10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  He knew it was way too late, but the sergeant loosened the wire anyway and laid the corpse flat on the floor. Holmes was resting his head against the cold metal door, screwing shut his eyes against the parody inside the cell.

  ‘He must’ve had it hidden on him,’ the sergeant said, seeking excuses for the monumental blunder, referring to the wire which he now held in his hands. ‘Jesus, what a way to go.’

  Rebus was thinking: he’s cheated me, he’s cheated me. I wouldn’t have had the guts to do that, not slowly choke myself. . . . I could never do it, something inside would have stopped me. . . .

  ‘Who’s been in here since he was brought in?’

  The sergeant stared at Rebus, uncomprehending.

  ‘The usual lot, I suppose. He had a few questions to answer last night when you brought him in.’

  ‘Yes, but after that?’

  ‘Well, he had a meal when you lot went. That’s about it.’

  ‘Sonofabitch,’ growled Rebus, stalking out of the cell and back along the corridor. Holmes, his face white and slick, was a few steps behind, and gaining.

  ‘They’re going to bury it, Brian,’ Rebus said, his voice an angry vibrato. ‘They’re going to bury it, I know they are, and there’ll be no cross marking the spot, nothing. A junkie died of his own volition. An estate agent committed suicide. Now a lawyer tops himself in a police cell. No connection, no crime committed.’

  ‘But what about Andrews?’

  ‘Where do you think we’re headed?’

  They arrived at the hospital ward in time to witness the efficiency of the staff in a case of emergency. Rebus hurried forward, pushing his way through. Finlay Andrews, lying on his bed, chest exposed, was being given oxygen while the cardiac apparatus was installed. A doctor held the pads in front of them, then pushed them slowly against Andrews’ chest. A moment later, a jolt went through the body. There was no reading from the machine. More oxygen, more electricity. . . . Rebus turned away. He’d seen the script; he knew how the film would end.

  ‘Well?’ said Holmes.

  ‘Heart attack.’ Rebus’s voice was bland. He began to walk away. ‘Let’s call it that anyway, because that’s what the record will say.’

  ‘So what next?’ Holmes kept pace with him. He, too, was feeling cheated. Rebus considered the question.

  ‘Probably the photos will disappear. The ones that matter at any rate. And who’s left to testify? Testify to what?’

  ‘They’ve thought of everything.’

  ‘Except one thing, Brian. I know who they are.’

  Holmes stopped. ‘Will that matter?’ he called to his superior’s retreating figure. But Rebus just kept walking.

  There was a scandal, but it was a small one, soon forgotten. Shuttered rooms in elegant Georgian terraces soon became light again, in a great resurrection of spirit. The deaths of Finlay Andrews and Malcolm Lanyon were reported, and journalists sought what muck and brass they could. Yes, Finlay Andrews had been running a club which was not strictly legitimate in all of its dealings, and yes, Malcolm Lanyon had committed suicide when the authorities had begun to close in on this little empire. No, there were no details of what these ‘activities’ might have been.

  The suicide of local estate agent James Carew was in no way connected to Mr Lanyon’s suicide, though it was true the two men were friends. As for Mr Lanyon’s connection with Finlay Andrews and his club, well, perhaps we would never know. It was no more than a sad coincidence that Mr Lanyon had been appointed Mr Carew’s executor. Still, there were other lawyers, weren’t there?

  And so it ended, the story petering out, the rumours dying a little less slowly. Rebus was pleased when Tracy announced that Nell Stapleton had found her a job in a cafe/deli near the University Library. One evening, however, having spent some time in the Rutherford Bar, Rebus decided to opt for a takeaway Indian meal before home. In the restaurant, he saw Tracy, Holmes and Nell Stapleton at a corner table, sharing a joke with their meal. He turned and left without ordering.

  Back in his flat, he sat at the kitchen table for the umpteenth time, writing a rough draft of his letter of resignation. Somehow, the words failed to put across any of his emotions adequately. He crumpled the paper and tossed it towards the bin. He had been reminded in the restaurant of just how much Hyde’s had cost in human terms, and of how little justice there had been. There was a knock at the door. He had hope in his heart as he opened it. Gill Templer stood there, smiling.

  In the night, he crept through to the living room, and switched on the desk lamp. It threw light guiltily, like a constable’s torch, onto the small filing cabinet beside the stereo. The key was hidden under a corner of the carpet, as secure a hiding place as a granny’s mattress. He opened the cabinet and lifted out a slim file, which he carried to his chair, the chair which had for so many months been his bed. There he sat, composed, remembering the day at James Carew’s flat. Back then he had been tempted to lift Carew’s private diary and keep it for himself. But he had resisted temptation. Not the night at Hyde’s though. There, alone in Andrews’ office for a moment, he had filched the photograph of Tony McCall. Tony McCall, a friend and colleague with whom, these days, he had nothing in common. Except perhaps a sense of guilt.

  He opened the file and took out the photographs. He had taken them along with the one of McCall. Four photographs, lifted at random. He studied the faces again, as he did most nights when he found sleep hard to come by. Faces he recognised. Faces attached to names, and names to handshakes and voices. Important people. Influential people. He’d thought about this a lot. Indeed, he had thought about little else since that night in Hyde’s club. He brought out a metal wastepaper bin from beneath the desk, dropped the photographs into it, and lit a match, holding it over the bin, as he had done so many times before.

  Discussion points for Hide & Seek

  Ian Rankin saw Hide & Seek as a companion piece to Knots & Crosses, especially in his allusions to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. How does he reveal the relationship between the two books?

  Two other non-Rebus novels were written between Knots & Crosses and Hide & Seek (neither was very successful, selling only 500 hardback copies apiece). Does Ian Rankin’s extra writing experience show in Hide & Seek?

  To open Hide & Seek, a quotation is used from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: ‘My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring.’ Would you say that this refers more to the murderer or to Rebus?

  Has Rebus’s promotion to DI changed him? Has the confidence shown in him by his superiors at work translated into new confidence in social situations in his private life? Why hasn’t he told Rhona about the end of his relationship with colleague Gill Templer?

  Does Rebus treat Brian Holmes fairly? Does Rebus feel close to him? And how good is Holmes at looking after himself?

  How does Rebus respond to the suggestion made by a colleague that there may be an occult aspect to the case? Is Ian Rankin being playful when he says that Rebus is on a ‘witch hunt’?

  Is Rebus sympathetic when questioning young people? Does he deal similarly with his daughter Sammy?

  Discussing the ‘real’ Edinburgh, it is claimed that the justified sinners, men like Burke and Hare, or Deacon Brodie, have been ‘cleaned up for the tourists’. ‘And sure enough [says the interviewee], it’s all still here, the past replaying itself in the present.’ Would Rebus agree with this comment? And when he visits the rundown estates of Edinburgh, does Rebus feel slightly like a tourist himself?

  ‘Rebus believed in good and evil, and believed stupid people could be attracted toward the latter.’ Is the reader supposed to infer that Rebus might give credence to the idea that intelligent people are not attracted to evil?

  Carew’s suicide note says, ‘If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers too.’ How does Rebus respond to this?

  Rebus wonders why he didn’t tell Gill Templer immediately about the complaint against him. Why didn’t he?

  Wh
en Ronnie McGrath shrieks ‘Hide!’, in what ways might this be understood, and why does it take Rebus such a long time to consider the various implications?

  What is the reader’s response to the novel’s ending? Is Rebus pleased or disappointed with the way things turned out?

  TOOTH & NAIL

  For Miranda, again,

  but this time for Mugwump too . . .

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  The Chamber of Horrors

  Underground

  Catching a Bite

  Fibs

  Churchill

  Know This, Womin

  The Gallery

  Family

  Acknowledgements

  Discussion Points

  INTRODUCTION

  I lived in London for four years, from 1986 to 1990, during which time my home was a maisonette in Tottenham, not far from the River Lea. When I left for France in the summer of 1990, some friends took on the maisonette. We kept in touch. Tooth & Nail was eventually published in the spring of 1992, only it wasn’t called Tooth & Nail; it was called Wolfman, the name of the serial killer who stalks the book. A few months after publication, my friends in Tottenham sent me a photo they’d taken of a subway between my old home and the river (where the first murder in the book takes place). The subway’s gloomy interior comprised white tiles, and on this surface, in six-foot-high black capitals, someone had painted the name ‘Wolfman’.

  I keep the photo close at hand even now, to remind myself that there are some fans an author just doesn’t want to meet.

  Ever.

  It was my editor in the USA who mentioned that Wolfman made my story sound like a horror novel, and it was his idea to rename the book Tooth & Nail for the American audience. The title seemed resonant, and chimed with my first two Rebus adventures. When my current publisher Orion got hold of the rights to the book, I persuaded them that it should become Tooth & Nail in the UK too.

  The book is set in London, the only Rebus novel so far to take place outside Scotland. Basically, I wanted Rebus to be more of an outsider than ever. In London, he’s a fish out of water. He can’t begin to comprehend the city, doesn’t even know what a bagel is, and no one around him understands his accent and dialect (to such an extent that passages from the book have become teaching aids in some Scottish primary schools). In essence, I was using Rebus to explore my own feelings about the London I had known, just at a time when I was preparing to leave the place.

  From the early 1970s until May 1990, I’d kept a page-a-day diary. For whatever reason, I stopped soon after arriving in France. However, an entry for 11 March that year reads: ‘I’ve started, half-heartedly, a new Rebus novel, though I know I should plan more and research more before I really get into it. It’s going to be called Wolfman, if it ever gets off the ground.’ I think some of the impetus for the book came from the spectacular success of the American author Thomas Harris. I’d spent a sleepless night reading The Silence of the Lambs from cover to cover. The man had a huge talent and sales to match, and I wanted some of the latter. The serial killer was in vogue and there seemed an endless fascination with the psychology and pathology of evil. It was fortunate for me that my editor, Euan Cameron, was not as easily seduced by trends. I remember that when I sent him the first version of the manuscript, he told me there was far too much sex and violence in the story and asked for cuts in both departments. I’d learned a valuable lesson: that the two can be suggested without having to show either in graphic and voyeuristic detail.

  During my time in London, I’d served jury duty at the Old Bailey, a bizarre and unsatisfactory experience which was to provide me with an abundance of detail and anecdotes for the Old Bailey scenes in Tooth & Nail. The trial I’d attended had been full of farcical moments, starting with an arresting officer called De’Ath, a prosecutor who didn’t know the difference between 180° and 360°, and a juror who said, ‘I think he done it, but I don’t want him going to prison for it’, then voted Not Guilty, leading to the prisoner escaping sentence. (The police foul-up in the book which allows Tommy Watkiss to go free actually happened during my trial, but in real life no one noticed except we jurors.)

  I took lots of notes about the Old Bailey – its interior layout; security issues; the route from the courtroom to the jury room – and was stopped one day by a security guard as I left the building. He asked to see my notes, seemed horrified by them, and tore them up in front of me. I thanked him and stepped outside, where I proceeded to write them all down again as he watched helplessly through a window.

  Tooth & Nail is notable for introducing the character of Morris Gerald Cafferty – aka ‘Big Ger’ – the gangster who runs Edinburgh. In this book, he has a cameo only, but it was enough to persuade me that I could do more with him. I also started to introduce Scottish words into the text, perhaps to ensure that I wouldn’t lose them entirely. After all, living in rural south-west France, I had few opportunities to say things like ‘wersh’ (meaning sour), ‘winching’ (going steady) and ‘hoolit’ (drunk). In time, some of these words would even start to creep into the Oxford English Dictionary, with the Rebus novels cited for reference.

  Crivvens.

  Having said in the diary entry quoted above that ‘I should plan more and research more’, I should confess here that the lengthy list of acknowledgements at the end of Tooth & Nail is actually an extended joke. Each recipient is a friend of mine, and I just wanted to sneak as many of their names into the book as I could. Steve Adams and Fiona Campbell, for example, were our next-door neighbours in Tottenham, while Tiree Macgregor and Don Nichol had been literature postgrads during my own time at the University of Edinburgh. Professor J. Curt, however, deserves special mention. He’s my mate Jon Curt. I shared a flat with him for an intensely boozy year when I was a postgrad and he was finishing his MA. As well as being a student, Jon was part-time barman at the Oxford Bar. Without him, I might never have found what was to become Rebus’s favourite watering-hole. I rewarded Jon with a professorship in Tooth & Nail, and would later turn him into Dr Curt, pathologist and friend of Rebus in many of the later novels.

  The book also contains one of my favourite one-liners in any of my novels. I won’t give the game away here, but watch out for the mention of a ‘nudist beach’ . . .

  April 2005

  ‘How many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin’

  Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

  Prologue

  She drives home the knife.

  The moment, she knows from past experience, is a very intimate one. Her hand is gripped around the knife’s cool handle and the thrust takes the blade into the throat up to the hilt until her hand meets the throat itself. Flesh upon flesh. Jacket first, or woollen jersey, cotton shirt or T-shirt, then flesh. Now rent. The knife is writhing, like an animal sniffing. Warm blood covering hilt and hand. (The other hand covers the mouth, stifling screams.) The moment is complete. A meeting. Touching. The body is hot, gaping, warm with blood. Seething inside, as insides become outsides. Boiling. The moment is coming to an end all too soon.

  And still she feels hungry. It isn’t right, isn’t usual, but she does. She removes some of the clothing; in fact, removes quite a lot of it, removes more, perhaps, than is necessary. And she does what she must do, the knife squirming again. She keeps her eyes screwed tightly shut. She does not like this part. She has never liked this part, not then, not now. But especially not then.

  Finally, she brings out her teeth and sinks them into the white stomach, until they grind together in a satisfying bite, and whispers, as she always does, the same four words.

  ‘It’s only a game.’

  It is evening when George Flight gets the call. Sunday evening. Sunday should be his blessed relief, beef and Yorkshires, feet up in front of the television, papers falling from his lap. But he’s had a feeling all day.
In the pub at lunchtime he’d felt it, a wriggling in his gut like there were worms in there, tiny blind white worms, hungry worms, worms he could not hope to satisfy. He knew what they were and they knew what they were. And then he’d won third prize in the pub raffle: a three-foot high orange and white teddy bear. Even the worms had laughed at him then and he’d known the day would end badly.

  As it was doing now, the phone as insistent as last orders. Ringing with whatever bad news couldn’t wait until the morning shift. He knew what it meant of course. Hadn’t he been expecting it these past weeks? But still he was reluctant to pick up the receiver. At last he did.

  ‘Flight speaking.’

  ‘There’s been another one, sir. The Wolfman. He’s done another.’

  Flight stared at the silent television. Highlights of the previous day’s rugby match. Grown men running after a funny-shaped ball as though their lives depended on it. It was only a bloody game after all. And propped up against the side of the TV that smirking prize, the teddy bear. What the hell could he do with a teddy bear?

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘just tell me where . . .’

  ‘After all, it is only a game.’

  Rebus smiled and nodded at the Englishman across the table. Then he stared out of the window, pretending once more to be interested in the blur of dark scenery. If the Englishman had said it once, he had said it a dozen times. And during the trip, he had said little else. He also kept stealing precious legroom from Rebus, while his collection of empty beer cans was creeping across the table, invading Rebus’s space, pushing against the neatly folded stack of newspapers and magazines.