‘I know that. The version Jim Stevens’ paper is printing... Oakes is spinning them a line.’
‘He told me one of his victims was the same age as my daughter. Nobody in here fits with that.’
Alan Archibald shrugged. ‘Your daughter’s mid-twenties, Deirdre was eighteen.’ He paused. ‘Maybe there are others we don’t know about.’
Yes, thought Rebus, and maybe it had been just another lie. ‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked.
‘Keep at him.’
‘Play along with him?’
‘I don’t see it that way.’
‘I know you don’t; that’s what worries me.’
‘She wasn’t your niece.’
Rebus looked into Alan Archibald’s eyes; saw courage and grit, the vital energies which had stayed with him all his working years, not about to be jettisoned now.
‘How can I help?’
‘What makes you think I want any help?’
‘Because you came back tonight. Not to talk to him, but to see me.’
Alan Archibald smiled. ‘I know a bit about you, John. I know we’re not so very different.’
‘So how can I help?’
‘Help me make him come to Hillend.’
‘What good do you think it would do?’
‘He ran from the crime, John. Ran as far as he could from the memory of it. Take him back there, back to his first killing... I think it would bring it all back: the terror, the uncertainty. I think he’d start to unravel.’
‘Is that what we want?’ Rebus thinking: He’ll kill again...
‘It’s what I want. I just need to know if I’ll have your help.’
Rebus rubbed his hands over the steering-wheel. ‘I’ll need to think.’
‘Well, don’t be too long about it. I get the feeling maybe you need this as much as I do.’
Rebus looked at him.
‘We can’t always live by faith alone,’ Archibald went on. ‘Now and then, there has to be something more.’
22
After a further hour of conversation, Archibald left, saying he’d find himself a taxi. He’d talked about his niece, his memories of her, the way her murder had affected the family.
‘We disintegrated,’ he’d said. ‘So slowly, I don’t think anybody noticed. I think we felt guilty whenever we met, like we were to blame. Because when we got together, there was only one possible subject, one thing on our minds, and we didn’t want that.’
He’d talked too about his work on the case: weeks spent in police archives; months spent piecing together Cary Oakes’s history; trips to the US.
‘It must all have cost a lot,’ Rebus had said.
‘Worth every penny, John.’
Rebus hadn’t added that money wasn’t his point. He knew all about obsession, knew how it could rob you of everything. He’d been given a jigsaw one year as a Christmas present, back when Sammy was just a kid. He’d cleared a table and started work on it, found he worked late into the night, even though he knew the picture he was making — knew because it was right there on the box. Only he tried not to look at it, wanting to complete the puzzle without any help.
And one piece was missing. He’d asked Rhona, questioned Sammy: had she taken it? Rhona told him maybe it wasn’t in the box to start with, but he couldn’t accept that. He’d stripped the sofa and chairs, pulled up the carpet, gone over the room inch by inch, then the rest of the flat — just in case Sammy had put it somewhere. Never found it. Even years later, he would find himself wondering if maybe it had slipped between the floorboards, or under the skirting-board...
Police work could affect you like that, if you let it. Unsolved cases; questions that niggled; people you knew were the culprits but couldn’t incriminate... He’d had more than his fair share of those. But eventually he let them go, even if it meant drinking them into oblivion. Alan Archibald didn’t look capable of putting Cary Oakes behind him. Rebus got the feeling that even if Oakes were proved innocent, Archibald would go on believing in his guilt. It was in the nature of obsession.
Alone with his thoughts, Rebus reached into his pocket for the quarter-bottle, drained it dry.
Proved innocent... He thought of Darren Rough, shaking with fear, holed up in his locked toilet. All because Social Work had put him in a flat above a kids’ playground. And because John Rebus had placed on Rough’s shoulders the sins of others — the sins of men who had themselves abused Rough.
Rebus rubbed at his eyes. It wasn’t unusual for him to feel a weight of guilt. He carried Jack Morton’s death with him. But something had changed. In the old days, he wouldn’t have given much thought to Darren Rough. He’d have told himself Rough deserved what he got, for being what he so evidently was. But go back further... back to the cop he had once been, so long ago now, and he wouldn’t have taken Rough’s story to the tabloids. Maybe Mairie Henderson was right: something’s gone bad inside you.
He admired Alan Archibald’s persistence, but wondered what would happen if he were proved wrong. Would he still pursue Cary Oakes? Would he take things further than mere pursuit...? Rebus stared out at the night sky.
It’s all pretty tricky down here, isn’t it, Big Man?
He wondered what point the surveillance was serving. Oakes seemed to be turning it to his own advantage, coming and going as he pleased, letting them know he could do it. So that all their efforts seemed so much waste. He closed his eyes, listened to the occasional message on the police radio, his thoughts turning to Damon Mee. The boat looked like another dead end. Damon had walked out of the world, given his life the slip. Thoughts of Damon took him to Janice, and from there to his schooldays, when everything had just started to get complicated in his life.
Alec Chisholm had disappeared one day; never found.
Rebus had gone to the school leaving dance, with something he wanted to tell Mitch.
Then Janice had knocked him cold, a gang had descended on Mitch, and suddenly Rebus’s whole life was decided...
A noise brought him out of his reverie. He thought it had come from the back of the hotel. He decided to investigate. The car park and service entrance in darkness, but he swept his torch around. Looked up at the hotel windows. You could tell the corridors: lights still burned in those windows. One of the windows was open, curtains flapping. Rebus moved his torch in a downward arc, its beam landing on the roof of a lock-up garage, one of a row of three. They were separated from the hotel property by a wall. Rebus pulled himself up and over it. A narrow alley, puddles and rubbish underfoot. No sign of life, but footprints in the mud. He followed the path. It led him around the back of a factory unit and tenement, then up on to the busy thoroughfare of Bernard Street, where late-night cars and taxis idled at traffic lights. Where drunks stumbled their way home. One man was doing an elaborate dance and providing his own musical accompaniment. The woman with him thought he was hilarious. Can: ‘Tango Whiskyman’.
There was no sign of Cary Oakes, no sign at all, but Rebus got the feeling he was out there. He retraced his steps, stopped at a rubbish skip parked next to one of the service doors, took the empty bottle from his pocket and tossed it in.
Felt his head jerk forward as a blow hit him from behind. Searing pain, his eyes screwing shut. He raised a hand, half-turned. A second blow laid him out cold.
It was pitch black, and when he moved there was a dull steel echo.
And a smell.