The Hanging Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

suddenly, people stripping to t-shirts as the first buds appeared, so that spring and summer seemed entwined into a single season. And no sooner had the leaves started turning brown than the first frost came again.
    Sammy waved at him through the cafe window then was gone. She seemed to have grown up all right. He’d always been on the lookout for evidence of instability, hints of childhood traumas or a genetic predisposition towards self-destruction. Maybe he should phone Rhona some day and thank her, thank her for bringing Samantha up on her own. It couldn’t have been easy: that was what people always said. He knew it would be nice if he could feel some responsibility for the success, but he wasn’t
that
hypocritical. The truth was, while she’d been growing up, he’d been elsewhere. It was the same with his marriage: even when in the same room as his wife, even out at the pictures oraround the table at a dinner party … the best part of him had been elsewhere, fixed on some case or other, some question that needed answering before he could rest.
    Rebus lifted his coat from the back of his chair. Nothing left for it but to go back to the office. Sammy was headed back to her own office; she worked with ex-convicts. She had refused his offer of a lift. Now that it was out in the open, she’d wanted to talk about her man, Ned Farlowe. Rebus had tried to look interested, but found that his mind was half on Joseph Lintz – in other words, same problem as always. When he’d been given the Lintz case, he’d been told he was well-suited to it: his Army background for one thing; and his seeming affinity for historical cases – by which Farmer Watson, Rebus’s chief superintendent, had meant Bible John – for another.
    ‘With respect, sir,’ Rebus had said, ‘that sounds like a load of balls. Two reasons for me getting lumbered with this: one, no other bugger will touch it with a barge-pole; two, it’ll keep me out of the way for a while.’
    ‘Your remit,’ the Farmer had said, unwilling to let Rebus rile him, ‘is to sift through what there is, see if any of it amounts to evidence. You can interview Mr Lintz if it’ll help. Do whatever you think necessary, and if you find enough to warrant a charge …’
    ‘I won’t. You know I won’t.’ Rebus sighed. ‘Sir, we’ve been through this before. It’s the whole reason the War Crimes section was shut down. That case a few years back – lot of hoo-haa about bugger all.’ He was shaking his head. ‘Who wants it all dragged up, apart from the papers?’
    ‘I’m taking you off the Mr Taystee case. Let Bill Pryde handle that.’
    So it was settled: Lintz belonged to Rebus.
    It had started with a news story, with documents handed over to a Sunday broadsheet. The documents had come from the Holocaust Investigation Bureau based in Tel Aviv.They had passed on to the newspaper the name of Joseph Lintz, who had, they said, been living quietly in Scotland under an alias since the end of the war, and who was, in fact, Josef Linzstek, a native of Alsace. In June 1944, Lieutenant Linzstek had led the 3rd Company of an SS regiment, part of the 2nd Panzer Division, into the town of Villefranche d’Albarede in the Corrèze region of France. 3rd Company had rounded up everyone in the town – men, women, children. The sick were carried from their beds, the elderly pulled from their armchairs, babies hoisted from their cots.
    A teenage girl – an evacuee from Lorraine – had seen what the Germans were capable of. She climbed into the attic of her house and hid there, watching from a small window in the roof-tiles. Everyone was marched into the village square. The teenager saw her schoolfriends find their families. She hadn’t been in school that day: a throat infection. She wondered if anyone would tell the Germans …
    There was a commotion as the mayor and other dignitaries remonstrated with the officer in charge. While machine guns were aimed at the crowd, these men