10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  Rebus thought again of the scene at the brothel. And Jack seemed to read his mind, for he gave an embarrassed smile. Rebus shook the proffered hand. He noticed that a plaster had been stuck on the left hand’s offending finger. One secret vice, and one tiny flaw . . .

  Jack saw him noticing. ‘Eczema,’ he explained, and seemed about to say more.

  ‘Yes, you said.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me, Inspector. I don’t usually repeat myself. But what with yesterday and everything . . .’

  ‘Understood.’ Past Jack, Rebus noticed a card standing on the mantelpiece. It hadn’t been there yesterday.

  Jack realized he had a glass in his hand. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’

  ‘You can, sir, and I accept.’

  ‘Whisky all right? I don’t think there’s much else . . .’

  ‘Whatever you’re having, Mr Jack.’ And for some reason he added: ‘I like the Rolling Stones myself, their earlier stuff.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Jack. ‘The music scene these days, it’s all rubbish, isn’t it?’ He’d gone over to the wall to the left of the fireplace, where glass shelves held a series of bottles and glasses. As he poured, Rebus walked over to the table where yesterday Urquhart had been fussing with some papers. There were letters, waiting to be signed (all with the House of Commons portcullis at the head), and some notes relating to parliamentary business.

  ‘This job,’ Jack was saying, approaching with Rebus’s drink, ‘really is what you make of it. There are some MPs who do the minimum necessary, and believe me that’s still plenty. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’ They both drank.

  ‘Then there are those,’ said Jack, ‘who go for the maximum. They do their constituency work, and they become involved in the parliamentary process, the wider world. They debate, they write, they attend . . .’

  ‘And which camp do you belong to, sir?’ He talks too much, Rebus was thinking, and yet he says so little . . .

  ‘Straight down the middle,’ said Jack, steering a course with his flattened hand. ‘Here, sit down.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ They both sat, Rebus on the chair, Jack on the sofa. Rebus had noticed straight away that the whisky was watered, and he wondered by whom? And did Jack know about it? ‘Now then,’ said Rebus, ‘you said on the phone that there was something –’

  Jack used a remote control to switch off the music. He aimed the remote at the wall, it seemed to Rebus. There was no hi-fi system in sight. ‘I want to get things straight about my wife, Inspector,’ he said. ‘About Liz. I am worried about her, I admit it. I didn’t want to say anything before . . .’

  ‘Why not, sir?’ So far, the speech sounded well prepared. But then he’d had over an hour in which to prepare it. Soon enough, it would run out. Rebus could be patient. He wondered where Urquhart was . . .

  ‘Publicity, Inspector. Ian calls Liz my liability. I happen to think he’s going a bit far, but Liz is . . . well, not quite temperamental . . .’

  ‘You think she saw the newspapers?’

  ‘Almost certainly. She always buys the tabloids. It’s the gossip she likes.’

  ‘But she hasn’t been in touch?’

  ‘No, no, she hasn’t.’

  ‘And that’s a bit strange, wouldn’t you say?’

  Jack creased his face. ‘Yes and no, Inspector. I mean, I don’t know what to think. She’s capable of just laughing the whole thing off. But then again . . .’

  ‘You think she might harm herself, sir?’

  ‘Harm herself?’ Jack was slow to understand. ‘You mean suicide? No, I don’t think so, no, not that. But if she felt embarrassed, she might simply disappear. Or something could have happened to her, an accident . . . God knows what. If she got angry enough . . . it’s just possible . . .’ He bowed his head again, elbows resting on his knees.

  ‘Do you think it’s police business, sir?’

  Jack looked up with glinting eyes. ‘That’s the crux, isn’t it? If I report her missing . . . I mean report her officially . . . and she’s found, and it turns out she was simply keeping out of things . . .’

  ‘Does she seem the type who would stay out of things, sir?’ Rebus’s thoughts were spinning now. Someone had set Jack up . . . but not his wife, surely? Sunday newspaper thoughts, but still they worried him.

  Jack shrugged. ‘Not really. It’s hard to tell with Liz. She’s changeable.’

  ‘Well, sir, we could make a few discreet inquiries up north. Check hotels, guest houses –’

  ‘It would have to be hotels, Inspector, where Liz is concerned. Expensive hotels.’

  ‘Okay then, we check hotels, ask around. Any friends she might visit?’

  ‘Not many.’

  Rebus waited, wondering if Jack would change his mind. After all, there was always Andrew Macmillan, the murderer. Someone she probably knew, someone nearby. But Jack merely shrugged and repeated, ‘Not many.’

  ‘Well, a list would help, sir. You might even contact them yourself. You know, just phoning for a chat. If Mrs Jack was there, they’d be bound to tell you.’

  ‘Unless she’d told them not to.’

  Well, that was true.

  ‘But then,’ Jack was saying, ‘if it turned out she’d been off to one of the islands and hadn’t heard a thing . . .’

  Politics, it was all about politics in the end. Rebus was coming to respect Gregor Jack less, but, in a strange way, like him more. He rose and walked over towards the shelf unit, ostensibly to put his glass there. At the mantelpiece, he stopped by the card and picked it up. The front was a cartoon showing a young man in an open-topped sports car, champagne in an ice bucket on the passenger seat. The message above read GOOD LUCK! Inside was another message, written in felt pen: ‘Never fear, The Pack is with you’. There were six signatures.

  ‘Schoolfriends,’ Jack was saying. He came over to stand beside Rebus. ‘And a couple from university days. We’ve stuck pretty close over the years.’

  A few of the names Rebus recognized, but he was happy to look puzzled and let Jack provide the information.

  ‘Gowk, that’s Cathy Gow. She’s Cath Kinnoul now, Kinnoul as in Rab, the actor.’ His finger drifted to the next signature. ‘Tampon is Tom Pond. He’s an architect in Edinburgh. Bilbo, that’s Bill Fisher, works in London for some magazine. He was always daft on Tolkien.’ Jack’s voice had become soft with sentiment. Rebus was thinking of the schoolfriends he’d kept up with – a grand total of none. ‘Suey is Ronnie Steele . . .’

  ‘Why Suey?’

  Jack smiled. ‘I’m not sure I should tell you. Ronnie would kill me.’ He considered for a moment, gave a mellow shrug. ‘Well, we were on a school trip to Switzerland, and a girl went into Ronnie’s room and found him . . . doing something. She went and told everyone about it, and Ronnie was so embarrassed that he ran outside and lay down in the road. He said he was going to kill himself, only no cars came past, so eventually he got up.’

  ‘And suicide abbreviates to Suey?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Jack studied the card again. ‘Sexton, that’s Alice Blake. Sexton Blake, you see. A detective like yourself.’ Jack smiled. ‘Alice works in London, too. Something to do with PR.’

  ‘And what about . . .?’ Rebus was pointing to the last secret name, Mack. Jack’s face changed.

  ‘Oh, that’s . . . Andy Macmillan.’

  ‘And what does Mr Macmillan do these days?’ Mack, Rebus was thinking. As in Mack the Knife, grimly apt . . .

  Jack was aloof. ‘He’s in prison, I believe. Tragic story, tragic.’

  ‘In prison?’ Rebus was keen to pursue the subject, but Jack had other ideas. He pointed to the names on the card.

  ‘Notice anything, Inspector?’

  Yes, Rebus had, though he hadn’t been going to mention it. Now he did. ‘The names are all written by the same person.’

  Jack gave a quick smile. ‘Bravo.’

  ‘Well, Mr Macmillan’
s in prison, and Mr Fisher and Miss Blake could hardly have signed, could they, living in London? The story only broke yesterday . . .’

  ‘Ah yes, good point.’

  ‘So who . . .?’

  ‘Cathy. She used to be an expert forger, though you might not think it to look at her. She used to have all our signatures off by heart.’

  ‘But Mr Pond lives in Edinburgh . . . couldn’t he have signed his own?’

  ‘I think he’s in the States on business.’

  ‘And Mr Steele . . .?’ Rebus tapped the ‘Suey’ scrawl.

  ‘Well, Suey’s a hard man to catch, Inspector.’

  ‘Is that so,’ mused Rebus, ‘is that so.’

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Come in, Helen.’

  Helen Greig put her head round the door. She was dressed in a raincoat, the belt of which she was tying. ‘I’m just off, Gregor. Ian not back yet?’

  ‘Not yet. Catching up on his sleep, I expect.’

  Rebus was replacing the card on the mantelpiece. He was wondering, too, whether Gregor Jack was surrounded by friends or by something else entirely . . .

  ‘Oh,’ said Helen Greig, ‘and there’s another policeman here. He was at the back door . . .’

  The door opened to its full extent, and Brian Holmes walked into the room. Awkwardly, it seemed to Rebus. It struck him that Holmes was awkward in the presence of Gregor Jack MP.

  ‘Thank you, Helen. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re at Westminster tomorrow, Gregor.’

  ‘God, so I am. Right, see you the day after.’

  Helen Greig left, and Rebus introduced Jack to Brian Holmes. Holmes still seemed unnaturally awkward. What the hell was the matter? It couldn’t just be Jack could it? Then Holmes cleared his throat. He was looking at his superior, avoiding eye contact with the MP altogether.

  ‘Sir, er . . . there’s something maybe you should see. Round the back. In the dustbin. I had some rubbish in my pockets and I thought I’d get rid of it, and I happened to lift the lid off the bin . . .’

  Gregor Jack’s face turned stark white.

  ‘Right,’ said Rebus briskly, ‘lead the way, Brian.’ He made a sweeping motion with his arm. ‘After you, Mr Jack.’

  The back of the house was well lit. Two sturdy black plastic bins sat beside a bushy rhododendron. Each bin had attached inside it a black plastic refuse bag. Holmes lifted the lid off the left-hand bin and held it open so that Rebus could peer inside. He was staring at a flattened cornflake packet and the wrapping from some biscuits.

  ‘Beneath,’ Holmes stated simply. Rebus lifted the cornflake packet. It had been concealing a little treasure chest. Two video cassettes, their casings broken, tape spewing from them . . . a packet of photographs . . . two small gold-coloured vibrators . . . two pairs of flimsy-looking handcuffs . . . and clothing, body-stockings, knickers with zips. Rebus couldn’t help wondering what the hacks would have done if they’d found this lot first . . .

  ‘I can explain,’ said Jack brokenly.

  ‘You don’t have to, sir. It’s none of our business.’ Rebus said this in such a way that his meaning was clear: it might not be our business, but you’d better tell us anyway.

  ‘I . . . I panicked. No, not really a panic. It’s just, what with that story about the brothel, and now Liz is off somewhere . . . and I knew you were on your way . . . I just wanted rid of the lot of it.’ He was perspiring. ‘I mean, I know it must look strange, that’s precisely why I wanted rid of it all. Not my stuff, you see, it’s Liz’s. Her friends . . . the parties they have . . . well, I didn’t want you to get the wrong impression.’

  Or the right impression, thought Rebus. He picked up the packet of photographs, which just happened to burst open. ‘Sorry,’ he said, making a show of gathering them up. They were polaroids, taken at a party it was true. Quite a party, by the look of it. And who was this?

  Rebus held the photograph up so that Jack could see it. It showed Gregor Jack having his shirt removed by two women. Everyone’s eyes were red.

  ‘The first and last party I ever went to,’ Jack stated.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Rebus.

  ‘Look, Inspector, my wife’s life is her own. What she chooses to get up to . . . well, it’s out of my hands.’ Anger was replacing embarrassment. ‘I might not like it, I might not like her friends, but it’s her choice.’

  ‘Right, sir.’ Rebus threw the photographs back into the bin. ‘Well, maybe your wife’s . . . friends will know where she is, eh? Meantime, I wouldn’t leave that lot in there, not unless you want to see yourself on the front pages again. The bins are the first place some journalists look. It’s not called “getting the dirt” for nothing. And as I say, Mr Jack, it’s none of our business . . . not yet.’

  But it would be soon enough; Rebus felt it in his gut, which tumbled at the thought.

  It would be soon enough.

  Back inside the house, Rebus tried to concentrate on one thing at a time. Not easy, not at all easy. Jack wrote down the names and addresses of a few of his wife’s friends. If not quite high society, they were certainly more than a few rungs above the Horsehair. Then Rebus asked about Liz Jack’s car.

  ‘A black BMW,’ said Jack. ‘The 3-series. My birthday present to her last year.’

  Rebus thought of his own car. ‘Very nice too, sir. And the registration?’ Jack reeled it off. Rebus looked a little surprised, but Jack smiled weakly.

  ‘I’m an accountant by training,’ he explained. ‘I never forget figures.’

  ‘Of course, sir. Well, we’d better be –’

  There was a sound, the sound of the front door opening and closing. Voices in the hall. Had the prodigal wife returned? All three men turned towards the living room door, which now swung open.

  ‘Gregor? Look who I found coming up the drive . . .’

  Ian Urquhart saw that Gregor Jack had visitors. He paused, startled. Behind him, a tired-looking man was shuffling into the room. He was tall and skinny, with lank black hair and round NHS-style spectacles.

  ‘Gregor,’ the man said. He walked up to Gregor Jack and they shook hands. Then Jack placed a hand on the man’s shoulder.

  ‘Meant to look in before now,’ the man was saying, ‘but you know how it is.’ He really did look exhausted, with dark-ringed eyes and a stoop to his posture. His speech and movements were slow. ‘I think I’ve clinched a nice collection of Italian art books . . .’

  He now seemed ready to acknowledge the visitors’ presence. Rebus had been given Urquhart’s hand and was shaking it. The visitor nodded towards Rebus’s right hand.

  ‘You,’ he said, ‘must be Inspector Rebus.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ said Gregor Jack, suitably impressed.

  ‘Scratch marks on the wrist,’ the visitor explained. ‘Vanessa told me an Inspector Rebus had been in, and that Rasputin had made his mark . . . his considerable mark, by the look of things.’

  ‘You must be Mr Steele,’ said Rebus, shaking hands.

  ‘The very same,’ said Steele. ‘Sorry I wasn’t in when you called. As Gregor here will tell you, I’m a hard man to –’

  ‘Catch,’ interrupted Jack. ‘Yes, Ronnie, I’ve already told the Inspector.’

  ‘No sign of those books then, sir?’ Rebus asked Steele. He shrugged.

  ‘Too hot to handle, Inspector. Do you have any idea how much that lot would fetch? My guess would be a private collector.’

  ‘Stolen to order?’

  ‘Maybe. A fairly broad range though . . .’ Steele seemed to tire quickly of the topic. He turned again to Gregor Jack and held his arms wide open, half shrugging. ‘Gregor, what the hell are they trying to do to you?’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Urquhart, who was helping himself unasked to a drink, ‘someone somewhere is looking for a resignation.’

  ‘But what were you doing there in the first place?’

  Steele had asked the question. He asked it into
a silence which lasted for a very long time. Urquhart had poured him a drink, and handed it over, while Gregor Jack seemed to study the four men in the room, as though one of them might have the answer. Rebus noticed that Brian Holmes was studying a painting on one wall, seemingly oblivious to the whole conversation. At last, Jack made an exasperated sound and shook his head.

  ‘I think,’ Rebus said, into the general silence, ‘we’d better be off.’

  ‘Remember to empty your dustbin, sir,’ was his final message to Jack, before he led Holmes down the driveway towards the main road. Holmes agreed to give him a lift into Bonnyrigg, from where Rebus could pick up a ride back into town, but otherwise reached, opened and started the car without comment. As he moved up into second gear, however, Holmes finally said: ‘Nice guy. Do you think maybe he’d give us an invite to one of those parties?’

  ‘Brian,’ Rebus said warningly. Then: ‘Not his parties, parties attended by his wife. It didn’t look like their house in those photos.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t get that good a look. All I saw was my MP being stripped by a couple of eager ladies.’ Holmes gave a sudden chuckle.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Strip Jack Naked,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘It’s a card game,’ Holmes explained. ‘Strip Jack Naked. You might know it as Beggar My Neighbour.’

  ‘Really?’ Rebus said, trying not to sound interested. But was that precisely what someone was trying to do, strip Jack of his constituency, his clean-cut image, perhaps even his marriage? Were they trying to beggar the man whose nickname also was Beggar?

  Or was Jack not quite as innocent as he seemed? No, hell, be honest: he didn’t seem all that innocent anyway. Fact: he had visited a brothel. Fact: he had tried to get rid of evidence that he himself had attended at least one fairly ‘high-spirited’ party. Fact: his wife hadn’t been in touch. Big deal. Rebus’s money was still on the man. In religion, he might be more Pessimisterian than Presbyterian, but in some things John Rebus still clung to faith.

  Faith and hope. It was charity he usually lacked.

  4

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