Tooth & Nail

A couple of minutes later, they had moved a further fifteen yards and were about to pass a narrow junction with a No Entry sign at its mouth. Flight glanced up this sidestreet. `Time to take a few liberties,' he said, turning the steering-wheel hard. One side of the street was lined with market-stalls. Rebus could hear the stall-holders sharpening their patter against the whetstone of passing trade. Nobody paid the slightest attention to a car travelling the wrong way down a one-way street, until a boy pulling a mobile stall, from one side of the road to the other halted their progress. A meaty fist banged on the driver's side window. Flight rolled down the window, and a head appeared, extraordinarily pink and round and totally hairless.

'Oi, what's your fucking game then?' The words died in his throat. `Oh, it's you Mister Flight. Didn't recognise the motor.'

`Hello, Arnold,' Flight said quietly, his eyes on the ponderous movement of the stall ahead. `How's tricks?'

The man laughed nervously. `Keeping me nose clean, Mister Flight.'

Only now did Flight deign to turn his head towards, the man. `That's good,' he said. Rebus had never heard those two words sound so threatening. Their road ahead was now clear. `Keep it that way,' Flight said, moving off.

Rebus stared at him, waiting for an explanation.

'Sex, offender,' Flight said. `Two previous. Children. The psychiatrists say he's okay now, but I don't know. With that, sort of thing, one hundred percent sure isn't quite sure enough. He's been working the market now for a few weeks, loading and unloading. Sometimes he gives me good gen. You know how it is.'

Rebus could imagine. Flight had this huge, strong-looking man in the palm of his hand. If Flight told the market-traders what he knew about Arnold, not only would Arnold lose his job, but he'd be in for a good kicking as well. Maybe the man was all right now, maybe he was, in psychiatric parlance, `a fully integrated member of society'. He had paid for his crimes, and now was trying to go straight. And what happened? Policemen, men like Flight and like Rebus himself (if, he was being honest), used his past against him to turn him into an informant.

`I've got a couple of dozen snitches,' Flight went on. `Not all like Arnold. Some are in it for the cash, some simply because they can't keep their gobs shut. Telling what they know to somebody like me makes them feel important, makes them feel like they're in the know. A place this size, you'd be lost without a decent network of snitches.'

Rebus merely nodded, but Flight was warming to his subject.

`In some ways London is too big to take in. But in other ways it's tiny. Everyone knows everyone else. There's north and south of the river, of course, those are like two different countries. 'But the way the place divides, the loyalties, the same old faces, sometimes I feel like a village bobby on his bicycle.' Because Flight had turned towards him, Rebus nodded again. Inside he was thinking: here we go, the same old story, London is bigger, better, rougher, tougher and more important than anywhere else. He had come across this attitude before, attending courses with Yard men or hearing about it from visitors to London. Flight hadn't, seemed the type, but really everybody was the type. Rebus, too, in his time had exaggerated the problems the police faced in Edinburgh, so that he could look tougher and more important in somebody's eyes.

The facts still had to be faced. Police work was all about paperwork and computers and somebody stepping forward with the truth.

`Nearly there,' said Flight. 'Kilmore Road's the third on the left.'

Kilmore Road was part of an industrial estate and therefore would be deserted at night. It nestled in a maze of back streets about two hundred yards from a tube station. Rebus had always looked on tube stations as busy places, sited in populous areas, but this one stood on a narrow back street, well away from high road, bus route or railway station.

`I don't get it,' he said. Flight merely shrugged and shook his head.

Anyone coming out of the tube station at night found themselves with a lonely walk through the streets, past net curtained windows where televisions blared. Flight showed him that a popular route was to cut into the industrial estate and across the parkland behind it. The park was flat and lifeless, boasting a single set of goalposts, two orange traffic cones substituting for the missing set. On the other side of the park three hi-rise blocks and some lo-rise, housing sprang up. May Jessop had been making for one of those houses, where her parents lived. She was nineteen and had a good job, but it kept her late at her office, so it wasn't until ten o'clock that her parents started to worry. An hour later, there was a knock at the door. Her father rushed to answer, relieved, only to find a detective there, bearing the news that May's body, had been found.