Read Exit Music (2007) for Free Online Page B

sensing Rebus behind him.
    “Found something?”
    “I think there’s blood under here . . . quite a bit of it. If you were asking me, I’d say this is trail’s end.”
    Rebus walked around the vehicle. There was a ticket on the dashboard, showing that it had entered the car park at 11:00 that morning.
    “Next car along,” Duff was saying, “is there something underneath it?”
    Rebus did a circuit of the big Lexus but couldn’t see anything. Nothing else for it but to get down on hands and knees himself. A bit of string or wire. He reached a hand beneath the car, fingertips scrabbling at it, eventually drawing it out. Hauled himself back to his feet and held it dangling by thumb and forefinger.
    A plain silver neck chain.
    “Ray,” he said, “better go fetch your kit.”

5
    C larke decided it wasn’t worth visiting the librarian, so called her from Todorov’s flat while Hawes and Tibbet started the search. Clarke had barely punched in the number for the Poetry Library when Hawes arrived back from the bedroom, waving the dead man’s passport.
    “Under a corner of the mattress,” Hawes said. “First place I looked.”
    Clarke just nodded and moved into the hallway for a bit more privacy.
    “Miss Thomas?” she said into her phone. “It’s Detective Sergeant Clarke here, sorry to trouble you again so soon . . .”
    Three minutes later she was back in the living room with just a couple of names: yes, Abigail Thomas had accompanied Todorov to the pub after his recital, but she’d stayed for only the one, and knew that the poet wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d sampled another four or five watering holes.
    “I reckoned he was in safe hands with Mr. Riordan,” she’d told Clarke.
    “The sound engineer?”
    “Yes.”
    “No one else was there? None of the other poets?”
    “Just the three of us, and, as I say, I didn’t stay long . . .”
    Colin Tibbet meantime had finished rummaging through desk drawers and kitchen cupboards and was tilting the sofa to see if anything other than dust might be hidden there. Clarke lifted a book from the floor. It was another copy of Astapovo Blues . She’d managed a couple of minutes’ research on Count Tolstoy, so knew that he’d died in a railway siding, shunning the wife who had refused to join his pared-to-the-bone lifestyle. This helped her make more sense of the collection’s final poem, “Codex Coda,” with its refrain of “a cold, cleansed death.” Todorov, she saw, had not quite finished with any of the poems in the book—there were penciled amendments throughout. She reached into his waste bin and uncrumpled one of the discarded sheets.
City noise invisible
Havoc-crying air
Congested as a
    The rest of the sheet consisted of doodled punctuation marks. There was a folder on his desk, but nothing inside it. A book of Killer Sudokus , all of them finished. Pens and pencils and an unused calligraphy set, complete with instructions. She walked over to the wall and stood in front of the Edinburgh bus map, traced a line from King’s Stables Road to Buccleuch Place. There were a dozen routes he could have chosen. Maybe he was on a pub crawl, or a little bit lost. No reason to assume he’d been heading home. He could have left his flat and crossed George Square, made for Candlemaker Row and wandered down its steep brae into the Grassmarket. Plenty of pubs there, and King’s Stables Road only a right-hand fork away. . . . Her phone rang. Caller ID: Rebus.
    “Phyl found his passport,” she told him.
    “And I just found his neck chain, lying on the floor of the multistory.”
    “So he was killed there and dumped in the lane?”
    “Trail of blood says so.”
    “Or he staggered that far and then keeled over.”
    “Another possibility,” Rebus seemed to concede. “Thing is, though, what was he doing in the car park in the first place? Are you at his flat?”
    “I was just about to leave.”
    “Before you do, add car keys or a driving license to the