Ten Year Stretch

by Martin Edwards

  ‘Might be a daft question, but does the name Rab or Robert Merrilees mean anything to you?’

  ‘Diddly-squat, pal.’ The door began to close. Rebus leaned forward, pressing his hand against it, maintaining eye contact.

  ‘You sure about that? He was a copper.’

  ‘Means hee-haw to me.’

  ‘Is there anyone else inside you could ask?’

  ‘Look, we only moved here six months back. He an old tenant? Owes back rent or something? Whoever was here before us, all they left was the smell. I’m going to shut this door now, and if you try and stop me, it won’t be words we’ll be having.’

  Rebus considered for a moment, then dropped his hand and watched the door slowly close.

  ‘Worth a try,’ he told himself, remembering all the times on the job when he’d had to knock on doors. Dozens if not hundreds of them, usually leading nowhere. Back on the pavement, he studied the houses on either side. One was just that little bit neater than the other. Doormat on the step. Windows cleaned within memory. So he walked up to it and rang the bell. A stooped woman in her seventies answered, but only after she’d slid the security chain in place. Rebus smiled through the four-inch gap.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said. ‘But do you know the name Merrilees? Rab or Robert Merrilees?’

  ‘He passed away,’ she said, her face instantly sad at the memory. ‘I saw his obituary. You get to that point, don’t you, where they’re the first thing you check in the newspaper?’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘I couldn’t get to his funeral. I had a doctor’s appointment that day and they’re like gold-dust.’

  Rebus kept smiling and nodding. ‘How did you know him, Mrs…?’

  ‘I’m Elspeth Tanner. People used to tease me, you know.’

  ‘Tease you?’

  ‘Elsie Tanner—from Coronation Street. Not that I’ve ever been anything like that little madam.’

  ‘Mrs Tanner, how did you know Big Rab?’

  ‘He changed the light bulb in my living room. Nice big strapping man, he was. Helped with the Christmas tree, too.’

  ‘So you met him…?’

  ‘Through Alison, of course. Alison from next door.’

  ‘He used to visit her? Were they related?’

  Mrs Tanner’s eyes sparkled and she lowered her voice a little. ‘He was her gentleman friend.’

  ‘Oh.’ Rebus paused while this sank in.

  ‘He was married and everything—Alison told me. He’d leave his wife if he could—that’s what he told her. But he’d made his bed and must lie in it.’

  ‘Two beds, actually, when you think of it.’

  Mrs Tanner gave a little squeal of laughter, hiding her mouth behind her hand. ‘I couldn’t condone his behaviour, but he was always considerate—and Alison didn’t seem to mind. He brought her flowers and things.’

  ‘Anything a bit more extravagant? Maybe earrings or a necklace?’

  ‘Perhaps once or twice—Christmas and her birthday.’

  ‘No more than that?’

  Mrs Tanner started to frown. ‘Why all these questions? What business is it of yours?’

  ‘I’m an old friend of Rab’s. I was sorting out some of his stuff and found Alison’s address.’

  The wariness eased from Mrs Tanner’s face. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Did he leave her anything in his will? Difficult without his poor wife finding out.’

  ‘Difficult, yes.’ Rebus paused. ‘So is Alison still with us?’

  ‘She’s in a home. Has been for a year or so. I used to try to visit but it’s two buses, sometimes three.’

  ‘Do you know if Rab still saw her?’

  ‘He broke it off three Christmases past.’ Mrs Tanner grew thoughtful. ‘Actually, I think it was Alison who persuaded him. Soon after, she had an “episode,” and it got so she couldn’t look after herself. Maybe she knew it was coming. We sometimes sense these things, don’t we?’ Her eyes brightened. ‘If he’d maybe left a note for her…something that would cheer her up?’

  ‘I didn’t find anything.’ Rebus winced at the lie.

  ‘You could look again. I doubt she knows he’s dead. Will you break it to her?’

  ‘Do you think I should?’

  Mrs Tanner was nodding. ‘Wait there,’ she said. ‘I’ll go find the address…’

  Alison Hardy’s care home was in Morningside. It looked to Rebus as if a couple of large semi-detached houses had been knocked through to create it. He’d decided to walk there—it was only quarter of an hour from his flat—in the weak sunshine of the following morning. He tied Brillo to the iron railings outside and gave him a pat.

  ‘Five or ten minutes tops,’ he promised.

  The door was being opened as he approached it. A uniformed woman stood there. ‘We allow dogs,’ she said. ‘The clients quite like it.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure…’

  So, tail wagging in delight at his inclusion, Brillo accompanied his owner indoors. Rebus had expected to smell cheap talc and strong disinfectant, but was met with neither. The place was brightly lit and freshly decorated.

  ‘You’ll be Mr Rebus,’ the woman was saying. ‘It was me you spoke to earlier.’

  ‘Thanks for letting me visit.’

  ‘We’re not a prison, Mr Rebus. Guests are welcome day and night. But as I said, I’m in two minds about breaking the news to Alison. She’s not had an episode for a while, and it’d be best if nothing brought on another one.’

  ‘Has she ever mentioned Mr Merrilees to you?’

  The woman—he recalled now her name was Semple—shook her head. ‘But you say he was married and their affair was just that, so…’

  Rebus nodded slowly. Some secrets had to be kept. ‘Well, maybe I’ll just say hello, then, and pass on her neighbour’s regards.’

  Semple led the way without another word, down a wide carpeted corridor towards the last door before the fire escape. The door was ajar but she knocked anyway before putting her head inside.

  ‘Someone to see you, Alison. He’s a friend of your old neighbour, Elspeth. Is it all right if he comes in?’

  Without waiting for an answer, she led the way. Alison Hardy sat in a chair with a tartan rug around her lower body. She had been flicking through a magazine and peered at Rebus from above her half-moon spectacles.

  ‘Elspeth never comes,’ she commented. Her hair was fine and silver, her face gaunt. A breeze could have toppled her. Rebus tried not to think about her trysts with Big Rab Merrilees.

  ‘Can I fetch you tea or anything?’ Semple was asking. Rebus shook his head and watched her withdraw. She hadn’t quite shut the door, so he did it for her.

  ‘Lovely dog,’ Alison Hardy said. Brillo was still on the lead so Rebus neared the woman’s chair. Brillo obliged by lifting his front paws onto the travel rug, so that Hardy’s slender hands could rub at his ears.

  ‘He’s called Brillo,’ Rebus informed her.

  ‘I never had a pet. Goldfish and budgies when I was a bairn, but nothing since.’

  Rebus extended the lead a little so he could sit down on the chair opposite. ‘Elspeth’s sorry she doesn’t come as much as she’d like.’

  ‘It’s the buses, isn’t it? She’d spend half of every visit complaining about them.’

  Rebus smiled an acknowledgment. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Maybe someone bedbound, or with a wandering mind. The woman he was facing didn’t even seem that old—not more than a handful of years older than him.

  ‘My name’s John, by the way,’ he said. ‘I was a policeman for a long time.’ She focused a little more deeply on him. ‘I knew Rab Merrilees back then.’

  She gave a twitch of her mouth. ‘I saw in the paper that he’d died. I thought about the funeral, but with his wife and everything…’

/>   ‘I visited his old police box on the Canongate. Did you ever go there?’

  ‘Maybe once.’

  ‘He scratched your address on the paintwork—did you know about that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any notion why he’d do something like that?’

  ‘Maybe to lead someone to my door, John. And here you are.’ She pursed her lips and peered at him.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’ he eventually broke the silence to ask.

  She took a deep breath. ‘All I know is, Rab reckoned one day someone would turn up.’

  ‘Would you care to take a guess why they’d turn up, Alison?’

  Her face broke into a smile. ‘You want the bookshelf over there.’ She gestured over Rebus’s shoulder. He turned to look. The shelves by the window contained mostly ornaments rescued from Hardy’s old home. But there were also a dozen or so paperbacks. He rose to his feet and approached the unit.

  ‘The Muriel Spark novel,’ she directed him. ‘It’s what I was reading at the time.’

  Rebus lifted it down and looked at it. Loitering With Intent.

  ‘Inside the back cover,’ he heard Hardy say.

  A small white envelope. Still sealed, no writing on it.

  ‘Rab said someone nosy might come asking questions, and if they did I was to give them this.’

  Rebus put the book back on the shelf and carried the envelope to the chair.

  ‘Do you know what’s in it?’ he inquired. She shook her head. ‘Never tempted to take a look?’

  ‘I knew Rab had done some things during his life. It was him I was interested in, not them.’

  ‘What do you think is in it?’

  ‘The answer to a question you’ve not been brave enough to ask.’

  ‘So I have your blessing to open it?’

  She nodded slowly and watched him get to work.

  Back in his living room, once he’d fed Brillo, he stood by the window, staring out at the street. Eventually he took the sheet of notepaper from his pocket and unfolded it, reading it for the fourth or fifth time.

  I got rid of the lot and spent the cash. What else was I going to do? I’m not the mug here.

  One final practical joke on the world. A wild goose chase around the city. And Rebus the mug who’d fallen for it. He twisted his mouth and managed a pained smile, then took out his phone and called Camille Riordan.

  ‘You wanted the story,’ he said. ‘So here it is.’

  When he finished, he heard laughter on the line, then her voice. ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  Rebus’s eyes narrowed. ‘Say what?’

  ‘If you’d given me Merrilees’s name, I might have saved you the trouble.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘All the police boxes—the job lot. We bought them from someone called Robert Merrilees. I’d no idea he’d been a cop—he was just a name on a purchase agreement. They’d have cost him a few thousand back in the day but they cost us a good bit more.’

  ‘How long had he owned them?’

  ‘Long enough.’

  ‘That’s what he did with the proceeds then? He bought half a city’s worth of redundant Tardises?’

  ‘And made sure his widow’s sitting pretty as a result, I dare say.’

  Rebus remembered Jerry Calder’s words: Widow didn’t look too unhappy at the funeral…

  ‘Which means,’ Riordan continued, ‘he was doing the same two things as you, John.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Thinking inside the box and out.’ And she started to laugh again.

  Freezer Burn

  James Sallis

  Within a week of thawing Daddy out, we knew something was wrong.

  He claims, seems in fact fully to believe, that before going cold he was a freelance assassin; furthermore, that he must get back to work. ‘I was good at it,’ he tells us. ‘The best.’

  When what he actually did was sell vacuum cleaners, mops, and squeegee things at Cooper Housewares.

  It doesn’t matter what you decide to be, he’s told us since we were kids, a doctor, car salesman, janitor, just be the best at what you do—one of a dozen or so endlessly recycled platitudes.

  Dr Paley said he’s seen this sort of thing before, as side effects from major trauma. That it’s probably temporary. We should be supportive, he told us, give it time. Research online uncovers article after article suggesting that such behavior, in fact, may be backwash from cryogenics and not uncommon at all, ‘long dreams’ inherent to the process itself.

  So, in support as Dr Paley counseled, we agreed to drive Daddy to a meeting with his new client. How he contacted that client, or was contacted by him, we had no idea, and Daddy refused (we understand, of course, he said) to violate client confidentiality or his own trade secrets.

  The new client turned out to be not he but she. ‘You must be Paolo,’ she said, rising from a spotless porch glider and taking a step towards us as we came up the walk. Paolo is not Daddy’s name. The house was in what we hereabouts call Whomville, modestly small from out here, no doubt folded into the hillside and continuing below ground and six or eight times its apparent size. I heard the soft whir of a servicer inside, approaching the door.

  ‘Single malt, if I recall correctly. And for your friends?’

  ‘Matilda, let me introduce my son—’

  Immediately, I asked for the next waltz.

  ‘—and daughter,’ who, as ever in unfamiliar circumstances, at age twenty-eight, smiled with the simple beauty and innocence of a four-year-old.

  ‘And they are in the business as well?’

  ‘No, no. But kind enough to drive me here. Perhaps they might wait inside as we confer?’

  ‘Certainly. Gertrude will see to it.’ Gertrude being the soft-voiced server. It set down a tray with whiskey bottle and two crystal glasses, then turned and stood alongside the door to usher us in.

  I have no knowledge of what was said out on that porch but afterwards, as we drove away, Daddy crackled with energy, insisting that we stop for what he called a trucker’s breakfast, then, as we remounted, announcing that a road trip loomed in our future. That very afternoon, in fact.

  ‘Road trip!’ Susanna’s excitement ducked us into the next lane—unoccupied, fortunately. She must have forgotten the last such outing, which left us stranded carless and moneyless in suburban badlands, limping home on the kindness of a stranger or two.

  Back at the house we readied ourselves for the voyage. Took on cargo of energy bars, bottled water, extra clothing, blankets, good toilet paper, all-purpose paper towels, matches, extra gasoline, a folding shovel.

  ‘So I gotta know,’ Susanna said as we bumped and bottomed-out down a back road, at Daddy’s insistence, to the freeway. ‘Now you’re working for the like of Old-money Matilda back there?’

  ‘Power to the people.’ That was me.

  ‘Eat the rich,’ she added.

  ‘Matilda is undercover. Deep. One of us.’

  Susanna: ‘Of course.’

  ‘In this business, few things are as they appear.’

  ‘Like dead salesmen,’ I said.

  ‘My cover. And a good one.’

  ‘Which one? Dead, or salesman?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Susanna said and, as if on cue, to our right sprouted a one-room church. Outside it sat one of those rental LED digital signs complete with wheels and trailer hitch.

  COME IN AND HELP US HONE

  THE SWORD OF TRUTH

  Susanna was driving. Daddy looked over from the passenger seat and winked. ‘I like it.’

  ‘I give up. No scraps or remnants of sanity remain.’

  ‘Chill, Sis,’ I told her. ‘Be cool. It’s the journey, not the destination.’

  ‘To know where we are, we must know where we’re not.’

 
; ‘As merrily we roll along—’

  ‘Stitching up time—’

  Then for a time, we all grew quiet. Past windshield and windows the road unrolled like recalls of memory: familiar as it passed beneath, empty of surprise or anticipation, a slow unfolding.

  Until Daddy, looking in the rear view, asked how long that vehicle had been behind us.

  ‘Which one?’ Sis said. ‘The van?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’ve not been keeping count but that has to be maybe the twenty-third white van since we pulled out of the driveway.’

  ‘Of all the cards being dealt,’ Daddy said, ‘I had to wind up with you jokers. Not one but two smart-asses.’

  ‘Strong genes,’ I said.

  ‘Some are born to greatness—’

  ‘—others get twisted to fit.’

  ‘Shoes too large.’

  ‘Shoes too small.’

  ‘Walk this way…’

  Half a mile further along, the van fell back and took the exit to Logosland, the philosophy playground. Best idea for entertainment since someone built a replica of Noah’s Ark and went bankrupt the first year. Then again, there’s The Thing in Texas. Been around forever and still draws. Billboards for a hundred miles, you get there and there’s not much to see, proving yet again that anticipation’s, like, ninety percent of life.

  ‘They’ll be passing us on to another vehicle,’ Daddy said. ‘Keep an eye out.’

  ‘Copy that,’ Susanna said.

  ‘Ten-four.’

  ‘Wilco.’

  Following Daddy’s directions, through fields with center-pivot irrigation rollers stretching to the horizon and town after town reminiscent of miniature golf courses, we pulled into Willford around four that afternoon. Bright white clouds clustered like fish eggs over the mountains as we came in from the west and descended into town, birthplace of Harry the Horn, whoever the hell that was, Pop. 16,082. Susanna and I took turns counting churches (eleven), filling stations (nine), and schools (three). Criss-cross of business streets downtown, houses mostly single-story from fifty, sixty years back, ranch style, cookie-cutter suburban, modest professional, predominantly dark gray, off-white, shades of beige.