Knots And Crosses (11 page)

Tom Jameson was as astute an editor as any, and he had a team of four reporters working on the story. He could not help noticing, however, that Jim Stevens was not on his best form. He seemed uninterested – never a good sign in a journalist. Jameson was worried. Stevens was the best he had, a household name. He would speak to him about it soon.

As the case grew along with the interest in it, John Rebus and Gill Templer became confined to communicating by telephone and via the occasional chance meeting in or around HQ. Rebus hardly saw his old station now. He was strictly a murder-case victim himself, and was told to think about nothing else during his waking hours. He thought about everything else: about Gill, about the letters, about his car’s inability to pass its MOT. And all the time he watched Anderson, father of Rhona’s lover, watched him as he grew ever more frantic for a motive, a lead, anything. It was almost a pleasure to watch the man in action.

As to the letters, Rebus had pretty much discounted his wife and daughter. A slight mark on Knot’s last missive had
been checked by the forensic boys (for the price of a pint) and had turned out to be blood. Had the man nicked his finger while cutting the twine? It was yet another small mystery. Rebus’s life was full of mysteries, not the least of which was where his ten legitimate daily cigarettes went. He would open his packet of a late afternoon, count the contents, and find that he was supposed to have smoked all ten of his ration already. It was absurd; he could hardly remember smoking one of the alloted ten, never mind all of them. Yet a count of the butts in his ashtray would produce empirical evidence enough to withstand any denials on his part. Bloody strange though. It was as though he were shutting out a part of his waking life.

He was stationed in the HQ’s Incident Room at the moment, while Jack Morton, poor sod, was on door-to-door. From his vantage point he could see how Anderson was running the shambles. It was little wonder the man’s son had turned out to be less than bright. Rebus also had to deal with the many phone-calls – from those of the trying-to-be-helpfuls to those of the psychic-cranks-who-want-to-confess – and with the interviews carried out in the building itself at all hours of the day and night. There were hundreds of these, all to be filed and put into some kind of order of importance. It was a huge task, but there was always the chance that a lead would come from it, so he was not allowed to slack.

In the hectic, sweaty canteen he smoked cigarette number eleven, lying to himself that it was from the next day’s ration, and read the daily paper. They were straining for new, shocked adjectives now, having exhausted their thesauruses. The appalling, mad, evil crimes of The Strangler. This insane, evil, sex-crazed man. (They did not seem to mind that the killer had never sexually assaulted his victims.) Gymslip Maniac! ‘What are our police doing? All the technology in the world cannot replace the reassurance offered by bobbies on the beat. WE NEED THEM NOW.’ That was from James
Stevens, our crime correspondent. Rebus remembered the stocky drunk man from the party. He recalled the look on Stevens’ face when he had been told Rebus’s name. That was strange. Everything was bloody strange. Rebus put down the newspaper. Reporters. Again, he wished Gill well in her job. He studied the blurred photograph on the front of the tabloid. It showed a crop-haired, unintelligent child. She was grinning nervously, as though snapped at a moment’s notice. There was a slight, endearing gap between her front teeth. Poor Nicola Turner, aged twelve, a pupil at one of the southside’s comprehensive schools. She had no attachments to either of the other dead girls. There were no visible links between them, and what was more, the killer had moved up a year, choosing a High School kid this time. So there was to be no regularity about his choice of age-groups. The randomness continued unabated. It was driving Anderson nuts.

But Anderson would never admit that the killer had his beloved police force tied in knots. Tied in absolute knots. Yet there
had
to be clues. There had to be. Rebus drank his coffee and felt his head spin. He was feeling like the detective in a cheap thriller, and wished that he could turn to the last page and stop all his confusion, all the death and the madness and the spinning in his ears.

Back in the Incident Room, he gathered together reports of phone-calls that had come in since he had left for his break. The telephonists were working flat out, and near them a telex-machine was almost constantly printing out some new piece of information thought useful to the case and sent on by other forces throughout the country.

Anderson pushed his way through the noise as if swimming in treacle.

‘A car is what we need, Rebus. A car. I want all the
sightings of men driving away with children collated and on my desk in an hour. I want that bastard’s car.’

‘Yes, sir.’

And he was off again, wading through treacle deep enough to drown any normal human being. But not Indestructible Anderson, impervious to any danger. That made him a liability, thought Rebus, sifting through the piles of paper on his desk, which were meant to be in some system of order.

Cars. Anderson wanted cars, and cars he would have. There were swear-on-a-Bible descriptions of a man in a blue Escort, a white Capri, a purple Mini, a yellow BMW, a silver TR7, a converted ambulance, an ice-cream van (the telephone-caller sounding Italian and wishing to remain anonymous), and a great big Rolls-Royce with personalized number plates. Yes, let’s put them all into the computer and have it run a check of every blue Escort, white Capri, and Rolls-Royce in Britain. And with all that information at our fingertips … then what? More door-to-door, more gathering of telephone-calls and interviews, more paperwork and bullshit. Never mind, Anderson would swim through it all, indomitable amidst all the craziness of his personal world, and at the end of it all he would come out looking clean and shiny and untouchable, like an advertisement for washing powder. Three cheers.

Hip hip

Rebus had not enjoyed bullshit during his Army days either, and there had been plenty of it then. But he had been a good soldier, a very good soldier, when finally they had got down to soldiering. But then, in a fit of madness, he had applied to join the Special Air Squadron, and there had been very little bullshit there, and an incredible amount of savagery. They had made him run from the railway station to the camp behind a sergeant in his jeep. They had tortured him with twenty-hour marches, brutal instructors, the works. And when Gordon Reeve and he had made the grade, the
SAS had tested them just that little bit further, just that inch too far, confining them, interrogating them, starving them, poisoning them, and all for a little piece of worthless information, a few words that would show they had cracked. Two naked, shivering animals with sacks tied over their heads, lying together to keep warm.

‘I want that list in an hour, Rebus,’ called Anderson, walking past again. He would have his list. He would have his pound of flesh.

Jack Morton arrived back, looking foot-weary and not at all amused with life. He slouched across to Rebus, a sheaf of papers under his arm, a cigarette in the other hand.

‘Look at this,’ he said, lifting his leg. Rebus saw the foot-long gash in the material.

‘What happened to you then?’

‘What do you think? I got chased by a great fucking alsatian, that’s what happened to me. Will I get a penny for this? Will I hell.’

‘You could try claiming for it anyway.’

‘What’s the point? I’d just be made to look stupid.’

Morton dragged a chair across to the table.

‘What are you working on?’ he asked, seating himself with visible relief.

‘Cars. Lots of them.’

‘Fancy a drink later on?’

Rebus looked at his watch, considering.

‘Might do, Jack. Thing is, I’m hoping to make a date for tonight.’

‘With the ravishing Inspector Templer?’

‘How did you know that?’ Rebus was genuinely surprised.

‘Come on, John. You can’t keep that sort of thing a secret – not from policemen. Better watch your step, mind. Rules and regulations, you know.’

‘Yes, I know. Does Anderson know about this?’

‘Has he said anything?’

‘No.’

‘Then he can’t, can he?’

‘You’d make a good policeman, son. You’re wasted in this job.’

‘You’re telling me, dad.’

Rebus busied himself with lighting cigarette number twelve. It was true, you couldn’t keep anything secret in a police station, not from the lower ranks anyway. He hoped Anderson and the Chief wouldn’t find out about it though.

‘Any luck with the door-to-door?’ he asked.

‘What do you think?’

‘Morton, you have an annoying habit of answering a question with another question.’

‘Have I? It must be all this work then, spending my days asking questions, mustn’t it?’

Rebus examined his cigarettes. He found he was smoking number thirteen. This was becoming ridiculous. Where had number twelve gone?

‘I’ll tell you, John, there’s nothing to be had out there, not a sniff of a lead. No one’s seen anything, no one knows anything. It’s almost like a conspiracy.’

‘Maybe that’s what it is then, a conspiracy.’

‘And has it been established that all three murders were the work of a single individual?’

‘Yes.’

The Chief Inspector did not believe in wasting words, especially with the press. He sat like a rock behind the table, his hands clasped before him, Gill Templer on his right. Her glasses – an affectation really, her vision was near-perfect – were in her bag. She never wore them while on duty, unless the occasion demanded it. Why had she worn them to the party? They were like jewellery to her. She found it
interesting, too, to gauge different reactions towards her when she was and was not wearing them. When she explained this to her friends, they looked at her askance as if she were joking. Perhaps it all went back to her first true love, who had told her that girls who wore glasses seemed, in his experience, to be the best fucks. That had been fifteen years ago, but she still saw the look on his face, the smile, the glint. She saw, too, her own reaction – shock at his use of the word ‘fuck’. She could smile at that now. These days she swore as much as her male colleagues; again gauging their reaction. Everything was a game to Gill Templer, everything but the job. She had not become an Inspector through luck or looks, but through hard, efficient work and the will to climb as high as they would let her go. And now she sat with her Chief Inspector, who was a token presence at these gatherings. It was Gill who made up the handouts, who briefed the Chief Inspector, who handled the media afterwards, and they all knew it. A Chief Inspector might add weight of seniority to the proceedings, but Gill Templer it was who could give the journalists their ‘extras’, the useful snippets left unsaid.

Nobody knew that better than Jim Stevens. He sat to the back of the room, smoking without removing the cigarette from his mouth once. He took little of the Chief Inspector’s words in. He could wait. Still, he jotted down a sentence or two for future use. He was still a newsman after all. Old habits never died. The photographer, a keen teenager, nervously changing lenses every few minutes, had departed with his roll of film. Stevens looked around for someone he might have a drink with later on. They were all here. All the old boys from the Scottish press, and the English correspondents too. Scottish, English, Greek – it didn’t matter, pressmen always looked like nothing other than pressmen. Their faces were robust, they smoked, their shirts were a day or two old. They did not look well-paid, yet were extremely well-paid, and with
more fringe benefits than most. But they worked for their money, worked hard at building up contacts, squeezing into nooks and crannies, stepping on toes. He watched Gill Templer. What would she know about John Rebus? And would she be willing to tell? They were still friends after all, her and him. Still friends.

Maybe not good friends, certainly not good friends – though he had tried. And now she and Rebus … Wait until he nailed that bastard, if there
was
anything there to nail. Of course there was something there to nail. He could sense it. Then her eyes would be opened, truly opened. Then they would see what they would see. He was already preparing the headline. Something to do with ‘Brothers in Law – Brothers in Crime!’ Yes, that had a nice ring to it. The Rebus brothers put behind bars, and all his own work. He turned his attention back to the murder case. But it was all too easy, too easy to sit down and write about police inefficiency, about the conjectured maniac. Still, it was bread and butter for the moment. And there was always Gill Templer to stare at.

‘Gill!’

He caught her as she was getting into her car.

‘Hello, Jim.’ Cold, businesslike.

‘Listen, I just wanted to apologise for my behaviour at the party.’ He was out of breath after a brief jog across the car park, and the words came slowly from his burning chest. ‘I mean, I was a bit pissed. Anyway, sorry.’

But Gill knew him too well, knew that this was merely a prelude to a question or request. Suddenly she felt a little sorry for him, sorry for his fair thick hair which needed a wash, sorry for his short, stocky – she had once thought it powerful – body, for the way he trembled now and again as though cold. But the pity soon wore off. It had been a hard day.

‘Why wait till now to tell me? You could have said something at Sunday’s briefing.’

He shook his head.

‘I didn’t make Sunday’s briefing. I was a bit hungover. You must have noticed I wasn’t there?’

‘Why should I have noticed that? Plenty of other people were there, Jim.’

That cut him, but he let it pass.

‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘sorry. Okay?’

‘Fine.’ She made to step into her car.

‘Can I buy you a drink or something? To cement the apology, so to speak.’

‘Sorry, Jim, I’m busy.’

‘Meeting that man Rebus?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Look after yourself, Gill. That one might not be what he seems.’

She straightened up again.

‘I mean,’ said Stevens, ‘just take care, all right?’