Black And Blue by Ian Rankin Read Free Book Online

and a job. Makes you think.’
    ‘Makes me think he misses the force.’
    Maclay smiled. ‘It can turn into a habit.’
    ‘That why you divorced?’
    ‘I dare say it played a part.’
    Rebus thought of Brian Holmes, feared for him. Stress getting to the younger man, affecting work and personal life both. Rebus had been there.
    ‘You know Ted Michie?’
    Rebus nodded: the man he’d replaced at Fort Apache.
    ‘Doctors think it’s terminal. He won’t let them cut, says knives are against his religion.’
    ‘I hear he was handy with a truncheon in his day.’
    One of the support bands entered the marquee to scattered applause. Five males, mid-twenties, stripped to the waist with towels around their shoulders, high on something – maybe just from performing. Hugs and kisses from a group of girls at a table, whoops and roars.
    ‘We fucking killed them out there!’
    Rebus and Maclay drank their drinks in silence, tried not to look like promoters, succeeded.
    When they walked back outside, it was dark enough for the light-show to be worth watching. There were fireworks, too, reminding Rebus that it was the tourist season. Not long till the nightly Tattoo, fireworks you could hear from Marchmont, even with the windows closed. A camera crew, stalked by photographers, was itself stalking the main support band who were ready to go on. Maclay watched the procession.
    ‘You’re probably surprised they’re not after you,’ he said, mischief in his voice.
    ‘Fuck off,’ Rebus replied, making for the side of the stage. The passes were colour-coded. His was yellow, and it got him as far as the stage-wings, where he watched the entertainment. The sound system was a travesty, but there were monitors nearby and he concentrated on those. The crowd seemed to be having fun, bobbing up and down, a sea of disembodied heads. He thought of the Isle of Wight, of other festivals he’d missed, headliners who weren’t around any more.
    He thought of Lawson Geddes, his one-time mentor, boss, protector, his memory rippling back through two decades.
    John Rebus, mid-twenties, a detective constable, looking to put army years behind him, ghosts and nightmares. A wife and infant daughter trying to be his life. And Rebus maybe seeking out a surrogate father, finding one in Lawson Geddes,Detective Inspector, City of Edinburgh Police. Geddes was forty-five, ex-army, served in the Borneo conflict, told stories of jungle war versus The Beatles, no one back in Britain very interested in a last spasm of colonial muscle. The two men found they shared common values, common night sweats and dreams of failure. Rebus was new to CID, Geddes knew everything there was to know. It was easy to recall the first year of growing friendship, easy now to forgive the few hiccups: Geddes making a pass at Rebus’s young wife, almost succeeding; Rebus passing out at a Geddes party, waking in the dark and pissing into a dresser-drawer, thinking he’d found the toilet; a couple of fist-fights after last orders, the fists not connecting, turning into wrestling matches instead.
    Easy to forgive so much. But then they landed a murder inquiry, Leonard Spaven Geddes’ chief suspect. Geddes and Lenny Spaven had been playing cat-and-mouse for a couple of years – aggravated assault, pimping, the hijacking of a couple of cigarette lorries. Even whispers of a murder or two, gangster stuff, trimming the competition. Spaven had been in the Scots Guards same time as Geddes, maybe the bad blood started there, neither man ever said.
    Christmas 1976, a gruesome find on farmland near Swanston: a woman’s body, decapitated. The head turned up almost a week later, New Year’s Day, in another field near Currie. The weather was sub-zero. From the rate of decay, the pathologist was able to say that the head had been kept indoors for some time after being severed from the body, while the body itself had been dumped fresh. Glasgow police semi-interested, the file on Bible John still open