A Good Hanging - Rankin: Short 01

by Ian Rankin

  Washing machine rumbling. Hair-drier whirring. Coleman Hawkins in the living-room. He went into the living-room. Could do with a tidy, couldn’t it? Hoover, dust. Car sitting outside waiting to be washed. Everything could wait. There were the papers to be read. There they were on the table, just next to his briefcase. The briefcase full of documents for his attention, half-completed case-notes, reminders of appointments, all the rubbish he hadn’t found time for during the week at the station. All the so-important paperwork, without which his life would be milk and honey. Some toast perhaps? Yes, he would eat some toast.

  He checked his watch: ten past eleven. He had switched off the hairdrier, but left it sitting on the toilet, the extension lead snaking across the floor to the wall-socket in the hall. The washing machine was silent, spent. One more cup of coffee left in the pot. He had flicked through the papers, looking for the interesting, the unusual. Same old stories: court cases, weekend crime, sport. There was even a paragraph on Friday night’s action. He skipped that, but remembered all the same. Bright knife’s flat edge, caught in the lamplight. Sour damp smell in the alleyway. Feet standing in something soft. Don’t look down, look at him, look straight at him, the cornered animal. Look at him, talk to him with your eyes, try to calm him, or quell him.

  There were birds on the window sill, chirping, wanting some crumbled up crusts of bread, but he had no bread worth the name left in the flat; just fresh rolls, too soft to be thrown out. Ach, he’d never eat six rolls though, would he? One or two would go stale and then he’d give them to the birds. So why not give them some in advance, while the rolls are soft and sweet?

  In the kitchen he prepared the broken pieces of bread on a plate, then took it to the birds on the window-ledge. Hell: what about lunch? Sunday afternoon lunch. In the freezer compartment, he found a steak. How long would it take to defrost? Damn! he meant to pick up the microwave during the week. The shop had called him to say they’d fixed the fault. He was supposed to have collected it on Friday, but he’d been too busy. So: defrost in a low oven. And wine. Yes, open a bottle. He could always drink just one or two glasses, then keep the rest of the bottle for some other occasion. Last Christmas, a friend had given him a vacuum-tube. It was supposed to keep wine fresh after opening. Where had he put it? In the cupboard beside the wine: that would make sense. But there was no gadget to be found.

  He chose a not-bad bottle, bought from a reliable wine merchant in Marchmont and stood it on the table in the living-room. Beside his briefcase. Let the sediment settle. That’s what Sunday was all about, wasn’t it? Maybe he could try one of the crosswords. It was ages since he’d done a crossword. A glass of wine and a crossword while he waited for the meat to thaw. Sediment wouldn’t be settled yet, but what the hell. He opened the bottle and poured an inch into his glass. Glanced at his watch again. It was half past eleven. A bit early to be drinking. Cheers.

  You could break the rules on a Sunday, couldn’t you?

  Christ, what a week it had been at work. Everything from a senile rapist to a runaway blind boy. A shotgun robbery at a bookmaker’s shop and an apparently accidental drowning at the docks. Drunk, the victim had been. Dead drunk. Fished about a bottle of whisky and a recently dismembered kebab from his stomach. Annual crime figures for the Lothians were released: murder slightly up on the previous year, sexual assaults well up, burglaries up, street crime down a little, motoring offences significantly reduced. The clear-up rate for housebreakings in some parts of Edinburgh was standing at less than five per cent. Rebus was not exactly a fascist, not quite a totalitarian, but he knew that given wider powers of entry and search, that final figure could be higher. There were high-rise blocks where a flat on the twelfth floor would be broken into time after time. Was someone climbing twelve flights to break in? Of course not: someone in the block was responsible, but without the powers of immediate and indiscriminate search, they’d never find the culprit.

  And that was the tip of the whole polluted iceberg. Maniacs were put back on the streets by institutions unable or unwilling to cope. Rebus had never seen so many beggars in Edinburgh as in this past year. Teenagers (and younger) up to grandparents, dossing, cadging the occasional quid or cigarette. Christ, it depressed him to think of it almost as much as it did to pretend he could ignore it. He stalked through to the kitchen and felt the steak. It was still solid at its core. He lifted the nearly dry clothes out of the machine and draped them over the cold radiators throughout the flat. More music on the hi-fi. Art Pepper this time, a little louder, the hour being respectable. Not that the neighbours ever complained. Sometimes he could see in their eyes that they wanted to complain - complain about his noise, his irregular comings and goings, the way he revved his car or coughed his way up the stairwell. They wanted to complain, but they daren’t, for fear that he would somehow ‘stitch them up’ or would prove not to be amenable to some favour they might ask one day. They all watched the TV police dramas and thought they must know their neighbour pretty well. Rebus shook his head and poured more wine: two inches deep in the glass this time. They knew nothing about him. Nothing. He didn’t have a TV, hated all the game shows and the cop shows and the news programmes. Not having a TV had set him apart from his colleagues at the station: he found he had little to discuss with them of a morning. His mornings were quieter and saner for it.

  He checked the damp patch in the bathroom again, letting his hand rest against it for half a minute. Mmm: it still wasn’t completely dry. But then maybe his hands were damp from the washing he had been carrying. What the hell. Back in the bedroom, he picked up some books from the floor and stacked them against a wall, beside other columns of paperbacks and hardbacks, read and unread. One day he would get time to read them. They were like contraband: he couldn’t stop himself buying them, but then he never really did anything with them once he’d bought them. The buying was the thing, that sense of ownership. Perhaps somewhere in Britain someone had exactly the same collection of books as him, but he doubted it. The range was too eclectic, everything from secondhand rugby yearbooks to dense philosophical works. Meaningless, really; without pattern. So much of his working life was spent to a pattern, a modus operandi. A series of rules for the possible (not probable) solving of crimes. One of the rules would have it that he get through the briefcase full of work before Monday morning and, preferably, while still sober.

  Bell. Bell?

  Bell. Someone at his front door. Jesus, on a Sunday? Not on a Sunday, please, God. The wrong door: they’d got the wrong door. Give them a minute and they would realise their mistake. Bell again. Bloody hell’s bells. Right then, he would answer it.

  He pulled the door open slowly, peering around it. Detective Constable Brian Holmes was standing on the tenement landing.

  ‘Brian?’

  ‘Hello, sir. Hope you don’t mind. I was in the neighbourhood and thought I’d ... you know.’

  Rebus held open the door. ‘Come in.’

  He led Holmes through the hall, stepping over the electric flex. Holmes stared at the flex, an alarmed look on his face.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Rebus, pausing at the threshold of the living-room. ‘I’m not going to jump in the bath with an electric fire. Just drying out a damp patch.’

  ‘Oh.’ Holmes sounded unconvinced. ‘Right.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Rebus. ‘I’ve just opened a bottle of wine. Would you like some?’

  ‘Bit early for me,’ Holmes said, glancing towards Rebus’s glass.

  ‘Well, coffee then. I think there’s still some in the pot.’

  ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

  They were both seated, Rebus in his usual chair, Holmes perched on the edge of the sofa. Rebus knew why the younger officer was here, but he was damned if he would make it easy for him.

  ‘In the neighbourhood you say?’

  ‘That’s right. I was at a party last night in Mayfield. Afterwards, I stopped the night.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Holmes smiled. ‘No such luc
k, I slept on the sofa.’

  ‘It’s still off with Nell then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes she ... let’s change the subject.’

  He flipped one of the newspapers over so that he could study the back page. ‘Did you see the boxing last night?’

  ‘I don’t have a television.’

  Holmes looked around the room, then smiled again. ‘Neither you do. I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind when you come up for promotion, Constable.’ Rebus took a large gulp of wine, watching Holmes over the rim of the glass. Holmes was looking less comfortable by the second.

  ‘Any plans for the day?’

  ‘Such as?’

  Holmes shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I thought maybe you had a Sunday routine. You know: clean the car, that sort of thing.’

  Rebus nodded towards the briefcase on the table. ‘Paperwork. That’ll keep me busy most of the day.’

  Holmes nodded, flicking through the paper until he came, as Rebus knew he would, to the piece about the nightclub bust.

  ‘It’s at the bottom of the page,’ Rebus said. ‘But then you know that, don’t you? You’ve already seen it.’ He rose from his chair sharply and walked to the hi-fi, turning the record over. Alto sax bloomed from the speakers. Holmes still hadn’t said anything. He was pretending to read the paper, but his eyes weren’t moving. Rebus returned to his seat.

  ‘Was there really a party, Brian?’

  ‘Yes.’ Holmes paused. ‘No.’

  ‘And you weren’t just passing?’

  ‘No. I wanted to see how you were.’

  ‘And how am I?’

  ‘You look fine.’

  ‘That’s because I am fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  Holmes sighed and threw aside the paper. ‘I’m glad to hear it. I was worried, John. We were all a bit shaken up.’

  ‘I’ve killed someone before, Brian. It wasn’t the first time.’

  ‘Yes, but Christ, I mean ...’ Holmes got up and walked to the window, looking down on the street. A nice quiet street in a quiet part of town. Net curtains and trim front gardens, the gardens of professional people, lawful people, people who smiled at you in shops or chatted in a bus queue.

  But Rebus’s mind flashed again to the dark alleyway, a distant streetlamp, the cornered drug dealer. He had thrown packets from his pockets onto the ground as he had run. Like sowing seed. Small polythene bags of drugs soft and hard. Sowing them in the soft mud, every year a new crop.

  Then the blinding light. The flat steel of a knife. Not a huge knife, but how big did a knife need to be? An inch of blade would be enough. Anything more was excess. It was a very excessive knife indeed, curved, serrated edge, a commando special. The kind you could buy from a camping shop. The kind anybody could buy from a camping shop. A serious knife for outdoor pursuits. Rebus had the idea they called them ‘survival’ knives.

  The man - not much more than a boy in reality, eighteen or nineteen - had not hesitated. He slid the knife out from the waistband of his trousers. He lunged, one swipe, two swipes. Rebus wasn’t fit, but his reactions were fast. On the third swipe, he snapped out a hand and caught the wrist, twisting it all the way. The knife fell to the ground. The dealer cried out in pain and dropped to one knee. No words had passed between the two men. There was no real need for words.

  But then Rebus had realised that his opponent was not on his knees as a sign of defeat. He was scrabbling around for the knife and found it with his free hand. Rebus let go of the dead wrist and pinned the man’s left arm to his body, but the arm was strong and the blade sheared through Rebus’s trousers, cutting a red line up across his thigh. Rebus brought his knee up hard into his adversary’s crotch and felt the body go limp. He repeated the action, but the dealer wasn’t giving up. The knife was rising again. Rebus grabbed the wrist with one hand, the other going for the man’s throat. Then he felt himself being spun and pushed hard up against the wall of the alley. The wall was damp, smelling of mould. He pressed a thumb deep into the dealer’s larynx, still wrestling with the knife. His knee thudded into the man’s groin again. And then, as the strength in the knife-arm eased momentarily, Rebus yanked the wrist and pushed.

  Pushed hard, driving the dealer across the alley and against the other wall. Where the man gasped, gurgled, eyes bulging. Rebus stood back and released his grasp on the wrist, the wrist which held the knife, buried up to the hilt in the young man’s stomach.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he whispered. ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.’

  The dealer was staring in surprise at the handle of the knife. His hand fell away from it, but the knife itself stayed put. He shuffled forward, walking past Rebus, who could only stand and watch, making for the entrance to the alleyway. The tip of the knife was protruding through the back of the dealer’s jacket. He made it to the mouth of the alley before falling to his knees.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Mmm?’ Rebus looked up and saw that Holmes was studying him from the window. ‘What is it, Brian?’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I told you, I’m fine.’ Rebus tipped the last of the wine down his throat and placed the glass on the floor, trying to control the trembling in his hand.

  ‘It’s just that ... well, I’ve never — ’

  ‘You’ve never killed anyone.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Holmes came back to the sofa. ‘I haven’t.’ He sat down, hands pressed between his knees, leaning slightly forwards as he spoke. ‘What does it feel like?’

  ‘Feel like?’ Rebus smiled with half his mouth. ‘It doesn’t feel like anything. I don’t even think about it. That’s the best way.’

  Holmes nodded slowly. Rebus was thinking: get to the point. And then Holmes came to the point.

  ‘Did you mean to do it?’ he asked.

  Rebus had no hesitation. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t know it had happened until it did happen. We got into a clinch and somehow the knife ended up where it ended up. That’s all. That’s what I told them back at the station and that’s what I’ll tell any inquiry they shove at me. It was an accident.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Holmes quietly, nodding. ‘That’s what I thought.’

  Accidents will happen, won’t they?

  Like burning the steak. Like finishing the bottle when you’d meant to have just a couple of glasses. Like punching a dent in the bathroom wall. Accidents happened and most of them happened in the home.

  Holmes refused the offer of lunch and left. Rebus sat in the chair for a while, just listening to jazz, forgetting all about the steak. He only remembered it when he went to open another bottle of wine. The corkscrew had found its way back into the cutlery drawer, and he plucked out a knife by mistake. A small sharp-bladed knife with a wooden handle. He kept this knife for steaks especially.

  It was good of Holmes to look in, no matter what the motive. And it was good of him not to stay, too. Rebus needed to be alone, needed time and space enough to think. He had told Holmes he never thought about it, never thought about death. That was a lie; he thought about it all the time. This weekend he was replaying Friday night, going over the scene time and time again in his head. Trying to answer the question Holmes himself had asked: was it an accident? But every time Rebus went through it, the answer became more and more vague. The hand was holding the knife, and then Rebus was angling that hand away from himself, propelling the hand and the body behind it backward into the wall of the alley. Angling the hand ... That was the vital moment. When he grabbed the wrist so that the knife was pointing towards the dealer, what had been going through his mind then? The thought that he was saving himself? Or that he was about to kill the dealer?

  Rebus shook his head. It was no clearer now than it had been at the time. The media had chalked it up yesterday as self-defence and the internal inquiry would come to the same conclusion. Could he have disarmed the young man? Probably. Would the man have killed Rebus, given the chance? Certainly. Had h
e lived, would he have become Prime Minister, or fascist dictator, or Messiah? Would he have seen the error of his ways, or would he have gone on dispensing the only thing he had to sell? What about his parents, his family, his friends who had known him at school, who had known him as a child: what would they be thinking now? Were the photograph albums and the paper hankies out? Pictures of the dealer as a boy, dressed up as a cowboy on his birthday, pictures of him splashing in the bath as a baby. Memories of someone John Rebus had never known.

  He shook his head again. Thinking about it would do no good, but it was the only way to deal with it. And yes, he felt guilty. He felt soiled and defeated and bad. But he would stop feeling bad, and then eventually he would stop feeling anything at all. He had killed before; it might be he would kill again. You never knew until the moment itself.

  And sometimes even then, you still didn’t know, and would continue not to know. Holmes mentioned Mayfield. Rebus knew of a church in Mayfield with an evening service on a Sunday. A church with a restrained congregation and a minister not overly keen on prying into one’s affairs. Maybe he would go there later. Meantime, he felt like a walk. He would walk through The Meadows and back across Bruntsfield Links, with a diversion towards the ice-cream shop near Tollcross. Maybe he’d bump into his friend Frank.

  For this was Sunday, his day off, and he could do whatever he liked, couldn’t he? After all, Sunday was a day for breaking the rules. It was the only day he could afford.

  Auld Lang Syne

  Places Detective Inspector John Rebus did not want to be at midnight on Hogmanay: number one, the Tron in Edinburgh.

  Which was perhaps, Rebus decided, why he found himself at five minutes to midnight pushing his way through the crowds which thronged the area of the Royal Mile outside the Tron Kirk. It was a bitter night, a night filled with the fumes of beer and whisky, of foam licking into the sky as another can was opened, of badly sung songs and arms around necks and stooped, drunken proclamations of undying love, proclamations which would be forgotten by morning.