Let It Bleed by Ian Rankin Read Free Book Online

anywhere for LABarum.
    Someone had been working on the text, underlining some phrases, circling words, doing jotted calculations beside the graphs and bar charts. Sentences had been deleted in red pen, words changed. Some points had been ticked. Rebus couldn’t know if the handwriting was Willie Coyle’s. He didn’t know if Willie had owned such a thing as a red Biro. But he
did
wonder what such a document was doing hidden in Willie Coyle’s bedroom. When he turned to the last sheet, there was a word scrawled diagonally across it and underlined heavily. The word was DALGETY. He flipped through the report again but found no other mention of Dalgety. Was it a person, a place, another company? The word was scored into the paper in blue ink. It was impossible to say if it was in the same hand as the amendments and marginalia.
    He poured another drink – this would be his last – and flipped the album over. He was annoyed, more with himself than anyone. It was case closed after all: a couple of desperate hoaxers fell off a bridge and died. That was all. He should have cleared it from his mind by now. Yet he couldn’t.
    ‘Damn you, Willie,’ he said out loud. He sat down againwith his drink and picked up the business plan. There were a couple of letters in the top right-hand corner, written faintly in pencil. CK. He wondered if they were an abbreviation for ‘check’.
    ‘Who cares?’ he said, trying to concentrate on the music. What a shambles the band were, yet sometimes they could get it so exactly right that it hurt.
    ‘Here’s to you, Willie,’ Rebus said, raising his glass in the air.

6
    It wasn’t till he woke up in the morning freezing that he remembered the radiator key in his jacket pocket. The pipes were gurgling, the boiler roaring away, yet the radiators were barely warm.
    He got coffee and a bacon roll from a café and had breakfast in his car on the way to work. There was a hard frost on the ground, and the sky was leaden, threatening worse. It had taken him five minutes to scrape the ice off his windscreen, and even so it was like driving a tank, peering through the one clear slit.
    A message on his desk warned of a nine-thirty meeting in the Farmer’s office. Rebus felt he deserved another coffee, and made for the canteen. A lone woman sat at a table, slowly stirring a beaker of tea.
    ‘Gill?’
    She looked up. It was Gill Templer. Rebus’s face broke into its first grin of the year. He pulled out a chair and sat down.
    ‘Hello, John.’ Her eyes were on her drink.
    ‘I thought you were in Fife.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Sex Offences Unit, isn’t it?’
    ‘That’s it.’
    He nodded, trying to ignore the coolness in her tone. ‘You look good.’ He meant it too. Her short dark hair was feather-cut, long crescents sweeping over both ears to her cheeks. Her eyes were emerald green. She hadn’t changed abit. Gill Templer smiled an acknowledgment but didn’t say anything.
    Brian Holmes put a hand on Rebus’s shoulder. ‘Those pathology tests have come in.’
    ‘Oh?’
    Holmes went to fetch himself coffee and a dough-ring, Rebus following. ‘So what’s the news?’ he asked.
    Holmes took a bite out of his dough-ring and shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he mumbled, swallowing. ‘The professor can’t confirm the presence of heroin or any other drug in the blood of either deceased. He thinks he may have a couple of jab marks on one corpse, but they’re not recent.’
    ‘Which body?’
    ‘The shorter.’
    ‘Dixie.’ Rebus lifted his coffee and left Holmes to pay for it. When he turned, Gill Templer wasn’t at the table any more. She had left the beaker of tea untouched.
    ‘Who was she?’ Holmes asked, tucking change back into his pocket.
    ‘Someone I used to know.’
    ‘Well, that narrows things down.’
    Rebus picked a new table for them to sit at.
    DI Alister Flower looked like he was on his way to a fashion shoot for one of the stores on Princes Street.
    ‘Run out of dummies, have they?’