‘Pork belly.’
‘Good choice. It’s from my own piggery in Fife. Maybe we’ll take a wee trip there some day.’
With a wave of one hand, Brian Steele was dismissed. Climbing back towards the light and the noise, he felt able to breathe again. Rebecca was holding her phone close to her face.
‘Guess,’ she said without looking up, ‘how many men have tried buying me a drink in the last five minutes?’
‘Lots,’ Steele answered. Having placed the napkin back on his lap, the main courses arrived. But he was shaking his head. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said. ‘Bring me something else.’
The waiter looked startled. ‘Anything in particular, sir?’
Steele picked up his flute and emptied it. ‘Just so long as it hasn’t come from one of Big Ger Cafferty’s pigs,’ he said.
Cafferty’s office at the Devil’s Dram was behind an inch-thick steel door with three locks and an alarm system. Only Cafferty himself had the means of opening the safe where the takings were kept. On nights when he wasn’t around, his deputy would be driven to Quartermile accompanied by at least one of the doormen. The cash would be handed to Cafferty at his front door, along with the relevant paperwork. Of course, it was mostly credit and debit cards these days, plus contactless. Drinkers even paid using their smart watches. Cafferty preferred cash — it left less of a trail for HM Revenue and Customs to follow.
Most nights, he turned up at the club just before it closed, fixing the staff with a look that told them not to get up to any of the usual tricks. Not so much as a filched bottle of spirits or finessed tenner was going to leave the premises if Cafferty could help it. He also frowned on assignations with punters — next thing you knew, drinks were being offered on the house to people of no consequence. Only people he might have a use for merited the occasional freebie, people like Brian Steele. Cafferty knew that Steele loathed him and the feeling was entirely mutual. What the ACU man hated was that he belonged to Cafferty. As always, it had started with a few tiny tottering steps, but those steps had led Steele from a path that he was never going to find again.
Seated at his desk, Cafferty had started to replay the security footage from earlier in the evening. She was a looker, Rebecca. Cafferty knew her to speak to, of course; even had her phone number. He had paused the footage, zoomed in on the table. Steele had swapped the pork belly for a steak. Rebecca’s choice was the salmon fillet. She’d be watching her weight, wanting always to look her very best. Cafferty thought about texting her to ask if she’d liked it, but by now she was probably in bed with Steele. So instead he turned from CCTV to internet, typing in Conor Maloney’s name.
Maloney had remained a hobby. It irritated Cafferty that they could have become partners, had it not been for the private eye’s disappearance and that bloody kid OD’ing on an Edinburgh street. With Maloney on board, Cafferty could probably have taken Aberdeen and Glasgow. Christ, maybe even Newcastle. And from there... who knew? Maloney probably hadn’t been a paramilitary himself, content to negotiate with both sides. But the men around him had all come from that direction — sharp-witted and deadly. Yes, Cafferty could have used that, a whole trajectory lost to him. Instead of which, he had these meagre winnings from small-timers like Darryl Christie. It was nowhere near enough. Events had robbed him of the larger prize.
He kept clicking and searching. He knew Maloney’s known aliases by heart, tried the same series of keywords. He had spent a small fortune down the years attempting to keep tabs on the bastard. He needed to know about Maloney. How much richer was he? What circles did he move in? Who did he rub shoulders with? Where in the world did he call home?
After a largely fruitless half-hour, he returned to the security footage, watching as Rebecca got to her feet, adjusting her tight dress. Steele was leading the way as the pair headed for the exit. He didn’t wait for her, didn’t take her arm or hand as Cafferty would have done. He stopped for a word with the doormen, leaving her to wave down a taxi.
There was a knock at the door, so Cafferty closed the screen.
‘What?’ he barked.
The manager’s head appeared around the door. ‘About ready to lock up,’ he explained. ‘Want your car fetched?’
‘I’ll probably walk.’ Cafferty checked one final time that the safe was locked, remembering for a moment another safe a long time back, one whose contents he had been keen to examine.
‘Want me to tell Shug to hang around?’
‘I’m not an invalid — I don’t need a fucking carer!’
The manager’s head disappeared again, the door closing. Cafferty had scared him. Cafferty could always scare him. And he liked that.
Rebus’s eyes were stinging, reminding him of the days when he’d smoked, a stray puff catching him unawares. No smoking tonight, though, just too much time spent on the Meikle files. A desk lamp would have helped, but he didn’t have one. He’d had the same CD on repeat, Van Morrison’s Moondance, the volume turned down low. When he got up to switch it off, he felt his vertebrae click. Placed his fists either side of his spine and pushed. More clicks.
‘Like a shagged-out record, John,’ he told himself. He’d allowed himself two beers, in between half a packet of gum. He had half a mind to call Deborah Quant for a chat, but it was gone midnight and she would be asleep. Peering from his window, he saw that a couple of flats opposite his still had their lights on; students probably. Marchmont had always been a student area, even back in the mists of time when his wife Rhona had persuaded him to buy there. She’d been a teacher and her feeling was that being around so many students would ‘keep us young’.
Aye, right.
Not that he would have said that — not then. Or maybe he would; it was hard to remember the person he’d been, new to the city and new to the job.
He turned from the window and looked at the paperwork piled high on his dining table. He’d made pages of notes, each word capitalised so he’d be able to read it. His handwriting these days was a mess. But he knew the Meikle case now, knew it probably as well as anyone on Siobhan Clarke’s original team. His phone had pinged earlier with a text from Dallas Meikle. Word had been got to Ellis that there was a visitor coming. A good night’s sleep was now required; not that Rebus would get it. His mind was revved up as a result of all the reading. It would take more than another play of Moondance to switch off the motor. Meaning he might as well sit down at the table again for one last read-through. It was either that or wake up Brillo for an unneeded walk.
Switching from Moondance to Solid Air, Rebus went back to work.
Tuesday
28
At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Emily Crowther phoned Clarke from Poretoun House. She was there with the scene-of-crime team, watching as they went about their business.
‘You won’t believe it,’ she told Clarke. ‘I’ll send you a couple of pics, hang on...’
The line went dead and Clarke waited. She was in the MIT office, seated at her desk, on which sat a putter, nine iron, two tees and two golf balls. They’d been waiting for her that morning, a gift from Graham Sutherland. Across the room, the list Derek Shankley had helped compile was being gone through name by name, phone calls made, interviews arranged. Within a few seconds her phone pinged, alerting her to the photos. There were three of them. The SOCOs in their white overalls were taking the place apart, floorboards removed, plaster scraped from the walls for analysis. Brand had insisted on being in attendance. In one photograph he had his own camera out, leaning down as Haj Atwal studied a section of floorboard. Clarke called Crowther.