Beggars Banquet

by Ian Rankin

  ‘And meanwhile he could be slipping off into the night?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Still, apart from continuing to fend him off and hoping he gets fed up, I can’t see what else can be done. You don’t recognise the voice? Someone from your past . . . an ex-lover . . . someone with a grudge?’

  ‘I don’t make enemies, Inspector.’

  Looking at her, listening to her voice, he found that easy to believe. Maybe not personal enemies . . .

  ‘What about the other radio stations? They can’t be too thrilled about your ratings.’

  Her laughter was loud. ‘You think they’ve put out a contract on me, is that it?’

  Rebus smiled and shrugged. ‘Just a thought. But yours is the most popular show Lowland has got, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think I’m still just about ahead of Hamish, yes. But then Hamish’s show is just . . . well, Hamish. My show’s all about the people themselves, the ones who call in. Human interest, you could say.’

  ‘And there’s plenty of interest.’

  ‘Suffering is always interesting, isn’t it? It appeals to the voyeur. We do get our fair share of crank calls. Maybe that’s why. All those lonely, slightly deranged people out there . . . listening to me. Me, pretending I’ve got all the answers.’ Her smile this time was rueful. ‘The calls recently have been getting . . . I don’t know whether to say “better” or “worse”. Worse problems, better radio.’

  ‘Better for your ratings, you mean?’

  ‘Most advertisers ignore the late-night slots. That’s common knowledge. Not a big enough audience. But it’s never been a problem on my show. We did slip back for a little while, but the figures picked up again. Up and up and up . . . Don’t ask me what sort of listeners we’re attracting. I leave all that to market research.’

  Rebus finished his coffee and clasped both knees, preparing to rise. ‘I’d like to take the tape with me, is that possible?’

  ‘Sure.’ She ejected the tape.

  ‘And I’d like to have a word with . . . Sue, is it?’

  She checked her watch. ‘Sue, yes, but she won’t be in for a few hours yet. Night shift, you see. Only us poor disc jockeys have to be here twenty-four hours. I exaggerate, but it feels like it sometimes.’ She patted a tray on the ledge beside the cassette player. The tray was filled with correspondence. ‘Besides, I have my fan mail to deal with.’

  Rebus nodded, glanced at the cassette tape he was now holding. ‘Let me have a think about this, Miss Cook. I’ll see what we can do.’

  ‘OK, Inspector.’

  ‘Sorry I can’t be more constructive. You were quite right to contact us.’

  ‘I didn’t suppose there was much you could—’

  ‘We don’t know that yet. As I say, give me a little time to think about it.’

  She rose from her chair. ‘I’ll see you out. This place is a maze, and we can’t have you stumbling in on the Afternoon Show, can we? You might end up doing your Laughing Policeman routine after all . . .’

  As they were walking down the long, hushed corridor, Rebus saw two men in conversation at the bottom of the stairwell. One was a beefy, hearty-looking man with a mass of rumpled hair and a good growth of beard. His cheeks seemed veined with blood. The other man proved a significant contrast, small and thin with slicked-back hair. He wore a grey suit and white shirt, the latter offset by a bright red paisley-patterned tie.‘Ah,’ said Penny Cook quietly, ‘a chance to kill two birds. Come on, let me introduce you to Gordon Prentice - he’s the station chief - and to the infamous Hamish MacDiarmid.’

  Well, Rebus had no trouble deciding which man was which. Except that, when Penny did make the introductions, he was proved utterly wrong. The bearded man pumped his hand.

  ‘I hope you’re going to be able to help, Inspector. There are some sick minds out there.’ This was Gordon Prentice. He wore baggy brown cords and an open-necked shirt from which protruded tufts of wiry hair. Hamish MacDiarmid’s hand, when Rebus took it, was limp and cool, like something lifted from a larder. No matter how hard he tried, Rebus couldn’t match this . . . for want of a better word, yuppie . . . couldn’t match him to the combative voice. But then MacDiarmid spoke.

  ‘Sick minds is right, and stupid minds too. I don’t know which is worse, a deranged audience or an educationally subnormal one.’ He turned to Penny Cook. ‘Maybe you got the better bargain, Penelope.’ He turned back to Prentice. So that’s what a sneer looks like, Rebus thought. But MacDiarmid was speaking again. ‘Gordon, how about letting Penny and me swap shows for a day? She could sit there agreeing with every bigoted caller I get, and I could get stuck in about her social cripples. What do you think?’

  Prentice chuckled and placed a hand on the shoulder of both his star DJs. ‘I’ll give it some thought, Hamish. Penny might not be too thrilled though. I think she has a soft spot for her “cripples”.’

  Penny Cook certainly didn’t look ‘too thrilled’ by the time Rebus and she were out of earshot.

  ‘Those two,’ she hissed. ‘Sometimes they act like I’m not even there! Men . . .’ She glanced towards Rebus. ‘Present company excluded, of course.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be so hard on Gordon actually. I know I joke about being here twenty-four hours a day, but I really think he does spend all day and all night at the station. He’s here from early morning, but each night he comes into the studio to listen to a bit of my show. Beyond the call of duty, wouldn’t you say?’

  Rebus merely shrugged.

  ‘I bet,’ she went on, ‘when you saw them you thought it was Hamish with the beard.’

  Rebus nodded. She giggled. ‘Everybody does,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s what they seem in this place. I’ll let you into a secret. The station doesn’t keep any publicity shots of Hamish. They’re afraid it would hurt his image if everyone found out he looks like a wimp.’

  ‘He’s certainly not quite what I expected.’

  She gave him an ambiguous look. ‘No, well, you’re not quite what I was expecting either.’ There was a moment’s stillness between them, broken only by some coffee commercial being broadcast from the ceiling: ‘. . . but Camelot Coffee is no myth, and mmm . . . it tastes so good.’ They smiled at one another and walked on.

  Driving back into Edinburgh, Rebus listened, despite himself, to the drivel on Lowland Radio. Advertising was tight, he knew that. Maybe that was why he seemed to hear the same dozen or so adverts over and over again. Lots of airtime to fill and so few advertisers to fill it . . .‘. . . and mmm . . . it tastes so good.’

  That particular advert was beginning to get to him. It careered around in his head, even when it wasn’t being broadcast. The actor’s voice was so . . . what was the word? It was like being force-fed a tablespoon of honey. Cloying, sickly, altogether too much.

  ‘Was Camelot a myth or is it real? Arthur and Guinevere, Merlin and Lancelot. A dream, or—’

  Rebus switched off the radio. ‘It’s only a jar of bloody coffee,’ he told his radio set. Yes, he thought, a jar of coffee . . . and mmm . . . it tastes so good. Come to think of it, he needed coffee for the flat. He’d stop off at the corner shop, and whatever he bought it wouldn’t be Camelot.

  But, as a promotional gimmick, there was a fifty-pence refund on Camelot, so Rebus did buy it, and sat at home that evening drinking the vile stuff and listening to Penny Cook’s tape. Tomorrow evening, he was thinking, he might go along to the station to catch her show live. He had an excuse after all: he wanted to speak with Sue, the telephonist. That was the excuse; the truth was that he was intrigued by Penny Cook herself.You’re not quite what I was expecting.

  Was he reading too much into that one sentence? Maybe he was. Well, put it another way then: he had a duty to return to Lowland Radio, a duty to talk to Sue. He wound the tape back for the umpteenth time. That ferocious voice. Sue had been surprised by its ferocity, hadn’t she? The man had seemed so quiet, so polite in their initial conversation. Rebus was stu
ck. Maybe the caller would simply get fed up. When it was a question of someone’s home being called, there were steps you could take: have someone intercept all calls, change the person’s number and keep it ex-directory. But Penny Cook needed her number to be public. She couldn’t hide, except behind the wall provided by Sue and David.

  Then he had an idea. It wasn’t much of an idea, but it was better than nothing. Bill Costain at the Forensic Science Lab was keen on sound recording, tape recorders, all that sort of stuff. Maybe he could do something with Mr Anonymous. Yes, he’d call him first thing tomorrow. He sipped his coffee, then squirmed.

  ‘Tastes more like camel than Camelot,’ he muttered, hitting the play button.

  The morning was bright and clear, but Bill Costain was dull and overcast.‘I was playing in a darts match last night,’ he explained. ‘We won for a change. The amount of drink we put away, you’d think Scotland had just done the Grand Slam.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Rebus, handing over the cassette tape. ‘I’ve brought you something soothing . . .’

  ‘Soothing’ wasn’t the word Costain himself used after listening to the tape. But he enjoyed a challenge, and the challenge Rebus had laid down was to tell him anything at all about the voice. He listened several times to the tape, and put it through some sort of analyser, the voice becoming a series of peaks and troughs.

  Costain scratched his head. ‘There’s too big a difference between the voice at the beginning and the voice when hysterical.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Costain always seemed able to baffle Rebus.

  ‘The hysterical voice is so much higher than the voice at the beginning. It’s hardly . . . natural.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I’d say one of them’s a put-on. Probably the initial voice. He’s disguising his normal tone, speaking in a lower register than usual.’

  ‘So can we get back to his real voice?’

  ‘You mean can we retrieve it? Yes, but the lab isn’t the best place for that. A friend of mine has a recording studio out Morningside way. I’ll give him a bell . . .’

  They were in luck. The studio’s facilities were not in use that morning. Rebus drove them to Morningside and then sat back as Costain and his friend got busy at the mixing console. They slowed the hysteric part of the tape; then managed somehow to take the pitch of the voice down several tones. It began to sound more than slightly unnatural, like a Dalek or something electronic. But then they started to build it back up again, until Rebus was listening to a slow, almost lifeless vocal over the studio’s huge monitor speakers.

  ‘I . . . know . . . what . . . you’ve . . . done.’

  Yes, there was life there now, almost a hint of personality. After this, they switched to the caller’s first utterance - ‘Not so good, Penny’ - and played around with it, heightening the pitch slightly, even speeding it up a bit.

  ‘That’s about as good as it gets,’ Costain said at last.

  ‘It’s brilliant, Bill, thanks. Can I get a copy?’

  Having dropped Costain back at the lab, Rebus wormed his way back through the lunchtime traffic to Great London Road police station. He played this new tape several times, then switched from tape to radio. Christ, he’d forgotten: it was still tuned to Lowland.

  ‘. . . and mmm . . . it tastes so good.’

  Rebus fairly growled as he reached for the off button. But the damage, the delirious, wonderful damage, had already been done . . .

  The wine bar was on the corner of Hanover Street and Queen Street. It was a typical Edinburgh affair in that though it might have started with wine, quiche and salad in mind, it had reverted to beer - albeit mainly of the ‘designer’ variety - and pies. Always supposing you could call something filled with chickpeas and spices a ‘pie’. Still, it had an IPA pump, and that was good enough for Rebus. The place had just finished its lunchtime peak, and tables were still cluttered with plates, glasses and condiments. Having paid over the odds for his drink, Rebus felt the barman owed him a favour. He gave the young man a name. The barman nodded towards a table near the window. The table’s sole occupant looked just out of his teens. He flicked a lock of hair back from his forehead and gazed out of the window. There was a newspaper folded into quarters on his knee. He tapped his teeth with a ballpoint, mulling over some crossword clue.Without asking, Rebus sat down opposite him. ‘It whiles away the time,’ he said. The tooth-tapper seemed still intent on the window. Maybe he could see his reflection there. The modern Narcissus. Another flick of the hair.

  ‘If you got a haircut, you wouldn’t need to keep doing that.’

  This achieved a smile. Maybe he thought Rebus was trying to chat him up. Well, after all, this was known as an actors’ bar, wasn’t it? Half a glass of orange juice sat on the table, the ubiquitous ice-cube having melted away to a sliver.

  ‘Aye,’ Rebus mused, ‘passes the time.’

  This time the eyes turned from the window and were on him. Rebus leaned forward across the table. When he spoke, he spoke quietly, confidently.

  ‘I know what you’ve done,’ he said, not sure even as he said it whether he were quoting or speaking for himself.

  The lock of hair fell forward and stayed there. A frozen second, then another, and the man rose quickly to his feet, the chair tipping back. But Rebus, still seated, had grabbed at an arm and held it fast.

  ‘Let go of me!’

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘I said let go!’

  ‘And I said sit down!’ Rebus pulled him back on to his chair. ‘That’s better. We’ve got a lot to talk about, you and me. We can do it here or down at the station, and by “station” I don’t mean Scotrail. OK?’

  The head was bowed, the careful hair now almost completely dishevelled. It was that easy . . . Rebus found the tiniest grain of pity. ‘Do you want something else to drink?’ The head shook from side to side. ‘Not even a cup of coffee?’

  Now the head looked up at him.

  ‘I saw the film once,’ Rebus went on. ‘Bloody awful it was, but not half as bad as the coffee. Give me Richard Harris’s singing any day.’

  Now, finally, the head grinned. ‘That’s better,’ said Rebus. ‘Come on, son. It’s time, if you’ll pardon the expression, to spill the beans.’

  The beans spilled . . .

  Rebus was there that night for What’s Cookin’. It surprised him that Penny Cook herself, who sounded so calm on the air, was, before the programme, a complete bundle of nerves. She slipped a small yellow tablet on to her tongue and washed it down with a beaker of water.‘Don’t ask,’ she said, cutting off the obvious question. Sue and David were stationed by their telephones in the production room; which was separated from Penny’s studio by a large glass window. Her producer did his best to calm things down. Though not yet out of his thirties, he looked to be an old pro at this. Rebus wondered if he shouldn’t have his own counselling show . . .

  Rebus chatted with Sue for ten minutes or so, and watched as the production team went through its paces. Really, it was a two-man operation - producer and engineer. There was a last-minute panic when Penny’s microphone started to play up, but the engineer was swift to replace it. By five minutes to eleven, the hysteria seemed over. Everyone was calm now, or was so tense it didn’t show. Like troops just before a battle, Rebus was thinking. Penny had a couple of questions about the running order of the night’s musical pieces. She held a conversation with her producer, communicating via mikes and headphones, but looking at one another through the window.

  Then she turned her eyes towards Rebus, winked at him, and crossed her fingers. He crossed his fingers back at her.

  ‘Two minutes everyone . . .’

  At the top of the hour there was news, and straight after the news . . .

  A tape played. The show’s theme music. Penny leaned towards her microphone, which hung like an anglepoise over her desk. The music faded.

  ‘Hello again. This is Penny Cook, and this is What’s Cookin’. I’ll be with you until thre
e o’clock, so if you’ve got a problem, I’m just a phone call away. And if you want to ring me the number as ever is . . .’

  It was extraordinary, and Rebus could only marvel at it. Her eyes were closed, and she looked so brittle that a shiver might turn her to powder. Yet that voice . . . so controlled . . . no, not controlled; rather, it was as though it were apart from her, as though it possessed a life of its own, a personality . . . Rebus looked at the studio clock. Four hours of this, five nights a week? All in all, he thought, he’d rather be a policeman.

  The show was running like clockwork. Calls were taken by the two operators, details scribbled down. There was discussion with the producer about suitable candidates, and during the musical interludes or the commercials -‘. . . and mmm . . . it tastes so good’ - the producer would relay details about the callers to Penny.

  ‘Let’s go with that one,’ she might say. Or: ‘I can’t deal with that, not tonight.’ Usually, her word was the last, though the producer might demur.

  ‘I don’t know, it’s quite a while since we covered adultery . . .’

  Rebus watched. Rebus listened. But most of all, Rebus waited . . .

  ‘OK, Penny,’ the producer told her, ‘it’s line two next. His name’s Michael.’

  She nodded. ‘Can somebody get me a coffee?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And next,’ she said, ‘I think we’ve got Michael on line two. Hello, Michael?’

  It was quarter to midnight. As usual, the door of the production room opened and Gordon Prentice stepped into the room. He had nods and smiles for everyone, and seemed especially pleased to see Rebus.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said shaking Rebus’s hand. ‘I see you take your work seriously, coming here at this hour.’ He patted the producer’s shoulder. ‘How’s the show tonight?’

  ‘Been a bit tame so far, but this looks interesting.’

  Penny’s eyes were on the dimly lit production room. But her voice was all for Michael.