Tooth & Nail

Every man is a rapist, hadn't someone said, that once? Traces of salt . . . Bite marks on the . . . The train slowed into another station: Mile End, his stop. The girl was getting out, too. He lingered on the platform until she was gone, without really knowing why, then headed up, towards ground level and a taste of fresh air.

Taste of monoxide, more like. Three lanes of traffic were jammed in either direction, the result of an articulated lorry failing to reverse through the narrow gates of some building. Two exasperated constables were trying to untie this Gordian Knot and for the first time it struck Rebus how silly their tall rounded hats looked. The Scottish-issue flat caps were more sensible. They also made less of a target at football matches.

Rebus wished the constables a silent `Good luck' and made for Gideon Park—not a park but a road—and for number 78, a three-storey house which, according to the front door's entry system, had been split somehow into four flats. He pressed the second-from-bottom buzzer and waited. The door was opened by a tall skinny teenage girl, her long straight hair dyed black, three earrings in each ear. She smiled and gave him an unexpected hug.

`Hello, Dad,', she said.

Samantha Rebus led her father up a narrow staircase to the first-floor flat she shared with her mother. If the change in his daughter was striking, then the change in Rebus's ex-wife was doubly so. He had never seen her looking so good. There were strands of grey in her hair, but it had been cut fashionably short and there was a healthy suntanned look to her face, a gleam to her eyes. They studied one another without words, then embraced quickly.

'John.'

'Rhona.'

She had been reading a book. He looked at its cover: To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf. `Tom Wolfe's more my style,' he said. The living-room was small, cramped even, but a, lot of clever work with shelves and wall-mirrors gave the impression of space. It was a strange sensation, seeing things he recognised, that chair, a cushion-cover, a lamp, things from his life with Rhona, now transported to this pokey flat. But he praised the interior decoration, the snug feel of the place and then they sat down to drink tea. Rebus had brought gifts: record tokens for Samantha, chocolates for Rhona—received with a knowing, coded look between the two women.

Two women. Samantha was no longer a child. Her figure might retain a child's suppleness, but her way of moving, her actions, her face were all fully formed and adult.

`You look good, Rhona.'

She paused, accepting the compliment. `Thank you, John,' she said at last. He noted her inability to say the same of him. Mother and daughter shared another of their secret looks. It was as though their time together had led to a kind of telepathy between them, so that during the course of the evening Rebus was to do most of the talking, nervously filling the many silent gaps in the conversation.

None of it was very important anyway. He spoke of Edinburgh, without going into detail about his work. This wasn't easy, since work apart he did very little. Rhona asked about mutual friends and he had to admit that he saw none of the old crowd. She talked about her teaching, of property prices in London. (Rebus heard nothing in her tone to suggest that he should pay something towards a bigger place for his kin. After all, it had been her idea to leave him. No real grounds, except, as, she'd put it, that she'd loved a man but married a job.) Then Samantha told him about her secretarial course.

`Secretarial?' said Rebus, trying to sound enthusiastic. Samantha's reply was cool.

`I told you about it in one of my letters.'

`Oh.' There was another break in the conversation. Rebus wanted to burst out: I read your letters, Sammy! I devour your letters! And I'm sorry I so seldom write back, but you know what a lousy letter-writer I am, how much effort it takes, how little time and energy I have. So many cases to solve, so many people depending on me.

But he said nothing. Of course he said nothing. Instead, they played out this little sham scenario. Polite chit-chat in a tiny living-room off Bow Road. Everything to say. Saying nothing. It was unbearable. Truly unbearable. Rebus moved his hands to his knees, spreading the fingers, ready to rise to his feet in the expected manner of one about to leave. Well, it's been nice seeing you, but there's a starched hotel bed waiting for me, and a machine to dispense ice, and another to shine shoes. He started to rise.

And the buzzer sounded. Two short, two long. Saman?tha fairly flew to the stairs. Rhona smiled.

`Kenny,' she explained.

`Oh?'

`Samantha's current gentleman.'

Rebus nodded slowly, the understanding father. Sammy was sixteen. She'd left school. A secretarial course at college. Not a boyfriend, a gentleman. `What about you, Rhona?' he said.