he started to reconstruct the bodies: not so they became identifiable as humans, not entirely, but just so he could be satisfied he had everything the bodies had once had. Nothing missing, and nothing extraneous.

‘I used to love jigsaws when I was a youngster,’ the pathologist said quietly, bent over his task.

Outside it was a dry, freezing day. Rebus remembered liking jigsaws too. He wondered if kids still played with them. The post-mortem over, he stood on the pavement and smoked a cigarette. There were pubs to left and right of him, but none were yet open. His breakfast tot of whisky had all but evaporated.

Brian Holmes came out of the mortuary stuffing a green cardboard file into his briefcase. He saw Rebus rubbing at his jaw.

‘You all right?’

‘Toothache, that’s all.’

It was, too; it was definitely toothache, or at least gum-ache. He couldn’t positively identify any one tooth as the culprit: the pain was just there, swelling below the surface.

‘Give you a lift?’

‘Thanks, Brian, but I’ve got my car.’

Holmes nodded and tugged up his collar. His chin was tucked into a blue lambswool scarf. ‘The bridge is open again,’ he said, ‘one lane southbound.’

‘What about the Cortina?’

‘Howdenhall have it. They’re fingerprinting, just in case she ever was in the car.’

Rebus nodded, saying nothing. Holmes said nothing back.

‘Something I can do for you, Brian?’

‘No, not really. I was just wondering … weren’t you supposed to be at the station first thing?’

‘So?’

‘So why come here instead?’

It was a good question. Rebus looked back at the mortuary doors, remembering the scene all over again. The artic, assuming the crash position, Lauderdale spread across the bonnet, then seeing the other car … a final