A Question of Blood

  “Be with you in ten,” the voice on the phone told him. A cheery, female voice. It was almost enough to persuade him that there was another world than this . . .

  Siobhan stood in the middle of her living room and looked around her. She walked over to the window and closed the shutters against the dying light. She picked up a mug and plate from the floor: toast crumbs identifying her last meal in the flat. She checked that there were no messages on her phone. It was Friday, which meant Toni Jackson and the other female officers would be expecting her, but the last thing she felt like was girlie bonhomie and the drunken eyeing-up of pub talent. The mug and plate took half a minute to wash and place on the draining board. A quick look in the fridge. The food she’d bought, intending to cook a meal for Rebus, was still there, a few days shy of its “best before” date. She closed the door again and went into her bedroom, straightened the duvet on her bed, confirmed that doing laundry would be necessary this weekend. Then into the bathroom, a glance at herself in the mirror before heading back into the living room, where she opened the day’s mail. Two bills and a postcard. The postcard was from an old college friend. They hadn’t managed to see each other this year, despite living in the same city. Now the friend was enjoying a four-day break in Rome . . . probably already back, judging by the date on the card. Rome: Siobhan had never been there.

  I walked into the travel agent, asked them what they had at short notice. Having a great time, chilling, doing the café thing, a bit of culture when the mood takes me. Love, Jackie.

  She stood the card on her mantelpiece, tried remembering her last real holiday. A week with her parents? That weekend break in Dublin? It had been a hen party for one of the uniforms . . . and now the woman was expecting her first kid. She looked up at the ceiling. Her upstairs neighbor was thumping around. She didn’t think he did it on purpose, but he walked like an elephant. She’d met him on the sidewalk outside when she was coming home, complaining that he’d just had to fetch his car from the city impound.

  “Twenty minutes I left it, twenty on a single yellow . . . by the time I got back, it’d been towed . . . hundred and thirty quid, can you believe it? I almost told them it was more than the bloody thing’s worth.” Then he’d stabbed a finger at her. “You should do something about it.”

  Because she was a cop. Because people thought cops could pull strings, get things sorted, change things.

  You should do something about it.

  He was raging all around his living room, a caged animal ready to hurl itself against the bars. He worked in an office on George Street: account executive, retail insurance. Not quite Siobhan’s height, he wore glasses with narrow rectangular lenses. Had a male flatmate, but had stressed to Siobhan that he wasn’t gay, information for which she had thanked him.

  Stomp, thunk, plod.

  She wondered if there was any purpose to his movements. Was he opening and closing drawers? Looking for the lost remote perhaps? Or was movement itself his purpose? And if so, what did that say about her own stillness, about the fact that she was standing here listening to him? One postcard on her mantelpiece . . . one plate and mug on the draining board. One shuttered window, with a horizontal locking bar that she never bothered fastening. Safe enough in here as it was. Cocooned. Smothered.

  “Sod it,” she muttered, turning to make good her escape.

  St. Leonard’s was quiet. She’d intended burning off some frustration in the gym, but instead got herself a can of something cold and fizzy from the machine and headed upstairs to CID, checking her desk for messages. Another letter from her mystery admirer:

  DO BLACK LEATHER GLOVES TURN YOU ON?

  Referring to Rebus, she surmised. There was a note for her to call Ray Duff, but all he wanted to say was that he’d managed to test the first of her anonymous letters.

  “And it’s not good news.”

  “Meaning it’s clean?” she guessed.

  “As the proverbial whistle.” She let out a sigh. “Sorry I can’t be more helpful. Would buying you a drink help?”

  “Some other time maybe.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll probably be here for another hour or two as it is.” “Here” being the forensic lab at Howdenhall.

  “Still working on Port Edgar?”

  “Matching blood types, see whose spatters are whose.”

  Siobhan was seated on the edge of her desk, phone tucked between cheek and shoulder as she sifted through the rest of the paperwork in her in-tray. Most of it concerned cases from weeks back . . . names she could barely remember.

  “Better let you get back to it, then,” she said.

  “Keeping busy yourself, Siobhan? You sound tired.”

  “You know what it’s like, Ray. Let’s have that drink sometime.”

  “By then, I reckon we’ll both need it.”

  She smiled into the phone. “Bye, Ray.”

  “Take care of yourself, Shiv . . .”

  She put the phone down. There it was again: somebody calling her Shiv, trying for a kind of intimacy they thought the foreshortening would bring. She’d noticed, though, that no one ever tried the same tack with Rebus, never called him Jock, Johnny, Jo-Jo, or JR. Because they looked at him or listened to him and knew he was none of those things. He was John Rebus. Detective Inspector Rebus. To his closest friends: John. Yet some of these same people would happily see her as “Shiv.” Why? Because she was a woman? Did she lack Rebus’s gravitas or sense of perpetual threat? Were they just trying to worm their way into her affections? Or would the conferring of a nickname make her seem more vulnerable, less edgy and potentially dangerous to them?

  Shiv . . . It meant a knife, didn’t it? American slang. Well, right now she felt just about as blunt as she ever had. And here was another nickname walking into the room. DS George “Hi-Ho” Silvers. Looking around as if for someone in particular. Spotting her, it took him a second to make up his mind that she might suit his particular requirements.

  “Busy?” he asked.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Fancy a wee drive, then?”

  “You’re not really my type, George.”

  A snort. “We’ve got a DP.” DP: deceased person.

  “Where?”

  “Over Gracemount way. Abandoned railway track. Looks like he fell from the footbridge.”

  “An accident, then?” Like Fairstone’s chip-pan fire: another Gracemount accident.

  Silvers shrugged his shoulders as far as he could within the confines of a suit jacket that had fitted him with room to spare three years before. “Story is, he was being chased.”

  “Chased?”

  Another shrug. “That’s as much as I know till we get there.”

  Siobhan nodded. “So what are we waiting for?”

  They took Silvers’s car. He asked her about South Queensferry, about Rebus and the house fire, but she kept her answers short. Eventually he got the message and turned on the radio, whistling along to trad jazz, possibly her least favorite music.

  “You listen to any Mogwai, George?”

  “Never heard of it. Why?”

  “Just wondering . . .”

  There was nowhere to park near the railway line. Silvers pulled up to the curb, behind a patrol car. There was a bus stop, and behind it an area of grassland. They crossed it on foot, approaching a low fence overgrown with thistles and brambles. The fence was broken by a short metal stairway leading to the bridge across the railway, where sightseers from the local apartment houses had gathered. A uniformed officer was asking each one if they’d seen or heard anything.

  “How the hell are we supposed to get down?” Silvers growled. Siobhan pointed to the far side, where a makeshift stile had been erected from plastic milk crates and cinder blocks, an old mattress folded across the top of the fence. When they reached it, Silvers took one look and decided it wasn’t for him. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head. So Siobhan clambered up and over, skidding down the steep embankment, digging her heels as far
as possible into the soft ground, feeling nettles sting her ankles, briars snag at her trousers. Several figures had gathered around the prone body on the track. She recognized faces from the Craigmillar police station, and the pathologist, Dr. Curt. He saw her and smiled a greeting.

  “We’re lucky they haven’t reopened this line yet,” he said. “At least the poor chap’s in one piece.”

  She looked down at the twisted, broken body. His duffel coat had been thrown open, exposing a torso clad in a loose-fitting checked shirt. Brown cord trousers and brown loafers.

  “A couple of people called in,” one of the Craigmillar detectives was telling her, “saying they’d seen him wandering the streets.”

  “Probably not too unusual around here . . .”

  “Except he looked like he was on the hunt for somebody. Kept a hand in one pocket, like he might be carrying.”

  “And is he?”

  The detective shook his head. “Might be he dropped it when he was being chased. Local kids by the sound of it.”

  Siobhan looked from the body to the bridge and back again. “Did they catch him?”

  The detective shrugged.

  “So do we know who he is?”

  “Video rental card in his back pocket. Name’s Callis. Initial A. We’ve got someone checking the phone book. If that doesn’t work, we’ll get an address from the video shop.”

  “Callis?” Siobhan’s eyebrows creased. She was trying to remember where she’d heard that name . . . Then it hit her.

  “Andy Callis,” she said, almost to herself.

  The detective had heard her. “You know him?”

  She shook her head. “But I know someone who might. If it’s the same guy, he lives in Alnwickhill.” She was reaching for her mobile. “Oh, and one other thing . . . if it is him, he’s one of us.”

  “A cop?”

  She nodded. The detective from Craigmillar sucked air through his teeth and stared up at the spectators on the bridge with a new sense of purpose.

  16

  There was nobody home. Rebus had been watching Miss Teri’s room for almost an hour. Dark, dark, dark. Just like his memories. He could not even recall which friends he’d met with that day in the park. Yet the scene had stayed with Allan Renshaw these past thirty-odd years. Indelible. It was funny, the things you couldn’t help remembering, the ones you chose to forget. The little tricks your brain could play on you, sudden scents or sensations reviving the long-forgotten. Rebus wondered if perhaps Allan was angry with him because such anger was possible. After all, what point was there in getting angry with Lee Herdman? Herdman wasn’t there to bear the brunt, while Rebus conspicuously was, as if conjured up for the very purpose.

  The laptop kicked into screen-saver mode, shooting stars moving out of the far darkness. He hit the RETURN key and was back in Teri Cotter’s bedroom. What was he watching for? Because it satisfied the voyeur in him? He’d always enjoyed surveillances for the same reason: glimpses into secret lives. He wondered what Teri herself got out of it. She wasn’t making money. There was no interaction as such, no way for the viewer to make contact with her or for her to communicate with her audience. Why then? Because she felt the need to be on display? Like hanging out on Cockburn Street, stared at and sometimes set upon. She had accused her mother of spying on her, yet had made straight for her mother’s door when the Lost Boys had attacked. Hard to know what to think about that particular relationship. Rebus’s own daughter had lived her teenage years in London with her mother, remaining a mystery to him. His ex-wife would call him to complain about Samantha’s “attitude” or her “moods,” would let off steam at him and then put down the phone.

  The phone.

  His phone was ringing. His mobile phone. It was plugged into the wall, recharging. He picked it up. “Hello?”

  “I tried ringing your home phone.” Siobhan’s voice. “It was engaged.”

  Rebus looked at the laptop, the laptop that was hooked up to his phone line. “What’s up?”

  “Your friend, the one you were visiting that night you bumped into me . . .” She was on her mobile, sounded like she was out- doors.

  “Andy?” he said. “Andy Callis?”

  “Can you describe him?”

  Rebus froze. “What’s happened?”

  “Look, it might not be him . . .”

  “Where are you?”

  “Describe him for me . . . that way you’re not headed all the way out here for nothing.”

  Rebus squeezed his eyes shut, saw Andy Callis in his living room, feet up in front of the TV. “Early forties, dark brown hair, five-eleven, probably a hundred and sixty-five pounds or thereabouts . . .”

  She was silent for a moment. “Okay,” she sighed. “Maybe you should come after all.”

  Rebus was already looking for his jacket. He remembered the laptop, broke the Internet connection.

  “So where are you?” he asked.

  “How are you going to get here?”

  “My problem,” he told her, looking around for his car keys. “Just give me the address.”

  She was waiting for him curbside, watched him pull on the hand brake and get out of the driver’s seat.

  “How are the hands?” she asked.

  “They were fine before I got behind the wheel.”

  “Painkillers?”

  He shook his head. “I can do without.” He was looking around at the scene. A couple of hundred yards or so up the road was the bus stop where his taxi had stopped for the Lost Boys. They started walking towards the bridge.

  “He’d been stalking the place for a couple of hours,” Siobhan explained. “Two or three people reported seeing him.”

  “And did we do anything about it?”

  “There wasn’t a patrol car available,” she said quietly.

  “If there had been, he might not be dead,” Rebus stated starkly. She nodded slowly.

  “One of the neighbors heard shouts. She thinks some kids had started chasing him.”

  “Did she see anyone?”

  Siobhan shook her head. They were on the bridge now. The onlookers had started drifting away. The body had been wrapped in a blanket and loaded onto a stretcher, hitched to a length of rope with which to haul it up the embankment. A van from the morgue had pulled up next to the stile. Silvers was standing there, chatting to the driver and smoking a cigarette.

  “We’ve checked the Callises in the phone book,” he told Rebus and Siobhan. “No sign of him.”

  “Unlisted,” Rebus said. “Same as you and me, George.”

  “You sure it’s the same Callis?” Silvers inquired. There was a yell from below, the driver flicking away his cigarette so he could concentrate on his end of the rope. Silvers kept on smoking, not offering a hand until the driver asked for one. Rebus kept his own hands in his pockets. They felt like they were on fire.

  “Heave away!” came the call. In under a minute, the stretcher was being carried over the fence. Rebus stepped forwards, unwrapped the face. Stared at it, noting how peaceful Andy Callis looked in death.

  “It’s him,” he said, standing back again so the body could be loaded into the van. Dr. Curt was at the top of the incline, having been helped by the Craigmillar detective. He was breathing hard, climbing over the stile with difficulty. When someone stepped forwards to help, he spluttered that he could manage, his speech thick with effort.

  “It’s him,” Silvers was telling the new arrivals. “According to DI Rebus, that is.”

  “Andy Callis?” someone asked. “Is he the guy from Firearms?”

  Rebus nodded.

  “Any witnesses?” the Craigmillar detective was asking.

  One of the uniforms answered. “People heard voices, nobody seems to’ve seen anything.”

  “Suicide?” someone else asked.

  “Or he was trying to escape,” Siobhan commented, noting that Rebus wasn’t adding anything to the conversation, even though he’d known Andy Callis best. Or maybe because . . .


  They watched the morgue van bump over the uneven ground on its way back to the road. Silvers asked Siobhan if she was headed back. She looked at Rebus and shook her head.

  “John’ll give me a lift,” she said.

  “Please yourself. Looks like Craigmillar’ll be handling it anyway.”

  She nodded, waiting for Silvers to leave. Then, left alone with Rebus: “You okay?”

  “I keep thinking of the patrol car that never came.”

  “And?” He looked at her. “There’s more to it, isn’t there?”

  Eventually, he nodded slowly.

  “Care to share it?” she asked.

  He kept on nodding. When he moved off, she followed, back over the bridge, across the grass to where the Saab was sitting. It wasn’t locked. He opened the driver’s door, thought better of it and handed her the keys. “You drive,” he said. “I don’t think I’m up to it.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just cruising around. Maybe we’ll get lucky, find ourselves in Never-Never Land.”

  It took her a moment to decode the reference. “The Lost Boys?” she said.

  Rebus nodded, walked around the car to the passenger side.

  “And while I’m driving, you’ll be telling me the story?”

  “I’ll tell you the story,” he agreed.

  And he did.

  What it boiled down to was: Andy Callis and his partner on patrol in their car. Called to a nightclub on Market Street, just behind Waverley Station. It was a popular spot, people queuing to get in. One of them had called the police, reporting someone brandishing a handgun. Vague description. Teenager, green parka, three mates with him. Not in the queue as such, just walking past, pulling open his coat so people could see what was tucked into his waistband.

  “By the time Andy got there,” Rebus said, “there was no sign of him. He’d gone heading off down towards New Street. So that’s where Andy and his partner went. They’d called it in and been authorized to unlock their guns . . . had them on their laps. Flak jackets on . . . Backup was on its way, just in case. You know where the railway passes over the bottom of New Street?”