Mortal Causes by Ian Rankin Page A

days in her life. She spoke Murdock’s name. His breathing remained regular. Only then did she slip out of bed and walk barefoot to Billy’s bedroom door, touching the door with her fingertips. Christ, to think he wasn’t there, would never be there again. She tried to control her breathing, fast in, slow out. Otherwise she might hyperventilate. Panic attacks, they called them. For years she’d suffered them not knowing she was not alone. There were lots of people out there like her. Billy had been one of them.
    She turned the doorknob and slipped into his room. His mother had been round earlier on, hardly in a state to cope with any of it. There had been a policewoman with her, the same one who’d come to the flat that first time. Billy’s mum had looked at his room, but then shook her head.
    ‘I can’t do this. Another time.’
    ‘If you like,’ Millie had offered, ‘I can bag everything up for you. All you’d have to do is have his things collected.’ The policewoman had nodded her gratitude at that. Well, it was the least … She felt the tears coming and sat down on his narrow bed. Funny how a bed so narrow could be made wide enough for two, if the two were close. She did the breathing exercises again. Fast in, slow out, but those words, her instructions to herself, reminded her of other things, other times. Fast in, slow out.
    ‘I’ve got this self-help book,’ Billy had said. ‘It’s in my room.’ He’d gone to find it for her, and she’d followed him into his room. Such a tidy room. ‘Here it is,’ he’d said, turning towards her quickly, not realising how close behind him she was.
    ‘What’s all this Red Hand stuff?’ she’d asked, looking past him at his walls. He’d waited till her eyes returned to his, then he’d kissed her, tongue rubbing at her teeth till she opened her mouth to him.
    ‘Billy,’ she said now, her hands filling themselves with his bedcover. She stayed that way for a few minutes, part of her mind staying alert, listening for sounds from the room she shared with Murdock. Then she moved across the bed to where the Hearts pennant was pinned to the wall. She pushed it aside with a finger.
    Underneath, taped flat against the wall, was a computer disk. She’d left it here, half hoping the police would find it when they searched the room. But they’d been hopeless. And watching them search, she’d become suddenly afraid for herself, and had started to hope they wouldn’t find it. Now, she got her fingernails under it and unpeeled it, looking at the disk. Well, it was hers now, wasn’t it? They might kill her for it, but she could never let it go. It was part of her memory of him. She rubbed her thumb across the label. The streetlight coming through the unwashed window wasn’t quite enough for her to read by, but she knew what the label said anyway.
    It was just those three letters, SaS.
    Dark, dark, dark.
    Rebus recalled that line at least. If Patience had asked him to quote from a poem instead of giving her movie titles, he’d have been all right. He was standing at a window of St Leonard’s, taking a break from his deskful of work, all the paperwork on Morris Gerald Cafferty.
    Dark, dark, dark.
    She was trying to civilise him. Not that she’d admit it. What she said instead was that it would be nice if they liked the same things. It would give them things to talk about. So she gave him books of poetry, and played classical music at him, bought them tickets for ballet and modern dance. Rebus had been there before, other times, other women. Asking for something more, for commitment beyond the commitment.
    He didn’t like it. He enjoyed the basic, the feral. Cafferty had once accused him of liking cruelty, of being attracted to it; his natural right as a Celt. And hadn’t Rebus accused Peter Cave of the same thing? It was coming back to him, pain on pain, crawling back along his tubes from some place deep within him.
    His time in Northern Ireland.
    He’d been