The Black Book by Ian Rankin

Author:Ian Rankin
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Mystery, Detective, Police Procedural, Police, Mystery & Detective, Fiction - Mystery, Scotland, Mystery & Detective - General, General, Inspector (Fictitious character), Suspense, Mystery & Detective - Police Procedural, Rebus, Fiction, English Mystery & Suspense Fiction
ISBN: 9780312565640
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2009-08-13T20:00:00+00:00

20

Hetelephoned first, Morris Cafferty not being a man you just dropped in on.

‘Will I need my lawyer?’ Cafferty growled, sounding amused. ‘I’ll answer that for you, Strawman, no I fucking won’t. Because I’ve got something better than a lawyer here, better than a fucking judge in my pocket. I’ve got a dog that’ll rip your oesophagus out if I tell it to lick your chops. Be here at six.’ The phone went dead, leaving Rebus dry-mouthed and persuading himself all over again that this jumped-up bastard didn’t scare him.

What scared him more was the realisation that someone somewhere in the ranks of the Lothian and Borders Police was probably listening in to Cafferty’s telephone conversations. Rebus felt like he was in a corridor with doors locking behind him all the time. He saw a gas chamber in his mind and shivered, changing the picture.

Six o’clock wasn’t very far away. And at least in dentists’ waiting rooms they gave you magazines to pass the time.

Morris Gerald Cafferty lived in a mansion house in the expensive suburb of Duddingston. Duddingston was a ‘suburb’ by dint of having Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags between it and central Edinburgh. Cafferty liked living in Duddingston because it annoyed his neighbours, most of whom were lawyers, doctors and bankers, and also because it wasn’t far from his actual and spiritual birthplace, Craigmillar. Craigmillar was one of the tougher Edinburgh housing schemes. Cafferty grew up there, seeing his first trouble there and in neighbouring Niddrie. He’d led a gang of Craigmillar youths into Niddrie to sort out their rivals. There was a stabbin…with an uprooted iron railing. Police discovered that the teenage Cafferty had already been in trouble at school for ‘accidentally’ jamming a ballpoint pen into the corner of a fellow pupil’s eye.

It was the quiet start to a long career.

The wrought iron gates at the bottom of the driveway opened automatically as Rebus approached. He drove his car along a well-gritted private road with mature trees either side. You caught a glimpse of the house from the main road, nothing more. But Rebus had been here before; to ask questions, to make an arrest. He knew there was another smaller house behind the main house, linked by a covered walkway. This smaller house had been staff quarters in the days when a city merchant might have lived here. The gravel road forked to the front and back of the main house. A man directed Rebus towards the back: the servants’ entrance. The man was very big with a biker helmet haircut, cut high at the fringe but falling over the ears. Where did Cafferty get them, these throwbacks?

The man followed him to the back of the house. Rebus knew where to park. There were three spaces, two vacant and one taken up by a Volvo estate. Rebus thought he recognised the Volvo, though it wasn’t Cafferty’s. Cafferty’s collection of cars was kept in the vast garage. He had a Bentley and a cherry-red ‘63 T-Bird, neither of which he ever drove.

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