Let It Bleed by Ian Rankin

of an ox to survive this,’ Rebus muttered to himself. The blasts of air against his ears meant he could barely hear what Mairie was saying, and every time he opened his mouth to yell something back, the malevolent air flooded in and attacked his tooth again. Mairie ran to a wall and hunkered down with her back against it. Her cheeks looked as if they’d been sandblasted; which in a sense they had.
    Rebus crouched beside her, thankful for the shelter. He liked to take an interest in Mairie, especially now she was afreelance journalist. He worried about that lack of salary, but she seemed to be doing all right.
    ‘So,’ he asked, ‘what exactly did you come up with?’
    She smiled. ‘You forget, I used to cover local government, regional
and
district councils. It was my first job on the paper. I didn’t have to do much digging.’ She leaned forward and drew a circle in the sand. ‘Where do you want me to start?’
    ‘Give me some background.’
    ‘District council, not regional?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘Well, about the only glamorous angle attached to district councildom is the fact of a big budget, which means only the four major cities are worth the candle.’
    ‘From a journalist’s perspective?’
    ‘It’s the only perspective I can give.’ She pushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘Therefore, being a district councillor is not an attractive proposition. You’ve got long, boring working hours, requiring you to take time off from your daytime job, plus eating into your evening hours, since a lot of the meetings are evening affairs, as are surgeries if they’re not on a Saturday.’
    ‘OK, so I won’t be standing for councillor, unless the money compensates.’
    Mairie shook her head. ‘It’s not great for such a thankless task. Of course, you can claim expenses, plus if you chair a committee there’s a bonus, but even so … For all these reasons and others, you find that councillors tend to fall into one of several groups: retired, unemployed, self-employed, or with an affluent spouse.’
    ‘The first two because they’ve got lots of time, the last two because they can make time?’
    She nodded. ‘Result? A lot of councils are not what you’d call dynamic. Edinburgh’s more interesting than most.’
    ‘So tell me about Edinburgh.’ Rebus stared out towards Inchkeith Island.
    ‘Well, we’ve sixty-two wards, Labour holding most of them.’
    ‘No surprise.’
    ‘But there isn’t much of a gap between Labour and the Tories, only about seven seats. The Lib-Dems have a few, and the SNP a couple. As to what the council does, if you’d ever had to sit in on their meetings and then write them up as even vaguely interesting prose, you’d know.’
    ‘Boring?’
    ‘Most councillors could bore for Britain at the World
Ennui
Cup.’
    ‘So that’s how you pronounce that word.’ This got him a smile. She didn’t smile much these days, not since she’d led Rebus to a horror above the Crazy Hose Saloon. Rebus looked out to sea. It seemed all whitecaps as far as the horizon.
    ‘There are all sorts of committees and sub-committees,’ she went on, ‘and the full district council meets once a month. But despite all that, what the council basically does is house people. Glasgow District Council is the biggest landlord in Britain – one hundred and seventy thousand houses. It’s rumoured the district councils were only given the housing portfolio after local government reorganisation so they’d have something to do.’
    ‘You’ve lost me.’
    ‘The Tories wanted to keep housing out of regional council control.’ She sighed at his puzzled look. ‘It’s all to do with politics and it’s all intensely dull.’
    ‘And the councillors are dull too?’
    ‘Almost of necessity. Maybe “worthy” would be a better word.’ She looked at him. ‘We’re focusing in nicely on Councillor Tom Gillespie. He chairs an industrial planning committee, looking at economic and property development.The