10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (384 page)

‘Did you know Darren Rough, Mr Heggie?’ Rebus asked.

‘He’s the one that got topped?’ He waited for Rebus to nod confirmation. ‘Never knew him.’

‘Never spoke to him?’

‘We weren’t in the same block.’

‘You knew where he lived then?’

‘It’s been all over the papers. Perverted little bastard, whoever did it deserves a medal.’

‘Why do you say he was “little”? He was, by the way. Not tall, at any rate. But it wasn’t in the papers.’

‘It’s just . . . it’s something you say, isn’t it?’

‘It’s certainly something
you
say. Makes me think you’d seen him.’

‘Maybe I had. It’s not that big a scheme.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Rebus said quietly. ‘Everyone knows everyone else.’

‘Until the council move in bastards they can’t put anywhere else.’

Rebus nodded. ‘So you might have seen Darren Rough around?’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘It’s just that he liked young kids too. Paedophiles seem to be good at recognising one another.’

‘I’m not a paedophile!’ Losing it. His voice was trembling as he got to his feet. ‘I’d kill every last one of them.’

‘Did you start with Darren?’

‘What?’

‘Get rid of him, you’d be a hero.’

A burst of nervous laughter. ‘So now I didn’t just do in Billy, I topped the pervert as well?’

‘Is that what you’re telling us?’ Rebus asked.

‘I haven’t killed anyone!’

‘How did you get on with Billy, by the way? Must’ve been awkward, having him around, you wanting Joanna all to yourself.’

‘He’s a nice kid.’

‘Sit down, Mr Heggie,’ Frazer commanded.

Eventually Heggie sat down, but then leapt up again, his finger pointing at Rebus. ‘He’s trying to set me up!’

Rebus shook his head, gave a wry smile. He pushed off from the wall.

‘I’m just after the truth,’ he said, making to leave the room.

‘Inspector Rebus leaving the interview room,’ he could hear Frazer saying behind him.

Later, Frazer stopped off at Rebus’s desk. ‘You don’t really make him for Darren Rough, do you?’

Rebus shrugged. ‘Do you make him for the kid?’

‘Maybe if Sex Offences come up with something. From what I hear, her mum’s sticking to her like glue, answering for her, putting words in her mouth.’

‘Doesn’t mean she’s lying.’

‘No.’ Frazer was thoughtful. ‘Heggie doesn’t give a shit about Billy Horman. All he’s worried about is that Joanna will boot him out.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘People like him, you never get through to them, do you?’

‘No.’

‘And you can’t get them to change.’ He looked at Rebus. ‘That’s what you think too, isn’t it?’

‘Welcome to my world, Roy,’ Rebus said, reaching for the telephone.

He had to keep working; had to stop letting thoughts of Cary Oakes consume him. So Rebus phoned Phyllida Hawes at Gayfield station.

‘Has your MisPer turned up?’ she asked.

‘Not a bloody sign of him.’

‘Well, that can be good news too, can’t it? Means he’s probably still alive.’

‘Or the body’s been well-hidden.’

‘I do like an optimist.’

Another time, Rebus might have kept the banter going. ‘You know Gaitano’s?’ he said instead, getting to the point.

‘Yes.’ Sounding curious, wondering what he was after.

‘As owned by Charmer Mackenzie?’

‘The same.’

‘What have you got on him?’

Silence for a moment. ‘Is he connected to your MisPer?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Rebus told her about the boat.

‘Yes, I knew about that,’ she said. ‘But it’s strictly a money thing. I mean, Mackenzie has a share, but he doesn’t interfere with the business. You’ve met Billy Preston?’ Rebus admitted he had. ‘Charmer leaves him to get on with it.’

‘Not quite. The under manager at Gaitano’s, young guy called Archie Frost, he keeps an eye on the Clipper. Plus provides muscle for the door.’

‘Is that so?’ Rebus could hear her scribbling a note to herself.

‘Does he have any other interests?’ he asked.

‘You might want to take this conversation to NCIS.’

NCIS: the National Criminal Intelligence Service. Rebus leaned forward in his chair. ‘They have something on Mackenzie?’

‘They have a file, yes.’

‘So he’s got dirt under his fingernails: what is it exactly?’

‘Farmyard mud for all I know. Go talk to NCIS.’

‘I will.’ Rebus put the phone down, logged on at one of the computer terminals and entered Mackenzie’s details. At the bottom of the screen there was a reference number and an officer’s name. Rebus called NCIS and asked to speak to the name: Detective Sergeant Paul Carnett.

‘That’s a misprint,’ the switchboard told him. ‘It’s not Paul, it’s Pauline.’ She put him through anyway, where a male voice told Rebus DS Carnett would be in a meeting for another hour, maybe an hour and a half. Rebus checked his watch.

‘Has she anything after that?’

‘Not that I can see.’

‘Then I’d like to make a reservation: table for two, the name’s DI Rebus.’

The Scottish office of NCIS was based at Osprey House in Paisley, not far off the M8. Last time Rebus had been this way had been to drop his ex-wife off at Glasgow Airport. She’d come up from London to see Sammy, and all the Edinburgh flights had been full. He couldn’t remember what they’d talked about on the drive.

Osprey House was supposed to be the future of high-profile policing in Scotland, housing as it did the Scottish Crime Squad and Customs and Excise as well as NCIS and the Scottish Criminal Intelligence Office. Its remit was intelligence-gathering. Having started with just the two officers, NCIS now had a staff of ten. There had been bad feeling when the office had opened, due to the fact that the Scottish NCIS team reported not to a Scottish chief constable but to the London-based director of the whole UK operation, who in turn reported to the Scottish Secretary. NCIS dealt with counterfeiting, money-laundering, organised drug and vehicle crime, and, if Rebus remembered correctly, paedophile gangs. Rebus had heard the officers at NCIS called ‘anoraks’ and ‘computer nerds’, but not by anyone who’d actually met them.

‘It’s fairly irregular,’ Pauline Carnett said, as Rebus explained why he was there.

They were seated in an open-plan office, around them the incessant humming of computer fans and quiet telephone conversations. The occasional flurry of keyboard strokes. Young men in shirtsleeves and ties; two women, both dressed for business. Pauline’s desk was at the opposite end of the room from the other woman
officer. Rebus wondered if there was any significance in this.

Pauline Carnett was in her mid-thirties with short blonde hair brushed out from a centre parting. Tall and broad-shouldered, she had offered a handshake firmer than most Masons Rebus knew. She had a gap between her two front teeth and seemed overly conscious of the fact, which made Rebus want to make her smile.

Like all the others, her desk was L-shaped, with one surface given over to a computer, the other to paperwork. The office shared a printer. It was churning out work, a young man standing beside it, looking bored.

‘So this is the heart of the machine,’ had been Rebus’s comment on entering the room.

Carnett put her cup down on a mouse pad stained with dozens of coffee rings. Rebus set his own cup on the worktop.

‘Irregular,’ she said again, as if he might be persuaded to leave. Instead, he just shrugged. ‘Information is usually requested by telephone or fax.’

‘I’ve always preferred the personal touch,’ Rebus said. He handed her a scrap of paper on which he’d jotted the reference number concerning Charmer Mackenzie. She slid her chair closer to the desk and hammered on the keys, as if meaning to do violence to the keyboard. Then she slid the mouse around the pad, expertly avoiding the coffee cup, and double-clicked.

Charmer Mackenzie’s file came up. Rebus saw straight away that there was a lot of stuff there. He moved his own chair closer to hers.

‘Initially,’ she said, ‘it looks like we got on to him because Crime Squad had him hosting private parties for someone called Thomas Telford.’

‘I know Telford,’ Rebus said. ‘I helped put him away.’

‘Good for you. Telford used Mackenzie’s club for meetings, and also rented a boat part-owned by Mackenzie. The boat was used for parties. Crime Squad kept tabs
on it because you never knew who might turn up. Didn’t get much joy, though: operation suspended.’ She hit the return key, bringing up another page. ‘Ah, here we go,’ she said, leaning in towards the screen. ‘Money-lending.’

‘Mackenzie?’

She nodded. Rebus read over her shoulder. NCIS suspected Mackenzie of running a little business on the side, fronting money for criminal schemes – guaranteed payback, one way or another – but also loaning cash sums to people who either couldn’t get the money elsewhere or had reasons not to go walking into a bank or building society.

‘How accurate is this?’ Rebus asked.

‘It wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t one hundred per cent.’

‘All the same . . .’

‘All the same, there’s obviously not enough to go on, or we’d have had him in court.’ She pointed to an icon at the foot of the screen. ‘Case-notes went to the Procurator Fiscal, who decided there wasn’t enough for a prosecution.’

‘So is the case ongoing?’

She shook her head. ‘We have patience, we can wait. We’ll see what else filters down to us, decide when the time’s right to try again.’ She glanced at him. ‘Robert the Bruce and all that.’

Rebus was still studying the screen. ‘Have you got names?’

‘You mean people who’ve borrowed from him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hang on.’ She hit more keys, studied the information as it came up on the screen. ‘Hard copies,’ she mumbled at last. Then she got up from her seat and told him to follow her. They went to a storeroom filled with filing cabinets.

‘So much for the paperless office,’ Rebus said.

‘I’m with you on that.’ She found the cabinet she was looking for, pulled out the top drawer and started riffling
through the file-holders, found the one she was looking for and pulled it out.

Inside the green file were about three dozen sheets of paper. Two of the sheets listed ‘suspected’ users of Charmer Mackenzie’s loan scheme.

‘No statements,’ Rebus said, sifting the sheets.

‘Case probably didn’t get that far.’

‘I thought it was your case.’

She shrugged. ‘We get sent a lot of stuff from Crime Squad, Customs, wherever. It goes into the computer and into a drawer – that’s my job.’

‘You’re a filing clerk?’ Rebus suggested. Her eyes narrowed aggressively. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Trying to make a joke.’ He went back to the file. ‘So how did you come by these names?’

‘Probably one or two people talked.’

‘But didn’t make reliable witnesses?’

She nodded. ‘People who need to go to a loan shark, we’re not talking public-minded citizens here.’

Rebus recognised a couple of names: known house-breakers. Maybe looking to finance some bigger scheme.

‘Others on the list,’ Carnett was saying, ‘could be they got thumped by Mackenzie or his men, and Crime Squad got wind of it.’

‘And nobody would talk?’ Rebus guessed. She nodded again. He’d come across this before; they both had. It was fine to have seven bells knocked out of you, but a black mark to talk to the filth about it. You’d get ‘GRASS’ sprayed on your front door. People would cross the road to avoid you. Rebus started jotting down names and addresses, sure none of it was going to be any use. But he’d come all this way, after all.

‘I can make copies,’ Carnett suggested.

Rebus nodded. ‘I’m a bit of a dinosaur, need to have the gist in my wee book.’ He tapped one entry. No name, just a series of numbers. ‘Is this what we’re supposed to call Prince now?’

She smiled, covered it quickly with her hand. ‘Looks like another reference,’ she said. ‘I’ll check it back at my desk.’

So they went back there, and while Rebus finished his cold coffee, he watched her work.

‘Interesting,’ she said at last, leaning back in her chair. ‘It’s our way of keeping certain names quiet. Computers aren’t always safe from prowlers.’

‘Hackers.’

She looked at him. ‘Not quite a dinosaur,’ she commented. ‘Wait here a minute.’

She was actually gone three minutes, long enough for her screen-saver to activate. When she returned, she had a single sheet of paper with her, which she handed to Rebus.

‘We use numbers as codes when a name is judged too hot: that means someone we don’t want everyone knowing about. Any idea who he is?’

Rebus was looking at the name on the sheet. There was nothing else printed there.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘He’s a judge’s son.’

‘That would explain it then,’ Pauline Carnett said, lifting her cup.

The name on the sheet was Nicol Petrie.

When they delved a little deeper, they found a Crime Squad report detailing a mugging attack. Nicol Petrie had been found unconscious in one of the shadowy back lanes off Rose Street – about a hundred yards from Gaitano’s nightclub. Petrie had been taken by ambulance to hospital, a uniformed officer waiting to talk to him. But when he’d regained consciousness, he had had nothing to say.

‘I can’t remember,’ had been his refrain. He couldn’t even say if anything had been stolen from him. But a couple of eye-witnesses gave descriptions of two men leaving the lane. They were laughing, lighting cigarettes. One of them even complained that he’d scraped his
knuckles. Police got as far as holding an ID parade for the witnesses, but by then they’d long since sobered up and wanted nothing to do with it, refused to identify anyone.

Two bouncers from Gaitano’s had been in the parade: one of them was named as Calumn Brady.

Rebus went through the witness statements. The descriptions of the attackers were vague. He could just about see one of them – the shorter of the two – as Cal Brady. But it didn’t matter. Nicol Petrie wasn’t about to say anything, and the witnesses had either been warned off, paid off, or had just come to their senses.

Crime Squad put it down to a ‘warning’ from Mackenzie, and let it go at that. Speculation: that’s all it was. But Rebus was willing to go along with it. All the same . . . something refused to click into place.