10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘The new LABarum building,’ he explained. ‘They’ll start construction in the spring.’ He turned to Rebus. ‘New jobs, Inspector.’

  ‘And another feather in your cap. What’ll it be this time – Lord Hunter of Ruthie?’

  Sir Iain’s smile evaporated. ‘They’re waiting for us in the boardroom.’

  They took a bright elevator to the third and top floor, and emerged into a compact hallway with three doors off. Sir Iain pressed four numbers on a wall console, and pushed open one of the doors. Inside, three men were waiting, standing by the window. A light airplane was taking off from Turnhouse, so close you could almost see the exhausted executives inside.

  Rebus looked at Haldayne first, then at J Joseph Simpson, and finally at Robbie Mathieson. ‘The gang’s all here,’ he commented.

  ‘That’s a cheap shot.’ Mathieson came forward to take Rebus’s hand. He was wearing an expensive suit, but showed he’d put aside the day’s cares by having shed his tie and undone the top button of his shirt.

  ‘Good of you to come,’ he told Rebus, with what some people would have taken for sincerity.

  ‘Good of you to ask me,’ Rebus said, playing the game.

  Mathieson waved a hand around the room. It had cream walls, some blown-up photos of computer chips, and a dozen framed awards for export, industry and achievement. There was a large oval table placed centrally, black like the floor. ‘I have this place swept for bugs once a week, Inspector. Industrial espionage is a constant threat. Unfortunately, this meeting was arranged at short notice . . .’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I don’t have any of the relevant devices to hand. How can I be sure you’re not bugged?’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Mathieson tried to look embarrassed. It was just an act. ‘I’d like you to remove your clothes.’

  ‘Nobody said it was going to be that sort of party.’

  Mathieson smiled, but angled his head, expecting compliance.

  ‘Anyone want to join me?’ Rebus said, removing his jacket.

  Sir Iain Hunter laughed.

  Rebus studied the four men as he stripped. Simpson looked the most ill at ease; probably because he was the least of the group. Haldayne had seated himself at the table and was toying with a fat chrome pen, as if already bored with proceedings. Mathieson stood by the window, averting his eyes from the disrobing. But Sir Iain stood fast and watched.

  Rebus got down to underpants and socks.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mathieson said. ‘Please get dressed again, and I apologise for putting you through that.’ He was using his business voice, deep and confident, the American burr touched with Scots inflexions. ‘Let’s all sit down.’

  Simpson hadn’t even reached his chair before he started blurting out that he didn’t know what he was doing here, it was all such a long time ago . . .

  ‘You’re here, Joe,’ Mathieson reminded him firmly, ‘because you broke the law of the land. We all did.’

  Then he turned to Rebus.

  ‘Inspector, a long time ago, almost in another age, we all profited from enterprises set up and run by Derwood Charters. Now, the question in court would be: did we know at the time that those profits were being made by fraudulent means?’ He shrugged. ‘That’s a question for the lawyers, and you know how lawyers can be, especially with questions of corporate law. They might take years and several million pounds to come to their conclusions. A lot of time, a lot of money . . .’ He opened his palms wide, a showman with his spiel. ‘And for what? The fact of the matter is, some of those profits – illicitly gained – went to build this very factory, bringing jobs to hundreds, with spin-off benefits creating and sustaining hundreds, maybe thousands more. Including, as you told me yourself, a friend of yours. Now, in law, none of this would count for anything – quite rightly so. The law is a stern mistress, that’s what they say.’ A little smile. ‘But the law, I would argue, isn’t everything. There are considerations of a moral, ethical and economic order.’ He raised a finger to stress the point, then touched it to his lips. ‘Moral law, Inspector, is something else again. If bad money is used to good purpose, can it really be called bad money? If a child stole some apples, then went on to be a life-saving surgeon, would any court convict him of the original theft?’

  Mathieson had prepared his lines well. Rebus tried not to listen, but his ears were working too well. Mathieson seemed to sense a change in him, and got up to walk around the table.

  ‘Now, Inspector, if you want to drag up ancient history, you must do so, but the consequences will rest on your conscience. They sure as hell won’t be on mine.’

  Rebus wondered if it was possible that Mathieson had compiled a dossier on him, had people watch him, talk to acquaintances. No, those methods would not have told the essential truths, they wouldn’t have revealed the man to whom Mathieson was appealing so subtly and cleverly. It had to be more than that. It had to be instinct.

  ‘A murder has been committed,’ Rebus said.

  Mathieson had been expecting this argument. ‘Not with the knowledge of anyone in this room,’ he said.

  ‘You’re saying it was Charters alone?’

  Mathieson nodded, stroking his beard. Rebus wondered if he’d grown it in memory of Aidan Dalgety. ‘Derwood has most to lose,’ he was explaining. ‘He’s been in prison all these years, and if you make public what you know, he’ll stay there.’

  ‘But Gillespie was set up by someone he knew. He wouldn’t have been in that alley otherwise.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he was scared.’

  ‘Then who was it?’ Mathieson asked.

  ‘I would guess Sir Iain,’ Rebus said. Four pairs of eyes fixed the Permanent Secretary. ‘Maybe Charters himself will tell us. As you say, he’s got most to lose. He might be all too willing to bargain down any extension to his sentence.’

  ‘This is preposterous,’ Hunter said, thumping the floor with his cane.

  ‘Is it?’ Rebus said. ‘You like guns, Sir Iain. You’ve got a whole room full of shotguns. What if I checked them against the records? Would they all be there, or would one be missing – the one you passed on to Shug McAnally?’ Rebus turned to Mathieson. ‘I want him. I want him tonight. The rest of you, maybe later.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Haldayne interrupted, ‘what evidence do you have? We’ve told you we don’t know any –’

  ‘Save your defence, Mr Haldayne. I know Sir Iain’s been controlling you all these years.’

  Mathieson was shaking his head slowly. ‘It would be very unfortunate indeed if any of this leaked out. If you arrest Sir Iain, you’ll precipitate a media circus as well as political questions. Why can’t you just charge Charters?’

  ‘Because then you’d all be getting away with it.’

  Mathieson looked frustrated. ‘Inspector, understand one thing: I don’t care about Sir Iain, I don’t care about anyone here tonight – including myself, if it comes down to it.’ His voice was rising the way it must have at other boardroom meetings, propelling him towards victory. ‘What I care about – more deeply than you would ever understand or believe – is PanoTech.’ Now the voice fell away. ‘LABarum will be a major expansion, Inspector. A new factory, new R and D unit, meaning more suppliers, contractors, a huge injection of hard cash and confidence into the local economy. But more than that, LABarum will be Europe’s Microsoft – Scotland will be producing its own software to install in the computers it manufactures.’

  ‘No wonder everyone wants you kept sweet.’

  ‘And you’re going to put all that in jeopardy over something that happened eight years ago and hurt no one at the time; no one but the taxpayer, who wouldn’t have known anyway how his or her money was being spent. A few million was a drop in the ocean, hardly even a ripple. Do you have any idea the scale of fraud being perpetrated in mainland Europe? A non-existent training scheme for airline pilots in Naples netted seventeen million pounds. Farm products and animals are shipped to and
fro across borders, netting a subsidy every time. The EC has paid a billion pounds to have vineyards destroyed, yet there are more vines every year. The Greeks lop a branch off a vine and stick it in the ground so they’ll be paid for two. I repeat, a few million hurt no one.’

  ‘It hurt Aidan Dalgety.’

  ‘Aidan hurt himself. You didn’t know him then. He was becoming so erratic, he could have dragged the company down with him.’

  ‘It’s hurt other people since.’ Rebus thought of Kirstie, finding out her father was no icon. He thought of her plan, a plan they all thought they could get away with because her father wasn’t going to get his daughter back – they’d been bartering for the LABarum document, and for Kirstie’s knowledge of the whole affair . . . And Willie and Dixie had died.

  ‘I accept,’ Mathieson was saying, ‘that a man died. Derwood’s gone crazy, that’s what it comes down to.’

  ‘There’s one other consideration,’ said Sir Iain, who’d had time to recover. ‘As Mr Haldayne will acknowledge, two more US companies have seen the benefits of locating their European operations in Lothian. If my name, or Mr Haldayne’s, were to be bandied about . . .’ Hunter gave a modest shrug.

  ‘Well,’ Rebus said, ‘this is turning into a harder sell than a Costa del Sol time-share.’ He turned to Simpson. ‘What about you, Joe?’

  Simpson nearly slid from his chair. ‘What about me?’

  ‘Do you have any properties to bargain with in this little game of moral “Monopoly”, or have you just picked up the Go-To-Jail card?’

  ‘I can’t go to jail! All I did was provide an accommodation address. It’s not illegal!’

  ‘Then why are you here?’ Rebus looked to Mathieson, whose lips twitched.

  ‘An offering,’ he said.

  ‘Hear that, Joe?’

  Simpson had heard. He rose trembling to his feet.

  ‘You could always testify against them,’ Rebus told him.

  ‘With what?’ Haldayne said.

  ‘Mr Haldayne has a point, Inspector.’ Mathieson was sitting down again, in his big chief executive chair at the end of the table. Tables without corners were supposed to make everyone equal, but Mathieson’s chair was a leather throne. He looked and sounded completely unruffled by events thus far, while Rebus felt as if his head would explode.

  Hundreds of jobs, spin-offs; happy, smiling faces. People like Salty Dougary, pride restored, given another chance. Did Rebus have the gall to think he could pronounce sentence on the future of people like that? People who wouldn’t care who got away with what, so long as they had a pay-cheque at the end of the month?

  Gillespie had died, but Rebus knew these men hadn’t killed him, not directly. At the same time he hated them, hated their confidence and their indifference, hated their certainty that what they did was ‘for the good’. They knew the way the world worked; they knew who – or, rather, what – was in charge. It wasn’t the police or the politicians, it wasn’t anyone stupid enough to place themselves in the front line. It was secret, quiet men who got on with their work the world over, bribing where necessary, breaking the rules, but quietly, in the name of ‘progress’, in the name of the ‘system’.

  Shug McAnally was dead, but no one was grieving: Tresa was spending his money, and having a good time with Maisie Finch. Audrey Gillespie, too, might start enjoying life for the first time in years, maybe with her lover. A man had died – cruelly and in terror – but he was all there was on Rebus’s side of the balance sheet. And on the other was everything else.

  ‘Well, Inspector?’ Mathieson could see something in Rebus’s eyes – a red light that had changed to amber. He rose from the throne. ‘Let’s have a drink.’

  Rebus hadn’t noticed that the far wall was a series of recessed cupboards, their doors flush and handleless. Mathieson pushed the edge of one door and it opened automatically.

  ‘I hope malt whisky’s all right for everyone,’ Mathieson said, as lightly as if they’d just finished a few rubbers of bridge.

  ‘You don’t have a drop of gin?’ Joe Simpson squawked.

  ‘You’re right, Joe, I don’t.’

  ‘Then I’ll take whisky.’

  ‘Yes, Joe, you will.’

  ‘Inspector,’ Haldayne said in reasoned tones, ‘we’re in your hands. It’s your decision now.’

  ‘Let the man have a drink first,’ Mathieson chided.

  Sir Iain was staring levelly at Rebus, his mouth a moral pout. There was a line from a song stuck in Rebus’s head, just when he least needed it: ‘you can’t always get what you want, but if you try some time, you’ll find you get what you need’.

  I need a drink, he thought. And Robbie Mathieson – caring, smiling – brought him one.

  ‘You’re all right anyway,’ Rebus told Haldayne. ‘You’ll have diplomatic immunity, the Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card.’

  Haldayne snorted his porcine laugh. ‘I’m also the only one here who lost five grand to Derwood Charters over Albavise.’

  ‘And you should have stayed out of it,’ Sir Iain snarled.

  ‘Hey,’ Haldayne said, light glinting from his glasses, ‘it worked in the past, didn’t it?’

  ‘You know, Inspector,’ Mathieson said, rising above all this, ‘any other policeman, any other public official, I might have been tempted to try offering a financial incentive.’

  They all shut up to listen. Rebus sipped from his crystal tumbler.

  ‘But with you,’ Mathieson went on, ‘I think that might have the opposite effect from the one intended.’

  ‘And how much cash would I be worth to you, Mr Mathieson?’

  ‘To me, nothing. But if it were a question of saving PanoTech . . . Well, it wouldn’t be a matter of actual cash, of course. Cash is messy, and you wouldn’t want any problems with the Inland Revenue.’

  ‘Perish the thought.’

  ‘But a new house with its own grounds, a trust fund for a daughter, shares in a company which is going to do extraordinarily well in the next few years . . . And then there are less tangible rewards – but no less valuable for that: friends in the right places, help when needed, a word in the right ear come promotion time . . .’ Mathieson’s voice died away as he handed out the final drink – a very mean whisky for Joe Simpson – and took one for himself. He stood behind his throne, a plane droning in the night sky behind him.

  ‘A little bit of bribery, eh?’ Rebus commented.

  Sir Iain Hunter sat forward. He looked like he was losing patience fast. He tapped his stick on the floor as he spoke. ‘Is it wrong,’ he said, ‘to bribe rich foreign companies to come to a depressed region? I’d say, Inspector, that morally speaking, anyone who did that would be in the right.’

  ‘Blackmail’s blackmail,’ Rebus said.

  ‘I disagree.’

  ‘And tell me, is nobody lining their own pockets?’

  Sir Iain savoured his whisky. ‘There must needs be incentives,’ he said drily.

  Rebus laughed. He felt a little looser after the drink. ‘Exactly. And all this love of country and duty to the workers stuff is just so much shite. Tell me, why did you bring the DCC and me together that day?’

  Sir Iain twisted in his chair. ‘I saw how dangerous Charters had become. I wanted him stopped, but my position would not allow me to . . . I felt it best to point you in the right direction rather than leading you there.’

  Rebus laughed again. ‘You old fraud. We were there to put the wind up Mathieson, to stop him even thinking about talking.’ He turned to Mathieson. ‘You were sweating like a pig in the killing pen.’ Then back to Sir Iain. ‘You used us the same way Charters used McAnally. And you’ve blackmailed Haldayne into helping bring firms here. What is it, is corruption part of the job description?’

  Hunter said nothing. He was too angry to speak.

  ‘Answer me this. Charters had a client called Quinlon, a building contractor who’d made money illicitly through a deal with someone in the SDA. Charters shopped Quinlon to the authorities so
they’d think more seriously about closing down the SDA. Now, you all knew Charters back then, didn’t you? You all knew that if the SDA disappeared, all accounts would be closed and the various frauds would remain undiscovered. So did you know about Quinlon?’ He looked at Sir Iain. ‘Did Charters maybe come to you with the story, and leave you to see that the right people heard about it?’

  ‘This is sheer paranoia,’ Sir Iain said. ‘I refuse to discuss it.’

  ‘OK, let’s try this – Charters made a couple of million through his paper companies. Enough to make a stint in jail worth while. That’s why he pled guilty. And when he gets out, the money’s waiting for him. You all know that, and you’re not going to do a thing about it. You know he’s a murderer, too, but you’ve kept quiet about that as well.’

  ‘Inspector,’ Haldayne said, ‘we’re not leeches.’

  ‘I know that – leeches are medicinal. You know something?’ He was talking to all of them now. ‘Tom Gillespie said something to me. He told me I was making a mistake. At the time, I took it as a threat, but it wasn’t – it was the literal truth. I thought because he had something to hide it must be something illicit. I was wrong about him all down the line; all he was was scared. He was terrified. Those last days of his life, all he felt was fear.’ And dear God, Rebus knew what that felt like.

  ‘Nobody’s mourning him!’ Sir Iain snapped.

  Rebus turned to him. ‘Now how do you know that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s got a widow: you don’t think she’s in mourning?’

  Sir Iain studied the handle of his cane. ‘I forgot,’ he said.

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ Rebus said quietly.

  ‘So, what’s it to be, Inspector?’ Mathieson himself was beginning to look impatient. He knew he had won the argument, but might still lose the fight. He had his glass half raised, ready for a toast if Rebus gave the right answer, the answer everybody wanted. ‘Just remember, if you want it, there’s a place for you.’

  Rebus was still staring at Sir Iain Hunter. He finished his whisky in one go and put the glass down. With his hands on the table, he pushed himself upright out of the chair.