A Good Hanging and other Stories (6 page)

The reasoning, in this case, proved false: Dean had never been near The Claymore.

‘The daughter came in though,’ commented one young man. There weren’t many people in the pub at this early stage of the day, save a few retired gentlemen who were in conversation with three or four reporters. The barman, too, was busy telling his life story to a young female hack, or rather, into her tape recorder. This made getting served difficult, despite the absence of a lunchtime scrum. The young man had solved this problem, however, reaching behind the bar to refill his glass with a mixture of cider and lager, leaving money on the bartop.

‘Oh?’ Rebus nodded towards the three-quarters full glass. ‘Have another?’

‘When this one’s finished I will.’ He drank greedily, by which time the barman had finished with his confessions - much (judging by her face) to the relief of the reporter. ‘Pint of Snakebite, Paul,’ called the young man. When the drink was before him, he told Rebus that his name was Willie Barr and that he was unemployed.

‘You said you saw the daughter in here?’ Rebus was anxious to have his questions answered before the alcohol took effect on Barr.

‘That’s right. She came in pretty regularly.’

‘By herself?’

‘No, always with some guy.’

‘One in particular, you mean?’

But Willie Barr laughed, shaking his head. ‘A different one every time. She’s getting a bit of a name for herself. And,’ he raised his voice for the barman’s benefit, ‘she’s not even eighteen, I’d say.’

‘Were they local lads?’

‘None I recognised. Never really spoke to them.’ Rebus swirled his glass, creating a foamy head out of nothing.

‘Any Irish accents among them?’

‘In here?’ Barr laughed. ‘Not in here. Christ, no. Actually, she hasn’t been in for a few weeks, now that I think of it. Maybe her father put a stop to it, eh? I mean, how would it look in the Sunday papers? Brigadier’s daughter slumming it in Barnton.’

Rebus smiled. ‘It’s not exactly a slum though, is it?’

‘True enough, but her boyfriends ... I mean, there was more of the car mechanic than the estate agent about them. Know what I mean?’ He winked. ‘Not that a bit of rough ever hurt her kind, eh?’ Then he laughed again and suggested a game or two of pool, a pound a game or a fiver if the detective were a betting man.

But Rebus shook his head. He thought he knew now why Willie Barr was drinking so much: he was flush. And the reason he was flush was that he’d been telling his story to the papers - for a price. Brigadier’s Daughter Slumming It. Yes, he’d been telling tales all right, but there was little chance of them reaching their intended audience. The Powers That Be would see to that.

Barr was helping himself to another pint as Rebus made to leave the premises.

It was late in the afternoon when Rebus received his visitor, the Anti-Terrorist accountant.

‘A Mr Matthews to see you,’ the Desk Sergeant had informed Rebus, and ‘Matthews’ he remained, giving no hint of rank or proof of identity. He had come, he said, to ‘have it out’ with Rebus.

‘What were you doing in The Claymore?’

‘Having a drink.’

‘You were asking questions. I’ve already told you, Inspector Rebus, we can’t have -’

‘I know, I know.’ Rebus raised his hands in a show of surrender. ‘But the more furtive you lot are, the more interested I become.’

Matthews stared silently at Rebus. Rebus knew that the man was weighing up his options. One, of course, was to go to Farmer Watson and have Rebus warned off. But if Matthews were as canny as he looked, he would know this might have the opposite effect from that intended. Another option was to talk to Rebus, to ask him what he wanted to know.

‘What do you want to know?’ Matthews said at last.

‘I want to know about Dean.’

Matthews sat back in his chair. ‘In strictest confidence?’

Rebus nodded. ‘I’ve never been known as a clipe.’

‘A clipe?’

‘Someone who tells tales,’ Rebus explained. Matthews was thoughtful.

‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘For a start, Dean is an alias, a very necessary one. During his time in the Army Major Dean worked in Intelligence, mostly in West Germany but also for a time in Ulster. His work in both spheres was very important, crucially important. I don’t need to go into details. His last posting was West Germany. His wife was killed in a terrorist attack, almost certainly IRA. We don’t think they had targeted her specifically. She was just in the wrong place with the wrong number plates.’

‘A car bomb?’

‘No, a bullet. Through the windscreen, point-blank. Major Dean asked to be ... he was invalided out. It seemed best. We provided him with a change of identity, of course.’

‘I thought he looked a bit young to be retired. And the daughter, how did she take it?’

‘She was never told the full details, not that I’m aware of. She was in boarding school in England.’ Matthews paused. ‘It was for the best.’

Rebus nodded. ‘Of course, nobody’d argue with that. But why did - Dean — choose to live in Barnton?’

Matthews rubbed his left eyebrow, then pushed his spectacles back up his sharply sloping nose. ‘Something to do with an aunt of his,’ he said. ‘He spent holidays there as a boy. His father was Army, too, posted here, there and everywhere. Never the most stable upbringing. I think Dean had happy memories of Barnton.’

Rebus shifted in his seat. He couldn’t know how long Matthews would stay, how long he would continue to answer Rebus’s questions. And there were so many questions.

‘What about the bomb?’

‘Looks like the IRA, all right. Standard fare for them, all the hallmarks. It’s still being examined, of course, but we’re pretty sure.’

‘And the deceased?’

‘No clues yet. I suppose he’ll be reported missing sooner or later. We’ll leave that side of things to you.’

‘Gosh, thanks.’ Rebus waited for his sarcasm to penetrate, then, quickly: ‘How does Dean get on with his daughter?’

Matthews was caught off-guard by the question. He blinked twice, three times, then glanced at his wristwatch.

‘All right, I suppose,’ he said at last, making show of scratching a mark from his cuff. ‘I can’t see what ... Look, Inspector, as I say, we’ll keep you fully informed. But meantime — ’

‘Keep out of your hair?’

‘If you want to put it like that.’ Matthews stood up. ‘Now I really must be getting back -’

‘To London?’

Matthews smiled at the eagerness in Rebus’s voice. ‘To Barnton. Don’t worry, Inspector, the more you keep out of
my
hair, the quicker I can get out of yours. Fair enough?’ He shot a hand out towards Rebus, who returned the almost painful grip.

‘Fair enough,’ said Rebus. He ushered Matthews from the room and closed the door again, then returned to his seat. He slouched as best he could in the hard, uncomfortable chair and put his feet up on the desk, examining his scuffed shoes. He tried to feel like Sam Spade, but failed. His legs soon began to ache and he slid them from the surface of the desk. The coincidences in Dashiell Hammett had nothing on the coincidence of someone nicking a car seconds before it exploded. Someone must have been watching, ready to detonate the device. But if they were watching, how come they didn’t spot that Dean, the intended victim, wasn’t the one to drive off?

Either there was more to this than met the eye, or else there was less. Rebus was wary - very wary. He’d already made far too many prejudgments, had already been proved wrong too many times. Keep an open mind, that was the secret. An open mind and an inquiring one. He nodded his head slowly, his eyes on the door.

‘Fair enough,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll keep out of your hair, Mr Matthews, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m leaving the barber’s.’

The Claymore might not have been Barnton’s most salubrious establishment, but it was as Princes Street’s Caledonian Hotel in comparison with the places Rebus visited that evening. He began with the merely seedy bars, the ones where each quiet voice seemed to contain a lifetime’s resentment, and then moved downwards, one rung of the ladder at a time. It was slow work; the bars tended to be in a ring around Edinburgh, sometimes on the outskirts or in the distant housing schemes, sometimes nearer the centre than most of the population would dare to think.

Rebus hadn’t made many friends in his adult life, but he had his network of contacts and he was as proud of it as any grandparent would be of their extended family. They were like cousins, these contacts; mostly they knew each other, at least by reputation, but Rebus never spoke to one about another, so that the extent of the chain could only be guessed at. There were those of his colleagues who, in Major Dean’s words, added two and two, then multiplied by ten. John Rebus, it was reckoned, had as big a net of ‘snitches’ as any copper on the force bar none.

It took four hours and an outlay of over forty pounds before Rebus started to catch a glimpse of a result. His basic question, though couched in vague and imprecise terms, was simple: have any car thieves vanished off the face of the earth since yesterday?

One name was uttered by three very different people in three distinct parts of the city: Brian Cant. The name meant little to Rebus.

‘It wouldn’t,’ he was told. ‘Brian only shifted across here from the west a year or so ago. He’s got form from when he was a nipper, but he’s grown smart since then. When the Glasgow cops started sniffing, he moved operations.’ The detective listened, nodded, drank a watered-down whisky, and said little. Brian Cant grew from a name into a description, from a description into a personality. But there was something more.

‘You’re not the only one interested in him,’ Rebus was told in a bar in Gorgie. ‘Somebody else was asking questions a wee while back. Remember Jackie Hanson?’

‘He used to be CID, didn’t he?’

‘That’s right, but not any more ...’

Not just any old banger for Brian Cant: he specialised in ‘quality motors’. Rebus eventually got an address: a third-floor tenement flat near Powderhall race-track. A young man answered the door. His name was Jim Cant, Brian’s younger brother. Rebus saw that Jim was scared, nervous. He chipped away at the brother quickly, explaining that he was there because he thought Brian might be dead. That he knew all about Cant’s business, but that he wasn’t interested in pursuing this side of things, except insofar as it might shed light on the death. It took a little more of this, then the brother opened up.

‘He said he had a customer interested in a car,’ Jim Cant explained. ‘An Irishman, he said.’

‘How did he know the man was Irish?’

‘Must have been the voice. I don’t think they met. Maybe they did. The man was interested in a specific car.’

‘A red Jaguar?’

‘Yeah, convertible. Nice cars. The Irishman even knew where there was one. It seemed a cinch, that’s what Brian kept saying. A cinch.’

‘He didn’t think it would be hard to steal?’

‘Five seconds’ work, that’s what he kept saying. I thought it sounded too easy. I told him so.’ He bent over in his chair, grabbing at his knees and sinking his head between them. ‘Ach, Brian, what the hell have you done?’

Rebus tried to comfort the young man as best he could with brandy and tea. He drank a mug of tea himself, wandering through the flat, his mind thrumming. Was he blowing things up out of all proportion? Maybe. He’d made mistakes before, not so much errors of judgment as errors of jumping the gun. But there was something about all of this ... Something.

‘Do you have a photo of Brian?’ he asked as he was leaving. ‘A recent one would be best.’ Jim Cant handed him a holiday snap.

‘We went to Crete last summer,’ he explained. ‘It was magic.’ Then, holding the door open for Rebus: ‘Don’t I have to identify him or something?’

Rebus thought of the scrapings which were all that remained of what may or may not have been Brian Cant. He shook his head. ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said. ‘If we need you, we’ll let you know.’

The next day was Sunday, day of rest. Rebus rested in his car, parked fifty yards or so along the road from the gates to West Lodge. He put his radio on, folded his arms and sank down into the driver’s seat. This was more like it. The Hollywood private eye on a stakeout. Only in the movies, a stakeout could be whittled away to a few minutes’ footage. Here, it was measured in a slow ticking of seconds ... minutes ... quarter hours.

Eventually, the gates opened and a figure hurried out, fairly trotting along the pavement as though released from bondage. Jacqueline Dean was wearing a denim jacket, short black skirt and thick black tights. A beret sat awkwardly on her cropped dark hair and she pressed the palm of her hand to it from time to time to stop it sliding off altogether. Rebus locked his car before following her. He kept to the other side of the road, wary not so much from fear that she might spot him but because C13 might have put a tail on her, too.

She stopped at the local newsagent’s first and came out heavy-laden with Sunday papers. Rebus, making to cross the road, a Sunday-morning stroller, studied her face. What was the expression he’d thought of the first time he’d seen her? Yes,
moping.
There was still something of that in her liquid eyes, the dark shadows beneath. She was making for the corner shop now. Doubtless she would appear with rolls or bacon or butter or milk. All the things Rebus seemed to find himself short of on a Sunday, no matter how hard he planned.

He felt in his jacket pockets, but found nothing of comfort there, just the photograph of Brian Cant. The window of the corner shop, untouched by the blast, contained a dozen or so personal ads, felt-tipped onto plain white postcards. He glanced at these, and past them, through the window itself to where Jacqueline was making her purchases. Milk and rolls: elementary, my dear Conan Doyle. Waiting for her change, she half-turned her head towards the window. Rebus concentrated on the postcards. ‘Candy, Masseuse’ vied for attention with ‘Pram and carrycot for sale’, ‘Babysitting considered’, and ‘Lada, seldom used’. Rebus was smiling, almost despite himself, when the door of the shop tinkled open.