‘Thing is, John, can we afford to play a waiting game? The ACC says we can have funding for partial surveillance.’
‘How partial?’
‘Two teams of two, maybe a fortnight.’
‘That’s big of him.’
‘The man likes a nice tight budget.’
‘Even when this guy might kill again?’
‘Even murder has a budget these days, John.’
‘I still don’t get it.’ Rebus picked up the fax. ‘According to the notes, Oakes wasn’t born here, doesn’t have family here. He lived here for, what, four or five years. Went to the States at twenty, he’s been almost half his life there. What’s for him back here?’
The Farmer shrugged. ‘A fresh start?’
A fresh start: Rebus was thinking of Darren Rough.
‘There has to be more to it than that, sir,’ Rebus said, picking up the file again. ‘There has to be.’
The Farmer looked at his watch. ‘Aren’t you due in court?’
Rebus nodded agreement. ‘Waste of time, sir. They won’t call me.’
‘All the same, Inspector...’
Rebus got up. ‘Mind if I take this stuff?’ Waving the sheets of fax paper. ‘You told me I should take something to read.’
11
Rebus sat with other witnesses, other cases, all of them waiting to be called to give evidence. There were uniforms, attentive to their notebooks, and CID officers, arms folded, trying to be casual about the whole thing. Rebus knew a few faces, held quiet conversations. The members of the public sat there with hands clasped between knees, or with heads angled to the ceiling, bored out of their minds. Newspapers — already read, crosswords finished — lay strewn around the room. A couple of dog-eared paperbacks had attracted interest, but not for long. There was something about the atmosphere that sucked all the enthusiasm out of you. The lighting gave you a headache, and all the time you were wondering why you were here.
Answer: to serve justice.
And one of the court officers would wander in and, looking at a clipboard, call your name, and you’d creak your way to the court, where your numbed memory would be poked and prodded by strangers playing to a judge, jury, and public gallery.
This was justice.
There was one witness, seated directly across from Rebus, who kept bursting into tears. He was a young man, maybe mid-twenties, corpulent and with thin strands of black hair plastered to his head. He kept emptying his nose loudly into a stained handkerchief. One time, when he looked up, Rebus gave him a reassuring smile, but that only started him off again. Eventually, Rebus had to get out. He told one of the uniforms that he was going for a ciggie.
‘I’ll join you,’ the uniform said.
Outside, they smoked furiously and in silence, watching the ebb and flow of people from the building. The High Court was tucked in behind St Giles’ Cathedral, and occasionally tourists would wander towards it, wondering what it was. There were few signs about, just Roman numerals above the various heavy wooden doors. A guard on the car park would sometimes point them back towards the High Street. Though members of the public could enter the court building, tourists were actively discouraged. The Great Hall was enough of a cattle market as it was. But Rebus liked it: he liked the carved wooden ceiling, the statue of Sir Walter Scott, the huge stained-glass window. He liked peering through the glass door into the library where the lawyers sought precedents in large dusty tomes.
But he preferred the fresh air, setts below him and grey stone above, and the inhalation of nicotine, and the illusion that he could walk away from all this if he chose. For the thing was, behind the splendour of the architecture, and the weight of tradition, and the high concepts of justice and the law, this was a place of immense and continual human pain, where brutal stories were wrenched up, where tortured images were replayed as daily fare. People who thought they’d put the whole thing behind them were asked to delve into the most secret and tragic moments of their past. Victims rendered their stories, the professionals laid down cold facts over the emotions of others, the accused wove their own versions in an attempt to woo the jury.
And while it was easy to see it as a game, as some kind of cruel spectator sport, still it could not be dismissed. Because for all the hard work Rebus and others put into a case, this was where it sank or swam. And this was where all policemen learned an early lesson that truth and justice were far from being allies, and that victims were something more than sealed bags of evidence, recordings and statements.
It had probably all been simple enough once upon a time; the concept still was fairly simple. There is an accused, and a victim. Lawyers speak for both sides, presenting the evidence. A judgment is made. But the whole thing was a matter of words and interpretation, and Rebus knew how facts could be twisted, misrepresented, how some evidence sounded more eloquent than others, how juries could decide from the off which way they’d vote, based on the manner or styling of the accused. And so it turned into theatre, and the cleverer the lawyers became, the more arcane became their games with language. Rebus had long since given up fighting them on their own terms. He gave his evidence, kept his answers short, and tried not to fall for any of the tried and tested tricks. Some of the lawyers could see it in his eyes, could see that he’d been here too often before. They detained him only briefly, before moving on to more amenable subjects.
That was why he didn’t think they’d call him today. But all the same, he had to sit it out, had to waste his time and energy in the great name of justice.
One of the guards came out. Rebus knew him, and offered a cigarette. The man took it with a nod, accepting Rebus’s box of matches.
‘Fucking awful in there today,’ the guard said, shaking his head. All three men were staring across the car park.
‘We’re not allowed to know,’ Rebus reminded him with a sly smile.
‘Which court are you in?’
‘Shiellion,’ Rebus said.
‘That’s the one I’m talking about,’ the guard said. ‘Some of the testimony...’ And he shook his head, a man who’d heard more horror stories than most in his working life.
Suddenly, Rebus knew why the man across from him had been crying. And if he couldn’t put a name to the man, at least now he knew who he was: he was one of the Shiellion survivors.
Shiellion House lay just off the Glasgow Road at Ingliston Mains. Built in the 1820s for one of the city’s Lord Provosts, after his death and various family wranglings it had passed into the care of the Church of Scotland. As a private residence it was found to be too big and draughty, its isolation — distant farms its only neighbours — driving away most of its residents. By the 1930s it had become a children’s home, dealing with orphans and the impoverished, teaching them Christianity with hard lessons and early rises. Shiellion had finally closed the previous year. There was talk of it becoming a hotel or a country club. But in its later years, Shiellion had garnered something of a reputation. There had been accusations from former residents, similar stories told by different intakes about the same two men.
Stories of abuse.
Physical and mental abuse to be sure, but eventually sexual abuse too. A couple of cases had come to the attention of the police, but the accusations were one-sided — the word of aggressive children against their quietly spoken carers. The investigations had been half-hearted. The Church had carried out its own internal inquiries, which had shown the children’s stories to be tissues of vindictive lies.