Exit Music (2007) by Ian Rankin Read Free Book Online Page A

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 that 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.
    “We do a number plate check once a fortnight,” he said.
    “So a stolen car, to give an example, could sit here fourteen days before you’d have an inkling?”
    “That’s the policy.” The man looked to Rebus like a drinker: gray stubble, hair in need of a wash, eyes red-rimmed. There was probably a bottle of something hidden away in his control room, to be added to the daily round of teas and coffees.
    “What sort of shifts do you work?”
    “Seven till three or three till eleven. I seem to prefer the mornings. Five days on, two off; there’s other guys usually do the weekends.”
    Rebus checked his watch: twenty minutes till the changeover.
    “Your colleague will be starting soon—is that the same one who’d have been here last night?”
    Wills nodded. “Name’s Gary.”
    “You haven’t spoken to him since yesterday?”
    Wills shrugged. “Here’s what I know about Gary: lives in Shandon, supports Hearts, and has a looker of a missus.”
    “That’s a start,” Rebus muttered. Then: “Let’s go look at your CCTV.”
    “What for?” The man’s eyes were glassy as he met Rebus’s glare.
    “To see if the tapes caught anything.” From the look on Wills’s face, Rebus knew what was coming next, a single word forming echo and question both.
    “Tapes . . . ?”
    They walked back up the exit slope anyway. Wills’s lair was a small booth with greasy windows and a radio playing. Five flickering black-and-white screens, plus a sixth that was blank.
    “Top story,” Wills explained. “It’s playing up.”
    Rebus studied the remaining five. The pictures were blurry; he couldn’t pick out any individual license plates. The figures from the floor below were indistinct, too. “What the hell use is this?” he couldn’t help asking.
    “Bosses seem to think it gives the clients a sense of security.”
    “Bloody false at best, as the poor sod in the mortuary can testify.” Rebus turned away from the screens.
    “One of the cameras used to point pretty much at that spot,” Wills said. “But they get moved around . . .”
    “And you don’t keep any recordings?”
    “Machine packed in a month back.” Wills nodded towards a dusty space below the monitors. “Not that we bothered much. All the bosses were interested in was when anyone tried conning their way out without paying. System’s pretty foolproof, didn’t happen often.” Wills thought of something. “There’s a set of stairs between the top story and the pavement. We had a punter attacked there last year.”
    “Oh?”
    “I said at the time they should get CCTV into the stairwell, but nothing ever happened.”
    “At least you tried.”
    “Don’t know why I bother . . . job’s on the way out anyway. They’re replacing us with just the one guy on a motorbike, scooting between half a dozen car parks.”
    Rebus was looking around the cramped space. Kettle and mugs, a few tattered paperbacks and magazines, plus the radio—these were all on the work surface opposite the monitors. He guessed that for most of the time, the guards would be facing away from the screens. Why the hell not? Minimum wage, bosses only a distant threat, no job security. One or two buzzes on the intercom per day, people who’d lost their tickets or didn’t have change. There was a rack of CDs, bands whose names Rebus vaguely recognized: Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight, Killers, Strokes, White Stripes . . .
    “No CD player,” he commented.
    “They’re Gary’s,” Wills explained. “He