Exit Music (2007) (13 page)

“Yes,” Janney conceded, “you must have a lot on your plate.”

“The whole help-yourself buffet,” Rebus acknowledged with a smile.

The two men shook hands. For a moment, it looked as if Macrae and the banker might leave the station together. Rebus didn’t like the idea of Macrae spilling any more of the buffet, so told him he needed a word. Janney exited alone, and Rebus waited until the door had closed. But it was Macrae who spoke.

“What do you think of Goodyear?” he asked.

“Seems proficient.” Macrae seemed to be expecting some caveat, but Rebus shrugged his shoulders instead and left it at that.

“Siobhan appears to agree with you.” Macrae paused. “There’ll be a few changes to the team when you retire.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I reckon Siobhan’s about ready for a step up to inspector.”

“She’s been ready for years.”

Macrae nodded to himself. “What was it you wanted to speak to me about?” he eventually asked.

“It’ll keep, sir,” Rebus assured him. He watched the boss head for the exit and considered stepping into the car park for a smoke. But instead, he headed back upstairs, tearing open the envelope and studying the names. There were a couple of dozen, but no other details—nothing like addresses or a list of occupations. Stahov had been scrupulous to the point of adding his own name at the very bottom—maybe he’d done it for a laugh, knowing the sheet itself was of no possible use to the inquiry. But as Rebus pushed open the door to the CID suite, he saw that Hawes and Tibbet were on their feet, keen to tell him something.

“Spit it out,” he said.

Tibbet was holding out another sheet of paper. “Fax from the Caledonian. Several of the hotel residents bought brandies at the bar that night.”

“Any of them Russian?” Rebus asked.

“Have a look.”

So Rebus took the fax from him and saw three names staring back at him. Two were complete strangers, but didn’t sound foreign. The third wasn’t foreign either, but it sent the blood thrumming in his ears.

Mr. M. Cafferty.

M for Morris. Morris Gerald Cafferty.

“Big Ger,” Hawes explained, with no necessity whatsoever.

17

R
ebus had only the one question: bring him in, or question him at his house?

“My decision, not yours,” Siobhan Clarke reminded him. She’d been back from the mortuary half an hour and seemed to be nursing a headache. Tibbet had made her a coffee, and Rebus had watched her press two tablets from their foil enclosure into the palm of her hand. Todd Goodyear had thrown up only the once, in the mortuary car park, though there had been another crisis point on the way back to Gayfield Square when they passed some men laying tarmac.

“Something about the smell,” he’d explained.

He now looked pale and shaken, but kept telling everyone he was all right—whether they wanted to hear it or not. Clarke had gathered them round so she could tell them what Gates and Curt had told her: male, five ten, rings on two fingers of the right hand, gold watch on one wrist, and with a broken jaw.

“Maybe a roof beam fell on him,” she speculated. The victim hadn’t been tied to any piece of furniture, and neither his hands nor his feet had been bound. “Just lying in a heap on the living room floor. Probable cause of death: smoke inhalation. Gates did stress that these were preliminary findings . . .”

Rebus: “Still makes it a suspicious death.”

Hawes: “Which means it’s ours.”

“And ID?” Tibbet asked.

“Dental records, if we’re lucky.”

“Or the rings?” Goodyear guessed.

“Even if they belonged to Riordan,” Rebus told him, “doesn’t mean Riordan was the last man wearing them. I had a case ten or twelve years back, guy being done for fraud tried faking his own death . . .”

Goodyear nodded slowly, beginning to see.

After which, Rebus divulged his own news, before asking his question.

Clarke sat with the fax in one hand, head resting in the other.

“This,” she said, “just keeps getting better and better. Then, raising her eyes to meet Rebus’s: “Interview Room 3?”

“IR3 it is,” he said, “and remember to wrap up warm.”

Cafferty, however, sat with his chair slid back from the table, one leg crossed over the other and hands behind his head, for all the world as if he were in the parlor back home.

“Siobhan,” he said as she walked into the room, “always a great delight. Doesn’t she look businesslike, Rebus? You’ve trained her to perfection.”

Rebus closed the door and took up position by the wall, Clarke easing herself onto the chair opposite Cafferty. He gave her a little bow, inclining the great dome of his head but keeping the hands where they were.

“I was wondering when you would pull me in,” he said.

“So you knew it was coming?” Clarke had placed a blank pad of paper on the table and was taking the top off her pen.

“With DI Rebus only days away from the scrap heap?” The gangster glanced in Rebus’s direction. “I knew you’d dream up some pretext for giving me grief.”

“Well, as it happens, we’ve got slightly
more
than a pretext —”

“Did you know, Siobhan,” Cafferty broke in, “that John here sits outside my house of an evening, making sure I’m tucked up in bed? I’d say that level of protection goes somewhat beyond the call of duty.”

Clarke was trying not to be deflected. She placed her pen on the table, but then had to stop it rolling towards the edge. “Tell us about Alexander Todorov,” she began.

“Say again?”

“The man you bought a tenner’s worth of cognac for last Wednesday night.”

“In the bar of the Caledonian Hotel,” Rebus added.

“What? The Polish guy?”

“Russian, actually,” Clarke corrected him.

“You live a mile and a half away,” Rebus pressed on. “Makes me wonder why you’d need a room.”

“To get away from you, maybe?” Cafferty made show of guessing. “Or just because I can afford one.”

“And then you sit in the bar, buying drinks for strangers,” Clarke added.

Cafferty unlinked his hands so he could raise a finger, as if to stress a point. “Difference between Rebus and me—
he’d
sit in the bar all night and buy drinks for no bugger.” He gave a cold chuckle. “This is the sum total of why you’ve dragged me here—because I bought some poor immigrant a drink?”

“How many poor immigrants do you reckon would wander into that bar?” Rebus asked.

Cafferty made show of thinking, closing his sunken eyes and then opening them again. They were like dark little pebbles in his huge pale face. “You have a fair point,” he admitted. “But the man was still a stranger to me. What’s he gone and done?”

“He’s gone and been murdered,” Rebus said, with as much restraint as he could muster. “And as of right now, you’re the last person who saw him alive.”

“Whoa there.” Cafferty looked from one detective to the other. “The poet guy, the one I saw in the papers?”

“Attacked on King’s Stables Road, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes after drinking with you. What was it the pair of you fell out about?”

Cafferty ignored Rebus and concentrated on Clarke. “Do I need my solicitor here?”

“Not as yet,” she said levelly. Cafferty smiled again.

“Are you not wondering, Siobhan, why I’m asking you and not Rebus? He outranks you, after all.” Now he turned back to Rebus. “But you’re days from the scrap heap, just like I say, while Siobhan here’s still on the way up. If the pair of you have got a case on the go, my guess is that Old Man Macrae will have seen sense and put Shiv in charge.”

“Only my friends get to call me Shiv.”

“My apologies, Siobhan.”

“Far as you’re concerned, I’m Detective Sergeant Clarke.”

Cafferty whistled through his teeth and slapped one meaty thigh. “Trained her to perfection,” he repeated. “And rare entertainment with it.”

“What were you doing at the Caledonian Hotel?” Clarke asked, as if he’d never spoken.

“Having a drink.”

“And staying in a room?”

“It can be murder, finding a taxi home.”

“So how did you meet Alexander Todorov?”

“I was in the bar . . .”

“Alone?”

“But only because I wanted to be—unlike DI Rebus there, I have plenty of friends I can drink and have a laugh with. I’m betting
you’d
be fun to drink with, too, DS Clarke, so long as misery-guts was elsewhere.”

“And Todorov just happened to sit next to you?” Clarke was guessing.

“I was on a stool at the bar. He was standing, waiting to get served. Barman was crafting a cocktail, so we had a minute or two to talk. I liked him well enough to put his drink on my tab.” Cafferty offered an exaggerated shrug. “He slugged it, said thanks, and buggered off.”

“He didn’t offer to buy one back?” Rebus asked. He took the poet to be a drinker of the old school; etiquette would have demanded no less.

“Actually he did,” Cafferty admitted. “I told him I was fine.”

“Here’s hoping the CCTV backs you up,” Rebus commented.

For the first time, Cafferty’s mask slipped a little, though the unease was momentary at best. “It will,” he stated.

Rebus just nodded slowly while Clarke suppressed a smile. Good to know they could still rattle Cafferty.

“Victim was beaten without mercy,” Rebus went on. “If I’d thought about it, I’d’ve had you in the frame from the word go.”

“You always did like framing people.” Cafferty turned his gaze on Clarke. So far all she’d added to the top sheet of paper was a sequence of doodles. “Three, four times a week, he’s in that old banger of his, parked on the street outside my house. Some people would cry ‘harassment’—what do you think, DS Clarke? Should I apply for one of those restraining orders?”

“What did the two of you talk about?”

“Back to the Russian guy again?” Cafferty sounded disappointed. “Far as I can recollect, he said something about Edinburgh being a cold city. I probably said he was dead right.”

“Maybe he meant the people rather than the climate.”

“And he’d
still
have been right. I don’t mean you, of course, DS Clarke—you’re a little ray of sunshine. But those of us who’ve lived here all our lives, well, we can be on the morose side, wouldn’t you agree, DI Rebus? A pal of mine told me once it’s because we’ve never stopped being invaded—a silent invasion, to be sure, quite a pleasant invasion, and sometimes more a trickle than an onslaught, but it’s made us . . . prickly—some more than most.” Giving a sly glance towards Rebus.

“You’ve still not explained why you were paying for a room at the hotel,” Rebus stated.

“I thought I had,” Cafferty countered.

“Only if you mistake us for half-wits.”

“I agree, ‘half-wits’ would be stretching it.” Cafferty gave another chuckle. Rebus had slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, the better to curl them into unseen fists. “Look,” Cafferty went on, seeming suddenly to tire of the game, “I bought a drink for a stranger, somebody mugged him, end of story.”

“Not until we know the who and the why,” Rebus corrected him.

“What else did you talk about?” Clarke added.

Cafferty rolled his eyes. “He said Edinburgh was cold, I said yes. He said Glasgow was warmer, I said maybe. His drink arrived, and we both said ‘cheers.’ . . . Come to think of it, he had something with him. What was it? A compact disc, I think.”

Yes, the one Charles Riordan had given him. Two dead men sharing a curry. Rebus clenching and unclenching his hands. Clenching and unclenching. Cafferty, he realized, stood for everything that had ever gone sour—every bungled chance and botched case, suspects missed and crimes unsolved. The man wasn’t just the grit in the oyster, he was the pollutant poisoning everything within reach.

And there’s no way I can take him down, is there?

Unless God really was up there, handing Rebus this last slim chance.

“The disc wasn’t on the body,” Clarke was saying.

“He took it with him,” Cafferty stated. “Slipped it into one of his pockets.” He patted his right-hand side.

“Meet any other Russians in the bar that night?” Rebus asked.

“Now you mention it, there were some rum accents—I thought they must be Gaels or something. Soon as they started with the cei-lidh songs, I swore I’d be heading for bed.”

“Did Todorov speak to any of them?”

“How should I know?”

“Because you were with him.”

Cafferty slapped both hands against the greasy tabletop. “
One
drink I had with him!”

“So you say.”
Got you rattled again, you bastard!

“Meaning you were the last person he spoke with before he died,” Clarke reinforced.

“You’re saying I followed him? Put the boot in him? Fine, let’s take a look at this CCTV of yours . . . let’s get the barman in here to say how late I stayed at the bar. You’ve obviously seen my tab—what time was it signed for? I didn’t move from that place until gone midnight. Room full of witnesses . . . signed bar tab . . . CCTV.” He held up three fingers triumphantly. There was silence in IR3. Rebus eased himself from the wall and took the couple of steps that left him standing beside Cafferty’s chair.

“Something happened in that bar, didn’t it?” he said, his voice not much above a whisper.

“Sometimes I wish I had your fantasy life, Rebus, I really do.”

There was a sudden knock at the door. Clarke released the breath she’d been holding and called out for whoever it was to come in. Todd Goodyear edged nervously around the door.

“What do you want?” Rebus snapped. Goodyear’s eyes were on the gangster, but the message was for Clarke.

“Fire investigator’s got some news.”

“Is she here?” Clarke asked.

“In the suite,” he confirmed.

“Fresh blood,” Cafferty drawled, measuring Goodyear from head to toe. “What’s your name, son?”

“PC Goodyear.”

“A police constable out of uniform?” Cafferty smiled. “CID must be desperate. Is he your replacement, Rebus?”

“Thanks, Goodyear” was all Rebus said, nodding to let the young man know he was dismissed. Cafferty, however, had other ideas. “Used to know a heid-the-ba’ called Goodyear . . .”

“Which one?” Todd Goodyear decided to ask. Cafferty’s smile turned into a laugh.

“You’re right—there was old Harry, used to run a pub on Rose Street. But I was thinking of more recent times.”

“Solomon Goodyear,” Todd stated.

“That’s the one.” Cafferty’s eyes gleamed. “Sol, everyone calls him.”

“My brother.”

Cafferty nodded slowly. Rebus was gesturing for Goodyear to hoof it, but Cafferty’s stare held the young man captive. “Now I think of it, Sol
did
have a brother . . . never seemed to want to talk about him, though. Does that make you the black sheep, PC Goodyear?” He was laughing again.

“Tell the FI we’ll be there in a minute,” Clarke interrupted, but still Goodyear didn’t move.

“Todd?” Rebus’s use of his first name seemed to break the spell. Goodyear nodded and disappeared around the door again.

“Nice kid,” Cafferty mused. “He’ll be your pet project then, DS Clarke, for when Rebus slopes off into the sunset, just like you used to be Rebus’s.” When neither detective spoke, Cafferty decided to quit while he was ahead. He stretched his spine, arms extended to either side, and started getting to his feet. “We done here?”

“For the moment,” Clarke conceded.

“You don’t want me to make a statement or anything?”

“Wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on,” Rebus growled.

“Get all the digs in while you can,” Cafferty advised. He was at eye level with his old adversary. “See you tonight maybe—same time, same place. I’ll be thinking of you, freezing in your car. Speaking of which, it was a nice touch turning off the heating in here—it’ll make my room at the hotel feel all the cozier.”

“Speaking of the Caledonian,” Clarke decided to add, “you bought a lot of drinks that night—eleven, according to your tab.”

“Maybe I was thirsty—or just generous.” His gaze settled on her. “I can be the generous sort, Siobhan, when the circumstances are right. But then you know that already, don’t you?”

“I know a lot of things, Cafferty.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that. Maybe we can talk about them while you give me a lift back into town.”