Ian Rankin: Mortal Causes

'Tell me,' he said.

`Well, sir,' the constable began, 'the three young people upstairs, they decided to come down here. The place had been closed to tours while the building work goes on, but they wanted to come down at night. There are a lot of ghost stories told about this place, headless dogs and `How did they get a key?’

`The boy's great-uncle, he's one of the tour guides, a retired planner or something.’

`So they came looking for ghosts and they found this.’

`That's right, sir. They ran back up to the High Street and bumped into PC Andrews and me. We thought they were having us on at first, like.’

But Rebus was no longer listening, and when he spoke it wasn't to the constable.

'You poor little bastard, look what they did to you.’

Though it was against regulations, he leaned forward and touched the young man's hair. It was still slightly damp. He'd probably died on Friday night, and was meant to hang here over the weekend, enough time for any trail, any clues, to grow as cold as his bones.

`What do you reckon, sir?’

`Gunshots.’ Rebus looked to where blood had sprayed the wall. `Something high-velocity. Head, elbows, knees, and ankles.’ He sucked in breath. `He's been six-packed.’

There were shuffling noises in the close, and the wavering beam of another torch. Two figures stood in the doorway, their bodies silhouetted by the arc lamp.

`Cheer up, Dr Galloway,' a male voice boomed to the hapless figure still crouched in the close. Recognising the voice, Rebus smiled.

'Ready when you are, Dr Curt,' he said.

The pathologist stepped into the chamber and shook Rebus's hand. `The hidden city, quite a revelation.’

His companion, a woman, stepped forward to join them, `Have the two of you met?’

Dr Curt sounded like the host at a luncheon party. 'Inspector Rebus, this is Ms Rattray from the Procurator Fiscal's office.’

'Caroline Rattray.’

She shook Rebus's hand. She was tall, as tall as either man, with long dark hair tied at the back.

`Caroline and I,' Curt was saying, 'were enjoying supper after the ballet when the call came. So I thought I'd drag her along, kill two birds with one stone… so to speak.’

Curt exhaled fumes of good food and good wine. Both he and the lawyer were dressed for an evening out, and already some white plaster-dust had smudged Caroline Rattray's black jacket. As Rebus moved to brush off the dust, she caught her first sight of the body, and looked away quickly, Rebus didn't blame her, but Curt was advancing on tie figure as though towards another guest at the party. He paused to put on polythene overshoes.

'I always carry some in my car,' he explained. `You never know when they'll be needed.’

He got close to the body and examined the head first, before looking back towards Rebus..

`Dr Galloway had a look, has he?’

Rebus shook his head slowly. He knew what was coming. He'd seen Curt examine headless bodies and mangled bodies and bodies that were little more than torsos or melted to the consistency of lard, and the pathologist always said the same thing.

`Poor chap's dead.’

'Thank you.’

'I take it the crew are on their way?’

Rebus nodded. The crew were on their way. A van to start with, loaded with everything they'd need for the initial scene of crime investigation. SOC officers, lights and cameras, strips of tape, evidence bags, and of course a bodybag. Sometimes a forensic team came too, if cause of death looked particularly murky or the scene was a mess.

'I think,' said Curt, 'the Procurator Fiscal's office will agree that foul play is suspected?’

Rattray nodded, still not looking.

'Well, it wasn't suicide,'- commented Rebus. Caroline Rattray turned towards the wall, only to find herself facing the sprays of blood. She turned instead to the doorway, where Dr Galloway was dabbing his mouth with a handkerchief.

'We'd better get someone to fetch me my tools.’

Curt was studying the ceiling. `Any idea what this place was?’

`A butcher's shop, sir,' said the constable, only too happy to help. 'There's a wine shop too, and some houses. You can still go into them.’

He turned to Rebus. 'Sir, what's a six-pack?’

`A six-pack?’ echoed Curt.

Rebus stared at the hanging body. 'It's a punishment,` he said quietly. 'Only you're not supposed to die. What's that on the floor?’

He was pointing to the dead man's feet, to the spot where they grazed the dark-stained ground.

'Looks like rats have been nibbling his toes,' said Curt.

'No, not that.’

There were shallow grooves in the earth, so wide they must have been made with a big toe. Four crude capital letters were discernible.

'Is that Neno or Nemo?’

'Could even be Memo,' offered Dr Curt.

'Captain Nemo,' said the constable. 'He's the guy in 2,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea.’

'Jules Verne,' said Curt, nodding.

The constable shook his head. `No, sir, Walt Disney,' he said.

On Sunday morning Rebus and Dr Patience Aitken decided to get away from it all by staying in bed. He nipped out early for croissants and papers from the local corner shop, and they ate breakfast from a tray on top of the bedcovers, sharing sections of the newspapers, discarding more than they read.

There was no mention of the previous night's grisly find in Mary King's Close. The news had seeped out too late for publication. But Rebus knew there would be something about it on the local radio news, so he was quite content for once when Patience tuned the bedside radio to a classical station.

He should have come off his shift at midnight, but murder tended to disrupt the system of shifts. On a murder inquiry, you stopped working when you reasonably could. Rebus had hung around till two in the morning, consulting with the night shift about the corpse in Mary King's Close. He'd contacted his Chief Inspector and Chief Super, and kept in touch with Fettes HQ, where the forensic stuff' had gone. DI Flower kept telling him to go home. Finally he'd taken tile advice.

The real problem with back shifts was that Rebus couldn't sleep well after them anyway. He'd managed four hours since arriving home, and four hours would suffice. But there was a warm pleasure in slipping into bed as dawn neared, curling against the body already asleep there. And even more pleasure in pushing the cat off the bed as you did so.

Before retiring, he'd swallowed four measures of whisky He told himself it was purely medicinal, but rinsed the put it away, hoping Patience wouldn't notice. She` complained often of his drinking, among other things.

`We're eating out,' she said now.

`When?’

'Lunch today.’

`Where?’

`That place out at Carlops.’

Rebus nodded. `Witch's Leap,' he said.

`What?’

`That's what Carlops means. There's a big rock there. They used to throw suspected witches from it. If you didn't fly, you were innocent.’

`But also dead?’

`Their judicial system wasn't perfect, witness the duckingstool. Same principle.’

`How do you know all this?’

`It's amazing what these young constables know nowadays.’

He paused. 'About lunch… I should go into work.’

`Oh no, you don't.’

`Patience, there's been a-‘

`John, there'll be a murder here if we don't start spending some time together. Phone in sick.’

`I can't do that.’

`Then I'll do it. I’m a doctor, they'll believe me.’

They believed her.

They walked off lunch by taking a look at Carlops Rock, and then braving a climb onto the Pentlands, despite the fierce horizontal winds. Back in Oxford Terrace, Patience eventually said she had some `office things' to do, which meant filing or tax or flicking through the-latest media: journals. So Rebus drove out along Queensferry Road and parked outside the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual noting with guilty pleasure that no one had yet corrected the mischievous graffiti on the noticeboard which turned 'Help' into `Hell'.