Rebus glanced up. ‘Not quite the same thing, is it?’
‘Look, Inspector, I’m trying to help...’
‘Amanda Petrie,’ Rebus said. Then he saw her address, recognised it. He looked up at Preston again.
‘The judge’s daughter?’
Preston was nodding. ‘Ama Petrie.’
‘Ama Petrie,’ Rebus echoed. He turned to Janice, saw the question in her eyes. ‘Edinburgh’s original wild child.’ Back to Preston: ‘I see you didn’t charge her for the boat.’
‘Ama always brings a good crowd.’
‘She uses the Clipper a lot?’
‘Maybe once a month, usually fancy dress of some kind.’
‘Does everyone play along?’
Preston saw what he was getting at. ‘Not all the time.’
‘So this night, there’d have been guests in normal clothes?’
‘Some, yes.’
‘And they wouldn’t have been quite as eye-catching as pirates and parrots?’
‘Agreed.’
‘So it’s possible...?’
‘It’s possible,’ Preston said with a sigh. ‘Look, what do you want me to say? Want me to lie and say I saw them there?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Best person to talk to is Ama herself.’
‘Yes,’ Rebus said thoughtfully. Thinking of Amanda Petrie, her reputation. Thinking too of her father, Lord Justice Petrie.
‘She runs with a pretty fast bunch,’ Preston said.
Rebus nodded. ‘Pretty rich too.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘The kind of customers you could do with more of.’
Preston glared at him. ‘I wouldn’t lie for her. Besides, I’m not sure the old ticker could cope with more than one Ama. Takes an age to clean up after her — more expense for me. And I always seem to get the bulk of complaints after Ama’s parties. God knows, they’re loud enough when they arrive...’
‘Anything out of the ordinary that night?’
Preston stared at Rebus. ‘Inspector, this was Ama Petrie. With her, there is no “ordinary”.’
Rebus was copying her phone number from the ledger into his notebook. His eyes ran down other bookings, saw nothing to interest him.
‘Well, thanks for your time, Mr Preston.’ A final glance towards the computer. ‘We’ll let you get back to your game.’
Outside, Janice turned to him. ‘I get the feeling I missed something back there.’
Rebus shrugged, shook his head. The car was parked on a sideroad. Drizzle was being blown into their faces as they walked.
‘Ama Petrie,’ Rebus said, keeping his head bowed. ‘She doesn’t fit my picture of Damon.’
‘The mystery blonde,’ Janice stated.
‘Friend of hers, you reckon?’
‘Let’s ask Ms Petrie.’
Rebus tried the number from his cellphone: got an answering machine, and didn’t leave a message. Janice looked at him.
‘Sometimes it helps not to give too much advance warning,’ he explained.
‘Gives people time to concoct a story?’
He nodded. ‘Something like that.’
She was still looking at him. ‘You’re good at this, aren’t you?’
‘I used to be.’ He thought of Alan Archibald: all those years on the force, all that persistence, pursuing Deirdre Campbell’s killer... It might be a kind of madness, but you had to admire it. It was what Rebus liked about cops. Only thing was, most of them weren’t like that at all...
‘Back to Arden Street,’ he told Janice. There were calls she still had to make; his flat was still her base.
‘What about you?’ she asked.
‘Things to do, people to see.’
She took his hand, squeezed it. ‘Thanks, John.’ Then reached up to touch his face. ‘You look tired.’ Rebus removed her fingers from his cheek, held them to his mouth, kissed them. Reached down with his free hand to turn the ignition.
The first instalment of Cary Oakes’s ‘Lifer Story’ was perfunctory: a couple of paragraphs about his return to Scotland, a couple more about his incarceration, and then early biography. Rebus noted that place-names were kept to a minimum. Oakes’s explanation: ‘I don’t want anywhere getting a bad rep just because Cary Oakes once spent a wet winter there.’
Thoughtful of him.
Several times, revelations were hinted at — teasers to keep the audience coming back for more — but on the whole it looked like whatever the paper had paid Oakes, they’d got themselves a pig in a poke. Rebus doubted Stevens’ editor would be chuffed. There were photos: Oakes at the airport; Oakes on his release from the penitentiary; Oakes as a baby. A small photo too of ‘reporter James Stevens’, alongside his byline. Rebus noted that the photographs took up more space than the actual story. Looked like the reporter would be struggling to get a book’s worth.
He folded the paper and looked out of his car window. He was parked at the gateway to a Do-It-Yourself superstore, one of those thinly disguised warehouses which, cheaply and quickly built, seemed to surround the city. There were only four cars in the capacious car park. He didn’t know this part of the city welclass="underline" Brunstane. Just to the west was The Jewel, with its mandatory shopping centre; to the east stood Jewel and Esk College. The message Jane Barbour had left for him at the office had been perfunctory: time and place, telling him to meet her. Rebus lit another cigarette, wondering if she was ever coming. Then a car pulled up alongside him, sounded its horn, and proceeded into the car park. Rebus started his engine and followed.
DI Jane Barbour drove a cream-coloured Ford Mondeo. She was getting out as Rebus parked alongside her. She reached back into the car for an A4 envelope.
‘Nice car,’ Rebus said.
‘Thanks for coming.’
Rebus closed the car door for her. ‘What’s up? Run out of rawl-plugs?’
‘Have you been here before?’
‘Can’t say that I have.’
The wind blew her hair across her face. ‘Come on,’ she said, all businesslike, verging on the hostile.
He let himself be led round the side of the building. This was where staff parked their cars and bikes. There were two fire-exit doors, painted a green as drab as the grey of the corrugated walls. The back of the warehouse was a waste and delivery area. Skips spilled out flattened cardboard boxes. A dozen terracotta pots waited to be taken inside and displayed for sale. A low brick wall surrounded the area.
‘Is this where you mug me?’ Rebus asked, sticking his hands in his pockets.
‘Why have you got it in for Darren Rough?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘Just tell me.’
He tried for eye contact, but she wasn’t playing. ‘Because of what he is, what he was doing at the zoo. Because he slandered a fellow officer. Because of...’
‘Shiellion?’ she guessed, her eyes meeting his at last. ‘You couldn’t touch Ince and Marshall, but suddenly there was someone you could replace them with.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
Barbour reached into the envelope, lifted out a black and white photograph. It looked old, showed a three-storey Georgian house. A family posed in front of it, proud of their new motor car. The car was a 1920s model.
‘They knocked it down six years ago,’ Barbour explained. ‘It was either that or wait for it to disintegrate of its own accord.’
‘Nice-looking house.’
‘The patriarch there,’ Barbour said, tapping the man with one foot on the car’s running-board, ‘he went bankrupt. Mr Callstone, he was called. Worked in jute or something. The family home had to be sold. Church of Scotland snapped it up. But part of the deal was, they had to retain the family’s name. So it stayed Callstone House.’
She waited for him to get the name. ‘Children’s home,’ he said at last, watching her nod.