Someone was at the front desk asking for him, that was the message. But when Rebus got there, there was nobody about. Then he saw a figure outside, motioning to him. It was Paul Duggan. He was wearing his long black coat again, but it had a small tear in the sleeve, and a white smudge on one shoulder.
‘Nothing personal like,’ he said when Rebus joined him outside, ‘but I hate police stations.’
‘There’s a cafe across — ’
Duggan was shaking his head. ‘She’s waiting for us.’
‘Kirstie?’ Duggan nodded. ‘Where?’
‘Have you got a car?’
They went to Rebus’s car.
Duggan directed him down the Pleasance and right on Holyrood Road. This was a dispiriting part of town; all empty sites and disused warehouses. The Younger Universe was under construction, and was going to make everything all right again, if you believed the publicity. Rebus hoped it would succeed; he liked the symbolism: the USA had Disneyland, and Scotland gets a theme park built by a brewery. The theme park would be a neighbour to Holyrood Palace, the monarch’s Edinburgh residence. This, too, Rebus liked.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Just park by the palace gates.’
It was easy to park this time of year; in warmer seasons, the place was a log-jam of tourist coaches. A kid was at the locked gates, peering through them at the palace beyond.
‘Toot your horn,’ Duggan ordered. Rebus did so, to no effect.
‘She’s on another planet.’ Duggan wound down his window. ‘Hiy, Kirstie!’
Slowly the ‘kid’ turned, and Rebus saw a face older than the frame which supported it. Nobody had said Kirstie Kennedy would be so scrawny, so tiny. But as she walked towards the car her face was set like cement. Lipstick, eyeshadow and panstick provided her with a mask. She wore tight black jeans, accentuating her matchstick legs, and a long shapeless black jumper whose arms stretched down past her hands. Her hair was greasy, shoulderlength, tied back with a band. A spiky fringe, dyed blood-red, fell into her eyes. She was chewing gum. She pulled open the back door and climbed in.
‘Hello, Kirstie,’ Rebus said. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘I want ice cream.’
Rebus thought of Luca’s, but it was too far. ‘Tollcross?’ he suggested.
Tollcross would do her.
They sat in the ice-cream parlour and she ordered the biggest concoction on the menu, plus a giant Coke. The place was quiet: an old couple, smoking and drinking frothy coffee; a harassed mother hissing at her two children who were arguing over bowls of garish ice cream.
Rebus had ordered coffee, Duggan orange juice and some apple pie with cream. Rebus remembered that he used to bring Sammy in here when she was a kid. He looked at the Lord Provost’s daughter and tried to remember she was seventeen.
‘Paul says you want a word.’ Her voice was polite in a way no attitude could hide. Rebus knew that her street diction, her low-class language, had been only recently learned.
‘How long have you been on the Bob Hope, Kirstie?’
‘You mean the Merry?’
Duggan looked at Rebus. ‘Merry Mac, crack,’ he explained.
‘Long enough,’ Kirstie answered.
‘Long enough to be tired of it?’
‘Long enough to know you never get tired of it.’ Her ice cream arrived: three different flavours with chocolate sauce, nuts, tinned peaches and wafers. The sight of it made Rebus’s teeth crackle.
‘Your dad’s been worried,’ he said.
‘So what?’
‘And your mum.’
Her sudden convulsion almost sent a mouthful of ice cream on to the table. ‘My mum died when I was five. What you mean is, “that woman who lives with my dad”.’
‘OK.’
‘Have you met her?’
‘No.’
‘She’s off her trolley, praise the Lord.’
‘So you don’t get on with her. Is that why you ran away?’
‘Does there have to be a reason?’
Rebus shrugged. ‘Only, most teenagers I know who run away, they go a bit further.’
‘You mean London? I didn’t like it. My pals are all up here.’
‘You mean pals like Willie and Dixie?’
She put the spoon back on her plate and started on the Coke. ‘I liked Willie. Dixie was a nutter, you never knew what he’d do next, but Willie was all right.’
‘You heard what they did?’
She nodded.
‘You left that wreath for them on the bridge, didn’t you?’
Another nod. She dipped her finger into the chocolate sauce. She was trying not to care, but there was still a core of sentiment buried in her brain, a precious nugget of guilt.
‘Was it your idea, Kirstie?’ She looked up at him. ‘It was, wasn’t it?’
She got to her feet. ‘I have to go to the toilet.’
Rebus snatched her wrist. ‘Why did you do it, Kirstie? Just for the money? Why did you take the LABarum plans from your father’s office?’
She shook free of his grip. ‘Let me go!’ She stumbled away from the table and ran to the toilets. Rebus sat back and started to light a cigarette.
‘No smoking,’ the waitress told him.
‘Can I get a beer?’
‘We’re not licensed.’
Rebus nicked his cigarette and put it back in the packet. He looked across the table at Paul Duggan.
‘You like her, don’t you?’ Rebus said.
Duggan said nothing. He was making circles in the cream with his spoon.
‘Remember I told you she’d left something in Willie’s bedroom? It was some papers stolen from her father. Do you have any idea why she took them?’
Duggan shook his head slowly but determinedly. ‘She’s … go easy on her, OK?’
‘Or what?’
‘Or she’ll run.’ Duggan paused. ‘Again.’
Eventually the toilet door opened and she walked back to the table, arms hanging in a lazy slouch. Rebus looked into her eyes and saw pupils shrunk to pinheads.
‘That was stupid.’
‘So what?’ she said, starting back into her ice cream. After two mouthfuls, she pushed the plate away.
‘The kidnap,’ Rebus said, ‘the ransom demand — it was all your idea, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘To get back at your stepmother?’
‘My dad.’
‘To get back at your dad?’
She nodded. ‘And everything he represents, the old bastard.’ She was much more together now, more confident. She didn’t care what she told him.
‘You know you committed an offence?’ Rebus asked.
‘I’d deny it in court. I’d deny it everywhere. Where’s the proof that it wasn’t just two wee boys with a daft scheme in their heads?’
‘There’s corroboration.’ Rebus glanced towards Duggan.
