10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said again.

  The judge was staring out of the rear window. ‘I think she’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘John?’ It was Flight’s tin-can voice on the line. ‘Who was that speaking?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Rebus. ‘That was the judge. It’s his Jaguar I’ve commandeered.’ He had found the windscreen wiper switch and was letting them deal with the pancake mixture on the windscreen.

  ‘You what?’ So that was what a roar sounded like. The BMW was still in sight. But it had slowed a little, perhaps aware of the incident behind it.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Rebus. ‘Look, just get some patrol cars up here. We’re on . . .’ He glanced out of windscreen and side window, but could see no street signs.

  ‘High Holborn,’ said the judge.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Rebus. ‘We’re on High Holborn, George.’

  ‘Wait a second,’ said Flight. There was a muffled exchange at his end of the line. Then he came back on again. He sounded tired. ‘Please, John, tell me it isn’t you behind these reports we’re getting. The switchboards are lighting up like Christmas trees.’

  ‘That’s probably us, George. We took a bollard out a little way back, caused a couple of accidents and now we’ve just sent an old woman’s messages flying everywhere. Yes, that’s us.’

  If Flight groaned, he did so quietly. Then: ‘What if it’s not him, John? What if you’re wrong?’

  ‘Then it’s all a bit of a balls-up, George, and I’ll probably get to see what the inside of a dole office looks like, if not a prison cell. Meanwhile, get those coppers down here!’ Rebus looked at the handset. ‘Judge, help me. How do I –’

  ‘Just press Power.’ Rebus did, and the illuminated digits faded.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  The traffic was slowing, a jam of lights up ahead. ‘And,’ the judge was saying, ‘if you intend using the apparatus again, I should probably inform you that it can be used in hands-free mode. Just dial and leave it in its little compartment there. You’ll be able to hear the caller and they’ll be able to hear you.’ Rebus nodded his thanks. The judge’s head was close to Rebus’s ear, peering over his shoulder at the road ahead.

  ‘So,’ he said excitedly, ‘you think Malcolm Chambers is behind all these killings?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And what evidence do you have, Inspector?’

  Rebus laughed, and tapped his head. ‘Just this, your lordship, just this.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ said the judge. He seemed to be considering something. ‘I always thought Malcolm was rather an odd young man. Fine in court, of course, very much the star prosecutor, playing to the gallery and what have you. But outside the courtroom, he seemed very different. Oh, very different indeed. Almost sullen, as though his mind were wandering.’

  His mind had wandered all right, thought Rebus, wandered all the way over the edge.

  ‘Would you like to speak to him?’

  ‘You think I’m chasing him for a bet?’

  The judge chuckled, pointing to the car-phone. ‘I meant talk to him right now.’

  Rebus went rigid. ‘You mean you’ve got his number?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Rebus thought it over, but shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He’s got someone with him. An innocent woman. I don’t want to panic him.’

  ‘I see,’ said the judge, settling back again. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. I hadn’t thought of that.’

  And then there was an electric purring inside the car. It was the phone, its display illuminated now and flashing. Rebus handed the set to the judge.

  ‘Probably for you,’ he said drily.

  ‘No,’ said the judge, ‘just put it back and press Receive.’ Rebus did so. Only then did the judge speak. ‘Hello?’

  The voice was clear, the reception signal strong. ‘Edward? Is that you following me?’

  It was Chambers’s voice, sounding amused about something. The judge stared at Rebus, who could offer no suggestion for an answer.

  ‘Malcolm?’ said the judge, his composure intact. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘You should know. You’re only about twenty yards behind me.’

  ‘Am I? Which road are you on?’

  The voice altered, taking on an edge of sudden viciousness. ‘Don’t fuck with me, Ted! Who’s driving the fucking car? Can’t be you, you haven’t even got a licence. Who is it?’

  The judge looked to Rebus again, seeking guidance. They listened together in silence and heard Lisa’s faint voice.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she was saying. ‘What’s happening?’

  Then Chambers’s voice. ‘Shut up, bitch! You’ll get yours.’ The voice rose a chilling octave, sounding like a bad female impersonator, making the hairs on Rebus’s neck bristle. ‘You’ll get yours.’ Then it dropped again, speaking into the handset. ‘Hello? Who’s that? Who’s there? I can hear you breathing, you little shit.’ Rebus bit his lip. Was it better to let Chambers know, or to stay silent? He stayed silent.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Chambers with a sigh, as though resigned to this stalemate. ‘Out she goes.’

  Ahead, Rebus saw the BMW’s passenger door swing open as the car veered onto the pavement.

  ‘What are you doing!’ screamed Lisa. ‘No! No! Let me go!’

  ‘Chambers!’ Rebus yelled towards the handset. ‘Leave her!’ The BMW swerved back into the road, the door drifting shut. There was a pause.

  ‘Hello,’ said Chambers’s voice. ‘To whom am I speaking?’

  ‘My name’s Rebus. We met at –’

  ‘John!’ It was Lisa’s voice, very afraid now, almost hysterical. The sound of the slap was a static crack in Rebus’s ear.

  ‘I said leave her!’ Rebus yelled.

  ‘I know you did,’ said Chambers, ‘but then you’re hardly in a position to give orders. Anyway, now that I know you two know each other, that makes things interesting, doesn’t it, Inspector?’

  ‘You remember me?’

  ‘I have an intimate knowledge of everyone on the Wolfman case. I’ve taken an interest in it from the start – for obvious reasons. There was always someone around willing to tell what they knew.’

  ‘So you could keep one step ahead?’

  ‘One step?’ Chambers laughed. ‘You flatter yourself. So tell me, Inspector, what do we do now? Do you stop your car – Edward’s car, I should say – or do I kill your friend here? Do you know, she wanted to ask me about the psychology of court trials. She couldn’t have picked better, could she, the little bitch?’ Lisa was sobbing. Rebus could hear her, and every sound cut him a little deeper. ‘Picture in the paper,’ Chambers was cooing. ‘Picture in the paper with the big tough detective.’

  Rebus knew he had to keep Chambers talking. By keeping him talking, he was keeping Lisa alive. But the traffic had stalled. Red lights ahead. The BMW only a few cars in front, prevented from jumping the lights by another car directly in front of it. Could he . . .? Should he even be thinking of it? The judge was still gripping Rebus’s headrest, staring out towards the gleaming black car, the car that was so close to them. So close . . . and so stationary.

  ‘Well?’ It was Chambers’s voice. ‘Do you pull over, Inspector, or do I kill her?’

  Rebus was staring hard at Chambers’s car. He could see that Lisa was leaning away from Chambers, as though making to escape. But Chambers was gripping her with his left arm, his right presumably resting on the steering-wheel. So the man’s attention would be focussed on the passenger side of the car, leaving the driver’s side unguarded.

  Rebus made up his mind and quietly opened his door, slipping out onto the reassuringly solid surface of the road. Horns were sounding around him. He paid them no heed. The lights were still at red. He began to move forward, crouching, but moving quickly. Chambers’s driver’s-side mirror! If Chambers looked into it, he’d have a clear view of Rebus’s approach. Make it fast, John, make it.

  Amber.

  Shit!

 
Green.

  He had reached the BMW, had gripped the doorhandle. Chambers looked out at him, a stunned expression on his face. And then the car in front moved off, and Chambers gunned the engine, the car accelerating forwards, tearing itself free of Rebus.

  Shit! Car horns all around. Angry. Angry drivers rolling down their windows and yelling at him as he ran back to the Jaguar. Started the car, moved off. The judge’s hand patted his shoulder.

  ‘Good try, my boy. Good try.’

  And Chambers’s laughter on the car-phone. ‘Hope I didn’t hurt you, Inspector.’ Rebus examined his hand, flexed it painfully. The fingers had nearly been pulled out of their joints. His little finger was swelling already. A break? Perhaps.

  ‘So,’ said Chambers, ‘for the last time I make you an offer you can hardly refuse. Stop the car, or I kill Dr Frazer.’

  ‘She’s not a doctor, Chambers. She’s just a student.’ He swallowed: now Lisa knew that he knew. Not that it mattered one way or the other, not now. He took a deep breath. ‘Kill her,’ he said. Behind him, the judge gasped, but Rebus shook his head, reassuring him.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Chambers.

  ‘I said kill her. I’m not really bothered. She’s led me a merry little dance this past week. It’s her own fault she’s in this deep. And after you’ve killed her, I’ll take great pleasure in killing you, Mr Chambers.’

  He heard Lisa’s faint voice again. ‘God, John, please no!’ And then Chambers, seeming to grow calmer as Rebus grew more excited: ‘As you wish, Inspector. As you wish.’ The voice was as cold as a mortuary floor, any vestige of humanity gone. Perhaps partly it was Rebus’s fault, taunting him with newspaper stories, with fabrications. But Chambers hadn’t picked on Rebus: he had picked on Lisa. Had Rebus arrived a minute later at the Old Bailey, she would be on her way to certain death. As it was, nothing was certain.

  Nothing but the fact of Malcolm Chambers’s madness.

  ‘He’s turning onto Monmouth Street,’ said the judge, his voice level. He had grasped the fact of Chambers’s guilt, the horror of what had happened and what might still happen.

  Rebus heard a flapping sound overhead, and glanced up towards where a helicopter was shadowing the chase. A police helicopter. He could hear sirens, too. So, it seemed, could Chambers. The BMW spurted ahead, slashing the side of another car as it squeezed into a space. The injured car stopped dead. Rebus braked, pulled on the steering-wheel, but still clipped it with his driver’s-side bumper, the headlamp shattering.

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Never mind the car,’ said the judge. ‘Just don’t let him get away.’

  ‘He won’t get away,’ said Rebus, with sudden confidence. Now where the hell had that come from? The moment he thought about it, it disappeared again, leaving behind a quivering vapour.

  They were on St Martin’s Lane now. People mingling, pre-theatre or after work. The busy West End. Yet the traffic ahead had thinned for no apparent reason and the crowds gawped as first the BMW, then the Jaguar sped past.

  As they approached Trafalgar Square Rebus saw, to right and left, police officers in luminous yellow jackets holding up the traffic in the side-streets. Now why would they do that? Unless . . .

  Road block! One entrance to the Square left open, all exits blocked, the Square itself kept empty for their arrival. In a moment they’d have him. God bless you, George Flight.

  Rebus picked up the handset, his voice a snarl, specks of saliva dotting the windscreen as he spoke.

  ‘Stop the car, Chambers. There’s no place to go.’

  Silence. They were skidding into Trafalgar Square now, traffic blaring in queues all around them, held back by the gloved, raised hand of authority. Rebus was buzzing again. The whole West End of London, brought to a standstill so that he might race a Jaguar against a BMW. He could think of friends who’d give whole limbs to be in his place. Yet he had a job to do. That was the bottom line. It was just another job to be cleared up. He might as well have been following teenage Cortina thieves through the streets of some Edinburgh housing-scheme.

  But he wasn’t.

  They’d done one full circuit around Nelson’s Column. Canada House, South Africa House and the National Gallery were just blurs. The judge was being thrown against the door behind Rebus.

  ‘Hang on,’ Rebus called.

  ‘To what, pray?’

  And Rebus laughed. He roared with laughter. Then he realised the line was still open to Chambers’s BMW. He laughed even harder, picking up the handset, his knuckles white against the steering-wheel, left arm aching.

  ‘Having fun, Chambers?’ he yelled. ‘Like the TV programme used to say, there’s no hiding place!’

  And then the BMW gave a jolt, and Rebus heard Chambers gasp.

  ‘You bitch!’ Another jolt, and sounds of a struggle. Lisa was retaliating, now that Chambers was intent on this speeding circuit without end.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Get off!’

  ‘I’ll –’

  And a piercing scream, two piercing screams, both high-pitched, feminine in their intensity, and the black car didn’t take the next bend, flew straight for the pavement, mounted it and bounced into a bus shelter, crumpling the metal structure and driving on into the walls of the National Gallery itself.

  ‘Lisa!’ Rebus cried. He brought the Jaguar to a sudden, pivoting stop. The driver’s door of the BMW creaked open and Chambers stumbled out, slouching off in a half-run, clutching something in his right hand, one leg damaged. Rebus struggled with his own door, finally finding the handle. He ran to the BMW and peered in. Lisa was slumped in the passenger seat, a seatbelt passing in a diagonal across her body. She was groaning, but there were no signs of blood. Whiplash. Nothing more serious than whiplash. She opened her eyes.

  ‘John?’

  ‘You’re going to be all right, Lisa. Just hang on. Somebody will be here.’ Indeed, the police cars were closing in, uniforms running into the Square. Rebus looked up from the car, seeking Chambers.

  ‘There!’ The judge was out of the Jaguar and pointing with a rigid arm, pointing upwards. Rebus followed the line to the steps of the National Gallery. Chambers had reached the top step.

  ‘Chambers!’ Rebus yelled. ‘Chambers!’

  But the body disappeared from view. Rebus started towards the steps, finding his own legs to be less than solid. As though rubber instead of bone and cartilage were keeping him upright. He climbed the steps and entered the building by its nearest door – the exit door. A woman in a staff uniform was lying on the ground in the foyer, a man standing over her. The man gestured towards the gallery’s interior.

  ‘He ran inside!’

  And where Malcolm Chambers went, Rebus would surely follow.

  He ran and he ran and he ran.

  The way he used to run from his father, running and climbing the steps to the attic, hoping to hide. But always caught in the end. Even if he hid all day and half of the night, eventually the hunger, the thirst, would force him back downstairs, to where they were waiting.

  His leg hurts. And he’s cut. His face is stinging. The warm blood is trickling down his chin, down his neck. And he’s running.

  It wasn’t all bad, his childhood. He remembers his mother delicately snipping away at his father’s nosehairs. ‘Long nosehairs are so unbecoming in a man.’ It wasn’t his fault, was it, any of it? It was theirs. They’d wanted a daughter; they’d never wanted a son. His mother had dressed him in pink, in girls’ colours and girls’ clothes. Then had painted him, painted him with long blonde curls, imagining him into her paintings, into her landscapes. A little girl running by a riverbank. Running with bows in her hair. Running.

  Past one guard, past two. Lunging at them. The alarm is ringing somewhere. Maybe it’s just his imagination. All these paintings. Where have all these paintings come from? Through one door, turn right, through another.

  They kept him at home. The schools couldn’t teach him the way they could. Home taught. Hom
e made. His father, some nights, drunk, would knock over his mother’s canvases and dance on them. ‘Art! Fuck art!’ He’d do his little dance with a chuckle in his throat and all the time his mother would sit with her face in her hands and cry, then run to her room and bolt shut the door. Those were the nights when his father would stumble through to his bedroom. Just for a cuddle. Sweet alcoholic breath. Just for a cuddle. And then more than a cuddle, so very much more. ‘Open wide, just like the dentist tells you.’ Christ, it hurt so much. A probing finger . . . tongue . . . the wrenching open . . . And even worse was the noise, the dull grunting, the loud nasal breathing. And then the sham, pretending it had been just a game, that was all. And to prove it, his father would bend down and take a big soft bite out of his stomach, growling like a bear. Blowing a raspberry on the bare flesh. And then a laugh. ‘You see, it was only a game, wasn’t it?’

  No, never a game. Never. Running. To the attic. To the garden, to squeeze behind the shed, where the stinging nettles were. Even their bite was not so bad as his father’s. Had his mother known? Of course she had known. Once, when he had tried to tell her in a whispered moment, she had refused to listen. ‘No, not your father, you’re making it up, Malcolm.’ But her paintings had grown more violent: the fields now were purple and black, the water blood-red. The figures on the riverbank had grown skeletal, painted stark white like ghosts.

  He’d hidden it all so well for so long. But then she’d come back to him. And now he was mostly ‘she’, consumed by her, and by her need for . . . Not revenge, it couldn’t really be called revenge. Something deeper than revenge, some huge and hungry need without a name, without a form. Only a function. Oh yes, a function.

  This way and that. The people in the gallery make way for him. The alarm is ringing still. There’s a hissing in his head like a child’s rattle. Sss-sss-sss. Sss-sss-sss. These paintings he is running past, they’re laughable. Long nosehairs Johnny. None mimicked real life, and less so the life beneath. None could ape the grim caveman thoughts of every human being on the planet. But then he pushes open another door and it’s all so very different. A room of darkness and shadowplay, of skulls and frowning bloodless faces. Yes, this is how it is. Velázquez, El Greco, the Spanish painters. Skull and shadow. Ah, Velázquez.