Mortal Causes

  ‘What?’

  Smylie, half out of his door, stopped. ‘What’s up?’

  Ormiston just shook his head. Rebus looked to Smylie. ‘See you later then.’

  ‘Aye, sure.’ And Smylie got out, relieving the car’s suspension. As soon as he’d closed the door, Ormiston moved off.

  ‘What is it, Ormiston?’

  ‘Best if the Chief tells you himself.’

  ‘Give me a clue then.’

  ‘A murder,’ Ormiston said, changing up a gear. ‘There’s been a murder.’

  The scene had been cordoned off.

  It was a narrow street of tall tenements. St Stephen Street had always enjoyed a rakish reputation, something to do with its mix of student flats, cafes and junk shops. There were several bars, one of them catering mainly to bikers. Rebus had heard a story that Nico, ex-Velvet Underground, had lived here for a time. It could be true. St Stephen Street, connecting the New Town to Raeburn Place, was a quiet thoroughfare which still managed to exude charm and seediness in equal measures.

  The tenements either side of the street boasted basements, and a lot of these were flats with their own separate stairwells and entrances. Patience lived in just such a flat not seven minutes’ walk away. Rebus walked carefully down the stone steps. They were often worn and slippy. At the bottom, in a sort of damp courtyard, the owner or tenant of the flat had attempted to create a garden of terracotta pots and hanging baskets. But most of the plants had died, probably from lack of light, or perhaps from rough treatment at the hands of the builders. Scaffolding stretched up the front of the tenement, much of it covered with thick polythene, crackling in the breeze.

  ‘Cleaning the façade,’ someone said. Rebus nodded. The front door of the flat faced a whitewashed wall, and in the wall were set two doors. Rebus knew what these were, they were storage areas, burrowed out beneath the surface of the pavement. Patience had almost identical doors, but never used the space for anything; the cellars were too damp. One of the doors stood open. The floor was mostly moss, some of which was being scraped into an evidence-bag by a SOCO.

  Kilpatrick, watching this, was listening to Blackwood, who ran his left hand across his pate, tucking an imaginary hair behind his ear. Kilpatrick saw Rebus.

  ‘Hello, John.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Where’s Smylie?’

  Ormiston was coming down the steps. Rebus nodded towards him. ‘The Quiet Man there dropped him at HQ. So what’s the big mystery?’

  Blackwood answered. ‘Flat’s been on the market a few months, but not selling. Owner decided to tart it up a bit, see if that would do the trick. Builders turned up yesterday. Today one of them decided to take a look at the cellars. He found a body.’

  ‘Been there long?’

  Blackwood shook his head. ‘They’re doing the postmortem this evening.’

  ‘Any tattoos?’

  ‘No tattoos,’ said Kilpatrick. ‘Thing is, John, it was Calumn.’ The Chief Inspector looked genuinely troubled, almost ready for tears. His face had lost its colour, and had lengthened as though the muscles had lost all motivation. He massaged his forehead with a hand.

  ‘Calumn?’ Rebus shook away his hangover. ‘Calumn Smylie?’ He remembered the big man, in the back of the HGV with his brother. Tried to imagine him dead, but couldn’t. Especially not here, in a cellar …

  Kilpatrick blew his nose loudly, then wiped it. ‘I suppose I’d better get back and tell Ken.’

  ‘No need, sir.’

  Ken Smylie was standing at street level, gripping the gloss-black railings. He looked like he might uproot the lot. Instead he arched back his head and gave a high-pitched howl, the sound swirling up into the sky as a smattering of rain began to fall.

  Smylie had to be ordered to go home, they couldn’t shift him otherwise. Everyone else in the office moved like automatons. DCI Kilpatrick had some decisions to make, chief among them whether or not to tie together the two murder inquiries.

  ‘He was stabbed,’ he told Rebus. ‘No signs of a struggle, certainly no torture, nothing like that.’ There was relief in his voice, a relief Rebus could understand. ‘Stabbed and dumped. Whoever did it probably saw the For Sale sign outside the flat, didn’t reckon on the body being found for a while.’ He had produced a bottle of Laphroaig from the bottom drawer of his desk, and poured himself a glass.

  ‘Medicinal,’ he explained. But Rebus declined the offer of a glass. He’d taken three paracetamol washed down with Irn-Bru. He noticed that the level in the Laphroaig bottle was low. Kilpatrick must have a prescription.

  ‘You think he was rumbled?’

  ‘What else?’ said Kilpatrick, dribbling more malt into his glass.

  ‘I’d have expected another punishment killing, something with a bit of ritual about it.’

  ‘Ritual?’ Kilpatrick considered this. ‘He wasn’t killed there, you know. The pathologist said there wasn’t enough blood. Maybe they held their “ritual” wherever they killed him. Christ, and I let him go out on a limb.’ He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, then took a deep breath. ‘Well, I’ve got a murder inquiry to start up, the high hiedyins are going to be asking questions.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Rebus stood up, but stopped at the door. ‘Two murders, two cellars, two lots of builders.’

  Kilpatrick nodded, but said nothing. Rebus opened the door.

  ‘Sir, who knew about Calumn?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Who knew he was undercover? Just this office, or anyone else?’

  Kilpatrick furrowed his brow. ‘Such as?’

  ‘Special Branch, say.’

  ‘Just this office,’ Kilpatrick said quietly. Rebus turned to leave. ‘John, what did you find out in Belfast?’

  ‘That Sword and Shield exists. That the RUC know it’s operating here on the mainland. That they told Special Branch in London.’ He paused. ‘That DI Abernethy probably knows all about it.’

  Having said which, Rebus left the room. Kilpatrick stared at the door for a full minute.

  ‘Christ almighty,’ he said. His telephone was ringing. He was slow to answer it.

  ‘Is it true?’ Brian Holmes asked. Siobhan Clarke was waiting for an answer too.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Rebus. They were in the Murder Room at St Leonard’s. ‘He was working on something that might well be connected to Billy Cunningham.’

  ‘So what now, sir?’

  ‘We need to talk to Millie and Murdock again.’

  ‘We’ve talked to them.’

  ‘That’s why I said “again”. Don’t you listen? And after that, let’s fix up a little chat with some of the Jaffas.’

  ‘Jaffas?’

  Rebus tutted at Siobhan Clarke. ‘How long have you lived here? Jaffas are Orangemen.’

  ‘The Orange Lodge?’ said Holmes. ‘What can they tell us?’

  ‘The date of the Battle of the Boyne for a start.’

  ‘1690, Inspector.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The date, of course, means more than a mere annus mirabilis. One-six-nine-o. One and six make seven, nine plus nought equals nine, seven and nine being crucial numbers.’ He paused. ‘Do you know anything of numerology, Inspector?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What about the lassie?’

  Siobhan Clarke bristled visibly. ‘It’s sort of a crank science, isn’t it?’ she offered. Rebus gave her a cooling look. Humour him, the look ordered.

  ‘Not crank, no. It’s ancient, with the ring of truth. Can I get you something to drink?’

  ‘No, thanks, Mr Gowrie.’

  They were seated in Arch Gowrie’s ‘front room’, a parlour kept for visitors and special occasions. The real living room, with comfortable sofa, TV and video, drinks cabinet, was elsewhere on this sprawling ground floor. The house was at least three storeys high, and probably boasted an attic conversion too. It was sited in The Grange, a leafy backwater of the city’s southern side. The Grange got few visitors, few strange
rs, and never much traffic, since it was not a well-known route between any two other areas of the city. A lot of the huge detached houses, one-time merchants’ houses with walled grounds and high wooden or metal gates, had been bought by the Church of Scotland or other religious denominations. There was a retirement home to one side of Gowrie’s own residence, and what Rebus thought was a convent on the other side.

  Archibald Gowrie liked to be called ‘Arch’. Everyone knew him as Arch. He was the public face of the Orange Lodge, an eloquent enough apologist (not that he thought there was anything to apologise for), but by no means that organisation’s most senior figure. However, he was high enough, and he was easy to find – unlike Millie and Murdock, who weren’t home.

  Gowrie had agreed readily to a meeting, saying he’d be free between seven and quarter to eight.

  ‘Plenty of time, sir,’ Rebus had said.

  He studied Arch Gowrie now. The man was big and fiftyish and probably attractive to women in that way older men could be. (Though Rebus noticed Siobhan Clarke didn’t seem too enthralled.) Though his hair – thinning nicely – was silver, his thick moustache was black. He wore his shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing darkly haired arms. He was always ready for business. In fact, ‘open for business’ had been his public motto, and he worked tirelessly whenever he got his teeth into a new development.

  From what Rebus knew, Gowrie had made his money initially as director of a company which had nippily shifted its expertise from ships and pipelines to building exploration platforms and oil rigs for the North Sea. That was back in the early ’70s. The company had been sold at vast profit, and Gowrie had disappeared for several years before reappearing in the guise of property developer and investment guru. He was still a property developer, his name on several projects around the city as well as further afield. But he had diversified into wildly different areas: film production, hi-fi design, edible algae, forestry, two country house hotels, a woollen mill, and the Eyrie restaurant in the New Town. Probably Arch was best known for his part-ownership of the Eyrie, the city’s best restaurant, certainly its most exclusive, by far its most expensive. You wouldn’t find nutritious Hebridean Blue Algae on its menu, not even written in French.

  Rebus knew of only one large loss Gowrie had taken, as money man behind a film set predominantly in Scotland. Even boasting Rab Kinnoul as its star, the film had been an Easter turkey. Still, Gowrie wasn’t shy: there was a framed poster for the film hanging in the entrance hall.

  ‘Annus mirabilis,’ Rebus mused. ‘That’s Latin, isn’t it?’

  Gowrie was horrified. ‘Of course it’s Latin! Don’t tell me you never studied Latin at school? I though we Scots were an educated bunch. Miraculous year, that’s what it means. Sure about that drink?’

  ‘Maybe a small whisky, sir.’ Kill or cure.

  ‘Nothing for me, sir,’ said Siobhan Clarke, her voice coming from the high moral ground.

  ‘I won’t be a minute,’ said Gowrie. When he’d left the room, Rebus turned to her.

  ‘Don’t piss him off!’ he hissed. ‘Just keep your gob shut and your ears open.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. Have you noticed?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s nothing green in this room, nothing at all.’

  He nodded again. ‘The inventor of red, white and blue grass will make a fortune.’

  Gowrie came back into the room. He took a look at the two of them on the sofa, then smiled to himself and handed Rebus a crystal tumbler.

  ‘I won’t offend you by offering water or lemonade with that.’

  Rebus sniffed the amber liquid. It was a West Highland malt, darker, more aromatic than the Speysides. Gowrie held his own glass up.

  ‘Slainte.’ He took a sip, then sat in a dark blue armchair. ‘Well now,’ he said, ‘how exactly can I help you?’

  ‘Well, sir –’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with us, you know. We’ve told the Chief Constable that. They’re an offshoot of the Grand Lodge, less than that even, now that we’ve disbarred them.’

  Rebus suddenly knew what Gowrie was talking about. There was to be a march along Princes Street on Saturday, organised by the Orange Loyal Brigade. He’d heard about it weeks ago, when the very idea had provoked attacks from republican sympathisers and anti-right wing associations. There were expected to be confrontations during the march.

  ‘When did you disbar the group exactly, sir?’

  ‘April 14th. That was the day we had the disciplinary hearing. They belonged to one of our district lodges, and at a dinner-dance they’d sent collecting tins round for the LPWA.’ He turned to Siobhan Clarke. ‘That’s the Loyalist Prisoners’ Welfare Association.’ Then back to Rebus. ‘We can’t have that sort of thing, Inspector. We’ve denounced it in the past. We’ll have no truck with the paramilitaries.’

  ‘And the disbarred members set up the Orange Loyal Brigade?’

  ‘Correct.’

  Rebus was feeling his way. ‘How many do you think will be on the march?’

  ‘Ach, a couple of hundred at most, and that’s including the bands. I think they’ve got bands coming from Glasgow and Liverpool.’

  ‘You think there’ll be trouble?’

  ‘Don’t you? Isn’t that why you’re here?’

  ‘Who’s the Brigade’s leader?’

  ‘Gavin MacMurray. But don’t you know all this already? Your Chief Constable asked if I could intervene. But I told him, they’re nothing to do with the Orange Lodge, nothing at all.’

  ‘Do they have connections with the other right-wing groups?’

  ‘You mean with fascists?’ Gowrie shrugged. ‘They deny it, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few skinheads on the march, even ones with Sassenach accents.’

  Rebus left a pause before asking, ‘Do you know if there’s any link-up between the Orange Brigade and The Shield?’

  Gowrie frowned. ‘What shield?’

  ‘Sword and Shield. It’s another splinter group, isn’t it?’

  Gowrie shook his head. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Never.’

  Rebus placed his whisky glass on a table next to the sofa. ‘I just assumed you’d know something about it.’ He got to his feet, followed by Clarke. ‘Sorry to have bothered you, sir.’ Rebus held out his hand.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘That’s all, sir, thanks for your help.’

  ‘Well …’ Gowrie was clearly troubled. ‘Shield … no, means nothing to me.’

  ‘Then don’t worry about it, sir. Have a good evening now.’

  At the front door, Clarke turned and smiled at Gowrie. ‘We’ll let you get back to your wee numbers. Goodbye, sir.’

  They heard the door close behind them with a solid click as they walked back down the short gravel path to the driveway.

  ‘I’ve only got one question, sir: what was all that about?’

  ‘We’re dealing with lunatics, Clarke, and Gowrie isn’t a lunatic. A zealot maybe, but not a madman. Tell me, what do you call a haircut in an asylum?’

  By now Clarke knew the way her boss’s mind worked. ‘A lunatic fringe?’ she guessed.

  ‘That’s who I want to talk to.’

  ‘You mean the Orange Loyal Brigade?’

  Rebus nodded. ‘And every one of them will be taking a stroll along Princes Street on Saturday.’ He smiled without humour. ‘I’ve always enjoyed a parade.’

  16

  Saturday was hot and clear, with a slight cooling breeze, just enough to make the day bearable. Shoppers were out on Princes Street in numbers, and the lawns of Princes Street Gardens were as packed as a seaside beach, every bench in full use, a carousel attracting the children. The atmosphere was festive if frayed, with the kids squealing and tiring as their ice-cream cones melted and dropped to the ground, turning instantly into food for the squirrels, pigeons, and panting dogs.

  The parade was due to set off from Regent Road at three o’clock, and by tw
o-fifteen the pubs behind Princes Street were emptying their cargo of brolly-toting white-gloved elders, bowler hats fixed onto their sweating heads, faces splotched from alcohol. There was a show of regalia, and a few large banners were being unfurled. Rebus couldn’t remember what you called the guy at the front of the march, the one who threw up and caught the heavy ornamental staff. He’d probably known in his youth. The flute players were practising, and the snare drummers adjusted their straps and drank from cans of beer.

  People outside the Post Office on Waterloo Place could hear the flutes and drums, and peered along towards Regent Road. That the march was to set off from outside the old Royal High School, mothballed site for a devolved Scottish parliament, added a certain something to the affair.

  Rebus had been in a couple of the bars, taking a look at the Brigade members and supporters. They were a varied crew, taking in a few Doc Marten-wearing skinheads (just as Gowrie had predicted) as well as the bowler hats. There were also the dark suit/white shirt/dark tie types, their shoes as polished as their faces. Most of them were drinking like fury, though they didn’t seem completely mortal yet. Empty cans were being kicked along Regent Road, or trodden on and left by the edges of the pavement. Rebus wasn’t sure why these occasions always carried with them the air of threat, of barely suppressed violence, even before they started. Extra police had been drafted in, and were readying to stop traffic from coming down onto Princes Street. Metal-grilled barriers waited by the side of the road, as did the small groups of protesters, and the smaller group of protesters who were protesting against the protesters. Rebus wondered, not for the first time, which maniac on the Council had pushed through the okay for the parade.

  The marching season of course had finished, the main parades being on and around the 12th of July, date of the Battle of the Boyne. Even then the biggest marches were in Glasgow. What was the point of this present parade? To stir things up, of course, to make a noise. To be noticed. The big drum, the lambeg, was being hammered now. There was competition from a few bagpipe buskers near Waverley Station, but they’d be silenced by the time the parade reached them.

  Rebus wandered freely among the marchers as they drank and joked with each other and adjusted their uniforms. A Union Jack was unfurled, then ordered to be rolled up again, bearing as it did the initials of the British National Party. There didn’t seem to be any collecting tins or buckets, the police having pressed for a quick march with as little interaction with the public as possible. Rebus knew this because he’d asked Farmer Watson, and the Farmer had confirmed that it would be so.