10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a lift.’

  In his fragile state, Rebus felt this to be the nicest, kindest thing anyone had said to him in weeks. ‘Are you sure you have room?’ he said. ‘I mean, with the teddy bear and all.’

  Flight paused. ‘Or if you’d prefer to walk, Inspector?’

  Rebus threw up his hands in surrender, then, when the door was unlocked, slipped into the passenger seat of Flight’s red Sierra. The seat seemed to wrap itself around him.

  ‘Here,’ said Flight, handing a hip flask to Rebus. Rebus unscrewed the top of the flask and sniffed. ‘It won’t kill you,’ Flight called. This was probably true. The aroma was of whisky. Not great whisky, not a smoky island malt, but a decent enough proprietary brand. Well, it would help keep him awake perhaps until they reached the hotel. Rebus toasted the windscreen and let the liquid trickle into his mouth.

  Flight got behind the steering-wheel and started the car, then, as the car idled, accepted the flask from Rebus and drank from it greedily.

  ‘How far to the hotel from here?’ Rebus asked.

  ‘About twenty minutes at this time of night,’ said Flight, screwing tight the stopper and replacing the flask in his pocket. ‘That’s if we stop for red lights.’

  ‘You have my permission to run every red light you see.’

  Flight laughed tiredly. Both men were wondering how to turn the conversation around to the autopsy.

  ‘Best leave it until morning, eh?’ said Rebus, speaking for them both. Flight merely nodded and moved off, waving to Cousins and Isobel Penny, who were about to get into their car. Rebus stared out of his side window to where DC Lamb stood beside his own car, a flash little sports model. Typical, thought Rebus. Just typical. Lamb stared back at him, and then gave that three-quarters sneer again.

  FYTP, Rebus mentally intoned. FYTP. Then he turned in his seat to examine the teddy bear behind him. Flight was resolutely refusing to take the hint, and Rebus, though curious, wasn’t about to jeopardise whatever relationship he might be able to strike up with this man by asking the obvious question. Some things were always best left until morning.

  The whisky had cleared his nostrils, lungs and throat. He breathed deeply, seeing in his mind the little mortuary attendant, that livid birthmark, and Isobel Penny, sketching like any amateur artist. She might have been in front of a museum exhibit for all the emotion she had shown. He wondered what her secret was, the secret of her absolute calmness, but thought he probably knew in any case. Her job had become merely that: a job. Maybe one day Rebus would feel the same way. But he hoped not.

  If anything, Flight and Rebus said less during the drive to the hotel than they had done on the way to the mortuary. The whisky was working on Rebus’s empty stomach and the interior of the car was oppressively hot. He tried opening his window a quarter of an inch, but the blast of chill air only made things worse.

  The autopsy was being played out again before him. The cutting tools, the lifting of organs out of the body, the incisions and inspections, Cousins’s face peering at spongy tissue from no more than an inch away. One twitch and his face would have been smothered in . . . Isobel Penny watching all, recording all, the slice from throat to pubis . . . London sped past him. Flight, true to his word, was cruising through some red lights and slowing merely for others. There were still cars on the streets. The city never slept. Nightclubs, parties, drifters, the homeless. Sleepless dog-walkers, all night bakeries and beigel shops. Some spelt ‘beigel’ and some spelt ‘bagel’. What the hell was a beigel? Wasn’t that what they were always eating in Woody Allen films?

  Samples from her eyebrows, for Christ’s sake. What use were samples from her eyebrows? They should be concentrating on the attacker, not the victim. Those teeth marks. What was the dentist’s name again? Not a dentist, a dental pathologist. Morrison. Yes, that was it. Morrison, like the street in Edinburgh, Morrison Street, not too far from the brewery canal, where the swans lived, a single pair of swans. What happened when they died? Did the brewery replace them? So damned hot in this shiny red car. Rebus could feel his insides wanting to become his outsides. The knife twisted in the throat. A small knife. He could almost visualise it. Something like a kitchen knife. Sharp, sour taste in his mouth.

  ‘Nearly there,’ said Flight. ‘Just along Shaftesbury Avenue. That’s Soho on the right. By God, we’ve cleaned that den up this past few years. You wouldn’t believe it. You know, I’ve been thinking, where the body was found, it’s not so far from where the Krays used to live. Somewhere on Lea Bridge Road. I was just a young copper when they were on the go.’

  ‘Please . . .’ said Rebus.

  ‘They did somebody in Stokie. Jack McVitie, I think it was. Jack the Hat, they called him.’

  ‘Can you stop here?’ Rebus blurted out. Flight looked at him.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I need some air. I’ll walk the rest of the way. Just stop the car, please.’

  Flight began to protest, but pulled over to the kerb. Stepping out of the car, Rebus immediately felt better. There was cold sweat on his forehead, neck and back. He breathed deeply. Flight deposited his bags on the pavement.

  ‘Thanks again,’ said Rebus. ‘Sorry about this. Just point me in the general direction.’

  ‘Just off the Circus,’ Flight said.

  Rebus nodded. ‘I hope there’s a night porter.’ Yes, he was feeling much better.

  ‘It’s a quarter to five,’ said Flight. ‘You’ll probably catch the day shift coming on.’ He laughed, but the laugh died quickly and he gave Rebus a serious nod of his head. ‘You made your point tonight, John. Okay?’

  Rebus nodded back. John. Another chip from the iceberg, or just good management?

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. They shook hands. ‘Are we still on for a meeting at ten?’

  ‘Let’s make it eleven, eh? I’ll have someone pick you up from your hotel.’

  Rebus nodded and picked up his bags. Then bent down again towards the car’s back window. ‘Good night, teddy,’ he said.

  ‘Watch you don’t get lost!’ Flight called to him from the car. Then the car moved off, making a screeching u-turn before roaring back the way they had come. Rebus looked around him. Shaftesbury Avenue. The buildings seemed about to swamp him. Theatres. Shops. Litter: the debris from a Sunday night out. A dull roar preceded the arrival, from one of the misty side streets, of a dustcart. The men were dressed in orange overalls. They paid no attention to Rebus as he trudged past them. How long was this street? It seemed to follow a vast curve, longer than he had expected.

  Bloody London. Then he spotted Eros atop his fountain, but there was something wrong. The Circus was no longer a Circus. Eros had been paved in, so that traffic had to sweep past it rather than around it. Why the hell had anyone decided to do that? A car was slowing behind him, coming parallel with him. White car with an orange stripe: a police car. The officer in the passenger seat had wound down his window and now called out to him.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, do you mind telling me where you’re going?’

  ‘What?’ The question stunned Rebus, stopped him in his tracks. The car had stopped too and both driver and passenger were emerging.

  ‘Are those your bags, sir?’

  Rebus felt it rise within him, a shining hard steel pole of anger. Then he happened to catch sight of himself in the window of the patrol car. A quarter to five on the streets of London. A dishevelled, unshaven man, a man obviously without sleep, carrying a suitcase, a bag and a briefcase. A briefcase? Who the hell would be carrying a briefcase around at this time of the morning? Rebus put down his luggage and rubbed at the bridge of his nose with one hand. And before he knew what was happening, his shoulders began moving, his body convulsing with laughter. The two uniformed officers were looking at one another. Rebus sniffed back the laughter and reached into his inside pocket. One of the officers stepped back a pace.

  ‘Take it easy, son,’ Rebus said. He produced his ID. ‘I’m on your side.’
The less cagey officer, the passenger, took the ID from Rebus, examined it, then handed it back.

  ‘You’re a long way off your patch, sir.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ said Rebus. ‘What’s your name, son?’

  The constable was wary now. ‘Bennett, sir. Joey Bennett. I mean, Joseph Bennett.’

  ‘All right, Joey. Would you like to do me a favour?’ The constable nodded. ‘Do you know the Prince Royal Hotel?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Bennett began to point with his left hand. ‘It’s about fifty yards –’

  ‘All right,’ Rebus interrupted. ‘Just show me, will you?’ The young man said nothing. ‘Will you do that, Constable Bennett?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Rebus nodded. Yes, he could handle London. He could take it on and win. ‘Right,’ he said, moving off towards the Prince Royal. ‘Oh,’ he said, turning back and taking in both men with his glance, ‘and bring my bags, will you?’ Rebus had his back to them again, but he could almost hear the sound of two jaws dropping open. ‘Or,’ he called back, ‘shall I just inform Chief Inspector Laine that two of his officers harassed me on my first night as his guest in this fine city?’

  Rebus kept on walking, hearing the two officers pick up his luggage and hurry after him. They were arguing as to whether or not they should leave the patrol car unlocked. He was smiling, despite everything. A small victory, a bit of a cheat, but what the hell. This was London, after all. This was Shaftesbury Avenue. And that was showbiz.

  Home at last, she had a good wash, and after that she felt a little better. She had brought in a black bin-liner from the boot of her car. It contained the clothes she had been wearing, cheap flimsy things. Tomorrow evening she would tidy the back garden and light a bonfire.

  She wasn’t crying any more. She had calmed down. She always calmed down afterwards. From a polythene shopping bag she removed another polythene bag, from which she removed the bloodied knife. The kitchen sink was full of boiling, soapy water. The polythene bags went into the bin-liner with the clothes, the knife went into the sink. She washed it carefully, emptying and refilling the washing bowl, all the time humming to herself. It wasn’t a recognisable song, nor even really a tune. But it calmed her, it soothed her, the way her mother’s hummed lullabies always had.

  There, all done. It was hard work, and she was pleased to be finished with it. Concentration was the key. A lapse in concentration, and you could make a slip, then fail to spot that slip. She rinsed the sink three times, sluicing away every last speckle of blood, and left the knife to dry on the draining-board. Then she walked out into the hallway and paused at one of the doors while she found the key.

  This was her secret room, her picture gallery. Inside, one wall was all but covered by oil and watercolour paintings. Three of these paintings were damaged beyond repair. A pity, since all three had been favourites. Her favourite now was a small countryside stream. Simple, pale colours and a naive style. The stream was in the foreground and beside it sat a man and a boy, or it could have been a man and a girl. It was hard to tell, that was the problem with the naive style. It was not as though she could even ask the artist, for the artist had been dead for years.

  She tried not to look at the other wall, the wall directly opposite. It was a horrid wall. She didn’t like what she could see there from the corner of one eye. She decided that what she liked about her favourite painting was its size. It was about ten inches by eight, excluding the rather Baroque gilt frame (which did not suit it at all – her mother had never had much taste in frames). These petite dimensions, added to the washed colours, gave the whole a subtlety and a lack of vision, a humility, a gentleness, which pleased her. Of course, it depicted no great truth, this painting. In fact, it was a monstrous lie, the absolute opposite of the facts. There had been no stream, no touching scene of father and child. There had been only horror. That was why Velázquez was her favourite painter: shadowplay, rich shades of black, skulls and suspicion . . . the dark heart exposed.

  ‘The dark heart.’ She nodded to herself. She had seen things, felt things, which few were ever privileged to witness. This was her life. This was her existence. And the painting began to mock her, the stream turning into a cruel turquoise grin.

  Calmly, humming to herself again she picked up a pair of scissors from a nearby chair and began to slash at the painting with regular vertical strokes, then horizontal strokes, then vertical again, tearing and tearing its heart out until the scene disappeared forever.

  Underground

  ‘And this,’ said George Flight, ‘is where the Wolfman was born.’

  Rebus looked. It was a depressing location for a birth. A cobblestoned alley, a cul-de-sac, the buildings three storeys high, every window either boarded up or barred and grilled. The black bags of rubbish looked to have been languishing by the side of the road for weeks. A few had been impaled on the steel spiked fencing in front of the shut-up windows, and these bags leaked their rank contents the way a cracked sewage pipe would.

  ‘Nice,’ he said.

  ‘The buildings are mainly disused. Local bands use the basement of one of them as a practice room, and make quite a racket while they’re about it.’ Flight pointed to a barred and grilled window. ‘And I think that’s a clothing manufacturer or distributor. Anyway, he hasn’t been back since we started taking an interest in the street.’

  ‘Oh?’ Rebus sounded interested, but Flight shook his head.

  ‘Nothing suspicious in that, believe me. These guys use slave labour, Bangladeshis, mostly illegal immigrants. The last thing they want is policemen sniffing around. They’ll move the machines and set up again somewhere else.’

  Rebus nodded. He was looking around the cul-de-sac, trying to remember, from the photographs he had been sent, just where the body had been found.

  ‘It was there.’ Flight was pointing to a gate in the iron railings. Ah yes, Rebus remembered now. Not at street level, but down some stone steps leading to a basement. The victim had been found at the bottom of the steps, same modus operandi as last night, down to the bite marks on the stomach. Rebus opened his briefcase and brought out the manila folder, opening it at the sheet he needed.

  ‘Maria Watkiss, age thirty-eight. Occupation: prostitute. Body found on Tuesday 16th January by council workmen. Estimated that victim had been murdered two to three days prior to being discovered. Rudimentary attempt had been made to conceal body.’

  Flight nodded towards one of the impaled bin-liners. ‘He emptied a bag of rubbish out over her. It pretty well covered the body. The rats alerted the workmen.’

  ‘Rats?’

  ‘Dozens of them, from all accounts. They’d had a bloody good feed, had those rats.’

  Rebus was standing at the top of the steps. ‘We reckon,’ said Flight, ‘the Wolfman must have paid her for a knee-trembler and brought her down here. Or maybe she brought him. She worked out of a pub on Old Street. It’s a five minute walk. We interviewed the regulars, but nobody saw her leave with anyone.’

  ‘Maybe he was in a car?’

  ‘It’s more than possible. Judging by the physical distance between the murder sites, he must be pretty mobile.’

  ‘It says in the report that she was married.’

  ‘That’s right. Her old man, Tommy, he knew she was on the game. It didn’t bother him, so long as she handed over the cash.’

  ‘And he didn’t report her missing?’

  Flight wrinkled his nose. ‘Not Tommy. He was on a bender at the time, practically comatose with drink when we went to see him. He said later that Maria often disappeared for a few days, told us she used to go off to the seaside with one or two of her regular Johns.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve been able to find these . . . clients?’

  ‘Leave it out.’ Flight laughed as though this were the best joke he’d heard all week. ‘For the record, Tommy thought one of them might be called Bill or Will. Does that help?’

  ‘It narrows things down,’ Rebu
s said with a smile.

  ‘In any event,’ said Flight, ‘I doubt Tommy would have come to us for help if she hadn’t come back. He’s got form as long as your inside leg. To tell you the truth, he was our first suspect.’

  ‘It follows.’ Every policeman knew it as a universal truth: most murders happen in the family.

  ‘A couple of years back,’ Flight was saying, ‘Maria was beaten up pretty badly. A hospital case, in fact. Tommy’s doing. She’d been seeing another man and he hadn’t been paying for it, if you understand my meaning. And a couple of years before that, Tommy served time for aggravated assault. It would have been rape if we could have got the woman into the witness box, but she was scared seven colours shitless. There were witnesses, but we were never going to pin rape on him. So aggravated assault it was. He got eight months.’

  ‘A violent man then.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘With a record of particular violence against women.’

  Flight nodded. ‘It looked good at first. We thought we could pin Maria’s murder on him and make it stick. But nothing added up. He had an alibi for openers. Then there were the bite marks: not his size, according to the dentist.’

  ‘You mean Dr Morrison?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I call him the dentist to annoy Philip.’ Flight scratched at his chin. The elbow of his leather jacket gave a creak. ‘Anyway, nothing added up. And then when the second murder came along, well, we knew we were working in a different league from Tommy.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure of that?’

  ‘John, I’m not absolutely sure what colour of socks I’ve put on in the morning, I’m sometimes not even sure that I’ve put socks on at all. But I’m fairly sure this isn’t Tommy Watkiss’s work. He gets his kicks from watching Arsenal, not mutilating dead women.’