‘You go on ahead, Jack. I’ll be with you in a minute. I want to check out an inspired guess.’
‘Mind if I join you?’
Rebus, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand, pulled out the chair from opposite the woman officer, who had her head buried in the day’s newspaper. He noted the garish headline on the front page. Someone had slipped out a little information to the local media.
‘Not at all,’ she said, not looking up.
Rebus smiled to himself and sat down. He began to sip the powdery, instant murk.
‘Busy?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Shouldn’t you be? Your friend left a few minutes ago.’
Sharp then, very sharp. Very, very sharp indeed. Rebus began to feel a mite uneasy. He disliked ballcrushers, and here were all the outward signs of one.
‘Yes, he did, didn’t he? But then he’s a glutton for punishment. We’re working on the Modus Operandi files. I’d do anything to defer that particular pleasure.’
She looked up at last, bitten by the potential insult.
‘That’s what I am, is it? A delaying tactic?’
Rebus smiled and shrugged.
‘What else?’ he said.
It was her turn to smile now. She closed the paper and folded it twice, placing it before her on the formica- topped table. She tapped the headline.
‘Looks like we’re in the news,’ she said.
Rebus turned the paper towards him.
EDINBURGH ABDUCTIONS — NOW IT’S MURDER!
‘A terrible bloody case,’ he offered. ‘Just terrible. And the newspapers don’t make it any better.’
‘Yes, well, we’ll have the PM results in a couple of hours, and then we just might have something to go on.’
‘I hope so. Just so long as I can put away those bloody files.’
‘I thought policemen,’ stressing the latter part of the word, ‘got their kicks from reading that stuff?’
Rebus spread his hands before him, a gesture he seemed to have picked up from Michael.
‘You have us to a T. How long have you been in the force?’
Rebus took her to be thirty, give or take two years. She had thick, short brown hair, and a long, straight ski- slope of a nose. There were no rings on her fingers, but these days that told him nothing.
‘Long enough,’ she said.
‘I think I knew you would say that.’
She was smiling still: no ballcrusher then.
‘Then you’re cleverer than I took you for,’ she said.
‘You’d be surprised.’
He was growing tired, realising that the game was going nowhere. It was all midfield, a friendly rather than a cup-tie. He checked his watch conspicuously.
‘Time I was getting back,’ he said.
She picked up her newspaper.
‘Are you doing anything this weekend?’ she asked.
John Rebus sat down again.
6
He left the station at four o’clock. The birds were doing their best to persuade everyone that it was dawn, but no one seemed fooled. It was dark still, and the air was chilled.
He decided to leave his car and walk home, a distance of two miles. He needed it, needed to feel the cool, damp air, the expectancy of a morning shower. He breathed deep, trying to relax, to forget, but his mind was too full of those files, and little pieces of recollected fact and figure, pieces of horror no bigger than a paragraph, haunted his walk.
To indecently assault an eight-week old baby girl. The babysitter who had calmly admitted to the assault saying that she had done it ‘for a kick’.
To rape a grandmother in front of her two grandchildren, then give the kids some sweets from a jar before leaving. The act premeditated; committed by a bachelor of fifty.
To burn with cigarettes the name of a street gang onto the breasts of a twelve-year old, leaving her for dead in a burning hut. Never caught.
And now the crux: to abduct two girls and then strangle them
Well, at least they were not dealing with a sex-offender; not right away. Which only, Rebus was forced to agree, made their task that much more difficult, for now they were confronted with something like a ‘serial killer’, striking at random and without clues, aiming at the record books rather than at any idea of ‘kicks’. The question now was would he stop at two? It seemed unlikely.
Strangulation. It was a fearful way to go, wrestling, kicking your way towards oblivion, panic, the fretful sucking for air, and the killer behind you most likely, so that you faced the fear of something totally anonymous, a death without knowledge of who or why. Rebus had been taught methods of killing in the SAS. He knew what it felt like to have the garotte tighten on your neck, trusting to the opponent’s prevailing sanity. A fearful way to go.
Edinburgh slept on, as it had slept on for hundreds of years. There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were Enlightenment ghosts, articulate and deferential. They were not about to leap from the darkness with a length of twine ready in their hands. Rebus paused and looked around him. Besides, it was morning now and any godfearing spirit would be tucked up in bed, as he, John Rebus, flesh and blood, would be soon.
Near his flat, he passed a little grocery shop outside which were stacked crates of milk and morning rolls. The owner had complained in private to Rebus about petty and occasional thefts, but would not submit a complaint proper. The shop was as dead as the street, the solitude of the moment disturbed only by the distant rumble of a taxi on cobblestones and the persistence of the dawn chorus. Rebus looked around him, examining the many curtained windows. Then, swiftly, he tore six rolls from a layer and stuffed them into his pockets, walking away a little too briskly. A moment later he hesitated, then walked on tiptoe back to the shop, the criminal returning to the scene of the crime, the dog to its vomit. Rebus had never actually seen dogs doing that, but he had it on the authority of Saint Peter.
Looking round again, he lifted a pint of milk out of its crate and made his getaway, whistling silently to himself.
Nothing in the world tasted as good for breakfast as stolen rolls with some butter and jam and a mug of milky coffee. Nothing tasted better than a venial sin.
He sniffed the stairwell of his tenement, catching the faint odour of tom-cats, a persistent menace. He held his breath as he climbed the two flights of stairs, fumbling in his pocket beneath the squashed rolls, trying to liberate his door-key.
The interior of the flat felt damp and smelt damp. He checked the central heating and, sure enough, the pilot-light had gone out again. He cursed as he relit it, turning the heat up all the way, and went through to the living-room.
There were still spaces on the book-case, the wall-unit, the mantelpiece where Rhona’s ornaments had once stood, but many of the gaps had already been filled by new mementoes of his own: bills, unanswered letters, old ring-pulls from tins of cheap beer, the occasional unread book. Rebus collected unread books. Once upon a time, he
