10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘You mean the little sodomite who made the complaint? He’s buggered off. Disappeared. Gave us a false address, the works.’

  ‘So I’m off the butcher’s hook?’

  ‘Just about.’ Rebus was about to remonstrate. ‘Give it a few more days, John, that’s all I’m asking. Time for it to die a natural death.’

  ‘You mean people are talking?’

  ‘A few of the lads have had a laugh about it. I don’t suppose you can blame them. In a day or so, there’ll be something else for them to joke about, and it’ll all be forgotten.’

  ‘There’s nothing to forget!’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s all some plot to keep you out of action, and this mysterious Mr Hyde’s behind it all.’

  Rebus stared at Watson, his lips clamped shut. He could yell, could scream and shout. He breathed hard instead, and snatched at the drink when the waiter placed the tray on the table. He’d taken two gulps before the waiter informed him that he was drinking the other gentleman’s orange juice. His own gin and orange was the one still on the tray. Rebus reddened as Watson, laughing again, placed a five-pound note on the tray. The waiter coughed in embarrassment.

  ‘Your drinks come to six pounds fifty, sir,’ he told Watson.

  ‘Ye gods!’ Watson searched in his pocket for some change, found a crumpled pound note and some coins, and placed them on the tray.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ The waiter lifted the tray and turned away before Watson had the chance to ask about any change that might be owing. He looked at Rebus, who was smiling now.

  ‘Well,’ Watson said, ‘I mean, six pounds fifty! That would feed some families for a week.’

  ‘This is the life,’ Rebus said, throwing the Superintendent’s words back at him.

  ‘Yes, well said, John. I was in danger of forgetting there can be more to life than personal comfort. Tell me, which church do you attend?’

  ‘Well, well. Come to take us all in, have you?’ Both men turned at this new voice. It was Tommy McCall. Rebus checked his watch. Eight thirty. Tommy looked as though he’d been to a few pubs en route to the club. He sat down heavily in what had been Paulette’s chair.

  ‘What’re you drinking?’ He snapped his fingers, and the waiter, a frown on his face, came slowly towards the table.

  ‘Sirs?’

  Tommy McCall looked up at him. ‘Hello, Simon. Same again for the constabulary, and I’ll have the usual.’

  Rebus watched the waiter as McCall’s words sank in. That’s right, son, Rebus thought to himself, we’re the police. Now why should that fact frighten you so much? The waiter turned, seeming to read Rebus’s mind, and headed stiffly back to the bar.

  ‘So what brings you two here?’ McCall was lighting a cigarette, glad to have found some company and ready to make a night of it.

  ‘It was John’s idea,’ Watson said. ‘He wanted to come, so I fixed it with Finlay, then reckoned I might as well come along, too.’

  ‘Quite right.’ McCall looked around him. ‘Nobody much in tonight though, not yet leastways. The place is usually packed to the gunnels with faces you’d recognise, names you’d know like you know your own. This is tame tonight.’

  He had offered round his pack of cigarettes, and Rebus had taken one, which he now lit, inhaling gratefully, regretting it immediately as the smoke mixed with the alcohol fumes in his chest. He needed to think fast and hard. Watson and now McCall: he had planned on dealing with neither.

  ‘By the way, John,’ Tommy McCall said, ‘thanks for the lift last night.’ His tone made the subtext clear to Rebus. ‘Sorry if it was any trouble.’

  ‘No trouble, Tommy. Did you sleep well?’

  ‘I never have trouble sleeping.’

  ‘Me neither,’ interrupted Farmer Watson. ‘The benefits of a clear conscience, eh?’

  Tommy turned to Watson. ‘Shame you couldn’t get to Malcolm Lanyon’s party. We had a pretty good time, didn’t we, John?’

  Tommy smiled across at Rebus, who smiled back. A group at the next table were laughing at some joke, the men drawing on thick cigars, the women playing with their wrist jewellery. McCall leaned across towards them, hoping perhaps to share in the joke, but his shining eyes and uneven smile kept him apart from them.

  ‘Had many tonight, Tommy?’ Rebus asked. McCall, hearing his name, turned back to Rebus and Watson.

  ‘One or two,’ he said. ‘A couple of my trucks didn’t deliver on time, drivers on the piss or something. Lost me two big contracts. Drowning my sorrows.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Watson said with sincerity. Rebus nodded agreement, but McCall shook his head theatrically.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of selling the business anyway, retiring while I’m still young. Barbados, Spain, who knows. Buy a little villa.’ His eyes narrowed, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘And guess who’s interested in buying me out? You’ll never guess in a million years. Finlay.’

  ‘Finlay Andrews?’

  ‘The same.’ McCall sat back, drew on his cigarette, blinking into the smoke. ‘Finlay Andrews.’ He leaned forward again confidentially. ‘He’s got a finger in quite a few pies, you know. It’s not just this place. He’s got this and that directorship, shares here there and everywhere, you name it.’

  ‘Your drinks.’ The waiter’s voice had more than a note of disapproval in it. He seemed to want to linger, even after McCall had pitched a ten-pound note onto the tray and waved him away.

  ‘Aye,’ McCall continued after the waiter had retreated. ‘Fingers in plenty of pies. All strictly above board, mind. You’d have a hellish job proving otherwise.’

  ‘And he wants to buy you out?’ Rebus asked.

  McCall shrugged. ‘He’s made a good price. Not a great price, but I won’t starve.’

  ‘Your change, sir.’ It was the waiter again, his voice cold as a chisel. He held the salver out towards McCall, who stared up at him.

  ‘I didn’t want any change,’ he explained. ‘It was a tip. Still,’ he winked at Rebus and Watson, scooping the coins from the tray, ‘if you don’t want it, son, I suppose I might as well have it back.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Rebus loved this. The waiter was giving McCall every kind of danger signal there was, but McCall was too drunk or too naive to notice. At the same time, Rebus was aware of complications which might be about to result from the presence of Superintendent Watson and Tommy McCall at Finlay’s, on the night Finlay’s erupted.

  There was a sudden commotion from the entrance hall, raised voices, boisterous rather than angry. And Paulette’s voice, too, pleading, then remonstrative. Rebus glanced at his watch again. Eight fifty. Right on time.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Everybody in the bar was interested, and a few had risen from their seats to investigate. The barman pushed a button on the wall beside the optics, then made for the hall. Rebus followed. Just inside the front door Paulette was arguing with several men, dressed in business suits but far the worse for wear. One was telling her that she couldn’t refuse him, because he was wearing a tie. Another explained that they were in town for the evening and had heard about the club from someone in a bar.

  ‘Philip, his name was. He told us to say Philip had said it was okay and we could come in.’

  ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, but this is a private club.’ The barman was joining in now, but his presence was unwanted.

  ‘Talking to the lady here, pal, okay? All we want is a drink and maybe a wee flutter, isn’t that right?’

  Rebus watched as two more ‘waiters’, hard young men with angular faces, came quickly down the stairs from the first floor.

  ‘Now look –’

  ‘Just a wee flutter –’

  ‘In town for the night –’

  ‘I’m sorry –’

  ‘Watch the jacket, pal –’

  ‘Hey! –’

  Neil McGrath struck the first blow, catching one of the heavies with a solid right to the gut, doubling the man over
. People were gathering in the hallway now, leaving the bar and the restaurant untended. Rebus, still watching the fight, began to move backwards through the crowd, past the door to the bar, past the restaurant, towards the cloakroom, the toilets, the office door, and the door behind that.

  ‘Tony! Is that you?’ It had to happen. Tommy McCall had noticed his brother Tony as one of the apparent out-of-town drunks. Tony, his attention diverted, received a blow to the face which sent him flying back against the wall. ‘That’s my brother you’re punching!’ Tommy was in there now too, mixing it with the best of them. Constables Neil McGrath and Harry Todd were fit and healthy young men, and they were holding their own. But when they saw Superintendent Watson, they automatically froze, even though he could have no idea who they were. Each was caught with a sickening blow, which woke them to the fact that this was for real. They forgot about Watson and struck out for all they were worth.

  Rebus noticed that one of the fighters was hanging back just a little, not really throwing himself into it. He stayed near the door, too, ready to flee when necessary, and he kept glancing towards the back of the hallway, where Rebus stood. Rebus waved an acknowledgment. Detective Constable Brian Holmes did not wave back. Then Rebus turned and faced the door at the end of the hallway, the door to the club’s extension. He closed his eyes, screwed up his courage, made a fist of his right hand, and brought it flying up into his own face. Not full strength, some self-protection circuit wouldn’t let him do that, but hard. He wondered how people managed to slit their wrists, then opened his watering eyes and checked his nose. There was blood smeared over his top lip, dripping from both nostrils. He let it drip, and hammered on the door.

  Nothing. He hammered again. The noise of the fight was at its height now. Come on, come on. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it below his nostrils, catching droplets of brightest crimson. The door was unlocked from within. It opened a couple of inches and eyes peered out at Rebus.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Rebus pulled back a little so the man could see the commotion at the front door. The eyes opened wide with surprise, and the man glanced back at Rebus’s bloody face before opening the door wider. The man was hefty, not old, but with hair unnaturally thin for his age. As if to compensate for this, he had a copious moustache. Rebus remembered Tracy’s description of the man who had followed her the night she’d come to his flat. This man would fit that description.

  ‘We need you out here,’ Rebus said. ‘Come on.’

  The man paused, thinking it over. Rebus thought he was about to close the door again, and was getting ready to kick out with all his might, but the man pulled open the door and stepped out, passing Rebus. Rebus slapped the man’s muscular back as he went.

  The door was open. Rebus stepped through, sought the key, and locked it behind him. There were bolts top and bottom. He slid the top one across. Let nobody in, he was thinking, and nobody out. Then, and only then, did he look around him. He was at the top of a narrow flight of stairs, concrete, uncarpeted. Maybe Paulette had been right. Maybe the extension wasn’t finished after all. It didn’t look like it was meant to be part of Finlay’s Club though, this staircase. It was too narrow, almost furtive. Slowly, Rebus moved downwards, the heels of his hired shoes making all-too-audible sounds against the steps.

  Rebus counted twenty steps, and figured that he was now below the level of the building’s lower ground floor, somewhere around cellar level or a bit below that even. Maybe planning restrictions had got Finlay Andrews after all. Unable to build up, he had built down. The door at the bottom of the stairs looked fairly solid. Again, a utilitarian-looking construction, rather than decorative. It would take a good twenty-pound hammer to break through this door. Rebus tried the handle instead. It turned, and the door opened.

  Utter darkness. Rebus shuffled through the door, using what light there was from the top of the stairs to make out what he could. Which was to say, nothing. It looked like he was in some kind of storage area. Some big empty space. Then the lights came on, four rows of strip lights on the ceiling high above him. Their wattage low, they still gave enough illumination to the scene. A small boxing ring stood in the centre of the floor, surrounded by a few dozen stiff-backed chairs. This was the place then. The disc jockey had been right.

  Calum McCallum had needed all the friends he could get. He had told Rebus all about the rumours he’d heard, rumours of a little club within a club, where the city’s increasingly jaded begetters of wealth could place some ‘interesting bets’. A bit out of the ordinary, McCallum had said. Yes, like betting on two rent boys, junkies paid handsomely to knock the daylights out of one another and keep quiet about it afterwards. Paid with money and drugs. There was no shortage of either now that the high rollers had spun north.

  Hyde’s Club. Named after Robert Louis Stevenson’s villain, Edward Hyde, the dark side of the human soul. Hyde himself was based on the city’s Deacon Brodie, businessman by day, robber by night. Rebus could smell guilt and fear and rank expectation in this large room. Stale cigars and spilt whisky, splashes of sweat. And amongst it all moved Ronnie, and the question which still needed to be answered. Had Ronnie been paid to photograph the influential and the rich – without their knowing they were being snapped, of course? Or had he been freelancing, summoned here only as a punchbag, but stealthy enough to bring a hidden camera with him? The answer was perhaps unimportant. What mattered was that the owner of this place, the puppet-master of all these base desires, had killed Ronnie, had starved him of his fix and then given him some rat poison. Had sent one of his minions along to the squat to make sure it looked like a simple case of an overdose. So they had left the quality powder beside Ronnie. And to muddy the water, they had moved the body downstairs, leaving it in candlelight. Thinking the tableau shockingly effective. But by candlelight they hadn’t seen the pentagram on the wall, and they hadn’t meant anything by placing the body the way they had.

  Rebus had made the mistake of reading too much into the situation, all along. He had blurred the picture himself, seeing connections where there were none, seeing plot and conspiracy where none existed. The real plot was so much bigger, the size of a haystack to his needle.

  ‘Finlay Andrews!’ The shout echoed around the room, hanging emptily in air. Rebus hauled himself up into the boxing ring and looked around at the chairs. He could almost see the gleaming, gloating faces of the spectators. The canvas floor of the ring was pockmarked with brown stains, dried blood. It didn’t end here, of course. There were also the ‘guest bedrooms’, the locked doors behind which ‘private games’ were played. Yes, he could visualise the whole Sodom, held on the third Friday of the month, judging by James Carew’s diary. Boys brought back from Calton Hill to service the clients. On a table, in bed, wherever. And Ronnie had perhaps photographed it all. But Andrews had found out that Ronnie had some insurance, some photos stashed away. He couldn’t know, of course, that they were next to useless as weapons of blackmail or evidence. All he knew was that they existed.

  So Ronnie had died.

  Rebus climbed out of the ring and walked past one row of chairs. At the back of the hall, lurking in shadow, were two doors. He listened outside one, then outside the other. No sounds, yet he was sure. . . . He was about to open the door on the left, but something, some instinct, made him choose the right-hand door instead. He paused, turned the handle, pushed.

  There was a light switch just inside the door. Rebus found it, and two delicate lamps either side of the bed came on. The bed was against the side wall. There wasn’t much else in the room, apart from two large mirrors, one against the wall opposite the bed, and one above the bed. The door clicked shut behind Rebus as he walked over to the bed. Sometimes he had been accused by his superiors of having a vivid imagination. Right now, he shut his imagination out altogether. Stick to the facts, John. The fact of the bed, the fact of the mirrors. The door clicked again. He leapt forwards and yanked at the handle, but it was fast, the door locked tight.
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  ‘Shit!’ He stood back and kicked out, hitting the belly of the door with the heel of his shoe. The door trembled, but held. His shoe did not, the heel flapping off. Great, bang went his deposit on the dress hire. Hold on though, think it through. Someone had locked the door, therefore someone was down here with him, and the only other place they could have been hiding was the other room, the room next to this. He turned again and studied the mirror opposite the bed.

  ‘Andrews!’ he yelled to the mirror. ‘Andrews!’

  The voice was muffled by the wall, sounding distant, but still lucid.

  ‘Hello, Inspector Rebus. Nice to see you.’

  Rebus almost smiled, but managed to hide it.

  ‘I wish I could say the same.’ He stared into the mirror, visualising Andrews standing directly behind it, watching him. ‘A nice idea,’ he said, making conversation, needing time to gather his strength and his thoughts. ‘People screwing in one room, while everyone else is free to watch through a two-way mirror.’

  ‘Free to watch?’ The voice seemed closer. ‘No, not free, Inspector. Everything costs.’

  ‘I suppose you set the camera up in there too, did you?’

  ‘Photographed and framed. Framed being quite apt under the circumstances, don’t you think?’

  ‘Blackmail.’ It was an observation, nothing more.

  ‘Favours merely. Often given without question. But a photograph can be a useful tool when favours are being withheld.’

  ‘That’s why James Carew committed suicide?’

  ‘Oh no. That was your doing really, Inspector. James told me you’d recognised him. He thought you might be able to follow your nose from him back to Hyde’s.’

  ‘You killed him?’

  ‘We killed him, John. Which is a pity. I liked James. He was a good friend.’

  ‘Well, you have lots of friends, don’t you?’

  There was laughter now, but the voice was level, elegiac almost. ‘Yes, I suppose they’d have a job finding a judge to try me, an advocate to prosecute me, fifteen good men and true to stand as jury. They’ve all been to Hyde’s. All of them. Looking for a game with just a little more edge than those played upstairs. I got the idea from a friend in London. He runs a similar establishment, though perhaps with a less sharp edge than Hyde’s. There’s a lot of new money in Edinburgh, John. Money for all. Would you like money? Would you like a sharper edge to your life? Don’t tell me you’re happy in your little flat, with your music and your books and your bottles of wine.’ Rebus’s face showed surprise. ‘Yes, I know quite a bit about you, John. Information is my edge.’ Andrews’ voice fell. ‘There’s a membership available here if you want it, John. I think maybe you do want it. After all, membership has its privileges.’