‘You said his girlfriend’s called Helen?’
Brian nodded. He’d lost some hair and put on weight, his face jowly. There was a row of cheap trophies above the mantelpiece: darts and pool, pub sports. He reckoned Brian kept in training most nights. Janice... Janice looked the same as ever. No, that wasn’t strictly true. She had wisps of grey in her hair. But all the same, talking to her was like stepping back into a previous age.
‘Does Helen live locally?’ he asked.
‘Practically round the corner.’
‘I’d like to talk to her.’
‘I’ll give her a bell.’ Brian got to his feet, left the room.
‘Where does Damon work?’ Rebus asked, for want of a better question.
‘Same place as his dad,’ Janice said, lighting a cigarette. Rebus raised an eyebrow: at school, she’d been anti-tobacco. She saw his look and smiled.
‘He got a job in packaging,’ her dad said. He seemed frail, chin quivering. Rebus wondered if he’d had a stroke. One side of his face looked slack. ‘He’s learning the ropes. It’ll be management soon.’
Working-class nepotism, jobs handed down from father to son. Rebus was surprised it still existed.
‘Lucky to find any work at all around here,’ Mrs Playfair added.
‘Are things bad?’
She made a tutting sound, dismissing the question.
‘Remember the old pit, John?’ Janice asked.
Of course he remembered it, and the bing and the wilderness around it. Long walks on summer evenings, stopping for kisses that seemed to last hours. Wisps of coal-smoke rising from the bing, the dross within still smouldering.
‘It’s all been levelled now, turned into parkland. They’re talking about building a mining museum.’
Mrs Playfair tutted again. ‘All it’ll do is remind us what we once had.’
‘Job creation,’ her daughter said.
‘They used to call Cowdenbeath the Chicago of Fife,’ Brian Mee’s mother added.
‘The Blue Brazil,’ Mr Playfair said, giving a croaking laugh. He meant Cowdenbeath football club, the nickname a self-imposed piece of irony. They called themselves the Blue Brazil because they were rubbish.
‘Helen’ll be here in a minute,’ Brian said, coming back in.
‘Are you not eating any cake, Inspector?’ added Mrs Playfair.
On the drive back to Edinburgh, Rebus thought back to his chat with Helen Cousins. She hadn’t been able to add much to Rebus’s picture of Damon, and hadn’t been there the night he’d vanished. She’d been out with friends. It was a Friday rituaclass="underline" Damon went out with ‘the lads’, she went out with ‘the girls’. He’d spoken with one of Damon’s companions; the other had been out. He’d learned nothing helpful.
As he crossed the Forth Road Bridge, he thought about the symbol Fife had decided upon for its ‘Welcome to Fife’ signs: the Forth Rail Bridge. Not an identity so much as an admission of failure, recognition that Fife was for many people a conduit or mere adjunct to Edinburgh.
Helen Cousins had worn black eyeliner and crimson lipstick and would never be pretty. Acne had carved cruel lines into her sallow face. Her hair had been dyed black and fell to a gelled fringe. When asked what she thought had happened to Damon, she’d just shrugged and folded her arms, crossing one leg over the other in a refusal to take any blame he might be trying to foist on her.
Joey, who’d been at Guiser’s that night, had been similarly reticent.
‘Just a night out,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing unusual about it.’
‘And nothing different about Damon?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Was he maybe preoccupied? Did he look nervous?’
A shrug: the apparent extent of Joey’s concern for his friend...
Rebus knew he was headed home, meaning Patience’s flat. But as he stop-started between the lights on Queens-ferry Road, he thought maybe he’d go to the Oxford Bar. Not for a drink, maybe just for a cola or a coffee, and some company. He’d drink a soft drink and listen to the gossip.
So he drove past Oxford Terrace, stopped at the foot of Castle Street. Walked up the slope towards the Ox. Edinburgh Castle was just over the rise. The best view you could get of it was from a burger place on Princes Street. He pushed open the door to the pub, feeling heat and smelling smoke. He didn’t need cigarettes in the Ox: breathing was like killing a ten-pack. Coke or a coffee, he was having trouble making up his mind. Harry was on duty tonight. He lifted an empty pint glass and waved it in Rebus’s direction.
‘Aye, OK then,’ Rebus said, like it was the easiest decision he’d ever made.
He got in at quarter to midnight. Patience was watching TV. She didn’t say much about his drinking these days: silence every bit as effective as lectures had ever been. But she wrinkled her nose at the cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes, so he dumped them in the washing basket and took a shower. She was in bed by the time he got out. There was a fresh glass of water his side of the bed.
‘Thanks,’ he said, draining it with two paracetamol.
‘How was your day?’ she asked: automatic question, automatic response.
‘Not so bad. Yours?’
A sleepy grunt in reply. She had her eyes closed. There were things Rebus wanted to say, questions he’d like to ask. What are we doing here? Do you want me out? He thought maybe Patience had the same questions or similar. Somehow they never got asked; fear of the answers, perhaps, and what those answers would mean. Who in the world relished failure?
‘I went to a funeral,’ he told her. ‘A guy I knew.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I didn’t really know him that well.’
‘What did he die of?’ Head still on the pillow, eyes closed.
‘A fall.’
‘Accident?’
She was drifting away from him. He spoke anyway. ‘His widow, she’d dressed their daughter to look like an angel. One way of dealing with it, I suppose.’ He paused, listening to Patience’s breathing grow regular. ‘I went to Fife tonight, back to the old town. Friends I haven’t seen in years.’ He looked at her. ‘An old flame, someone I could have ended up married to.’ Touched her hair. ‘No Edinburgh, no Dr Patience Aitken.’ His eyes turned towards the window. No Sammy... maybe no job in the police either.
No ghosts.
When she was asleep, he went back through to the living room and plugged headphones into the hi-fi. He’d added a record deck to her CD system. In a bag under the bookshelf he found his last purchases from Backbeat Records: Light of Darkness and Writing on the Wall, two Scottish bands he vaguely remembered from times past. As he sat to listen, he wondered why it was he was only ever happy on rewind. He thought back to times when he’d been happy, realising that at the time he hadn’t felt happy: it was only in retrospect that it dawned on him. Why was that? He sat back with eyes closed. Incredible String Band: ‘The Half-Remarkable Question’. Segue to Brian Eno: ‘Everything Merges with the Night’. He saw Janice Playfair the way she’d been the night she’d laid him out, the night that had changed everything. And he saw Alec Chisholm, who’d walked away from school one day and never been seen again. He didn’t have Alec’s face, just a vague outline and a way of standing, of composing himself. Alec the brainy one, the one who was going to go far.
Only nobody’d expected him to go the way he did.
Without opening his eyes, Rebus knew Jack Morton was seated in the chair across from him. Could Jack hear the music? He never spoke, so it was hard to know if sounds meant anything to him. He was waiting for the track called ‘Bogeyman’; listening and waiting...
It was nearly dawn when, on her way back from the toilet, Patience removed the headphones from his sleeping form and threw a blanket over him.