10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  Rebus squatted down and shone the torch over the torso again. Yes, there was bruising all right. A lot of bruising.

  ‘Mainly to the ribs,’ the doctor continued. ‘But also some to the face.’

  ‘Maybe he fell,’ Rebus suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Sir?’ This from one of the constables, his eyes and voice keen. Rebus turned to him.

  ‘Yes, son?’

  ‘Come and look at this.’

  Rebus was only too glad of the excuse to move away from the doctor and his patient. The constable was leading him to the far wall, shining his torch against it as he went. Suddenly, Rebus saw why.

  On the wall was a drawing. A five-pointed star, encompassed by two concentric circles, the largest of them some five feet in diameter. The whole had been well drawn, the lines of the star straight, the circles almost exact. The rest of the wall was bare.

  ‘What do you think, sir?’ asked the constable.

  ‘Well, it’s not just your usual graffiti, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Witchcraft?’

  ‘Or astrology. A lot of druggies go in for all sorts of mysticism and hoodoo. It goes with the territory.’

  ‘The candles. . . .’

  ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions, son. You’ll never make CID that way. Tell me, why are we all carrying torches?’

  ‘Because the electric’s been cut off.’

  ‘Right. Ergo, the need for candles.’

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘I do say so, son. Who found the body?’

  ‘I did, sir. There was a telephone call, female, anonymous, probably one of the other squatters. They seem to have cleared out in a hurry.’

  ‘So there was nobody else here when you arrived?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Any idea yet who he is?’ Rebus nodded the torch towards the corpse.

  ‘No, sir. And the other houses are all squats, too, so I doubt we’ll get anything out of them.’

  ‘On the contrary. If anyone knows the identity of the deceased, they’re the very people. Take your friend and knock on a few doors. But be casual, make sure they don’t think you’re about to evict them or anything.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The constable seemed dubious about the whole venture. For one thing, he was sure to get an amount of hassle. For another, it was still raining hard.

  ‘On you go,’ Rebus chided, but gently. The constable shuffled off, collecting his companion on the way.

  Rebus approached the photographer.

  ‘You’re taking a lot of snaps,’ he said.

  ‘I need to in this light, to make sure at least a few come out.’

  ‘Bit quick off the mark in getting here, weren’t you?’

  ‘Superintendent Watson’s orders. He wants pictures of any drugs-related incidents. Part of his campaign.’

  ‘That’s a bit gruesome, isn’t it?’ Rebus knew the new Chief Superintendent, had met him. Full of social awareness and community involvement. Full of good ideas, and lacking only the manpower to implement them. Rebus had an idea.

  ‘Listen, while you’re here, take one or two of that far wall, will you?’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Rebus turned to the doctor. ‘How soon will we know what’s in that full packet?’

  ‘Later on today, maybe tomorrow morning at the latest.’

  Rebus nodded to himself. What was his interest? Maybe it was the dreariness of the day, or the atmosphere in this house, or the positioning of the body. All he knew was that he felt something. And if it turned out to be just a damp ache in his bones, well, fair enough. He left the room and made a tour of the rest of the house.

  The real horror was in the bathroom.

  The toilet must have blocked up weeks before. A plunger lay on the floor, so some cursory attempt had been made to unblock it, but to no avail. Instead, the small, splattered sink had become a urinal, while the bath had become a dumping ground for solids, upon which crawled a dozen large and jet-black flies. The bath had also become a skip, filled with bags of refuse, bits of wood. . . . Rebus didn’t stick around, pulling the door tight shut behind him. He didn’t envy the council workmen who would eventually have to come and fight the good fight against all this decay.

  One bedroom was completely empty, but the other boasted a sleeping bag, damp from the drips coming through the roof. Some kind of identity had been imposed upon the room by the pinning of pictures to its walls. Up close, he noticed that these were original photographs, and that they comprised a sort of portfolio. Certainly they were well taken, even to Rebus’s untrained eye. A few were of Edinburgh Castle on damp, misty days. It looked particularly bleak. Others showed it in bright sunshine. It still looked bleak. One or two were of a girl, age indeterminate. She was posing, but grinning broadly, not taking the event seriously.

  Next to the sleeping bag was a bin-liner half filled with clothes, and next to this a small pile of dog-eared paperbacks: Harlan Ellison, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell. Science fiction and horror. Rebus left the books where they were and went back downstairs.

  ‘All finished,’ the photographer said. ‘I’ll get those photos to you tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I also do portrait work, by the way. A nice family group for the grandparents? Sons and daughters? Here, I’ll give you my card.’

  Rebus accepted the card and pulled his raincoat back on, heading out to the car. He didn’t like photographs, especially of himself. It wasn’t just that he photographed badly. No, there was more to it than that.

  The sneaking suspicion that photographs really could steal your soul.

  On his way back to the station, travelling through the slow midday traffic, Rebus thought about how a group photograph of his wife, his daughter and him might look. But no, he couldn’t visualise it. They had grown so far apart, ever since Rhona had taken Samantha to live in London. Sammy still wrote, but Rebus himself was slow at responding, and she seemed to take umbrage at this, writing less and less herself. In her last letter she had hoped Gill and he were happy.

  He hadn’t the courage to tell her that Gill Templer had left him several months ago. Telling Samantha would have been fine: it was the idea of Rhona’s getting to hear of it that he couldn’t stand. Another notch in his bow of failed relationships. Gill had taken up with a disc jockey on a local radio station, a man whose enthusing voice Rebus seemed to hear whenever he entered a shop or a filling station, or passed the open window of a tenement block.

  He still saw Gill once or twice a week of course, at meetings and in the station-house, as well as at scenes of crimes. Especially now that he had been elevated to her rank.

  Detective Inspector John Rebus.

  Well, it had taken long enough, hadn’t it? And it was a long, hard case, full of personal suffering, which had brought the promotion. He was sure of that.

  He was sure, too, that he wouldn’t be seeing Rian again. Not after last night’s dinner party, not after the fairly unsuccessful bout of lovemaking. Yet another unsuccessful bout. It had struck him, lying next to Rian, that her eyes were almost identical to Inspector Gill Templer’s. A surrogate? Surely he was too old for that.

  ‘Getting old, John,’ he said to himself.

  Certainly he was getting hungry, and there was a pub just past the next set of traffic lights. What the hell, he was entitled to a lunch break.

  The Sutherland Bar was quiet, Monday lunchtime being one of the lowest points of the week. All money spent, and nothing to look forward to. And of course, as Rebus was quickly reminded by the barman, the Sutherland did not exactly cater for a lunchtime clientele.

  ‘No hot meals,’ he said, ‘and no sandwiches.’

  ‘A pie then,’ begged Rebus, ‘anything. Just to wash down the beer.’

  ‘If it’s food you want, there’s plenty of cafes around here. This particular pub happens to sell beers, lagers and spirits. We’re not a chippie.’

  ‘What about
crisps?’

  The barman eyed him for a moment. ‘What flavour?’

  ‘Cheese and onion.’

  ‘We’ve run out.’

  ‘Well, ready salted then.’

  ‘No, they’re out too.’ The barman had cheered up again.

  ‘Well,’ said Rebus in growing frustration, ‘what in the name of God have you got?’

  ‘Two flavours. Curry, or egg, bacon and tomato.’

  ‘Egg?’ Rebus sighed. ‘All right, give me a packet of each.’

  The barman stooped beneath the counter to find the smallest possible bags, past their sell-by dates if possible.

  ‘Any nuts?’ It was a last desperate hope. The barman looked up.

  ‘Dry roasted, salt and vinegar, chilli flavour,’ he said.

  ‘One of each then,’ said Rebus, resigned to an early death. ‘And another half of eighty-shillings.’

  He was finishing this second drink when the bar door shuddered open and an instantly recognisable figure entered, his hand signalling for refreshment before he was even halfway through the door. He saw Rebus, smiled, and came to join him on one of the high stools.

  ‘Hello, John.’

  ‘Afternoon, Tony.’

  Inspector Anthony McCall tried to balance his prodigious bulk on the tiny circumference of the bar stool, thought better of it, and stood instead, one shoe on the foot-rail, and both elbows on the freshly wiped surface of the bar. He stared hungrily at Rebus.

  ‘Give us one of your crisps.’

  When the packet was offered, he pulled out a handful and stuffed them into his mouth.

  ‘Where were you this morning then?’ said Rebus. ‘I’d to take one of your calls.’

  ‘The one at Pilmuir? Ach, sorry about that, John. Heavy night last night. I had a bit of a hangover this morning.’ A pint of murky beer was placed in front of him. ‘Hair of the dog,’ he said, and took four slow gulps, reducing it to a quarter of its former size.

  ‘Well, I’d nothing better to do anyway,’ said Rebus, sipping at his own beer. ‘Christ, those houses down there are a mess though.’

  McCall nodded thoughtfully. ‘It wasn’t always like that, John. I was born there.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, to be exact, I was born on the estate that was there before this one. It was so bad, so they said, that they levelled it and built Pilmuir instead. Bloody hell on earth it is now.’

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ said Rebus. ‘One of the young uniformed kids thought there might be some kind of occult tie-in.’ McCall looked up from his drink. ‘There was a black-magic painting on the wall,’ Rebus explained. ‘And candles on the floor.’

  ‘Like a sacrifice?’ McCall offered, chuckling. ‘My wife’s dead keen on all those horror films. Gets them out of the video library. I think she sits watching them all day when I’m out.’

  ‘I suppose it must go on, devil worship, witchcraft. It can’t all be in the imagination of the Sunday newspaper editors.’

  ‘I know how you might find out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The university,’ said McCall. Rebus frowned, disbelieving. ‘I’m serious. They’ve got some kind of department that studies ghosts and all that sort of thing. Set up with money from some dead writer.’ McCall shook his head. ‘Incredible what people will do.’

  Rebus was nodding. ‘I did read about that, now you mention it. Arthur Koestler’s money, wasn’t it?’

  McCall shrugged.

  ‘Arthur Daley’s more my style,’ he said, emptying his glass.

  Rebus was studying the pile of paperwork on his desk when the telephone rang.

  ‘DI Rebus.’

  ‘They said you were the man to talk to.’ The voice was young, female, full of unfocussed suspicion.

  ‘They were probably right. What can I do for you, miss . . .?’

  ‘Tracy. . . .’ The voice fell to a whisper on the last syllable of the name. She had already been tricked into revealing herself. ‘Never mind who I am!’ She had become immediately hysterical, but calmed just as quickly. ‘I’m phoning about that squat in Pilmuir, the one where they found. . . .’ The voice trailed off again.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Rebus sat up and began to take notice. ‘Was it you who phoned the first time?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To tell us that someone had died there.’

  ‘Yes, it was me. Poor Ronnie. . . .’

  ‘Ronnie being the deceased?’ Rebus scribbled the name onto the back of one of the files from his in-tray. Beside it he wrote ‘Tracy – caller’.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice had broken again, near to tears this time.

  ‘Can you give me a surname for Ronnie?’

  ‘No.’ She paused. ‘I never knew it. I’m not sure Ronnie was even his real name. Hardly anyone uses their real name.’

  ‘Tracy, I’d like to talk to you about Ronnie. We can do it over the telephone, but I’d rather it was face to face. Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble –’

  ‘But I am. That’s why I called. Ronnie told me, you see.’

  ‘Told you what, Tracy?’

  ‘Told me he’d been murdered.’

  The room around Rebus seemed suddenly to vanish. There was only this disconnected voice, the telephone, and him.

  ‘He said that to you, Tracy?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was crying now, sniffing back the unseen tears. Rebus visualised a frightened little girl, just out of school, standing in a distant callbox. ‘I’ve got to hide,’ she said at last. ‘Ronnie said over and over that I should hide.’

  ‘Shall I bring my car and fetch you? Just tell me where you are.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then tell me how Ronnie was killed. You know how we found him?’

  ‘Lying on the floor by the window. That’s where he was.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Oh yes, that’s where he was. By the window. Lying wrapped up into a little ball. I thought he was just sleeping. But when I touched his arm he was cold. . . . I went to find Charlie, but he’d gone. So I just panicked.’

  ‘You say Ronnie was lying in a ball?’ Rebus had begun to draw pencilled circles on the back of the file.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this was in the living room?’

  She seemed confused. ‘What? No, not in the living room. He was upstairs, in his bedroom.’

  ‘I see.’ Rebus kept on drawing effortless circles. He was trying to imagine Ronnie dying, but not really dead, crawling downstairs after Tracy had fled, ending up in the living room. That might explain those bruises. But the candles. . . . He had been so perfectly positioned between them. . . . ‘And when was this?’

  ‘Late last night, I don’t know exactly when. I panicked. When I calmed down, I phoned for the police.’

  ‘What time was it when you phoned?’

  She paused, thinking. ‘About seven this morning.’

  ‘Tracy, would you mind telling this to some other people?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I pick you up. Just tell me where you are.’

  There was another pause while she considered this. ‘I’m back in Pilmuir,’ she said finally. ‘I’ve moved into another squat.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rebus, ‘you don’t want me to come down there, do you? But you must be quite close to Shore Road. What about us meeting there?’

  ‘Well. . . .’

  ‘There’s a pub called the Dock Leaf,’ continued Rebus, giving her no time to debate. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘I’ve been kicked out of it a few times.’

  ‘Me too. Okay, I’ll meet you outside it in an hour. All right?’

  ‘All right.’ She didn’t sound over-enthusiastic, and Rebus wondered if she would keep the appointment. Well, what of it? She sounded straight enough, but she might just be another casualty, making it up to draw attention to herself, to make her life seem more interesting than it was.

  But then he’d had a feeling, hadn’t he?

  �
�All right,’ she said, and the connection was severed.

  Shore Road was a fast road around the north coast of the city. Factories, warehouses, and vast DIY and home furnishing stores were its landmarks, and beyond them lay the Firth of Forth, calm and grey. On most days, the coast of Fife was visible in the distance, but not today, with a cold mist hanging low on the water. On the other side of the road from the warehouses were the tenements, four-storey predecessors of the concrete high-rise. There was a smattering of corner shops, where neighbour met neighbour, and information was passed on, and a few small unmodernised pubs, where strangers did not go unnoticed for long.

  The Dock Leaf had shed one generation of low-life drinkers, and discovered another. Its denizens now were young, unemployed, and living six to a three-bedroom rented flat along Shore Road. Petty crime though was not a problem: you didn’t mess your own nest. The old community values still held.

  Rebus, early for the meeting, just had time for a half in the saloon bar. The beer was cheap but bland, and everyone seemed to know if not who he was then certainly what he was, their voices turned down to murmurs, their eyes averted. When, at three thirty, he stepped outside, the sudden daylight made him squint.

  ‘Are you the policeman?’

  ‘That’s right, Tracy.’

  She had been standing against the pub’s exterior wall. He shaded his eyes, trying to make out her face, and was surprised to find himself looking at a woman of between twenty and twenty-five. Her age was transparent in her face, though her style marked her out as the perennial rebel: cropped peroxide hair, two stud earrings in her left ear (but none in the right), tie-dye T-shirt, tight, faded denims, and red basketball boots. She was tall, as tall as Rebus. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw the tear-tracks on either cheek, the old acne scars. But there were also crow’s-feet around her eyes, evidence of a life used to laughter. There was no laughter in those olive-green eyes though. Somewhere in Tracy’s life a wrong turning had been made, and Rebus had the idea that she was still trying to reverse back to that fork in the road.

  The last time he had seen her she had been laughing. Laughing as her semblance curled from the wall of Ronnie’s bedroom. She was the girl in the photographs.

  ‘Is Tracy your real name?’