10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (5 page)

Nowadays, Morton did not concern himself with headlines and high-profile arrests. He got on with the job, collected his salary, thought now and then of his pension and the fishing-years to come, and drank his wife and children out of his conscience.

‘This is a nice canteen,’ said Rebus, smoking, struggling to start a conversation.

‘Yes, it is. I’m in here now and again. I know one of the guys who work in the computer room. Comes in handy, you know, having one of those terminal-operators in your pocket. They can track down a car, a name, an address quicker than you can blink. It only costs the occasional drink.’

‘Get them to sort out this lot of ours then.’

‘Give them time, John. Then
all
the files will be on computer. And a little while after that, they’ll find that they don’t need the work-horses like us any more. There’ll just be a couple of DIs and a desk console.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Rebus.

‘It’s progress, John. Where would we be without it? We’d still be out there with our pipes and our guess-work and our magnifying glasses.’

‘I suppose you’re right, Jack. But remember what the Super says: “Give me a dozen good men every time, and send your machines back to their makers.”’

Rebus looked around him as he spoke. He saw that one of the two women from the briefing room had settled at a table by herself.

‘And besides,’ said Rebus, ‘there’ll always be a place for people like us, Jack. Society couldn’t do without us. Computers can never have inspired guesses. That’s where we’ve got them beat hands down.’

‘Maybe, I don’t know. Still, we better be getting back, eh?’ Morton looked at his watch, drained his cup, and pushed back his chair.

‘You go on ahead, Jack. I’ll be with you in a minute. I want to check out an inspired guess.’

‘Mind if I join you?’

Rebus, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand, pulled out the chair from opposite the woman officer, who had her head buried in the day’s newspaper. He noted the garish headline on the front page. Someone had slipped out a little information to the local media.

‘Not at all,’ she said, not looking up.

Rebus smiled to himself and sat down. He began to sip the powdery, instant murk.

‘Busy?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Shouldn’t you be? Your friend left a few minutes ago.’

Sharp then, very sharp. Very, very sharp indeed. Rebus began to feel a mite uneasy. He disliked ballcrushers, and here were all the outward signs of one.

‘Yes, he did, didn’t he? But then he’s a glutton for punishment. We’re working on the Modus Operandi files. I’d do anything to defer that particular pleasure.’

She looked up at last, bitten by the potential insult.

‘That’s what I am, is it? A delaying tactic?’

Rebus smiled and shrugged.

‘What else?’ he said.

It was her turn to smile now. She closed the paper and folded it twice, placing it before her on the formica-topped table. She tapped the headline.

‘Looks like we’re in the news,’ she said.

Rebus turned the paper towards him.

EDINBURGH ABDUCTIONS – NOW IT’S MURDER!

‘A terrible bloody case,’ he offered. ‘Just terrible. And the newspapers don’t make it any better.’

‘Yes, well, we’ll have the PM results in a couple of hours, and then we just might have something to go on.’

‘I hope so. Just so long as I can put away those bloody files.’

‘I thought policemen,’ stressing the latter part of the word, ‘got their kicks from reading that stuff?’

Rebus spread his hands before him, a gesture he seemed to have picked up from Michael.

‘You have us to a T. How long have you been in the force?’

Rebus took her to be thirty, give or take two years. She had thick, short brown hair, and a long, straight ski-slope of a nose. There were no rings on her fingers, but these days that told him nothing.

‘Long enough,’ she said.

‘I think I knew you would say that.’

She was smiling still: no ballcrusher then.

‘Then you’re cleverer than I took you for,’ she said.

‘You’d be surprised.’

He was growing tired, realising that the game was going nowhere. It was all midfield, a friendly rather than a cup-tie. He checked his watch conspicuously.

‘Time I was getting back,’ he said.

She picked up her newspaper.

‘Are you doing anything this weekend?’ she asked.

John Rebus sat down again.

He left the station at four o’clock. The birds were doing their best to persuade everyone that it was dawn, but no one seemed fooled. It was dark still, and the air was chilled.

He decided to leave his car and walk home, a distance of two miles. He needed it, needed to feel the cool, damp air, the expectancy of a morning shower. He breathed deep, trying to relax, to forget, but his mind was too full of those files, and little pieces of recollected fact and figure, pieces of horror no bigger than a paragraph, haunted his walk.

To indecently assault an eight-week old baby girl. The babysitter who had calmly admitted to the assault saying that she had done it ‘for a kick’.

To rape a grandmother in front of her two grandchildren, then give the kids some sweets from a jar before leaving. The act premeditated; committed by a bachelor of fifty.

To burn with cigarettes the name of a street gang onto the breasts of a twelve-year old, leaving her for dead in a burning hut. Never caught.

And now the crux: to abduct two girls and then strangle them
without
having sexually abused them. That, Anderson had posited only thirty minutes before, was a perversion in itself, and in a funny way Rebus knew what he meant. It made the deaths even more arbitrary, more pointless – and more shocking.

Well, at least they were not dealing with a sex-offender; not
right away. Which only, Rebus was forced to agree, made their task that much more difficult, for now they were confronted with something like a ‘serial killer’, striking at random and without clues, aiming at the record books rather than at any idea of ‘kicks’. The question now was would he stop at two? It seemed unlikely.

Strangulation. It was a fearful way to go, wrestling, kicking your way towards oblivion, panic, the fretful sucking for air, and the killer behind you most likely, so that you faced the fear of something totally anonymous, a death without knowledge of who or why. Rebus had been taught methods of killing in the SAS. He knew what it felt like to have the garotte tighten on your neck, trusting to the opponent’s prevailing sanity. A fearful way to go.

Edinburgh slept on, as it had slept on for hundreds of years. There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were Enlightenment ghosts, articulate and deferential. They were not about to leap from the darkness with a length of twine ready in their hands. Rebus paused and looked around him. Besides, it was morning now and any godfearing spirit would be tucked up in bed, as he, John Rebus, flesh and blood, would be soon.

Near his flat, he passed a little grocery shop outside which were stacked crates of milk and morning rolls. The owner had complained in private to Rebus about petty and occasional thefts, but would not submit a complaint proper. The shop was as dead as the street, the solitude of the moment disturbed only by the distant rumble of a taxi on cobblestones and the persistence of the dawn chorus. Rebus looked around him, examining the many curtained windows. Then, swiftly, he tore six rolls from a layer and stuffed them into his pockets, walking away a little too briskly. A moment later he hesitated, then walked on tiptoe back to the shop, the criminal
returning to the scene of the crime, the dog to its vomit. Rebus had never actually seen dogs doing that, but he had it on the authority of Saint Peter.

Looking round again, he lifted a pint of milk out of its crate and made his getaway, whistling silently to himself.

Nothing in the world tasted as good for breakfast as stolen rolls with some butter and jam and a mug of milky coffee. Nothing tasted better than a venial sin.

He sniffed the stairwell of his tenement, catching the faint odour of tom-cats, a persistent menace. He held his breath as he climbed the two flights of stairs, fumbling in his pocket beneath the squashed rolls, trying to liberate his door-key.

The interior of the flat felt damp and smelt damp. He checked the central heating and, sure enough, the pilot-light had gone out again. He cursed as he relit it, turning the heat up all the way, and went through to the living-room.

There were still spaces on the book-case, the wall-unit, the mantelpiece where Rhona’s ornaments had once stood, but many of the gaps had already been filled by new mementoes of his own: bills, unanswered letters, old ring-pulls from tins of cheap beer, the occasional unread book. Rebus collected unread books. Once upon a time, he had actually read the books that he bought, but these days he seemed to have so little time. Also, he was more discriminating now than he had been then, back in the old days when he would read a book to its bitter end whether he liked it or not. These days, a book he disliked was unlikely to last ten pages of his concentration.

These were the books that lay around his living-room. His books for reading tended to congregate in the bedroom, lying in co-ordinated rows on the floor like patients in a doctor’s waiting-room. One of these days he would take a holiday, would rent a cottage in the Highlands or on the Fife coast, and would take with him all of these waiting-to-be-read-or-reread books, all of that knowledge that could be his for the
breaking open of a cover. His favourite book, a book he turned to at least once a year, was
Crime and Punishment
. If only, he thought, modern murderers would exhibit some show of conscience more often. But no, modern killers bragged of their crimes to their friends, then played pool in their local pub, chalking their cues with poise and certainty, knowing which balls would drop in which order . . .

While a police-car slept nearby, its occupants unable to do anything save curse the mountains of rules and regulations and rue the deep chasms of crime. It was everywhere, crime. It was the life-force and the blood and the balls of life: to cheat, to edge; to take that body-swerve at authority, to kill. The higher up you climbed into crime, the more subtly you began to move back towards legitimacy, until a handful of lawyers only could crack open your system, and they were always affordable, always on hand to be bribed. Dostoevsky had known all that, clever old bastard. He had felt the stick burning from both ends.

But poor old Dostoevsky was dead and had not been invited to a party this weekend, while he, John Rebus, had. Often he declined invitations, because to accept meant that he had to dust off his brogues, iron a shirt, brush down his best suit, take a bath, and splash on some cologne. He had also to be affable, to drink and be merry, to talk to strangers with whom he had no inclination to talk and with whom he was not being paid to talk. In other words, he resented having to play the part of a normal human animal. But he had accepted the invitation given to him by Cathy Jackson in the Waverley Road canteen. Of course he had.

And he whistled at the thought of it, wandering through to the kitchen to make some breakfast, which he then took through to his bedroom. This was a ritual after a night duty. He stripped, climbed into bed, balanced the plate of rolls on his chest, and held a book to his nose. It was not a very good
book. It was about a kidnapping. Rhona had taken away the bed proper, but had left him the mattress, so it was easy for him to reach down for his mug of coffee, easy for him to discard one book and find another.

He fell asleep soon enough, the lamp still burning, as cars began to pass by his window.

His alarm did the trick for a change, pulling him off the mattress as a magnet attracts filings. He had kicked off the duvet, and was drenched in sweat. He felt suffocated, and remembered suddenly that the central heating was still boiling away like a steamship. On his way to switching off the thermostat, he stooped at the front door to pick up the day’s mail. One of the letters was unstamped and unfranked. It bore only his name in typescript across the front. Rebus’s stomach squeezed hard on the paste of rolls and butter. He ripped the envelope open, pulling out the single sheet of paper.

FOR THOSE WHO READ BETWEEN THE TIMES.

So now the lunatic knew where he lived. Checking in the envelope, laconic now and expecting to find the knotted string, he found instead two matchsticks, tied together with thread into the shape of a cross.

Organized chaos: that summed up the newspaper office. Organized chaos on the grandest of scales. Stevens rummaged amongst the sheaf of paper in his tray, looking for a needle. Had he perhaps filed it somewhere else? He opened one of the large, heavy drawers of his desk, then shut it quickly, afraid that some of the mess in there might escape. Controlling himself, he took a deep breath and opened it again. He plunged a hand into the jumble of paper inside the drawer, as if something in there would bite. A huge dog-clip, springing loose from one particular file, did bite. It nicked his thumb and he slammed the drawer shut, the cigarette wobbling in his mouth as he cursed the office, the journalistic profession, and trees, begetters of paper. Sod it. He sat back and squeezed his eyes shut as the smoke began to sting. It was eleven in the morning, and already the office was a blue haze, as though everything were happening on the set of a
Brigadoon
marsh-scene. He grabbed a sheet of typescript, turned it over, and began to scribble with a nub of pencil which he had lifted from a betting shop.

‘X (Mr Big?) delivers to Rebus, M. How does the policeman fit in? Answer – perhaps everywhere, perhaps nowhere.’

He paused, taking the cigarette from his mouth, replacing it with a fresh one, and using the butt to light its successor.

‘Now – anonymous letters. Threats? A code?’

Stevens found it unlikely that John Rebus could not know about his brother’s involvement in the Scottish drug-pushing world, and knowing, the chances were that he was involved in it too, perhaps leading the whole investigation the wrong way to protect his flesh and blood. It would make a cracking good story when it broke, but he knew that he would be treading on eggs from here on in. No one would go out of their way to help him nail a policeman, and if anyone found out what he was up to, he would be in very serious trouble indeed. He needed to do two things: check his life insurance policy, and tell nobody about this.