Rebus knew if he hadn’t walked in, his father might have done it, might have put her out of her misery.
Instead of which, she lingered for weeks.
He turned away from the Forth and found his vision blurred. He angled his head upwards, swallowing back the tears, and walked over to the abandoned car. Inside, Paul Duggan was crying.
‘They were my friends, too,’ he bawled. ‘And her stupid plan killed them! And yet I can’t hate her for it … can’t even get angry with her.’
Rebus put a hand on Duggan’s shoulder.
‘Nobody killed them,’ he said quietly. ‘They chose for themselves.’
The two of them sat there for a while, out of the wind, in shelter that wasn’t theirs.
Afterwards, Rebus drove them back into town. The teenagers in the back were both pink-eyed from crying; the two men in the front were not. He didn’t feel proud of the fact. He drove past the turn-off to Kennedy’s estate, and the Lord Provost still said nothing. Eventually, Rebus pulled the car on to the kerb outside Duggan’s Abbeyhill home.
‘Where are we?’ Kennedy asked.
‘Kirstie’s staying with some nice people,’ Rebus explained.
The Lord Provost turned to his daughter. ‘You’re not coming home?’
‘Not yet,’ she said, as if each word was costing her something.
‘You said you’d bring her back.’
‘I didn’t say she’d stay,’ Rebus said. ‘Kirstie’s got to decide if and when.’
She was already getting out of the car, as was Duggan. On the pavement, she doubled over and dry-heaved, spitting up foamy saliva.
‘Something’s wrong with her,’ Kennedy said. He made to open his door, but Rebus pulled the car abruptly off the kerb and into traffic.
‘You know what’s wrong with her,’ he said. ‘Now she’s coming off, and I think she’ll be all right.’
‘You infer,’ Kennedy said coldly, ‘that she wouldn’t be “all right” at home.’
‘What do you think?’ Rebus said, and he left it at that.
‘Where are we going?’
‘One good thing about Edinburgh, Lord Provost — there’s always a quiet spot nearby. You and me are going to have a talk. At least, you’ll be talking, I’ll be listening.’
He directed them around the base of Salisbury Crags and up to a car park near the summit of Arthur’s Seat. There were a few cars already there, parents and children out braving the gale. They would probably call it ‘blowing away the cobwebs’.
But Rebus and the Lord Provost stayed in the car, and the Lord Provost did the talking — that had been their bargain, after all. And afterwards, with the silence between them like an extra seat, Rebus drove the Lord Provost home.
There was a man at the top of the hill. He was mending a wall.
Rebus followed the line of the dry-stane dyke, climbing slowly. He was between Edinburgh and Carlops, in the foothills of the Pentland range. There was no escape from the wind and the cold up here, but Rebus was sweating as he neared the top. The man saw him coming, but didn’t stop working. He had three piles of stones close to him, varying in sizes and shapes. He would pick one up, feel it, study it, then either put it back in the pile or else add it to the wall. And with a fresh stone placed in the wall, a new challenge presented itself, and he had to study his mounds of stones all over again. Rebus stopped to catch his breath, and watched the man. It was the most painstaking work imaginable, and at the end of it the wall would be held together by nothing more than the artful arrangement of its constituent parts.
‘It must be a dying craft,’ Rebus said, having gained the summit.
‘Why do you say that?’ The man seemed amused.
Rebus shrugged. ‘Electric fences, barbed wire; not many farmers depend on dry-stane dykes.’ He paused. ‘Or dry-stane dykers, come to that.’
The man turned to look at him. He was ruddy-cheeked with a thick red beard and fair hair turning grey at the temples. He wore a baggy Aran sweater and green combat jacket, cord trousers and black boots. He wasn’t wearing gloves, and kept blowing on his hands.
‘I need to keep them bare,’ he explained. ‘I feel the stones better that way.’
‘Is your name Dalgety?’
‘Aidan Dalgety, at your service.’
‘Mr Dalgety, I’m Detective Inspector Rebus.’
‘Is that right?’
‘You don’t sound surprised.’
‘In a job like this, you don’t get many visitors. That’s one of the things I like about it. But since I started this wall, it’s been like a main thoroughfare rather than a deserted hillside.’
‘I know Councillor Gillespie visited you.’
‘Several times.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘I know.’
‘And that’s why you’re not surprised to see a detective?’
Dalgety smiled to himself and judged another stone, turning it in his hand, weighing it in his palm, feeling for its centre of gravity. He placed it on the wall, then thought better of it and moved it to another spot. The process took a couple of minutes.
Rebus looked back the way he’d come, following the wall down to the by-road where he’d parked his car. ‘Tell me, how many stones go into a wall like this?’
‘Tens of thousands,’ Dalgety said. ‘You could spend years counting them. Men took years building them.’
‘It’s a far cry from computers.’
‘Do you think so? Maybe it is. But then again, maybe there’s some connection.’
‘I understand you were Robbie Mathieson’s partner, back in the early days of PanoTech.’
‘It wasn’t called PanoTech in my day. The name belongs to Robbie.’
‘But the early designs … the early work was yours?’
‘Maybe it was.’ Dalgety tossed a stone from one pile to another.
‘That’s what I hear. He ran the company, but you designed the circuits. Your ideas made the company work.’ Dalgety didn’t say anything. ‘And then he bought you out.’
‘And then he bought me out,’ Dalgety echoed.
‘Is that the way it happened?’
‘It happened just the way I told it to the councillor. I had a … I’d been working too hard for too long. I had a breakdown. And when I came out of it, the company wasn’t mine any longer. Robbie had kissed me goodbye. And all the designs were his, too. The whole company was his. Dalmat, we were called — Dalgety and Mathieson. That was the first thing he changed.’ Dalgety was weighing another stone.
‘How did he find the money to buy you out? I take it you were bought out?’
‘Oh yes, it was all above board. He had some money invested somewhere: it paid a handsome profit and he used it to buy my share.’ He paused. ‘That’s what the lawyers told me afterwards. I didn’t remember any of it — discussions, signing the papers, none of it.’
‘You must have been bitter.’
Dalgety laughted. ‘I had another breakdown. They put me in a private nursing home. That took care of a lot of the pay-off money. When I came out, I didn’t want anything to do with the industry, or any industry like it. End of story.’
‘PanoTech’s grown since.’
‘Robbie Mathieson is good at what he does. Do you know about him?’ Rebus shook his head. ‘His family moved to the States when Robbie was eighteen. He joined one of the big boys, IBM or Hewlett Packard, someone like that. The company had operations in Europe, and Robbie was posted here. He liked Scotland. I was working on my own at the time, designing stuff, messing about with ideas, most of them impractical. We met, got to like one another, and he told me he was resigning and starting up his own computer business right here. He persuaded me along with him. We had a couple of good years …’ Dalgety seemed to have forgotten about the stone he was holding. The wind was hurting Rebus’s ears, but he didn’t let it show.
‘I’m not telling you the whole truth,’ Aidan Dalgety said at last. ‘I was an alcoholic; or, at least, I was on the verge of becoming one. I think that’s why Robbie wanted rid of me. Seemed to me afterwards that he must have been planning it for a while. I signed away the rights to a couple of components which went on to make PanoTech a lot of money.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But that was then and this is now.’