The Beat Goes On

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Turn it up a bit!’ yelled one of the pool players. ‘I can hardly hear it!’

  Rebus nodded to the barman in a gesture of farewell. Then he, too, made for the door.

  Outside, he knew he must act quickly. At any sign of trouble, members of T-Alice would crawl out of the woodwork like so many termites. Tattoos had pinned the juror to a shop-front window between the Goatfell and Rebus’s car. Rebus’s attention was drawn from the conflict to the car itself. Its doors were open! He could see two kids playing inside it, crawling over its interior, pretending they were at the wheel of a racing car. Rebus hissed and moved forwards. He was almost passing Tattoos and the juror when he yelled:

  ‘Get out of my bloody car!’

  Even Tattoos turned at this and as he did so Rebus hammered a clenched fist into his nose. It had to be fast: Rebus didn’t want Tattoos to be able ever to identify him. The sound of the nose flattening was dull and unmistakable. Tattoos let go of the juror and held his hands to his face. Rebus hit him again, this time in proper boxing fashion, knuckles against the side of the jaw. Tattoos fell against the glass shop-front and sank to the pavement.

  It was Rebus’s turn to grab the juror’s shoulder, marching him towards the car with no words of explanation. The juror went quietly, glancing back just the once towards the prone body.

  Seeing Rebus approach, brimstone in his eyes, the two boys ran from the car. Rebus watched them go, committing their faces to memory. Future Willie Provans.

  ‘Get in,’ he said to the juror, shoving him towards the passenger side. They both shut the car doors after them. Rebus’s police radio was missing, and wires protruded from beneath the dashboard, evidence of an attempted hot-wiring. Rebus was relieved the attempt hadn’t worked. Otherwise he would be trapped in Gorgie, surrounded by hostile natives. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  The car started first time and Rebus revved it hard as he drove off, never looking back.

  ‘I know you,’ said the juror. ‘You were in the public gallery, too.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The juror grew quiet. ‘You’re not one of…?’

  ‘I want to see Willie Provan behind bars. That’s all you need to know, and I don’t want to know anything about you. I just want you to go home, go back to court tomorrow, and do your duty.’

  ‘But I know how he—’

  ‘So do I.’ Rebus stopped at a red traffic light and checked in the mirror. No one was following. He turned to the juror. ‘It was a cuptie, a big crowd,’ he said. ‘And ever since Hillsborough, the football bosses and the police have been careful about big crowds.’

  ‘That’s right.’ The juror was bursting to come out with it first. ‘So they held up the game for ten minutes to let everybody in. The barman told me.’

  Rebus nodded. The game had been a seven-thirty kick-off all right, but that intended kick-off time had been delayed. The goal, scored fifteen minutes into the game, had been scored at seven fifty-five, not seven forty-five, giving Provan plenty of time to make the one-mile trip from Cooper Road to the Goatfell. The truth would have come out eventually, but it might have taken a little time. The situation, however, was still dangerous. The light turned green, and Rebus moved off.

  ‘So you think Provan is guilty?’ he asked the juror.

  ‘I know he is. It’s obvious.’

  Rebus nodded. ‘He could still get away with it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If,’ Rebus explained carefully, ‘it comes to light that you and I have been doing a little snooping. You’ll be thrown off the jury. It could go to a retrial, or some technicality might arise which would see Provan go free. We can’t let that happen, can we?’

  Rebus heard his own words. They sounded calm. Yet inside him the adrenalin was racing and his fist was pleasantly sore from use.

  ‘No,’ answered the juror, as Rebus had hoped he would.

  ‘So,’ continued Rebus, ‘what I propose is that I have a quiet word with the prosecution counsel. Let’s let him stand up in court and come out with the solution. That way no problems or technicalities arise. You just stay quiet and let the process work through.’

  The juror seemed disheartened. This was his feat, after all, his sleuthing had turned things around. And for what?

  ‘There’s no glory in it, I’m afraid,’ said Rebus. ‘But at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing Provan is inside, not out there, waiting to pick off another victim.’ Rebus nodded through the windscreen and the juror stared at the city streets, thinking it over.

  ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, you’re right.’

  ‘So we keep it quiet?’

  ‘We keep it quiet,’ the juror agreed. Rebus nodded slowly. This might shape up all right after all. The whisky was warming his veins. A quiet word to the prosecution, maybe by way of a typed and anonymous note, something that would keep Rebus out of the case. It was a pity he couldn’t be in court tomorrow for the revelation. But the last thing he wanted was to encounter a broken-nosed Tattoos. A pity though; he wanted to see Provan’s face and he wanted to catch Provan’s eyes and he wanted to give him a great big pitiless smile.

  ‘You can stop here,’ said the juror, waking Rebus from his reverie. They were approaching Princes Street. ‘I just live down Queens—’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Rebus said abruptly. The juror looked at him.

  ‘Technicalities?’ he ventured. Rebus smiled and nodded. He pulled the car over to the side of the road. The juror opened his door, got out, but then bent down into the car again.

  ‘I don’t even know who you are,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Rebus, reaching across and pulling shut the door. ‘You don’t.’

  He drove off into the Edinburgh evening. No thorn jabbed him now. By tomorrow there would be another. And then he’d have to report the theft of his radio. There would be smiles at that, smiles and, behind his back if not to his face, laughter.

  John Rebus could laugh, too.

  Sunday

  Where was that light coming from? Bright, hot light. Knives in the night. Last night, was it? No, the night before. Just another Friday in Edinburgh. A drug haul at a dance hall. A few of the dealers trying to run for it. Rebus cornering one. The man, sweating, teeth bared, turning before Rebus’s eyes into an animal, something wild, predatory, scared. And cornered. The glint of a knife…

  But that was Friday, the night before last. So this was Sunday. Yes! Sunday morning. (Afternoon, maybe.) Rebus opened his eyes and squinted into the sunshine, streaming through his uncurtained window. No, not sunshine. His bedside lamp. Must have been on all night. He had come to bed drunk last night, drunk and tired. Had forgotten to close the curtains. And now warming light, birds resting on the window-ledge. He stared into a small black eye, then checked his watch. Ten past eight. Morning then, not afternoon. Early morning.

  His head was the consistency of syrup, his limbs stiff. He’d been fit as a young man; not fitness daft, but fit all the same. But one day he had just stopped caring. He dressed quickly, then checked and found that he was running out of clean shirts, clean pants, clean socks. Today’s chore then: doing the laundry. Ever since his wife had left him, he had taken his dirty washing to a public laundrette at the top of Marchmont Road, where a service wash cost very little and the manageress always used to fold his clean clothes away very neatly, a smile on her scrupulous lips. But in a fit of madness one Saturday afternoon, he had walked calmly into an electrical shop and purchased a washer/dryer for the flat.

  He pressed the dirty bundle into the machine and found he was down to one last half-scoop of washing powder. What the hell, it would have to do. There were various buttons and controls on the machine’s fascia, but he only ever used one programme: Number 5 (40 degrees), full load, with ten minutes’ tumble dry at the end. The results were satisfactory, if never perfect. He switched the machine on, donned his shoes and left the flat, double-locking the door behind him.

  His car, parked dire
ctly outside the main entrance to the tenement, scowled at him. I need a wash, pal. It was true, but Rebus shook his head. Not today, today was his day off, the only day this week. Some other time, some other free time. Who was he kidding? He’d drive into a car wash one afternoon between calls. His car could like it or lump it.

  The corner shop was open. Rebus had seldom seen it closed. He bought ground coffee, rolls, milk, margarine, a packet of bacon. The bacon, through its plastic wrapping, had an oily, multicoloured look to it, but its sell-by date seemed reasonable. Pigs: very intelligent creatures. How could one intelligent creature eat another? Guilty conscience, John? It must be Sunday. Presbyterian guilt, Calvinist guilt. Mea culpa, he thought to himself, taking the bacon to the checkout till. Then he turned back and bought some washing powder, too.

  Back in the flat, the washing machine was churning away. He put Coleman Hawkins on the hi-fi (not too loud; it was only quarter to nine). Soon the church bells would start ringing, calling the faithful. Rebus would not answer. He had given up churchgoing. Any day but Sunday he might have gone. But Sunday, Sunday was the only day off he had. He remembered his mother, taking him with her to church every Sunday while his father stayed at home in bed with tea and the paper. Then one Sunday, when he was twelve or thirteen, his mother had said he could choose: go with her or stay with his father. He stayed and saw his little brother’s jealous eyes glance at him, desperate to be of an age where he would be given the same choice.

  Ah me, John, Sunday morning. Rubbedy-rrub of the washing machine, the coffee’s aroma wafting up from the filter. (Getting short on filters, but no panic: he only used them on Sunday.) He went into the bathroom. Suddenly, staring at the bath itself, he felt an overwhelming urge to steep himself in hot water. Wednesdays and Saturdays: those were his usual days for a bath. Go on, break the rules. He turned on the hot tap, but it was a mere trickle. Damn! the washing machine was being fed all the flat’s hot water. Oh well. Bath later. Coffee now.

  At five past nine, the Sunday papers thudded through the letterbox. Sunday Post, Mail, and Scotland on Sunday. He seldom read them, but they helped the day pass. Not that he got bored on a Sunday. It was the day of rest, so he rested. A nice lazy day. He refilled his coffee mug, went back into the bathroom and walked over to the toilet to examine a roughly circular patch on the wall beside it, a couple of feet up from floor level. The patch was slightly discoloured and he touched it with the palm of his hand. Yes, it was damp. He had first noticed the patch a week ago. Damp, slightly damp. He couldn’t think why. There was no dampness anywhere else, no apparent source of the damp. Curious, he had peeled away the paper from the patch, had scratched at the plaster wall. But no answer had emerged. He shook his head. That would irritate him for the rest of the day. As before, he went to the bedroom and returned with an electric hairdryer and an extension flex. He plugged the hairdryer into the flex, and rested the dryer on the toilet seat, aimed towards the patch, then switched on the hairdryer and tested that it was hitting the spot. That would dry things out a bit, but he knew the patch would return.

  Washing machine rumbling. Hairdryer whirring. Coleman Hawkins in the living-room. He went into the living-room. Could do with a tidy, couldn’t it? Hoover, dust. Car sitting outside waiting to be washed. Everything could wait. There were the papers to be read. There they were on the table, just next to his briefcase. The briefcase full of documents for his attention, half-completed case-notes, reminders of appointments, all the rubbish he hadn’t found time for during the week at the station. All the so-important paperwork, without which his life would be milk and honey. Some toast perhaps? Yes, he would eat some toast.

  He checked his watch: ten past eleven. He had switched off the hairdryer, but left it sitting on the toilet, the extension lead snaking across the floor to the wall-socket in the hall. The washing machine was silent, spent. One more cup of coffee left in the pot. He had flicked through the papers, looking for the interesting, the unusual. Same old stories: court cases, weekend crime, sport. There was even a paragraph on Friday night’s action. He skipped that, but remembered all the same. Bright knife’s flat edge, caught in the lamplight. Sour damp smell in the alleyway. Feet standing in something soft. Don’t look down, look at him, look straight at him, the cornered animal. Look at him, talk to him with your eyes, try to calm him, or quell him.

  There were birds on the window sill, chirping, wanting some crumbled up crusts of bread, but he had no bread worth the name left in the flat; just fresh rolls, too soft to be thrown out. Ach, he’d never eat six rolls though, would he? One or two would go stale and then he’d give them to the birds. So why not give them some in advance, while the rolls are soft and sweet?

  In the kitchen he prepared the broken pieces of bread on a plate, then took it to the birds on the window-ledge. Hell: what about lunch? Sunday afternoon lunch. In the freezer compartment, he found a steak. How long would it take to defrost? Damn! he meant to pick up the microwave during the week. The shop had called him to say they’d fixed the fault. He was supposed to have collected it on Friday, but he’d been too busy. So: defrost in a low oven. And wine. Yes, open a bottle. He could always drink just one or two glasses, then keep the rest of the bottle for some other occasion. Last Christmas, a friend had given him a vacuum-tube. It was supposed to keep wine fresh after opening. Where had he put it? In the cupboard beside the wine: that would make sense. But there was no gadget to be found.

  He chose a not-bad bottle, bought from a reliable wine merchant in Marchmont and stood it on the table in the living-room. Beside his briefcase. Let the sediment settle. That’s what Sunday was all about, wasn’t it? Maybe he could try one of the crosswords. It was ages since he’d done a crossword. A glass of wine and a crossword while he waited for the meat to thaw. Sediment wouldn’t be settled yet, but what the hell. He opened the bottle and poured an inch into his glass. Glanced at his watch again. It was half past eleven. A bit early to be drinking. Cheers.

  You could break the rules on a Sunday, couldn’t you?

  Christ, what a week it had been at work. Everything from a senile rapist to a runaway blind boy. A shotgun robbery at a bookmaker’s shop and an apparently accidental drowning at the docks. Drunk, the victim had been. Dead drunk. Fished about a bottle of whisky and a recently dismembered kebab from his stomach. Annual crime figures for the Lothians were released: murder slightly up on the previous year, sexual assaults well up, burglaries up, street crime down a little, motoring offences significantly reduced. The clear-up rate for housebreakings in some parts of Edinburgh was standing at less than five per cent. Rebus was not exactly a fascist, not quite a totalitarian, but he knew that given wider powers of entry and search, that final figure could be higher. There were high-rise blocks where a flat on the twelfth floor would be broken into time after time. Was someone climbing twelve flights to break in? Of course not: someone in the block was responsible, but without the powers of immediate and indiscriminate search, they’d never find the culprit.

  And that was the tip of the whole polluted iceberg. Maniacs were put back on the streets by institutions unable or unwilling to cope. Rebus had never seen so many beggars in Edinburgh as in this past year. Teenagers (and younger) up to grandparents, dossing, cadging the occasional quid or cigarette. Christ, it depressed him to think of it almost as much as it did to pretend he could ignore it. He stalked through to the kitchen and felt the steak. It was still solid at its core. He lifted the nearly dry clothes out of the machine and draped them over the cold radiators throughout the flat. More music on the hi-fi. Art Pepper this time, a little louder, the hour being respectable. Not that the neighbours ever complained. Sometimes he could see in their eyes that they wanted to complain–complain about his noise, his irregular comings and goings, the way he revved his car or coughed his way up the stairwell. They wanted to complain, but they daren’t, for fear that he would somehow ‘stitch them up’ or would prove not to be amenable to some favour they might ask one day. They all watched the TV po
lice dramas and thought they must know their neighbour pretty well. Rebus shook his head and poured more wine: two inches deep in the glass this time. They knew nothing about him. Nothing. He didn’t have a TV, hated all the game shows and the cop shows and the news programmes. Not having a TV had set him apart from his colleagues at the station: he found he had little to discuss with them of a morning. His mornings were quieter and saner for it.

  He checked the damp patch in the bathroom again, letting his hand rest against it for half a minute. Mmm: it still wasn’t completely dry. But then maybe his hands were damp from the washing he had been carrying. What the hell. Back in the bedroom, he picked up some books from the floor and stacked them against a wall, beside other columns of paperbacks and hardbacks, read and unread. One day he would get time to read them. They were like contraband: he couldn’t stop himself buying them, but then he never really did anything with them once he’d bought them. The buying was the thing, that sense of ownership. Perhaps somewhere in Britain someone had exactly the same collection of books as him, but he doubted it. The range was too eclectic, everything from secondhand rugby yearbooks to dense philosophical works. Meaningless, really; without pattern. So much of his working life was spent to a pattern, a modus operandi. A series of rules for the possible (not probable) solving of crimes. One of the rules would have it that he get through the briefcase full of work before Monday morning and, preferably, while still sober.

  Bell. Bell?

  Bell. Someone at his front door. Jesus, on a Sunday? Not on a Sunday, please, God. The wrong door: they’d got the wrong door. Give them a minute and they would realise their mistake. Bell again. Bloody hell’s bells. Right then, he would answer it.

  He pulled the door open slowly, peering around it. Detective Constable Brian Holmes was standing on the tenement landing.

  ‘Brian?’

  ‘Hello, sir. Hope you don’t mind. I was in the neighbourhood and thought I’d… you know.’