10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  John Rebus kissed his daughter.

  ‘See you later,’ he said, watching her as she left the coffee shop. Espresso and a slice of caramel shortbread – that’s all she’d had time for – but they’d fixed another date for dinner. Nothing fancy, just a pizza.

  It was October 30th. By mid-November, if Nature were feeling bloody, it would be winter. Rebus had been taught at school that there were four distinct seasons, had painted pictures of them in bright and sombre colours, but his native country seemed not to know this. Winters were long, outstaying their welcome. The warm weather came suddenly, people stripping to t-shirts as the first buds appeared, so that spring and summer seemed entwined into a single season. And no sooner had the leaves started turning brown than the first frost came again.

  Sammy waved at him through the cafe window then was gone. She seemed to have grown up all right. He’d always been on the lookout for evidence of instability, hints of childhood traumas or a genetic predisposition towards self-destruction. Maybe he should phone Rhona some day and thank her, thank her for bringing Samantha up on her own. It couldn’t have been easy: that was what people always said. He knew it would be nice if he could feel some responsibility for the success, but he wasn’t that hypocritical. The truth was, while she’d been growing up, he’d been elsewhere. It was the same with his marriage: even when in the same room as his wife, even out at the pictures or around the table at a dinner party . . . the best part of him had been elsewhere, fixed on some case or other, some question that needed answering before he could rest.

  Rebus lifted his coat from the back of his chair. Nothing left for it but to go back to the office. Sammy was headed back to her own office; she worked with ex-convicts. She had refused his offer of a lift. Now that it was out in the open, she’d wanted to talk about her man, Ned Farlowe. Rebus had tried to look interested, but found that his mind was half on Joseph Lintz – in other words, same problem as always. When he’d been given the Lintz case, he’d been told he was well-suited to it: his Army background for one thing; and his seeming affinity for historical cases – by which Farmer Watson, Rebus’s chief superintendent, had meant Bible John – for another.

  ‘With respect, sir,’ Rebus had said, ‘that sounds like a load of balls. Two reasons for me getting lumbered with this: one, no other bugger will touch it with a barge-pole; two, it’ll keep me out of the way for a while.’

  ‘Your remit,’ the Farmer had said, unwilling to let Rebus rile him, ‘is to sift through what there is, see if any of it amounts to evidence. You can interview Mr Lintz if it’ll help. Do whatever you think necessary, and if you find enough to warrant a charge . . .’

  ‘I won’t. You know I won’t.’ Rebus sighed. ‘Sir, we’ve been through this before. It’s the whole reason the War Crimes section was shut down. That case a few years back – lot of hoo-haa about bugger all.’ He was shaking his head. ‘Who wants it all dragged up, apart from the papers?’

  ‘I’m taking you off the Mr Taystee case. Let Bill Pryde handle that.’

  So it was settled: Lintz belonged to Rebus.

  It had started with a news story, with documents handed over to a Sunday broadsheet. The documents had come from the Holocaust Investigation Bureau based in Tel Aviv. They had passed on to the newspaper the name of Joseph Lintz, who had, they said, been living quietly in Scotland under an alias since the end of the war, and who was, in fact, Josef Linzstek, a native of Alsace. In June 1944, Lieutenant Linzstek had led the 3rd Company of an SS regiment, part of the 2nd Panzer Division, into the town of Villefranche d’Albarede in the Corrèze region of France. 3rd Company had rounded up everyone in the town – men, women, children. The sick were carried from their beds, the elderly pulled from their armchairs, babies hoisted from their cots.

  A teenage girl – an evacuee from Lorraine – had seen what the Germans were capable of. She climbed into the attic of her house and hid there, watching from a small window in the roof-tiles. Everyone was marched into the village square. The teenager saw her schoolfriends find their families. She hadn’t been in school that day: a throat infection. She wondered if anyone would tell the Germans . . .

  There was a commotion as the mayor and other dignitaries remonstrated with the officer in charge. While machine guns were aimed at the crowd, these men – among them the priest, lawyer, and doctor – were set upon with rifle butts. Then ropes were produced, and strung over half a dozen of the trees which lined the square. The men were hauled to their feet, their heads pushed through the nooses. An order was given, a hand raised then dropped, and soldiers pulled on each rope, until six men were hanging from the trees, bodies writhing, legs kicking uselessly, the movements slowing by degrees.

  As the teenager remembered it, it took an age for them to die. Stunned silence in the square, as if the whole village knew now, knew that this was no mere check of identity papers. More orders were barked. The men, separated from the women and children, were marched off to Prudhomme’s barn, everyone else shepherded into the church. The square grew empty, except for a dozen or so soldiers, rifles slung over their shoulders. They chatted, kicked up dust and stones, shared jokes and cigarettes. One of them went into the bar and switched the radio on. Jazz music filled the air, competing with the rustle of leaves as a breeze twisted the corpses in the trees.

  ‘It was strange,’ the girl later said. ‘I stopped seeing them as dead bodies. It was as if they’d become something else, parts of the trees themselves.’

  Then the explosion, smoke and dust billowing from the church. A moment’s silence, as though a vacuum had been created in the world, then screams, followed immediately by machine-gun fire. And when it finally stopped, she could still hear it. Because it wasn’t just inside the church: it was in the distance, too.

  Prudhomme’s barn.

  When she was finally found – by people from surrounding villages – she was naked except for a shawl she had found in a trunk. The shawl had belonged to her grandmother, dead the previous year. But she was not alone in escaping the massacre. When the soldiers had opened fire in Prudhomme’s barn, they’d aimed low. The first row of men to fall had been wounded in the lower body, and the bodies which fell on them shielded them from further fire. When straw was strewn over the mound and set alight, they’d waited as long as they could before starting to claw their way out from beneath, expecting at any moment to be shot. Four of them made it, two with their hair and clothes on fire, one dying later from his wounds.

  Three men, one teenage girl: the only survivors.

  The death toll was never finalised. No one knew how many visitors had been in Villefranche that day, how many refugees could be added to the count. A list was compiled of over seven hundred names, people who had most likely been killed.

  Rebus sat at his desk and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. The teenage girl was still alive, a pensioner now. The male survivors were all dead. But they’d been alive for the Bordeaux trial in 1953. He had summaries of their evidence. The summaries were in French. A lot of the material sitting on his desk was French, and Rebus didn’t speak French. That was why he’d gone to the Modern Languages department at the university and found someone who could. Her name was Kirstin Mede, and she lectured in French, but also had a working knowledge of German, which was handy: the documents which weren’t in French were in German. He had a one-page English summary of the trial proceedings, passed on from the Nazi hunters. The trial had opened in February 1953 and lasted just under a month. Of seventy-five men identified as having been part of the German force at Villefranche, only fifteen were present – six Germans and nine French Alsatians. Not one of them was an officer. One German received the death sentence, the others jail terms of between four and twelve years, but they were all released as soon as the trial finished. Alsace hadn’t been enjoying the trial, and in a bid to unite the nation, the government had passed an amnesty. The Germans, meantime, were said to have already served their sentences.

  The survivors of Villefranche had
been horrified.

  Even more extraordinary to Rebus’s mind, the British had apprehended a couple of German officers involved in the massacre, but had refused to hand them over to the French authorities, returning them to Germany instead, where they lived long and prosperous lives. If Linzstek had been captured then, there would have been none of the present commotion.

  Politics: it was all down to politics. Rebus looked up and Kirstin Mede was standing there. She was tall, deftly constructed, and immaculately dressed. She wore make-up the way women usually did only in fashion adverts. Today she was wearing a check two-piece, the skirt just touching her knees, and long gold-coloured earrings. She had already opened her briefcase and was pulling out a sheaf of papers.

  ‘Latest translations,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Rebus looked down at a note he’d made to himself: ‘Corrèze trip necessary??’ Well, the Farmer had said he could have whatever he wanted. He looked up at Kirstin Mede and wondered if the budget would stretch to a tour guide. She was sitting opposite him, putting on half-moon reading glasses.

  ‘Can I get you a coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a bit pushed today. I just wanted you to see these.’ She laid two sheets of paper on his desk so that they faced him. One sheet was the photocopy of a typed report, in German. The second sheet was her translation. Rebus looked at the German.

  ‘– Der Beginn der Vergeltungsmassnahmen hat ein merkbares Aufatmen hervorgerufen und die Stimmung sehr günstig beeinflusst.’

  ‘The beginning of reprisals,’ he read, ‘has brought about a marked improvement in morale, with the men now noticeably more relaxed.’

  ‘It’s supposed to be from Linzstek to his commander,’ she explained.

  ‘But no signature?’

  ‘Just the typed name, underlined.’

  ‘So it doesn’t help us identify Linzstek.’

  ‘No, but remember what we were talking about? It gives a reason for the assault.’

  ‘A touch of R&R for the lads?’

  Her look froze him. ‘Sorry,’ he said, raising his hands. ‘Far too glib. And you’re right, it’s almost like the Lieutenant is trying to justify the whole thing in print.’

  ‘For posterity?’

  ‘Maybe. After all, they’d just started being the losing side.’ He looked at the other papers. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Some further reports, nothing too exciting. And some of the eyewitness testimony.’ She looked at him with pale grey eyes. ‘It gets to you after a while, doesn’t it?’

  Rebus looked at her and nodded.

  The female survivor of the massacre lived in Juillac, and had been questioned recently by local police about the man in charge of the German troops. Her story hadn’t changed from the one she’d told at the trial: she’d seen his face only for a few seconds, and looking down from the attic of a three-storey house. She’d been shown a recent photo of Joseph Lintz, and had shrugged.

  ‘Maybe,’ she’d said. ‘Yes, maybe.’

  Which would, Rebus knew, be turfed out by the Procurator-Fiscal, who knew damned well what any defence lawyer with half a brain would do with it.

  ‘How’s the case coming?’ Kirstin Mede asked. Maybe she’d seen some look cross his face.

  ‘Slowly. The problem is all this stuff.’ He waved towards the strewn desk. ‘On the one hand I’ve got all this, and on the other I’ve got a wee old man from the New Town. The two don’t seem to go together.’

  ‘Have you met him?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  What was Joseph Lintz like? He was cultured, a linguist. He’d even been a Professor at the university, back in the early 70s. Only for a year or two. His own explanation: ‘I was filling a vacuum until they could find someone of greater standing’. He’d been Professor of German. He’d lived in Scotland since 1945 or ’46 – he was vague about exact dates, blaming his memory. His early life was vague, too. He said papers had been destroyed. The Allies had had to create a duplicate set for him. There was only Lintz’s word that these new papers were anything but an official record of lies he’d told and which had been believed. Lintz’s story – birth in Alsace; parents and relatives all dead; forced enlistment in the SS. Rebus liked the touch about joining the SS. It was the sort of admission that would make officials decide: he’s been honest about his involvement with that, so he’s probably being honest about the other details. There was no actual record of a Joseph Lintz serving with any SS regiment, but then the SS had destroyed a lot of their own records once they’d seen the way the war was headed. Lintz’s war record was vague, too. He mentioned shell-shock to explain the gaps in his memory. But he was vehement that he had never been called Linzstek and had never served in the Corrèze region of France.

  ‘I was in the east,’ he would say. ‘That’s where the Allies found me, in the east.’

  The problem was that there was no convincing explanation as to how Lintz had found himself in the United Kingdom. He said he’d asked if he could go there and start a new life. He didn’t want to return to Alsace, wanted to be as far away from the Germans as possible. He wanted water between him and them. Again, there was no documentation to back this up, and meantime the Holocaust investigators had come up with their own ‘evidence’, which pointed to Lintz’s involvement in the ‘Rat Line’.

  ‘Have you ever heard of something called the Rat Line?’ Rebus had asked at their first meeting.

  ‘Of course,’ Joseph Lintz had said. ‘But I never had anything to do with it.’

  Lintz: in the drawing-room of his Heriot Row home. An elegant four-storey Georgian edifice. A huge house for a man who’d never married. Rebus had said as much. Lintz had merely shrugged, as was his privilege. Where had the money come from?

  ‘I’ve worked hard, Inspector.’

  Maybe so, but Lintz had purchased the house in the late-1950s on a lecturer’s salary. A colleague from the time had told Rebus everyone in the department suspected Lintz of having a private income. Lintz denied this.

  ‘Houses were cheaper back then, Inspector. The fashion was for country properties and bungalows.’

  Joseph Lintz: barely five foot tall, bespectacled. Parchment hands with liver spots. One wrist sported a prewar Ingersoll watch. Glass-fronted bookcases lining his drawing-room. Charcoal-coloured suits. An elegant way about him, almost feminine: the way he lifted a cup to his lips; the way he flicked specks from his trousers.

  ‘I don’t blame the Jews,’ he’d said. ‘They’d implicate everyone if they could. They want the whole world feeling guilty. Maybe they’re right.’

  ‘In what way, sir?’

  ‘Don’t we all have little secrets, things we’re ashamed of?’ Lintz had smiled. ‘You’re playing their game, and you don’t even know it.’

  Rebus had pressed on. ‘The two names are very similar, aren’t they? Lintz, Linzstek.’

  ‘Naturally, or they’d have absolutely no grounds for their accusations. Think, Inspector: wouldn’t I have changed my name more radically? Do you credit me with a modicum of intelligence?’

  ‘More than a modicum.’ Framed diplomas on the walls, honorary degrees, photos taken with university chancellors, politicians. When the Farmer had learned a little more about Joseph Lintz, he’d cautioned Rebus to ‘ca’ canny’. Lintz was a patron of the arts – opera, museums, galleries – and a great giver to charities. He was a man with friends. But also a solitary man, someone who was happiest when tending graves in Warriston Cemetery. Dark bags under his eyes, pushing down upon the angular cheeks. Did he sleep well?

  ‘Like a lamb, Inspector.’ Another smile. ‘Of the sacrificial kind. You know, I don’t blame you, you’re only doing your job.’

  ‘You seem to have no end of forgiveness, Mr Lintz.’

  A careful shrug. ‘Do you know Blake’s words, Inspector? “And through all eternity/ I forgive you, you forgive me.” I’m not so sure I can forgive the media.’ This last word voiced with
a distaste which manifested itself as a twist of facial muscles.

  ‘Is that why you’ve set your lawyer on them?’

  ‘“Set” makes me sound like a hunter, Inspector. This is a newspaper, with a team of expensive lawyers at its beck and call. Can an individual hope to win against such odds?’

  ‘Then why bother trying?’

  Lintz thumped both arms of his chair with clenched fists. ‘For the principle, man!’ Such outbursts were rare and short-lived, but Rebus had experienced enough of them to know that Lintz had a temper . . .

  ‘Hello?’ Kirstin Mede said, angling her head to catch his gaze.

  ‘What?’

  She smiled. ‘You were miles away.’

  ‘Just across town,’ he replied.

  She pointed to the papers. ‘I’ll leave these here, okay? If you’ve any questions . . .’

  ‘Great, thanks.’ Rebus got to his feet.

  ‘It’s okay, I know my way out.’

  But Rebus was insistent. ‘Sorry, I’m a bit . . .’ He waved his hands around his head.

  ‘As I said, it gets to you after a while.’

  As they walked back through the CID office, Rebus could feel eyes following them. Bill Pryde came up, preening, wanting to be introduced. He had curly fair hair and thick blond eyelashes, his nose large and freckled, mouth small and topped with a ginger moustache – a fashion accessory he could well afford to lose.

  ‘A pleasure,’ he said, taking Kirstin Mede’s hand. Then, to Rebus: ‘Makes me wish we’d swopped.’

  Pryde was working on the Mr Taystee case: an ice-cream man found dead in his van. Engine left running in a lockup, looking initially like suicide.

  Rebus steered Kirstin Mede past Pryde, kept them moving. He wanted to ask her out. He knew she wasn’t married, but thought there might be a boyfriend in the frame. Rebus was thinking: what would she like to eat – French or Italian? She spoke both those languages. Maybe stick to something neutral: Indian or Chinese. Maybe she was vegetarian. Maybe she didn’t like restaurants. A drink then? But Rebus didn’t drink these days.