The Hanging Garden (4 page)

‘Telford doesn’t want Danny talking,’ she said to Rebus.

‘Obviously.’

‘And meantime he’ll want to even the score.’

‘Definitely.’

She caught Rebus’s eyes. ‘I thought he was a bit out of order back there.’ Meaning Claverhouse, but not wanting to name names in front of a uniform.

Rebus nodded. ‘Thanks.’ Meaning: you did right not to say as much at the time. Claverhouse and Clarke were partners now. It wouldn’t do for her to upset him.

A door slid open and a doctor appeared. She was young, and looked exhausted. Behind her in the room, Rebus could see a bed, a figure on the bed, staff milling around the various machines. Then the door slid closed.

‘We’re going to do a brain scan,’ the doctor was telling Redpath. ‘Have you contacted her family?’

‘I don’t have a name.’

‘Her effects are inside.’ The doctor slid open the door again and walked in. There was clothing folded on a chair, a bag beneath it. As the doctor pulled out the bag, Rebus saw something. A flat white cardboard box.

A white cardboard pizza box. Clothes: black denims, black bra, red satin shirt. A black duffel-coat.

‘John?’

And black shoes with two-inch heels, square-toed, new-looking except for the scuff marks, like they’d been dragged along the road.

He was in the room now. They had a mask over her face, feeding her oxygen. Her forehead was cut and bruised, the hair pushed away from it. Her fingers were blistered, the palms scraped raw. The bed she lay on wasn’t really a bed but a wide steel trolley.

‘Excuse me, sir, you shouldn’t be in here.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s this gentleman –’

‘John? John, what is it?’

Her earrings had been removed. Three tiny pin-pricks, one of them redder than its neighbours. The face above the sheet: puffy blackened eyes, a broken nose, abrasions on both cheeks. Split lip, a graze on the chin, eyelids which didn’t even flutter. He saw a hit and run victim. And beneath it all, he saw his daughter.

And he screamed.

Clarke and Redpath had to drag him out, helped by Claverhouse who’d heard the noise.

‘Leave the door open! I’ll kill you if you close that door!’

They tried to sit him down. Redpath rescued his book
from the chair. Rebus tore it from him and threw it down the hall.

‘How could you read a fucking book?’ he spat. ‘That’s Sammy in there! And you’re out here reading a book!’

Clarke’s cup of coffee had been kicked over, the floor slippy, Redpath going down as Rebus pushed at him.

‘Can you jam that door open?’ Claverhouse was asking the doctor. ‘And what about a sedative?’

Rebus was clawing his hands through his hair, bawling dry-eyed, his voice hoarse and uncomprehending. Staring down at himself, he saw the ludicrous t-shirt and knew that’s what he’d take away from this night: the image of an Iron Maiden t-shirt and its grinning bright-eyed demon. He hauled off his jacket and started tearing at the shirt.

She was behind that door, he thought, and I was out here chatting as casual as you like. She’d been in there all the time he’d been here. Two things clicked: a hit and run; the car speeding away from Flint Street.

He grabbed at Redpath. ‘Top of Minto Street. You’re sure?’

‘What?’

‘Sammy … top of Minto Street?’

Redpath nodded. Clarke knew straight away what Rebus was thinking.

‘I don’t think so, John. They were headed the opposite way.’

‘Could have doubled back.’

Claverhouse had caught some of the exchange. ‘I just got off the phone. The guys who did Danny Simpson, we picked up the car. White Escort abandoned in Argyle Place.’

Rebus looked at Redpath. ‘White Escort?’

Redpath was shaking his head. ‘Witnesses say dark-coloured.’

Rebus turned to the wall, stood there with his palms
pressed to it. Staring at the paintwork, it was like he could see
inside
the paint.

Claverhouse put a hand on his shoulder. ‘John, I’m sure she’s going to be fine. The doctor’s gone to fetch you a couple of tablets, but meantime what about one of these?’

Claverhouse with Rebus’s jacket folded in the crook of his arm, the quarter-bottle in his hand.

The little suicide bomb.

He took the bottle from Claverhouse. Unscrewed its top, his eyes on the open doorway. Lifted the bottle to his lips.

Drank.

A seaside holiday: caravan park, long walks and sandcastles. He sat in a deck-chair, trying to read. Cold wind blowing, despite the sun. Rhona rubbed suntan lotion on Sammy, said you couldn’t be too careful. Told him to keep an eye open, she was going back to the caravan for her book. Sammy was burying her father’s feet in the sand
.

He was trying to read, but thinking about work. Every day of the holiday, he sneaked off to a phone-box and called the station. They kept telling him to go and enjoy himself, forget about everything. He was halfway through a spy thriller. The plot had already lost him
.

Rhona was doing her best. She’d wanted somewhere foreign, a bit of glamour and heat to go with the sunshine. Finances, however, were on his side. So here they were on the Fife coast, where he’d first met her. Was he hoping for something? Some memory rekindled? He’d come here with his own parents, played with Mickey, met other kids, then lost them again at the end of the fortnight
.

He tried the spy novel again, but case-work got in the way. And then a shadow fell over him
.

‘
Where is she?
’

‘
What?’ He looked down. His feet were buried in sand, but Sammy wasn’t there. How long had she been gone? He stood up, scanned the seashore. A few tentative bathers, going in no further than their knees
.

‘
Christ, John, where is she?
’

He turned round, looked at the sand dunes in the distance
.

‘
The dunes …?
’

They warned her. There were hollows in the dunes where the sand was eroding. Small dens had been created – a magnet for kids. Only they were prone to collapse. Earlier in the season, a ten-year-old boy had been dug out by frantic parents. He hadn’t quite choked on the sand
…

They were running now. The dunes, the grass, no sign of her
.

‘
Sammy!
’

‘
Maybe she went into the water
.’

‘
You were supposed to be keeping an eye on her!
’

‘
I’m sorry. I
…’

‘
Sammy!
’

A small shape in one of the dens. Hopping on its hands and knees. Rhona reached in, pulled her out, hugged her
.

‘
Sweetie, we told you not to!
’

‘
I was a rabbit
.’

Rebus looked at the fragile roof: sand meshed with the roots of plants and grasses. Punched it with a fist. The roof collapsed. Rhona was looking at him
.

End of holiday
.

John Rebus kissed his daughter.

‘See you later,’ he said, watching her as she left the coffee shop. Espresso and a slice of caramel shortbread – that’s all she’d had time for – but they’d fixed another date for dinner. Nothing fancy, just a pizza.

It was October 30th. By mid-November, if Nature were feeling bloody, it would be winter. Rebus had been taught at school that there were four distinct seasons, had painted pictures of them in bright and sombre colours, but his native country seemed not to know this. Winters were long, outstaying their welcome. The warm weather came 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 or
around 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 – among them the priest, lawyer, and doctor – were set upon with rifle butts. Then ropes were produced, and strung over half a dozen of the trees which lined the square. The men were hauled to their feet, their heads pushed through the nooses. An order was given, a hand raised then dropped, and soldiers pulled on each rope, until six men were hanging from the trees, bodies writhing, legs kicking uselessly, the movements slowing by degrees.

As the teenager remembered it, it took an age for them to die. Stunned silence in the square, as if the whole village knew now, knew that this was no mere check of identity papers. More orders were barked. The men, separated from
the women and children, were marched off to Prudhomme’s barn, everyone else shepherded into the church. The square grew empty, except for a dozen or so soldiers, rifles slung over their shoulders. They chatted, kicked up dust and stones, shared jokes and cigarettes. One of them went into the bar and switched the radio on. Jazz music filled the air, competing with the rustle of leaves as a breeze twisted the corpses in the trees.

‘It was strange,’ the girl later said. ‘I stopped seeing them as dead bodies. It was as if they’d become something else, parts of the trees themselves.’

Then the explosion, smoke and dust billowing from the church. A moment’s silence, as though a vacuum had been created in the world, then screams, followed immediately by machine-gun fire. And when it finally stopped, she could still hear it. Because it wasn’t just inside the church: it was in the distance, too.

Prudhomme’s barn.

When she was finally found – by people from surrounding villages – she was naked except for a shawl she had found in a trunk. The shawl had belonged to her grandmother, dead the previous year. But she was not alone in escaping the massacre. When the soldiers had opened fire in Prudhomme’s barn, they’d aimed low. The first row of men to fall had been wounded in the lower body, and the bodies which fell on them shielded them from further fire. When straw was strewn over the mound and set alight, they’d waited as long as they could before starting to claw their way out from beneath, expecting at any moment to be shot. Four of them made it, two with their hair and clothes on fire, one dying later from his wounds.

Three men, one teenage girl: the only survivors.

The death toll was never finalised. No one knew how many visitors had been in Villefranche that day, how many refugees could be added to the count. A list was compiled
of over seven hundred names, people who had most likely been killed.

Rebus sat at his desk and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. The teenage girl was still alive, a pensioner now. The male survivors were all dead. But they’d been alive for the Bordeaux trial in 1953. He had summaries of their evidence. The summaries were in French. A lot of the material sitting on his desk was French, and Rebus didn’t speak French. That was why he’d gone to the Modern Languages department at the university and found someone who could. Her name was Kirstin Mede, and she lectured in French, but also had a working knowledge of German, which was handy: the documents which weren’t in French were in German. He had a one-page English summary of the trial proceedings, passed on from the Nazi hunters. The trial had opened in February 1953 and lasted just under a month. Of seventy-five men identified as having been part of the German force at Villefranche, only fifteen were present – six Germans and nine French Alsatians. Not one of them was an officer. One German received the death sentence, the others jail terms of between four and twelve years, but they were all released as soon as the trial finished. Alsace hadn’t been enjoying the trial, and in a bid to unite the nation, the government had passed an amnesty. The Germans, meantime, were said to have already served their sentences.