Ian Rankin: The Naming of the Dead

“I’m spending two days with DCI Macrae,” Siobhan was saying. “What’s to gloat about?”

Rebus unlocked his car and leaned in to slide the key into the ignition. He straightened again, took a last drag on his cigarette, and flicked the butt onto the roadway. Siobhan was saying something about a Scene of Crime team.

“Hold on,” Rebus told her. “I didn’t catch that.”

“Look, you’ve got enough on your plate without this.”

“Without what?”

“Remember Cyril Colliar?”

“Despite my advancing years, the memory’s not quite packed in.”

“Something really strange has happened.”

“What?”

“I think I’ve found the missing piece.”

“Of what?”

“The jacket.”

Rebus found that he’d lowered himself onto the driver’s seat. “I don’t understand.”

Siobhan gave a nervous laugh. “Me neither.”

“So where are you now?”

“Auchterarder.”

“And that’s where the jacket’s turned up?”

“Sort of.”

Rebus swung his legs into the car and pulled the door shut. “Then I’m coming to take a look. Is Macrae with you?”

“He went to Glenrothes. That’s where the G8 control center is.” She paused. “Are you sure you should be doing this?”

Rebus had started the engine. “I need to make my apologies first, but I can be there inside the hour. Will I have any trouble getting into Auchterarder?”

“It’s the calm before the storm. When you’re driving through town, look for the sign to the Clootie Well.”

“The what?”

“Easier if you just come and see for yourself.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do. Scene of Crime on their way?”

“Yes.”

“Which means word will get around.”

“Should I tell the DCI?”

“I’ll let you decide.” Rebus had wedged the phone between his shoulder and his cheek so he could steer the maze-like course to the gates of the crematorium.

“You’re breaking up,” Siobhan said.

Not if I can help it, Rebus thought to himself.

Cyril Colliar had been murdered six weeks before. Age twenty, he’d been locked away on a fixed ten-year stretch for a vicious rape. At the end of the sentence, he’d been released, despite the reservations of prison warders, police, and social services. They figured he was as big a threat as ever, having shown no remorse, denying his guilt despite DNA evidence. Colliar had returned to his native Edinburgh. All the bodybuilding he’d done in prison paid off. He worked as a nighttime bouncer and daytime muscle. His employer on both counts was Morris Gerald Cafferty. Big Ger was a villain of long standing. In had been Rebus’s job to confront him about his latest employee.

“What do I care?” had been the retort.

“He’s dangerous.”

“Way you’re hassling him would try the patience of a saint.” Cafferty swinging from side to side on his leather swivel chair, behind his desk at MGC Lettings. Anyone was slow with the weekly rent on one of Cafferty’s flats, Rebus guessed that was where Colliar would take over. Cafferty owned minicabs, too, and at least three raucous bars in the less salubrious parts of town. Plenty of work for Cyril Colliar.

Right up until the night he’d turned up dead. Skull caved in, the blow coming from behind. Pathologist figured he’d have died from that alone, but just to make sure, someone had added a syringe of very pure heroin. No indication that the deceased had been a user. Deceased was the word most of the cops on the case had used-and grudgingly at that. Nobody bothered with the term victim. Nobody could say the words out loud-Bastard got what he deserved-that wasn’t the done thing these days.

Didn’t stop them from thinking it, sharing it through eye contact and slow nods. Rebus and Siobhan had worked the case, but it had been one among many. Few leads and too many suspects. The rape victim had been interviewed, along with her family and her boyfriend from the time. One word kept coming up in discussing Colliar’s fate: “Good.”

His body had been found near his car, down a side street next to the bar where he’d been working. No witnesses, no scene-of-crime evidence. Just the one curiosity: a sharp blade had been used to slice away part of his distinctive jacket, a black nylon bomber emblazoned with the phrase CC Rider on the back. This was what had been removed, so that the white inner lining was revealed. Theories were in short supply. It was either a clumsy attempt to disguise the deceased’s identity, or there had been something hidden in the lining. Tests had proved negative for traces of drugs, leaving the police to shrug and scratch their heads.

To Rebus, it looked like a hit. Either Colliar had made an enemy, or a message was being sent to Cafferty. Not that their several interviews with Colliar’s employer had been enlightening.

“Bad for my reputation” was Cafferty’s main reaction. “Means either you catch whoever did it…”

“Or?”

But Cafferty hadn’t needed to answer. And if Cafferty got to the culprit first, it would be the last that was ever heard of them.

None of which had helped. The inquiry had hit a wall around the same time G8 preparations started focusing minds-most of them driven by images of overtime pay-elsewhere. Other cases had intruded, too, with victims-real victims. The Colliar murder team had been wound down.

Rebus lowered his driver’s-side window, welcoming the cool breeze. He didn’t know the quickest route to Auchterarder; he knew Gleneagles could be reached from Kinross, so had headed that way. A couple of months back, he’d bought a GPS for the car, but he hadn’t got round to reading the instructions yet. It lay on the passenger seat, screen blank. One of these days he’d take it to the garage that installed the car’s CD player. An inspection of the backseat, floors, and trunk had failed to turn up anything by The Who, so Rebus was listening to Elbow instead-Siobhan’s recommendation. He liked the title track, “Leaders of the Free World.” Stuck it on repeat. The singer seemed to think something had gone wrong since the ’60s. Rebus tended to agree, even coming at it from a different direction. He guessed the singer would have liked more change, a world run by Greenpeace and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, poverty made history. Rebus had been on a few marches himself in the ’60s, before and after joining the army. It was a way to meet girls if nothing else. Usually there was a party somewhere afterward. These days, though, he saw the ’60s as the end of something. A fan had been stabbed to death at a Stones concert in 1969, and the decade had petered out. The 1960s had given youth a taste for revolt. They didn’t trust the old order, certainly didn’t respect it. He wondered about the thousands who would descend on Gleneagles, confrontation a certainty. Hard to imagine it in this landscape of farms and hillsides, rivers and glens. He knew that Gleneagles’s very isolation would have been a factor in its choice as venue. The leaders of the free world would be safe there, safe to sign their names to decisions that had already been made elsewhere. On the stereo, the band was singing about climbing a landslide. The image stuck with Rebus all the way to the outskirts of Auchterarder.

He didn’t think he’d been there before. All the same, he seemed to know the place. Typical small Scottish town: a single, well-defined main street with narrow side roads leading off, built with the notion that people would walk to their local shops. Small, independently owned shops at that; he didn’t see much that would inflame the antiglobalization campaigners. The baker was even selling limited-edition G8 pies.

The good folk of Auchterarder, Rebus seemed to recall, had been vetted under the guise of providing them with ID badges. These would be necessary so they could cross the eventual barricades. Yet as Siobhan had pointed out, there was an eerie tranquillity to the place. Only a few shoppers and one carpenter who seemed to be measuring windows for protective boards. The cars were muddy 4x4s, which had probably spent more time on farm tracks than motorways. One woman driver was even wearing a head scarf, something Rebus hadn’t seen in a while. Within a couple of minutes, he was at the far end of town and heading toward the A9. He did a three-point turn and this time kept his eyes open for signposts. The one he wanted was next to a pub, pointing down a lane. He signaled, following the road past hedges and driveways, then a newer housing estate. The landscape opened before him, showing distant hills. In moments he was out of town again, flanked by neat hedgerows that would leave their mark on his car if he had to make way for a tractor or delivery van. There were some woods to his left, and another sign told him this was home to the Clootie Well. He knew the word from clootie dumpling, a sticky steamed dessert his mother had sometimes made. He remembered the taste and texture as being similar to Christmas pudding, dark and cloying and sugary. His stomach gave a small protest, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten in hours. His stop at the hotel had been brief, a few quiet words with Chrissie. She’d hugged him, just as she had back at the house earlier that morning. All the years he’d known her, there hadn’t been many hugs. In the early days, he’d actually fancied her; awkward under the circumstances. She’d seemed to sense this. Then he’d been best man at the wedding, and, during one dance, she’d blown mischievously in his ear. Later, on the few occasions when she and Mickey had been separated, Rebus had taken his brother’s side. He supposed he could have called her, said something, but he hadn’t. And when Mickey had gotten into that spot of bother, ended up in jail, Rebus hadn’t visited Chrissie and the kids. Mind you, he hadn’t visited Mickey that often either, in jail or since.