Faith and hope. It was charity he usually lacked.

4
Tips

‘We’ve got to keep this away from the papers,’ said Chief Superintendent Watson. ‘For as long as we can.’

‘Right, sir,’ said Lauderdale, while Rebus stayed silent. They were not talking about Gregor Jack, they were discussing a suspect in the Water of Leith drowning. He was in an interview room now with two officers and a tape recorder. He was helping with inquiries. Apparently, he was saying little.

‘Could be nothing, after all.’

‘Yes, sir.’

There was an afternoon smell of strong mints in the room, and perhaps this was why Chief Inspector Lauderdale sounded and looked more starched than ever. His nose twitched whenever Watson wasn’t looking at him. Rebus all of a sudden felt sorry for his Chief Superintendent, in the way that he felt sorry for the Scotland squad whenever it was facing defeat at the hands of third-world part-timers. There but for the grace of complete inability go I . . .

‘Just a bit of bragging, perhaps, overheard in a pub. The man was drunk. You know how it is.’

‘Quite so, sir.’

‘All the same . . .’

All the same, they had a man in the interview room, a man who had told anyone who’d listen in a packed Leith pub that he had dumped that body under Dean Bridge.

‘It wis me! Eh? How ’bout that, eh? Me! Me! I did it. She deserved worse. They all do.’

And more of the same, all of it reported to the police by a fearful barmaid, nineteen next month and this was her first bar job.

Deserved worse, she did . . . they all do . . . Only when the police had come into the pub, he’d quietened down, gone all sulky in a corner, standing there with head bent under the weight of a cigarette. The pint glass seemed heavy, too, so that his wrist sagged beneath it, beer dripping down on to his shoes and the wooden floor.

‘Now then, sir, what’s all this you’ve been telling these people, eh? Mind telling us about it? Down at the station, eh? We’ve got seats down there. You can have a seat while you tell us all about it . . .’

He was sitting, but he wasn’t telling. No name, no address, nobody in the pub seemed to know anything about him. Rebus had taken a look at him, as had most of the CID and uniformed men in the building, but the face meant nothing. A sad, weak example of the species. In his late thirties, his hair was already grey and thin, the face lined, bristly with stubble, and the knuckles had grazes and scabs on them.

‘How did you get them then? Been in a fight? Hit her a few times before you chucked her in?’

Nothing. He looked scared, but he was resilient. Their chances of keeping him in were, to put it mildly, not good. He didn’t need a solicitor; he knew he just had to keep his mouth shut.