Ian Rankin: Black and Blue

Outside, there was trouble finding a taxi. Plenty about, but already taken. They had to pull him out of the road when he tried to flag one down. He stumbled a bit and went down on one knee. They helped him back up.

‘So what do you do exactly on the rigs?’ one of them asked.

‘Try to stop them falling down.’

A taxi had stopped to let a couple out.

‘Is that your mother or are you just desperate?’ he asked the male passenger. His friends told him to shut up, and pushed him into the back. ‘Did you see her?’ he asked them. ‘Face like a bag of marbles.’ They weren’t going to his flat, there was nothing there.

‘We’ll go back to our place,’ his friends had said. So there was nothing to do but sit back and watch all the lights. Edinburgh was like Aberdeen — small cities, not like Glasgow or London. Aberdeen had more money than style, and it was scary, too. Scarier than Edinburgh. The trip seemed to take for ever.

‘Where are we?’

‘Niddrie,’ someone said. He couldn’t remember their names, and was too embarrassed to ask. Eventually the taxi stopped. Outside, the street was dark, looked like the whole fucking estate had welshed on the lecky bill. He said as much.

More laughter, tears, hands on his back.

Three-storey tenements, pebble-dashed. Most of the windows were blocked with steel plates or had been infilled with breeze blocks.

‘You live here?’ he said.

‘We can’t all afford mortgages.’

True enough, true enough. He was lucky in so many ways. They pushed hard at the main door and it gave. They went in, one friend either side of him with a hand on his back. Inside, the place was damp and rotten, the stairs half-blocked with torn mattresses and lavatory seats, runs of piping and lengths of broken skirting-board.

‘Very salubrious.’

‘It’s all right once you get up.’

They climbed two storeys. There were a couple of doors off the landing, both open.

‘In here, Allan.’

So he walked in.

There was no electricity, but one of his friends had a torch. The place was a midden.

‘I wouldn’t have taken youse for down and outs, lads.’

‘The kitchen’s OK.’

So they took him through there. He saw a wooden chair which had once been padded. It sat on what was left of the linoleum floor. He was sobering up fast, but not fast enough.

They hauled him down on to the chair. He heard tape being ripped from a roll, binding him to the chair, around and around. Then around his head, covering his mouth. His legs next, all the way down to the ankles. He was trying to cry out, gagging on the tape. A blow landed on the side of his head. His eyes and ears went fuzzy for a moment. The side of his head hurt, like it had just connected with a girder. Wild shadows flew across the walls.

‘Looks like a mummy, doesn’t he?’

‘Aye, and he’ll be crying for his daddy in a minute.’

The Adidas bag was on the floor in front of him, unzipped.

‘Now,’ one of them said, ‘I’ll just get out my games kit.’

Pliers, claw-hammer, staple-gun, electric screwdriver, and a saw.

Night sweat, salt stinging his eyes, trickling in, trickling out again. He knew what was happening, but still didn’t believe it. The two men weren’t saying anything. They were laying a sheet of heavy-duty polythene out on the floor. Then they carried him and the chair on to the sheet. He was wriggling, trying to scream, eyes screwed shut, straining against his bonds. When he opened his eyes, he saw a clear polythene bag. They pulled it down over his head and sealed it with tape around his neck. He breathed in through his nostrils and the bag contracted. One of them picked up the saw, then put it down and picked up the hammer instead.

Somehow, fuelled by sheer terror, Allan Mitchison got to his feet, still tied to the chair. The kitchen window was in front of him. It had been boarded up, but the boards had been torn away. The frame was still there, but only fragments of the actual window panes remained. The two men were busy with their tools. He stumbled between them and out of the window.

They didn’t wait to watch him fall. They just gathered up the tools, folded the plastic sheet into an untidy bundle, put everything back in the Adidas bag, and zipped it shut.

‘Why me?’ Rebus had asked when he’d called in.

‘Because,’ his boss had said, ‘you’re new. You haven’t been around long enough to make enemies on the estate.’

And besides, Rebus could have added, you can’t find Maclay or Bain.

A resident walking his greyhound had called it in. ‘A lot of stuff gets chucked on to the street, but not like this.’

When Rebus arrived, there were a couple of patrol cars on the scene, creating a sort of cordon, which hadn’t stopped the locals gathering. Someone was making grunting noises in imitation of a pig. They didn’t go much for originality around here; tradition stuck hard. The tenements were mostly abandoned, awaiting demolition. The families had been relocated. In some of the buildings, there were still a few occupied flats. Rebus wouldn’t have wanted to stick around.

The body had been pronounced dead, the circumstances suspicious to say the least, and now the forensic and photography crews were gathering. A Fiscal Depute was in conversation with the pathologist, Dr Curt. Curt saw Rebus and nodded a greeting. But Rebus had eyes only for the body. An old-fashioned spike-tipped set of railings ran the length of the tenement, and the body was impaled on the fence, still dripping blood. At first, he thought the body grossly deformed, but as he stepped closer he saw what it was. A chair, half of it smashed in the fall. It was attached to the body by runs of silver tape. There was a plastic bag over the corpse’s head. The bag, once translucent, was now half-filled with blood.

Dr Curt walked over. ‘I wonder if we’ll find an orange in his mouth.’

‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

‘I’ve been meaning to phone. I was sorry to hear about your... well...’

‘Craigmillar’s not so bad.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘I know you didn’t.’ Rebus looked up. ‘How many storeys did he fall?’

‘Looks like a couple. That window there.’

There was a noise behind them. One of the woolly suits was vomiting on to the road. A colleague had an arm around his shoulders, encouraging the flow.

‘Let’s get him down,’ Rebus said. ‘Get the poor bastard into a body bag.’

‘No electricity,’ someone said, handing Rebus a torch.

‘Are the floors safe to walk on?’

‘Nobody’s fallen through yet.’

Rebus moved through the flat. He’d been in dens like it a dozen times. Gangs had been in and sprayed their names and their urine around the place. Others had stripped out anything with even a whiff of monetary value: floor coverings, interior doors, wiring, ceiling roses. A table, missing one leg, had been turned upside down in the living room. There was a crumpled blanket lying on it, and some sheets of newspaper. A real home from home. There was nothing in the bathroom, just holes where the fittings had been. There was a large hole, too, in the bedroom wall. You could look right through into the adjoining flat, and see an identical scene.

The SOCOs were concentrating on the kitchen.

‘What have we got?’ Rebus asked. Someone shone their torch into a corner.

‘Bag full of booze, sir. Whisky, rum, some tinnies and nibbles.’

‘Party time.’

Rebus walked to the window. A woolly suit was standing there, looking down on to the street, where a team of four were trying to manoeuvre the body from the railings.

‘That’s just about as potted heid as you can get.’ The young constable turned to Rebus. ‘What’s the odds, sir? Alky commits suicide?’