dreamed often of just taking off, leaving wife and children and house, just his car and him. Taking off towards that far point, never stopping except to eat and fill up the car, driving until he died. It seemed like paradise, and so he felt quite safe fantasising about it, knowing that he would never dare put paradise into practice.
When he had first owned a car, he had wakened in the middle of the night, opening his curtains to see if it was still waiting for him outside. Sometimes he would rise at four or five in the morning and take off for a few hours, astonished at the distance he could cover so quickly, glad to be out on the silent roads with only the rabbits and the crows for company, his hand on the horn scaring fluttering clouds of birds into the air. He had never lost that initial love-affair with cars, the manumission of dreams.
People stared at his car now. He would park it in the streets of Kirkcaldy and stand a little distance away, watching people envy that car. The younger men, full of bravado and expectancy, would peer inside, staring at leather and dials as though examining living things at the zoo. The older men, some with their wives in tow, would glance at the machine, sometimes spitting on the road afterwards, knowing that it represented everything they had wanted for themselves and failed to find. Michael Rebus had found his dream, and it was a dream he could watch any time he chose.
In Edinburgh, however, it depended where you parked as to whether your car would attract attention. He had parked on George Street one day, only to find a Rolls-Royce cruising to a stop behind him. He had keyed the ignition again, fuming, near-spitting. He had parked eventually outside a discotheque. He knew that parking an expensive car outside a restaurant or a discotheque would mean that a few people would mistake you for the owner of the particular set-up, and that thought pleased him immensely, erasing the memory of the Rolls-Royce and infusing him with new versions of the dream.
Stopping at traffic-lights, too, could be exciting, except when some half-arsed biker on a big machine roared to a standstill behind him or, even worse, beside him. Some of those bikes were made for initial acceleration. More than once he had been beaten mercilessly in a race from traffic-lights. He tried not to think about those times either.
Today he parked where he had been told to park: in the car park atop Calton Hill. He could see over to Fife from his front window, and from the back he could see Princes Street laid out before him like a toy-set. The hill was quiet; it was not quite the tourist season, and it was cold. He knew that things hotted up at night: car chases, girls and boys hoping for a ride, parties at Queensferry beach. Edinburgh’s gay community would mix with those merely curious or lonely, and a couple, hand-in-hand, would now and again enter the graveyard at the bottom of the hill. When darkness fell, the east end of Princes Street became a territory all of its own, to be passed around, to be shared. But he was not about to share his car with anyone. His dream was a fragile entity.
He watched Fife across the Firth of Forth, looking quite splendid from this distance, until the man’s car slowed and stopped beside him. Michael slid across to his passenger seat and wound down the window, just as the other man was winding down his.
‘Got the stuff?’ he said.
‘Of course,’ said the man. He checked in his mirror. Some people, a family of all things, had just come over the rise. ‘We better wait for a minute.’
They paused, staring blankly at the scenery.
‘No hassles across in Fife?’ asked the man.
‘None.’
‘The word’s going round that your brother was over seeing you. Is that correct?’ The man’s eyes were hard; his whole being was hard. But the car he drove was a heap. Michael felt safe for the moment.
‘Yes, but it was nothing. It was just the anniversary of our dad’s death. That was all.’
‘He doesn’t know anything?’
‘Absolutely not. Do you think I’m thick or something?’
The man’s glance silenced Michael. It was a mystery to him how this one man could invoke such fear in him. He hated these meetings.
‘If anything happens,’ the man was saying, ‘if
‘It wasn’t my fault. He just dropped in on me. He didn’t even phone first. What could I do?’
His hands were gripping hard to the steering-wheel, cemented there. The man checked in his mirror again.
‘All clear,’ he said, reaching behind him. A small package slipped through Michael’s window. He took a look inside it, brought an envelope out of his pocket, and reached for the ignition.
‘Be seeing you around, Mister Rebus,’ said the man, opening the envelope.
‘Yes,’ said Michael, thinking: not if I can help it. This work was getting a bit too hairy for him. These people seemed to know everything about his movements. He knew, however, that the fear always evaporated, to be replaced by euphoria when he had rid himself of another load, pocketing a nice profit on the deal. It was that moment when fear turned to euphoria that kept him in the game. It was like the fastest piece of acceleration from traffic-lights that you could experience — ever.
Jim Stevens, watching from the hill’s Victorian folly, a ridiculous, never-completed copy of a Greek temple, saw Michael Rebus leave. That much was old news to him; he was more interested in the Edinburgh connection, a man he could not trace and did not know, a man who had lost him twice before and who could doubtless lose him again. Nobody seemed to know who this mysterious figure was, and nobody particularly wanted to know. He looked like trouble. Stevens, feeling suddenly impotent and old, could do nothing other than jot down the car registration number. He thought that perhaps McGregor Campbell could do something with it, but he was wary of being found out by Rebus. He felt trapped in the middle of something which was proving altogether a knottier problem than he had suspected.
Shivering, he tried to persuade himself that he liked it that way.
10
‘Come in, come in, whoever you are.’
Rebus’s coat, gloves, and bottle of wine were taken from him by complete strangers, and he was plunged into one of those packed, smoky, loud parties where it is easy to smile at people but near impossible to get to know anyone. He moved from the hall into the kitchen, and from there, through a connecting-door, into the living-room itself.
The chairs, table, settee had been pushed back to the walls, and the floor was filled with writhing, whooping couples, the men tieless, their shirts sticking to them.
The party, it appeared, had started earlier than he had anticipated.
He recognized a few faces around and beneath him, stepping over two inspectors as he waded into the room. He could see that the table at the far end had bottles and plastic cups heaped upon it, and it seemed as good a vantage point as any, and safer than some.
Getting to it was the problem however, and he was reminded of some of the assault courses of his Army days.
‘Hi there!’
Cathy Jackson, doing a passable imitation of a rag-doll, reeled into his path for a second before being swept off her feet by the large — the very large — man with whom she was pretending to dance.
‘Hello,’ managed Rebus, his face twisting into a grimace rather than a smile. He achieved the relative safety of the drinks-table and helped himself to a whisky and a chaser. That would do for starters. Then he watched as Cathy Jackson (for whom he had bathed, polished, scraped, adjusted, and sprayed) pushed her tongue into the cavernous mouth of her dancing-partner. Rebus thought that he was going to be sick. His partner for the evening had done a bunk before the evening had begun! That would teach him to be optimistic. So what did he do now? Leave quietly, or try to pull a few words of introduction out of his hat?
A stocky man, not at all a policeman, came from the kitchen, and, cigarette in mouth, approached the table with a couple of empty glasses in his hand.
