10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  Rebus’s eyes had not left Flight’s. ‘Your socks are blue,’ he said. Flight looked down, saw that this was indeed the case, and smiled broadly.

  ‘They’re also different shades,’ Rebus added.

  ‘Bloody hell, so they are.’

  ‘I’d still like to talk to Mr Watkiss,’ Rebus continued. ‘No hurry, and if it’s all right with you.’

  Flight shrugged. ‘Whatever you say, Sherlock. Now, shall we get out of this shit-hole, or is there anything else you want to see?’

  ‘No,’ said Rebus. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ They started back towards the mouth of the cul-de-sac, where Flight’s car waited. ‘What’s this part of town called again?’

  ‘Shoreditch. Remember your nursery rhymes? “When I am rich, say the bells of Shoreditch”.’

  Yes, Rebus had a vague memory. A memory of his mother, holding him on her knee, or maybe it was his father, singing him songs and bouncing the knee in time. It had never happened that way, but he had a memory of it all the same. They were at the end of the cul-de-sac now. A larger road flowed past, busy with daytime traffic. The buildings were black with grime, windows thick with the stuff. Offices of some kind, warehouses. No shops, save one selling professional kitchenware. No houses or even flats in the upper storeys by the look of it. No one to hear a muffled scream at the dead of night. No one to see, from an unwashed window, the killer slinking away, dappled with blood.

  Rebus stared back into the cul-de-sac, then up at the corner of the first building, where a barely legible plaque bore the cul-de-sac’s name: Wolf Street E1.

  This was the reason why the police had come to call the killer Wolfman. Nothing to do with the savagery of his attacks, or the teeth marks he left at the scene, but simply because, as Flight had said, this was so far as they could know his place of birth, the place where he had defined himself for the very first time. He was the Wolfman. He could be anywhere, but that was relatively unimportant. What was more important was that he could be anyone, anyone at all in this city of ten million faces, ten million secret lairs.

  ‘Where next?’ he said, opening the passenger door.

  ‘Kilmore Road,’ said Flight. He exchanged a glance with Rebus, acknowledging the irony.

  ‘Kilmore Road it is,’ said Rebus, getting into the car.

  The day had started early. Rebus, waking after three hours’ sleep and unable to drop off again, switched on the radio in his room and listened to the morning news programme as he dressed. Not knowing exactly what the day would bring, he dressed casually: caramel cord trousers, light jacket, shirt. No tweeds or tie today. He wanted a bath, but the facilities on his floor of the hotel were locked. He would have to ask in reception. Near the stairs there stood an automatic shoeshine machine. He polished the toes of both well-worn black shoes before starting down to breakfast.

  The restaurant area was busy, most of the customers looking like businessmen or tourists. The day’s newspapers had been arranged across one vacant table and Rebus lifted a Guardian before being directed to a table laid for one by the harassed waitress.

  Breakfast was mainly help-yourself, with juices, cereals and fruit crammed onto a large central display. A pot of coffee appeared, unasked for, on his table, as did a toastrack filled with cool half-slices of lightly tanned bread. Not so much toasted as wafted in front of a lightbulb, Rebus thought to himself as he smeared a portion of butter across one pitiful triangle.

  The Full English Breakfast consisted of one slice of bacon, one warm tomato (from a tin), three small mushrooms, a sickly egg and a curious little sausage. Rebus wolfed down the lot. The coffee wasn’t quite strong enough, but he finished the pot anyway and asked for a refill. All the time he was flicking through the paper, but only on a second examination did he find anything about the previous night’s murder: a short, bare-bones paragraph near the foot of page four.

  Bare bones. He looked around him. An embarrassed looking couple were trying to hush their two vociferous children. Don’t, thought Rebus, don’t stifle them, let them live. Who could know what might happen tomorrow? They might be killed. The parents might be killed. His own daughter was here in London somewhere, living in a flat with his ex-wife. He should get in touch. He would get in touch. A businessman at a corner table rustled his tabloid noisily, drawing Rebus’s attention towards the front cover.

  WOLFMAN BITES AGAIN.

  Ah, that was more like it. Rebus reached for a final half-slice of toast, only to find that he’d run out of butter. A hand landed heavily on his shoulder from behind, causing him to drop the toast. Startled, he turned to see George Flight standing there.

  ‘Morning, John.’

  ‘Hello, George. Sleep okay?’

  Flight pulled out the chair across from Rebus and sat down heavily, hands in his lap.

  ‘Not really. What about you?’

  ‘I managed a few hours.’ Rebus was about to turn his near-arrest on Shaftesbury Avenue into a morning anecdote, but decided to save it. There might come a time when they would need a funny story. ‘Do you want some coffee?’

  Flight shook his head. He examined the food on display. ‘Some orange juice wouldn’t go amiss though.’ Rebus was about to rise, but Flight waved him down and rose himself to fetch a glassful, which he promptly downed. He squeezed his eyelids together. ‘Tastes like powdered,’ he said. ‘Better give me some of that coffee after all.’

  Rebus poured another cup. ‘Seen that?’ he said, nodding towards the corner table. Flight glanced at the tabloid and smiled.

  ‘Well, it’s their story now as much as ours. Only difference is, we’ll keep things in perspective.’

  ‘I’m not sure just what that perspective is.’

  Flight stared at Rebus, but said nothing. He sipped at the coffee. ‘There’s a conference in the Murder Room at eleven o’clock. I didn’t think we’d be able to make it, so I left Laine in charge. He likes being in charge.’

  ‘And what are we going to be doing?’

  ‘Well, we could go up to the Lea and check on the house-to-house. Or we could visit Mrs Cooper’s place of employment.’ Rebus didn’t look enthusiastic. ‘Or I could give you a tour of the other three murder scenes.’ Rebus perked up. ‘Okay,’ said Flight, ‘the scenic route it is. Drink up, Inspector. There’s a long day ahead.’

  ‘Just one thing,’ said Rebus, lifting the cup halfway to his mouth. ‘Why the nursemaid treatment? I’d have thought you’d have better things to do with your time than act as my chauffeur?’

  Flight examined Rebus closely. Should he tell Rebus the real reason, or invent some story? He opted for invention and shrugged. ‘Just easing you into the case, that’s all.’ Rebus nodded slowly, but Flight knew he didn’t wholly believe him.

  Out at the car, Rebus glanced in through the back window, seeking the teddy bear.

  ‘I killed it,’ Flight said, unlocking the driver’s door. ‘The perfect murder.’

  ‘So what’s Edinburgh like?’

  Rebus knew Flight wasn’t talking about the tourist Edinburgh, home to the Festival and the Castle. He was talking about criminal Edinburgh, which was another city altogether.

  ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘we’ve still got a drug problem, and loan sharks seem to be making a comeback, but other than that things are fairly quiet at the moment.’

  ‘But,’ Flight reminded him, ‘you did have that child killer a few years back.’

  Rebus nodded.

  ‘And you solved it.’ Rebus made no reply to this. They’d managed to keep out of the media the fact that it had been personal, had not exactly been ‘serial’.

  ‘Thousands of man hours solved it,’ he said casually.

  ‘That’s not what the chiefs think,’ said Flight. ‘They think you’re some kind of serial killer guru.’

  ‘They’re wrong,’ said Rebus. ‘I’m just a copper, the same as you are. So who exactly are the chiefs? Whose idea was it?’

  But Flight shook his head. ‘I’m not exactly sure. I mean, I know wh
o the chiefs are – Laine, Chief Superintendent Pearson – but not which one of them is responsible for your being here.’

  ‘It was Laine’s name on the letter,’ said Rebus, knowing this didn’t really mean anything.

  Then he watched the midday pedestrians scurrying along the pavements. The traffic was at a standstill. He and Flight had come just over three miles in the best part of half an hour. Roadworks, double (and triple) parking, a succession of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings and some maddening tactics from selfish drivers had reduced their progress to a crawl. Flight seemed to read his mind.

  ‘We’ll be out of this in a couple of minutes,’ he said. He was thinking over what Rebus had said, just a copper, the same as you are. But Rebus had caught the child killer, hadn’t he? The files on the case credited him with the collar, a collar which had earned him the rank of Inspector. No, Rebus was just being modest, that was it. And you had to admire him for that.

  A couple of minutes later, they had moved a further fifteen yards and were about to pass a narrow junction with a No Entry sign at its mouth. Flight glanced up this side-street. ‘Time to take a few liberties,’ he said, turning the steering-wheel hard. One side of the street was lined with market stalls. Rebus could hear the stall-holders sharpening their patter against the whetstone of passing trade. Nobody paid the slightest attention to a car travelling the wrong way down a one-way street, until a boy pulling a mobile stall from one side of the road to the other halted their progress. A meaty fist banged on the driver’s side window. Flight rolled down the window, and a head appeared, extraordinarily pink and round and totally hairless.

  ‘Oi, what’s your fucking game then?’ The words died in his throat. ‘Oh, it’s you Mister Flight. Didn’t recognise the motor.’

  ‘Hello, Arnold,’ Flight said quietly, his eyes on the ponderous movement of the stall ahead. ‘How’s tricks?’

  The man laughed nervously. ‘Keeping me nose clean, Mister Flight.’

  Only now did Flight deign to turn his head towards the man. ‘That’s good,’ he said. Rebus had never heard those two words sound so threatening. Their road ahead was now clear. ‘Keep it that way,’ Flight said, moving off.

  Rebus stared at him, waiting for an explanation.

  ‘Sex offender,’ Flight said. ‘Two previous. Children. The psychiatrists say he’s okay now, but I don’t know. With that sort of thing, one hundred percent sure isn’t quite sure enough. He’s been working the market now for a few weeks, loading and unloading. Sometimes he gives me good gen. You know how it is.’

  Rebus could imagine. Flight had this huge, strong-looking man in the palm of his hand. If Flight told the market-traders what he knew about Arnold, not only would Arnold lose his job, but he’d be in for a good kicking as well. Maybe the man was all right now, maybe he was, in psychiatric parlance, ‘a fully integrated member of society’. He had paid for his crimes, and now was trying to go straight. And what happened? Policemen, men like Flight and like Rebus himself (if he was being honest), used his past against him to turn him into an informant.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of dozen snitches,’ Flight went on. ‘Not all like Arnold. Some are in it for the cash, some simply because they can’t keep their gobs shut. Telling what they know to somebody like me makes them feel important, makes them feel like they’re in the know. A place this size, you’d be lost without a decent network of snitches.’

  Rebus merely nodded, but Flight was warming to his subject.

  ‘In some ways London is too big to take in. But in other ways it’s tiny. Everyone knows everyone else. There’s north and south of the river, of course, those are like two different countries. But the way the place divides, the loyalties, the same old faces, sometimes I feel like a village bobby on his bicycle.’ Because Flight had turned towards him, Rebus nodded again. Inside he was thinking: here we go, the same old story, London is bigger, better, rougher, tougher and more important than anywhere else. He had come across this attitude before, attending courses with Yard men or hearing about it from visitors to London. Flight hadn’t seemed the type, but really everybody was the type. Rebus, too, in his time had exaggerated the problems the police faced in Edinburgh, so that he could look tougher and more important in somebody’s eyes.

  The facts still had to be faced. Police work was all about paperwork and computers and somebody stepping forward with the truth.

  ‘Nearly there,’ said Flight. ‘Kilmore Road’s the third on the left.’

  Kilmore Road was part of an industrial estate and therefore would be deserted at night. It nestled in a maze of back streets about two hundred yards from a tube station. Rebus had always looked on tube stations as busy places, sited in populous areas, but this one stood on a narrow back street, well away from high road, bus route or railway station.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. Flight merely shrugged and shook his head.

  Anyone coming out of the tube station at night found themselves with a lonely walk through the streets, past net-curtained windows where televisions blared. Flight showed him that a popular route was to cut into the industrial estate and across the parkland behind it. The park was flat and lifeless, boasting a single set of goalposts, two orange traffic cones substituting for the missing set. On the other side of the park three hi-rise blocks and some lo-rise housing sprang up. May Jessop had been making for one of those houses, where her parents lived. She was nineteen and had a good job, but it kept her late at her office, so it wasn’t until ten o’clock that her parents started to worry. An hour later, there was a knock at the door. Her father rushed to answer, relieved, only to find a detective there, bearing the news that May’s body had been found.

  And so it went. There seemed no connection between the victims, no real geographical link other than that, as Flight pointed out, all the killings had been committed north of the river, by which he meant north of the Thames. What did a prostitute, an office manageress and the assistant in an off-licence have in common? Rebus was damned if he knew.

  The third murder had taken place much further west in North Kensington. The body had been found beside a railway line and Transport Police had handled the investigation initially. The body was that of Shelley Richards, forty-one years old, unmarried and unemployed. She was the only coloured victim so far. As they drove through Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove and North ‘Ken’ (as Flight termed it) Rebus was intrigued by the scheme of things. A street of extraordinarily grand houses would suddenly give way to a squalid, rubbish-strewn road with boarded-up windows and bench-bound tramps, the wealthy and the poor living almost cheek by jowl. It would never happen in Edinburgh; in Edinburgh, certain boundaries were observed. But this, this was incredible. As Flight put it, ‘race riots one side, diplomats the other’.

  The spot where Shelley Richards had died was the loneliest, the most pathetic so far. Rebus clambered down from the railway line, down the embankment, lowered himself over the brick wall and dropped to the ground. His trousers were smeared with green moss. He brushed them with his hands, but to little effect. To get to the car where Flight was waiting he had to walk under a railway bridge. His footsteps echoed as he tried to avoid the pools of water and the rubbish, and then he stopped, listening. There was a noise all around him, a sort of wheezing, as if the bridge itself were drawing its dying breath. He looked up and saw the dark outlines of pigeons, still against the supporting girders. Cooing softly. That was what he could hear, not wheezing at all. There was a sudden rumble of thunder as a train passed overhead and the pigeons took to the wing, flapping around his head. He shivered and walked back out into sunlight.

  Then, finally, it was back to the Murder Room. This was, in fact, a series of rooms covering most of the top floor of the building. Rebus reckoned there to be about twenty men and women working flat out when Flight and he entered the largest of the rooms. There was little to differentiate the scene from that of any murder investigation anywhere in the country. Officers were busy on telephones or working at comp
uter terminals. Clerical staff moved from desk to desk with seemingly endless sheafs of paper. A photocopier was spewing out more paper in a corner of the room and two delivery-men were wheeling a new five-drawer filing cabinet into position beside the three which already stood against one wall. On another wall was a detailed street map of London, with the murder sites pinpointed. Coloured tapes ran from these sites to spaces on the wall where pictures, details and notes had been pinned. A duty roster and progress chart took up what space was left. All very efficient, but the faces told Rebus their own story: everyone here, working hard as they were, was waiting for the Lucky Break.

  Flight was immediately in tune with the glaze of efficiency in the office, firing off questions. How did the meeting go? Any word from Lambeth? (He explained to Rebus that the police lab was based there.) Any news on last night? What about house-to-house? Well, does anyone know anything?

  There were shrugs and shakes of the head. They were simply going through the motions, waiting for that Lucky Break. But what if it didn’t come? Rebus had an answer to that: you made your own luck.

  A smaller room off this main office was being used as a communications centre, keeping the Murder Room in touch with the investigation, and off this room were two smaller offices yet, each crammed with three desks. This was where the senior detectives worked. Both were empty.

  ‘Sit down,’ Flight said. He picked up the telephone on his desk, and dialled. While he waited for an answer, he surveyed with a frown the four-inch high pile of paper which had appeared in his in-tray during the morning. ‘Hello, Gino?’ he said into the mouthpiece. ‘George Flight here. Can I order some sandwiches? Salami salad.’ He looked to Rebus for confirmation that this would be acceptable. ‘On brown bread, please, Gino. Better make it four rounds. Thanks.’ He cut the connection and dialled again. Only two numbers this time: an internal call. ‘Gino has a cafe round the corner,’ he explained to Rebus. ‘He makes great sandwiches, and he delivers.’ Then: ‘Oh, hello. Inspector Flight here. Can we have some tea? A decent-sized pot should do it. We’re in the office. Is it wet milk today or that powdered crap? Great, thanks.’ He dropped the receiver back into its cradle and spread his hands, as if some feat of magic had just been performed. ‘This is your lucky day, John. We’ve got real milk for a change.’