10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Nonsense,’ Lauderdale was saying. ‘He’s only got himself to blame. What do you want us to do? Sneak him out the back door with a blanket over his head?’

  ‘No, sir, it’s just –’

  ‘He gets treated the same as the rest of them, Inspector. You know the score.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but –’

  ‘But what?’

  But what? Well, that was the question. What? Why was Rebus feeling so uncomfortable? The answer was complicatedly simple: because it was Gregor Jack. Most MPs, Rebus wouldn’t have given the time of day. But Gregor Jack was . . . well, he was Gregor Jack.

  ‘Vans are here, Inspector. Let’s round ’em up and ship ’em out.’

  Lauderdale’s hand on his back was cold and firm.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Rebus.

  So it was out into the cool dark night, lit by orange sodium lights, the glare of headlamps, and the dimmer light from open doors and twitching windows. The natives were restless. Some had come out on to their doorsteps, wrapped in paisley dressing gowns or wearing hastily found clothes, not quite hanging right.

  Police, natives, and of course the reporters. Flash-guns. Christ, there were photographers too, of course. No camera crews, no video machines. That was something: Watson hadn’t persuaded the TV companies to attend his little soirée.

  ‘Into the van, quick as you can,’ called Brian Holmes. Was that a new firmness, a new authority in his voice? Funny what promotion could do to the young. But by God they were quick. Not so much following Holmes’ orders, Rebus knew, as keen to escape the cameras. One or two of the women posed, trying a lopsided glamour learned from page three, before being persuaded by WPCs that this was neither the time nor the place.

  But the reporters were hanging back. Rebus wondered why. Indeed, he wondered what they were doing here at all. Was it such a big story? Would it provide Watson with useful publicity? One reporter even grabbed at a photographer’s arm and seemed to warn him about shooting off too many pictures. But now they were keening, now they were shouting. And the flashbulbs were going off like flak. All because they’d recognized a face. All because Gregor Jack was being escorted down the steps, across the narrow pavement, and into a van.

  ‘Christ, it’s Gregor Jack!’

  ‘Mr Jack! A word!’

  ‘Any comment to make?’

  ‘What were you doing –’

  ‘Any comment?’

  The doors were closing. A thump with the constabulary hand on the side of the van, and it moved slowly away, the reporters jogging after it. Well, Rebus had to admit it: Jack had held his head high. No, that wasn’t being accurate. He had, rather, held his head just low enough, suggesting penitence but not shame, humility but not embarrassment.

  ‘Seven days he’s been my MP,’ Holmes was saying by Rebus’s side. ‘Seven days.’

  ‘You must have been a bad influence on him, Brian.’

  ‘Bit of a shock though, wasn’t it?’

  Rebus shrugged noncommitally. The woman from the bedroom was being brought out now, having pulled on jeans and a t-shirt. She saw the reporters and suddenly lifted the t-shirt high over her naked breasts.

  ‘Get a load of this then!’

  But the reporters were busy comparing notes, the photographers loading new film. They’d be off to the station next, ready to catch Gregor Jack as he left. Nobody paid her any attention, and eventually she let her t-shirt fall back down and climbed into the waiting van.

  ‘He’s not choosy, is he?’ said Holmes.

  ‘But then again, Brian,’ answered Rebus, ‘maybe he is.’

  Watson was rubbing at his gleaming forehead. It was a lot of work for only one hand, since the forehead seemed to extend as far as Watson’s crown.

  ‘Mission accomplished,’ he said. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Holmes said smartly.

  ‘No problems then?’

  ‘Not at all, sir,’ said Rebus casually. ‘Unless you count Gregor Jack.’

  Watson nodded, then frowned. ‘Who?’ he asked.

  ‘Brian here can tell you all about him, sir,’ said Rebus, patting Holmes’ back. ‘Brian’s your man for anything smacking of politics.’

  Watson, hovering now somewhere between elation and dread, turned to Holmes.

  ‘Politics?’ he asked. He was smiling. Please be gentle with me.

  Holmes watched Rebus moving back inside the house. He felt like sobbing. Because, after all, that’s what John Rebus was – an s.o.b.

  2

  Scratching the Surface

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that some Members of Parliament have trouble keeping their trousers on. But Gregor Jack was not thought to be one of these. Indeed, he often eschewed troose altogether, opting for the kilt on election nights and at many a public function. In London, he took the jibes in good part, his responses matching the old questions with the accuracy of catechism.

  ‘Tell us now, Gregor, what’s worn beneath the kilt?’

  ‘Oh nothing, nothing at all. It’s all in perfect working order.’

  Gregor Jack was not a member of the SNP, though he had flirted with the party in his youth. He had joined the Labour Party, but had resigned for never specified reasons. He was not a Liberal Democrat, nor was he that rare breed – a Scots Tory MP. Gregor Jack was an Independent, and as an Independent had held the seat of North and South Esk, south and east of Edinburgh, since his mildly surprising by-election win of 1985. ‘Mild’ was an adjective often used about Jack. So were ‘honest’, ‘legal’ and ‘decent’.

  All this John Rebus knew from memory, from old newspapers, magazines and radio interviews. There had to be something wrong with the man, some chink in his shining armour. Trust Operation Creeper to find the flaw. Rebus scanned the Saturday newsprint, seeking a story. He didn’t find it. Curious that; the press had seemed keen enough last night. A story breaking at one thirty . . . plenty of time, surely, to see it into print by the final morning edition. Unless, of course, the reporters hadn’t been local. But they must have been, mustn’t they? Having said which, he hadn’t recognized any faces. Did Watson really have the front to get the London papers involved? Rebus smiled. The man had plenty of ‘front’ all right: his wife saw to that. Three meals a day, three courses each.

  ‘Feed the body,’ Watson was fond of saying, ‘and you feed the spirit.’ Something like that. Which was another thing: bible-basher or no, Watson was starting to put away a fair amount of spirits. A rosy glow to the cheeks and chins, and the unmistakable scent of extra-strong mints. When Lauderdale walked into his superior’s room these days, he sniffed and sniffed, like a bloodhound. Only it wasn’t blood he was sniffing, it was promotion.

  Lose a Farmer, gain a Fart.

  The nickname had perhaps been unavoidable. Word association. Lauderdale became Fort Lauderdale, and Fort quickly turned into Fart. Oh, but it was an apt name, too. For wherever Chief Inspector Lauderdale went, he left a bad smell. Take the Case of the Lifted Literature. Rebus had known the minute Lauderdale walked into his office that there would soon be a need to open the windows.

  ‘I want you to stick close to this one, John. Professor Costello is highly thought of, an international figure in this field . . .’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And,’ Lauderdale tried to look as though his next utterance meant nothing to him, ‘he’s a close personal friend of Chief Superintendent Watson.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What is this – Monosyllable Week?’

  ‘Monosyllable?’ Rebus frowned. ‘Sorry, sir, I’ll have to ask DS Holmes what that means.’

  ‘Don’t try to be funny –’

  ‘I’m not, sir, honest. It’s just that DS Holmes has had the benefit of a university education. Well . . . five months’ worth or thereabouts. He’d be the very man to coordinate the officers working on this highly sensitive case.’

  Lauderdale stared at the seated figure for what seemed – to Rebus at least – a very long time. God, was th
e man really that stupid? Did no one appreciate irony these days?

  ‘Look,’ Lauderdale said at last, ‘I need someone a bit more senior than a recently promoted DS. And I’m sorry to say that you, Inspector, God help us all, are that bit more senior.’

  ‘You’re flattering me, sir.’

  A file landed with a dull thud on Rebus’s desk. The chief inspector turned and left. Rebus rose from his chair and turned to his sash window, tugging at it with all his might. But the thing was stuck tight. There was no escape. With a sigh, he turned back and sat down at his desk. Then he opened the folder.

  It was a straightforward case of theft. Professor James Aloysius Costello was Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. One day someone had walked into his office, then walked out again taking with them several rare books. Priceless, according to the Professor, though not to the city’s various booksellers and auction rooms. The list seemed eclectic: an early edition of Knox’s Treatise on Predestination, a couple of Sir Walter Scott first editions, Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels, a signed early edition of Tristram Shandy, and editions of Montaigne and Voltaire.

  None of which meant much to Rebus until he saw the estimates at auction, provided by one of the George Street auction houses. The question then was: what were they doing in an unlocked office in the first place?

  ‘To be read,’ answered Professor Costello blithely. ‘To be enjoyed, admired. What good would they be locked up in a safe or in some old library display case?’

  ‘Did anyone else know about them? I mean, about how valuable they are?’

  The Professor shrugged. ‘I had thought, Inspector, that I was amongst friends.’

  He had a voice like a peat bog and eyes that gleamed like crystal. A Dublin education, but a life spent, as he put it, ‘cloistered’ in the likes of Cambridge, Oxford, St Andrews, and now Edinburgh. A life spent collecting books, too. Those left in his office – still kept unlocked – were worth at least as much as the stolen volumes, perhaps more.

  ‘They say lightning never strikes twice,’ he assured Rebus.

  ‘Maybe not, but villains do. Try to lock your door when you step out, eh, sir? If nothing else.’

  The Professor had shrugged. Was this, Rebus wondered, a kind of stoicism? He felt nervous sitting there in the office in Buccleuch Place. For one thing, he was a kind of Christian himself, and would have liked to be able to talk the subject through with this wise-seeming man. Wise? Well, perhaps not worldly-wise, not wise enough to know how snib locks and human minds worked, but wise in other ways. But Rebus was nervous, too, because he knew himself for a clever man who could have been cleverer, given the breaks. He had never gone to university, and never would. He wondered how different he would be if he had or could . . .

  The Professor was staring out of his window, down on to the cobblestoned street. On one side of Buccleuch Place sat a row of neat tenements, owned by the university and used by various departments. The Professor called it Botany Bay. And across the road uglier shapes reared up, the modern stone mausoleums of the main university complex. If this side of the road was Botany Bay, Rebus was all for transportation.

  He left the Professor to his muses and musings. Had the books been filched at random? Or was this designer theft, the thief stealing to order? There might well be unscrupulous collectors who would pay – no questions asked – for an early Tristram Shandy. Though the authors’ names had rung bells, only that particular title had meant anything to Rebus. He owned a paperback copy of the book, bought at a car-boot sale on The Meadows for tenpence. Maybe the Professor would like to borrow it . . .

  And so the Case of the Lifted Literature had, for Inspector John Rebus, begun. The ground had been covered before, as the case-notes showed, but it could be covered again. There were the auction houses, the bookshops, the private collectors . . . all to be talked to. And all to satisfy an unlikely friendship between a police chief superintendent and a professor of Divinity. A waste of time, of course. The books had disappeared the previous Tuesday. It was now Saturday, and they would doubtless be under lock and key in some dark and secret corner.

  What a way to spend a Saturday. Actually, if the time had been his own, this would have been a nice afternoon, which was perhaps why he hadn’t balked at the task. Rebus collected books. Well, that was putting it strongly. He bought books. Bought more of them than he had time to read, attracted by this cover or that title or the fact that he’d heard good things about the author. No, on second thoughts it was just as well these were business calls he was making, otherwise he’d be bankrupting himself in record time.

  In any case, he didn’t have books on his mind. He kept thinking about a certain MP. Was Gregor Jack married? Rebus thought so. Hadn’t there been some big society wedding several years previous? Well, married men were bread and butter to prostitutes. They just gobbled them up. Shame though, about Jack. Rebus had always respected the man – which was to say, now that he thought about it, that he’d been taken in by Jack’s public image. But it wasn’t all image, was it? Jack really had come from a working-class background, had clawed his way upwards, and was a good MP. North and South Esk was difficult territory, part mining villages, part country homes. Jack seemed to glide easily between the two hemispheres. He’d managed to get an ugly new road rerouted well away from his well-heeled constituents, but had also fought hard to bring new high-tech industry to the area, retraining the miners so that they could do the jobs.

  Too good to be true. Too bloody good to be true . . .

  Bookshops. He had to keep his mind on bookshops. There were only a few to check, the ones that had not been open earlier in the week. Footwork really, the stuff he should have been doling out to more junior men. But all that meant was that he’d feel bound to come round after them, double checking what they’d done. This way, he saved himself some grief.

  Buccleuch Street was an odd mixture of grimy junk shops and bright vegetarian takeaways. Student turf. Not far from Rebus’s own flat, yet he seldom ventured into this part of town. Only on business. Only ever on business.

  Ah, this was it. Suey Books. And for once the shop looked to be open. Even in the spring sunshine there was a need for a light inside. It was a tiny shop, boasting an unenthusiastic window display of old hardbacks, mostly with a Scottish theme. An enormous black cat had made a home for itself in the centre of the display, and blinked slowly if malignly up at Rebus. The window itself needed washing. You couldn’t make out the titles of the books without pressing your nose to the glass, and this was made difficult by the presence of an old black bicycle resting against the front of the shop. Rebus pushed open the door. If anything, the shop’s interior was less pristine than its exterior. There was a bristle-mat just inside the door. Rebus made a note to wipe his feet before he went back into the street . . .

  The shelves, a few of them glass-fronted, were crammed, and the smell was of old relatives’ houses, of attics and the insides of school desks. The aisles were narrow. Hardly enough room to swing a . . . There was a thump somewhere behind him, and he feared one of the books had fallen, but when he turned he saw that it was the cat. It swerved past him and made for the desk situated to the rear of the shop, the desk with a bare lightbulb dangling above it.

  ‘Anything in particular you’re looking for?’

  She was seated at the desk, a pile of books in front of her. She held a pencil in one hand and appeared to be writing prices on the inside leaves of the books. From a distance, it was a scene out of Dickens. Close up was a different story. Still in her teens, she had hennaed her short spiked hair. The eyes behind the circular tinted glasses were themselves round and dark, and she sported three earrings in either ear, with another curling from her left nostril. Rebus didn’t doubt she’d have a pale boyfriend with lank dreadlocks and a whippet on a length of clothes-rope.

  ‘I’m looking for the manager,’ he said.

  ‘He’s not here. Can I help?’

  Rebus shrugged, his eyes on the cat. It
had leapt silently on to the desk and was now rubbing itself against the books. The girl held her pencil out towards it, and the cat brushed the tip with its jaw.

  ‘Inspector Rebus,’ said Rebus. ‘I’m interested in some stolen books. I was wondering if anyone had been in trying to sell them.’

  ‘Do you have a list?’

  Rebus did. He drew it out of his pocket and handed it over. ‘You can keep it,’ he said. ‘Just in case.’

  She glanced down the typed list of titles and editions, her lips pursed.

  ‘I don’t think Ronald could afford them, even if he was tempted.’

  ‘Ronald being the manager?’

  ‘That’s right. Where were they stolen from?’

  ‘Round the corner in Buccleuch Place.’

  ‘Round the corner? They’d hardly be likely to bring them here then, would they?’

  Rebus smiled. ‘True,’ he said, ‘but we have to check.’

  ‘Well, I’ll hang on to this anyway,’ she said, folding the list. As she pushed it into a desk drawer, Rebus reached out a hand and stroked the cat. Like lightning, a paw flicked up and caught his wrist. He drew back his hand with a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the girl. ‘Rasputin’s not very good with strangers.’

  ‘So I see.’ Rebus studied his wrist. There were inch-long claw marks there, three of them. Whitened scratches, they were already rising, the skin swelling and breaking. Beads of blood appeared. ‘Jesus,’ he said, sucking on the damaged wrist. He glared at the cat. It glared back, then dropped from the desk and was gone.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Just about. You should keep that thing on a chain.’

  She smiled. ‘Do you know anything about that raid last night?’

  Rebus blinked, still sucking. ‘What raid?’

  ‘I heard the police raided a brothel.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I heard they caught an MP, Gregor Jack.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She smiled again. ‘Word gets about.’ Rebus thought, not for the first time, I don’t live in a city, I live in a bloody village . . .