by Ian Rankin
The two men started forward together, Cousins and Isobel a couple of yards in front. Flight pointed towards them. ‘Dr Philip Cousins,’ he said. ‘You’ve probably heard of him.’ But Rebus shook his head slowly. Flight stared at him as though Rebus had just failed to pick out the Queen from a row of postage stamps. ‘Oh,’ he said coldly. Then, pointing again: ‘And that’s Isobel Penny, Dr Cousins’s assistant.’
Hearing her name, Isobel turned her head back and smiled. She had an attractive face, round and girl-like with a shiny glow to her cheeks. Physically, she was the antithesis of her companion. Though tall, she was well-built – what Rebus’s father might have called big boned – and she boasted a healthy complexion to balance Cousins’s sickly colour. Rebus couldn’t recall ever having seen a really healthy looking pathologist. He put it down to all the time they spent standing under artificial light.
They had reached the body. The first thing Rebus saw was someone aiming a video camera towards him. But the camera moved away again to focus on the corpse. Flight was in conversation with one of the forensics team. Neither looked at the other’s face, but concentrated instead on the strips of tape which had been carefully lifted from the corpse and which the scientist now held.
‘Yes,’ said Flight, ‘no need to send them to the lab yet. We’ll do another taping at the mortuary.’ The man nodded and moved away. There was a noise from the river and Rebus turned to watch as a frogman broke the surface, looked around him, and then dived again. He knew a place like this in Edinburgh, a canal running through the west of the city, between parks and breweries and stretches of nothingness. He’d had to investigate a murder there once, the battered body of a tramp found beneath a road bridge, one foot in the canal. The killer had been easy to find: another tramp, an argument over a can of cider. The court had settled for manslaughter, but it hadn’t been manslaughter. It had been murder. Rebus would never forget that.
‘I think we should wrap those hands up right away,’ Dr Cousins was saying in a rich Home Counties voice. ‘I’ll have a good look at them at the mortuary.’
‘Right you are,’ said Flight, going off to fetch some more polythene bags. Rebus watched the pathologist at work. He held a small tape recorder in one hand and talked into it from time to time. Isobel Penny meantime had produced a sketch-pad, and was drawing a picture of the body.
‘Poor woman was probably dead before she hit the ground,’ Cousins was saying. ‘Little signs of bruising. Hypostasis seems consistent with the terrain. I’d say she certainly died on this spot.’
By the time Flight returned with some bags, Cousins, watched intermittently by Rebus, had taken readings of the air temperature and of internal temperature. The path on which they all stood was long and reasonably straight. The killer would have had ample visual warning of any approach. At the same time, there were homes and a main road nearby, so any screams would surely have been heard. Tomorrow there would be house-to-house enquiries. The path near the body was littered with rubbish: rusting drinks cans, crisp packets, sweet wrappers, torn and faded sheets of newsprint. In the river itself floated more rubbish and the red handle of a supermarket shopping-trolley broke the surface. Another diver had appeared, head and shoulders bobbing above the water. Where the main road crossed over the river, a crowd had gathered on the bridge, looking down towards the murder scene. Uniformed officers were doing their best to move the sightseers on, cordoning off as much of the area as they could.
‘From the marks on the legs, dirt, some grazing and bruising,’ continued the voice, ‘I would say the victim fell to the ground or was pushed or lowered to the ground on her front. Only later was she turned over.’ Dr Cousins’s voice was level, disinterested. Rebus took in a few deep breaths and decided he had postponed the inevitable long enough. He had only come here to show willing, to show that he wasn’t in London on a joyride. But now that he was here he supposed he should take a good close look at the body for himself. He turned away from the canal, the frogmen, the sightseers, and all the police officers standing behind the cordon. He turned away from the sight of his baggage standing all alone at the end of the path and gazed down on the corpse.
She was lying on her back, arms by her sides, legs together. Her tights and knickers had been pulled down to knee level, but her skirt was covering her, though he could see it was rucked up at the back. Her bright ski-style jacket was unzipped and her blouse had been ripped open, though her bra was intact. She had long straight black hair and wore large circlet earrings. Her face might have been pretty a few years ago, but life had ravaged it, leaving its marks. The killer had left marks, too. There was blood smeared across the face and matting the hair. The source of the blood was a gaping hole in the woman’s throat. But there was also blood lying beneath her, spreading out from under the skirt.
‘Turning her over,’ said Dr Cousins to his tape recorder. He did so, with Flight’s help, and then lifted the woman’s hair away from the nape of her neck. ‘Puncture wound,’ he said into his tape recorder, ‘consistent with larger wound to the throat. An exit wound, I’d say.’
But Rebus wasn’t really listening to the doctor any longer. He was staring in horror at where the woman’s skirt was rucked up. There was blood on the body, a lot of blood, staining the small of the back, the buttocks, the tops of the thighs. From the reports in his briefcase, he knew the cause of all this blood, but that didn’t make it any easier to face the reality of it, the cold clear horror of it all. He took in more deep breaths. He had never yet vomited at a murder scene and he wasn’t about to start now.
‘No fuck-ups,’ his boss had told him. It was a matter of pride. But Rebus knew now that the purpose of his trip to London was very serious indeed. It wasn’t to do with ‘pride’ or ‘putting up a good show’ or ‘doing his best’. It was to do with catching a pervert, a horrifically brutal sadist, and doing so before he could strike again. And if it took silver bullets, by God silver bullets there would be.
* * *
Rebus was still shaking when, at the operations van, someone handed him a plastic beaker of tea.
‘Thanks.’
He could always blame his gooseflesh on the cold. Not that it was cold, not really. The cloud cover helped and there was no wind. Of course, London was usually a few degrees warmer than Edinburgh at any time of year and there wasn’t the same wind, that bitter and biting wind which whipped across the streets of Edinburgh in summer as well as winter. In fact, if Rebus were asked to describe the weather on this night, the word he would use would be balmy.
He closed his eyes for a moment, not tired, just trying to shut out the sight of Jean Cooper’s cooling body. But she seemed etched onto his eyelids in all her grim glory. Rebus had been relieved to note that even Inspector George Flight was not unmoved. His actions, movements and speech had become somehow damped or more muted, as though he were consciously holding back some emotion, the urge to scream or kick out. The divers were coming up from the river, having found nothing. They would look again in the morning, but their voices betrayed a lack of hope. Flight listened to their report and nodded, all the time watched, from behind his beaker of tea, by Rebus.
George Flight was in his late forties, a few years older than Rebus. He wasn’t short, yet he had an appearance best described as stocky. There was the hint of a paunch, but a much greater hint of muscle. Rebus didn’t rate his own chances against him in a clinch. Flight’s wiry brown hair was thin at the crown, but thick elsewhere. He was dressed in a leather bomber jacket and denims. Most men in their forties looked stupid in denims, but not Flight. They fitted his attitude and his brisk, businesslike walk.
A long time before, Rebus had graded CID men into three sartorial groups: the leather-and-denim brigade, who wanted to look as tough as they felt; the suit-and-tie dapper merchants, who were looking for promotion and respect (not necessarily in that order); and the nondescripts, men who wore anything that came to hand of a morning, their year’s fashions usually the result of an hour’s shopping i
n a big-name department store.
Most CID men were nondescripts. Rebus reckoned he himself fell into that group. Yet catching a glimpse of himself in a wing-mirror, he noticed that he had a dapper look. Suit-and-ties never got on with leather-and-denims.
Now Flight was shaking hands with an important looking man, who other than for the handshake, kept his hands in his pockets and listened to Flight with head angled downwards, nodding occasionally as though deep in thought. He wore a suit and a black woollen coat. He couldn’t have been more crisply dressed if it had been the middle of the day. Most people were beginning to look fatigued, their clothes and faces crumpled. There were only two exceptions: this man and Philip Cousins.
The man was shaking hands with Dr Cousins now and even extended a greeting to Dr Cousins’s assistant. And then Flight gestured towards the van … no, towards Rebus! They were coming towards him. Rebus brought the beaker away from his face, and swapped it from his right to his left hand, just in case a handshake was in the offing.
‘This is Inspector Rebus,’ Flight said.
‘Ah, our man from north of the border,’ said the important looking man with a wry, rather superior smile. Rebus returned the smile but looked to Flight.
‘Inspector Rebus, this is Chief Inspector Howard Laine.’
‘How do you do.’ The handshake. Howard Laine: it sounded like a street-name.
‘So,’ said Chief Inspector Laine, ‘you’re here to help us with our little problem?’
‘Well,’ said Rebus, ‘I’m not sure what I can do, sir, but rest assured I’ll do what I can.’
There was a pause, then Laine smiled but said nothing. The truth hit Rebus like lightning splitting a tree: they couldn’t understand him! They were standing there smiling at him, but they couldn’t understand his accent. Rebus cleared his throat and tried again.
‘Whatever I can do to help, sir.’
Laine smiled again. ‘Excellent, Inspector, excellent. Well, I’m sure Inspector Flight here will show you the ropes. Settled in all right, have you?’
‘Well, actually –’
Flight himself interrupted. ‘Inspector Rebus came straight here, sir, as soon as he heard about the murder. He’s only just arrived in London.’
‘Is that so?’ Laine sounded impressed, but Rebus could see that the man was growing restless. This was Smalltalk, and he did not like to think he had time for Smalltalk. His eyes sought some escape. ‘Well, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again.’ And turning to Flight: ‘I’d better be off, George. Everything under control?’ Flight merely nodded. ‘Good, fine, well …’ And with that the Chief Inspector started back towards his car, accompanied by Flight. Rebus exhaled noisily. He felt completely out of his territory here. He knew when he was not wanted and wondered just whose idea it had been to second him to the Wolfman case. Someone with a warped sense of humour, that was for sure. His boss had passed the letter over to him.
‘It seems,’ he had said, ‘you’ve become an expert on serial killers, John, and they’re a bit short on those in the Met just now. They’d like you to go down to London for a few days, see if you can come up with anything, maybe give them a few ideas.’
Rebus had read the letter through in growing disbelief. It referred to a case from a few years before, the case of a child murderer, a case Rebus had cracked. But that had been personal, not really a serial killer at all.
‘I don’t know anything about serial killers,’ Rebus had protested to his boss.
‘Well then, it seems like you’ll be in good company, doesn’t it?’
And now look at him, standing on a stretch of ground in north-east London, a cup of unspeakably bad tea nursed in both hands, his stomach churning, nerves buzzing, his bags looking as lonely and out of place as he felt. Here to help solve the insoluble, our man from north of the border. Whose idea had it been to bring him here? No police force in the country liked to admit failure; yet by lugging Rebus down here the Met was doing precisely that.
Laine had gone and Flight seemed a little more relaxed. He even found time to smile reassuringly across to Rebus before giving orders to two men who, Rebus knew, would be from a funeral parlour. The men went back to their vehicle and returned with a large folded piece of plastic. They crossed the cordon and stopped at the body, laying the plastic out beside it. It was a translucent bag, over six feet long with a zip running from head to toe. Dr Cousins was in close attendance as the two men opened the bag and lifted the body into it, closing the zipper. One photographer had decided to shoot off a few more flash photographs of the spot where the body had lain, while the attendants carried the corpse back through the cordon and up to their vehicle.
Rebus noticed that the crowd of onlookers had disappeared, and only a few curious souls remained. One of them, a young man, was carrying a crash helmet and wore a shiny black leather jacket with shinier silver zips. A very tired constable was trying to move him on.
Rebus felt like an onlooker himself and thought of all the TV dramas and films he’d seen, with detectives swarming over the murder site in minute one (destroying any forensic evidence in the process) and solving the murder by minute fifty-nine or eighty-nine. Laughable, really. Police work was just that: work. Relentless, routine, dull, frustrating, and above all time-consuming. He checked his watch. It was exactly 2 am. His hotel was back in central London, tucked somewhere behind Piccadilly Circus. It would take another thirty to forty minutes to get back there, always supposing a spare patrol car was available.
‘Coming?’
It was Flight, standing a few yards in front of him.
‘Might as well,’ said Rebus, knowing exactly what Flight was talking about, or more accurately where he was talking about.
Flight smiled. ‘I’ll give you this, Inspector Rebus, you don’t give up.’
‘The famous tenacity of the Scots,’ said Rebus, quoting from one of Sunday’s newspaper rugby reports. Flight actually laughed. It didn’t last long, but it made Rebus feel glad that he’d come here tonight. The ice hadn’t been broken completely perhaps, but an important chunk had been chipped away from one corner of the berg.
‘Come on then. I’ve got my car. I’ll get one of the drivers to put your bags in his boot. The lock’s stuck on mine. Somebody tried to crowbar it open a few weeks back.’ He glanced towards Rebus, a rare moment of eye contact. ‘Nowhere is safe these days,’ he said. ‘Nowhere.’
There was already a lot of commotion up at road level. Voices and the slamming shut of car doors. Some officers would stay behind, of course, guarding the site. And a few might be going back to the warmth of the station or – luxury hardly to be imagined! – their own beds. But a few of the cars would be following the funeral van, following it all the way to the mortuary.
Rebus travelled in the front of Flight’s own car. Both men spent the journey in desperate pursuit of a conversational opening and as a result said very little until they were near their destination.
‘Do we know who she was?’ asked Rebus.
‘Jean Cooper,’ said Flight. ‘We found ID in her handbag.’
‘Any reason for her to be on that path?’
‘She was going home from work. She worked in an off-licence nearby. Her sister tells us she finished work at seven.’
‘When was the body found?’
‘Quarter to ten.’
‘That’s a fair gap.’
‘We’ve got witnesses who saw her in the Dog and Duck. That’s a pub near where she works. She used to go in there for a drink some evenings. The barmaid reckons she left at nine or thereabouts.’
Rebus stared out of the windscreen. The roads were still fairly busy considering the time of night and they passed groups of youthful and raucous pedestrians.
‘There’s a club in Stokie,’ Flight explained. ‘Very popular, but the buses have stopped by the time it comes out so everyone walks home.’
Rebus nodded, then asked: ‘Stokie?’
Flight smiled. ‘Stoke Newington.
You probably passed through it on your way from King’s Cross.’
‘God knows,’ said Rebus. ‘It all looked the same to me. I think my taxi driver had me down as a tourist. We took so long from King’s Cross I think we might have come via the M25.’ Rebus waited for Flight to laugh, but all he raised was a sliver of a smile. There was another pause. ‘Was this Jean Cooper single?’ Rebus asked at last.
‘Married.’
‘She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.’
Flight nodded. ‘Separated. She lived with her sister. No kids.’
‘And she went drinking by herself.’
Flight glanced towards Rebus. ‘What are you saying?’
Rebus shrugged. ‘Nothing. It’s just that if she liked a good time, maybe that’s how she met her killer.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘At any rate, whether she knew him or not, the killer could have followed her from the pub.’
‘We’ll be talking to everybody who was there, don’t worry.’
‘Either that,’ said Rebus, thinking aloud, ‘or the killer was waiting by the river for anyone who happened along. Somebody might have seen him.’
‘We’ll be asking around,’ said Flight. His voice had taken on a much harder edge.
‘Sorry,’ said Rebus. ‘A severe case of teaching my granny to suck eggs.’
Flight turned to him again. They were about to take a left through some hospital gates. ‘I am not your granny,’ he said. ‘And any comments you have to make are welcome. Maybe eventually you’ll come up with something I haven’t already thought of.’
‘Of course,’ said Rebus, ‘this couldn’t have happened in Scotland.’
‘Oh?’ Flight had a half-sneer on his face. ‘Why’s that then? Too civilised up there in the frozen north? I remember when you had the worst football hooligans in the world. Maybe you still do, only these days they look like butter wouldn’t melt in their underpants.’
