The Beat Goes On

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Chalk!’ Rebus thumped the tree with his fist.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Chalk! That morning I came to check on you. When the cadets got up, their knees had white, powdery chalk on them.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well look!’ Rebus led Holmes into the copse. ‘There’s no white rock here. No bits of chalky stone. That wasn’t bloody chalk.’ He fell to his knees and began to burrow furiously, raking his hands through the earth.

  The girls’ parents had messed up the ground, making the white powder inconspicuous. Enough to mark a trouser-knee, but hardly noticeable otherwise. Certainly, nothing a cadet would bother with. And besides, they’d been looking for something on the ground, not below it.

  ‘Ah!’ He paused, probed a spot with his fingers, then began to dig around it. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘just the one packet and it’s burst. That’s what it was. Must have burst when McLafferty was burying it. Better call for forensics, Brian. His blood and his prints will be all over it.’

  ‘Right, sir.’ Stunned, Brian Holmes sprinted from the clearing, then stopped and turned back. ‘Keys,’ he explained. Rebus fished his car-keys from his pocket and tossed them to him. Father Byrne, who had been a spectator throughout, came a little closer.

  ‘Heroin, Father. Either that or cocaine. Bigger profits than cannabis, you see. It all comes down to money in the end. They were doing a deal. McLafferty got himself stabbed. He was holding a packet when it happened. Got away somehow, ran down here before he had time to think. He knew he’d better get rid of the stuff, so he buried it. The men who were bothering you, McLafferty’s men, it was this they were after. Then they got Rab Philips instead and went home satisfied. If it wasn’t for your all-night vigil, they’d’ve had this stuff too.’

  Rebus paused, aware that he couldn’t be making much sense to the priest. Father Byrne seemed to read his mind and smiled.

  ‘For a minute there, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I thought you were speaking in tongues.’

  Rebus grinned, too, feeling breathless. With McLafferty’s prints on the bag, they would have the evidence they needed. ‘Sorry you didn’t get your miracle,’ he said.

  Father Byrne’s smile broadened. ‘Miracles happen every day, Inspector. I don’t need to have them invented for me.’

  They turned to watch as Holmes came wandering back towards them. But his eyes were concentrating on an area to the left of them. ‘They’re on their way,’ he said, handing Rebus’s keys back to him.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Who was that by the way? ‘Who?’

  ‘The other man.’ Holmes looked from Rebus to Byrne back to Rebus again. ‘The other man,’ he repeated. ‘The one who was standing here with you. When I was coming back, he was…’ He was pointing now, back towards the gate, then over towards the left of the tree. But his voice died away.

  ‘No, never mind,’ he said. ‘I thought… I just, no never mind. I must be—’

  ‘Seeing things?’ Father Byrne suggested, his fingers just touching the wooden cross around his neck.

  ‘That’s right, yes. Yes, seeing things.’

  Ghosts, thought Rebus. Spirits of the wood. Rab Philips maybe, or the Hermitage Witch. My God, those two would have a lot to talk about, wouldn’t they?

  A Good Hanging

  I

  It was quite some time since a scaffold had been seen in Parliament Square. Quite some time since Edinburgh had witnessed a hanging, too, though digging deeper into history the sight might have been common enough. Detective Inspector John Rebus recalled hearing some saloon-bar story of how criminals, sentenced to hang, would be given the chance to run the distance of the Royal Mile from Parliament Square to Holyrood, a baying crowd hot on their heels. If the criminal reached the Royal Park before he was caught, he would be allowed to remain there, wandering in safety so long as he did not step outside the boundary of the park itself. True or not, the tale conjured up the wonderful image of rogues and vagabonds trapped within the confines of Arthur’s Seat, Salisbury Crags and Whinny Hill. Frankly, Rebus would have preferred the noose.

  ‘It’s got to be a prank gone wrong, hasn’t it?’

  A prank. Edinburgh was full of pranks at this time of year. It was Festival time, when young people, theatrical people, flooded into the city with their enthusiasm and their energy. You couldn’t walk ten paces without someone pressing a handbill upon you or begging you to visit their production. These were the ‘Fringe lunatics’ as Rebus had not very originally, but to his own satisfaction, termed them. They came for two or three or four weeks, mostly from London and they squeezed into damp sleeping-bags on bedsit floors throughout the city, going home much paler, much more tired and almost always the poorer. It was not unusual for the unlucky Fringe shows, those given a venue on the outskirts, those with no review to boast of, starved of publicity and inspiration, for those unfortunate shows to play to single-figure audiences, if not to an audience of a single figure.

  Rebus didn’t like Festival time. The streets became clogged, there seemed a despair about all the artistic fervour and, of course, the crime rate rose. Pickpockets loved the festival. Burglars found easy pickings in the overpopulated, underprotected bedsits. And, finding their local pub taken over by the ‘Sassenachs’, the natives were inclined to throw the occasional punch or bottle or chair. Which was why Rebus avoided the city centre during the Festival, skirting around it in his car, using alleyways and half-forgotten routes. Which was why he was so annoyed at having been called here today, to Parliament Square, the heart of the Fringe, to witness a hanging.

  ‘Got to be a prank,’ he repeated to Detective Constable Brian Holmes. The two men were standing in front of a scaffold, upon which hung the gently swaying body of a young man. The body swayed due to the fresh breeze which was sweeping up the Royal Mile from the direction of Holyrood Park. Rebus thought of the ghosts of the royal park’s inmates. Was the wind of their making? ‘A publicity stunt gone wrong,’ he mused.

  ‘Apparently not, sir,’ Holmes said. He’d been having a few words with the workmen who were trying to erect a curtain of sorts around the spectacle so as to hide it from the view of the hundreds of inquisitive tourists who had gathered noisily outside the police cordon. Holmes now consulted his notebook, while Rebus, hands in pockets, strolled around the scaffold. It was of fairly ramshackle construction, which hadn’t stopped it doing its job.

  ‘The body was discovered at four-fifty this morning. We don’t think it had been here long. A patrol car passed this way at around four and they didn’t see anything.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean much,’ Rebus interrupted in a mutter.

  Holmes ignored the remark. ‘The deceased belonged to a Fringe group called Ample Reading Time. They come from the University of Reading, thus the name.’

  ‘It also makes the acronym ART,’ Rebus commented.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Holmes. His tone told the senior officer that Holmes had already worked this out for himself. Rebus wriggled a little, as though trying to keep warm. In fact, he had a summer cold.

  ‘How did we discover his identity?’ They were in front of the hanging man now, standing only four or so feet below him. Early twenties, Rebus surmised. A shock of black curly hair.

  ‘The scaffold has a venue number pinned to it,’ Holmes was saying. ‘A student hall of residence just up the road.’

  ‘And that’s where the ART show’s playing?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Holmes consulted the bulky Fringe programme which he had been holding behind his notebook. ‘It’s a play of sorts called “Scenes from a Hanging”.’ The two men exchanged a look at this. ‘The blurb,’ Holmes continued, consulting the company’s entry near the front of the programme, ‘promises “thrills, spills and a live hanging on stage”.’

  ‘A live hanging, eh? Well, you can’t say they didn’t deliver. So, he takes the scaffold from the venue, wheels it out here–I notice it’s on wheels, presumably to make it easier to trundle on and off the stage–and in th
e middle of the night he hangs himself, without anyone hearing anything or seeing anything.’ Rebus sounded sceptical.

  ‘Well,’ said Holmes, ‘be honest, sir.’ He was pointing towards and beyond the crowd of onlookers. ‘Does anything look suspicious in Edinburgh at this time of year?’

  Rebus followed the direction of the finger and saw that a twelve-foot-high man was enjoying a grandstand view of the spectacle, while somewhere to his right someone was juggling three saucepans high into the air. The stilt-man walked towards the pans, grabbed one from mid-air and set it on his head, waving down to the crowd before moving off. Rebus sighed.

  ‘I suppose you’re right, Brian. Just this once you may be right.’

  A young DC approached, holding a folded piece of paper towards them. ‘We found this in his trousers back-pocket.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Rebus, ‘the suicide note.’ He plucked the sheet from the DC’s outstretched hand and read it aloud.

  “‘Pity it wasn’t Twelfth Night”.’

  Holmes peered at the line of type. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Short but sweet,’ said Rebus. ‘Twelfth Night. A play by Shakespeare and the end of the Christmas season. I wonder which one he means?’ Rebus refolded the note and slipped it into his pocket. ‘But is it a suicide note or not? It could just be a bog-standard note, a reminder or whatever, couldn’t it? I still think this is a stunt gone wrong.’ He paused to cough. He was standing beside the cobblestone inset of the Heart of Midlothian, and like many a Scot before him, he spat for luck into the centre of the heart-shaped stones. Holmes looked away and found himself gazing into the dead man’s dulled eyes. He turned back as Rebus was fumbling with a handkerchief.

  ‘Maybe,’ Rebus was saying between blows, ‘we should have a word with the rest of the cast. I don’t suppose they’ll have much to keep them occupied.’ He gestured towards the scaffold. ‘Not until they get back their prop. Besides, we’ve got a job to do, haven’t we?’

  II

  ‘Well, I say we keep going!’ the voice yelled. ‘We’ve got an important piece of work here, a play people should see. If anything, David’s death will bring audiences in. We shouldn’t be pushing them away. We shouldn’t be packing our bags and crawling back south.’

  ‘You sick bastard.’

  Rebus and Holmes entered the makeshift auditorium as the speaker of these last three words threw himself forwards and landed a solid punch against the side of the speech-maker’s face. His glasses flew from his nose and slid along the floor, stopping an inch or two short of Rebus’s scuffed leather shoes. He stooped, picked up the spectacles and moved forward.

  The room was of a size, and had an atmosphere, that would have suited a monastery’s dining-hall. It was long and narrow, with a stage constructed along its narrow face and short rows of chairs extending back into the gloom. What windows there were had been blacked-out and the hall’s only natural light came from the open door through which Rebus had just stepped, to the front left of the stage itself.

  There were five of them in the room, four men and a woman. All looked to be in their mid- to late-twenties. Rebus handed over the glasses.

  ‘Not a bad right-hook that,’ he said to the attacker, who was looking with some amazement at his own hand, as though hardly believing it capable of such an action. ‘I’m Inspector Rebus, this is Detective Constable Holmes. And you are?’

  They introduced themselves in turn. Sitting on the stage was Pam, who acted. Beside her was Peter Collins, who also acted. On a chair in front of the stage, legs and arms crossed and having obviously enjoyed tremendously the one-sided bout he had just witnessed, sat Marty Jones.

  ‘I don’t act,’ he said loudly. ‘I just design the set, build the bloody thing, make all the props and work the lights and the music during the play.’

  ‘So it’s your scaffold then?’ commented Rebus. Marty Jones looked less confident.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I made it a bit too bloody well, didn’t I?’

  ‘We could just as easily blame the rope manufacturer, Mr Jones,’ Rebus said quietly. His eyes moved to the man with the spectacles, who was nursing a bruised jaw.

  ‘Charles Collins,’ the man said sulkily. He looked towards where Peter Collins sat on the stage. ‘No relation. I’m the director. I also wrote “Scenes from a Hanging”.’

  Rebus nodded. ‘How have the reviews been?’

  Marty Jones snorted.

  ‘Not great,’ Charles Collins admitted. ‘We’ve only had four,’ he went on, knowing if he didn’t say it someone else would. ‘They weren’t exactly complimentary.’

  Marty Jones snorted again. Stiffening his chin, as though to take another punch, Collins ignored him.

  ‘And the audiences?’ Rebus asked, interested.

  ‘Lousy.’ This from Pam, swinging her legs in front of her as though such news was not only quite acceptable, but somehow humorous as well.

  ‘Average, I’d say,’ Charles Collins corrected. ‘Going by what other companies have been telling me.’

  ‘That’s the problem with staging a new play, isn’t it?’ Rebus said knowledgeably, while Holmes stared at him. Rebus was standing in the midst of the group now, as though giving them a preproduction pep talk. ‘Trying to get audiences to watch new work is always a problem. They prefer the classics.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Charles Collins agreed enthusiastically. ‘That’s what I’ve been telling—’ with a general nod in everyone’s direction, ‘them. The classics are “safe”. That’s why we need to challenge people.’

  ‘To excite them,’ Rebus continued, ‘to shock them even. Isn’t that right, Mr Collins? To give them a spectacle?’

  Charles Collins seemed to see where Rebus’s line, devious though it was, was leading. He shook his head.

  ‘Well, they got a spectacle all right,’ Rebus went on, all enthusiasm gone from his voice. ‘Thanks to Mr Jones’s scaffold, the people got a shock. Someone was hanged. I think his name’s David, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’ This from the attacker. ‘David Caulfield.’ He looked towards the writer/director. ‘Supposedly a friend of ours. Someone we’ve known for three years. Someone we never thought could…’

  ‘And you are?’ Rebus was brisk. He didn’t want anyone breaking down just yet, not while there were still questions that needed answers.

  ‘Hugh Clay.’ The young man smiled bitterly. ‘David always said it sounded like “ukulele”.’

  ‘And you’re an actor?’

  Hugh Clay nodded.

  ‘And so was David Caulfield?’

  Another nod. ‘I mean, we’re not really professionals. We’re students. That’s all. Students with pretensions.’

  Something about Hugh Clay’s voice, its tone and its slow rhythms, had made the room darken, so that everyone seemed less animated, more reflective, remembering at last that David Caulfield was truly dead.

  ‘And what do you think happened to him, Hugh? I mean, how do you think he died?’

  Clay seemed puzzled by the question. ‘He killed himself, didn’t he?’

  ‘Did he?’ Rebus shrugged. ‘We don’t know for certain. The pathologist’s report may give us a better idea.’ Rebus turned to Marty Jones, who was looking less confident all the time. ‘Mr Jones, could David have operated the scaffold by himself ?’

  ‘That’s the way I designed it,’ Jones replied. ‘I mean, David worked it himself every night. During the hanging scene.’

  Rebus pondered this. ‘And could someone else have worked the mechanism?’

  Jones nodded. ‘No problem. The neck noose we used was a dummy. The real noose was attached around David’s chest, under his arms. He held a cord behind him and at the right moment he pulled the cord, the trapdoor opened and he fell about a yard. It looked pretty bloody realistic. He had to wear padding under his arms to stop bruising.’ He glanced at Charles Collins. ‘It was the best bit of the show.’

  ‘But,’ said Rebus, ‘the scaffold could easily be rejigged to work
properly?’

  Jones nodded. ‘All you’d need is a bit of rope. There’s plenty lying around backstage.’

  ‘And then you could hang yourself ? Really hang yourself ?’

  Jones nodded again.

  ‘Or someone could hang you,’ said Pam, her eyes wide, voice soft with horror.

  Rebus smiled towards her, but seemed to be thinking about something else. In fact, he wasn’t thinking of anything in particular: he was letting them stew in the silence, letting their minds and imaginations work in whatever way they would.

  At last, he turned to Charles Collins. ‘Do you think David killed himself ?’

  Collins shrugged. ‘What else?’

  ‘Any particular reason why he would commit suicide?’

  ‘Well,’ Collins looked towards the rest of the company. ‘The show,’ he said. ‘The reviews weren’t very complimentary about David’s performance.’

  ‘Tell me a little about the play.’

  Collins tried not to sound keen as he spoke. Tried, Rebus noticed, but failed. ‘It took me most of this year to write,’ he said. ‘What we have is a prisoner in a South American country, tried and found guilty, sentenced to death. The play opens with him standing on the scaffold, the noose around his neck. Scenes from his life are played out around him, while his own scenes are made up of soliloquies dealing with the larger questions. What I’m asking the audience to do is to ask themselves the same questions he’s asking himself on the scaffold. Only the answers are perhaps more urgent, more important for him, because they’re the last things he’ll ever know.’

  Rebus broke in. The whole thing sounded dreadful. ‘And David would be on stage the entire time?’ Collins nodded. ‘And how long was that?’

  ‘Anywhere between two hours and two and a half—’ with a glance towards the stage, ‘depending on the cast.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Sometimes lines were forgotten, or a scene went missing.’ (Peter and Pam smiled in shared complicity.) ‘Or the pace just went.’

  ‘“Never have I prayed so ardently for a death to take place”, as one of the reviews put it,’ Hugh Clay supplied. ‘It was a problem of the play. It didn’t have anything to do with David.’