Clarke dutifully jotted it all down.
‘Does it answer your questions?’
‘Pretty much,’ she admitted. The night he’d died, that was as close to ‘Chris Mackie’ as she was going to get. Since then she’d been moving away from him, because he didn’t exist. He was a figment, imagined by someone with something to hide.
The who and what she might never discover.
Because Mackie had been clever. Everyone else had said he kept himself clean, but for the DSS he’d camouflaged himself with filth. Why? Because it made his act the more believable: bumbling, forgetful, unhelpful. The sort of person a hard-pressed official would want rid of pronto. No NI number? Never mind, issue an emergency one. Vague address in London? Fine, leave it be. Just sign your name to his claim and get him out of the cubicle.
A call on her mobile to Register House confirmed that there was no birth record of a Christopher Mackie on the date she’d given. She could try the other date she had, or spread the net wider, ask Register House in London... But she knew she was chasing shadows. She sat in a cramped café, drinking her drink, staring into space, and wondered if it was time to write up her report and call an end to the hunt.
She could think of half a dozen reasons for doing so.
And just four hundred thousand for not.
Back at her desk, she found over a dozen messages waiting for her. A couple of the names she recognised: local journalists. They’d tried calling three times apiece. She screwed shut her eyes and mouthed a word her grandmother would have clapped her ear for using. Then she headed downstairs to the Coms Room, knowing someone there would have the latest edition of the News. Front page: TRAGIC MYSTERY OF MILLIONAIRE TRAMP. As they didn’t have a photograph of Mackie, they’d opted for one of the spot where he’d jumped. There wasn’t much to the piece: well-known face around city centre... bank account well into six figures... police trying to establish who might have ‘a claim on the cash’.
Siobhan Clarke’s worst nightmare.
When she got upstairs, her phone was ringing again. Hi-Ho Silvers came across the floor on his knees, hands held in mock prayer.
‘I’m his love child,’ he said. ‘Give me a DNA test, but for God’s sake give me the dosh!’
Laughter in the CID suite. ‘It’s for yoo-ou,’ someone else said, pointing to her phone. Every nutter and chancer in the kingdom would be getting ready. They’d call 999 or Fettes, and to get them off the line, someone would eventually admit that it was a St Leonard’s matter.
They all belonged to Siobhan now. They were her children.
So she turned on her heels and left, ignoring the pleas from behind her.
And headed back on to the streets, finding new people to ask about Mackie. She knew she had to be quick: news travelled. Soon they’d all claim to have known him, to have been his best pal, his nephew, his executor. The street people knew her now, called her ‘doll’ and ‘hen’. One old man had even christened her ‘Diana, the Huntress’. She was wise to some of the younger beggars, too; not the ones who sold the Big Issue, but the ones who sat in doorways, blankets around them. She’d been sheltering from a downpour when one had come into Thin’s Bookshop, blanket discarded and a mobile phone to his ear, complaining because his taxi hadn’t turned up. He’d seen her, recognised her, but kept the diatribe going.
The foot of the Mound was quiet. Two young guys with ponytails and cross-breeds; the dogs licking themselves while their owners shared a can of headnip.
‘Don’t know the guy, sorry. Got a fag on you?’
She had learned to carry a packet with her, offered them each a cigarette, smiling when they took two. Then it was back up the Mound. John Rebus had told her something: the steep hill had been constructed from New Town rubble. The man whose idea it had been had owned a business at the top. Construction had meant the demolition of his shop. John Rebus hadn’t found the story amusing; he’d told her it was a lesson.
‘In what?’ she’d asked.
‘Scots history,’ he’d replied, failing to explain.
She wondered now if it had been a reference to independence, to self-made, self-destructing schemes. It did seem to amuse him that, when pushed, she would defend independence. He wound her up, telling her it was a trick and she was an English spy, sent to undermine the process. Then he’d call her a ‘New Scot’, a ‘settler’. She never knew when he was being serious. People in Edinburgh were like that: obtuse, thrawn. Sometimes she thought he was flirting, that the jibes and jokes were part of some mating ritual made all the more complex because it consisted of baiting the subject rather than wooing them.
She’d known John Rebus for several years now, and still they weren’t close friends. Rebus, so far as she could tell, saw none of his colleagues outside work hours, apart from when she invited him to Hibs matches. His only hobby was drinking, and he tended to indulge where few women did, his chosen pubs museum pieces in a gallery marked prehistoric.
He’d been living on and off for years with Dr Patience Aitken, but that seemed to be over, not that he was saying anything about it. At first she’d thought him shy, awkward, but now she wasn’t so sure. It seemed more like a strategy, a wilfulness. She couldn’t imagine him joining a singles club the way Derek Linford had done. Linford... another of her little mistakes. She hadn’t spoken to him since The Dome. He’d left precisely one message on her answerphone: ‘Hope you’ve got over whatever it was.’ As if it was her fault! She’d almost called him back, forced an apology, but maybe that was his game: get her to make the move; contact of any kind the prelude to a rematch.
Maybe there was method in John Rebus’s madness. Certainly there was a lot to be said for quiet nights in, a video rental, the gin, and a box of Pringle’s. Not trying to impress anyone; putting on some music and dancing by yourself. At parties and in clubs there was always that self-consciousness, that sense of being watched and graded by anonymous eyes.
But next morning at the office it would be: ‘What did you get up to last night then?’ Asked innocently enough, but she never felt comfortable saying more than, ‘Not much, how about you?’ Because to utter the word alone implied that you were lonely.
Or available. Or had something to hide.
Hunter Square was empty save for a tourist couple poring over a map. The coffee she’d drunk was asking permission to leave, so she headed for the public toilet. When she came out of her cubicle, a woman was standing by the sinks, hunting through a series of carrier bags. Bag lady was an American term, but it suddenly seemed right. The woman’s padded jacket was grubby, the stitching loose at the neck and shoulders. Her hair was short and greasy, cheeks red from exposure. She was talking to herself as she found what she’d been looking for: a half-eaten burger, still in its greaseproof wrapper. The woman held the comestible under the hand-dryer and let hot air play on it, turning it in her fingers. Clarke watched in fascination, unsure whether to be appalled or impressed. The woman knew she was being watched, but stuck to her task. When the dryer had finished its cycle, she pushed it on again with her finger. Then she spoke.
‘Nosy little beggar, aren’t you?’ She glanced towards Clarke. ‘You laughing at me?’
‘“Beggar”,’ Clarke quoted.
The woman snorted. ‘Easy amused then. And I’m no beggar, by the way.’
Clarke took a step forward. ‘Wouldn’t it heat up quicker if you opened it?’
‘Eh?’