Rebus, too, had placed the young man as a drug user. It was something about the eyes, the facial muscles, something about the way the body held itself. In turn, the barman recognized pigs when he saw them.
“I’m off that stuff,” Malky said.
“Take your methadone religiously?” Hogan asked with a smile. “DI Rebus here is wondering whatever happened to your uncle.”
“Which one?”
“The one we don’t hear about so much these days . . . unless you know different.” Hogan turned to Rebus. “Malky here is Dickie’s sister’s kid.”
“How long you been working here then, Malky?” Rebus asked.
“Nearly a year.” The barman’s attitude had changed from indifference to surliness.
“Did you know the place when it was the Zombie?”
“I was too young, wasn’t I?”
“Doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have served you.” Rebus lit a cigarette, offering one to Hogan.
“Has Uncle Dickie turned up?” Malky asked. Rebus shook his head. “It’s just that my mum . . . every now and then she gets all weepy, says Uncle Dickie must be dead and buried somewhere.”
“What does she think happened to him?”
“How should I know?”
“You could try asking her.” Rebus had one of his cards out. It had his pager number as well as the police switchboard. “I’d be interested to know her answer.”
Malky stuck the card in the top pocket of his shirt.
“Dying of thirst over here!” Barclay called from the table. Hogan picked up two of the drinks. Rebus was staring at Malky.
“I mean it,” he said. “You ever hear anything, I’d really like to know what happened to him.”
Malky nodded, then turned away to answer the phone. But Rebus had gripped his arm. “Where do you live, Malky?”
“Sighthill. What’s it to you?” Malky wrestled his arm free, picked up the phone.
Sighthill was perfect. Rebus knew someone in Sighthill . . .
“So what happened to this place?” Ward was asking Hogan when Rebus reached the table.
“They got their market research wrong, thought there’d be enough yuppies in Leith by now to make them a fortune.”
“Maybe if they hang on a few more years,” Barclay said, pausing halfway down his cola.
Hogan nodded. “It’s coming,” he agreed. “Just a shame we didn’t get the parliament.”
Rebus snorted. “You’d’ve been welcome to it.”
“We wanted it.”
“So what was the problem?” Ward asked.
“The MSPs didn’t want to be in Leith. Too out of the way.”
“Maybe they were scared off by the temptations of the flesh,” Ward proposed. “Not that I’m seeing any around here . . .”
The door opened and another solitary drinker entered. He was all twitches and movement, as if someone had just wound up his mechanism. He saw Hogan and gave a nod of acknowledgment, but then started heading for the bar. Hogan, however, waved him over.
“Is this him?” Ward asked, already hardening his face, turning it into a mask.
“This is him,” Hogan said. Then, to the new arrivaclass="underline" “Father Joe . . . I was wondering if your pastoral wanderings would bring you in here.”
Joe Daly smiled at the joke, and nodded as if it were part of some ritual between Hogan and himself. Hogan meantime was making introductions. “Now talk to the good men,” he said in closing, “while I fetch you a small libation. Jameson’s and water, no ice, yes?”
“That would serve the purpose,” Daly said, his breath already sweetened by whiskey. He watched Hogan head for the bar. “A good man in his way,” he commented.
“And was Dickie Diamond a good man too, Father Joe?” Rebus asked.
“Ah, the Diamond Dog . . .” Daly was thoughtful for a moment. “Richard could be the best friend you’d ever had, but he could be a right bastard, too. He had no forgiveness in him.”
“You haven’t seen him recently?”
“Not in five or six years.”
“Did you ever meet another friend of his called Eric Lomax?” Ward asked. “Most people called him Rico.”
“Well, it was a long time ago, as I say . . .” Daly licked his lips expectantly.
“Of course, we’d pay the going rate,” Rebus informed him.
“Ah, well . . .” Daly’s whiskey arrived and he toasted the company in Gaelic. Rebus reckoned it was a double or treble — hard to tell with the added water.
“Father Joe was just about to tell us about Rico,” Rebus explained to Hogan, who was sitting down now.
“Well,” Daly began, “Rico was from the west coast, wasn’t he? Gave a good party, so the story went. Of course, I was never invited.”
“But Dickie was?”
“Oh, assuredly.”
“This was over in Glasgow?” Barclay asked, his face more bloodless than ever.
“I suppose there would have been parties there,” Daly admitted.
“But that’s not what you meant, is it?” Rebus asked.
“Well, no . . . I meant out at the caravans. There was a site in East Lothian, Rico stayed there sometimes.”
“Caravans, plural?” Rebus checked.
“He owned more than one; rented them out to tourists and the like.”
And the like . . . They already knew Rico’s reputation, bad men from Glasgow sheltering beside east coast beaches . . . Rebus noticed that Malky the barman was busying himself wiping down the already pristine tables in their vicinity.
“They were pretty close then, Rico and Dickie?” Ward asked.
“I don’t know that I’d say that. Rico probably only came to Leith three or four times a year.”
“Did you think it strange,” Rebus asked, “that Dickie did a bunk around the same time Rico was murdered?”
“Can’t say I connected the two,” Daly said. He hoisted the glass to his mouth, drained the whiskey.
“I don’t think that’s quite true, Father Joe,” Rebus stated quietly.
The glass was placed back on the table. “Well, maybe you’re right. I suppose I did wonder about it, same as everyone else in Leith.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And what conclusion did you draw?”
“None at all,” Daly said with a shrug. “Except that Our Lord moves in mysterious ways.”
“Amen to that,” said Hogan. Allan Ward rose to his feet, said he’d get another round.
“When you’ve finished polishing that ashtray . . . ,” he remarked to Malky. So he’d noted the barman’s actions, too. Maybe he was sharper than Rebus had given him credit for . . .
Linford was not to be deflected from his pursuit of Donny Dow. He’d called up what records they had, and was poring over them. Alongside them on his desk was a slim file with Laura Stafford’s name on it. Siobhan had taken a peek at the latter. The usual cautions and arrests: two sauna busts, one brothel bust. The brothel had been a flat above a video rental shop. The guy who owned the video shop, it was his girlfriend ran the operation upstairs. Laura had been one of the girls on duty the night the police, acting on a tip-off, had paid a visit. Bill Pryde had worked the case. His handwriting was in the margin of one page of the report: “tip-off anonymous, probably the sauna down the road . . .”
“The deep-throat business can be cutthroat, too” was Derek Linford’s comment.
He was having more joy with Donny Dow, who had been fighting since the age of ten. Arrests for vandalism and drunkenness, then Dow had taken up a healthy physical activity: Thai kickboxing. It had failed to keep him out of trouble: one charge of housebreaking — later dropped — several assaults, one drug bust.
“What sort of drugs?”
“Cannabis and speed.”
“A kickboxing headcase on speed? The mind boggles.”
“He worked as a bouncer for a time.” Linford pointed to the relevant line of the typed report. “His employer wrote a letter defending him.” He turned the page. The signature at the bottom of the letter was that of Morris G. Cafferty.
“Cafferty owned a security firm in the city,” Linford added. “Parted company with it a few years back.” He looked at Siobhan. “Still don’t think he could have clouted our art dealer?”