He didn’t know what he was thinking or how he was feeling about Dickie Diamond’s death. Hard to say how many enemies had been harboring their festering thoughts, just waiting for the night when they clapped eyes on Diamond again.
He cut across to Nicolson Street and headed for the city center, turning right at Thin’s Bookshop and taking the steep turn down to the Cowgate. A couple of taxis: a few drunks. Dead center, he was thinking. He knew the easiest way into the mortuary this time of night was the staff entrance, so he parked outside, making sure he wasn’t blocking the loading bay. For a long time, they’d had to carry out actual autopsies at one of the city’s hospitals, due to the lack of a decent air-filtering system in the mortuary’s autopsy suite, but that had been remedied now. Rebus walked into the building and saw Hogan in the corridor ahead of him.
“He’s in here,” Hogan said. “Don’t worry, he wasn’t long in the water.” Good news: the body underwent terrible changes after lengthy submersion. The short corridor led directly into the loading area, which itself led directly to the holding area — a wall of little doors, each one opening to reveal a trolley. One trolley was sitting out, a polythene-wrapped body lying on it. Dickie Diamond was still wearing the same clothes. His wet hair was slicked back from his face, and there was some kind of algae stuck to one cheek. His eyes were closed, mouth open. The attendants were readying to take him upstairs in the elevator.
“Who’s doing the cutting?” Rebus asked.
“They’re both on tonight,” Hogan told him. Meaning: Professor Gates and Dr. Curt, the city’s chief pathologists. “It’s been a busy one: drug overdose in Muirhouse, fatal fire in Wester Hailes.”
“And four naturals,” an attendant reminded him. People dying of old age, or in the hospital. Mostly they ended up here.
“Shall we go up?” Hogan asked.
“Why not?” Rebus said.
As they climbed the stairs, Hogan asked about Diamond. “You lot were just interrogating him, weren’t you?”
“Interviewing him, Bobby.”
“As a suspect or a witness?”
“The latter.”
“When did you let him go?”
“This afternoon. How long had he been dead when you fished him out?”
“I’d say about an hour. Question is: did he drown?”
Rebus shrugged. “Do we know if he could swim?”
“No.”
They’d entered a glass-fronted viewing area. There were a couple of benches for them to sit on. On the other side of the glass, people moved around in surgical gowns and green Wellingtons. There were two stainless-steel slabs, with drainage holes and old-fashioned wooden blocks for the head to rest on. Gates and Curt waved a greeting, Curt gesturing for the two detectives to come join the fun. They shook their heads, pointing to the benches to let him know they were fine where they were. The body bag had been removed, and now Dickie Diamond’s clothes were being discarded, placed in their own plastic bags.
“How did you ID him?” Rebus asked.
“Phone numbers in his pocket. One was for his sister. I recognized him anyway, but she did the formal ID downstairs just before you got here.”
“How was she?”
“She didn’t seem too surprised, to be honest. Maybe she was just in shock.”
“Or maybe she’d been expecting it?”
Hogan looked at him. “Something you want to tell me, John?”
Rebus shook his head. “We reopened the case, went sniffing. Malky, the nephew, told Dickie what was happening. He came haring up here. We picked him up.” He shrugged. “End of story.”
“Not as far as someone was concerned,” Hogan said, peering through the glass as one of the attendants lifted something from the clothing. It was the revolver Diamond had pointed at Rebus. The attendant held it up for them to see.
“Managed to miss that in your search, Bobby,” Rebus said.
Hogan stood up, called out through the glass. “Where was it?”
“Down the back of his underpants,” the attendant called back, voice muffled by the face mask he was wearing.
“Can’t have been too comfortable,” Professor Gates added. “Maybe he’d a bad case of piles and was resorting to threats.”
When Hogan sat down again, Rebus noticed that he had reddened slightly at the neck.
“These things happen, Bobby,” Rebus sought to reassure him. He was wondering now if the gun had been tucked into Diamond’s waistband when he’d been answering their questions in IR1 . . .
With the body stripped of its clothing, the autopsy proper was beginning with the taking of body temperature. Rebus and Hogan knew what the pathologists would be looking for: alcohol levels; signs of injuries; head trauma . . . They would want to know whether Diamond had been alive or dead when he’d entered the water. Alive, and it could have been an accident — too much booze, maybe. Dead, and there was foul play involved. Everything from the state of the eyeballs to the contents of the lungs provided little clues. The body temperature would be used to calculate time of death, though immersion would make any exact calculations problematic.
After twenty minutes as spectator, Rebus said he needed a cigarette. Hogan decided to join him. They went to the staff room and helped themselves to mugs of tea, then walked outside. The night was clear and chilly. An undertaker’s car had arrived to take charge of one of the “naturals.” The driver bowed his head to them in sleepy acknowledgment. At this time of night, in this location, you had a bond of sorts. You were dealing with things most people — those with their heads warm against pillows, dreaming the time away until morning — shied away from.
“Undertaker,” Hogan mused. “You ever thought it a bloody odd word to use in the circumstances? Funeral director, I can understand, but undertaker . . . ?”
“You getting philosophical on me, Bobby?”
“No, I’m just saying . . . ach, forget it.”
Rebus smiled. His own thoughts were of Dickie Diamond. Dickie had gifted them Chib Kelly’s name. They could have accepted his gift, presented the case to Tennant and left it at that. But Gray and Jazz — Jazz in particular — hadn’t been satisfied. Rebus was wondering if they’d decided to press Dickie further. They’d dumped Rebus at Haymarket, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t turned back. In fact, he was a damned good alibi. When last seen, the trio had been heading west out of town, while Dickie was found in the northeast corner of the city. The Wild Bunch had started life looking like an uneasy alliance of insubordinate officers who didn’t like authority and were as likely to ignore an order as carry it out. But now Rebus was wondering if there was something more dangerous, more lethal at work. Gray, Jazz and Ward had been all too ready to help rip off the warehouse consignment. Force would have been necessary, but that hadn’t seemed to bother them. Were they capable of killing Dickie Diamond? Then again, why would they have killed him? Rebus didn’t have an answer for that, not yet.
He was leaning over the wall, watching the roadway, when he spotted the parked car. Movement within it. As the driver’s door opened and the interior light came on, he recognized Malky. He looked for Malky’s mother but didn’t see her. Malky was making to cross the road towards Rebus, but stopped at the centerline and stretched his arm, pointing.
“You fucking killed him, ya bastard!”
Hogan was at the wall now, too. “Calm down, Malky,” he called.