Ian Rankin - Resurrection Men

“Was it tea or coffee you were after?”

“I think I’m capable of pushing the button myself,” Linford told him. Hynds realized he was trying too hard, took half a step back.

“Besides,” Linford added, “knowing this machine, it hardly makes any difference.” He managed a smile, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Why him?” Siobhan asked.

She was in DCS Templer’s office. Gill Templer had just got off the phone and was scribbling a note in the margin of a typewritten sheet.

“Why not?”

It struck Siobhan that Templer hadn’t been chief super back then. She didn’t know the full story.

“There’s . . .” — she found herself echoing Hynds’s word — “history.” Templer glanced up. “Between DI Linford and DI Rebus,” Siobhan went on.

“But DI Rebus is no longer part of this team.” Templer lifted the sheet of paper as if to read it.

“I know that, ma’am.”

Templer peered at her. “Then what’s the problem?”

Siobhan took the whole office in with a sweep of her eyes. Window and filing cabinets, potted plant, a couple of family photographs. She wanted it. She wanted someday to be sitting where Gill Templer was.

Which meant not giving up her secrets.

Which meant seeming strong, not rocking the boat.

“Nothing, ma’am.” She turned towards the door, reached out for the handle.

“Siobhan.” The voice was more human. “I respect your loyalty to DI Rebus, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing.”

Siobhan nodded, keeping her face to the door. When her boss’s phone rang again, she made what she felt was a dignified exit. Back in the murder room, she checked her screen saver. No one had tampered with it. Then she had a thought, and walked the short distance back across the corridor, knocking on the door, putting her head around without waiting. Templer put a hand across the receiver’s mouthpiece.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice once again iron.

“Cafferty,” Siobhan said simply. “I want to be the one who interviews him.”

Rebus was slowly circling the long oval table. Night had fallen, but the slat blinds remained open. The table was strewn with stuff from the box-files. What it lacked as yet was some order. Rebus didn’t think it was his job to impose order, yet that was what he was doing. He knew that come the morning, the rest of the team might want to rearrange everything, but at least he’d have tried.

Interview transcripts, reports from the door-to-door inquiries, medical and pathology, forensics and Scene of Crime . . . There was a lot of background on the victim, as was to be expected: how could they hope to solve the crime until they had a motive? The area’s prostitutes had been reluctant to come forward. No one had claimed Eric Lomax as a client. It didn’t help that there had been a series of murders of Glasgow prostitutes and that the police had been accused of not caring. Nor did it help that Lomax — known to his associates as Rico — had operated on the fringes of the city’s criminal community.

In short, Rico Lomax was a lowlife. And even on this morning’s evidence, Rebus could see that some of the officers on the original inquiry had felt that all his demise did was erase another name from the game. One or two of the Resurrection Men had mooted similar feelings.

“Why give us a scumbag to work on?” Stu Sutherland had asked. “Give us a case we want to see solved.”

Which remark had earned him a roasting from DCI Tennant. They had to want to see all their cases solved. Rebus had watched Tennant throughout, wondering why the Lomax case had been chosen. Could it be random chance, or something altogether more threatening?

There was a box of newspapers from the time. A lot of interest had been shown in them, not least because they brought back memories. Rebus sat himself down now and leafed through a couple. The official opening of the Skye Road Bridge . . . Raith Rovers in the UEFA Cup . . . a bantamweight boxer killed in the ring in Glasgow . . .

“Old news,” a voice intoned. Rebus looked up. Francis Gray was standing in the open doorway, feet apart, hands in pockets.

“Thought you were down the pub,” Rebus said.

Gray sniffed as he came in, rubbed a hand across his nose. “We just ended up discussing all this.” He tapped one of the empty box-files. “The lads are on their way over, but looks like you beat us all to it.”

“It was all right when it was just tests and lectures,” Rebus said, leaning back in his chair so he could stretch his spine.

Gray nodded. “But now there’s something for us to take seriously, eh?” He pulled out the chair next to Rebus’s, sat down and concentrated on the open newspaper. “But you seem to be taking it more seriously than most.”

“I just got here first, that’s all.”

“That’s what I mean.” Gray still wasn’t looking at him. He wet a thumb and turned back a page. “You’ve got a bit of a rep, haven’t you, John? Sometimes you get too involved.”

“Oh aye? And you’re here for always toeing the line?”

Gray allowed himself a smile. Rebus could smell beer and nicotine from his clothes. “We’ve all crossed the line sometime, haven’t we? It happens to good cops as well as bad. Maybe you could even say it’s what makes the good cops good. ”

Rebus studied the side of Gray’s head. Gray was at Tulliallan because he’d disobeyed one order too many from a senior officer. Then again, as Gray had said: “My boss was, is, and will forever be a complete and utter arsehole.” A pause. “With respect.” That final phrase had cracked the table up. The problem with most of the Resurrection Men was, they didn’t respect those above them in the pecking order, didn’t trust them to do a good job, make the right decision. Gray’s “Wild Bunch” would be returned to duty only when they’d learned to accept and respond to the hierarchy.

“See,” Gray was saying now, “give me a boss like DCI Tennant any day of the week. Guy like that’s going to call a spade a shovel. You know where you stand with him. He’s old school.”

Rebus was nodding. “At least he’s going to give you a bollocking to your face.”

“And not go shafting you from behind.” Now Gray found himself at the newspaper’s front page. He held it up for Rebus to see: ROSYTH BID BRINGS HOPE OF 5,000 JOBS . . . “Yet we’re still here,” Gray said quietly. “We haven’t quit and they haven’t made us. Why do you think that is?”

“We’d cause too much trouble?” Rebus guessed.

Gray shook his head. “It’s because deep down they understand something. They know that they need us more than we need them.” Now he turned to match Rebus’s gaze, seemed to be waiting for Rebus to say something in reply. But there were voices in the corridor, and then faces in the doorway. Four of them, toting a couple of shopping bags from which were produced cans of beer and lager and a bottle of cheap whiskey. Gray rose to his feet, quickly took over.

“DC Ward, you’re in charge of finding us some mugs or glasses. DC Sutherland, might as well shut the blinds, eh? DI Rebus here has already got the ball rolling. Who knows, maybe we’ll wrap this up tonight and put Archie Tennant’s gas at a peep . . .”

They knew they wouldn’t, but that didn’t stop them trying, starting with a brainstorming session that went all the better for the loosening effects of the alcohol. Some of the theories were wild, and got wilder, but there were nuggets among the dross. Tam Barclay made a list. As Rebus had suspected would happen, the separate clusters of paperwork on the table soon collided, restoring chaos to the whole. He didn’t say anything.

“Rico Lomax wasn’t expecting anything,” Jazz McCullough stated at one point.