“He’s not my pal.”
“His lawyer came asking all the right questions, almost as if he’d been primed.” It was Claverhouse who had advanced on Rebus this time, not that Rebus was budging an inch. He could hear the bath still filling. Not long now and it would start to overflow. “What was he doing here, John?”
“You wanted me to talk to him . . .”
Claverhouse paused. A glimmer of hope seemed to rise in his eyes. “And?”
“Nice talking to you, Claverhouse,” Rebus said. “Say hello to Ormie for me when you catch up with him.” He stepped backwards into his hall, and started closing the door. Claverhouse stood unmoving, almost as if he planned to stay there till morning. Not saying anything, because nothing needed to be said between them. Rebus padded back to the bathroom and turned off the tap. The water was scalding, and there wasn’t enough room to add cold. He sat down on the toilet and held his head in his hands. It struck him that he actually trusted the Weasel more than he did Claverhouse.
Make sure you know whose side you’re on . . .
Rebus didn’t like to think about it. He still couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t landed in a trap. Was Strathern out to nail him, using Gray and the others as bait? Even if there was some dirty deal to uncover, something involving Gray, Jazz and Ward, could Rebus succeed without implicating himself? He got up and went through to the living room, found the whiskey bottle and a glass. Picked up the first CD he found and stuck it on. REM: Out of Time. The title had never meant more to him than right here, this minute. He stared at the contents of the bottle but knew he wasn’t going to touch it, not tonight. He swapped it for the phone, called Jean at home. Answering machine, so he left another message. He thought about driving to the New Town, maybe dropping in on Siobhan. But it wasn’t fair to her . . . and she was probably out driving anyway, her scalp burning, eyes not quite focused on the road ahead . . .
He walked softly back to the door and put his eye to the peephole. The landing was empty. He allowed himself a smile, remembering the way he’d left Claverhouse dangling. Back into the living room and over to the window. No sign of anyone outside. On the hi-fi, Michael Stipe alternated between rage and grieving.
John Rebus sat down in his chair, prepared to let the nighttime take its toll. And then the phone rang, and it had to be Jean returning his call.
But it wasn’t.
“All right, big man?” Francis Gray said, in that soft west coast growl of his.
“Been better, Francis.”
“Never fear, Uncle Francis has the cure for all ills.”
Rebus rested his head against the back of his chair. “Where are you?”
“The delightful surroundings of the Tulliallan officers’ bar.”
“And that’s the cure for my ills?”
“Could I be that heartless? No, big man, I’m talking about the trip of a lifetime. Two people with a whole world of possibilities and delights opening before them.”
“Someone been spiking your drinks, DI Gray?”
“I’m talking about Glasgow, John. And you’ll have me as your guide to what’s best in the west.”
“It’s a bit late for all this, isn’t it?”
“Tomorrow morning . . . just you and me. So be here at sparrow-fart or you’ll miss all the fun!”
The phone went dead. Rebus stared at it, considered calling back . . . Gray and him in Glasgow: meaning what? Meaning Jazz had spoken to Gray, told him Rebus had something to offer? Why Glasgow? Why just the two of them? Was Jazz distancing himself from his old friend? Rebus’s thoughts turned again to the Weasel and Cafferty. Old ties could loosen. Old alliances and allegiances could crumble. There were always points of vulnerability; cracks in the carefully constructed wall. Rebus had been thinking of Allan Ward as the weakest link. . . now he was turning to Jazz McCullough. He went back through to the bathroom, gritted his teeth and plunged his hand into the superheated bathwater, letting the plug out. Then he turned on the cold tap to restore some balance. Back through to the kitchen for a mug of coffee and a couple of vitamin C tablets. Then into the living room. He’d hidden Strathern’s report under one of the sofa cushions.
His bathtime reading . . .
17
Bernie Johns had been a brute of a man, controlling a large chunk of the Scottish drug trade by means of contacts and ruthlessness, disposing of any and all contenders for his crown along the way. People had turned up tortured, maimed or dead — sometimes all three. A lot of people had simply disappeared. There had been talk that such a lengthy and successful reign of terror could be achieved only with the help of the police. In other words, Bernie Johns had been a protected species. This had never been proven, though the “report,” such as it was, made mention of some possible suspects, all based in and around Glasgow, but none of them Francis Gray.
Johns had lived for a large part of his life in an unassuming public housing unit in one of the city’s toughest projects. He’d been “a man of the people,” gifting money to local charities and benefiting everything from toddlers’ playgrounds to old people’s shelters. But the giver was also a tyrant, his munificence tempered by the knowledge that he was paying for power and invulnerability. Anyone came within a hundred yards of him on his home turf, he got to know about it. Police surveillance activities were scuppered within ten minutes of their outset. White vans were rumbled: flats were located and attacked. Nobody was going to get near Bernie Johns. There were plenty of pictures of him in the folder. He was tall, broad at the shoulders, but not physically massive. He wore fashionable suits, his wavy blond hair always carefully groomed. Rebus could imagine him as a child, playing the Angel Gabriel in his school’s Christmas show. The eyes had hardened in the interim, as had the jaw, but Johns had been a handsome man, his face sporting none of the nicks and slashes associated with longevity in a gangster.
And then Operation Clean-Cut had come along, involving several forces in a long-term surveillance and intelligence operation which had ended with a haul of several thousand tabs of Ecstasy and amphetamines, four kilos of heroin, and about the same weight of cannabis. The operation had been branded a success, and Bernie Johns had been put on trial. It wasn’t the first time he’d appeared in a dock. Three previous charges, all dropped due to admin cock-ups or by dint of witnesses changing their minds.
The case against him wasn’t watertight this time either — the Procurator Fiscal’s office had admitted as much in a letter Rebus found in the folder. It could go either way, but they would give it their best shot. Any police officer even rumored to have had links to Johns and his gang was sidelined throughout the investigation and trial. The team kept working even through the duration of the trial, ensuring evidence wasn’t changed or witnesses lost. It was only after Johns’s conviction that he started complaining that he’d been shaken down and ripped off. He wasn’t naming any names, but the story seemed to be that he’d been told that certain pieces of evidence could be “contaminated.” There was a price to pay, of course, and he’d been willing to pay it. One of his men had been dispatched to fetch the money from a secret stash. (Police had found little at Johns’s actual home: around five thousand in cash and a couple of unlicensed pistols.) The underling didn’t come back, and when he was tracked down, he told a story that he had been followed to the site and attacked by three men — almost certainly the same people who had done the deal in the first place. They had then cleaned Johns out. Precisely how much was involved was left to the rumor mill. The best estimate of Johns’s accumulated wealth was around the three million mark.
Three million pounds . . .
“Give us some names and we might start to believe you,” Johns had been told by an investigating officer. But Johns had refused. That wasn’t the way he worked; never had been, never would be. The underling, meantime, was found stabbed to death near his home after a night out: the price he’d had to pay for failure. Johns was adamant that this man could not by himself have tricked him, stolen from him. The man h
ad done a runner only because he’d been terrified of the ramifications of the theft. Three million was not the sort of figure Bernie Johns was likely to shrug off as human error.
The stabbing was proof of that.
No doubt he’d had similar fates in mind for the cops — it was assumed they were cops — who’d double-crossed him, but he never got time to put any plan into effect. He’d been stabbed in the neck with a homemade shiv — the painstakingly sharpened end of a soup spoon — by one of the inmates while queueing for breakfast. This inmate, Alfie Frazer, known to all and sundry as “Soft Alfie,” had been one of Francis Gray’s snitches — which gave the investigators their first inkling of who might have been involved in ripping off Bernie Johns.
Gray had been questioned, but had denied everything. It was never made clear precisely why Soft Alfie — known to be academically challenged and never the world’s most perfect physical specimen — would commit a murder. All the investigators knew was that Gray had fought hard to keep Alfie out of prison and that it was believed Alfie owed him as a result. But Alfie had been in on a three-year stretch: was it possible he would have committed himself to a far lengthier term by murdering Johns at Gray’s behest?
The only other valuable piece of the jigsaw had come when it was discovered that on the day Johns’s hapless henchman had been sent to fetch the cash, three officers — Gray, McCullough and Ward — had headed out in Gray’s car. Their excuse when asked about it later: they’d gone out to celebrate the end of the investigation. They named pubs they’d been in, a restaurant where they’d eaten.
This was as much as the High Hiedyins had on the three men. They hadn’t proved profligate spenders, and didn’t appear to have money salted away in hidden bank accounts. The last page of the report detailed Francis Gray’s disciplinary record. The sheet was handwritten and unsigned. Rebus got the feeling it came from Gray’s own chief constable. Reading between the lines, the personal bitterness was all too evident: “this man has been a disgrace . . .”; “verbal abuse of senior officers . . .”; “drunken antics at a social occasion . . .” It was Gray they really wanted. Whatever Rebus’s own reputation, Gray had raised the crossbar. It struck Rebus that they could have turfed Gray out at any time, so why hadn’t they? His reasoning: they were hanging on to Gray, waiting for an opportunity to nail him for Bernie Johns. But with retirement in the offing, they were growing desperate. In their eyes, it was time for payback . . . at any price.
Rebus dried himself off and padded through to the living room. The Blue Nile on the hi-fi, and him on his chair. Stone-cold sober and thinking hard. The file was all conjecture, rumor, stories told by old lags. All the High Hiedyins had to go on was the coincidence of the trio’s day trip taking place on the same day as the supposed money pickup; that and the death of Johns at the hands of one of Gray’s snitches. All the same . . . three million . . . he could see why they wouldn’t want Gray and Co. getting away with it. A cool million apiece. Rebus had to admit, they didn’t look like millionaires, didn’t act like them either. Why not just resign and head off to spend the loot?
Because it would have been proof of a sort, and might have helped launch a full-scale inquiry. Soft Alfie had been questioned half a dozen times in the intervening years, but hadn’t said anything worthwhile. Maybe he wasn’t so soft after all . . .
Again, Rebus wondered if the whole thing was part of some elaborate setup, meant to distract him, maybe leading him to incriminate himself in the Rico Lomax case. He concentrated on the music, but the Blue Nile weren’t about to help him. They were too busy singing beautiful songs about Glasgow.
Glasgow: tomorrow’s destination.
He tapped his fingers in time to the music, tapped them on the cover of the folder Strathern had given him . . .
When he woke up, the CD had finished and his neck felt stiff. He’d been dreaming that he was in a restaurant with Jean. Some posh hotel somewhere, but he was wearing clothes he’d been given by Rhona during their marriage. And he had no money on him to pay for the expensive meal. He’d felt so guilty . . . guilty of betraying Rhona and Jean . . . guilty about everything. Someone else had been in the dream, someone who had money enough to pay for it all, and Rebus had ended up following him through the maze of the hotel, everywhere from its penthouse to the cellars. Had he been going to ask for a loan? Was the figure someone he knew? Had he been going to take the money by force or duplicity from a total stranger? Rebus didn’t know. He pulled himself to his feet and stretched tiredly. Couldn’t have been asleep more than twenty minutes. Then he remembered that he had to be in Tulliallan by morning.
“No time like the present,” he told himself, snatching up his car keys.
Ponytailed Ricky was back on the door of the Sauna Paradiso.
“Christ, not you again,” he muttered as Siobhan walked in.
She looked around. The place was dead. One of the girls was lying along a sofa, reading a magazine. There was baseball on the TV monitor, the sound turned off.
“You like baseball?” Siobhan asked. Ricky didn’t look in the mood for conversation. “I watch it sometimes,” she went on, “if I’m awake through the night. Couldn’t tell you the rules or half of what the commentators are talking about, but I watch it anyway.” She looked around. “Laura in tonight?”
He thought about lying, but knew she’d spot it. “She’s with someone,” he said.
“Mind if I wait?”
“Take your coat off, make yourself at home.” He waved his arm in an exaggerated greeting. “If a punter comes in and wants to take you downstairs, don’t go blaming me.”
“I won’t,” Siobhan said, but she kept her coat on, and was glad she was wearing trousers and boots. The woman on the sofa, now that Siobhan studied her, was ten years older than she’d originally thought. Makeup, hair and clothes: they could put years on you, or take them off. She remembered when she’d been thirteen, knowing she could pass for sixteen or older. Another of the women had appeared from the curtained doorway. She gave Siobhan a look of curiosity as she moved behind Ricky’s desk. There was an alcove there with a kettle. She made herself a mug of coffee and reappeared, stopping in front of Siobhan.
“Ricky says you’re looking for some action.” She was in her mid-twenties with a pretty, rounded face and long brown hair. Her legs were bare, with black bra and panties visible beneath a knee-length negligee.
“Ricky’s having you on,” Siobhan informed her. The woman looked in the direction of the desk and stuck her tongue out, displaying a silver stud. Then she dropped into the chair next to Siobhan’s.
“Careful, Suzy, you might catch something.” This from the woman on the sofa, who was still flicking through her magazine.
Suzy looked at Siobhan. “She means I’m a cop,” Siobhan said.
“And is she right? Am I going to catch something?”
Siobhan shrugged. “I’ve been told I’ve got an infectious laugh.”
Suzy smiled. Siobhan noticed that she had a bruise on one shoulder which the negligee was failing to conceal. “Quiet tonight,” Siobhan commented.
“There’s always a bit of a rush after the pubs close, then it calms down again. You here to see one of the girls?”
“Laura.”
“She’s got a punter with her.”
Siobhan nodded. “How come you’re talking to me?” she asked.
“Way I see it, you’ve got your job to do, same as I have.” Suzy held the chipped mug to her lips. “No sense getting worked up about it. You here to arrest Laura?”
“No.”
“Asking her questions then?”
“Something like that.”
“Your accent’s not Scottish . . .”
“I was brought up in England.”
Suzy was studying her. “I had a friend sounded a bit like you.”
“Past tense?”
“This was at college. I did a year at Napier. I can’t remember where she was from . . . somewhere in the Midlands.”
&n
bsp; “That could be about right.”
“That where you’re from?” Suzy was wearing frayed moccasin-style slippers. She had crossed one leg over the other and was letting one moccasin dangle from her painted toes.
“Around there,” Siobhan said. “Do you know Laura?”
“We’ve worked some of the same shifts.”
“She been here long?”
Suzy stared at Siobhan, but didn’t answer.
“All right then,” Siobhan said, “what about you?”
“Nearly a year. That’s me just about ready to quit. Said I’d do it for a year and no longer. I’ve got enough saved now to go back to college.”
The woman on the sofa snorted.
Suzy ignored her. “You make good money in the police?”
“Not bad.”
“What . . . fifteen, twenty thousand?”
“A bit more actually.”
Suzy shook her head. “That’s nothing to what you can make in a place like this.”
“I don’t think I could do it, though.”
“That’s what I thought. But when college fell through . . .” She got a faraway look. The woman on the sofa was rolling her eyes. Siobhan didn’t know how much of it to believe. Suzy had had nearly a year to fashion her story. Maybe it was her way of coping with the Sauna Paradiso . . .
A man suddenly came out from behind the curtain. He looked around the room, surprised to find no other men there except Ricky. Siobhan recognized him: the less drunk businessman from her previous visit, the one who’d mentioned Laura by name. With head down, he walked briskly to the front door and made his exit.
“Has he got a tab or something?” Siobhan asked.
Suzy shook her head. “They pay us, then we settle with Ricky later.”
Siobhan looked across the desk, where Ricky was standing watching her. “Going to let Mr. Cafferty know I’m here?” she called.