10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘I like it, ken. Just American, not any other kind.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Why just American?’

  The man licked his lips. He wasn’t focusing on Rebus, or on anything in the bar. You couldn’t be sure he was even focusing on the present day.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I suppose it’s because of the Westerns. I love Westerns. Hopalong Cassidy, John Wayne . . . I used to like Hopalong Cassidy.’

  ‘Could It Be Forever,’ said Rebus, ‘that was one of his.’

  Then he finished his drink and went home.

  The telephone was ringing. Rebus considered not answering; resistance lasted all of ten seconds.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  He flopped into his chair. ‘Hello, Sammy. Where are you?’ She paused too long. ‘Still at Patience’s, eh? How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘How’s work?’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘Just being polite.’ Fatherly, he thought suddenly: I should have said fatherly, not polite. Sometimes he wished life had a rewind function.

  ‘Well, I won’t bore you with the details then.’

  ‘I take it Patience is out?’ It stood to reason: Sammy never called when she was home.

  ‘Yes, she’s out with . . . I mean at something. She’s out at something.’

  Rebus smiled. ‘What you really mean is that she’s out with someone.’

  ‘I’m not very good at this.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, blame your genes. Do you want to meet?’

  ‘Not tonight, I’m dog-tired. Patience asked . . . she wondered if you’d like to come to tea some day. She thinks we should see more of one another.’

  As usual, thought Rebus, Patience was right. ‘I’d like that. When?’

  ‘I’ll ask Patience and get back to you. Deal?’

  ‘Deal.’

  ‘Well, I’m off for an early night. What about you?’

  Rebus looked down at his chair. ‘I’m already there. Sleep tight.’

  ‘You too, Dad. Love you.’

  ‘You too, pet,’ Rebus said quietly, but only after he’d put down the phone.

  He went over to the hi-fi. After a drink, he liked to listen to the Stones. Women, relationships, and colleagues had come and gone, but the Stones had always been there. He put the album on and poured himself a last drink. The guitar riff, one of easily half a dozen in Keith’s tireless repertoire, kicked the album off. I don’t have much, Rebus thought, but I have this. He thought of Lauderdale in his hospital bed; Patience out enjoying herself; Kirstie Kennedy in a Charing Cross cardboard-box. Then he saw cheap trainers, a final embrace, and Willie Coyle’s face.

  Rebus just couldn’t seem to drink him off his mind.

  He remembered the report he’d found hidden in Willie’s bedroom. It was on the kitchen worktop, and he went to fetch it. It was a business plan, something to do with a computer software company called LABarum. The text explained that the dictionary definition of ‘labarum’ was ‘moral standard or guide’, and the reason the company would use upper case for the first three letters was to emphasise Lothian And Borders. The business plan discussed future development, costings, projected balance sheet, employment range. It was dry, and it was couched in the conditional. Rebus got out the phone book but found no listing anywhere for LABarum.

  Someone had been working on the text, underlining some phrases, circling words, doing jotted calculations beside the graphs and bar charts. Sentences had been deleted in red pen, words changed. Some points had been ticked. Rebus couldn’t know if the handwriting was Willie Coyle’s. He didn’t know if Willie had owned such a thing as a red Biro. But he did wonder what such a document was doing hidden in Willie Coyle’s bedroom. When he turned to the last sheet, there was a word scrawled diagonally across it and underlined heavily. The word was DALGETY. He flipped through the report again but found no other mention of Dalgety. Was it a person, a place, another company? The word was scored into the paper in blue ink. It was impossible to say if it was in the same hand as the amendments and marginalia.

  He poured another drink – this would be his last – and flipped the album over. He was annoyed, more with himself than anyone. It was case closed after all: a couple of desperate hoaxers fell off a bridge and died. That was all. He should have cleared it from his mind by now. Yet he couldn’t.

  ‘Damn you, Willie,’ he said out loud. He sat down again with his drink and picked up the business plan. There were a couple of letters in the top right-hand corner, written faintly in pencil. CK. He wondered if they were an abbreviation for ‘check’.

  ‘Who cares?’ he said, trying to concentrate on the music. What a shambles the band were, yet sometimes they could get it so exactly right that it hurt.

  ‘Here’s to you, Willie,’ Rebus said, raising his glass in the air.

  6

  It wasn’t till he woke up in the morning freezing that he remembered the radiator key in his jacket pocket. The pipes were gurgling, the boiler roaring away, yet the radiators were barely warm.

  He got coffee and a bacon roll from a café and had breakfast in his car on the way to work. There was a hard frost on the ground, and the sky was leaden, threatening worse. It had taken him five minutes to scrape the ice off his windscreen, and even so it was like driving a tank, peering through the one clear slit.

  A message on his desk warned of a nine-thirty meeting in the Farmer’s office. Rebus felt he deserved another coffee, and made for the canteen. A lone woman sat at a table, slowly stirring a beaker of tea.

  ‘Gill?’

  She looked up. It was Gill Templer. Rebus’s face broke into its first grin of the year. He pulled out a chair and sat down.

  ‘Hello, John.’ Her eyes were on her drink.

  ‘I thought you were in Fife.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sex Offences Unit, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  He nodded, trying to ignore the coolness in her tone. ‘You look good.’ He meant it too. Her short dark hair was feather-cut, long crescents sweeping over both ears to her cheeks. Her eyes were emerald green. She hadn’t changed a bit. Gill Templer smiled an acknowledgment but didn’t say anything.

  Brian Holmes put a hand on Rebus’s shoulder. ‘Those pathology tests have come in.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Holmes went to fetch himself coffee and a dough-ring, Rebus following. ‘So what’s the news?’ he asked.

  Holmes took a bite out of his dough-ring and shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he mumbled, swallowing. ‘The professor can’t confirm the presence of heroin or any other drug in the blood of either deceased. He thinks he may have a couple of jab marks on one corpse, but they’re not recent.’

  ‘Which body?’

  ‘The shorter.’

  ‘Dixie.’ Rebus lifted his coffee and left Holmes to pay for it. When he turned, Gill Templer wasn’t at the table any more. She had left the beaker of tea untouched.

  ‘Who was she?’ Holmes asked, tucking change back into his pocket.

  ‘Someone I used to know.’

  ‘Well, that narrows things down.’

  Rebus picked a new table for them to sit at.

  DI Alister Flower looked like he was on his way to a fashion shoot for one of the stores on Princes Street.

  ‘Run out of dummies, have they?’ Rebus asked, entering Farmer Watson’s office.

  Flower was wearing a light blue suit with blue shirt and a black and white tie with a zig-zag motif. He’d set things off with polished brown loafers and what looked like white tennis socks. Rebus sat down next to him and realised his own shoes could do with a polish. There was a speck of grease from the bacon roll on his shirt.

  ‘I’ve called this meeting,’ the Farmer was saying, ‘to put your minds at rest.’

  ‘Inspector Flower’s mind’s always at rest, sir,’ Rebus said.

  Flower attempted an
unselfconscious laugh, and Rebus realised how desperate the man was.

  ‘See, John,’ said the Farmer, ‘you always have to make a joke of things.’

  ‘Leave them laughing, sir.’ But the Farmer wasn’t laughing, and Rebus knew what that silence meant – as long as Rebus maintained ‘an attitude’, he’d find promotion impossible.

  Which left Alister Flower.

  ‘Aly,’ the Farmer began. Flower sat to attention; Rebus had never seen the trick before. ‘Aly, can I get you a refill?’

  Flower looked at his cup, then gulped the contents down. ‘Please, sir.’

  The Farmer got up from his desk, took Flower’s cup, and walked to the coffee machine. He had his back to both men when he spoke.

  ‘The temporary replacement for Frank Lauderdale will start immediately.’

  It hit Rebus then. It was like he’d assumed a new, much greater mass.

  ‘Her name,’ the Farmer went on, ‘is Gill Templer.’

  Flower made straight for the toilets, where he could conduct a swearing match with the mirror. Rebus walked thoughtfully back to the CID room. Gill was already there, reading a pathology report.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’ She kept on reading. He didn’t budge till she stopped and looked up at him. ‘John?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes, boss?’

  ‘My office.’

  Lauderdale’s name was still on the door; they wouldn’t bother with a new plaque, not yet. But Rebus noticed she’d already changed a few things.

  ‘Don’t bother sitting,’ she said. Rebus brought out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Come on, you know the rules: no smoking.’

  He put the cigarette in his mouth. ‘I’ll just suck on it then,’ he said.

  She closed the door, then went to Lauderdale’s desk, resting against it, folding her arms.

  ‘John, there’s a lot of history here.’ Rebus looked around the office. ‘You know what I mean. I hear you and Dr Aitken have split up.’

  Rebus took the cigarette out of his mouth. ‘So?’

  ‘So you’re on the rebound, and I don’t want you thinking I could be your springboard. Don’t go thinking you can jump me a few times before you dive back in the pool.’

  Rebus smiled. ‘Did I catch you rehearsing in the canteen?’

  ‘All I mean is, let’s leave the past well alone, let’s keep things professional.’

  ‘Fine.’ He put the cigarette back in his mouth.

  She went behind the desk and sat down. ‘So, what can you tell me about these two imbeciles who shut the Forth Bridge?’

  ‘Hoaxers, maybe with debts or a habit to finance. Desperadoes. No sign that they ever knew the girl. Howdenhall checked the car; there are none of her prints inside.’

  ‘So why were you so interested in the toxicology results?’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Someone came looking for you in the canteen to tell you they’d arrived.’

  Rebus smiled again. ‘I just wonder if maybe they were working for someone else.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘Paul Duggan. He loaned the desperadoes his car. Plus they were sub-letting his council house.’

  ‘That’s illegal.’

  ‘Yes, it is. We might want to ask him a few follow-up questions.’

  She thought this over, then nodded. ‘What else are you working on?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not a lot, it’s always quiet this time of year.’

  ‘Let’s hope it stays that way. I know your reputation, John. It was bad enough when I knew you, but the story goes that it’s even worse these days. I don’t want trouble.’

  Rebus looked out of the window. It had started snowing. ‘Weather like this,’ he said, ‘there’s never much trouble in Edinburgh, trust me.’

  7

  Hugh McAnally was universally known as Wee Shug. He didn’t know why people called Hugh always ended up nicknamed Shug. There were a lot of things he didn’t know, and never would know. He wished he’d spent his time in jail bettering himself. He supposed he’d bettered himself in some ways: he could use machine tools, and knew how a sofa was put together. But he knew he wasn’t educated, not like his cell-mate. His cell-mate had been really clever, a man of substance. Not like Shug at all; chalk and cheese, if you came down to it. But he’d taught Shug a lot. And he’d been a friend. Surrounded by people, a jail could still be a lonely place without a friend.

  Then again, what difference would it have made if he’d been brainier? None at all really, not a jot.

  But he was going to make a difference to his life this evening.

  It was another grievous night, a wind that was like walking through razor-blades.

  Councillor Tom Gillespie wasn’t expecting many souls to make the trek to his surgery. He’d get a few complaints from the regulars about frozen and burst pipes, maybe a question about the cold weather allowance, and that would be about it. The constituents in his Warrender ward tended to be self-reliant – or easily cowed, depending on your point of view. Depending on your politics. He smiled across the room towards the extravagance he called a secretary, then studied the art on the classroom walls.

  He always held his surgery in this school, third Thursday of every month during term-time. Between consultations he would catch up on correspondence, dictating letters into a hand-held recorder. The Central Members’ Services Division at the City Chambers typed the letters up. For general political matters, matters relating to his party, there was a separate admin assistant.

  Which was why, as Gillespie’s wife had pointed out on numerous occasions, a private secretary was such an extravagance. But as the councillor had argued (and he was very good at argument), if he was going to get ahead of the crowd he needed to be busier than the other councillors, and above all he needed to seem to be busier. Short term extravagance, long term gain. You always had to be thinking in the long term.

  He used the same rationale when he resigned his job. As he explained to his wife Audrey, half the district councillors had other jobs beside the council, but this meant they could not concentrate all their energies on council or political business. He needed to seem so busy that he had no time for a day job. Council committee meetings took place during the day, and now he was free to attend them.

  He had other arguments in his favour, too. By working on council business during the day, his evenings and weekends were relatively free. And besides (and here he would smile and squeeze Audrey’s hand), it wasn’t as if they needed the money. Which was just as well, since his district councillor’s basic allowance was £4,700.

  Finally, he would tell her, this was the most important time in local government for twenty years. In seven weeks’ time there would be new elections and the change would begin, turning the City of Edinburgh into a single-tier authority to be called the City of Edinburgh Council. How could he afford not to be at the centre of these changes?

  Audrey, though, had won one condition: his secretary should be an older woman, plain and bomely. Helena Profitt fitted that bill.

  Thinking of it, he never really won an argument with Audrey, not outright. She just snarled and spat and started slamming doors. He didn’t mind. He needed her money. Her money bought him time. If only it could save him the purgatory of these Thursday nights in the near-deserted school.

  His secretary brought her knitting with her, and he could measure how quiet things had been by how much she got done in the hour. He watched her needles work, then went back to the letter he was writing. It wasn’t an easy letter to write; he’d been trying for over a week now. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could trust to dictation, and so far all he’d managed were his address at the top and the date beneath.

  The school was quiet, the corridors well lit, the radiators burning away. The caretaker was busy somewhere, as were four cleaners. When the cleaners and the councillor had gone home, the caretaker would lock up for the night. One of the cleaners was a lot younger than the others, and had
a tidy body on her. He wondered if she lived in his ward. He looked at the clock on the wall again. Twenty minutes to go.

  He heard something slam, and looked over to the classroom door. A short man was standing there, looking deathly cold in a thin bomber-style jacket and shabby trousers. He had his hands deep in his jacket pockets and didn’t look inclined to remove them.

  ‘You the councillor?’ the man asked.

  Councillor Gillespie stood up and smiled. Then the man turned to Helena Profitt. ‘So who are you?’

  ‘My ward secretary,’ Tom Gillespie explained. Helena Profitt and the man seemed to be studying one another. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Aye, you can,’ the man said. Then he unzipped his jacket and drew out a sawn-off shotgun.

  ‘You,’ he said to Miss Profitt, ‘get the fuck out.’ He pointed the weapon at the councillor. ‘You stay.’

  Helena Profitt ran screaming from the classroom and nearly knocked over the cleaners. A pail of dirty water clattered to the wooden floor.

  ‘I’ve just polished thon!’

  ‘A gun, he’s got a gun!’

  The cleaners stared at her. A sound like a tyre exploding came from the classroom. Miss Profitt, who had fallen to her knees, was joined by the other women.

  ‘What in Christ was that?’

  ‘She said a gun.’

  And now there was a figure in the doorway. It was the councillor, almost in control of his legs. He looked for all the world like one of the paintings on the classroom wall, only it wasn’t paint that spattered his face and his hair.

  Rebus stood in the classroom and looked at the paintings. Some of them were pretty good. The colours weren’t always right, but the shapes were identifiable. Blue house, yellow sun, brown horse in a green field, and a red sky speckled with grey . . .

  Oh.

  The room had been cordoned off by the simple act of placing two chairs in the doorway. The body was still there, spreadeagled on the floor in front of the teacher’s desk. Dr Curt was examining it.

  ‘This seems to be your week for messy ones,’ he told Rebus.