Ian Rankin: Let It Bleed

‘I’m not very good at this.’

‘Don’t blame yourself, blame your genes. Do you want to meet?’

‘Not tonight, I’m dog-tired. Patience asked … she wondered if you’d like to come to tea some day. She thinks we should see more of one another.’

As usual, thought Rebus, Patience was right. ‘I’d like that. When?’

‘I’ll ask Patience and get back to you. Deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘Well, I’m off for an early night. What about you?’

Rebus looked down at his chair. ‘I’m already there. Sleep tight.’

‘You too, Dad. Love you.’

‘You too, pet,’ Rebus said quietly, but only after he’d put down the phone.

He went over to the hi-fi. After a drink, he liked to listen to the Stones. Women, relationships, and colleagues had come and gone, but the Stones had always been there. He put the album on and poured himself a last drink. The guitar riff, one of easily half a dozen in Keith’s tireless repertoire, kicked the album off. I don’t have much, Rebus thought, but I have this. He thought of Lauderdale in his hospital bed; Patience out enjoying herself; Kirstie Kennedy in a Charing Cross cardboard-box. Then he saw cheap trainers, a final embrace, and Willie Coyle’s face.

Rebus just couldn’t seem to drink him off his mind.

He remembered the report he’d found hidden in Willie’s bedroom. It was on the kitchen worktop, and he went to fetch it. It was a business plan, something to do with a computer software company called LABarum. The text explained that the dictionary definition of ‘labarum’ was ‘moral standard or guide’, and the reason the company would use upper case for the first three letters was to emphasise L othian A nd B orders. The business plan discussed future development, costings, projected balance sheet, employment range. It was dry, and it was couched in the conditional. Rebus got out the phone book but found no listing anywhere for LABarum.

Someone had been working on the text, underlining some phrases, circling words, doing jotted calculations beside the graphs and bar charts. Sentences had been deleted in red pen, words changed. Some points had been ticked. Rebus couldn’t know if the handwriting was Willie Coyle’s. He didn’t know if Willie had owned such a thing as a red Biro. But he did wonder what such a document was doing hidden in Willie Coyle’s bedroom. When he turned to the last sheet, there was a word scrawled diagonally across it and underlined heavily. The word was DALGETY. He flipped through the report again but found no other mention of Dalgety. Was it a person, a place, another company? The word was scored into the paper in blue ink. It was impossible to say if it was in the same hand as the amendments and marginalia.

He poured another drink — this would be his last — and flipped the album over. He was annoyed, more with himself than anyone. It was case closed after all: a couple of desperate hoaxers fell off a bridge and died. That was all. He should have cleared it from his mind by now. Yet he couldn’t.

‘Damn you, Willie,’ he said out loud. He sat down again with his drink and picked up the business plan. There were a couple of letters in the top right-hand corner, written faintly in pencil. CK. He wondered if they were an abbreviation for ‘check’.

‘Who cares?’ he said, trying to concentrate on the music. What a shambles the band were, yet sometimes they could get it so exactly right that it hurt.

‘Here’s to you, Willie,’ Rebus said, raising his glass in the air.

It wasn’t till he woke up in the morning freezing that he remembered the radiator key in his jacket pocket. The pipes were gurgling, the boiler roaring away, yet the radiators were barely warm.

He got coffee and a bacon roll from a cafe and had breakfast in his car on the way to work. There was a hard frost on the ground, and the sky was leaden, threatening worse. It had taken him five minutes to scrape the ice off his windscreen, and even so it was like driving a tank, peering through the one clear slit.

A message on his desk warned of a nine-thirty meeting in the Farmer’s office. Rebus felt he deserved another coffee, and made for the canteen. A lone woman sat at a table, slowly stirring a beaker of tea.

‘Gill?’

She looked up. It was Gill Templer. Rebus’s face broke into its first grin of the year. He pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘Hello, John.’ Her eyes were on her drink.

‘I thought you were in Fife.’

‘Yes.’

‘Sex Offences Unit, isn’t it?’

‘That’s it.’

He nodded, trying to ignore the coolness in her tone. ‘You look good.’ He meant it too. Her short dark hair was feather-cut, long crescents sweeping over both ears to her cheeks. Her eyes were emerald green. She hadn’t changed a bit. Gill Templer smiled an acknowledgment but didn’t say anything.

Brian Holmes put a hand on Rebus’s shoulder. ‘Those pathology tests have come in.’

‘Oh?’

Holmes went to fetch himself coffee and a dough-ring, Rebus following. ‘So what’s the news?’ he asked.

Holmes took a bite out of his dough-ring and shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he mumbled, swallowing. ‘The professor can’t confirm the presence of heroin or any other drug in the blood of either deceased. He thinks he may have a couple of jab marks on one corpse, but they’re not recent.’

‘Which body?’

‘The shorter.’

‘Dixie.’ Rebus lifted his coffee and left Holmes to pay for it. When he turned, Gill Templer wasn’t at the table any more. She had left the beaker of tea untouched.

‘Who was she?’ Holmes asked, tucking change back into his pocket.

‘Someone I used to know.’

‘Well, that narrows things down.’

Rebus picked a new table for them to sit at.

DI Alister Flower looked like he was on his way to a fashion shoot for one of the stores on Princes Street.

‘Run out of dummies, have they?’ Rebus asked, entering Farmer Watson’s office.

Flower was wearing a light blue suit with blue shirt and a black and white tie with a zig-zag motif. He’d set things off with polished brown loafers and what looked like white tennis socks. Rebus sat down next to him and realised his own shoes could do with a polish. There was a speck of grease from the bacon roll on his shirt.

‘I’ve called this meeting,’ the Farmer was saying, ‘to put your minds at rest.’

‘Inspector Flower’s mind’s always at rest, sir,’ Rebus said.

Flower attempted an unselfconscious laugh, and Rebus realised how desperate the man was.

‘See, John,’ said the Farmer, ‘you always have to make a joke of things.’

‘Leave them laughing, sir.’ But the Farmer wasn’t laughing, and Rebus knew what that silence meant — as long as Rebus maintained ‘an attitude’, he’d find promotion impossible.

Which left Alister Flower.

‘Aly,’ the Farmer began. Flower sat to attention; Rebus had never seen the trick before. ‘Aly, can I get you a refill?’

Flower looked at his cup, then gulped the contents down. ‘Please, sir.’

The Farmer got up from his desk, took Flower’s cup, and walked to the coffee machine. He had his back to both men when he spoke.

‘The temporary replacement for Frank Lauderdale will start immediately.’

It hit Rebus then. It was like he’d assumed a new, much greater mass.

‘Her name,’ the Farmer went on, ‘is Gill Templer.’

Flower made straight for the toilets, where he could conduct a swearing match with the mirror. Rebus walked thoughtfully back to the CID room. Gill was already there, reading a pathology report.

‘Congratulations,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’ She kept on reading. He didn’t budge till she stopped and looked up at him. ‘John?’ she said quietly.