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  Rebus thought back to the crime scene. ‘Could have been some on the ground,’ he admitted.

  ‘King’s Stables Road,’ the pathologist added. ‘A lot of the stables were turned into garages, weren’t they?’

  Rebus nodded and glanced towards Colwell, gauging her reaction.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she told him. ‘I’m not going to start blubbing again.’

  ‘Who was it spoke to you?’ Rebus asked Gates.

  ‘Ray Duff.’

  ‘Ray’s no slouch,’ Rebus said. In fact, Rebus knew damned well that Ray Duff was the best forensic scientist they had.

  ‘What’s the betting he’s at the locus right now,’ Gates said, ‘checking for oil?’

  Rebus nodded and lifted the mug of tea to his lips.

  ‘Now that we know the victim really is Alexander,’ Colwell said into the silence, ‘do I need to keep quiet about it? I mean, is it something you want to keep from the media?’

  Gates gave a loud snort. ‘Dr Colwell, we wouldn’t stand a chance of keeping it from the Fourth Estate. Lothian and Borders Police leaks like the proverbial sieve - as does this very building.’ He lifted his head towards the door. ‘Isn’t that right, Kevin?’ he called. They could hear feet beginning to shuffle back down the corridor. Gates gave a satisfied smile and picked up his ringing telephone.

  Rebus knew it would be Siobhan Clarke, waiting in reception ...

  After dropping Colwell back at the university, Rebus treated Clarke to lunch. When he’d made the offer, she’d stared at him and asked if anything was wrong. He’d shaken his head and she’d said he must be after a favour then.‘Who knows how often we’ll get the chance, once I’m retired,’ he’d explained.

  They went to an upstairs bistro on West Nicolson Street, where the dish of the day was venison pie. It came with chips and garden peas, over all of which Rebus dumped quarter of a bottle of HP sauce. He was limiting himself to a half-pint of Deuchar’s, and had managed four drags on a cigarette before stepping over the threshold. Between mouthfuls of pie crust, he told her about Ray Duff, and asked if everything was okay at Todorov’s flat.

  ‘Reckon young Colin has a thing going for Phyllida?’ Clarke mused. Detective Constables Phyllida Hawes and Colin Tibbet shared the CID suite at Gayfield Square with Rebus and Clarke. Until recently, all four had worked under the baleful gaze of Detective Inspector Derek Starr, but Starr, seeking the further advancement which he saw as his right, was on secondment to police headquarters on Fettes Avenue. The rumour was that once Rebus walked into the sunset, Clarke would take his place, promoted inspector. It was a rumour Clarke herself was trying not to listen to.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Rebus lifted his glass, noting that it was already almost empty.

  ‘They just seem very comfortable with one another.’

  Rebus stared at her, trying for a look of pained surprise. ‘And we’re not?’

  ‘We’re fine,’ she answered with a smile. ‘But I think they’ve been on a couple of dates - not that they want anyone to know.’

  ‘You reckon they’re snuggling up just now in the dead man’s bed?’

  Clarke wrinkled her nose at the suggestion. Then, half a minute later: ‘I’m just wondering how to handle it.’

  ‘You mean once I’m out of the way and you’re in charge?’ Rebus put down his fork and gave her a glare.

  ‘You’re the one who wants all the loose ends tied up,’ she complained.

  ‘Maybe so, but I’ve never thought of myself as an agony aunt.’ He lifted his glass again, only to find that he’d finished it.

  ‘Do you want coffee?’ she asked, making it sound like a peace offering. He shook his head and started patting his pockets.

  ‘What I need is a proper smoke.’ He found the packet and rose to his feet. ‘You get yourself a coffee while I’m outside.’

  ‘What about this afternoon?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘We’ll get more done if we divvy it up - you go see the librarian again, I’ll hit King’s Stables Road.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, not bothering to disguise the fact that it wasn’t really fine at all. Rebus stood his ground for a moment, as if about to muster some words, then waved the cigarette in her direction and headed for the door.

  ‘And thanks for the lunch,’ she said, as soon as he was out of earshot.

  Rebus thought he knew why they could barely hold a five-minute conversation without starting to snipe at one another. It was bound to be a tense time, him leaving the field of battle, her on the cusp of promotion. They’d worked together so long - been friends almost as long . . . Bound to be a tense time.Everyone assumed that they’d slept together at some point down the line, but no way either of them would have let it happen. How could they have worked as partners afterwards? It would have been all or nothing, and they both loved the job too much to let anything else get in the way. The one thing he’d made her promise was that there’d be no surprise parties his last week at work. Their boss at Gayfield Square had even offered to host something, but Rebus had thanked him with a shake of the head.

  ‘You’re the longest-serving officer in CID,’ DCI Macrae had persisted.

  ‘Then it’s the folk who’ve put up with me who deserve the medal,’ Rebus had retorted.

  The cordon was still in place at the bottom of Raeburn Wynd, but one of the locals ducked beneath the blue-and-white-striped tape, resistant to the idea that anywhere in Edinburgh could be off limits to him. Or so Rebus surmised by the hand gesture the man made when warned by Ray Duff that he was contaminating a crime scene. Duff was shaking his head, more in sorrow than anything else, when Rebus approached.

  ‘Gates reckoned this is where I’d find you,’ Rebus said. Duff rolled his eyes.

  ‘And now you’re walking all over my locus.’

  Rebus answered with a twitch of the mouth. Duff was crouching beside his forensic kit, a toughened red plastic toolbox bought from B&Q. Its myriad drawers opened concertina-style, but Duff was in the process of closing them.

  ‘Thought you’d be putting your feet up,’ Duff commented.

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  Duff laughed. ‘True enough.’

  ‘Any joy?’ Rebus asked.

  Duff snapped shut the box and lifted it with him as he got to his feet. ‘I wandered as far as the top of the lane, checking all the garages along the way. Thing is, if he’d been attacked up there, we’d have traces of blood on the roadway.’ He stamped his foot to reinforce the point.

  ‘And?’

  ‘The blood’s elsewhere, John.’ He gestured for Rebus to follow and took a left along King’s Stables Road. ‘See anything?’

  Rebus looked hard at the pavement and noticed the trail of splashes. There were intervals between them. The blood had lost most of its colour but was still recognisable. ‘How come we didn’t spot this last night?’

  Duff shrugged. His car was parked kerbside, and he unlocked it long enough to stow his box of tricks.

  ‘How far have you followed it?’ Rebus asked.

  ‘I was just about to get started when you arrived.’

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  They began walking, eyes on the sporadic series of drips. ‘You going to join SCRU?’ Duff asked.

  ‘Think they’d want me?’ SCRU was the Serious Crime Review Unit. It consisted of three retired detectives, whose job was to look at unsolveds.

  ‘Did you hear about that result we got last week?’ Duff said. ‘DNA from a sweated fingerprint. Sort of thing that can be useful on cold cases. DNA boost means we can decipher DNA multiples.’

  ‘Shame I can’t decipher what you’re saying.’

  Duff chuckled. ‘World’s changing, John. Faster than most of us can keep up with.’

  ‘You’re saying I should embrace the scrapheap?’

  Duff just shrugged. They’d covered a hundred yards or so and were standing at the exit to a multistorey car park. There were two barriers; drivers could choose either one. Once you’
d paid for your ticket, you slid it into a slot and the barrier would rise.

  ‘Have you ID’d the victim?’ Duff asked, looking around as he tried to pick up the trail again.

  ‘A Russian poet.’

  ‘Did he drive a car?’

  ‘He couldn’t change his own lightbulbs, Ray.’

  ‘Thing about car parks, John . . . there’s always a bit of oil left lying around.’

  Rebus had noticed that there were intercoms fixed alongside either barrier. He pressed a button and waited. After a few moments, a voice crackled from the loudspeaker.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Wonder if you can help me . . .’

  ‘You after directions or something? Look, chief, this is a car park. All we do here is park cars.’ It took Rebus only a second to work things out.

  ‘You can see me,’ he said. Yes: a CCTV camera high up in one corner, pointing at the exit. Rebus gave it a wave.

  ‘Have you got a problem with your car?’ the voice was asking.

  ‘I’m a cop,’ Rebus answered. ‘Want to have a word with you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Next floor up,’ the voice admitted eventually. ‘Is this to do with that prang I had?’

  ‘That depends - did you happen to hit a guy and kill him?’

  ‘Christ, no.’

  ‘Might be okay then. We’ll be there in a minute.’ Rebus moved away from the barrier towards where Ray Duff was down on all fours, peering beneath a parked BMW.

  ‘Not keen on these new Beamers,’ Duff said, sensing Rebus behind him.

  ‘Found something?’

  ‘I think there’s blood under here ... quite a bit of it. If you were asking me, I’d say this is trail’s end.’

  Rebus walked around the vehicle. There was a ticket on the dashboard, showing that it had entered the car park at eleven that morning.

  ‘Next car along,’ Duff was saying, ‘is there something underneath it?’

  Rebus did a circuit of the big Lexus but couldn’t see anything. Nothing else for it but to get down on hands and knees himself. A bit of string or wire. He reached a hand beneath the car, fingertips scrabbling at it, eventually drawing it out. Hauled himself back to his feet and held it dangling by thumb and forefinger.

  A plain silver neck-chain.

  ‘Ray,’ he said, ‘better go fetch your kit.’

  5

  Clarke decided it wasn’t worth visiting the librarian, so called her from Todorov’s flat while Hawes and Tibbet started the search. Clarke had barely punched in the number for the Poetry Library when Hawes arrived back from the bedroom, waving the dead man’s passport.‘Under a corner of the mattress,’ Hawes said. ‘First place I looked.’

  Clarke just nodded, and moved into the hallway for a bit more privacy.

  ‘Miss Thomas?’ she said into her phone. ‘It’s Detective Sergeant Clarke here, sorry to trouble you again so soon ...’

  Three minutes later she was back in the living room with just a couple of names: yes, Abigail Thomas had accompanied Todorov to the pub after his recital, but she’d only stayed for the one, and knew that the poet wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d sampled another four or five watering-holes.

  ‘I reckoned he was in safe hands with Mr Riordan,’ she’d told Clarke.

  ‘The sound engineer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No one else was there? None of the other poets?’

  ‘Just the three of us, and as I say, I didn’t stay long . . .’

  Colin Tibbet meantime had finished rummaging through desk drawers and kitchen cupboards and was tilting the sofa to see if anything other than dust might be hidden there. Clarke lifted a book from the floor. It was another copy of Astapovo Blues. She’d managed a couple of minutes’ research on Count Tolstoy, so knew that he’d died in a railway siding, shunning the wife who had refused to join his pared-to-the-bone lifestyle. This helped her make more sense of the collection’s final poem, ‘Codex Coda’, with its refrain of ‘a cold, cleansed death’. Todorov, she saw, had not quite finished with any of the poems in the book - there were pencilled amendments throughout. She reached into his waste-bin and uncrumpled one of the discarded sheets.

  City noise invisible

  Havoc-crying air

  Congested as a

  The rest of the sheet consisted of doodled punctuation marks. There was a folder on his desk, but nothing inside it. A book of Killer Sudokus, all of them finished. Pens and pencils and an unused calligraphy set, complete with instructions. She walked over to the wall and stood in front of the Edinburgh bus map, traced a line from King’s Stables Road to Buccleuch Place. There were a dozen routes he could have chosen. Maybe he was on a pub crawl, or a little bit lost. No reason to assume he’d been heading home. He could have left his flat and crossed George Square, made for Candlemaker Row and wandered down its steep brae into the Grassmarket. Plenty of pubs there, and King’s Stables Road only a right-hand fork away . . . Her phone rang. Caller ID: Rebus.‘Phyl found his passport,’ she told him.

  ‘And I just found his neck-chain, lying on the floor of the multistorey.’

  ‘So he was killed there and dumped in the lane?’

  ‘Trail of blood says so.’

  ‘Or he staggered that far and then keeled over.’

  ‘Another possibility,’ Rebus seemed to concede. ‘Thing is, though, what was he doing in the car park in the first place? Are you at his flat?’

  ‘I was just about to leave.’

  ‘Before you do, add car keys or a driving licence to the search list. And ask Scarlett Colwell if Todorov had access to a vehicle. I’m pretty sure she’ll say no, but all the same . . .’

  ‘No sign of any abandoned cars in the multistorey?’

  ‘Good point, Shiv, I’ll have someone check. Talk to you later.’ The phone went dead, and she managed a little smile, hadn’t heard Rebus so fired up in several months. Not for the first time, she wondered what the hell he would do with himself when the work was done.

  Answer: bug her, most likely - phone calls daily, wanting to know everything about her case load.

  Clarke got through to Dr Colwell on the mobile, Colwell having forgotten to turn her own off.

  ‘Sorry,’ Clarke apologised, ‘are you in the middle of your tutorial?’

  ‘I had to send them away.’

  ‘I can understand. Maybe you should shut up shop for the day. You’ve had quite a shock.’

  ‘And do what exactly? My boyfriend’s in London, I’ve got the whole flat to myself.’

  ‘There must be a friend you could call.’ Clarke looked up as Hawes walked back into the room, but this time all Hawes did was offer a shrug: no notebook, keys or cash card. Tibbet had done no better and was sitting on the chair, frowning over one of the poems in Astapovo Blues. ‘Anyway,’ Clarke rattled on, ‘reason I’m phoning is to ask if Alexander owned a car.’

  ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘Could he drive?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I certainly wouldn’t have ventured into any vehicle with him behind the wheel.’

  Clarke was nodding towards the route map - stood to reason Todorov would take buses. ‘Thanks anyway,’ she said.

  ‘Did you talk to Abi Thomas?’ Colwell asked abruptly.

  ‘She went to the pub with him.’

  ‘I’ll bet she did.’

  ‘But only stayed for one.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘You sound as if you don’t believe her, Dr Colwell.’

  ‘Abi Thomas got hot flushes just reading Alexander’s poems ... imagine how she felt squeezed in next to him at a corner table in some seedy bar.’

  ‘Well, thanks for your help ...’ But Clarke was talking into a dead phone. She stared at it, then became aware of two pairs of eyes on her: Hawes and Tibbet.

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to find anything else here, Siobhan,’ Hawes piped up, while her partner clucked his agreement. He was an inch shorter t
han her and several inches less smart, but knew enough to let her argue their case.

  ‘Back to base?’ Clarke suggested, to enthusiastic nods. ‘Okay,’ she agreed, ‘but take one more recce first - and this time we’re after car keys or anything else that might suggest the deceased would have need of a car-parking space.’ Having said which, she relieved Tibbet of his book and swapped places with him, settling back to see if there was anything she’d missed in ‘Codex Coda’.

  The SOCOs tried pushing the BMW aside, with no success at all. They then debated jacking it up, or manoeuvring a hoist in so they could lift it. The rest of the parking level had become a buzz of activity, as a line of cops in white overalls shuffled along in formation on their knees, checking that the ground held no further clues. Todd Goodyear was among them, and greeted Rebus with a nod. Photos and video were being taken, and another team was outside, tracing the route from car park to lane. The SOCOs were trying not to look too shamefaced, knowing they should have spotted the blood trail on the night itself. They gave Ray Duff dirty looks whenever his back was turned.Such was the scene which greeted the BMW’s owner when she returned, briefcase and shopping bags in hand. Todd Goodyear was told to get to his feet and take a brief statement from her.

  ‘Bloody brief,’ Tam Banks stressed, keen for his team to start work on the evidence beneath her car.

  Rebus was standing alongside the car park’s security guard. The man had just returned from a check of the other levels. His name was Joe Wills and the uniform he was wearing had probably been tailored with someone else in mind. He’d already explained that it would be hard to tell an abandoned car from any of the others.

  ‘You’re open twenty-four hours?’ Rebus had asked.

  Wills had shaken his head. ‘Close at eleven.’

  ‘And you don’t look to see if any cars are left?’

  Wills had offered a shrug which went beyond the casual. Not much job satisfaction, Rebus had guessed.

  Now Wills was explaining that he still couldn’t say whether any of the current bays had been occupied overnight.