Beggars Banquet

by Ian Rankin

  In fact, Grace took the newspaper to Lossie Park, where, weather permitting, she sat on one of the benches and, taking a ballpoint pen (free with a woman’s magazine, refilled twice since) from her handbag, proceeded to attempt the newspaper’s crossword. At first, she’d filled in the ‘quick’ clues, but had grown more confident with the years so that she now did the ‘cryptic’, often finishing it, sometimes failing for want of one or two answers, which she would ponder over the rest of the day. George, his eyes fixed on the sports pages, never noticed that she’d been busy at the crossword. He got his news, so he said, from the TV and the radio, though in fact Grace had noticed that he normally slept through the television news, and seldom listened to the radio.

  If the weather was dreich, Grace would sit on a sheltered bench, where one day a year or so back she had been joined by a gentleman of similar years (which was to say, eight or nine years younger than George). He was a local, a widower, and his name was Jim Malcolm. They talked, but spent most of the time just watching the park itself, studying mothers with prams, boys with their dogs, games of football, lovers’ tiffs, and, even at that early hour, the occasional drunk. Every day they met at one bench or another, seeming to happen upon one another by accident, never seeing one another at any other time of the day, or any other location, other than those truly accidental meetings in a shop or on the pavement.

  And then, a few weeks back, springtime, standing in the butcher’s shop, Grace had overheard the news of Jim Malcolm’s death. When her turn came to be served, Grace asked for half a pound of steak mince, instead of the usual ‘economy’ stuff. The butcher raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Something to celebrate, Mrs Gallagher?’

  ‘Not really,’ Grace had said quietly. That night, George had eaten the expensive mince without comment.

  Today she completed the crossword in record time. It wasn’t that the clues seemed easier than usual; it was more that her brain seemed to be working faster than ever before, catching that inference or this anagram. Anything, she decided, was possible on a day like this. Simply anything. The sun was appearing from behind a bank of cloud. She closed the newspaper, folded it into her bag alongside the pen, and stood up. She’d been in the park barely ten minutes. If she returned home so quickly, George might ask questions. So instead she walked a slow circuit of the playing fields, her thoughts on patience, and crosswords and creaking floorboards, and much more besides.

  Blame it on Patience.Detective Inspector John Rebus had known Dr Patience Aitken for several years, and not once during their working relationship had he been able to refuse her a favour. Patience seemed to Rebus the kind of woman his parents, if still alive, would have been trying to marry him off to, were he still single. Which, in a sense, he was, being divorced. On finding he was divorced, Patience had invited Rebus round to her surprisingly large house for what she had called ‘dinner’. Halfway through a home-baked fruit pie, Patience had admitted to Rebus that she was wearing no underwear. Homely but smouldering: that was Patience. Who could deny such a woman a favour? Not John Rebus. And so it was that he found himself this evening standing on the doorstep of 26 Gillan Drive, and about to intrude on private grief.

  Not that there was anything very private about a death, not in this part of Scotland, or in any part of Scotland come to that. Curtains twitched at neighbouring windows, people spoke in lowered voices across the divide of a garden fence, and fewer televisions than usual blared out the ubiquitous advertising jingles and even more ubiquitous game show applause.

  Gillan Drive was part of an anonymous working-class district on the south-eastern outskirts of Edinburgh. The district had fallen on hard times, but there was still the smell of pride in the air. Gardens were kept tidy, the tiny lawns clipped like army haircuts, and the cars parked tight against the kerbs were old - W and X registrations predominated - but polished, showing no signs of rust. Rebus took it all in in a moment. In a neighbourhood like this, grief was for sharing. Everybody wanted their cut. Still something stopped him lifting the door knocker and letting it fall. Patience Aitken had been vague, wary, ambivalent: that was why she was asking him for a favour, and not for his professional help.

  ‘I mean,’ she had said over the telephone, ‘I’ve been treating George Gallagher on and off - more on than off - for years. I think about the only complaints I’ve ever not known him to think he had are beri-beri and elephantiasis, and then only because you never read about them in the “Doc’s Page” of the Sunday Post.’

  Rebus smiled. GPs throughout Scotland feared their Monday morning surgeries, when people would suddenly appear in droves suffering from complaints read about the previous morning in the Post. No wonder people called the paper an ‘institution’ . . .

  ‘And all the while,’ Patience Aitken was saying, ‘Grace has been by his bedside. Always patient with him, always looking after him. The woman’s been an angel.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ Rebus nursed not only the telephone, but a headache and a mug of black coffee as well. (Black coffee because he was dieting; a headache for not unconnected reasons.)

  ‘The problem is that George fell downstairs this morning. He’s dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

  There was a silence at the other end of the line.

  ‘I take it,’ Rebus said, ‘that you don’t share my feelings.’

  ‘George Gallagher was a cantankerous old man, grown from a bitter younger man and most probably a fairly unsociable teenager. I don’t think I ever heard him utter a civil word, never mind a “please” or a “thank you”.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Rebus, ‘so let’s celebrate his demise.’

  Silence again.

  Rebus sighed and rubbed his temples. ‘Out with it,’ he ordered.

  ‘He’s supposed to have fallen downstairs,’ Patience Aitken explained. ‘He did go downstairs in the afternoon, sometimes to watch racing on the telly, sometimes just to stare at a different set of walls from the bedroom. But he fell at around eleven o’clock, which is a bit early for him . . .’

  ‘And you think he was pushed?’ Rebus tried not to sound cynical.

  Her reply was blunt. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘By this angel who’s managed to put up with him all these years?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘OK, Doc, so point me to the medical evidence.’

  ‘Well, it’s a narrow staircase, pretty steep, about eleven or twelve steps, say. If you weighed around thirteen stone, and happened to slip at the top, you’d sort of be bounced off the sides as you fell, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And you’d try to grab hold of something to stop your fall. There’s a banister on one wall. They were waiting for the council to come and fit an extra banister on the other wall.’

  ‘So you’d reach out to grab something, fair enough.’ Rebus drained the sour black coffee and studied the pile of work in his in-tray.

  ‘Well, you’d have bruising, wouldn’t you?’ said Patience Aitken. ‘Grazes on your elbows or knees, there’d be marks where you’d clawed at the walls.’

  Rebus knew that she was surmising, but could not disagree thus far. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘George Gallagher only has significant marks on his head, where he hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs, breaking his neck in the process. No real bruising or grazing to the body, no marks on the wall as far as I can see.’

  ‘So you’re saying he flew from the top landing with a fair bit of momentum, and the first thing he touched was the ground?’

  ‘That’s how it looks. Unless I’m imagining it.’

  ‘So he either jumped, or he was pushed?’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused again. ‘I know it sounds tenuous, John. And Christ knows I don’t want to accuse Grace of anything . . .’

  Rebus picked up a ballpoint pen from beside the telephone and scrabbled on the surface of his desk until he found the back of an envelope upon which to write.

  ‘You
’re only doing your job, Patience,’ he said. ‘Give me the address and I’ll go pay my respects.’

  The door of 26 Gillan Drive opened slowly, and a man peered out at Rebus, then ushered him quickly inside, laying a soft hand on his arm.‘In ye come, son. In ye come. The women are in the living-room. The kitchen’s through here.’ He nodded his head, then led Rebus through a narrow hallway past a closed door, from behind which came tearful sounds, towards a half-open door at the back of the house. Rebus had not even glanced at the stairs as they’d passed them, the stairs which had faced him at the open front door of the house. The kitchen door was now opened from within, and Rebus saw that seven or eight men had squeezed into the tiny back room. There were stale smells of cooking fat and soup, stew and fruit cake, but above them wafted a more recent smell: whisky.

  ‘Here ye are, son.’ Someone was handing him a tumbler with a good inch of amber liquid in it. Everyone else had just such a glass nestling in their hand. They all shuffled from one foot to another, awkward, hardly daring to speak. They had nodded at Rebus’s entrance, but now gave him little heed. Glasses were replenished. Rebus noticed the CoOp price label on the bottle.

  ‘You’ve just moved into Cashman Street, haven’t you?’ someone was asking someone else.

  ‘Aye, that’s right. A couple of months ago. The wife used to meet Mrs Gallagher at the shops, so we thought we’d drop in.’

  ‘See this estate, son, it was miners’ rows once upon a time. It used to be that you lived here and died here. But these days there’s that much coming and going . . .’

  The conversation continued at the level of a murmur. Rebus was standing with his back to the sink’s draining board, next to the back door. A figure appeared in front of him.

  ‘Have another drop, son.’ And the inch in his glass rose to an inch and a half. Rebus looked around him in vain, seeking out a relative of the deceased. But these men looked like neighbours, like the sons of neighbours, the male half of the community’s heart. Their wives, sisters, mothers would be in the living-room with Grace Gallagher. Closed curtains blocking out any light from what was left of the day: handkerchiefs and sweet sherry. The bereaved in an armchair, with someone else perched on an arm of the chair, offering a pat of the hand and well-meant words. Rebus had seen it all, seen it as a child with his own mother, and as a young man with his father, seen it with aunts and uncles, with the parents of friends and more recently with friends themselves. He wasn’t so young now. The odd contemporary was already falling victim to the Big C or an unexpected heart attack. Today was the last day of April. Two days ago, he’d gone to Fife and laid flowers on his father’s grave. Whether it was an act of remembrance or of simple contrition, he couldn’t have said . . .

  His guide pulled him back to the present. ‘Her daughter-in-law’s already here. Came over from Falkirk this afternoon. ’

  Rebus nodded, trying to look wise. ‘And the son?’

  Eyes looked at him. ‘Dead these past ten years. Don’t you know that?’

  There was suspicion now, and Rebus knew that he had either to reveal himself as a policeman, or else become more disingenuous still. These people, authentically mourning the loss of someone they had known, had taken him as a mourner too, had brought him in here to share with them, to be part of the remembering group.

  ‘I’m just a friend of a friend,’ he explained. ‘They asked me to look in.’

  It looked from his guide’s face, however, as though an interrogation might be about to begin. But then somebody else spoke.

  ‘Terrible crash it was. What was the name of the town again?’

  ‘Methil. He’d been working on building a rig there.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the guide knowledgeably. ‘Pay night it was. They’d been out for a few drinks, like. On their way to the dancing. Next thing . . .’

  ‘Aye, terrible smash it was. The lad in the back seat had to have both legs taken off.’

  Well, thought Rebus, I bet he didn’t go to any more hops. Then he winced, trying to forgive himself for thinking such a thing. His guide saw the wince and laid the hand back on his arm.

  ‘All right, son, all right.’ And they were all looking at him again, perhaps expecting tears. Rebus was growing red in the face.

  ‘I’ll just . . .’ he said, motioning towards the ceiling with his head.

  ‘You know where it is?’

  Rebus nodded. He’d seen all there was to see downstairs, and so knew the bathroom must lie upstairs, and upstairs was where he was heading. He closed the kitchen door behind him and breathed deeply. There was sweat beneath his shirt, and the headache was reasserting itself. That’ll teach you, Rebus, it was saying. That’ll teach you for taking a sip of whisky. That’ll teach you for making cheap jokes to yourself. Take all the aspirin you like. They’ll dissolve your stomach lining before they dissolve me.

  Rebus called his headache two seven-letter words before beginning to climb the stairs.

  He gave careful scrutiny to each stair as he climbed, and to the walls either side of each stair. The carpet itself was fairly new, with a thickish pile. The wallpaper was old, and showed a hunting scene, horse-riders and dogs with a fox panting and worried in the distance. As Patience Aitken had said, there were no scrapes or claw-marks on the paper itself. What’s more, there were no loose edges of carpet. The whole thing had been tacked down with a professional’s skill. Nothing for George Gallagher to trip over, no threads or untacked sections; and no smooth threadbare patches for him to slip on.

  He gave special attention to where the upstairs landing met the stairs. George Gallagher probably fell from here, from this height. Further down the stairs, his chances of survival would have been much greater. Yes, it was a steep and narrow staircase all right. A trip and a tumble would certainly have caused bruising. Immediate death at the foot of the stairs would doubtless have arrested much of the bruising, the blood stilling in the veins and arteries, but bruising there would have been. The post-mortem would be specific; so far Rebus was trading on speculation, and well he knew it.

  Four doors led off the landing: a large cupboard (what Rebus as a child would have called a ‘press’), filled with sheets, blankets, two ancient suitcases, a black-and-white television lying on its side; a musty spare bedroom, its single bed made up ready for the visitor who never came; the bathroom, with a battery-operated razor lying on the cistern, never to be used again by its owner; and the bedroom. Nothing interested Rebus in either the spare bedroom or the bathroom, so he slipped into the main bedroom, closing the door behind him, then opening it again, since to be discovered behind a closed door would be so much more suspicious than to be found inside an open one.

  The sheets, blanket and quilt had been pulled back from the bed, and three pillows had been placed on their ends against the headboard so that one person could sit up in bed. He’d seen a breakfast tray in the kitchen, still boasting the remnants of a morning meal: cups, toast crumbs on a greasy plate, an old coffee jar now holding the remains of some home-made jam. Beside the bed stood a walking-frame. Patience Aitken had said that George Gallagher usually wouldn’t walk half a dozen steps without his walking-frame (a Zimmer she’d called it, but to Rebus Zimmer was the German for ‘room’ . . . ). Of course, if Grace were helping him, he could walk without it, leaning on her the way he’d lean his weight on a stick. Rebus visualised Grace Gallagher coaxing her husband from his bed, telling him he wouldn’t be needing his walking-frame, she’d help him down the stairs. He could lean on her . . .

  On the bed rested a newspaper, dotted with tacky spots of jam. It was today’s paper, and it was open at the racing pages. A blue pen had been used to ring some of the runners - Gypsy Pearl, Gazumpin, Lot’s Wife, Castle Mallet, Blondie - five in total, enough for a super yankee. The blue pen was sitting on a bedside table, beside a glass half filled with water, some tablets (the label made out to Mr G. Gallagher), a pair of reading spectacles in their case, and a paperback cowboy novel - large print - borrowed fr
om the local library. Rebus sat on the edge of the bed and flipped through the newspaper. His eyes came to rest on a particular page, the letters and cartoons page. At bottom right was a crossword, a completed crossword at that. The pen used to fill in the squares seemed different to that used for the racing form further on in the paper, and the hand seemed different too: more delicate, more feminine. Thin faint marks rather than the robust lines used to circle the day’s favoured horses. Rebus enjoyed the occasional crossword, and, impressed to find this one completed, was more impressed to find that the answers were those to the cryptic clues rather than the quick clues most people favoured. He began to read, until at some point in his reading his brow furrowed, and he blinked a couple of times before closing the paper, folding it twice, and rolling it into his jacket pocket. A second or two’s reflection later, he rose from the bed and walked slowly to the bedroom door, out on to the landing where, taking careful hold of the banister, he started downstairs.

  He stood in the kitchen with his whisky, pondering the situation. Faces came and went. A man would finish his drink with a sigh or a clearing of the throat.‘Ay well,’ he’d say, ‘I suppose I’d better . . .’ And with these words, and a bow of the head, he would move out of the kitchen, timidly opening the living-room door so as to say a few words to the widow before leaving. Rebus heard Grace Gallagher’s voice, a high, wavering howl: ‘Thanks for coming. It was good of you. Cheerio.’

  The women came and went, too. Sandwiches appeared from somewhere and were shared out in the kitchen. Tongue, corned beef, salmon paste. White ‘half-pan’ bread sliced in halves. Despite his diet, Rebus ate his fill, saying nothing. Though he only half knew it, he was biding his time, not wishing to create a disturbance. He waited as the kitchen emptied. Once or twice someone had attempted to engage him in conversation, thinking they knew him from a neighbouring street or from the public bar of the local. Rebus just shook his head, the friend of a friend, and the enquiries usually ended there.