Let It Bleed

‘You shouldn’t say that to a policeman, Salty,’ George Klasser offered, causing laughter. He turned to Rebus.

‘How’s that tooth?’

‘The anaesthetic helps,’ Rebus said, tipping the last of his whisky into his mouth.

‘I hope you’re not mixing alcohol and painkillers.’

‘Would I do that? Salty, give the man some money.’

Salty stopped talking to himself. The barman was waiting, so he pulled out a ten-pound note, watching its sad ebbing as it flowed into the till. Salty was called Salty because of salt and sauce, which were what you put on your chip-shop supper. The connection being chips, since Salty worked in an electronics factory in South Gyle. He’d been a late arrival in ‘Silicon Glen’, and was hoping the industry would continue to prosper. Six factories before this one had closed on him, leaving long periods of jobless space between them. He still remembered the days when money was tight — ‘I could have collected Social Security for Scotland’ — and watched his money accordingly. He made microchips these days, feeding an assembly plant on Clydeside and another in Gyle Park West.

‘Ye dancing?’

Rebus half turned to see a woman grinning toothlessly at him. He thought her name was Morag. She was married to the man with the tartan shoelaces.

‘Not tonight,’ he said, trying to look flattered. You could never tell with the man with the tartan shoelaces: dance with his wife and you were flirting; turn her down and you were, by implication, snubbing him. Rebus rested his foot on the polished brass bar-rail and drank his drinks.

By eight o’clock, both Doc and Salty had left, and an old guy in a shapeless bunnet was standing next to Rebus. The man had forgotten his false teeth, and his cheeks were sunken. He was telling Rebus about American history.

‘I like it, ken. Just American, not any other kind.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Eh?’

‘Why just American?’

The man licked his lips. He wasn’t focusing on Rebus, or on anything in the bar. You couldn’t be sure he was even focusing on the present day.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I suppose it’s because of the Westerns. I love Westerns. Hopalong Cassidy, John Wayne … I used to like Hopalong Cassidy.’

‘Could It Be Forever,’ said Rebus, ‘that was one of his.’

Then he finished his drink and went home.

The telephone was ringing. Rebus considered not answering; resistance lasted all of ten seconds.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Dad.’

He flopped into his chair. ‘Hello, Sammy. Where are you?’ She paused too long. ‘Still at Patience’s, eh? How are you?’

‘Fine.’

‘How’s work?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Just being polite.’ Fatherly, he thought suddenly: I should have said fatherly, not polite. Sometimes he wished life had a rewind function.

‘Well, I won’t bore you with the details then.’

‘I take it Patience is out?’ It stood to reason: Sammy never called when she was home.

‘Yes, she’s out with … I mean at something. She’s out at something.’

Rebus smiled. ‘What you really mean is that she’s out with someone.’

‘I’m not very good at this.’

‘Don’t blame yourself, blame your genes. Do you want to meet?’

‘Not tonight, I’m dog-tired. Patience asked … she wondered if you’d like to come to tea some day. She thinks we should see more of one another.’

As usual, thought Rebus, Patience was right. ‘I’d like that. When?’

‘I’ll ask Patience and get back to you. Deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘Well, I’m off for an early night. What about you?’

Rebus looked down at his chair. ‘I’m already there. Sleep tight.’

‘You too, Dad. Love you.’

‘You too, pet,’ Rebus said quietly, but only after he’d put down the phone.

He went over to the hi-fi. After a drink, he liked to listen to the Stones. Women, relationships, and colleagues had come and gone, but the Stones had always been there. He put the album on and poured himself a last drink. The guitar riff, one of easily half a dozen in Keith’s tireless repertoire, kicked the album off. I don’t have much, Rebus thought, but I have this. He thought of Lauderdale in his hospital bed; Patience out enjoying herself; Kirstie Kennedy in a Charing Cross cardboard-box. Then he saw cheap trainers, a final embrace, and Willie Coyle’s face.

Rebus just couldn’t seem to drink him off his mind.

He remembered the report he’d found hidden in Willie’s bedroom. It was on the kitchen worktop, and he went to fetch it. It was a business plan, something to do with a computer software company called LABarum. The text explained that the dictionary definition of ‘labarum’ was ‘moral standard or guide’, and the reason the company would use upper case for the first three letters was to emphasise Lothian And Borders. The business plan discussed future development, costings, projected balance sheet, employment range. It was dry, and it was couched in the conditional. Rebus got out the phone book but found no listing anywhere for LABarum.

Someone had been working on the text, underlining some phrases, circling words, doing jotted calculations beside the graphs and bar charts. Sentences had been deleted in red pen, words changed. Some points had been ticked. Rebus couldn’t know if the handwriting was Willie Coyle’s. He didn’t know if Willie had owned such a thing as a red Biro. But he did wonder what such a document was doing hidden in Willie Coyle’s bedroom. When he turned to the last sheet, there was a word scrawled diagonally across it and underlined heavily. The word was DALGETY. He flipped through the report again but found no other mention of Dalgety. Was it a person, a place, another company? The word was scored into the paper in blue ink. It was impossible to say if it was in the same hand as the amendments and marginalia.

He poured another drink — this would be his last — and flipped the album over. He was annoyed, more with himself than anyone. It was case closed after all: a couple of desperate hoaxers fell off a bridge and died. That was all. He should have cleared it from his mind by now. Yet he couldn’t.

‘Damn you, Willie,’ he said out loud. He sat down again with his drink and picked up the business plan. There were a couple of letters in the top right-hand corner, written faintly in pencil. CK. He wondered if they were an abbreviation for ‘check’.

‘Who cares?’ he said, trying to concentrate on the music. What a shambles the band were, yet sometimes they could get it so exactly right that it hurt.

‘Here’s to you, Willie,’ Rebus said, raising his glass in the air.

6

It wasn’t till he woke up in the morning freezing that he remembered the radiator key in his jacket pocket. The pipes were gurgling, the boiler roaring away, yet the radiators were barely warm.

He got coffee and a bacon roll from a cafe and had breakfast in his car on the way to work. There was a hard frost on the ground, and the sky was leaden, threatening worse. It had taken him five minutes to scrape the ice off his windscreen, and even so it was like driving a tank, peering through the one clear slit.