“I take it you’ve got zoning permission for this?” Rebus asked, gazing at the surroundings.
“Is that what you’re reduced to? Zoning violations?” Cafferty laughed and handed them their drinks, nodding towards a table. They sat down.
“Cheers,” he said, raising his glass of whiskey.
“Good health,” Rebus said, his face set like stone.
Cafferty swallowed a mouthful and exhaled. “So what brings you out at this time of night?”
“Do you know anyone called Montrose?” Rebus asked, swirling his own drink around the inside of the glass.
“As in Château Montrose?” Cafferty asked.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“It’s one of the better Bordeaux reds,” Cafferty explained. “But then you’re not a wine man, are you?”
“So you don’t know anyone called Montrose?” Rebus asked again.
“No, I don’t.”
“And it’s not a name you’ve used yourself?” As Cafferty shook his head, Rebus produced a notebook and pen. “So you wouldn’t mind writing it down?”
“I’m not so sure about that, Strawman. I have to be careful of entrapment, don’t I?”
“Just to compare to a handwriting sample. You can make it a scrawl if you prefer . . .” Rebus pushed the notebook and pen across the table. Cafferty looked at him, then at Siobhan.
“Maybe if you were to explain . . .”
“There was someone calling themselves Montrose at the preview,” Siobhan told him. “They signed the guest book.”
“Ahh. . .” Cafferty nodded. “Well, as I know damned fine it wasn’t me . . .” He turned the notebook round, opened it at a clean page, and wrote the word Montrose. It looked nothing like the signature on the guest book.
“Want me to have another go?” Cafferty didn’t wait for an answer, writing the name a further four times, each one slightly different. Still none of them looked like the signature.
“Thank you.” Rebus took the notebook back. Cafferty was about to pocket the pen until Rebus reminded him that it wasn’t his.
“Am I off the hook?” Cafferty asked.
“Did you talk to a man at the party . . . slightly taller than you, maybe similar build . . . brown sports jacket, darkish hair?”
Cafferty seemed to ponder this. Claret had at last shut up. Maybe the bodyguard had dragged her off to her basket.
“I don’t remember,” he said at last.
“Maybe you’re not really trying,” Rebus said accusingly.
Cafferty tutted. “And I was just about to offer you a spare pair of swimming trunks . . .”
“Tell you what,” Rebus said, “you jump in again, and I’ll fetch the toaster from the kitchen.”
Cafferty looked at Siobhan. “Do you think he means it, DS Clarke?”
“Hard to say with DI Rebus. Tell me, Mr. Cafferty, you know Ellen Dempsey, don’t you?”
“We’ve had this conversation before, I seem to remember.”
“Maybe, but back then I didn’t know that she’d worked for you in Dundee.”
“Worked for me?”
“A stint in a sauna,” Siobhan explained. She was thinking of what Bain had told her . . . about how Cafferty’s tentacles might stretch as far as Fife and Dundee. “I think maybe you were the owner.”
Cafferty just shrugged.
“In which case,” Siobhan went on, “you might have come into contact with a local CID officer, name of McCullough?”
Cafferty shrugged again. “When you’re a businessman,” he told her, “a lot of palms seem to want crossing with silver.”
“Care to expand?”
Cafferty chuckled and shook his head.
Rebus shifted in his seat. “Okay, here’s another one for you to try. Any chance you can account for your whereabouts this past weekend?”
Siobhan couldn’t mask her surprise at the question.
“The whole forty-eight hours?” Cafferty asked. “If I put my mind to it. But you’d probably just be jealous.”
“Try me,” Rebus said.
Cafferty sat back in his wicker chair. “Saturday morning: I test-drove a new car. An Aston Martin. I’m still thinking about it . . . Lunch here, then a round of golf over at Prestonfield. Evening I was at a party . . . the neighbors two doors along. Lovely couple, both lawyers. That was me till around midnight. Sunday we took Claret for a walk around Blackford Hill and the Hermitage. Then I had to go to Glasgow to lunch with an old friend — I can’t mention her name, she’s still married. Hubbie’s in Brussels on business, so we booked one of the rooms above the restaurant.” He winked at Siobhan, who was concentrating on her drink. “Got back here about eight . . . watched some telly. Joe had to wake me up around midnight and tell me to go to bed.” He offered a thoughtful smile. “I think I will buy that Aston, you know . . .”
“Not much room for the Weasel in the back,” Rebus stated blithely.
“That hardly matters, as he no longer works for me.”
“Had a falling-out?” Siobhan couldn’t help but be curious.
“A business matter,” Cafferty said, the glass to his lips, eyes staring above the rim and straight into Rebus’s.
“Care to tell us which loch we can expect to fish him out of?” Rebus asked.
Cafferty tutted again. “Now you’re definitely not getting that swim.”
“Just as well . . .” Rebus was putting down his glass, getting to his feet. “I’d only go and pee in your pool.”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t, Strawman.” Cafferty rose as if to see them out but then called his bodyguard’s name. Buckley must have been standing right behind the door. It opened immediately.
“Our visitors are leaving, Joe,” Cafferty instructed.
Rebus stood his ground a moment longer. “You haven’t asked why I was interested in your weekend.”
“So go ahead and tell me.”
Rebus shook his head slowly. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Always playing your little games, Strawman,” Cafferty chuckled. As they left, he was back at the bar, throwing more ice into his glass.
Outside, bathed once more in halogen as they walked down the path, Siobhan had a question.
“What’s all this about last weekend?”
“Not your problem.”
“It is if we’re working as a team.”
“Since when have I been a team player, Siobhan?”
“I thought that was what Tulliallan was for.”
Rebus just snorted, opened the gate. “Claret’s a funny name for a brown and white spaniel,” he commented.
“Maybe it’s because too much of it gives you a bitch of a hangover.”
He smiled with half his mouth. “Maybe,” he echoed, but she could tell he was thinking otherwise.
“Bit late to go dropping in on Miss Meikle, isn’t it?” Siobhan said, angling her watch towards the intruder lights.
“You don’t think she’s a night owl?”
“Cocoa and a bedside radio,” Siobhan predicted. “When do I get to know what you were doing in your flat?”
“When we see Miss Meikle.”
“Then let’s go see her.”
“I was planning on doing just that . . .”
30
Jan Meikle lived in the top half of a house conversion facing Leith Links. Siobhan liked the area. When they’d turned an old bonded warehouse nearby into flats, she’d visited a couple of times, and the only thing that had stopped her buying was the thought of moving all her stuff. She was reminded of Cynthia Bessant, Edward Marber’s closest friend, and the warehouse she lived in not more than a third of a mile from here. Would Bessant have known if Marber was thinking of a move to Tuscany? Probably. Yet she hadn’t said anything — no doubt mindful of his good name. She would probably have known he was wanting to take Laura Stafford with him, too — he confided in her, trusted her. It was a plan Bessant would not have been able to agree with.
Siobhan thought of sharing her ideas with Rebus but didn’t want him to think she was showing off. He would ask her how she knew, and she’d have to shrug and tell him: “intuition.” He’d smile at that and understand, having relied on his own instincts many a time in the past.