10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  When Janice and Brian started bringing bags in from the car, Rebus dismissed Pete and Joey. Something else they’d said: Damon wouldn’t have minded finding a girl for the night. What did that say about his relationship with Helen?

  ‘All right, John?’ Janice said, smiling.

  ‘Fine,’ he replied.

  After lunch, Brian invited him to the pub. It was a regular thing – Saturday afternoon, football commentary on the radio or TV. A few drinks with the lads. But Rebus declined. He had the excuse that Janice had offered to take a walk around the town with him. Rebus didn’t want to be out drinking with Brian, a time when bonds could be made or tightened, secrets could dribble out ‘in confidence’. Now that he’d seen Janice sleeping in a separate room, Rebus felt he knew things he shouldn’t.

  Of course, she might be sleeping there because of Damon, because she missed him. But Rebus didn’t think that was it.

  So Brian went off to the pub, and Janice and Rebus went walking. Rain was falling, but lightly. She wore a red duffel coat with a hood. She offered Rebus an umbrella, but he declined, explaining that ever since he’d seen someone almost get their eye taken out with one on Princes Street, he’d regarded them as offensive weapons.

  ‘Where we’re walking won’t be quite so crowded,’ she told him.

  And it was true. The streets were empty. Locals went to Kirkcaldy or Edinburgh for their shopping. When Rebus had been young his family hadn’t owned a car. The shops on the main street had catered for all their needs. The needs these days seemed to be videos and takeaway food. The Goth was indeed closed, its windows boarded up, reminding Rebus of Darren Rough’s flat. The flats on Craigside Road had been demolished, new houses replacing them. Some of them were owned by the local housing association, the others were private.

  ‘Nobody owned their own house when we were growing up,’ Janice stated. Then she laughed. ‘I must sound about seventy-eight.’

  ‘The good old days,’ Rebus agreed. ‘Places do change, though.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And people are allowed to change too.’

  She looked at him, but didn’t ask what he meant. Maybe she already knew.

  They climbed up to The Craigs, a high ridge of wilderness above Auchterderran, and walked along it until they could see the old school.

  ‘Not that it’s used as a school any more,’ Janice explained. ‘Kids these days go to Lochgelly. Remember the school badge?’

  ‘I remember it.’ Auchterderran Secondary School: ASS. Kids from other schools used to bray at them, poking fun.

  ‘Why do you keep looking round?’ she asked. ‘Think someone’s following us?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Brian’s not like that, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘No, no, nothing—’

  ‘Sometimes I wish he was.’ She strode ahead of him. He took his time catching up.

  They walked back into town past the Auld Hoose pub. Cardenden as it now was had at one time been four distinct parishes known as the ABCD – Auchterderran, Bowhill, Cardenden and Dundonald. When they’d been going out together, Rebus had lived in Bowhill, Janice in Dundonald. He would take this route walking her home, going the longest way round they could think of. Crossing the River Ore at the old humpbacked bridge – now long replaced by a tarmac road. Sometimes, in summer, say, cutting through the park, crossing the river further up at one of the wide-diameter pipes. Those pipes had provided a test for the local kids. Rebus had known boys freeze halfway across, until their parents had to be fetched. He’d known one boy pee in his trousers with fear, but keep on moving his feet inch by inch along the pipe, while the river surged below him. Others took the crossing at a canter, hands in their pockets, needing no help with balancing.

  Rebus had been one of the cautious ones.

  The same pipe ran the length of the park before disappearing into the undergrowth beyond. You could follow it all the way to the bing – the hill-sized mound of dross and coal-shavings which the local colliery had deposited. Fires started on the bing could smoulder for months, wisps of smoke rising from the surface as from a volcano. In time, trees and grass had grown on the slopes, so that more than ever the bing came to resemble a natural hill. But if you climbed to the top, there was a plateau, an alien landscape, wired off for safety’s sake. It was like a small loch, its surface oily, thick-looking, and black. Nobody knew what it was, but they respected it – kept their distance and threw stones, watching them sink slowly from view as they were sucked beneath the surface.

  Boys and girls went into the wild areas behind the park and found secret places, flattened areas of fields which they could call their own. And that had been Janice and Johnny, too, once upon a time . . .

  The Kinks: ‘Young and Innocent Days’.

  Now, the place had changed. The bing had gone, the whole area landscaped. The colliery had been demolished. Cardenden had grown up around coal, hurried streets constructed in the twenties and thirties to house the incoming miners. These streets hadn’t even been given names, just numbers. Rebus’s family had moved into 13th Street. Relocation had taken the family to a pre-fab in Cardenden, and from there to a terraced house in a cul-de-sac in Bowhill. But by the time Rebus had been at secondary school, the coal was proving difficult to mine: fractured strata, so that a face might yield low tonnage. The colliery had become uneconomic. The daily siren signalling the change of shifts had been silenced. School-friends of Rebus, boys whose fathers and grandfathers had been miners, were left wondering what to do.

  And Rebus too had been asking himself questions. But with Mitch’s help he’d come to a decision. They’d both join the army. It had seemed so simple back then . . .

  ‘Is Mickey still around?’ Janice asked.

  ‘Lives in Kirkcaldy.’

  ‘He was a pest, your wee brother. Remember him charging into the bedroom? Or opening the bowley-hole all of a sudden so he could catch us?’

  Rebus laughed. Bowley-hole: a word he hadn’t heard in years. The serving-hatch between kitchen and living room. He could see Mickey now. He’d be up on the worktop in the kitchen, trying to spy on Rebus and Janice while they were alone in the living room.

  Rebus looked around again. He didn’t think Cary Oakes was in town. A place this size, where everyone knew everyone, it was hard to hide. He’d already had a couple of people come up and say hello, like they’d seen him just the other day, rather than a dozen or more years ago. And Janice had been stopped by half a dozen people – neighbours or the plain curious – and asked about Damon. It was hard to escape him: every wall, lamp-post and window seemed to have his picture stuck to it.

  ‘I was here a few years back,’ he told Janice. ‘Hutchy’s betting shop.’

  ‘You were after Tommy Greenwood?’

  He nodded. ‘And I bumped into Cranny.’ Their old nickname for Heather Cranston.

  ‘She’s still around. So’s her son.’

  Rebus sought the name. ‘Shug?’

  ‘That’s it,’ Janice said. ‘If you’re lucky, you might see Heather tonight.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She often comes to the karaoke.’

  Rebus asked Janice if they could turn back. ‘I want to see the cemetery,’ he explained. And backtracking, he might have added, as he’d learned in the army, was a good way to find if you were being followed. So they headed back through Bowhill, and up the cemetery brae. He was thinking of all the stories buried in the graveyard: mining tragedies; a girl found drowned in the Ore; a holiday car crash which had wiped out a family. Then there was Johnny Thomson, Celtic goalkeeper, fatally injured during an Old Firm derby, only in his twenties when he died.

  Rebus’s mother had been cremated, but his father had insisted on a ‘proper burial’. His headstone was over by the end wall. Loving husband to . . . and father of . . . And at the bottom, the words Not Dead, But at Rest in the Arms of the Lord. But as they approached, Rebus saw that something was wrong.

  ‘Oh, John,’ Janice
gasped.

  White paint had been poured down the headstone, covering most of the lettering.

  ‘Bloody kids,’ Janice said.

  Rebus saw tracks of paint on the grass, but no sign of the empty tin.

  ‘This wasn’t kids,’ he said. Too much of a coincidence.

  ‘Who then?’

  He touched his finger to the headstone: the paint was still viscous. Oakes had been in town. Janice was squeezing his arm.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s only a bit of stone,’ he said quietly. ‘It can be fixed.’

  They drank tea in the living room. Rebus had tried Oakes’s hotel – Stevens’ room, the bar, no one was there.

  ‘We’ve had phone calls,’ Janice told him.

  ‘Cranks?’ he guessed.

  She nodded. ‘Telling us Damon’s dead, or we killed him. Thing is, the callers . . . their voices sound local.’

  ‘Probably are local then.’

  She offered him a cigarette. ‘It’s pretty sick, isn’t it?’

  Rebus, looking around, nodded his agreement.

  They were still sitting in the living room when Brian came back from the pub.

  ‘I’ll just take a shower,’ he said.

  Janice explained that he always did this. ‘Clothes in the washing basket, and a good wash. I think it’s the cigarette smoke.’

  ‘He doesn’t like it?’

  ‘Hates it,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s why I started.’ The front door was opened again. It was Janice’s mum. ‘I’ll fetch a cup,’ Janice said, getting to her feet.

  Mrs Playfair nodded a greeting towards Rebus and sat down opposite him.

  ‘You haven’t found him yet?’

  ‘Not for want of trying, Mrs Playfair.’

  ‘Ach, I’m sure you’re doing your best, son. He’s our only grandchild, you know.’

  Rebus nodded.

  ‘A good laddie, wouldn’t harm a fly. I can’t believe he’d get into trouble.’

  ‘What makes you think he’s in trouble?’

  ‘He wouldn’t do this to us otherwise.’ She was studying him. ‘So what happened to you, son?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Wondering if she’d read his thoughts.

  ‘I don’t know . . . the way your life’s gone. Are you happy enough?’

  ‘I never really think about it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I like looking into people’s lives. That’s what detective work is.’

  ‘The army didn’t work out?’

  ‘No,’ he said simply.

  ‘Sometimes things don’t work out,’ she said, as Janice came back into the room. She watched her daughter pour the tea. ‘A lot of marriages break up round here.’

  ‘Do you think Damon and Helen would have made a go of it?’

  She took a long time thinking about it, accepted the cup from Janice. ‘They’re young, who knows?’

  ‘What odds would you give them?’

  ‘You’re talking to Damon’s gran, John,’ Janice said. ‘No girl in the world’s good enough for Damon, eh, Mum?’ She smiled to let him know she was half-joking. Then, to her mother again: ‘Johnny’s had a shock.’ Describing the vandalised grave. Brian came in rubbing his hair. He’d changed his clothes. Janice repeated the story for him.

  ‘Wee bastards,’ Brian said. ‘It’s happened before. They push the stones over, break them.’

  ‘I’ll fetch you a mug,’ Janice said, making to get up again.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Brian said, waving her back. He looked towards Rebus. ‘Probably don’t feel like eating out then? Only we were going to treat you.’

  After a moment’s thought, Rebus said, ‘I’d like to get out. But I should be paying.’

  ‘You can pay next time,’ Brian said.

  ‘Judging on past history,’ Rebus said, ‘that’ll be roughly thirty years from now.’

  Rebus drank nothing but mineral water with his curry. Brian was on the beers, and Janice managed two large glasses of white wine. Mr and Mrs Playfair had been invited, but had declined.

  ‘We’ll let you young things get on with it,’ Mrs Playfair had said.

  From time to time, when Janice wasn’t looking, Brian would glance in her direction. Rebus thought he was worried: worried his wife was going to leave him, and wondering what he was doing wrong. His life was falling apart, and he was on the lookout for clues as to why.

  Rebus considered himself something of an expert on break-ups. He knew sometimes a perspective could shift, one partner could start wanting things that seemed outwith their reach as long as they stayed married. It hadn’t been that way with his own marriage. There, it had been down to the fact that he never should have married in the first place. When work had begun to consume him, there hadn’t been much left to sustain Rhona.

  ‘Penny for them,’ Janice said at one point, tearing apart a nan bread.

  ‘I’m wondering about getting the headstone clean.’

  Brian said he knew a man who could do it: worked for the council, took graffiti off walls.

  ‘I’ll send you the money,’ Rebus told him. Brian nodded.

  After the meal, he drove them back to Cardenden. The karaoke night was held in a back room at the Railway Tavern. The equipment sat on a stage, but the singers stayed on the dancefloor, eyes on the TV monitor with its syrupy videos and the words appearing along the bottom of the screen. Sheets came round, printed with all the songs. You wrote your choice on a slip of paper and handed it to the compère. A skinhead got up and did ‘My Way’. A middle-aged woman had a go at ‘You to Me are Everything’. Janice said she always took ‘Baker Street’. Brian switched between ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Space Oddity’, depending on his mood.

  ‘So most people sing the same song every week?’ Rebus asked.

  ‘That guy getting up just now,’ she said, nodding towards the corner of the room, where people were shifting their seats to allow someone out, ‘he always chooses REM.’

  ‘So he’s probably pretty good at it by now?’

  ‘Not bad,’ she agreed. The song was ‘Losing My Religion’.

  Drinkers were wandering through from the front bar, standing in the doorway to watch. There was a small bar specially for the karaoke: a hatch, manned by a teenager who kept testing the acne on his cheeks. People seemed to have their regular tables. Rebus, Janice and Brian were seated near one of the loudspeakers. Brian’s mum was there, alongside Mr and Mrs Playfair. An elderly man came over to talk to them. Brian leaned towards Rebus.

  ‘That’s Alec Chisholm’s dad,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t have known him,’ Rebus admitted.

  ‘They don’t like talking to him. He’s always on about how long Alec’s been gone.’

  It was true that the Playfairs and Mrs Mee sat stony-faced as they listened to Chisholm. Rebus got up to get a round in. He felt numb, remembering the scene which had greeted him in the cemetery, Oakes letting him know he was one step ahead, making it personal. Rebus saw it as another part of the test, knew Oakes was trying to break him. Rebus was more determined than ever not to let that happen.

  Janice’s mum was drinking Bacardi Breezes, watermelon flavour. Rebus doubted she’d ever seen a watermelon in her life. He saw Helen Cousins standing in the doorway with a couple of friends, went up to say hello.

  ‘Any news?’ she asked.

  He shook his head, and she just shrugged, like she’d already given up on Damon. So much for the big romance. She was holding a bottle of Hooch, lemon flavour. All these sugary drinks, perfect for Scotland: a sweet tooth and a kick. Through in the saloon, he’d noticed they kept the bottles of mixers – lemonade and Irn Bru – on the bar, to be used freely by the punters. Not many pubs did that any more. Another thing: cheap beer. A lesson in economics: where you had a depressed area, you had to make your beer affordable. He’d spotted Heather Cranston through in the bar, seated on a stool, eyes drooping as some man talked into her ear and rested his hand on
the back of her neck.

  Helen handed her bottle to one of her friends, said she was off to the loo. Rebus hung around. The two girls were staring at him, wondering who he was.

  ‘She must be taking it hard,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ the one chewing gum asked, face creasing into puzzlement.

  ‘Damon disappearing.’

  The girl shrugged.

  ‘More embarrassed than anything,’ her friend commented. ‘Doesn’t do much for your morale, does it, your boyfriend doing a runner?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Rebus said. ‘I’m John, by the way.’

  ‘Corinne,’ the gum-chewer said. She had long black hair crimped with curling-tongs. Her pal was called Jacky and was tiny with dyed platinum hair.

  ‘So what do you think of Damon?’ he asked. He meant about Damon disappearing, but they didn’t take it that way.

  ‘Ach, he’s all right,’ Jacky said.

  ‘Just all right?’

  ‘Well, you know,’ Corinne said. ‘Damon’s heart’s in the right place, but he’s a bit thick. A bit slow, like.’

  Rebus nodded, as if this were his impression too. But the way Damon’s family had spoken of him, he’d been more of a genius in waiting. Rebus realised suddenly just how superficial his own portrait of Damon was. So far, he’d heard only one side of the story.

  ‘Helen likes him, though?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘They’re engaged.’

  ‘It happens, doesn’t it?’ Jacky said. ‘I’ve got girlfriends who got engaged just so they could throw a party.’ She looked at her pal for support, then leaned towards Rebus to utter a confidentiality. ‘They used to have some mega arguments.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Jealousy, I suppose.’ She waited till Corinne had nodded confirmation. ‘She’d see him notice someone, or he’d say she’d been letting some guy chat her up. Just the usual.’ She looked at him. ‘You think he’s gone off with someone?’ Rebus saw behind her eyeliner to a sharp intelligence.

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said.

  But Corinne was shaking her head. ‘He wouldn’t have had the guts.’

  Looking along the corridor, Rebus saw that Helen hadn’t made it to the toilets. She was chatting to some guy, her back to the wall, hands behind her. Rebus asked Corinne and Jacky what they were drinking. Two Bacardi-Cokes. He added them to the shopping list.