Let It Bleed (3 page)

‘Oh my God,’ he said. Then he started to clamber over the thick metal tines.

‘What are you doing?’ someone yelled. ‘Come back!’

But Rebus kept moving, only barely aware of the drop beneath him, the amounts of space between each metal bar and its neighbour. More space than metal. The cold metal felt good against his stinging palm. He passed the back of the lorry. It had come to rest on its side, half on the
roadway, half resting on the central gap. There was a sign on its side: Byars Haulage. Jesus, it was cold. That wind, that damned eternal wind. Yet he could feel he was sweating. I should be wearing a coat, he thought. I’ll catch my death.

Then he was on the carriageway, where a line of cars had come to an untidy stop. There was a proper gap between carriageway and walkway; a short distance, but all of it fresh air. Where the Cortina had made contact it had buckled the rails. Rebus stepped on to them, then made the short leap on to the walkway.

The two teenagers had stumbled from their car.

They’d had to climb over their seats and into the back in order to get out. The front doors led only to a fall. They were looking to left and right, seized by fright. There were sirens to the north. Fife Police were on their way.

Rebus held up his hands. The two uniformed officers were behind him. The youths weren’t looking at Rebus; all they could see were uniforms. They understood simple things. They understood what uniforms meant. They looked around again, looking for an escape that wasn’t there, then one of them – fair-haired, tall, slightly older-looking – gripped the younger one’s hand and started leading him backwards.

‘Don’t do anything daft, sons,’ said one of the uniforms. But they were just words. Nobody was listening. The two teenagers were against the rails now, only ten feet or so from the crashed car. Rebus walked slowly forwards, pointing with his finger, making it clear to them that he was going to the car. The impact had caused the boot to spring open an inch. Rebus carefully lifted it and looked in.

There was nobody inside.

As he closed the boot, the car rocked on its fulcrum then came to rest again. He looked towards the older of the boys.

‘It’s freezing out here,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you into a car.’

Then things happened in slow motion. The fair-haired boy shook his head, almost smiling, and placed his arms around his friend in what looked like nothing less than an embrace. Then he leaned back against the rail and just kept leaning, taking his friend with him. There was no resistance. Their cheap trainers held against the road surface for a second, then slipped, legs flicking up and over as they fell into the darkness.

Maybe it was suicide, maybe flight, Rebus thought later. Whatever it was meant to be, it was death for sure. When you hit water from that height, it was like hitting concrete. A fall like that, through the dark, and they didn’t scream, didn’t utter a sound, and couldn’t see the water rising to meet them.

Only they didn’t hit water.

A Royal Navy frigate had just left Rosyth Dockyard and was gliding out towards the sea, and that’s what they hit, embedding themselves in the metal deck.

Which, as everyone said back at the station, saved the police frogmen from a thankless sub-zero dip.

They took Rebus to the Royal Infirmary.

He travelled in the back of a police car. Frank Lauderdale was being brought by ambulance. Nobody knew yet how bad his injuries were. The frigate had been contacted by radio from Rosyth, but the crew had already found the bodies. Some had heard them hitting the deck. The frigate was returning to base. It would take a while to hammer the deck back into shape.

‘I feel like I’ve been hit with a hammer myself,’ Rebus told the nurse at the infirmary. He knew her; she’d treated him for burns a while back, rubbed lotion on and changed the dressings. She smiled as she left the little booth where he lay on an examining table. When she’d gone, Rebus took another account of himself. His jaw hurt where Lauderdale’s fist had connected prior to flying through the windscreen. The pain seemed to be burrowing deep, like it was getting into the nerves of his teeth. Otherwise he didn’t feel too bad; just shaken. He lifted his hands and held them in front of him. Yes, he could always blame the trembling on the crash, even if he knew he trembled a lot these days, smash or no smash. His palm was blistering nicely. Before putting on a dressing, the nurse had asked how he got the burn.

‘Put my hand on a hot engine,’ he’d explained.

‘Figures.’

Rebus looked and saw what she meant: part of the engine’s serial number had been branded on his flesh.

The doctor finally put in an appearance. It was a busy night. Rebus knew the doctor. His name was George Klasser and he was Polish or something, or at least his parents were. Rebus had always assumed Klasser was a bit too senior to do the night shift, yet here he was.

‘Bitter outside, isn’t it?’ Dr Klasser said.

‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

‘Just making conversation, John. How do you feel?’

‘I think I’m getting toothache.’

‘Anything else?’ Dr Klasser was fussing with the tools of his trade: penlight and stethoscope, a clipboard and nonworking Biro. Eventually he was ready to examine the patient. Rebus didn’t put up much of a fight. He was thinking of drinking: the creamy, almost gas-free head on a pint of eighty-bob. The warming aroma from a glass of malt.

‘How’s my chief inspector?’ Rebus asked when the nurse returned.

‘They’re taking X-rays,’ she told him.

‘Car chases at your age,’ Dr Klasser muttered. ‘I blame television.’

Rebus took a good look at him, and realised he hadn’t ever really looked at the man before, not properly. Klasser was in his early forties, steel-haired with a tanned and prematurely ageing face. If you only had head and shoulders to go on, you’d guess he was taller than was actually the case. He looked quite distinguished, which was why Rebus had pegged him for a senior consultant, something like that.

‘I thought only lackeys and L-plates worked nights,’ Rebus commented, while Klasser shone a light in his eyes.

Klasser put down the light and started to squeeze Rebus’s back, prodding it like he was plumping up a cushion.

‘Any pain there?’

‘No.’

‘What about there?’

‘No more than usual.’

‘Hmm … In answer to your question, John, I notice
you’re
working nights. Does that make you lackey or L-plate?’

‘That hurts.’

Dr Klasser smiled.

‘So,’ Rebus said, easing his shirt back on, ‘what’ve I got?’

Klasser found a pen that worked and scribbled something on his clipboard. ‘By my estimate, the way you’re going, you’ve got a year, maybe two.’

The two men stared at one another. Rebus knew precisely what the doctor was talking about.

‘I’m serious, John. You smoke, you drink like a fish, and you don’t exercise. Since Patience stopped feeding you, your diet’s gone to hell. Starch and carbohydrate, saturated fat …’

Rebus tried to stop listening. He knew his drinking was a problem these days precisely because he’d learned self-control. As a result, few people noticed that he
had
a problem. He was well dressed at work, alert when the occasion demanded, and even visited the gym some lunchtimes. He ate lazily, and maybe too much, and yes, he was back on the cigs. But then nobody was perfect.

‘An uncanny prognosis, Doctor.’ He finished buttoning his shirt, started tucking it into his waistband, then thought better of it. He felt more comfortable with the shirt outside his trousers. He knew he’d feel even more comfortable with his trouser button undone. ‘And you can tell that just by prodding my back?’

Dr Klasser smiled again. He was folding up his stethoscope. ‘You can’t hide that sort of thing from a doctor, John.’

Rebus eased into his jacket. ‘So,’ he said, ‘see you in the pub later?’

‘I’ll be there around six.’

‘Fine.’

Rebus walked out of the hospital and took a deep breath.

It was two-thirty in the morning, about as cold and dark as the night could get. He thought about checking on Lauderdale, but knew it could wait till morning. His flat was just across The Meadows, but he didn’t fancy the walk. The sleet was still falling, beginning to turn to snow, and there was that stabbing wind, like a thug you meet in a narrow lane, one who won’t let you go.

Then a car horn sounded. Rebus saw a cherry-red Renault 5, and inside it DC Siobhan Clarke, waving towards him. He almost danced to the car.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I heard,’ she said.

‘How come?’ He opened the passenger-side door.

‘I was curious. I wasn’t on shift, but I kept in touch with the station, just to find out what happened at the meet. When I heard about the crash, I got dressed and came down here.’

‘Well, you’re a sight for sore teeth.’

‘Teeth?’

Rebus rubbed his jaw. ‘Sounds crazy, but I think that dunt has given me toothache.’

She started the car. It was lovely and warm. Rebus could feel himself drifting off.

‘Bit of a disaster then?’ she said.

‘A bit.’ They turned out of the gates, heading left towards Tollcross.

‘How’s the CI?’

‘I don’t know. They’re X-raying him. Where are we going?’

‘I’m taking you home.’

‘I should go back to the station.’

She shook her head. ‘I called in. They don’t want you till morning.’

Rebus relaxed a little more. Maybe the painkillers were kicking in. ‘When’s the post-mortem?’

‘Nine-thirty.’ They were on Lauriston Place.

‘There was a shortcut you could have taken back there,’ Rebus told her.

‘It was a one-way street.’

‘Yes, but nobody uses it this time of night.’ He realised what he’d said. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered, rubbing his eyes.

‘So what was it?’ Siobhan Clarke asked. ‘I mean, was it an accident, or were they looking to escape?’

‘Neither,’ Rebus said quietly. ‘If I’d to put money on it, I’d say suicide.’

She looked at him. ‘Both of them?’

He shrugged, then shivered.

At the Tollcross lights they waited in silence until red turned to green. A couple of drunks were walking home, bodies tilted into the wind.

‘Horrible night,’ Clarke said, moving off. Rebus nodded, saying nothing. ‘Will you attend the post-mortem?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can’t say I’d fancy it.’

‘Do we know who they were yet?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘I keep forgetting, you’re off-duty.’

‘That’s right, I’m off-duty.’

‘What about the car, have we traced that?’

She turned towards him and laughed. It sounded odd to him, there in that stuffy overheated car, that time of night, with all that had gone before. Sudden laughter, as strange a sound as you’d ever hear. He rubbed his jaw and pushed an
exploratory finger into his mouth. The teeth he touched seemed solid enough.

Then he saw feet suddenly sweeping out from under two young bodies, the bodies leaning back into space and disappearing. They hadn’t made a sound. No accident, no escape attempt; something fatalistic, something agreed between them.

‘Cold?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not cold.’

She signalled to turn off Melville Drive. To the left, what he could see of The Meadows was covered in a fresh glaze of slow. To the right was Marchmont, and Rebus’s flat.

‘She wasn’t in the car,’ he said flatly.

‘There was always that possibility,’ Siobhan Clarke said. ‘We don’t even know she’s missing, not for a fact.’

‘No,’ he agreed, ‘we don’t.’

‘Just two daft laddies.’ She’d picked up the expression, but it sounded awkward given her English accent. Rebus smiled in the dark.

And then he was home.

She dropped him outside his tenement door, and refused a half-hearted offer of coffee. Rebus didn’t want her to see the dump he called home. The students had moved out in October, leaving the place not quite his. There were things not quite right, not quite the way he remembered. Cutlery was missing, and had been replaced with stuff he hadn’t seen before. It was the same with the crockery. When he’d moved back here from Patience’s, he’d brought his stuff back in boxes. Most of the boxes were in the hall, still waiting to be unpacked.

Exhausted, he climbed the stairs, opened his door, and walked past the boxes, making straight for the living room and his chair.

His chair was much the same as ever. It had remoulded
itself quickly to his shape. He sat down, then got up again and checked the radiator. The thing was barely warm, and there was a racking noise from within. He needed a special key, some tool that would open the valve and let it bleed. The other radiators were the same.

He made himself a hot drink, put a tape into the cassette deck, and got the duvet off his bed. Back at his chair he took off some of his clothes and covered himself with the duvet. He reached down, unscrewed the top from a bottle of Macallan, and poured some into his coffee. He drank the first half of the mug, then added more whisky.

He could hear car engines, and metal twisting, and the wind whistling all around. He could see feet, the soles of cheap trainers, something close to a smile on the lips of a fair-haired teenager. But then the smile became darkness, and everything disappeared.

Slowly, he hugged himself to sleep.

Down at the City Mortuary in the Cowgate Dr Curt was nowhere to be seen, but Professor Gates was already at work.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘you can fall from any height you want; it’s just that last damned half-inch that’s fatal.’

With him around the slab were Inspector John Rebus, Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes, another doctor, and a pathology assistant. The Preliminary Notification of Sudden Death had already been submitted to the Procurator-Fiscal, and now the Sudden Death Report was being prepared on two deceased males, probable identities William David Coyle and James Dixon Taylor.

James Taylor – Rebus looked at the mess over which Professor Gates was fussing and remembered that final embrace. Ain’t it good to know that you’ve got a friend.

The force of the impact of the bodies upon the steel deck of Her Majesty’s naval frigate
Descant
had turned them from human beings into something more like hairy jam. There was some on the slab – the rest sat in gleaming steel buckets. No next of kin was going to be asked to participate in a formal identification. It was the sort of thing they could just about accomplish by DNA-testing, if such proved necessary.