Ian Rankin - The Impossible Dead

‘Eminem,’ Naysmith stated.

‘Just sounds like noise to me,’ Tony Kaye muttered.

Teresa Collins was seated in an armchair in her uncluttered living room, dangling one leg over the side and with a lit cigarette in her mouth. She wore black Lycra leggings and a purple T-shirt with the words Porn Star picked out in diamante.

‘No need to spruce yourself up on our account,’ Kaye told her, examining a 3-D poster of Beyonce above the fireplace. The music from downstairs was causing the windowpanes to vibrate.

‘I forgot to ask,’ Collins said. ‘Should I maybe have called my lawyer?’

‘You’re the victim here,’ Fox reminded her, introducing himself, Kaye and Naysmith. There was one other armchair, but it was piled high with laundry. When it came to underwear, Teresa Collins seemed to favour the thong.

‘Victim is right,’ she said, taking another drag on the cigarette. There was a flat-screen TV and Freeview box in one corner of the room. On an otherwise empty bookcase sat the dock and speakers for an MP3 player. The beige carpet had collected an impressive number of ash burns.

‘Everybody needs good neighbours, eh?’ Kaye announced, thumping the floor with the heel of his shoe.

‘They’re all right.’ The foot hanging over the arm of the chair was keeping time, while Collins’s other knee pumped furiously.

‘Few uppers to counteract the methadone?’ Fox guessed.

‘You won’t find anything that’s not prescribed,’ she snapped back.

‘We’re not looking for anything. As I said on the phone, it’s Carter’s colleagues we’re checking.’

‘So you say.’

‘It’d be nice if you believed me.’

She looked like she was having trouble focusing on him. ‘Go ahead, then,’ she said at last. ‘Ask me the same bloody questions…’

‘DI Carter used to come here?’

‘Aye.’

‘Some of your neighbours saw him?’

‘They said so, didn’t they?’

‘Wasn’t very discreet of him. What about his colleagues – they never came in?’

‘Scholes did, one time. But that was early days, when they were wanting me to be a grass.’

‘Scholes was never here when Carter was after one of these “favours”?’

She shook her head. ‘Might’ve waited in the car.’ She was looking agitated. ‘When you lot got wise, it was Scholes who phoned me, tried to warn me off.’

‘I know it can’t be easy, going back over this.’

‘I thought it was done with. Is this what happens now? He’s going down, so you lot keep persecuting me till I go off my head or do myself in?’

Fox didn’t answer for a moment. ‘You know there are charities that can help, numbers you can phone?’

‘Rape Crisis? All that lot?’ She shook her head determinedly. ‘I just want left alone.’ She exhaled a plume of smoke and brushed flecks of ash from her T-shirt. ‘Now he’s inside, that’s all I’m asking…’

‘What if he’s not inside?’ As soon as the words were out of Naysmith’s mouth, he knew he’d made a mistake: the combined glower from Fox and Kaye intimated as much.

‘You mean he’s out?’ The pale eyes in the paler face had widened.

‘You should have been told,’ Fox said quietly.

‘He’s…?’ Collins got to her feet and padded over to the window, staring down on to the street.

‘He’s been warned not to come within half a mile of you,’ Fox tried to reassure her. ‘If he does, he’s back inside pronto.’

‘Well that’s just dandy,’ she said, voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘Carter’s bound to stick to that, isn’t he? Law-abiding prick like him …’

She spun away from the window. ‘What if I say it’s all a lie? I made it up to get him into bother?’

‘Then you’ll be the one under lock and key,’ Fox cautioned her. He placed his business card on the arm of the chair. ‘My number’s there – any sign of him, call me.’

‘You’re here to threaten me,’ Teresa Collins stated, pointing a trembling finger. ‘Three of you – that’s intimidation enough. Plus your story about him being out… This is me being told, isn’t it? Scholes and Haldane and Michaelson, and now you three.’

‘I can assure you we’re-’

‘I’ll go to the papers! That’s what I’ll do! I’ll scream blue murder.’

‘Will you calm down, Teresa?’ Fox had his hands held up in a show of surrender. He took a step forwards, but she had spun round again and pulled the window open.

‘Help!’ she screamed. ‘Somebody help me!’

Fox saw that Kaye was looking at him, waiting for a decision.

‘I’ll call you,’ Fox told Collins, raising his voice in the hope she might hear. ‘Later, when you’ve had a chance to…’

He signalled to Kaye and Naysmith that they were leaving. The neighbours upstairs were looking down at them from the landing.

‘She’s hysterical,’ Fox explained, starting his descent. Nobody from the ground-floor party had heard – or if they had, they couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. But the kids were outside on the pavement, facing Fox and his colleagues as they emerged. Fox had his warrant card out for them to see.

‘Back off,’ he told them.

‘Youse’ve raped her,’ one voice said accusingly.

‘She’s just upset.’

‘Aye, and who did that, eh? Youse did…’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Tony Kaye burst out. ‘Look at my car!’

The contents of a waste bin had been tipped over the bonnet and windscreen: fast-food cartons, cigarette butts, crushed beer cans, and what looked like the remains of a dead pigeon.

‘Car wash down the road, only three quid,’ one of the gang suggested.

‘Five if you tell them you’re a pig,’ another added.

There was laughter, for which Fox was grateful. The situation was being defused – and Teresa Collins had stopped yelling and closed her window.

Tony Kaye, however, looked furious. He lunged at the youths, Fox hauling him back by his arm.

‘Easy, Tony, easy. Let’s just get out of here, eh?’

‘But these wee wankers-’

‘In the car,’ Fox commanded. Kaye waited another couple of beats before complying, using the wipers to brush aside some of the debris, and reversing hard to dislodge more from the bonnet.

‘Swear to God I’m coming back here with a bat,’ he muttered, as the gang jogged along by the side of the car, giving it the occasional kick or slap. He revved the engine and shot away in first, doing a U-turn that got rid of almost all the remaining rubbish.

‘Forget it, Kaye,’ Joe Naysmith said. ‘It’s Gallatown.’

‘Think you’re funny, eh?’ Tony Kaye leaned over and gave him a hard punch to the side of his head. ‘Laugh now, ya wee shite-bag…’

‘That was quick,’ Malcolm Fox said into his phone. Evelyn Mills was on the other end of the line. The eavesdropping operation had been given the green light.

‘My boss decided we didn’t need to refer it upwards,’ she explained.

‘Why not?’

‘My guess is, he reckons it might have been knocked back.’

‘I like the sound of your boss.’

‘He reminds me a bit of you, actually.’

‘Then I’m flattered. How long till you’re operational?’

‘Need a telephone engineer to help us with the landline.’

‘Us?’

‘I’ve got help: two youngsters from CID. Mobile phone will take longer – first things we’ll have access to are numbers called and calls received…’ She broke off. ‘You know all this already.’

‘True.’

He heard her give a short sigh. ‘It’ll be end of play today for the landline; some time tomorrow for everything else. Unlikely Scholes would bother e-mailing Carter, so I was going to skip the key-stroke surveillance.’