Mortal Causes

'Were there detonators in the cache?’ Rebus asked. 'That's the question.’

Holmes and Clarke looked at one another.

'A rhetorical one,' Rebus added.

29

The city was definitely coming out to play.

It was the start of September, and therefore the begi

Rebus might have been driving through a thunderstorm for all the notice he took. He was a hunter, and hunters didn't smile. Abernethy had just admitted being Marie's anonymous caller, the one who'd put her on to Calumn Smylie.

'You knew you were putting his life in danger?’ Rebus asked.

'Maybe I thought I was saving it.’

'How did you know about Mairie anyway? I mean, how did you know to contact her?’

Abernethy just smiled.

'You sent me that stuff about Clyde Moncur, didn't you?’

'Yes.’

'You could have warned me what I was getting into.’

'You were more effective the way you were.’

'I've been a walking punch-bag.’

'But you're still here.’

'I bet you'd lose a lot of sleep if I wasn't.’

The sun had finally given up. The street lights were on. There were a lot of people on the streets tonight. Hogmanay apart, it was the city's biggest night of the year. The traffic was all headed into town, where most of the parking spaces had been grabbed hours ago.

'Families,' Rebus explained, 'on their way to the fireworks.’

'I thought we were on our way to the fireworks,' Abernethy said, smiling again.

'We are,' said Rebus quietly.

There were never signposts to places like the Gar-B, the inference being that if you wanted to go there, you must already know the place. People didn't just visit on a whim. Rebus took the slip-road past the gable end – ENJOY YOUR VISIT TO THE GAR-B – and turned into the access road.

'Nine o'clock, he said.’

Abernethy checked his watch. 'Nine it is.’

But Rebus wasn't listening. He was watching a van roaring towards them. The road was barely wide enough for two vehicles, and the van driver didn't seem to be paying much attention. He was crouched down, eyes on his wing mirror. Rebus slammed on the brakes and the horn and whipped the steering wheel around. The rust bucket slew sideways like it was on ice. That was the problem with bald tyres.

Out!' Rebus called. Abernethy didn't need telling twice. The driver had finally seen them. The van was skidding to an uncertain stop. It hit the driver's side door, shuddered, and was still. Rebus pulled open the van door and hauled out Jim Hay. He'd heard of people looking white as a sheet, white as a ghost, but Jim Hay looked whiter than that. Rebus held him upright.

'He's gone off his fucking headl' Hay yelled.

'Who has?’

'Soutar.’

Hay was looking behind him, back down the road which curled snake-like into the Gar-B. 'I'm only the delivery man, not this… not this.’

Dusting himself off, Abernethy joined them. He'd lost the knees out of his denims.

'You deliver the stuff,' Rebus was saying to Hay, 'the explosives, the arms?’

Hay nodded.

Yes, the perfect delivery man, in his little theatre van, all boxes and props, costumes and sets, guns and grenades. Delivered east coast to west, where another co

'Hold him,' Rebus ordered. Abernethy looked like he didn't understand. 'Hold him!' Then Rebus let Jim Hay go, got into the van, and reversed it out of his car's bodywork and back into the Gar-B. When he reached the car park, he turned the van and bumped it at speed onto the grass, heading for the youth centre.

There was nobody about, not a soul. The door-to-door had been wound up for the day, having yielded nothing. The Gar-B simply didn't speak to the 'polls'. It was a rule of life, like remembering to breathe. Rebus was breathing hard. The garages he passed had been searched and declared safe, though one of them had contained a suspicious number of TV sets, videos, and camcorders, and another showed evidence of sniffed glue and smoked crack.

No neighbours were out discussing the day's events. There was even silence at the community centre. He doubted the Gar-B tribe were the kind to be attracted to a firework display… not normally.

The doors were open, so Rebus walked in. A bright trail of blood led in an arc across the floor from the stage to the far wall. Kilpatrick was slumped against the wall, almost but not quite sitting up. He'd removed his necktie halfway across the room, maybe to help him breathe. He was still alive, but he'd lost maybe a pint of blood already. When Rebus crouched down beside him, Kilpatrick clutched at him with wet red fingers, leaving a bloody handprint on Rebus's shirt. His other hand was protecting his own stomach, source of the wound.

'I tried to stop him,' he whispered.

Rebus looked around him. 'Was the stuff hidden here?’

'Under the stage.’

Rebus looked at the small stage, a stage he'd sat on and stood on.

'Hay's gone to fetch an ambulance,' Kilpatrick said.

'He was ru

Kilpatrick forced a smile. 'I thought he might.’

He licked his lips. They were cracked, edged with white like missed toothpaste. 'They've gone with him.’

'Who? His gang?’

'They'll follow Davey Soutar to hell. He made those phone calls. He told me so. Just before he did this.’

Kilpatrick tried to look down at his stomach. The effort was almost too much for him.

Rebus stood up. Blood flushed around his system, making him dizzy. 'The Fireworks? He's going to blow up the Fireworks?’

He ran out of the hall and into the nearest tower block. The first front door he came to, he kicked it in. It took him three good hits. Then he marched into the living room, where-two terrified pensioners were watching TV, 'Where's your phone?’

'We di

Rebus walked back out and kicked in the next door. Same procedure. This time the single mother with the two shrieking kids did have a phone. She hurled abuse at Rebus as he pressed the buttons.

'I'm the police,' he told her. It made her angrier still. She quietened, though, when she heard Rebus order an ambulance. She was shushing the kids as he made his second call.

'It's DI Rebus here,' he said. 'Davey Soutar and his gang are on their way to Princes Street with a load of high explosives. We need that area sealed.’

He half-smiled an apology as he left the flat and half-ran back to the van. Still nobody had come to investigate, to see what all the noise and the fuss were. Like Edinburghers of old, they could become invisible to trouble. In olden times, they'd hidden in the catacombs below the Castle and the High Street. Now they just shut their windows and turned up the TV. They were Rebus's employers, whose taxes paid his salary. They were the people he was paid to protect. He felt like telling them all to go to hell.

When he got back to his car, Abernethy was standing there with Jim Hay, not a clue what to do with him. Rebus yanked the steering wheel and pulled the van onto the grass.

`An ambulance is on its way,' he said, trying to pull open his car door. It groaned like something in a scrapyard crusher, but eventually gave, and he squeezed through the gap into his seat, brushing aside the glass chippings.

`Where are you going?’ Abernethy asked.

'Stay here with him,' Rebus said, starting the car and reversing back up the access road.

The Glenlivet Fireworks: every year there was a firework display from the Castle ramparts, accompanied by a chamber orchestra in Princes Street Gardens' bandstand and watched by crowds in the Gardens and packed into Princes Street itself. The concert usually started around ten-fifteen, ten-thirty. It was now ten o'clock on a balmy dry evening. The area would be full to bursting.