Fleshmarket Alley (2004) Read Online Free PDF Page A

his cigarette. “Could have been Mediterranean or Arabic . . . I didn’t really get that close. Surplus to requirements again.” He shook his cigarette pack. Finding it empty, he crushed it and finished his beer. “Same again?” he said, rising to his feet.
    “I’ve hardly started this one.”
    “Then put it to one side and have a proper drink. Not got anything else on tonight, have you?”
    “Doesn’t mean I’m ready to spend the evening helping you get hammered.” He stood his ground, giving her time to reconsider. “Go on then: gin and tonic.”
    Rebus seemed satisfied with this, and headed out of the room. She could hear voices from the bar, greeting his arrival there.
    “What’re you doing hiding upstairs?” one of them asked. She couldn’t hear an answer but knew it anyway. The front bar was Rebus’s domain, a place where he could hold court with his fellow drinkers—all of them men. But this part of his life had to remain distinct from any other—Siobhan wasn’t sure why, it was just something he was unwilling to share. The back room was for meetings and “guests.” She sat back and thought of the Jardines, and whether she was really willing to become involved in their search. They belonged to her past, and past cases seldom reappeared so tangibly. It was in the nature of the job that you became involved in people’s lives intimately—more intimately than many of them would like—but for a brief time only. Rebus had let slip to her once that he felt surrounded by ghosts: lapsed friendships and relationships, plus all those victims whose lives had ended before his interest in them had begun.
    It can play havoc with you, Shiv . . .
    She’d never forgotten those words; in vino veritas and all that. She could hear a mobile phone ringing in the front room. It prompted her to take out her own, checking for messages. But there was no signal, something she’d forgotten about this place. The Oxford Bar was only a minute’s walk from the city-center shops, yet somehow you could never pick up a signal in the back room. The bar was tucked away down a narrow lane, offices and flats above. Thick stone walls, built to survive the centuries. She angled the handset different ways, but the on-screen message remained a defiant “No Signal.” But now Rebus himself was in the doorway, no drinks in his hands. Instead, waving his own mobile at her.
    “We’re wanted,” he said.
    “Where?”
    He ignored her question. “You got your car?”
    She nodded.
    “Better let you drive, then. Lucky you stuck to the soft stuff, eh?”
    She put her jacket back on and picked up her bag. Rebus was purchasing cigarettes and mints from behind the bar. He popped one of the mints into his mouth.
    “So is this to be a mystery tour or what?” Siobhan asked.
    He shook his head, crunching down with his teeth. “Fleshmarket Alley,” he told her. “Couple of bodies we might be interested in.” He pulled open the door to the outside world. “Only not quite as fresh as the one in Knoxland . . .”
    Fleshmarket Alley was a narrow, pedestrian-only lane connecting the High Street to Cockburn Street. The High Street entrance was flanked by a bar and a photographic shop. There were no parking spaces left, so Siobhan turned into Cockburn Street itself, parking outside the arcade. They crossed the road and headed into Fleshmarket Alley. This end, its entrance boasted a bookmaker’s one side, and a shop opposite selling crystals and “dream-catchers”: old and new Edinburgh, Rebus thought to himself. The Cockburn Street end of the alley was open to the elements, while the other half was covered over by five floors of what he assumed to be flats, their unlit windows casting baleful looks on the goings-on below.
    There were several doorways in the lane itself. One would lead to the flats, and one, directly opposite, to the bodies. Rebus saw some of the same faces from the crime scene at Knoxland: white-suited SOCOs and police