Ian Rankin - Fleshmarket Close

‘What the hell did you do that for?’

Mangold was kneeling, trying to cradle Ishbel in his arms. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said.

‘I don’t mean you, I mean her !’ She prodded Ishbel with a toe. Les Young was trying to lead her away by the arm, mouthing words she couldn’t hear. There was a raging in her ears, a fire in her lungs.

Ishbel eventually turned her head to look up at her rescuer. Her hair was plastered to her face.

‘I’m sure she’s grateful,’ Mangold was saying, while Young added something about it being an automatic reflex... something he’d heard about before.

Ishbel Jardine, however, didn’t say anything. Instead, she bowed her head and spewed a mixture of bile and water on to damp earth stained white with feather-down.

‘I was bloody well fed up of you lot, if you want to know.’

‘And that’s your excuse, is it, Mr Mangold?’ Les Young asked. ‘That’s your whole explanation?’

They were seated in Interview Room 1, St Leonard’s police station — no distance at all from Holyrood Park. A few of the uniforms had expressed surprise at Siobhan’s return to her old stomping-ground, her humour not improved by a call on her mobile from DCI Macrae at Gayfield Square, asking where the hell she was. When she’d told him, he’d started a long complaint about attitude and teamwork and the apparent disinclination of former St Leonard’s officers to show anything other than contempt for their new billet.

All the time he was talking, Siobhan was having a blanket wrapped around her, a mug of instant soup pressed into her hand, her shoes removed to be dried on a radiator...

‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t catch all of that,’ she was forced to admit, once Macrae had stopped talking.

‘You think this is funny, DS Clarke?’

‘No, sir.’ But it was... in a way. She just didn’t think Macrae would share her sense of the absurd.

She sat now, bra-less in a borrowed T-shirt, and wearing black standard-issue trousers three sizes too large. On her feet: a pair of men’s white sports socks, covered by the polythene slip-ons used at crime scenes. Around her shoulders: a grey woollen blanket, the kind provided in each holding-cell. She hadn’t had a chance to wash her hair. It felt thick and dank, and smelled of the loch.

Mangold was wrapped in a blanket, too, hands cupped around a plastic beaker of tea. He’d lost his tinted glasses, and his eyes were reduced to slits in the glare of the strip-lighting. The blanket, Siobhan couldn’t help noticing, was exactly the same colour as the tea. There was a table between them. Les Young sat next to Siobhan, pen poised above an A4 pad of paper.

Ishbel was in one of the holding-cells. She would be interviewed later.

For now, they were interested in Mangold. Mangold, who hadn’t said anything for a couple of minutes.

‘That’s the story you’re sticking with,’ Les Young commented. He’d started doodling on the pad. Siobhan turned to him.

‘He can give us any drivel he feels like; it doesn’t alter the facts.’

‘What facts?’ Mangold asked, feigning only the faintest interest.

‘The cellar,’ Les Young told him.

‘Christ, are we back to that again?’

It was Siobhan who answered. ‘Despite what you told me last time round, Mr Mangold, I think you do know Stuart Bullen. I think you’ve known him for a while. He had this notion of a mock burial — pretending to bury those skeletons to show the immigrants what would happen to them if they didn’t toe the line.’

Mangold had pushed back so that the front two legs of his chair were off the floor. His face was angled ceiling-wards, eyes closed. Siobhan kept talking, her voice quiet and level.

‘When the skeletons were concreted over, that should have been the end of that. But it wasn’t. Your pub’s on the Royal Mile, you see the tourists every day. Nothing they like better than a bit of atmosphere — that’s why the ghost walks are so popular. You wanted some of that for the Warlock.’

‘No secret there,’ Mangold said. ‘It’s why I was having the cellar renovated.’

‘That’s right... but think what a boost you’d get if a couple of skeletons were suddenly discovered under the floor. Plenty of free publicity, especially with a local historian stoking the fires...’

‘I still don’t see what you’re getting at.’

‘The thing is, Ray, you weren’t seeing the bigger picture. Last thing Stuart Bullen wanted was those skeletons coming to light. People were bound to start asking questions, and those questions might lead back to him and his little slave empire. Is that why he slapped you about a bit? Maybe he got the Irishman to do it for him.’

‘I’ve told you how I got the bruises.’

‘Well, I’m choosing not to believe you.’

Mangold started laughing, still facing the ceiling. ‘Facts, you said. I’m not hearing anything you can even begin to prove.’

‘The thing I’m wondering is...’

‘What?’

‘Look at me and I’ll tell you.’

Slowly, the chair returned to the ground. Mangold fixed his slitted eyes on Siobhan.

‘What I can’t decide,’ she told him, ‘is whether you did it out of anger — you’d been beaten up and shouted at by Bullen, and you wanted to mete that out on someone else...’ She paused. ‘Or whether it was more in the nature of a gift to Ishbel — not wrapped in ribbons this time, but a gift all the same... something to make her life that bit easier.’

Mangold turned to Les Young. ‘Help me out here: do you have any idea what she’s on about?’

‘I know exactly what she’s on about,’ Young told him.

‘See,’ Siobhan added, shifting slightly in her chair, ‘when DI Rebus and I came to see you that last time... found you in the cellar...’

‘Yes?’

‘DI Rebus started playing around with a chisel: you remember that?’

‘Not really.’

‘It was in Joe Evans’s toolbox.’

‘Hold the front page.’

Siobhan smiled at the sarcasm; knew she could afford to. ‘There was a hammer there too, Ray.’

‘A hammer in a toolbox: what will they think of next?’

‘Last night, I went to your cellar and removed that hammer. I told the forensics team it was a rush job. They worked through the night. It’s a bit soon for the DNA results, but they found traces of blood on that hammer, Ray. Same group as Donny Cruikshank.’ She shrugged. ‘So much for the facts.’ She waited for Mangold’s reply, but his mouth was clamped shut. ‘Now,’ she went on, ‘here’s the thing... If that hammer was used in the killing of Donny Cruikshank, then I’m thinking there are three possibilities.’ She held up one finger at a time. ‘Evans, Ishbel, or yourself. It had to be one of you. And I think, realistically, we can leave Evans out of it.’ She lowered one of the fingers. ‘So it’s down to you or Ishbel, Ray. Which is it to be?’

Les Young’s pen was poised once more above the pad.

‘I need to see her,’ Ray Mangold said, voice suddenly dry and brittle-sounding. ‘Just the two of us... five minutes is all I need.’

‘Can’t do it, Ray,’ Young said firmly.

‘I’m giving you nothing till you let me see her.’

But Les Young was shaking his head. Mangold’s gaze shifted to Siobhan.

‘DI Young’s in charge,’ she told him. ‘He calls the shots.’

Mangold leaned forward, elbows on the table, head in hands. When he spoke, his words were muffled by his palms.

‘We didn’t catch that, Ray,’ Young said.

‘No? Well, catch this!’ And Mangold lunged across the table, swinging a fist. Young jerked back. Siobhan was on her feet, grabbed the arm and twisted. Young dropped his pen and was around the table, putting a headlock on Mangold.