Let It Bleed (22 page)

‘Unless,’ Rebus said quietly, ‘nobody wanted you to know.’

Rebus called CID from a phone box near St Leonard’s and, without identifying himself, asked to speak to either DS Holmes or DC Clarke.

It was a morning of heavy haar, floating across the city in a wet cloud from the coast. The kind of morning where you could imagine yourself back in time, a horse and coach clopping out of the mist rather than cars with their headlights on full. Rebus’s skin and clothes were damp to the touch.

‘DC Clarke speaking.’

‘It’s me. I want you to look up a name on the computer.’

‘Well, it’s a bit chaotic here just now. There was a small fire last night, a waste-bin went up. It’s a bit of a mystery, nobody was here at the time.’

‘Dear me.’

‘The chief super’s ordered an investigation. Meantime, half the office is off limits.’

‘But the computer system’s OK?’

‘The only damage is the bin and the desk next to it. It was Inspector Flower found the blaze.’

‘Really?’

‘He threw a coat over the bin to snuff it out. It was Holmes’s coat.’

‘The one Nell gave him for Christmas?’

‘That’s the one. What’s the name you want checking?’

‘Charters.’ He spelt it for her. ‘I don’t have a first name, but he’s serving time in Saughton. I’d like his record. I’m
in a callbox about a hundred yards away. There’s a café across from the DIY store, I’ll wait for you there.’

‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

‘The dough-rings are on me.’

But when Siobhan Clarke finally turned up at the café, she ordered a fried-egg sandwich instead, then handed Rebus a manila envelope.

‘Did anyone see you at the computer?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Watch your back. It’s not just the Farmer – Flower’s up to something, too.’

‘What?’

‘Fire-raising for a start.’ Rebus opened the envelope and read through the contents. Clarke’s food arrived and she bit into it, dripping yolk on to the plate.

‘“Derwood Charters”,’ Rebus read aloud, ‘“age forty-six, divorced, ex-company director. Found guilty of fraud, serving three years of a six-year sentence at HMP Edinburgh. Home address in Cramond till the place had to be sold. Date of birth … name of solicitor … no wife or next of kin”.’ Rebus skipped through what little else there was. ‘It’s a bit bald, isn’t it?’

‘A bit.’

‘Like somebody’s been into the computer and shorn it. Which station dealt with him?’ He looked through the notes again. ‘Well, well: St Leonard’s.’

‘But before our time?’

Rebus nodded. ‘I was still at Great London Road. But then so was Chief Inspector Lauderdale, yet his name’s down here as part of the team.’ He was thoughtful for a moment. ‘Right, what I want you to do is –’

‘Go back to the station and pull the case-notes out of the vault?’

‘I know it’s asking a lot.’

‘Only my career.’

But he knew she’d do it anyway.

Rebus waited over an hour for Clarke to return. She carried a supermarket carrier-bag with her, and laid it on the floor next to him. He ordered her a mug of tea; his own stomach was swilling with the stuff.

‘It wasn’t where it should have been,’ she told him. ‘It had been put back out of order.’

‘Like someone wanted to hide it?’

‘But without being too obvious. There are so many reports in the vault, it’s easy for one to disappear if it’s filed in the wrong place.’

‘Did anyone see you?’

‘Brian came to see what I was up to. I got him to keep an eye out for anyone else. Meantime, the sooner you read the case-notes, the sooner I can put them back.’

The woman who ran the café brought Siobhan Clarke’s tea, and saw Rebus lift a heavy folder out of the carrier-bag.

‘Thinking of taking up residence?’ she asked him.

‘I’m doing you a favour,’ he said, glancing at all the empty tables. ‘Nobody comes into an empty café.’

‘You did,’ she replied.

Rebus just smiled and opened the case-notes, starting to read.

At lunchtime, Rebus made a dentist’s appointment.

When he explained the problem, the receptionist asked him to hold the line. When she came back, she told him Dr Keene could squeeze him in at five.

The surgery was in a substantial semi-detached property on Inverleith Row, facing the entrance to the Botanic Gardens. Rebus was in a sweat as he sat in the waiting room. There was a woman in there with him, and he was relieved when she was called first. But that left only him. His ears seemed more receptive than usual. He could hear
the whine of a drill, the clatter of metal probes being dropped on to trays. When the woman patient came out, she walked to the reception desk to make another appointment. The dentist was with her. Then the dentist turned and, smiling, came to the waiting-room doorway.

‘Mr Rebus? Through here, please.’

He wore a white coat and half-moon glasses, and Rebus judged him to be in his late fifties.

‘Sit down, please,’ Dr Keene said, washing his hands. ‘Some swelling around the mouth?’

Rebus sat on the chair and swung his legs up on to it, his hands gripping the armrests. Dr Keene came over.

‘Now, just lie back and try to relax.’ Rebus could hear his own hoarse breathing. ‘That’s it.’ The dentist used an electric foot-switch to set the chair back so it was nearly flat, and to raise it up. He angled the lamp over the chair and switched it on. ‘We’ll just take a look.’ He swivelled a tray of dental tools towards him and sat down on a high chair by Rebus’s side.

‘Open wide.’

There was music playing. Radio Two, the airwaves’ answer to a placebo. Rebus opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. There was a blown-up photograph there, a huge black and white aerial shot of Edinburgh, from Trinity in the north to as far south as the Braid Hills. He started to map out the streets in his mind.

‘Looks like a wee abscess,’ the dentist was saying. He put down one tool and reached for another, tapping it against one of Rebus’s teeth. ‘Feel anything?’ Rebus shook his head. The assistant had joined them. Dr Keene said a few things to her in a language the patient wasn’t supposed to understand, then started packing Rebus’s mouth with cotton.

‘What I’m going to do is drill into the tooth from behind, to try to drain off the poison. That’ll release the pressure.
The tooth is pretty well dead anyway, I’ll do a root canal later. But for now the abscess needs to drain.’

Rebus could feel sweat on his forehead. A tube was being placed in his mouth, hoovering up what saliva there was.

‘A little injection first. It’ll take a minute or two to take.’

Rebus stared at the ceiling. There’s Calton Hill, where Davey Soutar ended up. There’s St Leonard’s … and Great London Road. Hyde’s Club was just down there. Ooyah! There’s Stenhouse, where Willie and Dixie lived. You could see Saughton Jail quite clearly. And Warrender School, where McAnally blew his head off. He had a sense of the way the streets interconnected, and with them the lives of the people who lived and died there. Willie and Dixie had known Kirstie Kennedy, whose father was Lord Provost. McAnally had sought out a councillor as witness to his act of self-destruction. The city might cover a fair old area, its population might be half a million, but you couldn’t deny how it all twisted together, all the crisscrossed lines which gave the structure its solidity …

‘Now,’ the dentist was saying, ‘you might feel some discomfort at first …’

Rebus raced up and down the streets. Marchmont, where he lived; Tollcross, Tresa McAnally’s home; South Gyle, only just taking off when the photograph was taken. There was no sign of the newer building work around the town. He saw holes in the ground and areas of wasteland where now there were structures and roads. And Jesus Christ Almighty it was hurting!

‘Ah,’ Dr Keene said at last, ‘there we are.’ Rebus could feel something nasty trickling down his throat. The pressure beneath his nose was easing. Like bleeding a radiator, he thought. ‘Drill into the poison,’ the dentist was saying, almost to himself, ‘and you relieve the pressure.’

Yes, Rebus thought, that was absolutely right.

The dentist gave the rest of his mouth a once-over. The
assistant had a card in her hand and was writing on it as Dr Keene recited a litany of decay.

‘I won’t do any of these fillings today,’ he said to Rebus’s relief.

Eventually he was allowed to rinse and spit, and the assistant removed the elasticated bib from around his neck. Rebus ran his tongue around his mouth. There was a gaping hole in the back of one of his front teeth.

‘We’ve got to let that drain, give it a few days. Once it’s drained, I can do the root canal. All right?’ And he smiled at Rebus. ‘Incidentally, when did you last have your teeth checked?’

‘Eleven, twelve years ago.’

The dentist shook his head.

‘I’ll make up your appointments,’ the assistant said, leaving the room. Dr Keene removed his latex gloves and went to wash his hands.

‘Now that we all wear gloves,’ he said, ‘I don’t really need to wash them. But I’ve done it for thirty years, hard to break the habit.’

‘You wear the gloves because of HIV?’

‘Yes. Well, goodbye then, Mr –’

‘Inspector Rebus, actually.’

‘Oh?’

‘I wonder if I might have a word?’ Rebus knew he was mumbling – the anaesthetic had frozen his mouth. But Dr Keene had no trouble understanding him.

‘You mean officially?’

‘Sort of. I believe you know a man called Derwood Charters?’

Dr Keene snorted and started rearranging his instruments.

‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Rebus said.

‘Very much to my cost. Like you, he walked into my surgery one day requiring treatment. Then I bumped into
him socially. We met a few more times, and he put a proposition to me.’

‘A financial proposition?’

‘He needed investors for a start-up. The man had a proven track record, he’d helped finance the PanoTech start-up for one thing, and you’d hardly call
that
a failure. Mind, I didn’t just take his word for anything; I had my accountant look at the figures. The projections seemed sound, professionally done.’

‘What was the company?’

‘Derry was very persuasive, he always stipulated the downside of any project. Somehow, the more he talked them down, the more attractive he made them sound. He came across like he wasn’t trying to sell you anything. The scheme I invested in, the company was going to profit from the downturn in the economy. That was the downside: other people’s misery was going to make his investors money. He was offering retraining and counselling for employees who suddenly found themselves “reorganised” out of a job. He explained that once the company was up and running – it was to be called Albavise – he’d be able to draw on European Community grants, Scottish Office funding, all that. What he needed was start-up capital.’ Dr Keene paused. ‘Know what? I believed him then and I believe him now: if he’d used the money to start the company, it would have succeeded.’

‘But he didn’t set up a company, did he?’

Dr Keene sighed. ‘He used it to pay off debts, and to finance his lifestyle. He’d picked out ten investors, each handing over five thou. Fifty thousand pounds, Inspector, and he blew the lot inside three months.’

Yes, and then tried to do a runner. Only, one of his investors had an accountant who was sharper than most. Charters was arrested as he made to board the shuttle to London.

‘Once they started investigating his affairs – the Inland Revenue, Fraud Squad, what have you – they found a lot of discrepancies, none of which Derry was willing to discuss. He kept his peace all through the trial.’ He looked at Rebus. ‘Has something happened?’

Rebus shrugged. ‘Early days yet, sir.’ The stock response, but Dr Keene accepted it.

‘It wasn’t the cash that hurt, you know,’ he told Rebus. ‘It was that sense of betrayal.’

‘I can imagine.’

The Charters case-notes had made for fascinating reading. For example, Rebus now knew that Frank Lauderdale had been attached to the Fraud Squad at the time they’d been investigating Albavise and Derwood Charters’ other business interests. Thinking back on it, Rebus did recall a period when Lauderdale had been away from Great London Road. But Lauderdale was the least interesting part of it. For the man who had been head of the Fraud Squad back then, Chief Superintendent Allan Gunner, was now deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police.

And that wasn’t all …

‘Dr Keene, do you know a man called Haldayne? Spelt with a y.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘He’s American, works at the consulate.’

Dr Keene was shaking his head. ‘No, I don’t know him. Is it important?’

‘He’s another of the investors ripped off over Albavise. I thought you might have met, that’s all.’

‘We might have met in court, had any witnesses been called. But Charters changed his mind at the last minute and pled guilty.’

‘Really? Any idea why?’

‘None. My solicitor was amazed. The case against him
was by no means watertight and, as I say, he had a very good track record. It was possible he might have gone free, or at least got off with a heavy fine. But instead, he went to jail. I’ve often wondered why he did that.’

Rebus was wondering the same thing. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘to protect someone or something that could have come to light at the trial.’

‘But who or what?’

Rebus just smiled and winked. He collected his coat and put it on in the hallway. The assistant had already gone home. There was an appointment card on her desk. Dr Keene picked it up and handed it to Rebus.

‘See you in a few days.’

Rebus looked at the card. There was a long column of appointments listed on its back. Six of them. Dates and times.

‘Dr Keene,’ he said, ‘exactly how many fillings do I need?’

‘Fifteen,’ the dentist said matter-of-factly. Then he saw Rebus to the door.

That night, Rebus went to see Tresa McAnally.

The tenement door wasn’t locked, so he climbed the stairs to her flat. He could hear music inside, good-time music, and the sounds of hands clapping in time. Rebus pressed the bell and waited, then pressed it again. The music was turned down. A voice came from behind the door. ‘Who is it?’