Beggars Banquet

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Let the man catch his breath!’ Janis Mee snapped. She was still standing by the gate, arms folded. ‘How have you been, Johnny?’

  And Rebus realised that Brian Mee had married Janis Playfair, the only girl in his long and trouble-strewn life who’d ever managed to knock him unconscious.

  The narrow, low-ceilinged living-room was full to bursting - not just Rebus and Janis and Brian, but Brian’s mother and Mr and Mrs Playfair. Introductions had to be made, and Rebus guided to ‘the seat by the fire’. The room was overheated. A pot of tea was produced, and on the table by Rebus’s armchair sat enough slices of cake to feed a football crowd.

  ‘He’s a brainy one,’ Janis’s mother said, handing Rebus a framed photo of Damon Mee. ‘Plenty of certificates from school. Works hard. Saving up to get married. The date’s set for next August.’The photo showed a smiling imp, not long out of school. ‘Have you got anything more recent?’

  Janis handed him a packet of snapshots. ‘From last summer.’

  Rebus went through them slowly. It saved having to look at the faces around him. He felt like a doctor, expected to produce an immediate diagnosis and remedy. The photos showed a man in his early twenties, still retaining the impish smile but recognisably older. Not careworn exactly, but with something behind the eyes, some disenchantment with adulthood. A few of the photos showed Damon’s parents.

  ‘We all went together,’ Brian explained. ‘Janis’s mum and dad, my mum, Helen and her parents.’

  Beaches, a big white hotel, poolside games. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Lanzarote,’ Janis said, handing him his tea. In a few of the pictures she was wearing a bikini - good body for her age, or any age come to that. He tried not to linger.

  ‘Can I keep a couple of the close-ups?’ he asked. Janis looked at him. ‘Of Damon.’ She nodded and he put the other photos back in their packet.

  ‘We’re really grateful,’ someone said. Janis’s mum? Brian’s? Rebus couldn’t tell.

  ‘Does Helen live locally?’

  ‘Practically round the corner.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to her.’

  ‘I’ll give her a bell,’ Brian Mee said, leaping to his feet.

  ‘Damon had been drinking in some club?’

  ‘Guisers,’ Janis said, handing round cigarettes. ‘It’s in Kirkcaldy.’

  ‘On the Prom?’

  She shook her head, looking just the same as she had that night of the school dance . . . shaking her head, telling him so far and no further. ‘In the town. It used to be a department store.’

  ‘It’s really called Gaitanos,’ Mr Playfair said. Rebus remembered him, too. He was an old man now.

  ‘Where does Damon work?’ Careful to stick to the present tense.

  Brian Mee came back into the room. ‘Same place I do. I managed to get him a job in packaging. He’s been learning the ropes; it’ll be management soon.’

  Working-class nepotism; jobs handed down from father to son. Rebus was surprised it still existed.

  ‘Helen’ll be here in a minute,’ Brian added.

  ‘Are you not eating any cake, Inspector?’ said Mrs Playfair.

  Helen Cousins hadn’t been able to add much to Rebus’s picture of Damon, and hadn’t been there the night he’d vanished. But she’d introduced him to someone who had, Andy Peters. Andy had been part of the group at Gaitanos. There’d been four of them. They’d been in the same year at school and still met up once or twice a week, sometimes to watch Raith Rovers if the weather was decent and the mood took them, other times for an evening session in a pub or club. It was only their third or fourth visit to Guisers.

  Rebus thought of paying the club a visit, but knew he should talk to the local cops first, and decided that it could all wait until morning. He knew he was jumping through hoops. He didn’t expect to find anything the locals had missed. At best, he could reassure the family that everything possible had been done.Next morning he made a few phone calls from his office, trying to find someone who could be bothered to answer some casual questions from an Edinburgh colleague. He had one ally - Detective Sergeant Hendry at Dunfermline CID - but only reached him at the third attempt. He asked Hendry for a favour, then put the phone down and got back to his own work. But it was hard to concentrate. He kept thinking about Bowhill and about Janis Mee, née Playfair. Which led him - eventually - guiltily - to thoughts of Damon. Younger runaways tended to take the same route: by bus or train or hitching, and to London, Newcastle, Edinburgh or Glasgow. There were organisations who would keep an eye open for runaways, and even if they wouldn’t always reveal their whereabouts to the anxious families, at least they could confirm that someone was alive and unharmed.

  But a twenty-three-year-old, someone a bit cannier and with money to hand . . . could be anywhere. No destination was too distant - he owned a passport, and it hadn’t turned up. Rebus knew, too, that Damon had a current account at the local bank, complete with cashcard, and an interest-bearing account with a building society in Kirkcaldy. The bank might be worth trying. Rebus picked up the telephone again.

  The manager at first insisted that he’d need something in writing, but relented when Rebus promised to fax him later. Rebus held while the manager went off to check, and had doodled half a village, complete with stream, parkland and school, by the time the man came back.

  ‘The most recent withdrawal was from a cash machine in Kirkcaldy. One hundred pounds on the twenty-second.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘I’ve no way of knowing.’

  ‘No other withdrawals since then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How up-to-date is that information?’

  ‘Very. Of course a cheque - especially if post-dated - would take longer to show up.’

  ‘Could you keep tabs on that account, let me know if anyone starts using it again?’

  ‘I could, but I’d need it in writing, and I might also need Head Office approval.’

  ‘Well, see what you can do, Mr Brayne.’

  ‘It’s Bain,’ the bank manager said coldly, putting down the phone.

  DS Hendry didn’t get back to him until late afternoon.

  ‘Gaitanos,’ Hendry said. ‘I don’t know the place personally. Locals call it Guisers. It’s a pretty choice establishment. Two stabbings last year, one inside the club itself, the other in the back alley where the owner parks his Merc. Local residents are always girning about the noise when the place lets out.’

  ‘What’s the owner’s name?’

  ‘Charles Mackenzie, nicknamed “Charmer”. He seems to be clean. A couple of uniforms talked to him about Damon Mee, but there was nothing to tell. Know how many missing persons there are every year? They’re not exactly a white-hot priority. God knows there are times I’ve felt like doing a runner myself.’

  ‘Haven’t we all? Did the woolly suits talk to anyone else at the club?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Bar staff, punters.’

  ‘No. Someone did take a look at the security video for the night Damon was there, but they didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Where’s the video now?’

  ‘Back with its rightful owner.’

  ‘Am I going to be stepping on toes if I ask to see it?’

  ‘I think I can cover you. I know you said this was personal, John, but why the interest?’

  ‘I’m not sure I can explain.’ There were words - community, history, memory - but Rebus didn’t think they’d be enough.

  ‘They mustn’t be working you hard enough over there.’

  ‘Just the twenty-four hours every day.’

  Three

  Matty Paine could tell a few stories. He’d worked his way round the world as a croupier. Cruise liners he’d worked on, and in Nevada. He’d spent a couple of years in London, dealing out cards and spinning the wheel for some of the wealthiest in the land, faces you’d recognise from the TV and the papers. Moguls, royalty, stars - Matty had seen them all. But his best story - the one pe
ople sometimes disbelieved - was about the time he’d been recruited to work in a casino in Beirut. This was at the height of the civil war, bomb sites and rubble, smoke and charred buildings, refugees and regular bursts of small-arms fire. And amazingly, in the midst of it all (or, to be fair, on the edge of it all), a casino. Not exactly legal. Run from a hotel basement with torchlight when the generator failed and not much in the way of refreshments, but with no shortage of punters - cash bets, dollars only - and a management team of three who prowled the place like Dobermanns, since there was no surveillance and no other way to check that the games were being played honestly. One of them had stood next to Matty for a full forty minutes one session, making him sweat despite the air-conditioning. He’d reminded Matty of the gaffers casinos employed to check on apprentices. He knew the gaffers were there to protect him as much as the punters - there were professional gamblers out there who’d psych out a trainee, watch them for hours, whole nights and weeks, looking for the flaw that would give them an edge over the house. Like, when you were starting out, you didn’t always vary the force with which you span the wheel, or sent the ball rolling, and if they could suss it, they’d get a pretty good idea which quadrant the ball was going to stop in. Good croupiers were immune to this. A really good croupier - one of a very select, very highly thought of group - could master the wheel and get the ball to land pretty well where they wanted.

  Of course, this might be against the interests of the house, too. And in the end, that’s why the checkers were out there, patrolling the tables. They were looking out for the house. In the end it all came down to the house.And when things had got a wee bit too hot in London, Matty had come home, meaning Edinburgh, though really he was from Gullane - perhaps the only boy ever to be raised there and not show the slightest interest in golf. His father had played - his mother too, come to that. Maybe she still did; he didn’t keep in touch. There had been an awkward moment at the casino when a neighbour from Gullane days, an old business friend of his father’s, had turned up, a bit the worse for wear and in tow with three other middle-aged punters. The neighbour had glanced towards Matty from time to time, but had eventually shaken his head, unable to place the face.

  ‘Does he know you?’ one of the all-seeing gaffers had asked quietly, seeking out some scam against the house.

  Matty had shaken his head. ‘A neighbour from when I was growing up.’ That was all; just a ghost from the past. He supposed his mother was still alive. He could probably find out by opening the phone book. But he wasn’t that interested.

  ‘Place your bets, please, ladies and gentlemen.’

  Different houses had different styles. You either did your spiel in English or French. House rules changed, too. Matty’s strengths were roulette and blackjack, but really he was happy in charge of any sort of game - most houses liked that he was flexible, it meant there was less chance of him trying some scam. It was the one-note wonders who tried small, stupid diddles. His latest employers seemed fairly laid back. They ran a clean casino which boasted only the very occasional high roller. Most of the punters were business people, well enough heeled but canny with it. You got husbands and wives coming in, proof of a relaxed atmosphere. There were younger punters too - a lot of those were Asians, mainly Chinese. The money they changed, according to the cashier, had a funny feel and smell to it.

  ‘That’s because they keep it in their underwear,’ the day boss had told her.

  The Asians . . . whatever they were . . . sometimes worked in local restaurants; you could smell the kitchen on their crumpled jackets and shirts. Fierce gamblers, no game was ever played quickly enough for their liking. They’d slap their chips down like they were in a playground betting game. And they talked a lot, almost never in English. The gaffers didn’t like that, never could tell what they might be scheming. But their money was good, they seldom caused trouble, and they lost a percentage same as everyone else.

  ‘Daft bastards,’ the night manager said. ‘Know what they do with a big win? Go bung it on the gee-gees. Where’s the sense in that?’

  Where indeed? No point giving your money to a bookmaker when the casino would happily take it instead.

  It wasn’t really on for croupiers to be friends with the clients, but sometimes it happened. And it couldn’t very well not happen with Matty and Stevie Scoular, since they’d been in the same year at school. Not that they’d known one another well. Stevie had been the football genius, also more than fair at the hundred and two hundred metres, swimming and basketball. Matty, on the other hand, had skived off games whenever possible, forgetting to bring his kit or getting his mum to write him notes. He was good at a couple of subjects - maths and woodwork - but never sat beside Stevie in class. They even lived at opposite ends of the town.

  At playtime and lunchtime, Matty ran a card game - three-card brag mostly, sometimes pontoon - playing for dinner money, pocket money, sweets and comics. A few of the cards were nicked at the corners, but the other players didn’t seem to notice and Matty got a reputation as ‘lucky’. He’d take bets on horse races too, sometimes passing the bets on to an older boy who wouldn’t be turned away by the local bookmaker. Often though, Matty would simply pocket the money and if someone’s horse happened to win, he’d say he couldn’t get the bets on in time and hand back the stake.

  He couldn’t tell you exactly when it was that Stevie had started spending less breaktime dribbling past half a dozen despairing pairs of legs and more hanging around the edges of the card school. Thing about three-card brag, it doesn’t take long to pick it up and even a moron can have a stab at playing. Soon enough, Stevie was losing his dinner money with the rest of them, and Matty’s pockets were about bursting with loose change. Eventually, Stevie had seemed to see sense, drifted away from the game and back to keepie-up and dribbling. But he’d been hooked, no doubt about it. Maybe only for a few weeks, but a lot of those lunchtimes had been spent cadging sweets and apple cores, the better to stave off hunger.

  Even then, Matty had thought he’d be seeing Stevie again. It had just taken the best part of a decade, that was all.

  When Stevie Scoular walked into the casino, people looked his way. It was the done thing. He was a sharp dresser, young, usually accompanied by women who looked like models. When Stevie had first walked into the Morvena, Matty’s heart had sunk. They hadn’t seen one another since school and here Stevie was, local boy made good, a hero, picture in the papers and plenty of money in the bank. Here was a schoolboy dream made flesh. And what was Matty? He had stories he could tell but that was about it. So he’d been hoping Stevie wouldn’t grace his table, or if he did that he wouldn’t recognise him. But Stevie had seen him, seemed to know him straight off and come bouncing up.

  ‘Matty!’

  ‘Hello there, Stevie.’

  It was flattering really. Stevie hadn’t become big-headed or anything. He took the whole thing - the way his life had gone - as a bit of a joke really. He’d made Matty promise to meet him for a drink when his shift was over. All through their conversation, Matty had been aware of gaffers hovering and when Stevie wandered off to another table one of them muttered in Matty’s ear and another croupier took over from him.

  He hadn’t been in the plush back office that often, just for the initial interview and to discuss a couple of big losses on his table. The casino’s owner, Mr Mandelson, was watching a football match on Sky Sports. He was well-built, mid-forties, his face pockmarked from childhood acne. His hair was black, slicked back from the forehead, long at the collar. He always seemed to know what he was about.

  ‘How’s the table tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘Look, Mr Mandelson, I know we’re not supposed to be too friendly with the punters, but Stevie and me were at school together. Haven’t clapped eyes on one another since - not till tonight.’

  ‘Easy, Matty, easy.’ Mandelson motioned for him to sit down. ‘Something to drink?’ A smile. ‘No alcohol on shift, mind.’

  ‘Ehh . . . a Coke maybe.’<
br />
  ‘Help yourself.’

  There was a fridge in the far corner, stocked with white wine, champagne and soft drinks. A couple of the female croupiers said Mandelson had tried it on with them, plying them with booze. But he didn’t seem upset by a refusal: they still had their jobs. There were seven female croupiers all told, and only two had spoken to Matty about it. It made him wonder about the other five.

  He took a Coke and sat down again.

  ‘So, you and Stevie Scoular, eh?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him in here before.’

  ‘I think he only recently found out about the place. He’s been in a few times, dropped some hefty bets.’ Mandelson was staring at him. ‘You and Stevie, eh?’

  ‘Look, if you’re worried, just take me off whatever table he’s playing.’

  ‘Nothing like that, Matty.’ Mandelson’s face broke into a grin. ‘It’s nice to have a friend, eh? Nice to meet up again after all these years. Don’t you worry about anything. Stevie’s the King of Edinburgh. As long as he keeps scoring goals, we’re all his subjects.’ He paused. ‘Nice to know someone who knows the King, almost makes me feel like royalty myself. On you go now, Matty.’

  Matty got up, leaving the Coke unopened.

  ‘And don’t you go upsetting that young man. We don’t want to put him off his game, do we?’

  Four

  It had taken a couple of days to get the tape from Gaitanos. At first, they thought they’d wiped it, and then they’d sent the wrong day’s recording. But at last Rebus had the right tape and had watched it at home half a dozen times before deciding he could use someone who knew what he was doing . . . and a video machine that would freeze-frame without the screen looking like a technical problem.