Knots And Crosses

by Ian Rankin

  ‘It’s looking good for your man if it goes the distance,’ said Campbell, ordering more drinks.

  ‘Aye. But let’s wait and see, eh? How’s work, by the way?’

  ‘Fine, how’s yours?’

  ‘A pure bloody slog at the moment, if you must ask.’ Some ash dropped onto his tie as he talked, the cigarette never leaving his mouth, though it wobbled precariously from time to time. ‘A pure slog.’

  ‘Are you still chasing up that drugs story?’

  ‘Not really. I’ve landed on this kidnapping thing.’

  ‘Oh? So has Rebus. You’d better not get into his hair.’

  ‘Newspapermen get in everybody’s hair, Mac. It goes with the etcetera.’

  Mac Campbell, though wary of Jim Stevens, was grateful for a friendship, however tenuous and strained it had sometimes been, which had given him some information useful to his career. Stevens kept much of the juiciest tidbits to himself, of course. That’s what ‘exclusives’ were made of. But he was always willing to trade, and it seemed to Campbell that the most innocuous pieces of gossip and information often seemed adequate for Stevens’ needs. He was a kind of magpie, collecting everything without prejudice, storing much more of it than, surely, he would ever use. But with reporters you never could tell. Certainly, Campbell was happier with Stevens as a friend than as an enemy.

  ‘So what’s happening about your drugs dossier?’

  Jim Stevens shrugged his creased shoulders.

  ‘There’s nothing in there just now that could be of much use to you boys anyway. I’m not about to let the whole thing drop though, if that’s what you mean. No, that’s too big a nest of vipers to be allowed to go free. I’ll still be keeping my eyes open.’

  A bell rang for the last round of the fight. Two sweating, dog-tired bodies converged on one another, becoming a single knot of limbs.

  ‘Still looks good for Mailer,’ said Campbell, an uneasy feeling coming over him. It couldn’t be true. Rebus wouldn’t have done that to him. Suddenly, Maxwell, the heavier and slower-moving of the two fighters, was hit by a blow to the face and staggered back. The bar erupted, sensing blood and victory. Campbell stared into his glass. Maxwell was taking a standing count. It was all over. A sensation in the final seconds of the contest, according to the commentator.

  Jim Stevens held out his hand.

  I’ll kill bloody Rebus, thought Campbell. So help me, I’ll kill him.

  Later, over drinks bought with Campbell’s money, Jim Stevens asked about Rebus.

  ‘So it looks as if I’ll be meeting him at last?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. He’s not exactly friendly with Anderson, so he may well get the shitty end of the stick, sitting at a desk all day. But then John Rebus isn’t exactly friendly with anybody.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Ach, he’s not that bad, I suppose, but he’s not the easiest of men to like.’ Campbell, ducking from his friend’s interrogative eyes, studied the reporter’s tie. The recent layer of cigarette-ash had merely formed a veil over much older stains. Egg, perhaps, fat, alcohol. The scruffiest reporters were always the sharp ones, and Stevens was sharp, as sharp as ten years on the local newspaper could make a man. It was said that he had turned down jobs with London papers, just because he liked to live in Edinburgh. And what he liked best about his job was the opportunity it gave him to uncover the city’s murkier depths, the crime, the corruption, the gangs and the drugs. He was a better detective than anyone Campbell knew, and, because of that very fact perhaps, the high-ups in the police both disliked and distrusted him. That seemed proof enough that he was doing his job well. Campbell watched as a little beer escaped from Stevens’ glass and dripped onto his trousers.

  ‘This Rebus,’ said Stevens, wiping his mouth, ‘he’s the brother of the hypnotist, isn’t he?’

  ‘Must be. I’ve never asked him, but there can’t be too many people about with a name like that, can there?’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’ He nodded to himself as though confirming something of great importance.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just something. And he’s not a popular man, you say?’

  ‘I didn’t say that exactly. I feel sorry for him really. The poor bugger has a lot on his plate. He’s even started getting crank letters.’

  ‘Crank letters?’ Smoke enveloped Stevens for a moment as he puffed on another cigarette. Between the two men lay a thin blue pub-haze.

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you that. That was strictly off the record.’

  Stevens nodded.

  ‘Absolutely. No, it’s just that I was interested. That sort of thing does happen though, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not often. And not nearly as queer as the ones he’s getting. I mean, they’re not abusive or anything. They’re just ... queer.’

  ‘Go on. How so?’

  ‘Well, there’s a bit of string in each one, tied into a knot, and there’s a message that reads something like “clues are everywhere”.’

  ‘Bloody hell. That is strange. They’re a strange family. One a bloody hypnotist and the other getting anonymous notes. He was in the Army, wasn’t he?’

  ‘John was, yes. How did you know?’

  ‘I know everything, Mac. That’s the job.’

  ‘Another funny thing is that he won’t speak about it.’

  The reporter looked interested again. When he was interested in something, his shoulders shivered slightly. He stared at the television.

  ‘Won’t speak about the Army?’

  ‘Not a word. I’ve asked him about it a couple of times.’

  ‘Like I said, Mac, it’s a funny family that one. Drink up, I’ve got lots of your money left to spend.’

  ‘You’re a bastard, Jim.’

  ‘Born and bred,’ said the reporter, smiling for only the second time that evening.

  3

  ‘Gentlemen, and, of course, ladies, thank you for being so quick to gather here. This will remain the centre of operations during the inquiry. Now, as you all know ...’

  Detective Chief Superintendent Wallace froze in mid-speech as the Inquiry Room door pushed itself open abruptly and John Rebus, all eyes turned towards him, entered the room. He looked about in embarrassment, smiled a hopeful but wasted apology towards the senior officer, and sat himself down on a chair nearest to the door. ‘As I was saying,’ continued the superintendent.

  Rebus, rubbing at his forehead, studied the roomful of officers. He knew what the old boy would be saying, and right now the last thing he needed was a pep-talk of the old school. The room was packed. Many of them looked tired, as if they’d been on the case for a while. The fresher, more attentive faces belonged to the new boys, some of them brought in from stations outwith the city. Two or three had notebooks and pencils at the ready, almost as if they were back in the school classroom. And at the front of the group, legs crossed, sat two women, peering up at Wallace, who was in full flight now, parading before the blackboard like some Shakespearean hero in a bad school play.

  ‘Two deaths, then. Yes, deaths I’m afraid.’ The room shivered expectantly. ‘The body of Sandra Adams, aged eleven, was found on a piece of waste ground adjacent to Haymarket Station at six o’clock this evening, and that of Mary Andrews at six-fifty on an allotment in the Oxgangs district. There are officers at both locations, and at the end of this briefing more of you will be selected to join them.’

  Rebus was noticing that the usual pecking-order was in play: inspectors near the front of the room, sergeants and the rest to the back. Even in the midst of murder, there is a pecking-order. The British Disease. And he was at the bottom of the pile, because he had arrived late. Another black mark against him on someone’s mental sheet.

  He had always been one of the top men while he had been in the Army. He had been a Para. He had trained for the SAS and come out top of his class. He had been chosen for a crack Special Assignments group. He had his medal and his commendations. It had been a good time, and ye
t it had been the worst of times, too, a time of stress and deprivation, of deceit and brutality. And when he had left, the police had been reluctant to take him. He understood now that it was something to do with the pressure applied by the Army to get him the job that he wanted. Some people resented that, and they had thrown down banana skins ever since for him to slide on. But he had sidestepped their traps, had performed the job, and had grudgingly been given his commendations here also. But there was precious little promotion, and that had caused him to say a few things out of line, a few things that were always to be held against him. And then he had cuffed an unruly bastard one night in the cells. God forgive him, he had simply lost his head for a minute. There had been more trouble over that. Ah, but it was not a nice world this, not a nice world at all. It was an Old Testament land that he found himself in, a land of barbarity and retribution.

  ‘We will, of course, have more information for you to work on come tomorrow, after the post-mortems. But for the moment I think that will do. I’m going to hand you over to Chief Inspector Anderson, who will assign you to your tasks for the present.’

  Rebus noticed that Jack Morton had nodded off in the corner and, if left unattended, would begin snoring soon. Rebus smiled, but the smile was short-lived, killed by a voice at the front of the room, the voice of Anderson. This was all Rebus needed. Anderson, the man at the centre of his out-of-line remarks. It felt for one sickening moment like predestination. Anderson was in charge. Anderson was doling out their tasks. Rebus reminded himself to stop praying. Perhaps if he stopped praying, God would take the hint and stop being such a bastard to one of his few believers on this near-godforsaken planet.

  ‘Gemmill and Hartley will be assigned to door-to-door.’

  Well, thank God he’d not been landed with that one. There was only one thing worse than door-to-door ...

  ‘And for an initial check on the MO files, Detective Sergeants Morton and Rebus.’

  ... and that was it.

  Thank you, God, oh, thank you. That’s just what I wanted to do with my evening: read through the case histories of all the bloody perverts and sex-offenders in east central Scotland. You must really hate my guts. Am I Job or something? Is that it?

  But there was no ethereal voice to be heard, no voice at all save that of the satanic, leering Anderson, whose fingers slowly turned the pages of the roster, his lips moist and full, his wife a known adulteress and his son - of all things - an itinerant poet. Rebus heaped curse after curse upon the shoulders of that priggish, stick-thin superior officer, then kicked Jack Morton’s leg and brought him snorting and chaffing into consciousness.

  One of those nights.

  4

  ‘One of those nights,’ said Jack Morton. He sucked luxuriously on his short, tipped cigarette, coughed loudly, brought his handkerchief from his pocket and deposited something into it from his mouth. He studied the contents of the handkerchief. ‘Ah ha, some vital new evidence,’ he said. All the same, he looked rather worried.

  Rebus smiled. ‘Time to stop smoking, Jack,’ he said. They were seated together at a desk upon which were piled about a hundred and fifty files on known sex-offenders in central Scotland. A smart young secretary, doubtless relishing the overtime that came with a murder inquiry, kept bringing more files into the office, and Rebus stared at her in mock outrage every time she entered. He was hoping to scare her away, and if she came back again, the outrage would become real.

  ‘No, John, it’s these tipped bastards. I can’t take to them, really I can’t. Sod that bloody doctor.’

  So saying, Morton took the cigarette from his lips, broke off the filter, and replaced the cigarette, now ridiculously short, between thin, bloodless lips.

  ‘That’s better. That’s more like a fag.’

  Rebus had always found two things remarkable. One was that he liked, and in return was liked by, Jack Morton. The other was that Morton could pull so hard on a cigarette and yet release so little smoke. Where did all that smoke go? He could not figure it out.

  ‘I see you’re abstaining this evening, John.’

  ‘Limiting myself to ten a day, Jack.’

  Morton shook his head.

  ‘Ten, twenty, thirty a day. Take it from me, John, it makes no difference in the end. What it comes down to is this: you either stop or you don’t, and if you can’t stop, then you’re as well smoking as many as you like. That’s been proven. I read about it in a magazine.’

  ‘Aye, but we all know the magazines you read, Jack.’

  Morton chuckled, gave another tremendous cough, and searched for his handkerchief.

  ‘What a bloody job,’ said Rebus, picking up the first of the files.

  The two men sat in silence for twenty minutes, flicking through the facts and fantasies of rapists, exhibitionists, pederasts, paedophiles, and procurers. Rebus felt his mouth filling with silt. It was as if he saw himself there, time after time after time, the self that lurked behind his everyday consciousness. His Mister Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh-born. He felt ashamed of his occasional erection: doubtless Jack Morton had one too. It came with the territory, as did the revulsion, the loathing and the fascination.

  Around them, the station whirled in the business of the night. Men in shirtsleeves walked purposefully past their open door, the door of their assigned office, cut off from everyone else so that no one would be contaminated by their thoughts. Rebus paused for a moment to reflect that his own office back in Great London Road was in need of much of this equipment: the modern desk (unwobbly, with drawers that could be opened easily), the filing-cabinets (ditto), the drinks-dispenser just outside. There were carpets even, rather than his own liver-red linoleum with its curled, dangerous edges. It was a very palatable environment this in which to track down the odd pervert or killer.

  ‘What exactly are we looking for, Jack?’

  Morton snorted, threw down a slender brown file, looked at Rebus, shrugged his shoulders, and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Garbage,’ he said, picking up another folder, and whether or not it was meant as an answer Rebus was never to know.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Rebus?’

  A young constable, acne on his throat, cleanly-shaven, stood at the open door.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Message from the Chief, sir.’

  He handed Rebus a folded piece of blue notepaper.

  ‘Good news?’ asked Morton.

  ‘Oh, the best news, Jack, the very best news. Our boss sends us the following fraternal message: “Any leads from the files?” End of message.’

  ‘Will there be any reply, sir?’ asked the constable.

  Rebus crumpled the note and tossed it into a new aluminium bin.

  ‘Yes, son, there will be,’ he said, ‘but I very much doubt whether you’d want to deliver it.’

  Jack Morton, wiping ash from his tie, laughed.

  It was one of those nights. Jim Stevens, walking home at long last, had not found anything interesting since his conversation with Mac Campbell all of four hours ago. He had told Mac then that he was not about to drop his own investigation into Edinburgh’s burgeoning drugs racket, and that had been the whole truth. It was becoming a private obsession, and though his boss might move him on to a murder case, still he would follow up his old investigation in his free, spare and private time, time found late at night when the presses were rolling, time spent in lower and lower dives further and further out of town. For he was close, he knew, to a big fish, and yet not close enough to be able to enlist the help of the forces of law and order. He wanted the story to be watertight before he called for the cavalry.

  He knew the dangers, too. The ground he walked upon was always likely to fall away beneath his feet, letting him slip into Leith docks of a dark and silent morning, finding him trussed and gagged in some motorway ditch outside Perth. He didn’t mind all that. It was no more than a passing thought, brought on by tiredness and a need to lift his emotions out of the rather tawdry, unglamorous world of Edi
nburgh’s dope scene, a scene carried out in the sprawling housing-schemes and after-hours drinking holes more than in the glittery discotheques and chintzy rooms of the New Town. What he disliked, really disliked, was that the people ultimately behind it all were so silent and so secretive and so alien to it all. He liked his criminals to be involved, to live the life and stick close to the lifestyle. He liked the Glasgow gangsters of the 1950s and ’60s, who lived in the Gorbals and operated from the Gorbals and loaned illicit money to neighbours, and who would slash those same neighbours eventually, when the need arose. It was like a family affair. Not like this, not at all like this. This was other, and he hated it for that reason.

  His talk with Campbell had been interesting though, interesting for other reasons. Rebus sounded a fishy character. So was his brother. They might be in it together. If the police were involved in all of this, then his task would be all the harder, and all the more satisfying for that.

  Now what he needed was a break, a nice break in the investigation. It couldn’t be far off. He was supposed to have a nose for that sort of thing.

  5

  At one-thirty they took a break. There was a small canteen in the building, open even at this ungodly hour. Outside, the majority of the day’s petty crime was being committed, but inside it was warm and cosy, and there was hot food to be had and endless cups of coffee for the vigilant policemen.

  ‘This is a complete shambles,’ said Morton, pouring coffee back from his saucer into the cup. ‘Anderson hasn’t a clue what he’s up to.’ ‘Give me a cigarette, will you? I’m out.’ Rebus patted his pockets convincingly.

  ‘Christ, John,’ said Morton, wheezing an old man’s cough and passing across the cigarettes, ‘the day you give up smoking is the day I change my underwear.’

  Jack Morton was not an old man, despite the excesses that were leading him quickly and inexorably towards that early fate. He was thirty-five, six years younger than Rebus. He, too, had a broken marriage behind him, the four children now resident with their grandmother while their mother was off on a suspiciously long vacation with her present lover. Misery, he had told Rebus, surrounded the whole bloody set-up, and Rebus had agreed with him, having a daughter who troubled his own conscience.