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23
What have you been up to?” Rebus asked.
She’d been waiting for him on Arden Street. He’d said maybe he should give her a key, if they were going to keep using his place as an office.
“Not much,” Siobhan replied, taking off her jacket. “How about you?”
They went into the kitchen and he boiled the kettle, telling her about Trevor Guest and Councilman Tench. She asked a few questions, watching him spoon coffee into two mugs.
“Gives us our Edinburgh co
“Of a kind.”
“You sound doubtful?”
He shook his head. “You said so yourself…so did Ellen. Trevor Guest could be the key. Started off looking different from the others with all those wounds-” He broke off.
“What is it?”
But he shook his head again, stirred a spoon in his mug. “Tench thinks something happened to him. Guest had been taking drugs, hitting the bottle pretty hard. Then he scurries north and ends up in Craigmillar, meets the councilman, works with old people for a few weeks.”
“Nothing in the case notes to suggest he did anything like that before or since.”
“Fu
“Unless he was pla
Rebus shook his head, but took out his phone and called Mrs. Eadie to ask. By the time she’d answered in the negative, Siobhan was seated at the dining table in the living room, delving into the files again.
“What about his time in Edinburgh?” she asked.
“I got Mairie to check.” She looked at him. “Didn’t want anyone else getting wind that we’re still active.”
“So what did Mairie say?”
“Her answer wasn’t definitive.”
“Time to call Ellen?”
He knew she was right and made that call, too, but warned Ellen Wylie to be careful.
“Start searching the computer and you’ll be leaving a calling card.”
“I’m a big girl, John.”
“Maybe so, but the chief constable’s keeping a beady eye.”
“It’ll be fine.”
He wished her luck and slid the phone back into his pocket. “You all right?” he asked Siobhan.
“Why?”
“Seemed to be in a dream. Have you spoken to your parents?”
“Not since they left.”
“Best thing you can do is hand those photos to the public prosecutor, make sure of a conviction.”
She nodded, but didn’t look convinced. “That’s what you’d do, right?” she asked. “If someone had lashed out at your nearest and dearest?”
“There’s not much room on the ledge, Shiv.”
She stared at him. “What ledge?”
“The one I always seem to be perched on. You know you don’t want to be standing too close.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means hand over the photos, leave the rest to judge and jury.”
Her eyes were still boring into his. “You’re probably right.”
“No alternative,” he added. “None you’d ever want to consider.”
“That’s true.”
“Or you could always ask me to kick the crap out of Mr. Baseball Cap.”
“Aren’t you a bit long in the tooth for that?” she asked with the hint of a smile.
“Probably,” he acknowledged. “Might not stop me trying, though.”
“Well, there’s no need. I only wanted the truth-” She considered for a moment. “I mean, when I thought it was one of us…”
“Way this week’s gone, it might well have been,” he said quietly, pulling out a chair and seating himself across from her.
“But I couldn’t have stood it, John. That’s what I’m getting at.”
He made a show of turning some of the paperwork toward him. “You’d have thrown it in?”
“It was an option.”
“But now it’s all right again?” He was hoping for some reassurance. She gave a slow nod, picking up some paperwork of her own. “Why hasn’t he struck again?”
It took Rebus’s brain a moment to shift gears. He’d been on the verge of telling her about seeing Keith Carberry outside the city chambers. “I’ve no idea,” he eventually conceded.
“I mean, they speed up, right? Once they get a taste for it?”
“That’s the theory.”
“And they don’t just stop?”
“Maybe some do. Whatever it is inside them…maybe it gets buried somehow.” He shrugged. “I don’t pretend to be an expert.”
“Me neither. That’s why we’re meeting someone who claims she is.”
“What?”
Siobhan was checking her watch. “In an hour from now. Which just gives us time to decide what questions we need to ask.”
The University of Edinburgh department of psychology was based in George Square. Two sides of the original Georgian development had been flattened and replaced with a series of concrete boxes, but the psychology department was based in an older building sandwiched between two such blocks. Dr. Roisin Gilreagh had a room on the top floor, with views over the gardens.
“Nice and quiet this time of year,” Siobhan commented. “The students being gone, I mean.”
“Except that in August the gardens play host to various fringe shows,” Dr. Gilreagh countered.
“Offering a whole new human laboratory,” Rebus added. The room was small and awash with sunlight. Dr. Gilreagh was in her midthirties, with thick curly blond hair falling past her shoulders, and pinched cheeks that Rebus took to be clues as to her Irish ancestry, despite the resolutely local accent. When she smiled at Rebus’s comment, her sharp nose and chin seemed to become even more jagged.
“I was telling DI Rebus on the way here,” Siobhan interrupted, “that you’re considered a bit of an expert in the field.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Dr. Gilreagh felt obliged to argue. “But there are interesting times ahead in the field of offender profiling. The Crichton Street parking light is being turned into our new Center for Informatics, part of which will be dedicated to behavior analysis. Add in neuroscience and psychiatry and you begin to see that there are potentials…” She beamed at both her visitors.
“But you work for none of those particular departments?” Rebus couldn’t help pointing out.
“True, true,” she was happy to acknowledge. She kept twitching in her seat, as though stillness were a crime. Motes of dust danced across the sunbeams in front of her face.
“Could we maybe draw the blind?” he suggested, squinting a little for effect. She leaped to her feet and apologized as she pulled the blind down. It was pale yellow and made from something like tent canvas, doing little to relieve the room’s glare. Rebus gave Siobhan a look, as if to suggest that Dr. Gilreagh was kept locked in the attic for a reason.
“Tell DI Rebus about your research,” Siobhan said encouragingly.
“Well.” Dr. Gilreagh clapped her hands together, straightened her back, gave a little wriggle, and took a deep breath. “Behavioral patterning in offenders is nothing new, but I’ve been concentrating on victims. It’s by delving into the behavior of the victim that we begin to see why offenders act the way they do, whether on impulse or through a more deterministic approach…”
“Almost goes without saying,” Rebus offered with a smile.
“Term time being over, and thus having room for some smaller personal projects, I was intrigued by the little shrine-I suppose the description is fitting-in Auchterarder. The newspaper reports were sometimes sketchy, but I decided to take a look anyway…and then, as if it were meant to be, Detective Sergeant Clarke asked for a meeting.” She took another deep breath. “I mean, my findings aren’t really ready to…no, what I mean is, I’ve only scratched the surface as yet.”
“We can get the case notes to you,” Siobhan assured her, “if that would help. But in the meantime, we’d be grateful for any thoughts you might have.”
Dr. Gilreagh clapped her hands together again, stirring the cloud of dust particles in front of her.
“Well,” she said, “interested as I am in victimology”-Rebus tried to catch Siobhan’s eye, but she wouldn’t let him-“I have to admit that the site stirred my curiosity. It’s a statement, isn’t it? I’m guessing you’ve considered the possibility that the killer lives locally, or has some long-standing knowledge of the immediate area?” She waited till Siobhan had nodded. “And you will also have speculated that the murderer knows of the Clootie Well because its existence is recorded in various guidebooks and also extensively on the World Wide Web…?”