by Ian Rankin
Peter Collins was smiling thinly. He gazed past Rebus towards Marie, his eyes full and liquid. His voice when he spoke was tender. ‘“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage; and for turning away, let summer bear it out.” ’
‘That’s right,’ Rebus said, nodding eagerly. ‘Summer bore it out, all right. A summer fling. That’s all. Not worth killing someone for, was it, Peter? But that didn’t stop you. And the hanging was so apt, so neat. When you recalled the Fool’s quote, you couldn’t resist putting that note in David’s pocket.’ Rebus was shaking his head. ‘More fool you, Mr Collins. More fool you.’
Brian Holmes went home from the police station that night in sombre mood. The traffic was slow, too, with theatregoers threading in and out between the near-stationary cars. He rolled down the driver’s-side window, trying to make the interior less stuffy, less choked, and instead let in exhaust fumes and balmy late-evening air. Why did Rebus have to be such a clever bugger so much of the time? He seemed always to go into a case at an odd angle, like someone cutting a paper shape which, apparently random, could then be folded to make an origami sculpture, intricate and recognisable.
‘Too clever for his own good,’ he said to himself. But what he meant was that his superior was too clever for Holmes’ own good. How was he expected to shine, to be noticed, to push forwards towards promotion, when it was always Rebus who, two steps ahead, came up with the answers? He remembered a boy at school who had always beaten Holmes in every subject save History. Yet Holmes had gone to university; the boy to work on his father’s farm. Things could change, couldn’t they? Though all he seemed to be learning from Rebus was how to keep your thoughts to yourself, how to be devious, how to, well, how to act. Though all this were true, he would still be the best understudy he possibly could be. One day, Rebus wouldn’t be there to come up with the answers, or - occasion even more to be relished - would be unable to find the answers. And when that time came, Holmes would be ready to take the stage. He felt ready right now, but then he supposed every understudy must feel that way.
A flybill was thrown through his window by a smiling teenage girl. He heard her pass down the line of cars, yelling ‘Come and see our show!’ as she went. The small yellow sheet of paper fluttered onto the passenger seat and stayed there, face up, to haunt Holmes all the way back to Nell. Growing sombre again, it occurred to him how different things might have been if only Priestley had called the play A Detective Constable Calls instead.
Tit for Tat
Before he’d arrived in Edinburgh in 1970, Inspector John Rebus had fixed in his mind an image of tenement life. Tenements were things out of the Gorbals in the early years of the century, places of poverty and despair, safe havens for vermin and disease. They were the enforced homes of the poorest of the working class, a class almost without a class, a sub-class. Though tenements rose high into the air, they might as well have been dug deep into the ground. They were society’s replacement for the cave.
Of course, in the 1960s the planners had come up with something even more outrageous - the tower-block. Even cities with plenty of spare land started to construct these space-saving horrors. Perhaps the moral rehabilitation of the tenement had something to do with this new contender. Nowadays, a tenement might contain the whole of society in microcosm - the genteel spinster on the ground floor, the bachelor accountant one floor above, then the barkeeper, and above the barkeeper, always it seemed right at the top of the house, the students. This mix was feasible only because the top two floors contained flats rented out by absentee landlords. Some of these landlords might own upwards of one hundred separate flats - as was spectacularly the case in Glasgow, where the figure was even rumoured, in one or two particulars, to rise into four figures.
But in Edinburgh, things were different. In Edinburgh, the New Town planners of the nineteenth century had come up with streets of fashionable houses, all of them, to Rebus’s latter-day eyes, looking like tenements. Some prosperous areas of the city, such as Marchmont where Rebus himself lived, boasted almost nothing but tenements. And with the price of housing what it was, even the meaner streets were seeing a kind of renaissance, stone-blasted clean by new owner-occupiers who kept the cooking-range in the living-room as an ‘original feature’.
The streets around Easter Road were as good an example as any. The knock-on effect had reached Easter Road late. People had to decide first that they couldn’t afford Stockbridge, then that they couldn’t quite afford any of the New Town or its immediate surroundings, and at last they might arrive in Easter Road, not by chance but somehow through fate. Soon, an enterprising soul saw his or her opportunity and opened a delicatessen or a slightly upmarket cafe, much to the bemusement of the ‘locals’. These were quiet, accepting people for the most part, people who liked to see the tenement buildings being restored even if they couldn’t understand why anyone would pay good money for bottled French water. (After all, you were always told to steer clear of the water on foreign holidays, weren’t you?)
Despite this, the occasional Alfa Romeo or Golf GTi might find itself scratched maliciously, as might a too-clean 2CV or a coveted Morris Minor. But arson? Attempted murder? Well, that was a bit more serious. That was a very serious turn of events indeed. The trick was one perfected by racists in mixed areas. You poured petrol through the letter-box of a flat, then you set light to a rag and dropped it through the letter-box, igniting the hall carpet and ensuring that escape from the resulting fire was made difficult if not impossible. Of course, the noise, the smell of petrol meant that usually someone inside the flat was alerted early on, and mostly these fires did not spread. But sometimes ... sometimes.
‘His name’s John Brodie, sir,’ the police constable informed Rebus as they stood in the hospital corridor. ‘Age thirty-four. Works for an insurance company in their accounts department.’
None of which came as news to Rebus. He had been to the second-floor flat, just off Easter Road, reeking of soot and water now; an unpleasant clean-up ahead. The fire had spread quickly along the hall. Some jackets and coats hanging from a coat-stand had caught light and sent the flames licking along the walls and ceiling. Brodie, asleep in bed (it all happened around one in the morning) had been wakened by the fire. He’d dialled 999, then had tried putting the fire out himself, with a fair degree of success. A rug from the living-room had proved useful in snuffing out the progress of the fire along the hall and some pans of water had dampened things down. But there was a price to pay - burns to his arms and hands and face, and smoke inhalation. Neighbours, alerted by the smoke, had broken down the door just as the fire engine was arriving. CID, brought to the scene by a police constable’s suspicions, had spoken with some of the neighbours. A quiet man, Mr Brodie, they said. A decent man. He’d only moved in a few months before. Worked for an insurance company. Nobody thought he smoked, but they seemed to assume he’d left a cigarette burning somewhere.
‘Careless that. Even supposing we do live in Auld Reekie.’ And the first-floor occupier had chuckled to himself, until his wife yelped from their flat that there was water coming in through the ceiling. The man looked helpless and furious.
‘Insurance should cover it,’ Rebus commented, pouring oil on troubled ... no, not the best image that. The husband went off to investigate further and the other tenement dwellers began slouching off to bed, leaving Rebus to head into the burnt-out hallway itself.
But even without the Fire Officer, the cause of the fire had been plain to Rebus. Chillingly plain. The smell of petrol was everywhere.
He took a look round the rest of the flat. The kitchen was tiny, but boasted a large sash-window looking down onto back gardens and across to the back of the tenement over the way. The bathroom was smaller still, but kept very neat. No ring of grime around the bath, no strewn towels or underpants, nothing steeping in the sink. A very tidy bachelor was Mr Brodie. The living-room, too, was uncluttered. A series of framed prints more or less covered one wall. Detailed paintings of birds. Rebus glance
d at one or two: willow warbler, bearded tit. The rooms would need to be redecorated, of course, otherwise the charred smell would always be there. Insurance would probably cover it. Brodie was an insurance man, wasn’t he? He’d know. Maybe he’d even squeeze a cheque out of the company without too much haggling.
Finally, Rebus went into the bedroom. Messier here, mostly as a result of the hurriedly flung-back bedclothes. Pyjama bottoms lying crumpled on the bed itself. Slippers and a used mug sitting on the floor beside the bed, and in one corner, next to the small wardrobe, a tripod atop which was fixed a good make of SLR camera. On the floor against the wall was a large-format book, Better Zoom Pictures, with a photograph of an osprey on the front. Probably one of the Loch Garten ospreys, thought Rebus. He’d taken his daughter there a couple of times in the past. Tourists, plenty of them, he had seen, but ospreys were there none.
If anyone had asked him what he thought most odd about the flat, he would have answered: there’s no television set. What did Mr Brodie do for company then of an evening?
For no real reason, Rebus bent down and peered beneath the bed itself, and was rewarded with a pile of magazines. He pulled one out. Soft porn, a ‘readers’ wives’ special. He pushed it back into place. The tidy bachelor’s required bedtime companion. And, partly, an answer to his earlier question.
He left the flat and sought out one or two of the still wakeful neighbours. No one had seen or heard anything. Access to the tenement itself was easy; you just pushed open the communal front door, the lock of which had broken recently and was waiting to be fixed.
‘Any reason,’ Rebus asked, ‘why anyone would bear Mr Brodie a grudge?’
That gave them pause. No smouldering cigarette then, but arson. But there were shakes of rumpled heads. No reason. A very quiet man. Kept himself to himself. Worked in insurance. Always stopped for a chat if you met him on the stairs. Always cleaned the stairs promptly when his turn came, not like some they could mention. Probably paid his rent promptly, too. Tea was being provided in the kitchen of one of the first-floor flats, where the ‘Auld Reekie’ wag was being consoled.
‘I only painted that ceiling three months back. Do you know how much textured paint costs?’
Soon enough everyone found the answer. The man’s wife looked bored. She smiled towards the tea-party’s hostess.
‘Wasn’t that first fireman dishy?’ she said.
‘Which one?’
‘The one with the blue eyes. The one who told us not to worry. He could give me a fireman’s lift anytime.’
The hostess snorted into her tea. Rebus made his excuses and left.
Rebus had dealt with racist arson attacks before. He’d even come across ‘anti-yuppie’ attacks, usually in the form of graffiti on cars or the outside walls of property. A warehouse conversion in Leith had been sprayed with the slogan HOUSES FOR THE NEEDY, NOT THE GREEDY. The attack on Brodie seemed more personal, but it was worth considering all the possible motives. He was crossing things off from a list in his mind as he drove to the hospital. Once there, he talked to the police constable in the corridor and, after nodding his head a few times, he entered the ward where John Brodie had been ‘made comfortable’. Despite the hour, Brodie was far from asleep. He was propped up against a pillow, his arms lying out in front of him on top of the sheets. Thick creamy white cotton pads and delicate-looking bandages predominated. Part of his hair had been shaved away, so that burns to the scalp could be treated. He had no eyebrows, and only remnants of eyelashes. His face was round and shiny; easy to imagine it breaking into a chuckle, but probably not tonight.
Rebus picked a chair out from a pile against the far wall and sat down, only then introducing himself.
Brodie’s voice was shaky. ‘I know who did it.’
‘Oh?’ Rebus kept his voice low, in deference to the sleeping bodies around him. This was not quite how he’d expected the conversation to begin.
Brodie swallowed. ‘I know who did it and I know why she did it. But I don’t want to press charges.’
Rebus wasn’t about to say that this decision was not up to Brodie himself. He didn’t want the man clamming up. He wanted jaw-jaw. He nodded as if in agreement. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’ he said, inviting further confessions, as though from one friend to another.
‘She must be a bit cracked,’ Brodie went on, as though Rebus hadn’t spoken at all. ‘I told the police that at the time. She’s doolally, I said. Must be. Well, this proves it, doesn’t it?’
‘You think she needs help?’
‘Maybe. Probably.’ He seemed deep in thought for a moment. ‘Yes, almost certainly. I mean, it’s going a bit far, isn’t it? Even if you think you’ve got grounds. But she didn’t have grounds. The police told her that.’
‘But they didn’t manage to convince her.’
‘That’s right.’
Rebus thought he was playing this fairly well. Obviously, Brodie was in shock. Maybe he was even babbling a bit, but as long as he was kept talking, Rebus would be able to piece together whatever the story was that he was trying to tell. There was a wheezy, dry laugh from the bed.
Brodie’s eyes twinkled. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’ Rebus was obliged to shake his head. ‘Of course you don’t. Well, I’ll have a sip of water and then I’ll tell you.’
And he did.
The morning was bright but grey: ‘sunshine and showers’, the weatherman would term it. It wasn’t quite autumn yet. The too-short summer might yet have some surprises. Rebus waited in his room - his desk located not too far from the radiator - until the two police constables could be found. They were uneasy when they came in, until he reassured them. Yes, as requested, they had brought their notebooks with them. And yes, they remembered the incident very well indeed.
‘It started with anonymous phone calls,’ one of them began. ‘They seemed to be genuine enough. Miss Hooper told us about one of them in particular. Her phone rings. Man on the other end identifies himself as a police inspector and tells her there’s an anonymous caller who’s going through the Edinburgh directory trying number after number. He says her number might come up soon, but the police have put a trace on her line. So can she keep the man talking for as long as possible.’
‘Oh yes.’ Really, Rebus didn’t need to hear the rest. But he listened patiently to the constable’s story.
‘Later on that day, a man did ring. He asked her some very personal questions and she kept him talking. Afterwards, she rang the police station to see if they’d caught him. Only, of course, the name the so-called inspector had given wasn’t known to the station. It was the anonymous caller himself, setting her up.’
Rebus shook his head slowly. It was old, but clever. ‘So she complained about anonymous calls?’
‘Yes, sir. But then the calls stopped. So that didn’t seem too bad. No need for an operator to intercept or a change of number or anything.’
‘How did Miss Hooper seem at the time?’
The constable shrugged and turned to his colleague, who now spoke. ‘A bit nervy, sir. But that was understandable, wasn’t it? A very nice lady, I’d say. Not married. I don’t think she even had a boyfriend.’ He turned his head towards his colleague. ‘Didn’t she say something like that, Jim?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘So then what happened?’ asked Rebus.
‘A few weeks later, this would be just over a week ago, we had another call from Miss Hooper. She said a man in the tenement across the back from her was a peeping tom. She’d seen him at a window, aiming his binoculars towards her building. More particularly, she thought, towards her own flat. We investigated and spoke to Mr Brodie. He appeared quite concerned about the allegations. He showed us the binoculars and admitted using them to watch from his kitchen window. But he assured us that he was bird-watching.’ The other constable smiled at this. ‘“Bird-watching,” he said.’
‘Ornithology,’ said Rebus.
‘That’s right, sir. He s
aid he was very interested in birds, a bird-fancier sort of thing.’ Another smile. They were obviously hoping Rebus would come to enjoy the joke with them. They were wrong, though they didn’t seem to sense this just yet.
‘Go on,’ he said simply.
‘Well, sir, there did seem to be a lot of pictures of birds in his flat.’
‘You mean the prints in the living-room?’
‘That’s right, sir, pictures of an ornithological nature.’
Now the other constable interrupted. ‘You won’t believe it, sir. He said he was watching the tenement and the garden because he’d seen some ...’ pause for effect ... ‘bearded tits.’
Now both the young constables were grinning.
‘I’m glad you find your job so amusing,’ Rebus said. ‘Because I don’t think frightening phone calls, peeping toms and arson attacks are material for jokes!’
The grins disappeared.
‘Get on with it,’ Rebus demanded. The constables looked at one another.
‘Not much more to tell, sir,’ said the one called Jim. ‘The gentleman, Mr Brodie, seemed genuine enough. But he promised to be a bit more careful in future. Like I say, he seemed genuinely concerned. We informed Miss Hooper of our findings. She didn’t seem entirely convinced.’
‘Obviously not,’ said Rebus, but he did not go on to clarify. Instead, he dismissed the two officers and sat back in his chair. Brodie suspected Hooper of the arson attack, not, it would appear, without reason. What was more, Brodie had said he couldn’t think of any other enemies he might have made. Either that or he wasn’t about to tell Rebus about them. Rebus leaned back in his chair and rested his arm along the radiator, enjoying its warmth. The next person to speak to, naturally, was Miss Hooper herself. Another day, another tenement.