Beggars Banquet by Ian Rankin Page A

reporters here. He didn’t want them asking him questions. He unzipped the holdall, taking his Gillian Webster case notes from it. Included in the file was a packet of black and white photographs he’d taken during the weeks leading up to the snatch. He looked through them again.
    The Websters lived in a large detached house set in a few acres of rambling grounds. He’d gone out there one Sunday with his camera. He’d been out that way several times before in his car, stopping once with engine trouble near the house. About a hundred yards from the house there was a clump of bushes and saplings, big enough for him to hide in. On that particular Sunday, he’d taken his very best zoom lenses for the Canon camera. Then he went strolling with camera and binoculars and a bird identification book.
    What he hadn’t expected was that Gillian Webster would not be home. He also had not expected the Websters to be entertaining. They’d invited a dozen or so people for late-afternoon drinks. He was lucky the weather was cool: nobody seemed inclined to wander down into the garden towards where he was hiding. But a veranda ran the length of the back of the house, and some of the guests wandered out on to it; so, occasionally, did the host and hostess. He shot off a single roll of film, concentrating on Webster and his wife. She was younger than her husband by at least ten years; even so, she was showing her age. The skin sagged from her face and neck, and her short blonde hair looked brittle.
    Lying on the bed, he paused at one particular photograph. A man had been standing alone on the veranda, then had been joined by Mrs Webster. It looked as though she were greeting the man. They were kissing. The man, who was holding a champagne flute, held Mrs Webster’s arm with his free hand, drawing her towards him. The kiss was no perfunctory peck. Their lips met, were maybe even parted. The kiss had seemed to last quite a while. He searched through the other photos for a better one of the man. Yes, here he was with Mr Webster and another guest. They looked serious, as though discussing business. The man was caught face-on. He was shorter than Webster, heavily built, with dark wavy hair just covering his ears. Early on in the party, he had loosened his tie and his shirt collar. Did he merely look serious in this photo, or did he look worried? There were dark bags under his eyes . . .
    He lifted a newspaper and stared at the photofit police had issued, the one made up from Gillian Webster’s description. It was the guest from the party. He was sure of that.

    The local radio station had set up a van in the police station car park, with a tall antenna flexing from its roof. It looked as though the journalists had been made to move into the car park. Probably their cars had been holding up traffic in Castle Lane. As he arrived, they were milling around, drinking beakers of tea, talking into portable phones, reading from sheets of paper.
    He looked around. One young man stood apart from the others. He looked shy and uncomfortable, and was wearing cheap clothes. There were spots around his mouth and on his neck, and he kept pushing slippery glasses back up his nose as he read from his own sheets of paper, glancing up from time to time to see what the other journalists were doing.
    He was perfect.
    ‘Local are you, chief ?’
    The young man looked up in surprise at the man with the south-east accent, the man wearing the expensive jacket.
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘You look like the local press.’
    The young man twitched. ‘I’m from the Post .’
    ‘Thought so.’ The sheets of paper were plucked from the young man’s hands. They detailed the morning’s media briefing. There would be a conference at three o’clock, and another at seven. Otherwise, the only news was that the man they’d been questioning was to be held for another twenty-four hours.
    ‘What do you think, chief?’ The young man looked dazed. ‘Come on, you can tell Uncle