Dead Souls Read Online Free PDF Page A

from his bed in the middle of the night? If he had worries, why did he need to think them out at the top of Salisbury Crags, several miles from his home? He lived in The Grange, in what had been his wife’s parents’ house. It was raining that night, yet he didn’t take the car. Would a desperate man notice he was getting soaked …?
    Looking down, Rebus saw the site of the old brewery, where they were going to build the new Scottish parliament. The first in three hundred years, and sited next to atheme park. Nearby stood the Greenfield housing scheme, a compact maze of high-rise blocks and sheltered accommodation. He wondered why the Crags should be so much more impressive than the man-made ingenuity of high-rises, then reached into his pocket for a folded piece of paper. He checked an address, looked back down on to Greenfield, and knew he had one more detour to make.
    Greenfield’s flat-roofed tower blocks had been built in the mid-1960s and were showing their age. Dark stains bloomed on the discoloured harling. Overflow pipes dripped water on to cracked paving slabs. Rotting wood was flaking from the window surrounds. The wall of one ground-floor flat, its windows boarded up, had been painted to identify the one-time tenant as ‘Junky Scum’.
    No council planner had ever lived here. No director of housing or community architect. All the council had done was move in problem tenants and tell everyone central heating was on its way. The estate had been built on the flat bottom of a bowl of land, so that Salisbury Crags loomed monstrously over the whole. Rebus rechecked the address on the paper. He’d had dealings in Greenfield before. It was far from the worst of the city’s estates, but still had its troubles. It was early afternoon now, and the streets were quiet. Someone had left a bicycle, missing its front wheel, in the middle of the road. Further along stood a pair of shopping trolleys, nose to nose as though deep in local gossip. In the midst of the six eleven-storey blocks stood four neat rows of terraced bungalows, complete with pocket-handkerchief gardens and low wooden fences. Net curtains covered most of the windows, and above each door a burglar alarm had been secured to the wall.
    Part of the tarmac arena between the tower blocks had been given over to a play area. One boy was pulling another along on a sledge, imagining snow as the runners scraped across the ground. Rebus called out the words ‘Cragside Court’ and the boy on the sledge waved in thedirection of one of the blocks. When Rebus got up close to it, he saw that a sign on the wall identifying the building had been defaced so that ‘Cragside’ read ‘Crap-site’. A window on the second floor swung open.
    ‘You needn’t bother,’ a woman’s voice boomed. ‘He’s not here.’
    Rebus stood back and angled his head upwards.
    ‘Who is it I’m supposed to be looking for?’
    ‘Trying to be smart?’
    ‘No, I just didn’t know there was a clairvoyant on the premises. Is it your husband or your boyfriend I’m after?’
    The woman stared down at him, made up her mind that she’d spoken too soon. ‘Never mind,’ she said, pulling her head back in and closing the window.
    There was an intercom system, but only the numbers of flats, no names. He pulled at the door; it was unlocked anyway. He waited a couple of minutes for the lift to come, then let it shudder its way slowly up to the fifth floor. A walkway, open to the elements, led him past the front doors of half a dozen flats until he was standing outside 5/14 Cragside Court. There was a window, but curtained with what looked like a frayed blue bedsheet. The door showed signs of abuse: failed break-ins maybe, or just people kicking at it because there was no bell or knocker. No nameplate, but that didn’t matter. Rebus knew who lived here.
    Darren Rough.
    The address was new to Rebus. When he’d helped build the case against Rough four years before, Rough had been living in a flat