10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  He reversed into a space in front of a tenement block on Mayfield Gardens. The address was a top floor flat.

  ‘Why is it always the top floor?’ Siobhan complained.

  ‘Because that’s where the poor people live.’

  There were two doors on the top landing. The name on one doorbell read MURDOCK. There was a brown bristle welcome-mat just outside the door. The message on it was GET LOST!

  ‘Charming.’ Rebus pressed the bell. The door was opened by a bearded man wearing thick wire-framed glasses. The beard didn’t help, but Rebus would guess the man’s age at mid-twenties. He had thick shoulder-length black hair, through which he ran a hand.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Rebus. This is –’

  ‘Come in, come in. Mind out for the motorbike.’

  ‘Yours, Mr Murdock?’

  ‘No, it’s Billy’s. It hasn’t worked since he moved in.’

  The bike’s frame was intact, but the engine lay disassembled along the hall carpet, lying on old newspapers turned black from oil. Smaller pieces were in polythene bags, each bag tied at the neck and marked with an identifying number.

  ‘That’s clever,’ said Rebus.

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Murdock, ‘he’s organised is Billy. In here.’ He led them into a cluttered living area. ‘This is Millie, she lives here.’

  ‘Hiya.’

  Millie was sitting on the sofa swathed in a sleeping bag, despite the heat outside. She was watching the television and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘You phoned us, Mr Murdock.’

  ‘Aye, well, it’s about Billy.’ Murdock began to pad around the room. ‘See, the description in the paper and on the telly, well . . . I didn’t think about it at the time, but as Millie says, it’s not like Billy to stay away so long. Like I say, he’s organised. Usually he’d phone or something, just to let us know.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  Murdock looked to Millie. ‘When was it, Thursday night?’

  ‘I saw him Friday morning.’

  ‘So you did.’

  Rebus turned to Millie. She had short fair hair, dark at the roots, and dark eyebrows. Her face was long and plain, her chin highlighted by a protruding mole. Rebus reckoned she was a few years older than Murdock. ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything. There’s not a lot of conversation in this flat at that hour.’

  ‘What hour?’

  She flicked ash into the ashtray which was balanced on her sleeping bag. It was a nervous habit, the cigarette being tapped even when there was no ash for it to surrender. ‘Seven thirty, quarter to eight,’ she said.

  ‘Where does he work?’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ said Murdock, resting his hand on the mantelpiece. ‘He used to work in the Post Office, but they laid him off a few months back. He’s on the dole now, along with half of Scotland.’

  ‘And what do you do, Mr Murdock?’

  ‘I’m a computer consultant.’

  Sure enough, some of the living room’s clutter was made up of keyboards and disk drives, some of them dismantled, piled on top of each other. There were piles of fat magazines too, and books, hefty operating manuals.

  ‘Did either of you know Billy before he moved in?’

  ‘I did,’ said Millie. ‘A friend of a friend, casual acquaintance sort of thing. I knew he was looking for a room, and there was a room going spare here, so I suggested him to Murdock.’ She changed channels on the TV. She was watching with the sound turned off, watching through a squint of cigarette smoke.

  ‘Can we see Billy’s room?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Murdock. He’d been glancing nervously towards Millie all the time she’d been talking. He seemed relieved to be in movement. He took them back into where the narrow entrance hall became a wider rectangle, off which were three doors. One was a cupboard, one the kitchen. Back along the narrow hall they’d passed the bathroom on one side and Murdock’s bedroom on the other. Which left just this last door.

  It led them into a very small, very tidy bedroom. The room itself would be no more than ten feet by eight, yet it managed to contain single bed, wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a writing desk and chair. A hi-fi unit, including speakers, sat atop the chest of drawers. The bed had been made, and there was nothing left lying around.

  ‘You haven’t tidied up, have you?’

  Murdock shook his head. ‘Billy was always tidying. You should see the kitchen.’

  ‘Do you have a photograph of Billy?’ Rebus asked.

  ‘I might have some from one of our parties. You want to look at them?’

  ‘Just the best one will do.’

  ‘I’ll fetch it then.’

  ‘Thank you.’ When Murdock had gone, Siobhan squeezed into the room beside Rebus. Until then, she’d been forced to stay just outside the door.

  ‘Initial thoughts?’ Rebus asked.

  ‘Neurotically tidy,’ she said, the comment of one whose own flat looked like a cross between a pizza franchise and a bottle bank.

  But Rebus was studying the walls. There was a Hearts pennant above the bed, and a Union Jack flag on which the Red Hand of Ulster was centrally prominent, with above it the words ‘No Surrender’ and below it the letters FTP. Even Siobhan Clarke knew what those stood for.

  ‘Fuck the Pope,’ she murmured.

  Murdock was back. He didn’t attempt to squeeze into the narrow aisle between bed and wardrobe, but stood in the doorway and handed the photo to Siobhan Clarke, who handed it to Rebus. It showed a young man smiling manically for the camera. Behind him you could see a can of beer held high, as though someone were about to pour it over his head.

  ‘It’s as good a photo as we’ve got,’ Murdock said by way of apology.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Murdock.’ Rebus was almost sure. Almost. ‘Billy had a tattoo?’

  ‘On his arm, aye. It looked like one of those things you do yourself when you’re a daft laddie.’

  Rebus nodded. They’d released details of the tattoo, looking for a quick result.

  ‘I never really looked at it close up,’ Murdock went on, ‘and Billy never talked about it.’

  Millie had joined him in the doorway. She had discarded the sleeping bag and was wearing a modestly long t-shirt over bare legs. She put an arm around Murdock’s waist. ‘I remember it,’ she said. ‘SaS. Big S, small a.’

  ‘Did he ever tell you what it stood for?’

  She shook her head. Tears were welling in her eyes. ‘It’s him, isn’t it? He’s the one you found dead?’

  Rebus tried to be non-committal, but his face gave him away. Millie started to bawl, and Murdock hugged her to him. Siobhan Clarke had lifted some cassette tapes from the chest of drawers and was studying them. She handed them silently to Rebus. They were collections of Orange songs, songs about the struggle in Ulster. Their titles said it all: The Sash and other Glories, King Billy’s Marching Tunes, No Surrender. He stuck one of the tapes in his pocket.

  They did some more searching of Billy Cunningham’s room, but came up with little excepting a recent letter from his mother. There was no address on the letter, but it bore a Glasgow postmark, and Millie recalled Billy saying something about coming from Hillhead. Well, they’d let Glasgow deal with it. Let Glasgow break the news to some unsuspecting family.

  In one of the drawers, Siobhan Clarke came up with a Fringe programme. It contained the usual meltdown of Abigail’s Partys and Krapp’s Last Tapes, revues called things like Teenage Alsatian Orgy, and comic turns on the run from London fatigue.

  ‘He’s ringed a show,’ said Clarke.

  So he had, a country and western act at the Crazy Hose Saloon. The act had appeared for three nights back at the start of the Festival.

  ‘There’s no country music in his collection,’ Clarke commented.

  ‘At least he showed taste,’ said Rebus.

  On the way back to the station, he pushed the Orange tape into his car’s antiquated machine.

  The tape pl
ayed slow, which added to the grimness. Rebus had heard stuff like it before, but not for a wee while. Songs about King Billy and the Apprentice Boys, the Battle of the Boyne and the glory of 1690, songs about routing the Catholics and why the men of Ulster would struggle to the end. The singer had a pub vibrato and little else, and was backed by accordion, snare and the occasional flute. Only an Orange marching band could make the flute sound martial to the ears. Well, an Orange marching band or Iain Anderson from Jethro Tull. Rebus was reminded that he hadn’t listened to Tull in an age. Anything would be better than these songs of . . . the word ‘hate’ sprang to mind, but he dismissed it. There was no vitriol in the lyrics, just a stern refusal to compromise in any way, to give ground, to accept that things could change now that the 1690s had become the 1990s. It was all blinkered and backward-looking. How narrow a view could you get?

  ‘The sod is,’ said Siobhan Clarke, ‘you find yourself humming the tunes after.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Rebus, ‘bigotry’s catchy enough all right.’

  And he whistled Jethro Tull all the way back to St Leonard’s.

  Lauderdale had arranged a press conference and wanted to know what Rebus knew.

  ‘I’m not positive,’ was the answer. ‘Not a hundred percent.’

  ‘How close?’

  ‘Ninety, ninety-five.’

  Lauderdale considered this. ‘So should I say anything?’

  ‘That’s up to you, sir. A fingerprint team’s on its way to the flat. We’ll know soon enough one way or the other.’

  One of the problems with the victim was that the last killing shot had blown away half his face, the bullet entering through the back of the neck and tearing up through the jaw. As Dr Curt had explained, they could do an ID covering up the bottom half of the face, allowing a friend or relative to see just the top half. But would that be enough? Before today’s potential break, they’d been forced to consider dental work. The victim’s teeth were the usual result of a Scottish childhood, eroded by sweets and shored up by dentistry. But as the forensic pathologist had said, the mouth was badly damaged, and what dental work remained was fairly routine. There was nothing unusual there for any dentist to spot definitively as his or her work.

  Rebus arranged for the party photograph to be reprinted and sent to Glasgow with the relevant details. Then he went to Lauderdale’s press conference.

  Chief Inspector Lauderdale loved his duels with the media. But today he was more nervous than usual. Perhaps it was that he had a larger audience than he was used to, Chief Superintendent Watson and DCI Kilpatrick having emerged from somewhere to listen. Both sported faces too ruddy to be natural, whisky certainly the cause. While the journalists sat towards the front of the room, the police officers stood to the back. Kilpatrick saw Rebus and sidled over to him.

  ‘You may have a positive ID?’ he whispered.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So is it drugs or the IRA?’ There was a wry smile on his face. He didn’t really expect an answer, it was the whisky asking, that was all. But Rebus had an answer for him anyway.

  ‘If it’s anybody,’ he said, ‘it’s not the IRA but the other lot.’ There were so many names for them he didn’t even begin to list them: UDA, UVF, UFF, UR . . . The U stood for Ulster in each case. They were proscribed organisations, and they were all Protestant. Kilpatrick rocked back a little on his heels. His face was full of questions, fighting their way to the surface past the burst blood vessels which cherried nose and cheeks. A drinker’s face. Rebus had seen too many of them, including his own some nights in the bathroom mirror.

  But Kilpatrick wasn’t so far gone. He knew he was in no condition to ask questions, so he made his way back to the Farmer instead, where he spoke a few words. Farmer Watson glanced across to Rebus, then nodded to Kilpatrick. Then they turned their attention back to the press briefing.

  Rebus knew the reporters. They were old hands mostly, and knew what to expect from Chief Inspector Lauderdale. You might walk into a Lauderdale session sniffing and baying like a bloodhound, but you shuffled out like a sleepy-faced pup. So they stayed quiet mostly, and let him have his insubstantial say.

  Except for Mairie Henderson. She was down at the front, asking questions the others weren’t bothering to ask; weren’t bothering for the simple reason that they knew the answer the Chief Inspector would give.

  ‘No comment,’ he told Mairie for about the twentieth time. She gave up and slumped in her chair. Someone else asked a question, so she looked around, surveying the room. Rebus jerked his chin in greeting. Mairie glared and stuck her tongue out at him. A few of the other journalists looked around in his direction. Rebus smiled out their inquisitive stares.

  The briefing over, Mairie caught up with him in the corridor. She was carrying a legal notepad, her usual blue fineliner pen, and a recording walkman.

  ‘Thanks for your help the other night,’ she said.

  ‘No comment.’

  She knew it was a waste of time getting angry at John Rebus, so exhaled noisily instead. ‘I was first on the scene, I could have had a scoop.’

  ‘Come to the pub with me and you can have as many scoops as you like.’

  ‘That one’s so weak it’s got holes in its knees.’ She turned and walked off, Rebus watching her. He never liked to pass up the opportunity of looking at her legs.

  6

  Edinburgh City Mortuary was sited on the Cowgate, at the bottom of High School Wynd and facing St Ann’s Community Centre and Blackfriars Street. The building was low-built red brick and pebbledash, purposely anonymous and tucked in an out of the way place. Steep sloping roads led up towards the High Street. For a long time now, the Cowgate had been a thoroughfare for traffic, not pedestrians. It was narrow and deep like a canyon, its pavements offering scant shelter from the taxis and cars rumbling past. The place was not for the faint-hearted. Society’s underclass could be found there, when it wasn’t yet time to shuffle back to the hostel.

  But the street was undergoing redevelopment, including a court annexe. First they’d cleaned up the Grassmarket, and now the city fathers had the Cowgate in their sights.

  Rebus waited outside the mortuary for a couple of minutes, until a woman poked her head out of the door.

  ‘Inspector Rebus?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘He told me to tell you he’s already gone to Bannerman’s.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Rebus headed off towards the pub.

  Bannerman’s had been just cellarage at one time, and hadn’t been altered much since. Its vaulted rooms were unnervingly like those of the shops in Mary King’s Close. Cellars like these formed connecting burrows beneath the Old Town, worming from the Lawnmarket down to the Canongate and beyond. The bar wasn’t busy yet, and Dr Curt was sitting by the window, his beer glass resting on a barrel which served as table. Somehow, he’d found one of the few comfortable chairs in the place. It looked like a minor nobleman’s perch, with armrests and high back. Rebus bought a double whisky for himself, dragged over a stool, and sat down.

  ‘Your health, John.’

  ‘And yours.’

  ‘So what can I do for you?’

  Even in a pub, Rebus would swear he could smell soap and surgical alcohol wafting up from Curt’s hands. He took a swallow of whisky. Curt frowned.

  ‘Looks like I might be examining your liver sooner than I’d hoped.’

  Rebus nodded towards the pack of cigarettes on the table. They were Curt’s and they were untipped. ‘Not if you keep smoking those.’

  Dr Curt smiled. He hadn’t long taken up smoking, having decided to see just how indestructible he was. He wouldn’t call it a death wish exactly; it was merely an exercise in mortality.

  ‘How long have you and Ms Rattray been an item then?’

  Curt laughed. ‘Dear God, is that why I’m here? You want to ask me about Caroline?’

  ‘Just making conversation. She’s not bad though.’

  ‘Oh, she’s quite something.’ Curt lit a ciga
rette and inhaled, nodding to himself. ‘Quite something,’ he repeated through a cloud of smoke.

  ‘We may have a name for the victim in Mary King’s Close. It’s up to fingerprints now.’

  ‘Is that why you wanted to see me? Not just to discuss Caro?’

  ‘I want to talk about guns.’

  ‘I’m no expert on guns.’

  ‘Good. I’m not after an expert, I’m after someone I can talk to. Have you seen the ballistics report?’ Curt shook his head. ‘We’re looking at something like a Smith and Wesson model 547, going by the rifling marks – five grooves, right-hand twist. It’s a revolver, takes six rounds of nine millimetre parabellum.’

  ‘You’ve lost me already.’

  ‘Probably the version with the three-inch rather than four-inch barrel, which means a weight of thirty-two ounces.’ Rebus sipped his drink. There were whisky fumes in his nostrils now, blocking any other smells. ‘Revolvers don’t accept silencers.’

  ‘Ah.’ Curt nodded. ‘I begin to see some light.’

  ‘A confined space like that, shaped the way it was . . .’ Rebus nodded past the bar to the room beyond. ‘Much the same size and shape as this.’

  ‘It would have been loud.’

  ‘Bloody loud. Deafening, you might say.’

  ‘Meaning what exactly?’

  Rebus shrugged. ‘I’m just wondering how professional all of this really was. I mean, on the surface, if you look at the style of execution, then yes, it was a pro job, no question. But then things start to niggle.’

  Curt considered. ‘So what now? Do we scour the city for recent purchasers of hearing-aids?’

  Rebus smiled. ‘It’s a thought.’

  ‘All I can tell you, John, is that those bullets did damage. Whether meant to or not, they were messy. Now, we’ve both come up against messy killers before. Usually the facts of the mess make it easier to find them. But this time there doesn’t seem to be much evidence left lying around, apart from the bullets.’

  ‘I know.’

  Curt slapped his hand on the barrel. ‘Tell you what, I’ve got a suggestion.’

  ‘What is it?’