Ian Rankin: Black and Blue

‘Get used to that uniform, son.’ Rebus turned back into the room. ‘I want prints from the bag and its contents. If it’s from an off-licence, you’ll probably find price stickers. If not, could be from a pub. We’re looking for one, more likely two people. Whoever sold them the hooch might give a description. How did they get here? Their own transport? Bus? Taxi? We need to know. How did they know about this place? Local knowledge? We need to ask the neighbours.’ He was walking through the room now. He recognised a couple of junior CID from St Leonard’s, plus Craigmillar uniforms. ‘We’ll split the tasks later. It could all be some hideous accident or joke gone wrong, but whatever it was the victim wasn’t here on his tod. I want to know who was here with him. Thank you and good night.’

Outside, they were taking final photographs of the chair and the bonds around it, before separating chair from body. The chair would be bagged, too, along with any splinters they found. Funny how orderly it all became; order out of chaos. Dr Curt said he’d do the post mortem in the morning. That was fine by Rebus. He got back into the patrol car, wishing it were his own: the Saab had a half bottle of whisky tucked under the driver’s seat. Many of the pubs would still be open: midnight licences. Instead, he drove back to the station. It was less than a mile away. Maclay and Bain looked like they’d just got in, but they’d already heard the news.

‘Murder?’

‘Something like it,’ Rebus said. ‘He was tied to a chair with a plastic bag over his head, mouth taped shut. Maybe he was pushed, maybe he jumped or fell. Whoever was with him left in a rush — forgot to take their carry-out.’

‘Junkies? Dossers?’

Rebus shook his head. ‘New jeans by the look of them, and new Nikes on his feet. Wallet with plenty of cash, bank card and credit card.’

‘So we’ve got a name?’

Rebus nodded. ‘Allan Mitchison, address off Morrison Street.’ He shook a set of keys. ‘Anybody want to tag along?’

Bain went with Rebus, leaving Maclay to ‘hold the fort’ — a phrase overused at Fort Apache. Bain said he didn’t make a good passenger, so Rebus let him drive. DS ‘Dod’ Bain had a rep; it had followed him from Dundee to Falkirk and from there to Edinburgh. Dundee and Falkirk weren’t exactly spa towns either. He sported a nick in the skin beneath his right eye, souvenir of a knife attack. Every so often, his finger strayed to the spot; it wasn’t something he was conscious of. At five-eleven he was a couple of inches shorter than Rebus, maybe ten pounds lighter. He used to box middleweight amateur, southpaw, leaving him one ear which hung lower than the other and a nose which covered half his face. His shorn hair was salt-and-pepper. Married, three sons. Rebus hadn’t seen much at Craigmillar to justify Bain’s hardman rep; he was a regular soldier, a form-filler and by-the-book investigator. Rebus had just dispatched one nemesis — DI Alister Flower, promoted to some Borders outpost, chasing sheep-shaggers and tractor racers — and wasn’t looking to fill the vacancy.

Allan Mitchison’s flat was in a designer block in what wanted to be called ‘the Financial District’. Scrapland off Lothian Road had been transformed into a conference centre and ‘apartments’. A new hotel was in the offing, and an insurance company had grafted its new headquarters on to the Caledonian Hotel. There was room for more expansion, more road-building.

‘Desperate,’ Bain said, parking the car.

Rebus tried to remember the way the area had looked before. He only had to think back a year or two, but found the process difficult nonetheless. Was it just a big hole in the ground, or had they knocked things down? They were half a mile, maybe less, from Torphichen cop-shop; Rebus thought he knew this whole hunting-ground. But now he found that he didn’t know it at all.

There were half a dozen keys on the chain. One of them opened the main door. In the well-lit lobby there was a whole wall of letter-boxes. They found the name Mitchison — flat 312. Rebus used another key to open the box and remove the mail. There was some junk — ‘Open Now! You Could Have Scooped Life’s Jackpot!’ — and a credit-card statement. He opened the statement. Aberdeen HMV, an Edinburgh sports shop — £56.50, the Nikes — and a curry house, also in Aberdeen. A gap of just under two weeks, then the curry house again.

They took the narrow lift to the third floor, Bain shadow-boxing the full-length mirror, and found flat 12. Rebus unlocked the door, saw that an alarm panel was flashing on the wall in the small hallway, and used another key to disable it. Bain found the light-switch and closed the door. The flat smelled of paint and plaster, carpets and varnish — new, uninhabited. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the place, just a telephone on the floor beside an unrolled sleeping-bag.

‘The simple life,’ Bain said.

The kitchen was fully equipped — washing machine, cooker, dishwasher, fridge — but the seal was still across the door of the washer-drier and the fridge contained only its instruction manual, a spare lightbulb, and a set of risers. There was a swing-bin in the cupboard beneath the sink. When you opened the door, the lid of the bin opened automatically. Inside, Rebus saw two crushed beer cans and the red-stained wrappings from what smelled like a kebab. The flat’s solitary bedroom was bare, no clothes in the built-in wardrobe, not even a coat-hanger. But Bain was dragging something out of the tiny bathroom. It was a blue rucksack, a Karrimor.

‘Looks like he came in, had a wash, changed clothes and buggered off out again pronto.’

They started emptying the rucksack. Apart from clothing, they found a personal stereo and some tapes — Soundgarden, Crash Test Dummies, Dancing Pigs — and a copy of Iain Banks’s Whit .

‘I meant to buy that,’ Rebus said.

‘Take it now. Who’s watching?’

Rebus looked at Bain. The eyes seemed innocent, but he shook his head anyway. He couldn’t go handing anyone any more ammunition. He pulled a carrier bag out of one of the side pockets: new tapes — Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Dancing Pigs again. The receipt was from HMV in Aberdeen.

‘My guess,’ Rebus said: ‘he worked in Furry Boot town.’

From the other side pocket, Bain produced a pamphlet, folded in four. He unfolded it, opened it, and let Rebus see what it was. There was a colour photograph of an oil platform on the front, beneath a headline: ‘T-BIRD OIL — STRIKING THE BALANCE’, and a sub-head: ‘Decommissioning Offshore Installations — A Modest Proposal’. Inside, besides a few paragraphs of writing, there were colour charts, diagrams and statistics. Rebus read the opening sentence:

‘“In the beginning there were microscopic organisms, living and dying in the rivers and seas many millions of years ago.”’ He looked up at Bain. ‘And they gave their lives so that millions of years on we can tank around in cars.’

‘I get the feeling Spike maybe worked for an oil company.’

‘His name was Allan Mitchison,’ Rebus said quietly.

It was getting light when Rebus finally arrived home. He turned the hi-fi on so that it was just audible, then rinsed a glass in the kitchen and poured an inch of Laphroaig, adding a dribble of water from the tap. Some malts demanded water. He sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the newspapers laid out there, cuttings from the Johnny Bible case, photocopies of old Bible John stuff. He’d spent a day in the National Library, fast-tracking the years 1968–70, winding a blur of microfilm through the machine. Stories had leapt out at him. Rosyth was to lose its Royal Navy Commander; plans were announced for a £50 million petrochemical complex at Invergordon; Camelot was showing at the ABC.