Around them, the station whirled in the business of the night. Men in shirtsleeves walked purposefully past their open door, the door of their assigned office, cut off from everyone else so that no one would be contaminated by their thoughts. Rebus paused for a moment to reflect that his own office back in Great London Road was in need of much of this equipment: the modern desk (unwobbly, with drawers that could be opened easily), the filing- cabinets (ditto), the drinks-dispenser just outside. There were carpets even, rather than his own liver-red linoleum with its curled, dangerous edges. It was a very palatable environment this in which to track down the odd pervert or killer.
‘What exactly are we looking for, Jack?’
Morton snorted, threw down a slender brown file, looked at Rebus, shrugged his shoulders, and lit a cigarette.
‘Garbage,’ he said, picking up another folder, and whether or not it was meant as an answer Rebus was never to know.
‘Detective Sergeant Rebus?’
A young constable, acne on his throat, cleanly-shaven, stood at the open door.
‘Yes.’
‘Message from the Chief, sir.’
He handed Rebus a folded piece of blue notepaper.
‘Good news?’ asked Morton.
‘Oh, the best news, Jack, the very best news. Our boss sends us the following fraternal message: “Any leads from the files?” End of message.’
‘Will there be any reply, sir?’ asked the constable.
Rebus crumpled the note and tossed it into a new aluminium bin.
‘Yes, son, there will be,’ he said, ‘but I very much doubt whether you’d want to deliver it.’
Jack Morton, wiping ash from his tie, laughed.
It was one of those nights. Jim Stevens, walking home at long last, had not found anything interesting since his conversation with Mac Campbell all of four hours ago. He had told Mac then that he was not about to drop his own investigation into Edinburgh’s burgeoning drugs racket, and that had been the whole truth. It was becoming a private obsession, and though his boss might move him on to a murder case, still he would follow up his old investigation in his free, spare and private time, time found late at night when the presses were rolling, time spent in lower and lower dives further and further out of town. For he was close, he knew, to a big fish, and yet not close enough to be able to enlist the help of the forces of law and order. He wanted the story to be watertight before he called for the cavalry.
He knew the dangers, too. The ground he walked upon was always likely to fall away beneath his feet, letting him slip into Leith docks of a dark and silent morning, finding him trussed and gagged in some motorway ditch outside Perth. He didn’t mind all that. It was no more than a passing thought, brought on by tiredness and a need to lift his emotions out of the rather tawdry, unglamorous world of Edinburgh’s dope scene, a scene carried out in the sprawling housing-schemes and after-hours drinking holes more than in the glittery discotheques and chintzy rooms of the New Town.
What he disliked, really disliked, was that the people ultimately behind it all were so silent and so secretive and so alien to it all. He liked his criminals to be involved, to live the life and stick close to the lifestyle. He liked the Glasgow gangsters of the 1950s and ’60s, who lived in the Gorbals and operated from the Gorbals and loaned illicit money to neighbours, and who would slash those same neighbours eventually, when the need arose. It was like a family affair. Not like this, not at all like this. This was other, and he hated it for that reason.
His talk with Campbell had been interesting though, interesting for other reasons. Rebus sounded a fishy character. So was his brother. They might be in it together. If the police were involved in all of this, then his task would be all the harder, and all the more satisfying for that.
Now what he needed was a break, a nice break in the investigation. It couldn’t be far off. He was supposed to have a nose for that sort of thing.
5
At one-thirty they took a break. There was a small canteen in the building, open even at this ungodly hour. Outside, the majority of the day’s petty crime was being committed, but inside it was warm and cosy, and there was hot food to be had and endless cups of coffee for the vigilant policemen.
‘This is a complete shambles,’ said Morton, pouring coffee back from his saucer into the cup. ‘Anderson hasn’t a clue what he’s up to.’
‘Give me a cigarette, will you? I’m out.’ Rebus patted his pockets convincingly.
‘Christ, John,’ said Morton, wheezing an old man’s cough and passing across the cigarettes, ‘the day you give up smoking is the day I change my underwear.’
Jack Morton was not an old man, despite the excesses that were leading him quickly and inexorably towards that early fate. He was thirty-five, six years younger than Rebus. He, too, had a broken marriage behind him, the four children now resident with their grandmother while their mother was off on a suspiciously long vacation with her present lover. Misery, he had told Rebus, surrounded the whole bloody set-up, and Rebus had agreed with him, having a daughter who troubled his own conscience.
Morton had been a policeman for two decades, and unlike Rebus had started at the extreme bottom of the heap, pulling himself up to his present rank through sheer hard slog alone.
He had given Rebus his life story when the two of them had gone off for a day’s fly-fishing near Berwick. It had been a glorious day, both of them landing fine catches, and over the course of the day they had become friends. Rebus, however, had not deigned to tell his own life story to Morton. It felt, to Jack Morton, as if the man were in a little prison-cell of his own construction. He seemed especially tight-lipped about his years in the Army. Morton knew that the Army could occasionally do that to a man, and he respected Rebus’s silence. Perhaps there were a few skeletons in that particular closet. He knew all about those himself; some of his most noteworthy arrests had not exactly been conducted along ‘correct procedural lines’.
Nowadays, Morton did not concern himself with headlines and high-profile arrests. He got on with the job, collected his salary, thought now and then of his pension and the fishing-years to come, and drank his wife and children out of his conscience.
‘This is a nice canteen,’ said Rebus, smoking, struggling to start a conversation.
‘Yes, it is. I’m in here now and again. I know one of the guys who work in the computer room. Comes in handy, you know, having one of those terminal-operators in your pocket. They can track down a car, a name, an address quicker than you can blink. It only costs the occasional drink.’
‘Get them to sort out this lot of ours then.’
‘Give them time, John. Then
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Rebus.
‘It’s progress, John. Where would we be without it? We’d still be out there with our pipes and our guess- work and our magnifying glasses.’
‘I suppose you’re right, Jack. But remember what the Super says: “Give me a dozen good men every time, and send your machines back to their makers.”’
Rebus looked around him as he spoke. He saw that one of the two women from the briefing room had settled at a table by herself.
‘And besides,’ said Rebus, ‘there’ll always be a place for people like us, Jack. Society couldn’t do without us. Computers can never have inspired guesses. That’s where we’ve got them beat hands down.’
‘Maybe, I don’t know. Still, we better be getting back, eh?’ Morton looked at his watch, drained his cup, and pushed back his chair.
