10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (213 page)

‘You’d have to have the constitution of an ox to survive this,’ Rebus muttered to himself. The blasts of air against his ears meant he could barely hear what Mairie was saying, and every time he opened his mouth to yell something back, the malevolent air flooded in and attacked his tooth again. Mairie ran to a wall and hunkered down with her back against it. Her cheeks looked as if they’d been sandblasted; which in a sense they had.

Rebus crouched beside her, thankful for the shelter. He liked to take an interest in Mairie, especially now she was a
freelance journalist. He worried about that lack of salary, but she seemed to be doing all right.

‘So,’ he asked, ‘what exactly did you come up with?’

She smiled. ‘You forget, I used to cover local government, regional
and
district councils. It was my first job on the paper. I didn’t have to do much digging.’ She leaned forward and drew a circle in the sand. ‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘Give me some background.’

‘District council, not regional?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, about the only glamorous angle attached to district councildom is the fact of a big budget, which means only the four major cities are worth the candle.’

‘From a journalist’s perspective?’

‘It’s the only perspective I can give.’ She pushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘Therefore, being a district councillor is not an attractive proposition. You’ve got long, boring working hours, requiring you to take time off from your daytime job, plus eating into your evening hours, since a lot of the meetings are evening affairs, as are surgeries if they’re not on a Saturday.’

‘OK, so I won’t be standing for councillor, unless the money compensates.’

Mairie shook her head. ‘It’s not great for such a thankless task. Of course, you can claim expenses, plus if you chair a committee there’s a bonus, but even so . . . For all these reasons and others, you find that councillors tend to fall into one of several groups: retired, unemployed, self-employed, or with an affluent spouse.’

‘The first two because they’ve got lots of time, the last two because they can make time?’

She nodded. ‘Result? A lot of councils are not what you’d call dynamic. Edinburgh’s more interesting than most.’

‘So tell me about Edinburgh.’ Rebus stared out towards Inchkeith Island.

‘Well, we’ve sixty-two wards, Labour holding most of them.’

‘No surprise.’

‘But there isn’t much of a gap between Labour and the Tories, only about seven seats. The Lib-Dems have a few, and the SNP a couple. As to what the council does, if you’d ever had to sit in on their meetings and then write them up as even vaguely interesting prose, you’d know.’

‘Boring?’

‘Most councillors could bore for Britain at the World
Ennui
Cup.’

‘So that’s how you pronounce that word.’ This got him a smile. She didn’t smile much these days, not since she’d led Rebus to a horror above the Crazy Hose Saloon. Rebus looked out to sea. It seemed all whitecaps as far as the horizon.

‘There are all sorts of committees and sub-committees,’ she went on, ‘and the full district council meets once a month. But despite all that, what the council basically does is house people. Glasgow District Council is the biggest landlord in Britain – one hundred and seventy thousand houses. It’s rumoured the district councils were only given the housing portfolio after local government reorganisation so they’d have something to do.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘The Tories wanted to keep housing out of regional council control.’ She sighed at his puzzled look. ‘It’s all to do with politics and it’s all intensely dull.’

‘And the councillors are dull too?’

‘Almost of necessity. Maybe “worthy” would be a better word.’ She looked at him. ‘We’re focusing in nicely on Councillor Tom Gillespie. He chairs an industrial planning committee, looking at economic and property development.
The council has its own department – Economic Development and Estates – and mostly the committee would be checking to ensure that the department is working hard and not trying to fix anything.’

‘Fix? You don’t mean as in repair?’

‘I don’t. Land deals and building contracts can be worth millions. Even repairs to buildings can be worth hundreds of thousands. Suppose I handed you the contract to clean the windows of every council building in the city?’

‘I’d have to buy a new chamois.’

‘You could afford it. The only thing about Gillespie is that he’s ambitious, but that’s nothing new. Twenty years ago, just before the corporation became the district council, Malcolm Rifkind, George Foulkes, and Robin Cook were all councillors. That’s another thing: the district council is about to disappear with effect from April 1996. There are elections coming up so we can install a sort of shadow authority, if anyone bothers to vote.’

‘Any news of crooked deals, bent councillors?’

‘Nothing. Tom Gillespie is a diligent, hard-working councillor with no bad press, no apparent skeletons in his closet, not even any rumours. He’s not a tippler, not a gambler, and he doesn’t cheat on his wife with the secretary –’

‘What makes you say that?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s just one of those things people sometimes do.’ She touched the back of his hand. ‘Do you know something I don’t?’

Rebus stood up. ‘That’d be the day. Which is he, by the way: self-employed? Unemployed?’

‘Wealthy spouse. His wife runs her own business.’

Rebus looked around. ‘Is there a café open somewhere?’

‘We could try the Fun Park.’ She wiped her hands clean of sand. ‘Am I in for an exclusive?’

Rebus rubbed his shoe over the circle she’d made in the sand, obliterating it.

‘Well?’ she persisted.

‘Are you still singing in that country and western band?’

‘Now there’s a subtle change of subject. You were about to answer my question.’

‘What question?’

‘About the exclusive.’

‘No I wasn’t.’ They came off the beach on to the promenade. ‘Can you check a couple of other things for me?’

‘What?’

‘A company name: LABarum.’ He spelt it for her. ‘That’s all I’ve got on it. Plus another name. Dalgety.’

‘A company?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve checked, and there are companies called Dalgety, plus it’s a place name
and
a surname.’

‘So what do you want me to do?’

He shrugged. ‘If you find out anything about LABarum, maybe Dalgety will tie into it.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Oh, I forgot to say, I’m talking to your daughter later on.’

Rebus stopped. ‘You
forgot
to say?’

‘OK, I wasn’t going to tell you. I’m interviewing her on the McAnally suicide.’ Rebus started walking again, Mairie hurrying to catch him up. ‘Any comment you’d like to make at this point, Inspector, strictly
on
the record?’

‘No comment, Miss Henderson,’ Rebus growled.

He’d decided the interview room might prove just
too
much for Helena Proffit, so made an appointment to see her at her work. She worked part-time in an office, on top of her post as Gillespie’s ward secretary. But someone from her office phoned to say Miss Proffit had been taken ill with a migraine and had gone home. He tried her home
number, but got no answer. It could wait. Meantime he made another appointment, this time with the Governor of HM Prison Edinburgh. He told the governor’s secretary that it concerned the suicide of an ex-inmate. The secretary booked him in for Tuesday afternoon.

‘Sooner would be better,’ he told her.

‘Sooner isn’t possible,’ she replied.

That night, after the usual session with Doc and Salty, he drove out to the Forth Road Bridge, parked, and walked on to the bridge itself. For once there was no howling gale, hardly even a breeze. There was no moon, and the temperature was still a degree or two above freezing. The bridge had been reopened, some temporary repairs completed. Initial structural surveys had shown no real damage to the fabric, though if the car had snapped one of the thick metal support cables, it would have been different.

He stood there shivering after the warmth of the pub and his car. He was a few yards from where the boys had jumped. The area was cordoned off with metal barriers, anchored by sandbags. Two yellow metal lamps marked off the danger area. Someone had climbed over the barriers and laid a small wreath next to the broken rail, weighing it down with a rock so it wouldn’t be blown away. He looked up at the nearer of the two vast supports, red lights blinking at its summit as a warning to aircraft. He didn’t really feel very much, except a bit lonely and sorry for himself. The Forth was down there, as judgmental as Pilate. It was funny the things that could kill you: water, a ship’s hull, steel pellets from a plastic case. It was funny that some people actually
chose
to die.

‘I could never do it,’ Rebus said out loud. ‘I couldn’t kill myself.’

Which didn’t mean he hadn’t thought of it. It was funny the things you thought about some nights. It was all so funny, he felt a lump forming in his throat. It’s only the
drink, he thought. It’s the drink makes me maudlin. It’s only the drink.

Sometimes people who knew next to nothing about them called Edinburgh’s drop-in centres drop-
out
centres. Rebus knew that the police weren’t the most welcome guests, so he phoned ahead first.

He knew the person who ran the centre behind Waverley Station. Rebus had done him a favour once, bringing back a heroin addict who’d suffered sudden cold turkey on Nicolson Street. Some officers would have lifted the hapless wretch and taken him to the station for a knee in the groin and a long sweat. But Rebus had taken him where he wanted to go: the drop-in centre at Waverley. Turned out he was undergoing withdrawal, doing it all on his own.

‘How is he?’ Rebus asked Fraser Leitch, the centre’s manager and guiding light.

Leitch was sitting in his mouldering office, surrounded by the usual mounds of paperwork. The shelves behind his desk were bowed under the weight of files, document boxes, magazines and books. Fraser Leitch scratched his grey-flecked beard.

‘He was doing all right, last I heard. Retrained as a chippie and actually found a job. See, Inspector, sometimes the system works.’

‘Or he’s the exception that proves the rule.’

‘The eternal pessimist.’ Leitch got up and crouched in front of a tray on the floor. He checked there was water in the kettle and switched it on. ‘I’ll make a bet with you. I’ll
bet you’re here to talk about Willie Coyle and Dixie Taylor.’

‘I’d have to be daft to cover a bet like that.’

Leitch smiled. ‘You know Dixie was a user?’ Rebus nodded. ‘Well, as far as I know, with Willie’s help he’d been clean for a couple of months.’

‘His works were still under his bed.’

Leitch shrugged as he tipped coffee into two mugs. ‘The temptation’s always there. I’ll make another bet with you, I’ll bet you’ve never tried heroin yourself.’

‘You’d be right.’

‘Me neither, but the way I’ve heard it described . . . Well, like I say, the temptation never goes away. You have to take it one day at a time.’

Rebus knew Fraser Leitch used to have a drink problem. What the man was saying was that once you had it, you had it for life, because even if you dried out, the cause of your problem was still there, never quite beyond reach.

‘There’s a joke I’ve heard,’ Leitch said, as the kettle started to boil. ‘Well, it’s not much of a joke. Here it is: what kind of boat should Dixie have landed on?’

‘I give up.’

‘A sampan, because they’re both close to junk. Like I say, bad joke.’ He poured water and milk into the mugs, stirred them, and handed one to Rebus. ‘Sorry, we don’t stretch to pure Colombian.’

‘Is that another joke?’

Leitch sat down again. ‘I knew Dixie,’ he said. ‘I only met Willie a couple of times.’

‘Willie wasn’t a user?’

‘He probably toked up, maybe dropped some E.’

‘Pretty clean-living then? Were you surprised when you learned what they’d done?’

‘Surprised? I don’t know. How’s your coffee?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Terrible or not, it’s still twenty pence.’ Leitch pointed to a box on the desk. Rebus found a one-pound coin and dropped it in.

‘Keep the change.’

‘Giving a quid qualifies you as a patron.’ Leitch stuck his feet up on the edge of the desk, knees bent. He was wearing moccasins, their stitched seams coming undone. The bottoms of his denims were frayed too. He usually described himself as ‘just another old hippy’.

‘How’s the centre doing?’ Rebus asked.

‘We’re hanging on by the skin of our teeth.’

‘You get district council funding?’

‘Some.’ Leitch frowned. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘What happens when the district council is replaced?’

‘We pray the new authority keeps up our funding.’

Rebus nodded thoughtfully. ‘I was asking if you were surprised about Willie and Dixie.’

Leitch thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose I was, except that it was a dafter stunt than I would have expected from them.’

‘Because Willie was smarter than that?’

‘He must have known they’d never get away with it. Dixie was a different proposition, crazy at times, a real heid-the-ba’, but Willie could keep him under control.’

‘Like Keitel and DeNiro in
Mean Streets
.’

‘That’s not a bad comparison. Dixie would do something daft, and Willie would slap him about the head. Dixie wouldn’t have taken it from anyone else. You realise a lot of what I’m telling you is second-hand? Like I said, I only met Willie a couple of times.’ He paused. ‘You were there, weren’t you?’

‘I was there,’ Rebus said quietly. He shifted in his chair. ‘They just . . . Willie put his arm around Dixie and then leaned back over the rail, and Dixie went with him. There
was no resistance. They didn’t jump, they just slipped away.’

‘Christ.’ Leitch took his feet off the desk.

‘Why would they do that?’

Leitch got up and walked around the desk. ‘I think you know the answer to that, or at least you have an inkling. They couldn’t go to jail.’