Ian Rankin: Set in Darkness

‘That tape you gave me.’

‘The Blue Nile? There goes your dinosaur image. What do you think?’

‘I think you’re smitten by Mr Smarty-Pants.’

‘I do like it when you come over all fatherly.’

‘Watch I don’t put you over my knee.’

‘Careful, Inspector. These days I could have you off the job for saying something like that.’

‘Are we going to the game tomorrow?’

‘For our sins. I’ve a spare green and white scarf set aside for you.’

‘I must remember to bring my lighter. Two o’clock in Mather’s?’

‘There’ll be a beer waiting for you.’

‘Siobhan, whatever it was you were up to tonight...?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you get a result?’

‘No,’ she said, sounding suddenly tired. ‘Not even a goalless draw.’

He put the phone down, refilled his whisky glass. ‘Refined tonight, John,’ he told himself. Oftentimes nowadays he just swigged from the bottle. The weekend stretched ahead of him, one football game the extent of his plans. His living room was wreathed in shadows and cigarette smoke. He kept thinking of selling the flat, finding somewhere with fewer ghosts. Then again, they were the only company he had: dead colleagues, victims, expired relationships. He reached again for the bottle, but it was empty. Stood up and watched the floor sway beneath him. He thought he had a fresh bottle in the carrier bag beneath the window, but the bag was empty and crumpled. He looked out of his window, catching his reflection and its puzzled frown. Had he left a bottle in the car? Had he brought home two bottles or just the one? He thought of a dozen places where he could get a drink, even at two in the morning. The city — his city — was out there waiting for him, waiting to show its dark, shrivelled heart.

‘I don’t need you,’ he said, resting the palms of his hands on the window, as if willing the glass to shatter and take him tumbling with it. A two-storey descent to the street below.

‘I don’t need you,’ he repeated. Then he pushed off from the glass, went to find his coat.

Saturday, the clan had lunch at the Witchery.

It was a good restaurant, sited at the top of the Royal Mile. The Castle was a near neighbour. Lots of natural light: it was almost like eating in a conservatory. Roddy had organised it for their mother’s 75th. She was a painter, and he reckoned she’d like all the light that poured into the restaurant. But the day was overcast. Squalls of rain drilled at the windows. Low cloud base: standing at the Castle’s highest point, you felt you could have touched heaven.

They’d started with a quick walk around the battlements, Mother looking unimpressed. But then she’d first visited the place some seventy years before, had probably been there a hundred times since. And lunch hadn’t improved her spirits, though Roddy praised each course, each mouthful of wine.

‘You always overdo things!’ his mother snapped at him.

To which he said nothing, just stared into his pudding bowl, glancing up eventually to wink at Lorna. When he did so, she was reminded of her brother as a kid, always with that shy, endearing quality — something he mostly reserved for voters and TV interviewers these days.

You always overdo things! Those words hung in the air for a time, as though others at the table wanted to relish them. But then Roddy’s wife Seona spoke up.

‘I wonder who he gets that from.’

‘What did she say? What did she say? ’

And of course it was Cammo who brokered the peace: ‘Now, now, Mother, just because it’s your birthday...’

‘Finish the bloody sentence!’

Cammo sighed, took one of his deep breaths. ‘Just because it’s your birthday, let’s take a walk down towards Holyrood.’

His mother glared at him. She had eyes like a frigate’s hull. But then her face cracked into a smile. The others resented Cammo for his ability to bring about this transformation. At that moment, he possessed the powers of a magus.

Six of them at the table. Cammo, the elder son, hair swept back from his forehead, sporting his father’s gold cuff links — the one thing the old man had left him in the will. They’d never agreed on politics, Cammo’s father a Liberal of the old school. Cammo had joined the Conservative Party while still an undergraduate at St Andrews. Now he had a safe seat in the Home Counties, representing a mainly rural area between Swindon and High Wycombe. He lived in London, loved the nightlife and the sense of being at the core of something. Married, his wife a drunk and serial shopper. They were seldom seen together. He was photographed at balls and parties, always with some new woman on his arm.

That was Cammo.

He’d come north overnight on the sleeper; had complained that the club car hadn’t been open — staff shortages.

‘Bloody disgrace. You privatise the railways and still can’t get a decent whisky and soda.’

‘Christ, does anybody still drink soda?’

This was Lorna, back at the house as they prepared to go out to lunch. Lorna had always had the handling of her brother. She was all of eleven months younger than him, had somehow found time in her schedule for this reunion. Lorna was a fashion model — a story she was sticking to despite encroaching age and a shortage of bookings. In her late forties now, she’d been at her earning height in the 1970s. She still got work, cited Lauren Hutton as an influence. She’d dated MPs in her time, just as Cammo had seen fit to ‘walk out’ with the occasional model. She’d heard stories about him, and was sure he’d heard stories about her. On the rare occasions when they met, they circled one another like bare-knuckle fighters.

Cammo had made a point of choosing whisky and soda as his aperitif.

Then there was baby Roddy, just touching forty. Always the rebel at heart, but somehow lacking the curriculum vitae. Roddy the one-time Scottish office boffin, now an investment analyst. He was New Labour. Didn’t really possess the ammunition when his big brother came in with all ideological guns blazing. But Roddy sat there with quiet, immutable authority, the shells failing to scratch him. One political commentator had called him Scottish Labour’s Mr Fixit, because of his ability to brush away the sand from around the party’s many landmines and set about defusing them. Others called him Mr Suck-Up, a lazy explanation of his emergence as a prospective MSP. In fact, Roddy had planned today’s lunch as a double celebration, since he’d had official notice just that morning that he would be running in Edinburgh West End as Labour’s candidate for the Scottish Parliament.

‘Bloody hell,’ had been Cammo’s rolling-eyed reaction as the champagne was being poured.

Roddy had allowed himself a quiet smile, tucking a stray lock of thick black hair back behind his ear. His wife Seona had squeezed his arm in support. Seona was more than the loyal wife; if anything, she was the more politically active of the two, and history teacher at a city comprehensive.

Billary, Cammo often called them, a reference to Bill and Hillary Clinton. He thought most teachers were a short hop from subversives, which hadn’t stopped him flirting with Seona on half a dozen separate, usually drunken occasions. When challenged by Lorna, his defence was always the same: ‘Indoctrination by seduction. Bloody cults get away with it, why shouldn’t the Tory Party?’

Lorna’s husband was there, too, though he’d spent half the meal over by the doorway, head tucked in towards a mobile phone. From the back he looked faintly ridiculous: too paunchy for the cream linen suit, the pointy-toed black shoes. And the greying ponytail — Cammo had laughed out loud when introduced to it.