10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (168 page)

‘Story goes,’ said the constable, ‘there was a plague in the 1600s, people died or moved out, never really moved back. Then there was a fire. They blocked off the ends of the street. When they rebuilt, they built over the top of the close.’ He shone his torch towards the ceiling, which was now three or four storeys above them. ‘See that marble slab? That’s the floor of the City Chambers.’ He smiled. ‘I came on the tour last year.’

‘Incredible,’ the doctor said. Then to Rebus: ‘I’m Dr Galloway.’

‘Inspector Rebus. Thanks for getting here so quickly.’

The doctor ignored this. ‘You’re a friend of Dr Aitken’s, aren’t you?’

Ah, Patience Aitken. She’d be at home just now, feet tucked under her, a cat and an improving book on her lap, boring classical music in the background. Rebus nodded.

‘I used to share a surgery with her,’ Dr Galloway explained.

They were in the close proper now, a narrow and fairly steep roadway between stone buildings. A rough drainage channel ran down one side of the road. Passages led off to dark alcoves, one of which, according to the constable, housed a bakery, its ovens intact. The constable was beginning to get on Rebus’s nerves.

There were more ducts and pipes, runs of electric cable. The far end of the close had been blocked off by an elevator shaft. Signs of renovation were all around: bags of cement, scaffolding, pails and shovels. Rebus pointed to an arc lamp.

‘Can we plug that in?’

The constable thought they could. Rebus looked around. The place wasn’t damp or chilled or cobwebbed. The air seemed fresh. Yet they were three or four storeys beneath road level. Rebus took the torch and shone it through a doorway. At the end of the hallway he could see a wooden toilet, its seat raised. The next door along led into a long vaulted room, its walls whitewashed, the floor earthen.

‘That’s the wine shop,’ the constable said. ‘The butcher’s is next door.’

So it was. It too consisted of a vaulted room, again whitewashed and with a floor of packed earth. But in its ceiling were a great many iron hooks, short and blackened but obviously used at one time for hanging up meat.

Meat still hung from one of them.

It was the lifeless body of a young man. His hair was dark and slick, stuck to his forehead and neck. His hands had been tied and the rope slipped over a hook, so that he hung stretched with his knuckles near the ceiling and his toes barely touching the ground. His ankles had been tied together too. There was blood everywhere, a fact made all too plain as the arc lamp suddenly came on, sweeping light and shadows across the walls and roof. There was the faint smell of decay, but no flies, thank God. Dr Galloway swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple seeming to duck for cover, then retreated into the close to be sick. Rebus tried to steady his own heart. He walked around the carcass, keeping his distance initially.

‘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 the 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 the 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 glass and 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 ducking-stool. 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 medical journals. So Rebus drove out along Queensferry Road and parked outside the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Hell, noting with guilty pleasure that no one had yet corrected the mischievous graffiti on the noticeboard which turned ‘Help’ into ‘Hell’.

Inside, the church was empty, cool and quiet and flooded with coloured light from the stained glass. Hoping his timing was good, he slipped into the confessional. There was someone on the other side of the grille.

‘Forgive me, father,’ said Rebus, ‘I’m not even a Catholic.’

‘Ah good, it’s you, you heathen. I was hoping you’d come. I want your help.’

‘Shouldn’t that be my line?’

‘Don’t be bloody cheeky. Come on, let’s have a drink.’

Father Conor Leary was between fifty-five and seventy and had told Rebus that he couldn’t remember which he was nearer. He was a bulky barrelling figure with thick silver hair which sprouted not only from his head but also from ears, nose and the back of his neck. In civvies, Rebus guessed he would pass for a retired dockworker or skilled labourer of some kind who had also been handy as a boxer, and Father Leary had photos and trophies to prove that this last was incontrovertible truth. He often jabbed the air to make a point, finishing with an upper-cut to show that there could be no comeback. In conversation between the two men, Rebus had often wished for a referee.

But today Father Leary sat comfortably and sedately enough in the deckchair in his garden. It was a beautiful early evening, warm and clear with the trace of a cool seaborne breeze.

‘A great day to go hot-air ballooning,’ said Father Leary, taking a swig from his glass of Guinness. ‘Or bungee jumping. I believe they’ve set up something of the sort on The Meadows, just for the duration of the Festival. Man, I’d like to try that.’

Rebus blinked but said nothing. His Guinness was cold enough to double as dental anaesthetic. He shifted in his own deckchair, which was by far the older of the two. Before sitting, he’d noticed how threadbare the canvas was, how it had been rubbed away where it met the horizontal wooden spars. He hoped it would hold.

‘Do you like my garden?’

Rebus looked at the bright blooms, the trim grass. ‘I don’t know much about gardens,’ he admitted.

‘Me neither. It’s not a sin. But there’s an old chap I know who does know about them, and he looks after this one for a few bob.’ He raised his glass towards his lips. ‘So how are you keeping?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘And Dr Aitken?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘And the two of you are still . . .?’

‘Just about.’

Father Leary nodded. Rebus’s tone was warning him off. ‘Another bomb threat, eh? I heard on the radio.’

‘It could be a crank.’

‘But you’re not sure?’

‘The IRA usually use codewords, just so we know they’re serious.’

Father Leary nodded to himself. ‘And a murder too?’

Rebus gulped his drink. ‘I was there.’

‘They don’t even stop for the Festival, do they? Whatever must the tourists think?’ Father Leary’s eyes were sparkling.

‘It’s about time the tourists learned the truth,’ Rebus said, a bit too quickly. He sighed. ‘It was pretty gruesome.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. I shouldn’t have been so flippant.’

‘That’s all right. It’s a defence.’

‘You’re right, it is.’

Rebus knew this. It was the reason behind his many little jokes with Dr Curt. It was their way of avoiding the obvious, the undeniable. Even so, since last night Rebus had held in his mind the picture of that sad strung-up figure, a young man they hadn’t even identified yet. The picture would stay there forever. Everybody had a photographic memory for horror. He’d climbed back out of Mary King’s Close to find the High Street aglow with a firework display, the streets thronged with people staring up open-mouthed at the blues and greens in the night sky. The fireworks were coming from the Castle; the night’s Tattoo display was ending. He hadn’t felt much like talking to Mairie Henderson. In fact, he had snubbed her.