The Beat Goes On

The Dean Curse

The locals in Barnton knew him either as ‘the Brigadier’ or as ‘that Army type who bought the West Lodge’. West Lodge was a huge but until recently neglected detached house set in a walled acre and a half of grounds and copses. Most locals were relieved that its high walls hid it from general view, the house itself being too angular, too gothic for modern tastes. Certainly, it was very large for the needs of a widower and his unsmiling daughter. Mrs MacLennan, who cleaned for the Brigadier, was pumped for information by curious neighbours, but could say only that Brigadier-General Dean had had some renovations done, that most of the house was habitable, that one room had become a library, another a billiard-room, another a study, another a makeshift gymnasium and so on. The listeners would drink this in deeply, yet it was never enough. What about the daughter? What about the Brigadier’s background? What happened to his wife?

Shopkeepers too were asked for their thoughts. The Brigadier drove a sporty open-topped car which would pull in noisily to the side of the road to allow him to pop into this or that shop for a few things, including, each day at the same time, a bottle of something or other from the smarter of the two off-licences.

The grocer, Bob Sladden, reckoned that Brigadier-General Dean had been born nearby, even that he had lived for a few childhood years in West Lodge and so had retired there because of its carefree connections. But Miss Dalrymple, who at ninety-three was as old as anyone in that part of Barnton, could not recall any family named Dean living at West Lodge. Could not, indeed, recall any Deans ever living in this ‘neck’ of Barnton, with the exception of Sam Dean. But when pressed about Sam Dean, she merely shook her head and said, ‘He was no good, that one, and got what he deserved. The Great War saw to him.’ Then she would nod slowly, thoughtfully, and nobody would be any further forward.

Speculation grew wilder as no new facts came to light, and in The Claymore public bar one afternoon, a bar never patronised by the Brigadier (and who’d ever heard of an Army man not liking his drink?), a young out-of-work plasterer named Willie Barr came up with a fresh proposition.

‘Maybe Dean isn’t his real name.’

But everyone around the pool table laughed at that and Willie just shrugged, readying to play his next shot. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘real name or not, I wouldn’t climb over that daughter of his to get to any of you lot.’

Then he played a double off the cushion, but missed. Missed not because the shot was difficult or he’d had too many pints of Snakebite, but because his cue arm jerked at the noise of the explosion.

It was a fancy car all right, a Jaguar XJS convertible, its bodywork a startling red. Nobody in Barnton could mistake it for anyone else’s car. Besides, everyone was used to it revving to its loud roadside halt, was used to its contented ticking-over while the Brigadier did his shopping. Some complained — though never to his face — about the noise, about the fumes from the exhaust. They couldn’t say why he never switched off the ignition. He always seemed to want to be ready for a quick getaway. On this particular afternoon, the getaway was quicker even than usual, a squeal of tyres as the car jerked out into the road and sped past the shops. Its driver seemed ready actually to disregard the red stop light at the busy junction. He never got the chance. There was a ball of flames where the car had been and the heart-stopping sound of the explosion. Twisted metal flew into the air, then down again, wounding passers-by, burning skin. Shop windows blew in, shards of fine glass finding soft targets. The traffic lights turned to green, but nothing moved in the street.

For a moment, there was a silence punctuated only by the arrival on terra firma of bits of speedometer, headlamp, even steering-wheel. Then the screaming started, as people realised they’d been wounded. More curdling still though were the silences, the dumb horrified faces of people who would never forget this moment, whose shock would disturb each wakeful night.

And then there was a man, standing in a doorway, the doorway of what had been the wine merchant’s. He carried a bottle with him, carefully wrapped in green paper, and his mouth was open in surprise. He dropped the bottle with a crash when he realised his car was not where he had left it, realising that the roaring he had heard and thought he recognised was that of his own car being driven away. At his feet, he saw one of his driving gloves lying on the pavement in front of him. It was still smouldering. Only five minutes before, it had been lying on the leather of his passenger seat. The wine merchant was standing beside him now, pale and shaking, looking in dire need of a drink. The Brigadier nodded towards the carcass of his sleek red Jaguar.

‘That should have been me,’ he said. Then: ‘Do you mind if I use your telephone?’

John Rebus threw The Dain Curse up in the air, sending it spinning towards his living-room ceiling. Gravity caught up with it just short of the ceiling and pulled it down hard, so that it landed open against the uncarpeted floor. It was a cheap copy, bought secondhand and previously much read. But not by Rebus; he’d got as far as the beginning of the third section, ‘Quesada’, before giving up, before tossing what many regard as Hammett’s finest novel into the air. Its pages fell away from the spine as it landed, scattering chapters. Rebus growled. The telephone had, as though prompted by the book’s demise, started ringing. Softly, insistently. Rebus picked up the apparatus and studied it. It was six o’clock on the evening of his first rest-day in what seemed like months. Who would be phoning him? Pleasure or business? And which would he prefer it to be? He put the receiver to his ear.

‘Yes?’ His voice was non-committal.

‘DI Rebus?’ It was work then. Rebus grunted a response. ‘DC Coupar here, sir. The Chief thought you’d be interested.’ There was a pause for effect. ‘A bomb’s just gone off in Barnton.’

Rebus stared at the sheets of print lying all around him. He asked the Detective Constable to repeat the message.

‘A bomb, sir. In Barnton.’

‘What? A World War Two leftover you mean?’

‘No, sir. Nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.’

There was a line of poetry in Rebus’s head as he drove out towards one of Edinburgh’s many quiet middle-class districts, the sort of place where nothing happened, the sort of place where crime was measured in a yearly attempted break-in or the theft of a bicycle. That was Barnton. The line of poetry hadn’t been written about Barnton. It had been written about Slough.

It’s my own fault, Rebus was thinking, for being disgusted at how far-fetched that Hammett book was. Entertaining, yes, but you could strain credulity only so far, and Dashiell Hammett had taken that strain like the anchor-man on a tug-o’-war team, pulling with all his might. Coincidence after coincidence, plot after plot, corpse following corpse like something off an assembly line.

Far-fetched, definitely. But then what was Rebus to make of his telephone call? He’d checked: it wasn’t 1st April. But then he wouldn’t put it past Brian Holmes or one of his other colleagues to pull a stunt on him just because he was having a day off, just because he’d carped on about it for the previous few days. Yes, this had Holmes’ fingerprints all over it. Except for one thing.

The radio reports. The police frequency was full of it; and when Rebus switched on his car radio to the local commercial channel, the news was there, too. Reports of an explosion in Barnton, not far from the roundabout. It is thought a car has exploded. No further details, though there are thought to be many casualties. Rebus shook his head and drove, thinking of the poem again, thinking of anything that would stop him focussing on the truth of the news. A car bomb? A car bomb? In Belfast, yes, maybe even on occasion in London. But here in Edinburgh? Rebus blamed himself. If only he hadn’t cursed Dashiell Hammett, if only he hadn’t sneered at his book, at its exaggerations and its melodramas, if only... Then none of this would have happened.

But of course it would. It had.

The road had been blocked off. The ambulances had left with their cargo. Onlookers stood four deep behind the orange and white tape of the hastily erected cordon. There was just the one question: how many dead? The answer seemed to be: just the one. The driver of the car. An Army bomb disposal unit had materialised from somewhere and, for want of anything else to do, was checking the shops either side of the street. A line of policemen, aided so far as Rebus could judge by more Army personnel, was moving slowly up the road, mostly on hands and knees, in what an outsider might regard as some bizarre slow-motion race. They carried with them polythene bags, into which they dropped anything they found. The whole scene was one of brilliantly organised confusion and it didn’t take Rebus longer than a couple of minutes to detect the mastermind behind it all — Superintendent ‘Farmer’ Watson. ‘Farmer’ only behind his back, of course, and a nickname which matched both his north-of-Scotland background and his at times agricultural methods. Rebus decided to skirt around his superior officer and glean what he could from the various less senior officers present.

He had come to Barnton with a set of preconceptions and it took time for these to be corrected. For example, he’d premised that the person in the car, the as-yet-unidentified deceased, would be the car’s owner and that this person would have been the target of the bomb attack (the evidence all around most certainly pointed to a bomb, rather than spontaneous combustion, say, or any other more likely explanation). Either that or the car might be stolen or borrowed, and the driver some sort of terrorist, blown apart by his own device before he could leave it at its intended destination. There were certainly Army installations around Edinburgh: barracks, armouries, listening posts. Across the Forth lay what was left of Rosyth naval dockyard, as well as the underground installation at Pitreavie. There were targets. Bomb meant terrorist meant target. That was how it always was.

But not this time. This time there was an important difference. The apparent target escaped, by dint of leaving his car for a couple of minutes to nip into a shop. But while he was in the shop someone had tried to steal his car, and that person was now drying into the tarmac beneath the knees of the crawling policemen. This much Rebus learned before Superintendent Watson caught sight of him, caught sight of him smiling wryly at the car thief’s luck. It wasn’t every day you got the chance to steal a Jaguar XJS... but what a day to pick.

‘Inspector!’ Farmer Watson beckoned for Rebus to join him, which Rebus, ironing out his smile, did.

Before Watson could start filling him in on what he already knew, Rebus himself spoke.

‘Who was the target, sir?’

‘A man called Dean.’ Meaningful pause. ‘Brigadier-General Dean, retired.’

Rebus nodded. ‘I thought there were a lot of Tommies about.’

‘We’ll be working with the Army on this one, John. That’s how it’s done, apparently. And then there’s Scotland Yard, too. Their anti-terrorist people.’

‘Too many cooks if you ask me, sir.’

Watson nodded. ‘Still, these buggers are supposed to be specialised.’

‘And we’re only good for solving the odd drunk driving or domestic, eh, sir?’

The two men shared a smile at this. Rebus nodded towards the wreck of the car. ‘Any idea who was behind the wheel?’

Watson shook his head. ‘Not yet. And not much to go on either. We may have to wait till a mum or girlfriend reports him missing.’

‘Not even a description?’

‘None of the passers-by is fit to be questioned. Not yet anyway.’

‘So what about Brigadier-General Whassisname?’

‘Dean.’

‘Yes. Where is he?’

‘He’s at home. A doctor’s been to take a look at him, but he seems all right. A bit shocked.’

‘A bit? Someone rips the arse out of his car and he’s a bit shocked?’ Rebus sounded doubtful. Watson’s eyes were fixed on the advancing line of debris collectors.

‘I get the feeling he’s seen worse.’ He turned to Rebus. ‘Why don’t you have a word with him, John? See what you think.’

Rebus nodded slowly. ‘Aye, why not,’ he said. ‘Anything for a laugh, eh, sir?’

Watson seemed stuck for a reply, and by the time he’d formed one Rebus had wandered back through the cordon, hands in trouser pockets, looking for all the world like a man out for a stroll on a balmy summer’s evening. Only then did the Superintendent remember that this was Rebus’s day off. He wondered if it had been such a bright idea to send him off to talk to Brigadier-General Dean. Then he smiled, recalling that he had brought John Rebus out here precisely because something didn’t quite feel right. If he could feel it, Rebus would feel it too, and would burrow deep to find its source — as deep as necessary and, perhaps, deeper than was seemly for a Superintendent to go.

Yes, there were times when even Detective Inspector John Rebus came in useful.

It was a big house. Rebus would go further. It was bigger than the last hotel he’d stayed in, though of a similar style: closer to Hammer Films than House and Garden. A hotel in Scarborough it had been; three days of lust with a divorced school-dinner lady. School-dinner ladies hadn’t been like that in Rebus’s day... or maybe he just hadn’t been paying attention.

He paid attention now. Paid attention as an Army uniform opened the door of West Lodge to him. He’d already had to talk his way past a mixed guard on the gate — an apologetic PC and two uncompromising squaddies. That was why he’d started thinking back to Scarborough — to stop himself punching those squaddies in their square-chinned faces. The closer he came to Brigadier-General Dean, the more aggressive and unlovely the soldiers seemed. The two on the gate were like lambs compared to the one on the main door of the house, yet he in his turn was meekness itself compared to the one who led Rebus into a well-appointed living-room and told him to wait.

Rebus hated the Army — with good reason. He had seen the soldier’s lot from the inside and it had left him with a resentment so huge that to call it a ‘chip on the shoulder’ was to do it an injustice. Chip? Right now it felt like a whole transport cafe! There was only one thing for it. Rebus made for the sideboard, sniffed the contents of the decanter sitting there and poured himself an inch of whisky. He was draining the contents of the glass into his mouth when the door opened.

Rebus had brought too many preconceptions with him today. Brigadier-Generals were squat, ruddy-faced men, with stiff moustaches and VSOP noses, a few silvered wisps of Brylcreemed hair and maybe even a walking stick. They retired in their seventies and babbled of campaigns over dinner.

Not so Brigadier-General Dean. He looked to be in his mid- to late-fifties. He stood over six feet tall, had a youthful face and vigorous dark hair. He was slim too, with no sign of a retirement gut or a port drinker’s red-veined cheeks. He looked twice as fit as Rebus felt and for a moment the policeman actually caught himself straightening his back and squaring his shoulders.

‘Good idea,’ said Dean, joining Rebus at the sideboard. ‘Mind if I join you?’ His voice was soft, blurred at the edges, the voice of an educated man, a civilised man. Rebus tried hard to imagine Dean giving orders to a troop of hairy-fisted Tommies. Tried, but failed.

‘Detective Inspector Rebus,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘Sorry to bother you like this, sir, but there are a few questions—’

Dean nodded, finishing his own drink and offering to replenish Rebus’s.

‘Why not?’ agreed Rebus. Funny thing though: he could swear this whisky wasn’t whisky at all but whiskey — Irish whiskey. Softer than the Scottish stuff, lacking an edge.

Rebus sat on the sofa, Dean on a well-used armchair. The Brigadier-General offered a toast of slainte before starting on his second drink, then exhaled noisily.

‘Had to happen sooner or later, I suppose,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

Dean nodded slowly. ‘I worked in Ulster for a time. Quite a long time. I suppose I was fairly high up in the tree there. I always knew I was a target. The Army knew, too, of course, but what can you do? You can’t put bodyguards on every soldier who’s been involved in the conflict, can you?’

‘I suppose not, sir. But I assume you took precautions?’

Dean shrugged. ‘I’m not in Who’s Who and I’ve got an unlisted telephone number. I don’t even use my rank much, to be honest.’

‘But some of your mail might be addressed to Brigadier-General Dean?’

A wry smile. ‘Who gave you that impression?’

‘What impression, sir?’

‘The impression of rank. I’m not a Brigadier-General. I retired with the rank of Major.’

‘But the—’

‘The what? The locals? Yes, I can see how gossip might lead to exaggeration. You know how it is in a place like this, Inspector. An incomer who keeps himself to himself. A military air. They put two and two together then multiply it by ten.’

Rebus nodded thoughtfully. ‘I see.’ Trust Watson to be wrong even in the fundamentals. ‘But the point I was trying to make about your mail still stands, sir. What I’m wondering, you see, is how they found you.’

Dean smiled quietly. ‘The IRA are quite sophisticated these days, Inspector. For all I know, they could have hacked into a computer, bribed someone in the know, or maybe it was just a fluke, sheer chance.’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose we’ll have to think of moving somewhere else now, starting all over again. Poor Jacqueline.’

‘Jacqueline being?’

‘My daughter. She’s upstairs, terribly upset. She’s due to start university in October. It’s her I feel sorry for.’

Rebus looked sympathetic. He felt sympathetic. One thing about Army life and police life — both could have a devastating effect on your personal life.

‘And your wife, sir?’

‘Dead, Inspector. Several years ago.’ Dean examined his now empty glass. He looked his years now, looked like someone who needed a rest. But there was something other about him, something cool and hard. Rebus had met all types in the Army — and since. Veneers could no longer fool him, and behind Major Dean’s sophisticated veneer he could glimpse something other, something from the man’s past. Dean hadn’t just been a good soldier. At one time he’d been lethal.

‘Do you have any thoughts on how they might have found you, sir?’

‘Not really.’ Dean closed his eyes for a second. There was resignation in his voice. ‘What matters is that they did find me.’ His eyes met Rebus’s. ‘And they can find me again.’

Rebus shifted in his seat. Christ, what a thought. What a, well, time-bomb. To always be watching, always expecting, always fearing. And not just for yourself.

‘I’d like to talk to Jacqueline, sir. It may be that she’ll have some inkling as to how they were able to—’

But Dean was shaking his head. ‘Not just now, Inspector. Not yet. I don’t want her — well, you understand. Besides, I’d imagine that this will all be out of your hands by tomorrow. I believe some people from the Anti-Terrorist Branch are on their way up here. Between them and the Army... well, as I say, it’ll be out of your hands.’

Rebus felt himself prickling anew. But Dean was right, wasn’t he? Why strain yourself when tomorrow it would be someone else’s weight? Rebus pursed his lips, nodded, and stood up.

‘I’ll see you to the door,’ said the Major, taking the empty glass from Rebus’s hand.

As they passed into the hallway, Rebus caught a glimpse of a young woman — Jacqueline Dean presumably. She had been hovering by the telephone-table at the foot of the staircase, but was now starting up the stairs themselves, her hand thin and white on the bannister. Dean, too, watched her go. He half-smiled, half-shrugged at Rebus.

‘She’s upset,’ he explained unnecessarily. But she hadn’t looked upset to Rebus. She had looked like she was moping.

The next morning, Rebus went back to Barnton. Wooden boards had been placed over some of the shop windows, but otherwise there were few signs of yesterday’s drama. The guards on the gate to West Lodge had been replaced by beefy plainclothes men with London accents. They carried portable radios, but otherwise might have been bouncers, debt collectors or bailiffs. They radioed the house. Rebus couldn’t help thinking that a shout might have done the job for them, but they were in love with technology; you could see that by the way they held their radio-sets. He’d seen soldiers holding a new gun the same way.

‘The guvnor’s coming down to see you,’ one of the men said at last. Rebus kicked his heels for a full minute before the man arrived.

‘What do you want?’

‘Detective Inspector Rebus. I talked with Major Dean yesterday and—’

The man snapped. ‘Who told you his rank?’

‘Major Dean himself. I just wondered if I might—’

‘Yes, well there’s no need for that, Inspector. We’re in charge now. Of course you’ll be kept informed.’

The man turned and walked back through the gates with a steady, determined stride. The guards were smirking as they closed the gates behind their ‘guvnor’. Rebus felt like a snubbed schoolboy, left out of the football game. Sides had been chosen and there he stood, unwanted. He could smell London on these men, that cocky superiority of a self-chosen elite. What did they call themselves? C13 or somesuch, the Anti-Terrorist Branch. Closely linked to Special Branch, and everyone knew the trade name for Special Branch — Smug Bastards.

The man had been a little younger than Rebus, well-groomed and accountant-like. More intelligent, for sure, than the gorillas on the gate, but probably well able to handle himself. A neat pistol might well have been hidden under the arm of his close-fitting suit. None of that mattered. What mattered was that the captain was leaving Rebus out of his team. It rankled; and when something rankled, it rankled hard.

Rebus had walked half a dozen paces away from the gates when he half-turned and stuck his tongue out at the guards. Then, satisfied with this conclusion to his morning’s labours, he decided to make his own inquiries. It was eleven-thirty. If you want to find out about someone, reasoned a thirsty Rebus, visit his local.

The reasoning, in this case, proved false: Dean had never been near The Claymore.

‘The daughter came in though,’ commented one young man. There weren’t many people in the pub at this early stage of the day, save a few retired gentlemen who were in conversation with three or four reporters. The barman, too, was busy telling his life story to a young female hack, or rather, into her tape recorder. This made getting served difficult, despite the absence of a lunchtime scrum. The young man had solved this problem, however, reaching behind the bar to refill his glass with a mixture of cider and lager, leaving money on the bartop.

‘Oh?’ Rebus nodded towards the three-quarters full glass. ‘Have another?’

‘When this one’s finished I will.’ He drank greedily, by which time the barman had finished with his confessions — much (judging by her face) to the relief of the reporter. ‘Pint of Snakebite, Paul,’ called the young man. When the drink was before him, he told Rebus that his name was Willie Barr and that he was unemployed.

‘You said you saw the daughter in here?’ Rebus was anxious to have his questions answered before the alcohol took effect on Barr.

‘That’s right. She came in pretty regularly.’

‘By herself?’

‘No, always with some guy.’

‘One in particular, you mean?’

But Willie Barr laughed, shaking his head. ‘A different one every time. She’s getting a bit of a name for herself. And,’ he raised his voice for the barman’s benefit, ‘she’s not even eighteen, I’d say.’

‘Were they local lads?’

‘None I recognised. Never really spoke to them.’ Rebus swirled his glass, creating a foamy head out of nothing.

‘Any Irish accents among them?’

‘In here?’ Barr laughed. ‘Not in here. Christ, no. Actually, she hasn’t been in for a few weeks, now that I think of it. Maybe her father put a stop to it, eh? I mean, how would it look in the Sunday papers? Brigadier’s daughter slumming it in Barnton.’

Rebus smiled. ‘It’s not exactly a slum though, is it?’

‘True enough, but her boyfriends... I mean, there was more of the car mechanic than the estate agent about them. Know what I mean?’ He winked. ‘Not that a bit of rough ever hurt her kind, eh?’ Then he laughed again and suggested a game or two of pool, a pound a game or a fiver if the detective were a betting man.

But Rebus shook his head. He thought he knew now why Willie Barr was drinking so much: he was flush. And the reason he was flush was that he’d been telling his story to the papers — for a price. Brigadier’s Daughter Slumming It. Yes, he’d been telling tales all right, but there was little chance of them reaching their intended audience. The Powers That Be would see to that.

Barr was helping himself to another pint as Rebus made to leave the premises.

It was late in the afternoon when Rebus received his visitor, the Anti-Terrorist accountant.

‘A Mr Matthews to see you,’ the Desk Sergeant had informed Rebus, and ‘Matthews’ he remained, giving no hint of rank or proof of identity. He had come, he said, to ‘have it out’ with Rebus.

‘What were you doing in The Claymore?’

‘Having a drink.’

‘You were asking questions. I’ve already told you, Inspector Rebus, we can’t have—’

‘I know, I know.’ Rebus raised his hands in a show of surrender. ‘But the more furtive you lot are, the more interested I become.’

Matthews stared silently at Rebus. Rebus knew that the man was weighing up his options. One, of course, was to go to Farmer Watson and have Rebus warned off. But if Matthews were as canny as he looked, he would know this might have the opposite effect from that intended. Another option was to talk to Rebus, to ask him what he wanted to know.

‘What do you want to know?’ Matthews said at last.

‘I want to know about Dean.’

Matthews sat back in his chair. ‘In strictest confidence?’ Rebus nodded. ‘I’ve never been known as a clipe.’

‘A clipe?’

‘Someone who tells tales,’ Rebus explained. Matthews was thoughtful.

‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘For a start, Dean is an alias, a very necessary one. During his time in the Army Major Dean worked in Intelligence, mostly in West Germany but also for a time in Ulster. His work in both spheres was very important, crucially important. I don’t need to go into details. His last posting was West Germany. His wife was killed in a terrorist attack, almost certainly IRA. We don’t think they had targeted her specifically. She was just in the wrong place with the wrong number plates.’

‘A car bomb?’

‘No, a bullet. Through the windscreen, point-blank. Major Dean asked to be... he was invalided out. It seemed best. We provided him with a change of identity, of course.’

‘I thought he looked a bit young to be retired. And the daughter, how did she take it?’

‘She was never told the full details, not that I’m aware of. She was in boarding school in England.’ Matthews paused. ‘It was for the best.’

Rebus nodded. ‘Of course, nobody’d argue with that. But why did — Dean — choose to live in Barnton?’

Matthews rubbed his left eyebrow, then pushed his spectacles back up his sharply sloping nose. ‘Something to do with an aunt of his,’ he said. ‘He spent holidays there as a boy. His father was Army, too, posted here, there and everywhere. Never the most stable upbringing. I think Dean had happy memories of Barnton.’

Rebus shifted in his seat. He couldn’t know how long Matthews would stay, how long he would continue to answer Rebus’s questions. And there were so many questions.

‘What about the bomb?’

‘Looks like the IRA, all right. Standard fare for them, all the hallmarks. It’s still being examined, of course, but we’re pretty sure.’

‘And the deceased?’

‘No clues yet. I suppose he’ll be reported missing sooner or later. We’ll leave that side of things to you.’

‘Gosh, thanks.’ Rebus waited for his sarcasm to penetrate, then, quickly: ‘How does Dean get on with his daughter?’

Matthews was caught off-guard by the question. He blinked twice, three times, then glanced at his wristwatch.

‘All right, I suppose,’ he said at last, making show of scratching a mark from his cuff. ‘I can’t see what... Look, Inspector, as I say, we’ll keep you fully informed. But meantime—’

‘Keep out of your hair?’

‘If you want to put it like that.’ Matthews stood up. ‘Now I really must be getting back—’

‘To London?’

Matthews smiled at the eagerness in Rebus’s voice. ‘To Barnton. Don’t worry, Inspector, the more you keep out of my hair, the quicker I can get out of yours. Fair enough?’ He shot a hand out towards Rebus, who returned the almost painful grip.

‘Fair enough,’ said Rebus. He ushered Matthews from the room and closed the door again, then returned to his seat. He slouched as best he could in the hard, uncomfortable chair and put his feet up on the desk, examining his scuffed shoes. He tried to feel like Sam Spade, but failed. His legs soon began to ache and he slid them from the surface of the desk. The coincidences in Dashiell Hammett had nothing on the coincidence of someone nicking a car seconds before it exploded. Someone must have been watching, ready to detonate the device. But if they were watching, how come they didn’t spot that Dean, the intended victim, wasn’t the one to drive off?

Either there was more to this than met the eye, or else there was less. Rebus was wary — very wary. He’d already made far too many prejudgements, had already been proved wrong too many times. Keep an open mind, that was the secret. An open mind and an inquiring one. He nodded his head slowly, his eyes on the door.

‘Fair enough,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll keep out of your hair, Mr Matthews, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m leaving the barber’s.’

The Claymore might not have been Barnton’s most salubrious establishment, but it was as Princes Street’s Caledonian Hotel in comparison with the places Rebus visited that evening. He began with the merely seedy bars, the ones where each quiet voice seemed to contain a lifetime’s resentment, and then moved downwards, one rung of the ladder at a time. It was slow work; the bars tended to be in a ring around Edinburgh, sometimes on the outskirts or in the distant housing schemes, sometimes nearer the centre than most of the population would dare to think.

Rebus hadn’t made many friends in his adult life, but he had his network of contacts and he was as proud of it as any grandparent would be of their extended family. They were like cousins, these contacts; mostly they knew each other, at least by reputation, but Rebus never spoke to one about another, so that the extent of the chain could only be guessed at. There were those of his colleagues who, in Major Dean’s words, added two and two, then multiplied by ten. John Rebus, it was reckoned, had as big a net of ‘snitches’ as any copper on the force bar none.

It took four hours and an outlay of over forty pounds before Rebus started to catch a glimpse of a result. His basic question, though couched in vague and imprecise terms, was simple: have any car thieves vanished off the face of the earth since yesterday?

One name was uttered by three very different people in three distinct parts of the city: Brian Cant. The name meant little to Rebus.

‘It wouldn’t,’ he was told. ‘Brian only shifted across here from the west a year or so ago. He’s got form from when he was a nipper, but he’s grown smart since then. When the Glasgow cops started sniffing, he moved operations.’ The detective listened, nodded, drank a watered-down whisky, and said little. Brian Cant grew from a name into a description, from a description into a personality. But there was something more.

‘You’re not the only one interested in him,’ Rebus was told in a bar in Gorgie. ‘Somebody else was asking questions a wee while back. Remember Jackie Hanson?’

‘He used to be CID, didn’t he?’

‘That’s right, but not any more...’

Not just any old banger for Brian Cant: he specialised in ‘quality motors’. Rebus eventually got an address: a third-floor tenement flat near Powderhall race-track. A young man answered the door. His name was Jim Cant, Brian’s younger brother. Rebus saw that Jim was scared, nervous. He chipped away at the brother quickly, explaining that he was there because he thought Brian might be dead. That he knew all about Cant’s business, but that he wasn’t interested in pursuing this side of things, except insofar as it might shed light on the death. It took a little more of this, then the brother opened up.

‘He said he had a customer interested in a car,’ Jim Cant explained. ‘An Irishman, he said.’

‘How did he know the man was Irish?’

‘Must have been the voice. I don’t think they met. Maybe they did. The man was interested in a specific car.’

‘A red Jaguar?’

‘Yeah, convertible. Nice cars. The Irishman even knew where there was one. It seemed a cinch, that’s what Brian kept saying. A cinch.’

‘He didn’t think it would be hard to steal?’

‘Five seconds’ work, that’s what he kept saying. I thought it sounded too easy. I told him so.’ He bent over in his chair, grabbing at his knees and sinking his head between them. ‘Ach, Brian, what the hell have you done?’

Rebus tried to comfort the young man as best he could with brandy and tea. He drank a mug of tea himself, wandering through the flat, his mind thrumming. Was he blowing things up out of all proportion? Maybe. He’d made mistakes before, not so much errors of judgement as errors of jumping the gun. But there was something about all of this... Something.

‘Do you have a photo of Brian?’ he asked as he was leaving. ‘A recent one would be best.’ Jim Cant handed him a holiday snap.

‘We went to Crete last summer,’ he explained. ‘It was magic.’ Then, holding the door open for Rebus: ‘Don’t I have to identify him or something?’

Rebus thought of the scrapings which were all that remained of what may or may not have been Brian Cant. He shook his head. ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said. ‘If we need you, we’ll let you know.’

The next day was Sunday, day of rest. Rebus rested in his car, parked fifty yards or so along the road from the gates to West Lodge. He put his radio on, folded his arms and sank down into the driver’s seat. This was more like it. The Hollywood private eye on a stakeout. Only in the movies, a stakeout could be whittled away to a few minutes’ footage. Here, it was measured in a slow ticking of seconds... minutes... quarter hours.

Eventually, the gates opened and a figure hurried out, fairly trotting along the pavement as though released from bondage. Jacqueline Dean was wearing a denim jacket, short black skirt and thick black tights. A beret sat awkwardly on her cropped dark hair and she pressed the palm of her hand to it from time to time to stop it sliding off altogether. Rebus locked his car before following her. He kept to the other side of the road, wary not so much from fear that she might spot him but because C13 might have put a tail on her, too.

She stopped at the local newsagent’s first and came out heavy-laden with Sunday papers. Rebus, making to cross the road, a Sunday-morning stroller, studied her face. What was the expression he’d thought of the first time he’d seen her? Yes, moping. There was still something of that in her liquid eyes, the dark shadows beneath. She was making for the corner shop now. Doubtless she would appear with rolls or bacon or butter or milk. All the things Rebus seemed to find himself short of on a Sunday, no matter how hard he planned.

He felt in his jacket pockets, but found nothing of comfort there, just the photograph of Brian Cant. The window of the corner shop, untouched by the blast, contained a dozen or so personal ads, felt-tipped onto plain white postcards. He glanced at these, and past them, through the window itself to where Jacqueline was making her purchases. Milk and rolls: elementary, my dear Conan Doyle. Waiting for her change, she half-turned her head towards the window. Rebus concentrated on the postcards. ‘Candy, Masseuse’ vied for attention with ‘Pram and carry-cot for sale’, ‘Babysitting considered’, and ‘Lada, seldom used’. Rebus was smiling, almost despite himself, when the door of the shop tinkled open.

‘Jacqueline?’ he said. She turned towards him. He was holding open his ID. ‘Mind if I have a word, Miss Dean?’

Major Dean was pouring himself a glass of Irish whiskey when the drawing-room door opened.

‘Mind if I come in?’ Rebus’s words were directed not at Dean but at Matthews, who was seated in a chair by the window, one leg crossed over the other, hands gripping the arm-rests. He looked like a nervous businessman on an airplane, trying not to let his neighbour see his fear.

‘Inspector Rebus,’ he said tonelessly. ‘I thought I could feel my scalp tingle.’

Rebus was already in the room. He closed the door behind him. Dean gestured with the decanter, but Rebus shook his head.

‘How did you get in?’ Matthews asked.

‘Miss Dean was good enough to escort me through the gate. You’ve changed the guard detail again. She told them I was a friend of the family.’

Matthews nodded. ‘And are you, Inspector? Are you a friend of the family?’

‘That depends on what you mean by friendship.’

Dean had seated himself on the edge of his chair, steadying the glass with both hands. He didn’t seem quite the figure he had been on the day of the explosion. A reaction, Rebus didn’t doubt. There had been a quiet euphoria on the day; now came the aftershock.

‘Where’s Jacqui?’ Dean asked, having paused with the glass to his lips.

‘Upstairs,’ Rebus explained. ‘I thought it would be better if she didn’t hear this.’

Matthews’ fingers plucked at the arm-rests. ‘How much does she know?’

‘Not much. Not yet. Maybe she’ll work it out for herself.’

‘So, Inspector, we come to the reason why you’re here.’

‘I’m here,’ Rebus began, ‘as part of a murder inquiry. I thought that’s why you were here, too, Mr Matthews. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’re here to cover up rather than bring to light.’

Matthews’ smile was momentary. But he said nothing.

‘I didn’t go looking for the culprits,’ Rebus went on. ‘As you said, Mr Matthews, that was your department. But I did wonder who the victim was. The accidental victim, as I thought. A young car thief called Brian Cant, that would be my guess. He stole cars to order. A client asked him for a red open-top Jag, even told him where he might find one. The client told him about Major Dean. Very specifically about Major Dean, right down to the fact that every day he’d nip into the wine-shop on the main street.’ Rebus turned to Dean. ‘A bottle of Irish a day, is it, sir?’

Dean merely shrugged and drained his glass.

‘Anyway, that’s what your daughter told me. So all Brian Cant had to do was wait near the wine-shop. You’d get out of your car, leave it running, and while you were in the shop he could drive the car away. Only it bothered me that the client — Cant’s brother tells me he spoke with an Irish accent — knew so much, making it easy for Cant. What was stopping this person from stealing the car himself?’

‘And the answer came to you?’ Matthews suggested, his voice thick with irony.

Rebus chose to avoid his tone. He was still watching Dean. ‘Not straight away, not even then. But when I came to the house, I couldn’t help noticing that Miss Dean seemed a bit strange. Like she was waiting for a phone call from someone and that someone had let her down. It’s easy to be specific now, but at the time it just struck me as odd. I asked her about it this morning and she admitted it’s because she’s been jilted. A man she’d been seeing, and seeing regularly, had suddenly stopped calling. I asked her about him, but she couldn’t be very helpful. They never went to his flat, for example. He drove a flashy car and had plenty of money, but she was vague about what he did for a living.’

Rebus took a photograph from his pocket and tossed it into Dean’s lap. Dean froze, as though it were some hair-trigger grenade.

‘I showed her a photograph of Brian Cant. Yes, that was the name of her boyfriend — Brian Cant. So you see, it was small wonder she hadn’t heard from him.’

Matthews rose from the chair and stood before the window itself, but nothing he saw there seemed to please him, so he turned back into the room. Dean had found the courage to lift the photograph from his leg and place it on the floor. He got up too, and made for the decanter.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Matthews hissed, but Dean poured regardless.

Rebus’s voice was level. ‘I always thought it was a bit of a coincidence, the car being stolen only seconds before exploding. But then the IRA use remote control devices, don’t they? So that someone in the vicinity could have triggered the bomb any time they liked. No need for all these long-term timers and what have you. I was in the SAS once myself.’

Matthews raised an eyebrow. ‘Nobody told me that,’ he said, sounding impressed for the first time.

‘So much for Intelligence, eh?’ Rebus answered. ‘Speaking of which, you told me that Major Dean here was in Intelligence. I think I’d go further. Covert operations, that sort of thing? Counter-intelligence, subversion?’

‘Now you’re speculating, Inspector.’

Rebus shrugged. ‘It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that someone had been spying on Brian Cant, an ex-policeman called Jackie Hanson. He’s a private detective these days. He won’t say anything about his clients, of course, but I think I can put two and two together without multiplying the result. He was working for you, Major Dean, because you were interested in Brian Cant. Jacqueline was serious about him, wasn’t she? So much so that she might have forsaken university. She tells me they were even talking of moving in together. You didn’t want her to leave. When you found out what Cant did for a... a living, I suppose you’d call it, you came up with a plan.’ Rebus was enjoying himself now, but tried to keep the pleasure out of his voice.

‘You contacted Cant,’ he went on, ‘putting on an Irish accent. Your Irish accent is probably pretty good, isn’t it, Major? It would need to be, working in counter-intelligence. You told him all about a car — your car. You offered him a lot of money if he’d steal it for you and you told him precisely when and where he might find it. Cant was greedy. He didn’t think twice.’ Rebus noticed that he was sitting very comfortably in his own chair, whereas Dean looked... the word that sprang to mind was ‘rogue’. Matthews, too, was sparking internally, though his surface was all metal sheen, cold bodywork.

‘You’d know how to make a bomb, that goes without saying. Wouldn’t you, Major? Know thine enemy and all that. Like I say, I was in the SAS myself. What’s more, you’d know how to make an IRA device, or one that looked like the work of the IRA. The remote was in your pocket. You went into the shop, bought your whiskey, and when you heard the car being driven off, you simply pressed the button.’

‘Jacqueline.’ Dean’s voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Jacqueline.’ He rose to his feet, walked softly to the door and left the room. He appeared to have heard little or nothing of Rebus’s speech. Rebus felt a pang of disappointment and looked towards Matthews, who merely shrugged.

‘You cannot, of course, prove any of this, Inspector.’

‘If I put my mind to it I can.’

‘Oh, I’ve no doubt, no doubt.’ Matthews paused. ‘But will you?’

‘He’s mad, you’ve got to see that.’

‘Mad? Well, he’s unstable. Ever since his wife...’

‘No reason for him to murder Brian Cant.’ Rebus helped himself to a whisky now, his legs curiously shaky. ‘How long have you known?’

Matthews shrugged again. ‘He tried a similar trick in Germany, apparently. It didn’t work that time. So what do we do now? Arrest him? He’d be unfit to plead.’

‘However it happens,’ Rebus said, ‘he’s got to be made safe.’

‘Absolutely.’ Matthews was nodding agreement. He came to the sideboard. ‘A hospital, somewhere he can be treated. He was a good soldier in his day. I’ve read his record. A good soldier. Don’t worry, Inspector Rebus, he’ll be “made safe” as you put it. He’ll be taken care of.’ A hand landed on Rebus’s forearm. ‘Trust me.’

Rebus trusted Matthews — about as far as he could spit into a Lothian Road headwind. He had a word with a reporter friend, but the man wouldn’t touch the story. He passed Rebus on to an investigative journalist who did some ferreting, but there was little or nothing to be found. Rebus didn’t know Dean’s real name. He didn’t know Matthews’ first name or rank or even, to be honest, that he had been C13 at all. He might have been Army, or have inhabited that indefinite smear of operations somewhere between Army, Secret Service and Special Branch.

By the next day, Dean and his daughter had left West Lodge and a fortnight later it appeared in the window of an estate agent on George Street. The asking price seemed surprisingly low, if your tastes veered towards The Munsters. But the house would stay in the window for a long time to come.

Dean haunted Rebus’s dreams for a few nights, no more. But how did you make safe a man like that? The Army had designed a weapon and that weapon had become misadjusted, its sights all wrong. You could dismantle a weapon. You could dismantle a man, too, come to that. But each and every piece was still as lethal as the whole. Rebus put aside fiction, put aside Hammett and the rest and of an evening read psychology books instead. But then they too, in their way, were fiction, weren’t they? And so, too, in time became the case that was not a case of the man who had never been.