‘That’s because it was full of money.’
‘What have I done?’ Her face was reddening, her voice rising. ‘Broken some lousy prison rule, that’s all.’
‘I wish it were,’ Rebus said quietly.
She quietened. ‘What then?’
He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t do that to her … But it would all come out eventually, wouldn’t it?
‘Sammy,’ he said, ‘I think Charters paid Gerry Dip to kill a man. That envelope you delivered contained instructions and payment.’
Her face lost all its lovely colour. ‘What?’ The way she said it turned Rebus’s gut liquid. She tried picking up her drink, but spilt it, then retched into her cupped hands. Rebus got a handerkerchief out of his pocket and handed it over.
‘You’re trying to scare me,’ she said, ‘that’s all. You don’t like my job and you’re trying to scare me off!’
‘Sammy, please …’
She got to her feet, spilling the rest of her drink over his trousers. He followed her to the door, watched by barmaid and customer, and called after her. But she was running: down the steps on to the pavement, and then along to the corner and around it, back into Oxford Terrace.
‘Sammy!’
He watched her run, watched her until she’d disappeared.
‘Shite!’
A drunk, walking past, wished him a belated happy new year. Rebus told the man where he could stick it.
36
As arranged, Rebus drove to South Gyle next morning. He parked his car around the corner from the Lord Provost’s house, then went and rang the doorbell. The Lord Provost himself opened the door, and looked to left and right as if expecting her to be there.
‘We’ll have to go for a little drive,’ Rebus informed him.
Then a figure came storming along the passage behind Cameron Kennedy and brushed him aside.
‘Where is she?’ Mrs Kennedy’s voice trembled with emotion, her nostrils flaring. ‘Where’s the lost lamb?’ She turned to her husband. ‘You said he’d bring her!’
The Lord Provost looked at Rebus, who said nothing. ‘I have to go with Inspector Rebus, Beth.’
‘I’ll fetch my coat,’ Mrs Kennedy said.
‘No, Beth.’ The Lord Provost laid a hand on her arm. ‘Best I go alone.’
An argument started. Rebus turned and walked back towards the gate. The Lord Provost came after him.
‘Don’t you want a coat?’ Rebus asked.
‘I’ll be fine.’
His wife was calling to them from the door. “‘Thy will be blyther in heiven owre ae sinner at repents nor owre ninetie-nine saunts at need nae repentance.”’
‘She’s learned the New Testament in Scots,’ the Lord Provost explained. ‘She knows it backwards.’ It didn’t sound like a boast.
Kirstie was sitting in the back seat of Rebus’s car. Beside her was Paul Duggan. She’d had a bath, and her hair had been washed and rearranged. She was wearing clothes Mrs Duggan had bought for her — styles parents thought teenagers liked. You’d take her for a normal, sulky, shoulder-bechipped teenager, nothing more — if it wasn’t for the vomiting fits and the muscle spasms, the bolts of lightning through her bones.
Kennedy gasped when he saw her.
‘I said I’d bring her,’ Rebus told him. ‘Now get in.’
The Lord Provost’s face was like chiselled stone as they drove towards the Forth Bridges, the same route Rebus had taken that night with Lauderdale. He told himself he’d chosen the meeting place because it was nearby, open and private. But he thought maybe he had a deeper motive.
They came off the A90 and went three-quarters round the roundabout, then headed towards the Moat House Hotel, whose huge, desolate car park overlooked the Forth. At this time of day, this time of year, the car park was deserted save for a Ford Capri which looked as if it had been abandoned after a joyride. Rebus stopped the car and turned off the ignition.
‘This is where we get out,’ he told Paul Duggan.
Duggan squeezed Kirstie’s hand. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked her.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said coolly, watching her father in the rearview mirror, just as he was watching her.
So Rebus and Duggan got out.
Rebus walked across the tarmac and stood at the furthest edge. You got a great view of both bridges, and of the Fife coast beyond. You also took a beating from the wind, which blew from all directions. Rebus rode with it, swaying a little from the ankles. With his head tucked into his overcoat, he managed to light a cigarette at the sixth attempt. The smell of butane caused momentary nausea.
Paul Duggan was a little way off, resting one arm on a dull metal pay-view telescope. Rebus left him alone and just stared at the scenery. The clouds crawled past, looking as if they’d been hurt in too many bar room brawls. Beneath them, Fife was a slab of grey-green pavement.
Paul Duggan had finally arrived beside him. ‘Thinking about Willie and Dixie?’ he suggested. Rebus glanced at him but said nothing.
‘I’m not just a pretty face, Inspector.’
‘I was thinking that they got me into this. Their suicide. They got me thinking about things … asking myself questions. When McAnally killed himself, I was interested enough to want to know why.’ He smiled. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about.’
Duggan just shrugged. ‘I’m listening though.’ There was silence between them for a while. Duggan scuffed his toes against the kerb. ‘See this trouble I’m in, with the police and council and that …?’
‘You think I can help?’
‘I don’t know.’
It was strange that Kirstie should have run away from one smothering household only to end up in another, but Rebus thought he knew the reason why. After the deaths of Willie and Dixie, she’d disintegrated. To her, they had represented ‘real life’, a life well away from her father and his political conspiracies. Willie and Dixie had been the other side of the coin, a side she’d come to like, maybe even admire. And she’d killed them, after which she’d spiralled downwards until she realised she needed shelter and comfort, or she too might die. Paul Duggan had been there for her, and so had his parents.
‘You know,’ Rebus said, thinking aloud, ‘I think I know why she scrawled “Dalgety” on that document. If her father had paid the ransom — maybe even if he hadn’t — she was planning to send the LABarum plan back to him. It was a warning, a message that she knew something, and that he should leave her alone if he didn’t want her to reveal it to the world.’
‘Never mind Kirstie for the moment, what about me?’
‘Everybody’s got to pay, Paul,’ Rebus said, not looking at him. ‘That’s the way it works.’
‘Aye, right,’ Duggan said dismissively. ‘And if I was some rich bastard that had been to Fettes, I’d have to pay too, is that right? I’d be treated the same as an Oxgangs drop-out? Come on, Inspector, Kirstie’s told me the way it works, the whole system.’
He turned and shuffled away.
He had a point, one Rebus would happily concede, only he had other things to think about right now. The wind had finished his cigarette in double-quick time, so he lit another. Duggan was over at the abandoned car, peering in. He tried a door, opened it, and got in. Shelter accomplished. Some people said the weather made the Scots: long drear periods punctuated by short bursts of enlightenment and cheer. There was almost certainly something to the theory. It was hard to believe this winter would end, yet he knew that it would: knew, but almost didn’t believe. A matter of faith, as the old priest would say, or maybe the reverse of faith. Rebus hadn’t been to church in a while, and missed his conversations with Father Leary. But he didn’t miss the church, or even the Church. Leary would have no problem with suicide, in either concept or practice: it was a great sin, full stop. Assisted suicide, too, was a sin, every bit as heinous.
But when Rebus’s mother had been ill that last time, she’d begged his father for release. And one day, young John had walked in and had seen his father on the edge of her bed. She was asleep, her chest making awful, liquid sounds, and his father sat there with a pillow in his hands … looking at that pillow, then up at his son, asking to be told what to do.