The Beat Goes On

The Gentlemen’s Club

It was the most elegant of all Edinburgh’s elegant Georgian circuses, a perfect circle in design and construction, the houses themselves as yet untouched by the private contractors who might one day renovate and remove, producing a dozen tiny flats from each.

A perfect circle surrounding some private gardens, the gardens a wash of colour despite the January chill: violet, pink, red, green and orange. A tasteful display, though. No flower was allowed to be too vibrant, too bright, too inelegant.

The gate to the gardens was locked, of course. The keyholders paid a substantial fee each year for the privilege of that lock. Everyone else could look, could peer through the railings as he was doing now, but entrance was forbidden. Well, that was Edinburgh for you, a closed circle within a closed circle.

He stood there, enjoying the subtle smells in the air now that the flurry of snowflakes had stopped. Then he shifted his attention to the houses, huge three- and four-storey statements of the architect’s confidence. He found himself staring at one particular house, the one outside which the white police Sierra was parked. It was too ripe a day to be spoiled, but duty was duty. Taking a final deep breath, he turned from the garden railings and walked towards number 16, with its heavy closed curtains but its front door ajar.

Once inside, having introduced himself, John Rebus had to climb three large flights of stairs to ‘the children’s floor’, as his guide termed it. She was slender and middle-aged and dressed from head to toe in grey. The house was quiet, only one or two shafts of sunlight penetrating its gloom. The woman walked near-silently and quickly, while Rebus tugged on the bannister, breathing hard.

It wasn’t that he was unfit, but somehow all the oxygen seemed to have been pumped out of the house.

Arriving at last at the third floor, the woman passed three firmly closed doors before stopping at a fourth. This one was open, and inside Rebus could make out the gleaming tiles of a large bathroom and the shuffling, insect-like figures of Detective Constable Brian Holmes and the police pathologist, not the lugubrious Dr Curt but the one everybody called — though not to his face, never to his face — Dr Crippen. He turned to his guide.

‘Thank you, Mrs McKenzie.’ But she had already averted her eyes and was making back for the safety of the stairs. She was a brave one though, to bring him all the way up here in the first place. And now there was nothing for it but to enter the room. ‘Hello, Doctor.’

‘Inspector Rebus, good morning. Not a pretty sight, is it?’

Rebus forced himself to look. There was not much water in the bath, and what water there was had been dyed a rich ruby colour by the girl’s blood. She was undressed and as white as a statue. She had been very young, sixteen or seventeen, her body not yet quite fully formed. A late developer.

Her arms lay peacefully by her sides, wrists turned upwards to reveal the clean incisions. Holmes used a pair of tweezers to hold up a single razor blade for Rebus’s inspection. Rebus winced and shook his head.

‘What a waste,’ he said. He had a daughter himself, not much older than this girl. His wife had taken their daughter with her when she left him. Years ago now. He’d lost touch, the way you do sometimes with family, though you keep in contact with friends.

He was moving around the bath, committing the scene to memory. The air seemed to glow, but the glow was already fading.

‘Yes,’ said Holmes. ‘It’s a sin.’

‘Suicide, of course,’ Rebus commented after a silence. The pathologist nodded, but did not speak. They were not usually so awkward around a corpse, these three men. Each thought he had seen the worst, the most brutal, the most callous. Each had anecdotes to relate which would make strangers shudder and screw shut their eyes. But this, this was different. Something had been taken quietly, deliberately and ruinously from the world.

‘The question,’ Rebus said, for the sake of filling the void, ‘is why.’

Why indeed. Here he was, standing in a bathroom bigger than his own living-room, surrounded by powders and scents, thick towels, soaps and sponges. But here was this gruesome and unnecessary death. There had to be a reason for it. Silly, stupid child. What had she been playing at? Mute anger turned to frustration, and he almost staggered as he made his way out to the landing.

There had to be a reason. And he was just in the mood now to track it down.

‘I’ve told you already,’ said Thomas McKenzie irritably, ‘she was the happiest girl in Christendom. No, we didn’t spoil her, and no, we never forbade her seeing anyone. There is no reason in the world, Inspector, why Suzanne should have done what she did. It just doesn’t make sense.’

McKenzie broke down again, burying his face in his hands. Rebus loathed himself, yet the questions had to be asked.

‘Did she,’ he began, ‘did she have a boyfriend, Mr McKenzie?’

McKenzie got up from his chair, walked to the sideboard and poured himself another whisky. He motioned to Rebus who, still cradling a crystal inch of the stuff, shook his head. Mrs McKenzie was upstairs resting. She had been given a sedative by her doctor, an old friend of the family who had seemed in need of similar treatment himself.

But Thomas McKenzie had not needed anything. He was sticking to the old remedies, sloshing a fresh measure of malt into his glass.

‘No,’ he said, ‘no boyfriends. They’ve never really been Suzanne’s style.’

Though he would not be travelling to his office today, McKenzie had still dressed himself in a dark blue suit and tie. The drawing-room in which Rebus sat had about it the air of a commercial office, not at all homely or lived-in. He couldn’t imagine growing up in such a place.

‘What about school?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, was she happy there?’

‘Very.’ McKenzie sat down with his drink. ‘She gets good reports, good grades. She... she was going to the University in October.’

Rebus watched him gulp at the whisky. Thomas McKenzie was a tough man, tough enough to make his million young and then canny enough not to lose it. He was forty-four now, but looked younger. Rebus had no idea how many shops McKenzie now owned, how many company directorships he held along with all his other holdings and interests. He was new money trying to look like old money, making his home in Stockbridge, convenient for Princes Street, rather than further out in bungalow land.

‘What was she going to study?’ Rebus stared past McKenzie towards where a family portrait sat on a long, polished sideboard. No family snapshot, but posed, a sitting for a professional photographer. Daughter gleaming in the centre, sandwiched by grinning parents. A mock-up cloudscape behind them, the clouds pearl-coloured, the sky blue.

‘Law,’ said McKenzie. ‘She had a head on her shoulders.’

Yes, a head of mousy-brown hair. And her father had found her early in the morning, already cold. McKenzie hadn’t panicked. He’d made the phone calls before waking his wife and telling her. He always rose first, always went straight to the bathroom. He had remained calm, most probably from shock. But there was a stiffness to McKenzie, too, Rebus noticed. He wondered what it would take really to rouse the man.

Something niggled. Suzanne had gone to the bathroom, run some water into the bath, lain down in it, and slashed her wrists. Fine, Rebus could accept that. Maybe she had expected to be found and rescued. Most failed suicides were cries for help, weren’t they? If you really wanted to kill yourself, you went somewhere quiet and secret, where you couldn’t possibly be found in time. Suzanne hadn’t done that. She had almost certainly expected her father to find her in time. Her timing had been a little awry.

Moreover, she must have known her father always rose before her mother, and therefore that he would be the first to find her. This notion interested Rebus, though no one around him seemed curious about it.

‘What about friends at school,’ Rebus went on. ‘Did Suzanne have many friends?’

‘Oh yes, lots.’

‘Anyone in particular?’

McKenzie was about to answer when the door opened and his wife walked in, pale from her drugged sleep.

‘What time is it?’ she asked, shuffling forwards.

‘It’s eleven, Shona,’ her husband said, rising to meet her. ‘You’ve only been asleep half an hour.’ They embraced one another, her arms tight around his body. Rebus felt like an intruder on their grief, but the questions still had to be asked.

‘You were about to tell me about Suzanne’s friends, Mr McKenzie.’

Husband and wife sat down together on the sofa, hands clasped.

‘Well,’ said McKenzie, ‘there were lots of them, weren’t there, Shona?’

‘Yes,’ said his wife. She really was an attractive woman. Her face had the same smooth sheen as her daughter’s. She was the sort of woman men would instinctively feel protective towards, whether protection was needed or not. ‘But I always liked Hazel best,’ she went on.

McKenzie turned to Rebus and explained. ‘Hazel Frazer, daughter of Sir Jimmy Frazer, the banker. A peach of a girl. A real peach.’ He paused, staring at his wife, and then began, softly, with dignity, to cry. She rested his head against her shoulder and stroked his hair, talking softly to him. Rebus averted his eyes and drank his whisky. Then bit his bottom lip, deep in thought. In matters of suicide, just who was the victim, who the culprit?

Suzanne’s room was a cold and comfortless affair. No posters on the walls, no teenage clutter or signs of an independent mind. There was a writing-pad on the dressing table, but it was blank. A crumpled ball of paper sat in the bottom of an otherwise empty bin beside the wardrobe. Rebus carefully unfolded the sheet. Written on it, in a fairly steady hand, was a message: ‘Told you I would.’

Rebus studied the sentence. Told whom? Her parents seemed to have no inkling their daughter was suicidal, yet the note had been meant for someone. And having written it, why had she discarded it? He turned it over. The other side, though blank was slightly tacky. Rebus sniffed the paper, but could find no smell to identify the stickiness. He carefully folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket.

In the top drawer of the dressing-table was a leather-bound diary. But Suzanne had been no diarist. Instead of the expected teenage outpourings, Rebus found only one-line reminders, every Tuesday for the past six months or so, ‘The Gentlemen’s Club — 4.00’. Curiouser and curiouser. The last entry was for the previous week, with nothing in the rest of the diary save blank pages.

The Gentlemen’s Club — what on earth could she have meant? Rebus knew of several clubs in Edinburgh, dowdy remnants of a former age, but none was called simply The Gentlemen’s Club. The diary went into his pocket along with the note.

Thomas McKenzie saw him to the door. The tie around his neck was hanging loosely now and his voice was sweet with whisky.

‘Just two last questions before I go,’ Rebus said.

‘Yes?’ said McKenzie, sighing.

‘Do you belong to a club?’

McKenzie seemed taken aback, but shrugged. ‘Several, actually. The Strathspey Health Club. The Forth Golf Club. And Finlay’s as was.’

‘Finlay’s Gentlemen’s Club?’

‘Yes, that’s right. But it’s called Thomson’s now.’

Rebus nodded. ‘Final question,’ he said. ‘What did Suzanne do on Tuesdays at four?’

‘Nothing special. I think she had some drama group at school.’

‘Thank you, Mr McKenzie. Sorry to have troubled you. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Inspector.’

Rebus stood on the top step, breathing in lungfuls of fresh air. Too much of a good thing could be stifling. He wondered if Suzanne McKenzie had felt stifled. He still wondered why she had died. And, knowing her father would be the first to find her, why had she lain down naked in the bath? Rebus had seen suicides before — lots of them — but whether they chose the bathroom or the bedroom, they were always clothed.

‘Naked I came,’ he thought to himself, remembering the passage from the Book of Job, ‘and naked shall return.’

On his way to Hawthornden School for Girls, Rebus received a message from Detective Constable Holmes, who had returned to the station.

‘Go ahead,’ said Rebus. The radio crackled. The sky overhead was the colour of a bruise, the static in the air playing havoc with the radio’s reception.

‘I’ve just run McKenzie’s name through the computer,’ said Holmes, ‘and come up with something you might be interested in.’

Rebus smiled. Holmes was as thorough as any airport sniffer dog. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Are you going to tell me, or do I have to buy the paperback?’

There was a hurt pause before Holmes began to speak and Rebus remembered how sensitive to criticism the younger man could be. ‘It seems,’ Holmes said at last, ‘that Mr McKenzie was arrested several months back for loitering outside a school.’

‘Oh? Which school?’

‘Murrayfield Comprehensive. He wasn’t charged, but it’s on record that he was taken to Murrayfield police station and questioned.’

‘That is interesting. I’ll talk to you later.’ Rebus terminated the call. The rain had started to fall in heavy drops. He picked up the radio again and asked to be put through to Murrayfield police station. His luck was in. A colleague there remembered the whole incident.

‘We kept it quiet, of course,’ the Inspector told Rebus. ‘And McKenzie swore he’d just stopped there to call into his office. But the teachers at the school were adamant he’d parked there before, during the lunch-break. It’s not the most refined area of town after all, is it? A Daimler does tend to stand out from the crowd around there, especially when there isn’t a bride in the back of it.’

‘I take your point,’ said Rebus, smiling. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yes, one of the kids told a teacher he’d seen someone get into McKenzie’s Daimler once, but we couldn’t find any evidence of that.’

‘Vivid imaginations, these kids,’ Rebus agreed. This was all his colleague could tell him, but it was enough to muddy the water. Had Suzanne discovered her father’s secret and, ashamed, killed herself? Or perhaps her schoolfriends had found out and teased her about it? If McKenzie liked kids, there might even be a tang of incest about the whole thing. That would at least go some way towards explaining Suzanne’s nudity: she wasn’t putting on show anything her father hadn’t seen before. But what about The Gentlemen’s Club? Where did it fit in? At Hawthornden School, Rebus hoped he might find some answers.

It was the sort of school fathers sent their daughters to so that they might learn the arts of femininity and ruthlessness. The headmistress, as imposing a character as the school building itself, fed Rebus on cakes and tea before leading him to Suzanne’s form mistress, a Miss Selkirk, who had prepared more tea for him in her little private room.

Yes, she told him, Suzanne had been a very popular girl and news of her death came as quite a shock. She had run around with Hazel Frazer, the banker’s daughter. A very vivacious girl, Hazel, head of school this year, though Suzanne hadn’t been far behind in the running. A competitive pair, their marks for maths, English, languages almost identical. Suzanne the better at sciences; Hazel the better at economics and accounts. Splendid girls, the pair of them.

Biting into his fourth or fifth cake, Rebus nodded again. These women were all so commanding that he had begun to feel like a schoolboy himself. He sat with knees primly together, smiling, asking his questions almost apologetically.

‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘the name The Gentlemen’s Club means anything to you?’

Miss Selkirk thought hard. ‘Is it,’ she said at last, ‘the name of a discotheque?’

Rebus smiled. ‘I don’t think so. Why do you ask?’

‘Well, it’s just that I do seem to recall having heard it before from one of the girls, quite recently, but only in passing.’

Rebus looked disappointed.

‘I am sorry, Inspector.’ She tapped her skull. ‘This old head of mine isn’t what it used to be.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ said Rebus quietly. ‘One last thing, do you happen to know who takes the school’s drama classes?’

‘Ah,’ said Miss Selkirk, ‘that’s young Miss Phillips, the English teacher.’

Miss Phillips, who insisted that Rebus call her Jilly, was not only young but also very attractive. Waves of long auburn hair fell over her shoulders and down her back. Her eyes were dark and moist with recently shed tears. Rebus felt more awkward than ever.

‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that you run the school’s drama group.’

‘That’s right.’ Her voice was fragile as porcelain.

‘And Suzanne was in the group?’

‘Yes. She was due to play Celia in our production of As You Like It.’

‘Oh?’

‘That’s Shakespeare, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Rebus, ‘I do know.’

They were talking in the corridor, just outside her classroom, and through the panes of glass in the door, Rebus could see a class of fairly mature girls, healthy and from well-ordered homes, whispering together and giggling. Odd that, considering they’d just lost a friend.

‘Celia,’ he said, ‘is Duke Frederick’s daughter, isn’t she?’

‘I’m impressed, Inspector.’

‘It’s not my favourite Shakespeare play,’ Rebus explained, ‘but I remember seeing it at the Festival a few years back. Celia has a friend, doesn’t she?’

‘That’s right, Rosalind.’

‘So who was going to play Rosalind?’

‘Hazel Frazer.’

Rebus nodded slowly at this. It made sense. ‘Is Hazel in your classroom at the moment?’

‘Yes, she’s the one with the long black hair. Do you see her?’

Oh yes, Rebus could see her. She sat, calm and imperturbable, at the still centre of a sea of admirers. The other girls giggled and whispered around her, hoping to catch her attention or a few words of praise, while she sat oblivious to it all.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I see her.’

‘Would you care to speak with her, Inspector?’

He knew Hazel was aware of him, even though she averted her eyes from the door. Indeed, he knew precisely because she refused to look, while the other girls glanced towards the corridor from time to time, interested in this interruption to their classwork. Interested and curious. Hazel pretended to be neither, which in itself interested Rebus.

‘No,’ he said to Jilly Phillips, ‘not just now. She’s probably upset, and it wouldn’t do much good for me to go asking her questions under the circumstances. There was one thing, though.’

‘Yes, Inspector?’

‘This after-school drama group of yours, the one that meets on Tuesdays, it doesn’t happen to have a nickname, does it?’

‘Not that I know of.’ Jilly Phillips furrowed her brow. ‘But, Inspector?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re under some kind of misapprehension. The drama group meets on Fridays, not Tuesdays. And we meet before lunch.’

Rebus drove out of the school grounds and parked by the side of the busy main road. The drama group met during school hours, so what had Suzanne done on Tuesdays after school, while her parents thought she was there? At least, McKenzie had said he’d thought that’s what she’d done on Tuesdays. Suppose he’d been lying? Then what?

A maroon-coloured bus roared past Rebus’s car. A 135, on its way to Princes Street. He started up the car again and followed it along its route, all the time thinking through the details of Suzanne’s suicide. Until suddenly, with blinding clarity, he saw the truth of the thing, and bit his bottom lip fiercely, wondering just what on earth he could — should — do about it.

Well, the longer he thought about doing something, the harder it would become to do it. So he called Holmes and asked him for a large favour, before driving over to the house owned by Sir Jimmy Frazer.

Frazer was not just part of the Edinburgh establishment — in many ways he was that establishment. Born and educated in the city, he had won hard-earned respect, friendship and awe on his way to the top. The nineteenth-century walled house in which his family made its home was part of his story. It had been about to be bought by a company, an English company, and knocked down to make way for a new apartment block. There were public protests about this act of vandalism and in had stepped Sir Jimmy Frazer, purchasing the house and making it his own.

That had been years ago, but it was a story still heard told by hard men to other hard men in watering holes throughout the city. Rebus examined the house as he drove in through the open gates. It was an ugly near-Gothic invention, mock turrets and spires, hard, cold and uninviting. A maid answered the door. Rebus introduced himself and was ushered into a large drawing-room, where Sir Jimmy’s wife, tall and dark haired like her daughter, waited.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Lady—’ Rebus was cut short by an imperious hand, but an open smile.

‘Just Deborah, please.’ And she motioned for Rebus to sit.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but—’

‘Yes, your call was intriguing, Inspector. Of course, I’ll do what I can. It’s a tragedy, poor Suzanne.’

‘You knew her then?’

‘Of course. Why ever shouldn’t we know her? She visited practically every Tuesday.’

‘Oh?’ Rebus had suspected as much, but was keen to learn more.

‘After school,’ Lady Deborah continued. ‘Hazel and Suzanne and a few other chums would come back here. They didn’t stay late.’

‘But what exactly did they do?’

She laughed. ‘I’ve no idea. What do girls of that age do? Play records? Talk about boys? Try to defer growing up?’ She gave a wry smile, perhaps thinking of her own past. Rebus checked his wristwatch casually. Five to four. He had a few minutes yet.

‘Did they,’ he asked, ‘confine themselves to your daughter’s room?’

‘More or less. Not her bedroom, of course. There’s an old playroom upstairs. Hazel uses that as a kind of den.’

Rebus nodded. ‘May I see it?’

Lady Deborah seemed puzzled. ‘I suppose so, though I can’t see—’

‘It would help,’ Rebus interrupted, ‘to give me an overall picture of Suzanne. I’m trying to work out the kind of girl she was.’

‘Of course,’ said Lady Deborah, though she sounded unconvinced.

Rebus was shown to a small, cluttered room at the end of a long corridor. Inside, the curtains were closed. Lady Deborah switched on the lights.

‘Hazel won’t allow the maid in here,’ Lady Deborah explained, apologising for the untidiness. ‘Secrets, I suppose,’ she whispered.

Rebus did not doubt it. There were two small sofas, piles of pop and teenage magazines scattered on the floor, an ashtray full of dog-ends (which Lady Deborah pointedly chose to ignore), a stereo against one wall and a desk against another, on which sat a personal computer, its screen switched on but blank.

‘She always forgets to turn that thing off,’ said Lady Deborah. Rebus could hear the telephone ringing downstairs. The maid answered it and then called up to Lady Deborah.

‘Oh dear. Please excuse me, Inspector.’

Rebus smiled and bowed slightly as she left. His watch said four o’clock. As prearranged, it would be Holmes on the phone. Rebus had told him to pretend to be anybody, to say anything, so long as he kept Lady Deborah occupied for five minutes. Holmes had suggested he be a journalist seeking some quotes for a magazine feature. Rebus smiled now. Yes, there was probably vanity enough in Lady Deborah to keep her talking with a reporter for at least five minutes, maybe more.

Still, he couldn’t waste time. He had expected to have to do a lot of searching, but the computer seemed the obvious place to start. There were floppy discs stored in a plastic box beside the monitor. He flipped through them until he came to one labelled GC DISC. There could be no doubt. He slipped the disc into the computer and watched as the display came up. He had found the records of The Gentlemen’s Club.

He read quickly. Not that there was much to read. Members must attend every week, at four o’clock on Tuesday. Members must wear a tie. (Rebus looked quickly in a drawer of the desk and found five ties. He recognised them as belonging to various clubs in the city: the Strathspey, the Forth Golf Club, Finlay’s Club. Stolen from the girls’ fathers of course, and worn to meetings of a secret little clique, itself a parody of the clubs their fathers frequented.)

In a file named ‘Exploits of the Gentlemen’s Club’, Rebus found lists of petty thefts, acts of so-called daring, and lies. Members had stolen from city centre shops, had carried out practical jokes against teachers and pupils alike, had been, in short, malicious.

There were many exploits attributed to Suzanne, including lying to her parents about what she did on Tuesday after school. Twenty-eight exploits in all. Hazel Frazer’s list totalled thirty at the bottom, yet Rebus could count only twenty-nine entries on the screen. And in a separate file, the agenda for a meeting yet to be held, was a single item, recorded as ‘New Business: can suicide be termed an exploit of the Gentlemen’s Club?’

Rebus heard steps behind him. He turned, but it was not Lady Deborah. It was Hazel Frazer. Her eyes looked past him to the screen, firstly in fear and disbelief, then in scorn.

‘Hello, Hazel.’

‘You’re the policeman,’ she said in a level tone. ‘I saw you at the school.’

‘That’s right.’ Rebus studied her as she came into the room. She was a cool one, all right. That was Hawthornden for you, breeding strong, cold women, each one her father’s daughter. ‘Are you jealous of her?’

‘Of whom? Suzanne?’ Hazel smiled cruelly. ‘Why should I be?’

‘Because,’ answered Rebus, ‘Suzanne’s is the ultimate exploit. For once, she beat you.’

‘You think that’s why she did it?’ Hazel sounded smug. When Rebus shook his head, a little of her confidence seeped away.

‘I know why she did it, Hazel. She did it because she found out about you and her father. She found out because you told her. I notice it’s too much of a secret for you to put on your computer, but you’ve added it to the list, haven’t you? As an exploit. I expect you were having an argument, bragging, being competitive. And it just slipped out. You told Suzanne you were her father’s lover.’

Her cheeks were becoming a deep strawberry red, while her lips drained of colour. But she wasn’t about to speak, so Rebus went on at her.

‘You met him at lunchtime. You couldn’t meet near Hawthornden. That would be too risky. So you’d take a bus to Murrayfield. It’s only ten minutes ride away. He’d be waiting in his car. You told Suzanne and she couldn’t bear to know. So she killed herself.’ Rebus was becoming angry. ‘And all you can be bothered to do is write about her on your files and wonder whether suicide is an “exploit”.’ His voice had risen and he hardly registered the fact that Lady Deborah was standing in the doorway, looking on in disbelief.

‘No!’ yelled Hazel. ‘She did it first! She slept with Daddy months ago! So I did it back to her. That’s what she couldn’t live with! That’s why she—’

Then it happened. Hazel’s shoulders fell forward and, eyes closed, she began to cry, silently at first, but then loudly. Her mother ran to comfort her and told Rebus to leave. Couldn’t he see what the girl was going through? He’d pay, she told him. He’d pay for upsetting her daughter. But she was crying too, crying like Hazel, mother and child. Rebus could think of nothing to say, so he left.

Descending the stairs, he tried not to think about what he had just unleashed. Two families broken now instead of one, and to what end? Merely to prove, as he had always known anyway, that a pretty face was no mirror of the soul and that the spirit of competition still flourished in Scotland’s well-respected education system. He dug his hands deep into his jacket pockets, felt something there and drew out Suzanne’s note. The crumpled note, found discarded in her bin, sticky on one side. He stopped halfway down the stairs, staring at the note without really seeing it. He was visualising something else, something almost too horrible, too unbelievable.

Yet he believed it.

Thomas McKenzie was surprised to see him. Mrs McKenzie had, he said, gone to stay with a sister on the other side of the city. The body had been taken away, of course, and the bathroom cleaned. McKenzie was without jacket and tie and had rolled up his shirt-sleeves. He wore half-moon glasses and carried a pen with him as he opened the door to Rebus.

In the drawing-room, there were signs that McKenzie had been working. Papers were strewn across a writing desk, a briefcase open on the floor. A calculator sat on the chair, as did a telephone.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you again, sir,’ Rebus said, taking in the scene. McKenzie had sobered up since the morning. He looked like a businessman rather than a grieving father.

McKenzie seemed to realise that the scene before Rebus created a strange impression.

‘Keeping busy,’ he said. ‘Keeping the mind occupied, you know. Life can’t stop because...’ He fell silent.

‘Quite, sir,’ Rebus said, seating himself on the sofa. He reached into his pocket. ‘I thought you might like this.’ He held the paper towards McKenzie, who took it from him and glanced at it. Rebus stared hard at him, and McKenzie twitched, attempting to hand back the note.

‘No, sir,’ said Rebus, ‘you keep it.’

‘Why?’

‘It will always remind you,’ said Rebus, his voice cold and level, ‘that you could have saved your daughter.’

McKenzie was aghast. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said Rebus, his voice still lacking emotion, ‘that Suzanne wasn’t intending to kill herself, not really. It was just something to attract your attention, to shock you into... I don’t know, action I suppose, a reaction of some kind.’

McKenzie positioned himself slowly so that he rested on the armrest of one of the upholstered chairs.

‘Yes,’ Rebus went on, ‘a reaction. That’s as good a way of putting it as any. Suzanne knew what time you got up every morning. She wasn’t stupid. She timed the slashing of her wrists so that you would find her while there was still time to save her. She also had a sense of the dramatic, didn’t she? So she stuck her little note to the bathroom door. You saw the note and you went into the bathroom. And she wasn’t dead, was she?’

McKenzie had screwed shut his eyes. His mouth was open, the teeth gritted in remembrance.

‘She wasn’t dead,’ Rebus continued, ‘not quite. And you knew damned well why she’d done it. Because she’d warned you she would. She had told you she would. Unless you stopped seeing Hazel, unless you owned up to her mother. Perhaps she had a lot of demands, Mr McKenzie. You never really got on with her anyway, did you? You didn’t know what to do. Help her, or leave her to die? You hesitated. You waited.’

Rebus had risen from his seat now. His voice had risen, too. The tears were streaming down McKenzie’s face, his whole body shuddering. But Rebus was relentless.

‘You walked around a bit, you walked into her room. You threw her note into the waste-bin. And eventually, eventually you reached for a telephone and made the calls.’

‘It was already too late,’ McKenzie bawled. ‘Nobody could have saved her.’

‘They could have tried!’ Rebus was yelling now, yelling close to McKenzie’s own twisted face. ‘You could have tried, but you didn’t. You wanted to keep your secret. Well by God your secret’s out.’ The last words were hissed and with them Rebus felt his fury ebb. He turned and started to walk away.

‘What are you going to do?’ McKenzie moaned.

‘What can I do?’ Rebus answered quietly. ‘I’m not going to do anything, Mr McKenzie. I’m just going to leave you to get on with the rest of your life.’ He paused. ‘Enjoy it,’ he said, closing the doors of the drawing-room behind him.

He stood on the steps of the house, trembling, his heart pounding. In a suicide, who was to blame, who the victim? He still couldn’t answer the question. He doubted he ever would. His watch told him it was five minutes to five. He knew the pub near the circus, a quiet bar frequented by thinkers and amateur philosophers, a place where nothing happened and the measures were generous. He felt like having one drink, maybe two at most. He would raise his glass and make a silent toast: to the lassies.