Rebus and the Farmer — their station’s representatives — were towards the back of the crowd. And it was a good crowd, too. Lots of brass, alongside rugby players, churchgoers, and neighbours. Plus extended family. And standing by the open grave, the widow dressed in black, managing to look composed. She’d lifted her daughter off the ground. The daughter in a white lace dress, her hair thick and long and ringlet-blonde, face shining as she waved bye-bye to the wooden casket. With the blonde hair and white dress, she looked like an angel. Perhaps that had been the intention. Certainly, she stood out from the crowd.
Margolies’ parents were there, too. The father looking ex-forces, stiff-backed as a grandfather clock but with both trembling hands gripping the silver knob of a walking-stick. The mother teary-eyed, fragile, a veil falling to her wet mouth. She’d lost both her children. According to the Farmer, Jim’s sister had killed herself too, years back. History of mental instability, and she’d slashed her wrists. Rebus looked again at the parents, who had now outlived both their offspring. His mind flashed to his own daughter, wondering how scarred she was, scarred in places you couldn’t see.
Other family members nestled close to the parents, seeking comfort or ready to offer support — Rebus couldn’t tell which.
‘Nice family,’ the Farmer was whispering. Rebus almost perceived a whiff of envy. ‘Hannah’s won competitions.’
Hannah being the daughter. She was eight, Rebus learned. Blue-eyed like her father and perfect-skinned. The widow’s name was Katherine.
‘Dear Lord, the sheer waste.’
Rebus thought of the Farmer’s photographs, of the way individuals met and interlaced, forming a pattern which drew in others, colours merging or taking on discernible contrasts. You made friends, married into a new family, you had children who played with the children of other parents. You went to work, met colleagues who became friends. Bit by bit your identity became subsumed, no longer an individual and yet stronger somehow as a result.
Except it didn’t always work that way. Conflicts could arise: work perhaps, or the slow realisation that you’d made a wrong decision some time back. Rebus had seen it in his own life, had chosen profession over marriage, pushing his wife away. She’d taken their daughter with her. He felt now that he’d made the right choice for the wrong reasons, that he should have owned up to his failings from the start. His work had merely given him a reasonable excuse for bailing out.
He wondered about Jim Margolies, who had thrown himself to his death in the dark. He wondered what had driven him to that final stark decision. No one seemed to have a clue. Rebus had come across plenty of suicides over the years, from bungled to assisted and all points in between. But there had always been some kind of explanation, some breaking point reached, some deep-seated sense of loss or failure or foreboding. Leaf Hound: ‘Drowned My Life in Fear’.
But when it came to Jim Margolies... nothing clicked. There was no sense to it. His widow, parents, workmates... no one had been able to offer the first hint of an explanation. He’d been declared A1 fit. Things had been fine on the work front and at home. He loved his wife, his daughter. Money was not a problem.
But something had been a problem.
Dear Lord, the sheer waste.
And the cruelty of it: to leave everyone not only grieving but questioning, wondering if they were somehow to blame.
To erase your own life when life was so precious.
Looking towards the trees, Rebus saw Jack Morton standing there, seeming as young as when the two had first met.
Earth was being tossed down on to the coffin lid, a final futile wake-up call. The Farmer started walking away, hands clasped behind his back.
‘As long as I live,’ he said, ‘I’ll never understand it.’
‘You never know your luck,’ said Rebus.
3
He stood atop Salisbury Crags. There was a fierce wind blowing, and he turned up the collar of his coat. He’d been home to change out of his funeral clothes and should have been heading back for the station — he could see St Leonard’s from here — but something had made him take this detour.
Behind and above him, a few hardy souls had achieved the summit of Arthur’s Seat. Their reward: the panoramic view, plus ears that would sting for hours. With his fear of heights, Rebus didn’t get too close to the edge. The landscape was extraordinary. It was as though God had slapped his hand down on to Holyrood Park, flattening part of it but leaving this sheer face of rock, a reminder of the city’s origins.
Jim Margolies had jumped from here. Or a sudden gust had taken him: that was the less plausible, but more easily digested alternative. His widow had stated her belief that he’d been ‘walking, just walking’, and had lost his footing in the dark. But this raised unanswerable questions. What would take him from his bed in the middle of the night? If he had worries, why did he need to think them out at the top of Salisbury Crags, several miles from his home? He lived in The Grange, in what had been his wife’s parents’ house. It was raining that night, yet he didn’t take the car. Would a desperate man notice he was getting soaked...?
Looking down, Rebus saw the site of the old brewery, where they were going to build the new Scottish parliament. The first in three hundred years, and sited next to a theme park. Nearby stood the Greenfield housing scheme, a compact maze of high-rise blocks and sheltered accommodation. He wondered why the Crags should be so much more impressive than the man-made ingenuity of high-rises, then reached into his pocket for a folded piece of paper. He checked an address, looked back down on to Greenfield, and knew he had one more detour to make.
Greenfield’s flat-roofed tower blocks had been built in the mid-1960s and were showing their age. Dark stains bloomed on the discoloured harling. Overflow pipes dripped water on to cracked paving slabs. Rotting wood was flaking from the window surrounds. The wall of one ground-floor flat, its windows boarded up, had been painted to identify the one-time tenant as ‘Junky Scum’.
No council planner had ever lived here. No director of housing or community architect. All the council had done was move in problem tenants and tell everyone central heating was on its way. The estate had been built on the flat bottom of a bowl of land, so that Salisbury Crags loomed monstrously over the whole. Rebus rechecked the address on the paper. He’d had dealings in Greenfield before. It was far from the worst of the city’s estates, but still had its troubles. It was early afternoon now, and the streets were quiet. Someone had left a bicycle, missing its front wheel, in the middle of the road. Further along stood a pair of shopping trolleys, nose to nose as though deep in local gossip. In the midst of the six eleven-storey blocks stood four neat rows of terraced bungalows, complete with pocket-handkerchief gardens and low wooden fences. Net curtains covered most of the windows, and above each door a burglar alarm had been secured to the wall.
Part of the tarmac arena between the tower blocks had been given over to a play area. One boy was pulling another along on a sledge, imagining snow as the runners scraped across the ground. Rebus called out the words ‘Cragside Court’ and the boy on the sledge waved in the direction of one of the blocks. When Rebus got up close to it, he saw that a sign on the wall identifying the building had been defaced so that ‘Cragside’ read ‘Crap-site’. A window on the second floor swung open.