Set in Darkness (2 page)

‘The original kitchen,’ the shouter told us excitedly.
Then she tapped the fireplace. ‘This must’ve been where he roasted the servant.’

Turned out she knew the story. It was documented in several history books. I asked if we could perhaps remove the metal plate, opening up the fireplace. This we did, revealing the space to the world for the first time in decades. I shone a torch into the furthest corner. Nothing there but cobwebs, of course, but still . . . I was getting an idea. It was so extraordinary to me that I should have found out about this place from a magazine article picked up a thousand feet above Philadelphia, and be here on the very day when it was opened up again.

It was as if the story wanted to be told.

I’d had a similar experience with
Mortal Causes
, when a visit to Mary King’s Close, buried beneath the City Chambers, had gifted me the opening to my novel. Now it seemed that I had the first scene of a new story, and this story would be about the nascent parliament, Scotland’s first in three hundred years.

I had just signed a three-book deal, and I remember thinking that all three novels might share a political theme. I would invent a Member of the Scottish Parliament. He would be running for office in book one, elected in book two, and the parliament would be well under way in book three. I don’t want to spoil
Set in Darkness
for new readers, so let’s just say this plan never came to fruition: my narrative had other ideas. It works like that sometimes: characters to whom you assign minor roles demand a bigger part; projected major characters turn out to be unnecessary. Each story seems to shape itself, sometimes against the author’s better judgement.

Until this book, Rebus had done most of his drinking at the Oxford Bar. In
Set in Darkness
I actually name some of
that pub’s real-life regulars, but also let Rebus off the leash, so he can drink in other real bars such as the Royal Oak and Swany’s. Having returned to Edinburgh in 1996 (after ten years away), I’d been introduced to Swany’s by a local bookseller. The first time he took me there, we sat down with a few of his cronies, including a gentleman called Joe Rebus. When told his name, I really did need a drink. He said he’d always been amused by the coincidence.

‘And here’s another,’ he said. ‘I live in a house on Rankin Drive.’

Serendipity isn’t a big enough word for this. Joe and his family are the only Rebuses he knows of in Scotland; Rankin Drive is one of three streets in Edinburgh to feature my surname. What are the chances of a meeting of the two? You could run a Douglas Adams improbability drive on less.

When
Set in Darkness
was published, a BBC radio programme asked Donald Dewar – First Minister of the new Scottish Parliament – to review it. He found the book overly cynical about political process, and didn’t like some of the writing. My phrase ‘eyes like a frigate’s hull’ had him especially bemused. (I could have told him: grey and cold . . . think grey, steely and cold.) One thing, however, did impress the urbane Mr Dewar: my access to the parliament site. He couldn’t figure out how I knew so much. A few weeks later, I was heading north from London on the overnight train. Walking along the platform, I saw Dewar and his advisers seated around a table in the lounge car, so I took the table next to them. Eventually they fell silent, and started drifting off to bed. Donald came over and sat down across from me. We got talking. I asked how he knew who I was. Turned out one
of his retinue had recognised me and warned against further chat, lest I use it in any future projects . . .

Sadly, Donald died a few weeks later, tripping over a kerbstone outside his office, falling and striking his head. His library was bequeathed to the parliament, which is how
Set in Darkness
ended up there, back where it all started.

Might just be coincidence, of course.

Darkness was falling as Rebus accepted the yellow hard hat from his guide.

‘This will be the admin block, we think,’ the man said. His name was David Gilfillan. He worked for Historic Scotland and was coordinating the archaeological survey of Queensberry House. ‘The original building is late seventeenth century. Lord Hatton was its original owner. It was extended at the end of the century, after coming into the ownership of the first Duke of Queensberry. It would have been one of the grandest houses on Canongate, and only a stone’s throw from Holyrood.’

All around them, demolition work was taking place. Queensberry House itself would be saved, but the more recent additions either side of it were going. Workmen crouched on roofs, removing slates, tying them into bundles which were lowered by rope to waiting skips. There were enough broken slates underfoot to show that the process was imperfect. Rebus adjusted his hard hat and tried to look interested in what Gilfillan was saying.

Everyone told him that this was a sign, that he was here because the chiefs at the Big House had plans for him. But Rebus knew better. He knew his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent ‘Farmer’ Watson, had put his name forward because he was hoping to keep Rebus out of trouble and out of his hair. It was as simple as that. And if –
if
– Rebus accepted without complaining and saw the assignment through, then maybe –
maybe
– the Farmer would receive a chastened Rebus back into the fold.

Four o’clock on a December afternoon in Edinburgh;
John Rebus with his hands in his raincoat pockets, water seeping up through the leather soles of his shoes. Gilfillan was wearing green wellies. Rebus noticed that DI Derek Linford was wearing an almost identical pair. He’d probably phoned beforehand, checked with the archaeologist what the season’s fashion was. Linford was Fettes fast-stream, headed for big things at Lothian and Borders Police HQ. Late twenties, practically deskbound, and glowing from a love of the job. Already there were CID officers – mostly older than him – who were saying it didn’t do to get on the wrong side of Derek Linford. Maybe he’d have a long memory; maybe one day he’d be looking down on them all from Room 279 in the Big House.

The Big House: Police HQ on Fettes Avenue; 279: the Chief Constable’s office.

Linford had his notebook out, pen clenched between his teeth. He was listening to the lecture. He was
listening
.

‘Forty noblemen, seven judges, generals, doctors, bankers . . .’ Gilfillan was letting his tour group know how important Canongate had been at one time in the city’s history. In doing so, he was pointing towards the near future. The brewery next door to Queensberry House was due for demolition the following spring. The parliament building itself would be built on the cleared site, directly across the road from Holyrood House, the Queen’s Edinburgh residence. On the other side of Holyrood Road, facing Queensberry House, work was progressing on Dynamic Earth, a natural history theme park. Next to it, a new HQ for the city’s daily newspaper was at present a giant monkey-puzzle of steel girders. And across the road from that, another site was being cleared in preparation for the construction of a hotel and ‘prestige apartment block’. Rebus was standing in the midst of one of the biggest building sites in Edinburgh’s history.

‘You’ll probably all know Queensberry House as a hospital,’ Gilfillan was saying. Derek Linford was nodding, but then he nodded agreement with almost everything the
archaeologist said. ‘Where we’re standing now was used for car parking.’ Rebus looked around at the mud-coloured lorries, each one bearing the simple word DEMOLITION. ‘But before it was a hospital it was used as a barracks. This area was the parade ground. We dug down and found evidence of a formal sunken garden. It was probably filled in to make the parade ground.’

In what light was left, Rebus looked at Queensberry House. Its grey harled walls looked unloved. There was grass growing from its gutters. It was huge, yet he couldn’t remember having seen it before, though he’d driven past it probably several hundred times in his life.

‘My wife used to work here,’ another of the group said, ‘when it was a hospital.’ The informant was Detective Sergeant Joseph Dickie, who was based at Gayfield Square. He’d successfully contrived to miss two out of the first four meetings of the PPLC – the Policing of Parliament Liaison Committee. By some arcane law of bureaucratic semantics, the PPLC was actually a
sub
committee, one of many which had been set up to advise on security matters pertaining to the Scottish Parliament. There were eight members of the PPLC, including one Scottish Office official and a shadowy figure who claimed to be from Scotland Yard, though when Rebus had phoned the Met in London, he’d been unable to trace him. Rebus’s bet was that the man – Alec Carmoodie – was MI5. Carmoodie wasn’t here today, and neither was Peter Brent, the sharp-faced and sharper-suited Scottish Office representative. Brent, for his sins, sat on several of the subcommittees, and had begged off today’s tour with the compelling excuse that he’d been through it twice before when accompanying visiting dignitaries.

Making up the party today were the three final members of the PPLC. DS Ellen Wylie was from C Division HQ in Torphichen Place. It didn’t seem to bother her that she was the only woman on the team. She treated it like any other task, raising good points at the meetings and
asking questions to which no one seemed to have any answers. DC Grant Hood was from Rebus’s own station, St Leonard’s. Two of them, because St Leonard’s was the closest station to the Holyrood site, and the parliament would be part of their beat. Though Rebus worked in the same office as Hood, he didn’t know him well. They’d not often shared the same shift. But Rebus did know the last member of the PPLC, DI Bobby Hogan from D Division in Leith. At the first meeting, Hogan had pulled Rebus to one side.

‘What the hell are we doing here?’

‘I’m serving time,’ Rebus had answered. ‘What about you?’

Hogan was scoping out the room. ‘Christ, man, look at them. We’re Old Testament by comparison.’

Smiling now at the memory, Rebus caught Hogan’s eye and winked. Hogan shook his head almost imperceptibly. Rebus knew what he was thinking: waste of time. Almost everything was a waste of time for Bobby Hogan.

‘If you’ll follow me,’ Gilfillan was saying, ‘we can take a look indoors.’

Which, to Rebus’s mind, really was a waste of time. The committee having been set up, things had to be found for them to do. So here they were wandering through the dank interior of Queensberry House, their way lit irregularly by unsafe-looking strip lights and the torch carried by Gilfillan. As they climbed the stairwell – nobody wanted to use the lift – Rebus found himself paired with Joe Dickie, who asked a question he’d asked before.

‘Put in your exes yet?’ By which he meant the claim for expenses.

‘No,’ Rebus admitted.

‘Sooner you do, sooner they’ll cough up.’

Dickie seemed to spend half his time at their meetings totting up figures on his pad of paper. Rebus had never seen the man write down anything as mundane as a
phrase or sentence. Dickie was late thirties, big-framed with a head like an artillery shell stood on end. His black hair was cropped close to the skull and his eyes were as small and rounded as a china doll’s. Rebus had tried the comparison out on Bobby Hogan, who’d commented that any doll resembling Joe Dickie would ‘give a bairn nightmares’.

‘I’m a grown-up,’ Hogan had continued, ‘and he still scares me.’

Climbing the stairs, Rebus smiled again. Yes, he was glad to have Bobby Hogan around.

‘When people think of archaeology,’ Gilfillan was saying, ‘they almost always see it in terms of digging
down
, but one of our most exciting finds here was in the attic. A new roof was built over the original one, and there are traces of what looks like a tower. We’d have to climb a ladder to get to it, but if anyone’s interested . . . ?’

‘Thank you,’ a voice said. Derek Linford: Rebus knew its nasal quality only too well by now.

‘Creep,’ another voice close to Rebus whispered. It was Bobby Hogan, bringing up the rear. A head turned: Ellen Wylie. She’d heard, and now gave what looked like the hint of a smile. Rebus looked to Hogan, who shrugged, letting him know he thought Wylie was all right.

‘How will Queensberry House be linked to the parliament building? Will there be covered walkways?’ The questions came from Linford again. He was out in front with Gilfillan. The pair of them had rounded a corner of the stairs, so that Rebus had to strain to hear Gilfillan’s hesitant reply.

‘I don’t know.’

His tone said it all: he was an archaeologist, not an architect. He was here to investigate the site’s past rather than its future. He wasn’t sure himself why he was giving this tour, except that it had been asked of him. Hogan screwed up his face, letting everyone in the vicinity know his own feelings.

‘When will the building be ready?’ Grant Hood asked. An easy one: they’d all been briefed. Rebus saw what Hood was doing – trying to console Gilfillan by putting a question he could answer.