And now he was stringing them along.
“In your own time,” Rebus encouraged him. They were standing in front of a workbench on which various pieces of cloth had been laid out. Duff had placed numbered squares beside each one, and smaller squares-apparently color-coded-next to any stains or blemishes on each article. “Sooner we’re done, sooner you can get back to polishing the chrome on your MG.”
“That reminds me,” Siobhan said. “Thanks for offering me to Ray.”
“You should have seen first prize,” Rebus muttered. “What are we looking at, Prof?”
“Mud and bird shit mostly.” Duff rested his hands on his hips. “Brown for the former, gray for the latter.” He nodded at the colored squares.
“Leaving blue and pink…”
“Blue is for stuff that needs further analysis.”
“Tell me pink is for lipstick,” Siobhan said quietly.
“Blood, actually.” Duff spoke with a flourish.
“Oh, good,” Rebus responded, eyes fixing on Siobhan. “How many?”
“Two so far. Numbered one and two. One is a pair of brown cord trousers. Blood can be a bugger to make out against a brown background-resembles rust. Two belongs to a sports shirt, pale yellow, as you can see.”
“Not really,” Rebus said, leaning over for a closer look. The shirt was caked with dirt. “What’s that on the left breast? Badge of some kind?”
“What it actually says is Keogh’s Garage. The blood spatter is on the back.”
“Spatter?”
Duff nodded. “Consistent with a blow to the head. Something like a hammer, you make contact, break the skin, and when you draw the hammer away, the blood flies off in all directions.”
“Keogh’s Garage?” Siobhan’s question was directed at Rebus, who merely shrugged. Duff, however, cleared his throat.
“Nothing in the Perthshire phone book. Or Edinburgh, come to that.”
“Fast work, Ray,” Siobhan said approvingly.
“Another brownie point there, Ray,” Rebus added with a wink. “How about contestant number one?”
Duff nodded. “Not spatter this time-dollops on the right leg, around the level of the knee. Whack someone on the head, you’ll get some drips like that.”
“You’re saying we’ve got three victims, one attacker?”
Duff shrugged. “No way to prove it, of course. But ask yourself: what are the chances of three victims having three different attackers, all ending up in the same obscure location?”
“You’ve got a point, Ray,” Rebus conceded.
“And we’ve got a serial killer,” Siobhan said into the silence. “Different blood types, I take it?” She watched Duff nod. “Any idea which order they might have died in?”
“CC Rider is the freshest. I’d guess the sports shirt is the oldest.”
“And no other clues from the cords?”
Duff shook his head slowly, then dug into his lab-coat pocket and produced a clear plastic envelope. “Unless you count this, of course.”
“What is that?” Siobhan asked.
“Cash-machine card,” Duff told her, relishing the moment. “Name of Trevor Guest. So never let me hear you say I don’t earn my little rewards…”
Back in the fresh air, Rebus lit a cigarette. Siobhan paced the length of a parking bay, arms folded.
“One killer,” she stated.
“Yep.”
“Two named victims, the other a mechanic…”
“Or a car salesman,” Rebus mused. “Or just someone who had access to a shirt advertising a garage.”
“Thanks for refusing to narrow the search.”
He shrugged. “If we’d found a scarf with a soccer team’s logo on it, would we be homing in on the team?”
“All right, point taken.” She stopped in her tracks. “Do you need to get back to the autopsy?”
He shook his head. “One of us is going to have to break the news to Macrae.”
She nodded. “I’ll do it.”
“Not a hell of a lot more to be done today.”
“Back to Live 8 then?”
He gave another shrug. “And the Meadows for yourself?” he guessed.
She nodded, her mind elsewhere. “Can you think of a worse week for this to happen?”
“Why they pay us the big bucks,” Rebus told her, drawing the nicotine deep.
A fat parcel was waiting for Rebus at the door of his apartment. Siobhan was heading back down to the Meadows. Rebus had told her to drop by later for a drink. He realized his living room was stuffy so forced open the window. He could hear sounds from the march: echoey, amplified voices; drums and whistles. Live 8 was on TV, but not a band he recognized. He kept the sound down, opened the parcel. There was a note inside from Mairie-You don’t deserve it-followed by pages and pages of printout. News stories about Pennen Industries, dating right back to its separation from the MoD. Snippets from the business pages, detailing rising profits. Profiles praising Richard Pennen, accompanied by photos of him. Every inch the successful businessman: well-groomed, pin-striped, coiffed. Salt-and-pepper hair, even though he was still in his midforties. Steel-rimmed glasses and a square-set jaw below perfect-looking teeth.
Richard Pennen had been an MoD employee, something of a whiz with microchips and software programs. He stressed that his company didn’t sell arms as such, just the components to make them as efficient as possible. “Which has to be better than the alternative, for all concerned,” he was quoted as saying. Rebus flicked quickly though interviews and background features. Nothing to link Pennen to Ben Webster, except that both dealt with aspects of trade. No reason why the company wouldn’t treat MPs to five-star hotel rooms. Rebus turned to the next set of stapled sheets and gave a silent thank-you to Mairie. She’d added a list of stuff about Ben Webster himself. Not that there was much about his career as an MP. But five years back the media had shown sudden interest in the family, following the shocking attack on Webster’s mother. She and her husband had been vacationing in the Borders, renting a cottage in the countryside outside Kelso. He’d gone into town one afternoon for supplies and had returned to find the cottage ransacked and his wife dead, strangled with a cord from the window blinds. She had been beaten but not sexually assaulted. Money was missing from her bag, as was her cell phone. Nothing else had been taken.
Just some loose cash and a phone.
And a woman’s life.
The inquiry had dragged on for weeks. Rebus looked at photos of the isolated cottage, the victim, her grieving husband, the two children-Ben and Stacey. He lifted from his pocket the card Stacey had given him, rubbed its edges with his fingers as he continued to read. Ben the MP for Dundee North; Stacey the cop from the Met, whom colleagues described as “diligent and well liked.” The cottage was placed on the edge of woodland, amid rolling hills, no other habitation visible. Husband and wife had liked to take long walks and were regularly seen in Kelso’s bars and eateries. The region had been their destination of choice for many holidays. Councillors for the area were quick to point out that the Borders “remains largely crime-free and a haven of peace.” Didn’t want the tourists scared off…
The killer was never caught. The story drifted to the inside pages, then deeper into the paper, reappearing sporadically as a paragraph or two when Ben Webster was being profiled. There was one in-depth interview with him, dating back to when he’d been made PPS. He hadn’t wanted to talk about the tragedy.
Tragedies-plural, actually. The father hadn’t lasted long after his wife’s murder. His death came from natural causes. “The will to live just left him” was how one neighbor in Broughty Ferry had put it. “And now he’s at peace with the love of his life.”
Rebus looked again at the photograph of Stacey, taken on the day of her mother’s funeral. She’d gone on TV, apparently, appealing for information. Stronger than her brother, who’d decided not to join her at the press conference. Rebus really hoped she would stay strong…