Beggars Banquet (collection)

by Ian Rankin

  She ignored my question, so I repeated it.

  ‘What did you mean last night about Maxwell?’

  ‘He’s gay.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gay.’

  I hooted disbelief. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘He did. Well, not in so many words, but women just know. The way he talked to me one day…’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know, a few months back. He came round, and you’d been kept at school by some meeting.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything. He sort of talked around it. You had to read between the lines.’

  This from someone who didn’t even read a newspaper.

  ‘He goes out with loads of women.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Because he’s scared to admit the fact. I bet the reason he’s so successful at dating is because his dates are so safe with him.’

  ‘You’ve been watching too many of those problem-airing programmes.’

  She shrugged. But Alice, bless her, had given me an idea. There was a run-down cemetery in the city known to be frequented after dark by gays. What a fine ironic place to dump the body. Then I thought of Donna. If Maxwell was gay, I’d killed him needlessly. The whole thing was crazy.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘Why should I?’ She gave me one of her looks and disappeared into the kitchen. I could hear running water. She was washing her cereal bowl. She hadn’t even thought to take mine, empty and on the floor beside me. I stared at the TV. No more porno evenings at Maxwell’s flat. No more fucking around with the remote. No reason to leave my own flat on a Friday night…

  Then, without any warning, the real plan leapt into my head, so focused that it seemed like a gift from above.

  I took a long detour on my drive to school, stopping at Maxwell’s. The lane was as empty as ever. I used his key to let myself in, climbed the stairs quietly and opened his bedroom door. Fingerprints didn’t concern me. As a close friend and frequent visitor, my prints would be everywhere anyway. I removed a couple of the videos from Maxwell’s wardrobe and while I was there, sniffed around in search of some secret hoard of gay stuff. But I didn’t find anything other than some football magazines under the bed.

  ‘Whatever turns you on,’ I said to myself as I debated bringing the body back into the flat, but decided against it. I wanted to set everything up before allowing Maxwell to be found. So he stayed in the car-boot all the way to school. I did consider rigor mortis. I wasn’t sure about these things, but reckoned he was going to be stiff by the time I got him back to the mews. He’d be all bunched up. I wasn’t sure what the police or the pathologist would make of that. TV detectives were infallible, but I had doubts about their real-life counterparts. I hoped my doubts were well founded.

  The two free periods before lunch were my real break. There was no one in the video lab, so I could edit to my heart’s content. There were three videos in all, two from Maxwell’s wardrobe and one from his living-room. This last video was shot at one of his parties. You know the sort of video I mean. The camera is aimed at you, so you open your mouth and eyes wide and wave wildly into the lens, sometimes saying something crass at the same time. Either that or you studiously ignore the contraption, despite the film-maker’s enticements. And you still look a prat. Of course, Maxwell being behind the camera most of the time, there were lots of shots of the women in their party dresses, with attendant leg and cleavage, Max calling out a cod director’s ‘Enthuse, darlings, I want some passion from you!’

  After an hour, I had basically what I wanted. It didn’t look great. I wasn’t at all sure that it looked even halfway persuasive, and I was about to drop the whole scheme, but there was fever in my brain now. It was all or nothing. I was risking all my winnings on another turn of that wheel. Greedy, that’s what I was. Avarice was my sin of the moment.

  ‘To hell with it, it’ll do.’

  I knew the police wouldn’t be watching for clues anyway. They’d be watching for other things, and finding them.

  During the lunch-hour, I drove back to the mews, this time pulling Maxwell out of the boot and laying him at the bottom of the stairs. Who could tell, maybe the whole thing would be taken for an accident after all. I didn’t put the porn videos back in the wardrobe – they were en route to the dump – but I did put my little home-made ensemble in there. Then I sat down in Maxwell’s study and switched on his word processor. I’d been thinking about the letter, and it proved easy to write. I read it through and it seemed convincing, so I printed it out. Then I crumpled the sheet of paper and placed it beneath the occasional table at the top of the stairs.

  I was back in the study, checking everything was as it should be, when the downstairs door opened. For a hysterical second I thought: It’s him! Maxwell’s back! How was I going to explain…?

  But then I heard a sort of squeal, and a protracted thud. I tiptoed into the hall and looked down. A middle-aged woman was lying inside the door. Maxwell’s cleaning lady. I’d never set eyes on her before, but I knew he had a ‘Mrs Mop’: he never tired of repeating the fact. I crept quickly downstairs and out of the door, and kept my eyes on the rearview mirror all the way back along the mews.

  It all moved surprisingly slowly, I thought. In the movies they wrap up these sorts of cases within a good ninety minutes (or occasionally a supremely lousy ninety minutes), but even after we buried Maxwell no one had been asking the obvious questions. Then one evening Mark and Jimmy phoned, one after the other. Both had the same story to tell. They’d been asked to go along to the police station, and there had been shown a video recording. Both said the same thing.

  ‘They told me not to mention anything to you, but I thought… you know. You being a mate and all.’

  And then there was a ring at the doorbell. Alice answered, and after a few moments came back into the living-room. She didn’t look well.

  ‘It’s the police,’ she said. ‘They want to talk to me about Maxwell. Down at the station.’

  And indeed there were two grim-faced constables loitering on the stairwell.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked them.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, sir,’ said the more loquacious of the pair.

  Well, I thought, thank God for that.

  I didn’t go with Alice. I lay along the sofa, finding it curiously comfortable. The TV wasn’t on. I stared at the blank screen until, hours later, there was the sound of a key shivering in the lock. Alice looked exhausted and numb. Without demur she flopped on to the beanbag.

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ she said. ‘They think I had something to do with it.’

  I sat up. ‘What?’

  ‘They think there was something going on. Between Maxwell and me.’

  ‘What?’ This time I stood up. Alice eyed the empty sofa, so I sat back down again. ‘They think what?’

  So she told me about the interrogation. She called it that, not an interview but an interrogation. A nice WPC who didn’t say anything except when the two fat male detectives left the room.

  ‘She asked me if I wanted a cup of tea.’

  The whole thing had been tape-recorded. ‘They kept on at me about Maxwell, how well I knew him, what he was like, did we ever see one another alone. Christ, he was your friend, not mine. Besides, I told them he was gay. One of them smiled. He didn’t say anything, but he grinned and shook his head at me.’ She looked like she might cry, but only for a moment. Soon enough she was all anger and retribution. She’d talk to our solicitor.

  ‘Solicitor?’

  ‘The one we used to buy this place. I told them, I said I was going to talk to my solicitor.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  She swallowed drily. ‘They said that might be a good idea.’

  The following morning, they came for me.

  Not constables this time, but a detective sergeant and another man. The other man drove, while we sat together in the back. The detective
sergeant had bloodshot eyes and was overweight. He took me to an interview room where Detective Inspector Claverhouse was waiting. There was a tape recorder on the table between us. On another table sat a TV monitor with a video player built into its base. We had something similar at the school.

  It took a lot of questions, some of them about parties I’d attended at Maxwell’s flat. Then Inspector Claverhouse rose from his chair.

  ‘There’s something we’d like to show you, sir. Just so you can give us an opinion.’

  Although they must have watched the video a dozen times, they still drank it in, especially the latter sections. Then they turned to me.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘the first bit… with my wife…’

  ‘You recognise your wife then?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘That was her. At a party of Maxwell’s. I didn’t realise he’d taken so much film of her.’ He hadn’t, of course. After a while he’d handed the camera to me, and I’d concentrated for a few minutes on Alice, trying to work out if she looked better or worse through a lens. Better was the answer. The distance helped, and she did possess a camera-ready figure.

  ‘And the, er, material after that?’ said Inspector Claverhouse.

  I raised my eyebrows and exhaled. ‘Looks like something home-made,’ I replied. ‘I know it’s said that couples will rent video cameras for a weekend so they can record… you know.’

  ‘But they don’t need to rent the camera if they already own one,’ said Claverhouse.

  ‘True.’

  Claverhouse ejected the tape and examined it. ‘You couldn’t identify the participants?’

  I smiled bleakly. ‘You didn’t exactly see their faces.’ Of course you didn’t, I’d made sure of that. But I’d also chosen models whose physical shape was at least similar to Maxwell and Alice. I didn’t think anyone would notice that part of the way through the male model actually changed identity. By that stage, all you could see was skin and hair. Claverhouse was looking at the spine of the videotape.

  ‘True enough, I just wondered. There’s some writing on here, just initials. MG and AB. What do you make of that?’

  I stared at him, then at the detective sergeant, and laughed uneasily. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘You know damned fine MG is Maxwell, and you’re implying AB is my wife.’

  ‘Your wife is on the tape, sir.’

  ‘Yes, but not…’ I nodded towards the machine. ‘I mean, it’s not them doing…’ My voice died away again. ‘It’s not,’ I said quietly. I did not tell a lie. The two detectives understood. Inspector Claverhouse sat down again.

  ‘There’s also a letter, sir,’ he said sympathetically. ‘It appears to be from Maxwell Gray to someone called Alice. Perhaps you’d care to take a look.’ He produced a photocopy of the crumpled sheet for me to read. I read through it twice.

  ‘Alice, there’s no easy way to put this. I want out, pure and simple. It’s not your fault, it’s mine; or maybe it’s neither’s fault. I don’t know any more. It would break Kenny’s heart if he found out, you know that. Not that he would find out, he’s too stupid, too guileless. But that just makes me feel all the more guilty. I hope you can understand. I hope we can still be friends. Maxie.’

  Two notes jarred. He wouldn’t have called himself Maxie, but then the police weren’t to know that. It had just been devilment on my part. But neither would he have used a semicolon. Only people like me use semicolons in this day and age. I doubted CID would notice this either. I looked up at Inspector Claverhouse. There were tears in my eyes. Then I broke down altogether.

  And still it dragged on.

  With Alice under suspicion, I became her champion, protecting her from police and media alike. She didn’t understand any of it. How could there be a letter? How could there be a video? It wasn’t her on the video, she told Claverhouse. It wasn’t. I backed her up. I was sweating about that video. If the police watched it often enough – and I didn’t doubt it was required viewing between shifts at the station – maybe they’d begin to see discrepancies. Then again, all they’d want to watch were the dirty bits, and they would be watching for all the wrong reasons. I’d chosen the seediest, most amateurish tapes in Maxwell’s collection. They really did look home-made. The police meantime were interviewing more friends of Maxwell’s, and his colleagues. Again and again they called us to interview. It was a wearing process.

  They knew they were dealing with manslaughter at least. The pathologist had been able to say that Maxwell had fallen with some force, almost certainly not of his own volition. What’s more, the body had been moved, then placed back at the foot of the stairs, as if someone had thought to dispose of it, but been unable to. A woman, for example, might not have the weight and power necessary to shift such a load very far.

  It turned out, of course, that the police had wanted to prosecute at quite an early stage, but the Crown Office kept pressing for more evidence. At one stage, it seemed that the inquiry was turning more towards me. For a few days I looked like a chief suspect, but by then I was confident the police were just fishing (and sans hooks at that). When they’d wheelbarrowed enough information over to the Crown Office, someone must have decided something should happen. Everyone took one step forward. There was to be a trial. A trial not for manslaughter but for murder.

  The police produced a witness, a neighbour of Maxwell’s who was sure she’d seen a woman of Alice’s description going in and out of the flat at irregular intervals. I took a deep breath, and began to view Alice for the first time with suspicion. What if the two of them had really been…? And all her talk to me of Maxwell being gay was just to throw me off the scent? Was there to be a brilliant twist right at the end of the film? I asked Alice, but she denied and denied. She’d lost some weight, a lot of weight actually. And the fire had disappeared from her eyes. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been. She was obedient to commands, compliant, weepily grateful for my many kindnesses. In other words, she’d been broken. I liked her more than I had in years.

  I was almost determined that she should be found not guilty, and put up a firm performance in the witness box. But the looks I got from those in court were still understanding and sympathetic. I was the faithful husband, faithful right to the end. The jury seemed to ignore me altogether, and brought back a verdict of guilty.

  The flat seemed so empty, but soon filled with my own choice of music and video viewing. I worked harder than ever at school, but every night I found some space for reminiscence, mostly of the trial. As a witness, I hadn’t been able to soak up much of it, but afterwards I’d made it a sort of hobby, a preoccupation. There had been much talk in court of Maxwell’s promiscuous lifestyle, his interest in illicit pornography, his affiliations with barmaids, waitresses, secretaries. A little black notebook was produced, detailing names and telephone numbers. Some of the women had appeared in the witness box. None admitted to having sex with Maxwell, but you could see the type of women they were.

  I visited Alice when I could. It was always an interesting experience. I’d considered writing her a letter, explaining that I was a weak man who could not live with the shame and the guilty verdict (it was true that at school both pupils and teachers looked at me oddly), and telling her I’d be filing for divorce. I’d considered it, but rejected it almost as quickly. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe it had something to do with the evenings I spent going over old photographs of the pair of us, back in the days of foreign travel and fooling around. I still went for a drink some weekends with Andrew, Mark and Jimmy, and even a few times with Frank Marsh. But mostly I stayed home.

  Then one night there was a ring at the doorbell. I got the shock of my life when I answered the door. It was Donna, blue-eyed blonde-haired Donna, looking exquisite and smelling of recent perfume. She just needed to talk, to talk with someone who’d known Maxwell like she’d known him. She missed him so much.

  ‘So do I,’ I said.

&
nbsp; She collapsed into my gentle arms. I smoothed her hair away from one ear, shushing her. Like a friend. Like a friend.

  Talk Show – AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORY

  Lowland Radio was a young but successful station broadcasting to lowland Scotland. It was said that the station owed its success to two very different personalities. One was the DJ on the mid-morning slot, an abrasive and aggressive Shetland Islander, called Hamish MacDiarmid. MacDiarmid hosted a phone-in, supposedly concerning the day’s headlines, but in fact these were of relatively minor importance. People did not listen to the phone-in for opinion and comment: they listened for the attacks MacDiarmid made on just about every caller. There were occasional fierce interchanges, interchanges the DJ nearly always won by dint of severing the connection with anyone more intelligent, better informed, or more rational than himself.

  Rebus knew that there were men in his own station who would try to take a break between ten-forty-five and eleven-fifteen just to listen. The people who phoned the show knew what they’d get, of course: that was part of the fun. Rebus wondered if they were masochists, but in fact he knew they probably saw themselves as challengers. If they could best MacDiarmid, they would have ‘won’. And so MacDiarmid himself became like some raging bull, entering the ring every morning for another joust with the picadors. So far he’d been goaded but not wounded, but who knew how long the luck would last…?

  The other ‘personality’ – always supposing personality could be applied to someone so ethereal – was Penny Cook, the softly spoken, seductive voice on the station’s late-night slot. Five nights a week, on her show What’s Cookin’, she offered a mix of sedative music, soothing talk, and calming advice to those who took part in her own phone-in segment. These were very different people from those who chose to confront Hamish MacDiarmid. They were quietly worried about their lives, insecure, timid; they had home problems, work problems, personal problems. They were the kind of people, Rebus mused, who got sand kicked in their faces. MacDiarmid’s callers, on the other hand, were probably the ones doing the kicking…